Hello. I’ve been away for a while but nevertheless, I’ve been stewing on what I’ve made of Kiku so far.
In september, I paid a visit to a local eikaiwa school to promote kiku, but moreso as a temperature check to make sure the viability of such a project was promising.
Anyway, I came back hopeful, confused and kind of discombobulated as to the trajectory of where the web app needs to go. I had to take a long break. So as I said, I took a hiatus but I haven’t gotten off the bandwagon completely. A short conversation with Chris also fortified it for me that I would prefer this to be an educator facing app. Or perhaps, I’m more interested in working with educators than randoms in regards to marketing and designing the app.
There in lies the rub, or at the very least, the crux of my mental block. If appealing to end users, there is a tectonic shift of interests between demographics. What I mean is, the app is seemingly set up (and covers content) for academia, but is not available for mobile which limits my reach massively since most students who are in involved in academia would not have a credit card… so they’d have to get a guardian or parent involved which creates a canyon wide barrier between user interest and subscription.
As such, teachers would be the most surefire way to get students to adopt the app, but lacking LMS, it also creates lacks the appeal for an educator to sign up for something like this.
So moving forth, there’s a few things that need to change in terms of product design.
- LMS for teachers, or at least some rudimentary form of lesson management so that educators can understand how to utilize this more effectively or
- Better/ more effective learning loop for user progress so that there are incentives once a “lesson” has been completed.
Idk. I think I’ve hit my capacity in terms of development of product and now require tech consultation. I don’t even know if its worth doing this. In the mean time, perhaps I should just continue building content library. At least in terms of audio and articles.
Edit//
Okay, through my brain vomit and another chat with Chris, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is best if we consider how we can get Kiku off the WordPress framework into a mobile app. This would tbh, be the road of least resistance with maximum results in terms of pivoting. Will be reaching out to a few colleagues to get their input on this and will get back to you. In the mean time, I think I should just continue developing content.