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Learn languages socially

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Summary / Responsibilities
I co-founded idyoma while I was earning my B.S. in Business Administration and Information Systems from Northeastern University. I designed the app, animations, and all our marketing material. As CEO, I also managed our 5 outsourced developers work, our 2 full-time co-op students and relations with our board of advisors. We successfully MVP’d the app and shipped a final product for Android (Java) and iOS (Swift) 9 months after the first major capital infusion. By tracking analytics and collecting user feedback, we were able to refine the product doubling organic downloads and the likeliness a user would share the app. I also designed the pitch-decks used to enter competitions and to raise money. Ultimately the cost of development and the lack of a moat prevented idyoma from getting any serious market share. Over the years idyoma has turned into a great side-project for the core team, generating enough cash-flow from idyoma’s paid users to cover the project’s overhead, perpetually. Ultimately, the project became a sandbox for the founders to hone their respective skills. The idyoma app is still live, improving every day and is one of my favorite projects I have ever had the pleasure of working on.
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Accomplishments
At the age of 23, I successfully raised $100,000 in investment and was awarded an educational grant from Northeastern University for $10,000. The app garnered over 100,000 users in the first two years, converting users to paid accounts at a rate of 3.5%, which is the average for performing apps in the industry. The app was featured in popular periodicals such as bostinno.com and is still rated as one of the top digital language-learning solutions by Research and Markets.
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The Product
A mobile app for connecting language learners with one another so they can take turns speaking in each other’s target languages. Idyoma is great for language learners who know the basics in a language and need to immerse themselves with native speakers to reach fluency. In the app, the user adds their target language, as well as their current proficiencies in languages they already know and are shown people nearby and around the world who are willing to help.
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AR Concept
Below are two concepts of how Augmented Reality (AR) technology could be used to improve idyoma’s users’ language learning experience. To the right is a graphic I designed of how I imagine AR glasses looking like, modeled after my old pair of glasses.
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Tranposed Video Conferencing
One concept is to allow users to move inbound video calls to their AR glasses. By doing so, language exchange conversations are more flexible and more lifelike than ever before. Transposing video calls is great for group calls and for teacher / tutor environment where ones hand could be free to write on a white board, take notes, or do other activities like cooking.
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Real-life Language Exchange Support
Another concept is to allow the AR glasses to support visualization that would enhance real-life language exchange. Such support could be real-time call-signs and transliteration. Another possible feature of Real-life Language Exchange Support is to help AR glasses wearers to spot the members of their pre-arranged language exchange meet-up from a crowd, which is often the problem in many popular meet-up locations in Europe and Asia.
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Agile Design & Development
Due to budget restraints, the idyoma team had to be as efficient as possible with decisions relating to what functions it considered to develop. To do so, I recommended a version of a process I had seen work to good effect in the corporate world. The team would quantify the importance or impact of a proposed functionality by collecting user feedback and surveys. It would then weigh the cost and time (difficulty) of each function and use an online Fibonacci ranker to prioritize the different tasks for developers. After each sprint the team would funnel capital towards micro-influencers who ultimately had the best throughput in terms of cost of customer acquisition.
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How do we improve retention?
Case Study
Problem
This is an example of one of our sprints where we were perpetually trying to improve our current user retention rate. We found that the in-app video/voice calling feature was one of the most seeked after functionalities. Up until this point, idyoma was a 100% chat-based platform. Initially, video conferencing seemed like a frivolous functionality, as we assumed users would mostly use our app like a meeting or touch point like any other peer-2-peer meet up, as they make their initial introduction and swiftly transition to a more widely used app, like WhatsApp or iMessenger. However, over time it became clear, users were more interested in keeping their language exchange conversations with, what ultimately is, strangers on the platform and expected all the tools needed to have a productive language exchange conversation. With one of the main functions needed to have digital language exchange being video and voice calls.
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Solution
Video and voice calling would be available to all premium users who has received at least a one message response from the opposing party. Users would be notified of calls in the app as well as receive push-notifications externally. Calls would start with the camera off by default, allowing the video call service to be used initially as a voice only call function, essentially killing two birds at once. The future of voice / video conferencing is real-time transliteration and group calls.
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Next Project: Cross-Platform Interlopability

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John Lloyd

UI Designer
Boston, MA
john.s.f.lloyd@gmail.com