An accidental success story for a small, niche digital education product
This month, November 2020, is the tenth birthday of Arabic Reading Course. In this post I’ll talk about where the idea for the course came from, its unexpected success and some interesting insights and learnings.
When Arabic Reading Course launched in 2010, I was studying Arabic. I’d spent a while learning spoken Arabic and had avoided learning to read with the alphabet. When I started an Arabic course at SOAS at the University of London, the alphabet was forced upon me.
The teacher used a method of teaching the alphabet that made it seem much more manageable than my previous attempts. The way the teacher practised with us in class was useful and I wanted to be able to practise in the same way outside of the class. I searched online for a tool that would allow me to do that but couldn’t find anything. In fact, I began to realise how terrible so many online Arabic learning resources were.
Being a problem solver and a lover of digital solutions, I decided to create the tool myself. I had a burning desire for it to exist and I felt I should be the one to make it. This was the type of thing I did for a hobby.
After about 9 months of laborious work in my spare time (I manually edited 324 audio files and 648 images files one by one!) the course was ready to go online.
I produced the course using digital production skills I already had. I got a native Arabic speaker to make the audio recordings and a developer to help (for free!) with a bit of coding that was beyond my capabilities.
I had no ambitions for the course. I just wanted it to exist online so that if anyone went searching for something like it (as I had done), they would find it and be able to use it for free.
The first 6 years
I put it online and left it for a couple of years, occasionally checking the Google Analytics stats to see if anyone was using it. A few people were. After two years it was getting about 280 users visiting it every month. That felt like quite a lot and seemed to confirm that it was popular.
I started to think about how I might be able to make some money from the course. One option would have been to take payments from people using the website but in 2012 that wasn’t as easy as it is now.
I realised that launching an iPhone app would allow me to take payments through the app store. Also, at the time, the website used Flash which didn’t work on iPhones and iPads.
Plus, I just really wanted to have the experience of making an app.
I found a ‘cheap’ app developer who was keen to get some experience. I paid less than £250. That launched in 2013 and started making a bit of money. It was a great feeling to be making money from something I had created.
I continued to add new features to the course or make improvements, such as making it mobile-friendly. By 2016 I finally got round to developing a version of the app for Android and also begun to think about monetising the website version. It had been free to use for six years, which had helped it get a lot of users but now, with around 3200 people visiting it a month, it seemed stupid not to earn money from it.
In 2017 I started the company Big Languages, with the goal of earning money from the Arabic Reading Course website and developing other online language learning products.
The website-version of the course now has a fee and is the primary version. (This year I retired the apps because it was difficult and costly to update them).
Where do the course’s users come from?
I love this graph. It’s so satisfying and shows a slow but steady increase over time. Sometimes when I need a little bit of an ego boost I log in to Google Analytics and just look at this graph.
All these users are purely as a result of organic Google searches and referrals linked from other websites. I’ve never done any paid advertising. I’ve never done a social media campaign. It’s all from people finding the website through Google, using it and coming back to it.
The course has been linked to by King’s College London, Coventry University, Eton public school and the United Nations. That gave me proof that it’s a quality resource that good teachers are willing to get behind. I am convinced it’s still the best resource out there for learning the Arabic alphabet.
Over the past 10 years there have been a few moments that increased demand for the course. There is always an increase in uptake every year during Ramadan, when it’s customary for Muslims to spend more time reading the Koran in Arabic.
Even world events have had an impact. When the Syrian refugee crisis was at its height in 2015 and 2016, there was a small uplift as more people started learning Arabic to communicate with refugees.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020 there was also a spike in visitors when everyone realised they could use their time at home to finally learn Arabic. In fact, that also coincided with Ramadan, to give the course’s second-best week ever.
At the end of June 2019 Duolingo launched their long-awaited Arabic course. The 5 months following that were Arabic Reading Course’s most successful months on record. The Duolingo course doesn’t do a great job of teaching the alphabet and I believe the people who eagerly jumped on the new Duolingo course, came in search of a better place to learn the alphabet.
Learnings
There are two things I’ve learnt from the unplanned success of Arabic Reading Course.
1. It’s rare for a product to have overnight success but that doesn’t mean it never will be successful
A year after launch, when the course was getting 27 visitors a month, I could have looked at that number and thought, no one’s using it, it’s not useful, they don’t want it. And maybe given up.
Because I had no particular ambitions for the course, I just left it and over time it’s grown into something that has proven itself to be useful and needed.
2. A small niche can bring good rewards
If you’re an individual or a small company who doesn’t necessarily need to make a million dollars from your idea, you can pick a niche subject area that a relatively small number of people are interested in and make something small but brilliant that meets that need. With the whole word as a potential audience, even 0.05% of the whole word is a lot of people.
Arabic Reading Course is so niche. My audience is not even everyone who’s learning Arabic, it’s people who are at that specific stage of learning Arabic where they need to learn the alphabet.
The more niche you are, the easier it is to stand out in that category and truly delight your users, who will then gladly pay.
