I remember being poor and in college once, where "poor" means I was never in danger of starvation but I did routinely decline invitations to the movies for want of $5.

I also remember a collection of someones (parents, university, scholarship providers, government, self) feeling it was worth $80 per hour of instruction to get me Japanese classes. Please do not use the "Oh noes, our customers are poor!" factoid as a mental excuse to undercharge for your product. ($80. An. Hour.)

I'd also like to note that a significant portion of the American collegiate population has a significant amount of discretionary spending capability. Half of my Japanese class had parents who were paying full freight for that $80 an hour. Do you really need to sell to the other half?

Luckily, I don't think there is any place for ad-financed products (ads are too distracting when you are trying to memorize stuff like this), so there won't be many free commercial systems.

I am building something very similar to this. I have to say I am very impressed with what Skritter has done so far.

Are you acquainted with Rosetta Stone? They sell language learning software in the "couple of hundred dollars" range. And they're pretty freaking big.

it is difficult to differentiate

People always tell me that about my product. It isn't true for me, and my product is substantially more boring and smaller in scope than learning the key to accessing the history/culture/economic potential of China. A short list of points to differentiate on would be who you sell to, what level of learners you target, what focus of learners you target, visual design, etc etc.

There are definitely many interesting aspects of this market. I don't think it is impossible to differentiate or I wouldn't be in it. But, I really do think that prices for formal educational books, materials, and software are all heading towards $0 fast.

Rosetta Stone really has executed brilliantly in its segment of the market. It sales and marketing effort has been top-notch. It is also interesting to see how they are attempting to cross over from do-it-yourself language learners to traditional language learners. I would love to know what they are charging schools for their software.

We are making our own set of language data, which is a lot of work but which does help differentiate because students can see we have their textbook.

I always wonder how similar "very similar" is. Of course I'm curious. We haven't seen anything that (we think) is similar yet.

edit: p.s. our idea was rejected by yc, so maybe it is a terrible idea. we still think it is great which is why we are working on it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=548299

My co-founder noted that the rejection email contradicted this, but I'm sure there is some there is an explanation such as we are bad at selecting successful startups. It is tough to really know for sure, because while some of the groups selected fail, some of the ones who ought to have been selected will never succeed on their own when they may have with some guidance. So don't blame yourself, there are two parties involved and neither are God, just human.

So how much does it make sense to charge, from an outside perspective?

Your customers are not buying online SRS, they are buying an opportunity to improve their Chinese proficiency, and the experience of being the kind of person who wants to improve their Chinese proficiency. Never forget that.

I have a friend with an as-yet-unreleased application for studying Japanese. I told him what I'll tell you: I wouldn't consider charging less than $30 but I would consider trying more than $100. Yep, that is quite a range, and it all depends on what type of student you are targeting. To be perhaps a little unfair to my friends' prospective customers, I would expect to see no anime-related vocabulary in the $100+ product.

Exactly how you present your choice to the user is up to you. ($49 a semester, $80 if you buy a year at once should lead to an ARPU in excess of $100, hopefully.)

We actually do have some users who put together a kung cu list for us... uh oh!

ps/ I am interested in learning Chinese, however I am not sure I would pay at that point... Need to see incentives/success stories.

Good luck guys!

Yeah, we really do need an instructional demo video on the "try it page." We actually just got the front page up, so new instructional demo videos and the like are on the way. It's good to know people actually want them, and sorry for any confusion.

Regarding you interest in seeing success stories or incentives, we are going to conduct a study next semester with a big batch of students so that we can make claims about the efficacy, is that the sort of thing you're looking for ("With Skritter, you can learn character 44% faster than with traditional methods, see our study") or would it be more enticing to see small narratives from users about how much its helped them?

What are your criteria are for verifying the validity of the study? I've proofread lots of graduate papers about studies of second language acquisition and in almost every case the studies are summarized the same way: the results are (un)promising but no definite conclusions can drawn because the sample size was too small and/or there was too strong of a selection bias and/or there were some other significant flaws in the study. A study that would justify such a bold claim would be, as far as I can tell, a landmark study in the field--likely worthy of a Ph.D. People could probably get Ph.D.s just for studying your study! :)

I think many people will be interested in the results of your study. Do you know when/where the results will be published?

The Supermemo technique should be good at keeping the pace up to get to that magic 6000 character level. Once you get a lot more data I would think you would have something worth publishing in journals of education and that could be a very nice PR opportunity for you, showing that your software dramatically improves the time needed to become fluent in Chinese.

6000 characters is very extreme. I think 3000 is a more magic target.

I expect we can produce some very sexy stats, once we build a data analysis framework for it. Do you think we could publish just based on our online practice data, without doing a more traditional study?

As for publication, I'm really not sure. I think it would depend on you finding someone else's data for Chinese language learning for comparison purposes. There's probably some conference somewhere you can present at, if nothing else.

I've been using your app for months. This is a fantastic way to practice character writing.

Simply phenomenal work.

Thank you!

[update: I figured out how to use Select: List. Strangely it's taking a long time to add the list. The HSK1 list should already exist on your server somewhere, no? Maybe it's doing it character by character? Is this an App Engine-ism? I would think a simple UPDATE student_character_list INSERT '?' WHERE source_list='HSK1'; would be pretty fast (if I even got that SQL right) but then maybe App Engine doesn't support SQL?]

I just created an account. Is there a difference between the functionality for my fresh account versus the hackernews account, other than different usage data?

Yeah, App Engine doesn't do SQL. Makes things interesting.

No difference in functionality--everyone is the same right now.