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! 🙂

iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 3: technical interview

The 3rd article from my “iOS Developer – preparing for a recruitment process” series is live 🚀 You can read it here: https://damianmarkowski.medium.com/ios-developer-preparing-for-a-recruitment-process-part-3-technical-interview-86bad08b9fd6. Please feel free to reach out to me and share your thoughts, feedback 🙂 Thanks!

tournamentsheets.com reactivation

As you may know I have a DM Table Tennis app. A few months ago an idea of excluding a Tournament sheets part of the app to a website came to my mind. So I purchased a www.tournamentsheets.com domain and built a simple website offering the tournament sheets (in PDF files) to download for free.

There were the following sheets available:

  • 8 players – single elimination,
  • 8 players – double elimination,
  • 16 players – single elimination,
  • 16 players – double elimination,
  • 32 players – single elimination,
  • 32 players – double elimination,
  • 64 players – single elimination,
  • 64 players – double elimination,
  • 128 players – single elimination,
  • 128 players – double elimination,
  • 3 players – round-robin,
  • 4 players – round-robin,
  • 5 players – round-robin,
  • 6 players – round-robin.

Everything was fine, tournamentsheets.com was up and running for some time but I analysed my spendings and I wanted to optimise them. One of the actions that I decided to take was to decrease a number of web domains that I own. I thought that the best approach will be to keep my landing pages and web products under my main damianmarkowski.com domain.

My first step to slowly kill Tournament sheets project was moving it to damianmarkowski.com/tournamentsheets and not to renew the tournamentsheets.com domain anymore. The next planned step was to remove damianmarkowski.com/tournamentsheets entirely.

I didn’t do that though. Why? I kept seeing there is still some traffic coming to that website, even without me advertising or tweeting about it so I decided to give it the second chance.

Second life for tournamentsheets.com

So I’m moving back to tournamentsheets.com. I’m going to re-organise the website and the project’s business model. I will be offering tournament sheets on Gumroad for a small fee. I will re-build the website in the upcoming weeks and I should be able to start selling the sheets in the second half of May 2021.

iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 2: technical screening

I published the 2nd article from “iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process” series on Medium tonight. Please check it out here https://damianmarkowski.medium.com/ios-developer-preparing-for-a-recruitment-process-part-2-technical-screening-da8c40d88eb3 and let me know what you think 🙏 😄 Thanks and have a great upcoming week 🙂