Writing. My ability to write is highly dependent on the context. I'm much better at essays than emails, and fiction is completely outside my abilities. I would also like to change my style a little to be less flowery and more succinct. More Paul Graham than purple prose.
Marketing. I'm hopeless at it, and I need to be at least OK at it in order for my project (https://nuenki.app) to succeed.
Time management. I'm very good at obsessing over one thing; less so at managing lots of different things that need to be round-robined.
Physics and maths! I'm in my gap year at the moment, but I want to be prepared for my physics degree next year. I'm already really quite rusty.
Git. I know enough to use it, but I've no clue what a rebase is, for example.
I've had a vague interest in 3D printing for a while, but I've recently been getting into DND and it might finally justify getting one. It seems like miniatures are best with resin printers though, while most other things aren't. I also hate painting things, so maybe it isn't worth it.
German! Nuenki has distracted me from it, but I ought to properly get back to it. It's just something I enjoy - I've discovered how much fun language learning is.
And a number of other things, but the list is already quite long and I should probably be enjoying Christmas instead of browsing HN :)
Ok, you say you are bad at marketing but the Nuenki homepage is one of the best I've seen. The product and benefits are so clearly explained. Well done.
You may eventually want a small project to create a recognizable logo (think how much mileage Duolingo has got from their little owl fellah).
One thing I often see with SaaS offerings is no clear & simple concept / theme that separates the free and paid plans of a service. For Nuenki I would just lean into "works on mobile" being the clear value you get from the paid plan. Hopefully over time you can bring it to more mobile platforms with a small app or something.
Congrats on what you've built and hope to see more growth in 2025! Great idea well executed.
> Marketing. I'm hopeless at it, and I need to be at least OK at it in order for my project (https://nuenki.app) to succeed.
This project looks great and the homepage does a great job at explaining what it does. Especially the slider. And it supports Firefox which is a rarity in this space. I think you should take pride in what you have accomplished from a communication perspective.
If you didn't know about it already, I think that you could use it to tweak the Nuenki landing page, and you'll possibly have some aha moment that'll help in marketing down the line.
> Physics and maths! I'm in my gap year at the moment, but I want to be prepared for my physics degree next year. I'm already really quite rusty.
You should really check out Math Academy! It'll diagnose where your gaps are and build you up to all the math you need for a physics degree and then some [0].
I'm just about finished Mathematical Foundations I on Math Academy:
95% finished
2950 XP
63 hours
I started October 21st and aimed for 60 XP a day, every day. I tended to miss one or two days a week (so the equivalent of a weekend), and I ended up having one period of 9 days I missed completely (last week).
One XP is supposed to be roughly 1 minute of work, so 63-(2950/60) means I've done 13 hours more work than I should've theoretically needed.
I found the course after looking up Hacker News recommendations for learning math. I had hoped to have gotten through the course faster, and I had wanted to be more consistent. I really wanted to grok the concepts and understand them with complete confidence, but don't feel total confidence in quite a few areas.
But ultimately, I'm very happy with this course. I struggle with consistency and underestimate time ranges (it feels like I've done MA for less than 6 hours, not more than 63), and it's got me interested in math again and given me the confidence to do other online courses after years of feeling behind and helpless. I did a SQLite course and I've been using those skills in a big way in two recent software projects.
- - -
My goal for early 2024 is to start and finish Foundations II, as well as independently learn mental math to a higher-than-average degree. I've felt the lack of clear mental math impeding my life as well as greatly slowing down my math progress, so I'd like to be able to understand numeric relationships on a more innate level. I'd also like to learn some graph theory and release my Unicode graph website in the next month!
Thank you for the recommendation! I hadn't heard of Math Academy. "The Challenge: Knowledge Retention" sounds like precisely my problem. I'll try it out.
The site is solid, but as somebody who has also built a foreign language partial translation extension over a decade ago, there's a TON of competition in this area.
Off the top of my head, I can think of Langulearn, Language Immersion for Chrome, Polyglot, Alpharabius, Mind the Word, Gloss (I think defunct now though), and Toucan. These are all extension-based approaches and range from individual words to entire sentences.
I can't think of any effective marketing in my entire life that didn't involve repetition.
I think when people say they need to learn marketing they really mean they want to learn to skimp on spending on marketing.
Nothing anyone could come up with for 1 or 2 passes would really beat a white background with black text that just says https://nuenki.app that the target market sees 10 random times for 10 seconds.
I am hopeless at marketing because I think it is just that stupid at this scale of market size and being good at it goes against all my sensibilities.
Marketing. I'm hopeless at it, and I need to be at least OK at it in order for my project (https://nuenki.app) to succeed.
Time management. I'm very good at obsessing over one thing; less so at managing lots of different things that need to be round-robined.
Physics and maths! I'm in my gap year at the moment, but I want to be prepared for my physics degree next year. I'm already really quite rusty.
Git. I know enough to use it, but I've no clue what a rebase is, for example.
I've had a vague interest in 3D printing for a while, but I've recently been getting into DND and it might finally justify getting one. It seems like miniatures are best with resin printers though, while most other things aren't. I also hate painting things, so maybe it isn't worth it.
German! Nuenki has distracted me from it, but I ought to properly get back to it. It's just something I enjoy - I've discovered how much fun language learning is.
And a number of other things, but the list is already quite long and I should probably be enjoying Christmas instead of browsing HN :)