LingQ Academy Week 4: The Sting of Rejection

Rejection. It’s something startup PR and marketing people get used to. Sometimes you think you’ve written the perfect pitch to an editor or journalist. You’ve read their articles, you understand the audience they appeal to, you’ve reached out on Twitter and suggested a story you’re sure they’ll be interested in. A week goes by and nothing; no response to your “killer pitch”. You send a follow up email, then another a week later. Still nothing. We wanted to protect our students from the pain of rejection, but we knew they would have to experience it sooner or later. It’s par for the course in the startup world.
Last week, Emily, Hanna and Tamás pitched story ideas to the media in their home countries of Taiwan, South Korea and Hungary. They wrote the pitches both in their native languages and in English to online publications they figured would be interested in LingQ and the unique experience they’re having here. They searched for the writers from each publication who write on language learning and startups, found their direct emails and shot off their emails. They haven’t received any responses yet, but they’ll be following up and sending more emails to different publications over the coming weeks. Fingers and toes crossed!
In terms of the 90-Day Challenge, our students are doing really well. Last week Tamás warned LingQ member nishenrik that he was coming after his top spot on the leaderboard, and he wasn’t joking! Check out the Activity Score leaderboard today:

All three of the students are riding high on the board. Excellent work, guys! Tamás is also top of the Known Words board, too.

You guys deserve those twinkling silver apples above your avatars.

As well as pitching to the media, Hanna, Tamás and Emily have been testing LingQ 4.0. As part of the beta testing group. They’ve given us valuable feedback on what they like and what we can tweak to make sure LingQ users get the best experience. Check out the moment they tried the new version for the first time:

Lessons last week focussed on onboarding, which is the process of increasing a user’s chances of getting value out of a product or website. It includes the messages that guide you through signup, starting a lesson and making a LingQ, as well as the emails you receive as a new user. We’re always looking for ways to make it easier and more fun for our members to use LingQ, so we’re looking forward to hearing the ideas Emily, Tamás and Hanna have over the coming weeks. Their task this month is to give a presentation on our current onboarding flow and how it could be improved. Be sure to check out the LingQ Youtube channel to see how they do.
Interested in onboarding? You can study the articles our students did last week. Here are the links:
10 Great Examples of Customer Onboarding That You Can Learn From
8 Mission-Critical User Onboarding Lessons from 8 Top Product People
Mobile UX Design: What Makes a Good Notification?
A Look Inside Our Automated Onboarding Emails
Are You Making These 5 Common User Onboarding Mistakes?
And don’t forget to check out the latest video on the LingQ Academy Live Channel:

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