LearnLithuanian was a small market research project I did when I was trying to figure out what to build. At that time I was trying to find resources to learn the language, given that my wife was born there- but was quite hard to find anything useful. You see, Lithuanian has a very complex grammar system in which for example: depending of the noun behind a word the ending of the following word needs to change accordingly. Also add up other rules for different endings and scenarios and verbs.. and you see how this is getting hard to grasp already.

I did a bit of research into other platforms that provide what I was after but had little to no success. My aim was to find something like Duolingo, but tailored to Lithuanian. Sadly they still don’t have any courses for this language and seems like they are not planning to have it anytime soon. A few other apps here and there I found, but were very basic or just literally a list of sentences translated to English.

Upon realizing there wasn’t anything up to the standards I was after, I decided to create a simple landing page that was deployed to firebase and used a simple firebase database to store signups there. In the landing page I just described what the app was, what features had, and explained that while I was still building it I was planning on releasing it soon. With the hopes obviously, that people would signup anyway to know when it’s out in the market.

So once that was done it was time to find my target audience to advertise the small lading page. I quickly found out that there was a lot of Lithuanian migrants and expats living in the US, mostly people who left escaping the Soviet Union or WWII and were now living there with their children. And since their children grew up as Americans most of them dont speak Lithuanian at all, so that’s it! My target audience was mostly parents of Lithuanian decendants living in the US that have kids or couples in which one of the parts wants to learn the language of the other (such as myself).

I found a few facebook groups of lithuanians living in the US, another one of Lithuanians living in the UK, a few subreddits and a bunch of Duoling forum posts of people asking when they were going to add Lithuanian to their app. Upon the timespan of a month I got about 850+ signups and a bunch of messages and emails from people really looking forward to the launch.

But given the amount of work required to create the app and the content compared to how many people signed up I thought it wasn’t worthy to spend all that time building the product.