Your role is to figure out who wants to buy your product, and how your product can be more like what they want to buy. Hint: If you're not rich yet, you haven't answered this question correctly.
What's your story? Are you selling Chinese characters, or are you selling worldliness and adventure? Or time-saving? Or maybe profitability due to Chinese-reading employees? Hint: you started this as college students learning characters and thinking about ninjas. College students are poor. Business people who want the fastest way to learn something that makes them rich, are rich.
You need to be watching LOTS of other people use the product, and thinking every minute of every day about why your Skritter is actually a totally essential part of their lives. Hint: this means you're almost never in the office. So it's your job to find out what that is, and fix it.
Finally: Can I use it on an airplane? Language products that I can't use intensively on a flight to the country in question are a waste of time.
Thanks for the input. It's actually really frustrating to hear about the airplane use, because everyone and their mom wants an iPhone version, but Nick and Scott are seriously tapped out right now making features we've all agreed need to come before we can fork the code and get Nick learning objective C. Man, waiting for that really really bugs me. Everyone on the site right now wants the features we're developing, and our first mission at present is to please our current customers, but we could convert a lot better if only we had those kinds of nifty gadgets.
We'll be going back to Oberlin College this semester and doing in person testing with first year students and positioning is something we're struggling with.
Just get Adobe Air working. Doesn't have to be on an iPhone, just needs to work offline, and re-upload my progress. I study Japanese, but only on my way to Japan.
The flight takes 9 hours. So I bring my Casio e-dictionary with stylus and audio, and for 9 hours I intensively review JLPT words, sentences and kanji. By the time I land, I've regained about 90% of my abilities from the previous visit 6 months ago, and a sleep and then 2-3 more hours the following night get me back where I was.
But .. I have an Asus EeePC that lasts for 7.5 hours. Your product seems much more efficient for learning characters than my Casio. If I could use your product for 7.5 hours and learn as much as I get from the Casio in nine, that'd leave time for peanuts and a movie. So .. put it on Adobe Air (and get Japanese support!)
What's your story? Are you selling Chinese characters, or are you selling worldliness and adventure? Or time-saving? Or maybe profitability due to Chinese-reading employees? Hint: you started this as college students learning characters and thinking about ninjas. College students are poor. Business people who want the fastest way to learn something that makes them rich, are rich.
You need to be watching LOTS of other people use the product, and thinking every minute of every day about why your Skritter is actually a totally essential part of their lives. Hint: this means you're almost never in the office. So it's your job to find out what that is, and fix it.
Finally: Can I use it on an airplane? Language products that I can't use intensively on a flight to the country in question are a waste of time.