We’re aiming to build the best typing application; personalized to every users typing habits.
Typing is one of the most important hard skills today and yet most education systems skip it.
Most of our customers are adults who always wanted to type but can’t find the time. We make it faster to learn and improve by focusing around the user’s weak points (with our features like SmartPractice and TargetPractice)
Started as a side project but has become my full time focus since leaving a FAANG job ~6months ago
So far we've added:
- Code typing practice with any language: https://typequicker.com/code-typing-practice
- SmartPractice: analyzes your history stats to find weak areas and generates exercises for them: https://typequicker.com/app/text
- TargetPractice: lets you interact with any of your stats; for example, clicking on a certain bigram that you typed slowly will create a natural practice text that targets that two character sequence
- TypeAnything: let you create a typing exercise about anything; AI for typing pretty much
- Advanced stas: we measure every character, 2,3 charcter sequences (delay to click in ms), every word, and even breakdown speed/accuracy per finger
- Real-time hand/finger indicators: show you exactly where to place your fingers to type based on standard touch typing practices
- Keyboards supported: QWERTY, QWERTZ (German keyboard) ISO, British ISO (adding Dvorak and Colemak soo).
I wish this was the case but I have found that almost any success in my life took enormous amounts of effort.
However, to some extent I do agree. For example, when learning to play the guitar, it’s important to learn to exert just the right amount of effort to place on the strings. When typing on a keyboard, I have a habit of pressing way too hard and I realized this lead to a lot of hand pain.
So saying zero effort might be an incorrect title - maybe saying “using just the right amount of effort” would be more accurate
I’ve been building a type of an educational app for the last 6 months.
Spent 6 months building the product. Now I’m focusing on marketing and branding.
I’ve spent last few weeks studying other successful educational products.
And so far, from my research, pretty much every single one of these apps/sites prioritized making the user “feel good” about learning rather than actually learning.
And unfortunately, this is what the users want. They want to feel good about learning.
All the successful education sites employ these mechanisms that you’re intending to avoid. I wanted to avoid using these as well - but I just don’t see another way. I’ve even had users explicitly ask me to add milestones, streaks, etc to motivate them.
Reality is - most people who really want to study or learn anything, can do so without an app. Even a book from a library will do. But it requires tremendous consistency, effort and time. Apps are way easier and make the user feel good - there’s still learning being done, don’t get me wrong. But user feeling good about it is what keeps them coming back.
Edit: I’ve also studied many of their ads. Often times on places like TikTok, Instagram, etc their ads are what I would call “intelligence porn”. They get you excited about being more intelligent, investing in yourself, intelligence eliticism, etc. These were a common ad strategy that I have discovered so far.
Some apps literally ran ads with text: “become dangerously intelligent” text and had the song from the show Succession play with images of famous researchers and scientists changing quickly. (Newton, Einstein, etc). Stuff like this cracked me up tbh lol. But apparently it works
https://youtu.be/eQul-rkcGPQ
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