Happy Juneteenth, everyone! 🥳

I'm excited to share June '24 updates and enhancements to LumiReader - the #1 AI-powered language-learning e-reader.

The Goal

The goal of LumiReader is simple - to help you connect to other people and cultures through language quickly.

LumiReader personalizes your reading experience by enabling you to simplify and/or translate PDFs, such as novels, into your target language (we currently support over 30 languages) and read them aloud with AI voice. It can, for example, simplify Super Communicators (great read) to a 3rd-grade reading level in Korean.

I want to accelerate your language acquisition as fast as possible.

I love traveling to different countries and speaking comfortably with the people who live there.

So if you hate making new friends in new countries LumiReader isn’t for you.

But, if you like connecting to new cultures you can now do so faster by easily reading in your desired language.

The LumiReader approach is supported by modern linguistic theories of comprehensible input (CI) and reading while listening (RWL). Additionally, LumiReader is a direct output from my personal experiences learning Chinese.

I’ve designed LumiReader to be both effective and enjoyable.

What’s New

A New Landing Page - Who Dis?

The landing page is arguably the single most important webpage for a consumer application. It is the way for users to get to know your product and the team behind it at scale.

Our landing page is now significantly better.

We went from this

To this

It’s much more polished. Clearer and stickier CTAs. Clear explanation of the value proposition. “Texture” (read as fancy animations) on the page.

It’s still not perfect and it will continue to evolve but it is an important step forward. To see the whole thing click here.

We added a video that shows what Lumi does (instead of tells).

And, all of this wouldn't have been possible without members of the Lumi community - Aisha, Winston, Nelson, Naomi. Thank you all for not only subscribing but also for contributing to the app itself!

We 5x'd Our Library

I added 26 stories from across the world to our ever-expanding library of simplified language novels:

• Fairy Tales Folk Stories from America, France, Greece, the Himalayas, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, Netherlands, Nodics, and West Africa

• Classic Novels - Huckleberry Fin, Winnie the Pooh, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and more!

These literary masterpieces are now available for you to enjoy and learn from. Dive into these captivating stories while improving your language skills!

Referral Revenue Sharing

It takes a village to raise -- a startup. With that in mind, I wanted to share the love that you all have been giving Lumi back. I've set up a 50% split for new signups from Lumi referrals through the next 3 months.

To participate, all you have to do is sign up ➡️ here. Details are available in the portal.

(p.s the average commission rate for referrals is 15% - 30% but we're anything but average).

Track Your Progress

Often when learning anything new, growth isn't clear. Now, with LumiReader, you can track your growth through tracking word count.

Can you reach 10,000 words a day?

Side Quests

SEO Magic

To improve SEO ranking, I built an automated script that:

1. Searches language-specific YouTube videos

2. Creates a summary of the video and adds a Lumi perspective.

3. Gives credit to the original and supports their SEO ranking while also highlighting Lumi

4. Automatically publishes the articles online

Learnings:

1. While this was cool. The benefits are slow. Hopefully, in the medium term, I'll see increased ranking as a result.

2. Other people are making whole companies out of this tech alone (e.g. Leap AI). At LumiReader, we aim to develop technology like this to accelerate our go-to-market.

Facebook Virtual Assistant

To get LumiReader in front of many active language learners, I created a virtual assistant to message potential customers on Facebook:

1. Scraped a list of 16,000 people who belong to language-learning Facebook groups.

2. Drafted a personalized message template based on the language related to a particular group (e.g. French learners would get a message tailored to French)

3. Created a virtual AI assistant powered by Google's Gemini Flash model to message the 16,000 or so people and offer Lumi.

4. The VA messaged 25 people.

5. Facebook flagged it for spam and it could no longer send messages to other people

Learnings:

1. Facebook has a cap for outbound messages for new accounts.

2. Go slow, then go fast. In retrospect, I should've messaged people manually first and then I would have discovered the message limit. I could've also gotten a better sense of the conversion rate from a test pool of 100 messages.

3. For one-to-many outreach - free content (more articles, guides, YouTube videos, and shorts) is my next target!

I'm not going to share the code publicly for either of these systems. They're too powerful. But, if you or someone you know are interested in either of the side quest tech let me know.

On the Roadmap / Suggestions

Here are other features that will be out soon:

- More language support for Luna Voice. Voice-to-voice tutoring is coming. Luna voice-to-voice chat aims to be multi-lingual and fast — feeling like you’re having a natural conversation and not just talking to a bot. It’ll be a large next step for the Lumi platform.

- Documentation - both in terms of how to use the product and strategies around learning. We'll be launching more content shortly.

- User Preference Saving

- More books! How big can we get?!

I hope these new features and improvements make your language learning journey even more enjoyable and effective.

Stay tuned for more updates!

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p.s. Congrats on making it to the end! As a reward: let’s have an Oprah moment. If you are not a current subscriber and would like to try a month free - let's get you started. You can cancel anytime.

Just use this promo code on checkout: JUNETEENTH

The code expires in 7 days, so don’t wait. If you’d like a personal onboarding to Lumi by yours truly, please respond to this email. Happy reading and learning!

Jeremiah