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Persol comments on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? - Less Wrong
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I think Micaiah_Chang mostly nailed this. I actually wrote a site that did this a few months ago. I had about 4000 users who had actually gone through a complete session.
As guessed, the problem is that I couldn't get people to start forming it as a habit. There is no immediate payback. Less than 20 people out of 4000 did more than one session.
This one is easily solved. The Anki decks have a (weak) rating system, and allowing people to import anki decks was easy.
Additionally, there are at least 18 competitors. Here's the list I made at the time. Very few seem to be successful.
I shut the site down about a month ago. There are numerous free competitors which don't have any great annoyances. I wouldn't suggest starting another of these sites unless you figured out an effective way to "gamify" it.
Wow. You did a spaced repetition site which had 4000 people try, 2000 finish a session, and <20 return for a second review session?
Sorry, typo. ~4000 people finished a session. Many more 'tried' than 4000... I just couldn't determine which users were bots that registered randomly vs users that didn't finish the first session.
Persol, what traffic generating methods did you use to get those kind of figures?
About 75% of the hits came from Google adWords, which was on for about 8 months. Maybe about 10% from search results. I also had a few links from subject specific websites. Average CTR was about 0.25%. Best CTR were ads that mentioned 'flashcards' and 'online'. The best conversion rate (answered a study session question) was 17% with the ad below:
Graphic/animated ads were a waste of money, but at least I learned how to make animated GIFs.
Supermemo has been working on this problem since 1982, and they struggle to make Supermemo popular because it is not "sticky" enough. Basically it involves hard work for future benefit. This is the mental equivalent of "earning an honest living," or "getting rich slowly." We do not live in a world that portrays honest, slow but meaningful progress. We live in a world that is obsessed with instant gratification, and SRS methods go contrary to the river-like "current" of this system. See: http://wiki.supermemo.org/index.php?title=Why_isn'tSuperMemomore_popular%3F Also, the only way I could see SRS hitting massive appeal is if it were designed from the ground up to be a game of some sort where doing flashcard repetitions resulted in progress. I have an idea of how it would work, but I doubt we will see anything like that for the time being.
Judging by the user-hostile interface of the linked site, there is probably a much lower hanging fruit in the app's UI redesign.
Supermemo was designed by a scientist, and a simple user interface is not as high on the priority list as optimized algorithms, incremental reading, etc. I highly doubt that outside of Supermemo a more effective flashcard software exists. Thus, to make flashcard-based learning hit critical mass, it must be packaged in a way that is extremely appealing and fun (Aside from the joy of learning) so that people can survive the two-week "hump" that most people stop using Supermemo. Other than a game or a more aesthetically pleasing UI, I think we're kind of stuck with our present situation, unless a higher authority (Education system, government) makes such learning techniques mandatory, which will not happen due to the inefficiency of modern institutions to fulfill their explicit purpose. At least they exist for the self-motivated to use, and it gives us a mental edge on those that do not use (Or care to use) SRS.
That link (fixed version ) is very accurate. I wish I'd considered the first few points BEFORE programming/advertising the site.
Persol, that list of competitors is massively helpful, thank you.
I'd love to hear more about your experiences, and to get a better of idea of exactly what you had built. I think what I have in mind is a more mass-audience version of SRS (see my response to Micaiah above) rather than a more traditional Anki-type system.
I'd love to know how you were monetizing the service, and if there are any screenshots of what the site looked like. Did you offer a mobile application? Did you try to push people to engage via push notifications at all? I think this is definitely a core part of a strategy that I'd push for. I think "gamifying" is also an interesting route, need to think about this angle a little more carefully though.
Here's the actual PHP code, weighing in at 18Mb. It's probably the best way to get a feel for what it was, and it might help you decide what to do.
It includes:
* This version may not have the correct repetition calculation. Due to the inherent time factor, it was a hassle to test, so I didn't fix that part of the code until later. *
It was admittedly an ugly (but fast loading) site. After a few weeks of cheap banner ads and seeing the minimal reuse, I just set it to coast until the year ran out.
I did do some A/B testing with email notifications about a month in. It didn't have a measurable effect of return use.
Monetization was via banner ads. Via A/B testing, the best location for the ad was under the card's question. Once flipping the card, the ad was hidden. I also deactivated the ads for awhile too see if they were too intrusive; return visitors didn't improve.
I also incorporated graphics and audio, since the most successful SRS systems seem to revolve around vocabulary. I personally used it to help learn basic Mandarin for use with my in-laws... but it is a boring way of learning a language. While it is much more effective than Rosetta Stone, it is very difficult to stay engaged.
This is great - I'm going to take a look through the code and see if I can get it running on a test server.