the goose

There are several things that are hard to get used to in Argentina. First up is the fact that you can forget about finding somewhere to eat before 9 in the evening. Secondly it still kind of knocks my socks off when said meal out doesn’t require a mortgage extension. Finally – it is the language.

We’ve been batting away at it with a private tutor, podcasts, online training videos, books and video tutorials for a while and LangaugeBob was something I was keen to give a whirl. It is a great idea and I was kind of surprised to see that the company behind it is actually in Galway. Not that people in Galway don’t have great ideas of course.

LanguageBob is a plugin for your browser that splices Spanish/French/German etc words into the webpages you read.  The idea is that it helps you to build your vocabulary while browsing the web.  You can mostly figure out what the words are by context and in this way you can build up the range of words you know.

Great idea although you are out of luck if you want to use the Plugin on a Mac.

Damn.  Rather than mosey on and do something more profitable I then took it upon myself to right this outragous descrimination against FireFox using Mac users and rolled my own Spanglish script for firefox.  To install the script drag the Spanglish link to the top of your browser and hit it.  You should see a little sea of yellow words pop up where a Spanish word has been interpolated into your browser.  Fun.

This got me thinking. Stephen Downey recently pointed me towards the excellent Software by Ron blog.  Ron proffers a four step process to finding a profitable niche.

1. Market
2. Marketing
3. Aesthetic Third
4. Functionality a Distant Fourth

I’m not so sure how far behind the others functionality comes.  I was able to knock together something not a million miles away from their product in a few hours.  A polished execution can create some barrier to this kind of competition.  He does however emphasise a point that makes a lot of sense to me.  First you gotta find the market – then design your marketing around them.  Typically I spent about 8 hours putting together this Spanglish button but I hadn’t really thought about how you would market something like this.  Then I realised what LanguageBob are doing right.  They are already in a thriving marketplace – namely the FireFox plugin directory from where people can find their product and use it.  Of course is a marketplace is too crowded then this doesn’t help you much.

So who would you sell this product to?  Well – people like me is a good start – newly minted English speakers in foreign countries.  Expat forums might be a good start.  Perhaps directly to Schools?  After that perhaps teaming up with other language product providers?  All in all it is a toughie and perhaps demonstrates to myself how even though the cost of creating products like these (and mine) – the marketing costs seem to be pretty much the same as ever.