Hey Hacker News,

I’m Jay, a 26 year old Irish guy, and I’ve spent the last 2-3 months working full time on my AI language partner, Langchats.

I love languages (or at least the idea of speaking lots of languages). I also LOVE building, and making software applications has become a big part of my life.

I’ve combined two of my passions into an application. Langchats. An AI language partner, and my goal is to make it sufficiently good that it can replace a traditional language partner, and maybe even a teacher in the future. It’s early days yet for AI, but I have high hopes.

Over the last 3 months I’ve built out most of the core features:

- 30+ languages on offer - Translations - Corrections - Voice responses - Suggestions - Free chat (about anything) or Role play scenarios - And much more

I’m now at the point where I think I’ve got 70-80% of the main features built out. I’m happy enough with the UI too. However, I know there are plenty of improvements to make.

The next goal is Marketing. However, it’s not easy to promote your product when places like reddit and other forums don’t like self promotion. Has anybody got any tips on how to reach more people? I might test out paid some paid Ads. I also run a youtube channel called Linguajay which is mainly language content and this is how I’ve got some initial customers.

I’m also going to be doing a language series on Youtube / Twitter starting next week where I try to learn Dutch over the course of a month to a really basic conversation level ONLY using my application Langchats. In the hope that I can go viral and get on the radar of indiemakers such as Danny Postma and Pieter Levels, both Dutch. I’ll be a power user of my own app. In the process I’ll know exactly what additional features need to be built / what improvement need to be made.

Quick side note on Langchats (before someone comments): The product is free to use for the first 7 days. You can cancel anytime before the 7 days are up and you pay nothing. Yes I know this is a little friction but everything is handled via Stripe so payments are fully secure. I’m a solo developer an my goal is to be able to make a living of this product. It costs me to run it so I’m not in a position to offer a totally free plan at the moment.

You can follow my progress using the links below:

Langchats: https://www.langchats.com

Linguajay Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@linguajay

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jay_pinion

website: https://www.jaypinion.com/

If you’ve got any ideas or suggestions on how I can improve the product then give me a shout.

Thanks everyone!

Have a great day.

Jay