“GrowthMentor is the best thing I've discovered in the last ten years.”
01 · The Work
Tell us about what you are currently working on.
I'm building Kameleon, a language learning app. Learning languages is my biggest passion. For years people asked me why I didn't do a job with languages, but I was a civil engineer, and I didn't want to be a teacher for my whole life. Then I had the idea for the app.
I started it two and a half years ago in my free time, while I was still working. About half a year ago I quit my job to work on it full time.
The idea is that you learn a language while you travel through the country. If you learn German, chapter one starts when you arrive in Frankfurt. You walk through the city, you meet people, you talk to them and you learn about the local culture. Every chapter takes you to a new place.
I do everything alone, except the coding. For that I hired a developer from Ukraine. Most of my traffic comes from Instagram. I also have a YouTube channel, but YouTube is a long game.
02 · Before
Before you learned about GrowthMentor, how did you deal with the challenges you faced?
There are things I don't know how to do, or how to do better, so I looked for help on the internet. People make YouTube videos, but they are always general. Nobody can make a video for my specific problem. I tried ChatGPT too, and it didn't really help.
Last year I went to a four-day business retreat just for people in the language learning business. It was very specific, and I paid a lot of money for it. But it didn't solve my problem with retention. People signed up, used the app for ten minutes and never came back.
03 · The Decision
What ultimately compelled you to sign up to GrowthMentor?
I thought: I need someone to sit down with me and look at my product. But a mentor charges a lot of money. I asked ChatGPT about it, and ChatGPT said: try GrowthMentor. So I tried it out.
04 · Inside the Platform
What's your favorite thing about GrowthMentor?
There are mentors for any kind of thing. I came for help with retention, and then I realized I don't have to stop there. How about a mentor who looks at my landing page? How about a mentor who helps me with the stress of being a solo founder? I really feel like I discovered a gold mine.
The product also keeps getting better. I've only been a member for a few months, and I can see it change. Before, I used the filters to find a mentor, or I asked ChatGPT to find one for me. Now I type in my problem and I get three mentors recommended, inside GrowthMentor. Requesting a session is simpler too. A month ago I had to write a lot about myself and what I wanted from the call. Now it asks me one question at a time, and it feels more personal.
These are all things I should have in my own app, actually.
What topics have you mostly discussed with mentors?
Retention, the paywall and the onboarding, and also bigger things like life goals.
I take notes in every session, but afterwards I don't remember everything we discussed. That's why the AI notes help me a lot. Now I even get ideas for what we could talk about before every call.
05 · The Breakthrough
Is there a specific session/mentor that stands out in your mind as super helpful?
One session was about life goals. The mentor asked me: where do you want to be in twenty years? And I didn't know. I kind of go with the wind. The mentor said that people who are successful in life can answer that question. We talked about lots of other things too, but that's the part I remember the most.
06 · The Transformation
How has GrowthMentor helped you?
I changed a lot of things in my app because of these calls.
Kameleon used to be freemium, and people didn't see a paywall for a long time. I got about 100 new users every month, and only one in 100 paid. The others used it for free. In my first sessions, the mentors said straight away that the apps that are successful don't have freemium, they have a hard paywall. Almost every mentor told me: you can do that if you have millions of dollars, but if you're bootstrapped, it's not a sustainable system. So now you can't use the app without paying.
Many mentors also told me that the onboarding is where I need to sell. Ask a lot of questions, and convince people during the onboarding. So last month I changed the whole onboarding and redesigned where the paywall shows up. I shipped it last week, so it's too soon to see what it does to retention. But both changes came straight from my calls.
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