GitHub profile cleanup

A few weeks ago, my friend sent me a few screenshots showing quite funny descriptions of my public GitHub repositories. Those descriptions were generated by https://github-roast.pages.dev. I had 19 public repos at that time. Those screenshots and descriptions reminded me how much out of date and untouched for a long time my GitHub profile was. So I decided to fix that.

After a cleanup, I have only 2 public repos now:

  1. https://github.com/DamianMarkowski/ios-security,
  2. https://github.com/DamianMarkowski/BuckSample.

I believe both of them may be useful for at least some people. Moving forward, I will be adding and hopefully maintaining more public repos with the code focused on algorithms and data structures.

My book recommendations

I like readings books related to building a company, managing people, big tech company stories and their founder autobiographies and biographies. Here’s a list of such books that I’ve read so far and I fully recommend reading them (I keep this list up to date, I update this blog post, I put the items below in a random order):

  1. “How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story” by Billy Gallagher
  2. “The Spotify Play” by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud
  3. “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” by Steve Blank
  4. “Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager” by James Stanier
  5. “Tesla. Inventor of the Electrical Age” by W. Bernard Carlson
  6. “How to Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
  7. “Amazon Unbound” by Brad Stone
  8. “Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition” by Geoffrey A. Moore
  9. “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber” by Mike Isaac
  10. “No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention” by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
  11. “Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level” by Leander Kahney
  12. “Think Twice” by Michael J. Mauboussin
  13. “The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others” by Tali Sharot
  14. “Walt Disney: An American Original” by Bob Thomas
  15. “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” by Barry Schwartz
  16. “The Google Guys: Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin” by Richard L. Brandt
  17. “Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs” by Gina Keating
  18. “The Making of a Manager” by Julie Zhuo
  19. “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal” by Nick Bilton
  20. “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram” by Sarah Frier
  21. “Start With Why” by Sinek Simon
  22. “The Airbnb Story” by Leigh Gallagher
  23. “The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change” by Camille Fournier
  24. “The Facebook Effect” by David Kirkpatrick
  25. “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson
  26. “Make It, Don’t Fake It” by Sabrina Horn
  27. “7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy” by Hamilton Helmer

Introducing Mowyty AI

It’s been 2 months since I published Mowyty on the App Store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mowyty/id1622156106) and Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowyty.app). There have been 15 updates in both app versions in total since then but I just released the biggest update so far: I added Mowyty AI – an AI driven feature that will help the users improve their reading and listening skills and at the same time they are given an opportunity to learn the interesting facts about Poland and life in Poland. 

Why?

There are 2 reasons why I decided to add an AI driven feature:

  1. Nowadays many people talk about AI and also they expect to see something related to AI in the digital products they use on a daily basis. So adding Mowyty AI is a great move from a marketing and a user acquisition perspective.
  2. Mowyty AI is available for the users who purchased a Mowyty Pro subscription so it’s making the Pro version of the app more interesting. Hopefully it will increase a number of the paying users.

What?

I spent quite a bit of time on reading articles and watching videos about how people leverage AI in their digital products because I was struggling to find the use cases that would be fully beneficial for the users, not only attractive from a technical perspective. I didn’t want to use AI just because it’s a hot topic at the moment in our industry. Eventually I came up with a great AI use case for Mowyty.

Here is a user flow:

  1. User enters a Mowyty AI screen.
  2. AI generates a list of the topics related to Poland and life in Poland. The topics are generated in Ukrainian.
  3. AI translates all the topics from Ukrainian to Polish so we can display both versions.
  4. User chooses one of those topics.
  5. AI generates a text about the topic chosen by the user in point 4.
  6. User may read the generated text but also may choose the app to read it for them (either a full text or the particular words).

How?

I used OpenAI API (https://platform.openai.com) to build Mowyty AI.

Mowyty – first A/B tested ad campaign – results

We’ve run the first A/B tested Facebook + Instagram (stories and reels) ad campaign for Mowyty and I would like to share the results.

We ran the ads using Facebook Ads Manager. We added 2 Ad sets: one driving the Android app downloads and the second one the iOS app downloads. After more or less a week, we noticed that the Ad set targeting the iOS users reaches around 21 times less users than the Android one so we decided to switch it off and investigate it later and leave only the Android one on.

The campaign’s duration was 13 days: 19th April – 2nd May 2023.

We A/B tested the following ads (I’m showing only the screenshots here, we had videos in the campaign though):

ad 1

ad 2

As a result, only ad 2 made the users download the app, there were no installs from ad 1. I think the reason might be that ad 1 had too much text, that Facebook and Instagram users didn’t want to spend time on reading that.

Stats for the users who downloaded the Mowyty app after seeing ad 1:

Gender: men (36%), women (64%).

Age: 18-24 (8%), 25-34 (40%), 35-44 (48%), 45-54 (4%).

Mowyty is live 🥳

We did it! Mowyty – an app that will help Ukrainians to start their new life in Poland just landed on Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowyty.app) and App Store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mowyty/id1622156106) 🎉

Mowyty in numbers so far:
– 11 months since the first push in a git repository,
– 16 people worked on Mowyty so far,
– 1 burnout that I had on the way,
– 2 platforms: Android and iOS,
– 1 codebase: Flutter,
– 23 followers on our Instagram profile so far (https://www.instagram.com/mowytyapp).

Mowyty wouldn’t be live now without help and hard work of everyone who contributed with their development, design, translation, legal, marketing and other services. Special thanks to the PettersonApps and Perpetio teams and my friend Ula – I’m sure that without your help and support I would give up on this idea a few months ago 🙂

It is just a beginning of course. We want to listen to feedback from our users and keep improving the product. If you have any Ukrainian friends for whom the app may be useful please share the links with them 🙂

New product announcement – Mowyty

I strongly believe that a technology doesn’t exist for itself. It does exist to make our life easier, more efficient and more enjoyable. It exists to help us. I’m working on an app that will help Ukrainians who either live in Poland or want to move there in the future. I’m working on the first in a Polish market, Ukrainian user friendly, one-language app that will let them learn Polish in their native language, not in English as it’s already possible in a few language learning apps. The app is called Mowyty. Why Mowyty? Mowyty means “speak” in Ukrainian but it’s easily understandable for Polish people as well.

There is an official Mowyty website live already, please check it out here: https://mowyty.com. Please sign up for a Newsletter to be notified once the app is available. It would be great if you could share it with your Ukrainian friends and colleagues too of course, thanks! 🙏 Speaking of the app’s availability, there will be 2 versions of the app available: for the iOS and Android platforms. I’m aiming to release the iOS one by the end of June 2022 and the Android one by the end of 2022.

What will Mowyty give you?

  • possibility to learn the most useful Polish words and phrases from 12 categories,
  • 3 levels in each category, you will start with the basics and get to the more interesting vocabulary later,
  • 2 modes: learn and test, first you learn the phrases and then you can check your knowledge,
  • 2 types of tests: question-answers one and a memory game,
  • Mowyty Pro – additionally, you get the exercise sheets in a Pro version of the app! 

It is the first time when I’m hiring an external agency to help me with building my product. Big thanks to Perpetio company from Lviv, Ukraine! Thanks for all your engagement, ideas and a great cooperation 🙂 I would also like to thank my friend Ula. Ula is Ukrainian, lives in Poland and is a Polish teacher (you can check her YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/c/PolishglotsUA) so she is the best possible source of feedback for Mowyty. Thanks for all your help, Ula! 🙂