Hello!
Caleb from NativShark here, wanted to give you an update on how things are going 👋
It’s been a minute since I sent one of these out for sure for sure. But hey! We’re still at it, still shipping content, shipping features and improving the platform for everyone.
Speaking of content, have you seen Phase Two recently?? It’s pretty nuts. We’ve nearly covered grammar concepts up through all of N3 along with a splattering of N2 and N1 along the way, and I’ve heard from Niko that soon we’ll have all 常用漢字 (common use kanji) taught and the end of Phase 2 + start of Phase 3 is soon!
There’s 458 total Units between Phase One and Phase Two now. Proud of the content team for that one! They’ve been very consistently putting out at least 4 units every week for the past 18 months or so. Amazing.
On the engineering side, over the summer we pushed some QoL updates while working on a real big feature: Review Sets! Which we launched in October, and then shortly after a Lesson Quick Search.
Review Sets let you essentially build custom units with NativShark content or your own custom flashcards to review at any time, outside of the core studies system.
For more info on that, check out this video walkthrough we made:
Here's the patch notes which go in to more detail: https://www.nativshark.com/bug-and-updates/october-24-2022-review-sets-update-lesson-search
Coming up for the rest of this year we’re actually working on clearing up our “tech debt” as it’s called and doing a rebuild of the NativShark app moving away from some older tech we used back in 2019 when we first started building what became NativShark that has been a constant pain in our efforts for long enough.
For those curious, the short version of things is, we’re now building with Remix + TypeScript + Tailwind + Prisma + Postgres + Turborepo and hosting on Vercel. I won’t bother you with going into too much detail on what we’re moving from haha. If you wanna chat more on it, DM me on twitter or come hangout in our #dev-chat channel in our community on discord. Always happy to talk about what we’re up to in more detail there.
Super excited for this next phase of development. Although it will mean another stretch of no new features, the result of this will mean our development experience is incomparably better which will result in much, much faster feature updates in the future.
NativShark will become the nimble platform we’ve always dreamed it would be.
A lot to look forward to. We’ve learned a lot over the past 3 years since beginning!
Over on the business side, things are looking up lately^^ From mid 2021 to 2022 growth was very subtle. We weren’t running ads and weren’t doing much by way of exposure. However, since July of this year, we’ve slowly ramped up our ad presence on primarily YouTube (perhaps some of you may have noticed 👀). That has gone decently well in improving our over all growth rate. Much more testing to be done on optimizing our acquisition channels and improving conversion rate but I won’t go into too much detail here, I’ll spare you! Feel free to reach out though. I always like to hear from folks.
Oh! Another thing we’re looking to start up again soon is some of our podcasts and other such content^^ We’re also eying launching a proper Japanese study newsletter sometime next year, so keep a look out for that if you’re interested~
Lastly if you’re reading this and you’ve tried NativShark in the past but haven’t gotten to really give it a proper go, or you’d like to test out some of the new features, send us an email at support@nativshark.com with the account you use to sign in to NativShark and we’ll set you up with a new free trial if you’d like.
That’s where I think I’ll end this one, thanks for coming along:) See you in the next one~
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