Eighty thousand views on Reddit
The marketing that worked. TikTok had been fine until the algorithm stopped blessing Juan's videos (500 views a day down to 200), partly because it kept pushing his English-language posts to Spanish speakers. Running low on money and watching his dreams start to slip, he took it as a signal to change the mechanic, and went back to Reddit. The Reddit feedback pointed him at a niche, and the niche turned out to be IPA, the phonetic alphabet already in Severo that dramatically improved his French pronunciation and that, he discovered, very few people know exists. He posted it not as a sale but as 'I'm obsessed with IPA for French', no link, DM me, and it worked: roughly 80,000 views across two posts in two days plus about 20 genuinely interested users, against ~3,100 TikTok views in a week. The deeper lesson underneath the numbers: he'd spent a month heads-down on his own vision, disconnected from users, adrift in the ocean, and users are the ones who point the way. He'd even built useful features (IPA, pronunciation scoring) he never validated. Plus his brother's concept of bandwidth: you think you can do everything, but some tasks drain time without the best return.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 14:53 (TikTok funcionaba hasta que el algoritmo dejó de bendecirme, de 500 a 200 vistas)
- ↳ video diary @ 23:25 (el IPA es uno de los plus más grandes para aprender que existen, pero muy pocos lo conocen)
- ↳ video diary @ 30:11 (me desconecté un mes en mi visión, sin usuarios uno queda a la deriva en el océano)
- ↳ Entry 246-1: The polite feedback trap (la misma búsqueda de la señal real de usuarios, aquí encontrada)
The marketing that finally worked. TikTok had been fine until the algorithm stopped blessing him, 500 views a day down to 200, partly, he suspects, because it kept pushing his English-language videos to Spanish speakers who wouldn’t engage with English ▸ 14:53. Running low on money and watching his dreams start to slip, he read it as a signal: when something isn’t working, change the mechanic. So he went back to Reddit, where the feedback pointed him at a niche, and the niche was IPA, the phonetic alphabet already sitting in Severo that had sharpened his French pronunciation and that, it turned out, very few people even know exists ▸ 23:25. He posted it not as a sale but as “I’m obsessed with IPA for French”, no link, DM me, and it landed: roughly 80,000 views across two posts in two days plus about 20 genuinely interested users, against ~3,100 TikTok views in a week ▸ 33:39.
sin usuarios estás a la deriva en el océano; ellos te dicen por dónde ir →
The deeper lesson is under the numbers. He’d spent a month heads-down on his own vision, programming, programming, disconnected from users, and when that connection breaks you’re adrift in the ocean, because users are the ones calling “this way, this way” ▸ 30:11. He’d even built genuinely useful features, the IPA, the pronunciation scoring, and left them lying there, never validated, not realizing others would find them valuable too. And his brother’s concept of bandwidth frames the whole pivot: you think you can do everything, but some tasks drain your time without giving the best return, and 80,000 Reddit views in two days is a very different return than 3,100 TikTok views in a week ▸ 33:04…