Inspiration
I spent about three months traveling in Europe last year.
Signs, menus, things written on the street. I could not read any of it, and I wanted to point my phone at something and know what it said.
But I did not want the translation to stop at my own language. I am learning more than one language, and every time I looked something up I was only filling in one of them. An app that takes one thing you see and hands it back in every language you are studying, at once, did not exist. That is the app I decided to build.
What it does
mulvolin is a vocabulary app for people learning several languages at the same time.
A normal flashcard app ties one word to one translation. mulvolin ties one concept to every language you study, on a single card. Learning "apple" means keeping English, Spanish, Korean and Chinese together in one place, not in four separate decks.
You add a word by typing it, photographing it, or saying it. AI fills in the rest: readings, meanings and example sentences, in each of the languages on your card. Reviews come back through spaced repetition, and five quiz modes keep reviewing from feeling like a list. It supports 70 languages, mixed however you want.
How we built it
React Native, because I wanted iOS and Android from day one rather than shipping one and promising the other.
The part that shaped the app most was not the code. I gave builds to friends who are learning languages and to multilingual people I know, collected what they told me, and rebuilt against it. That loop is still running. The app is still changing.
Challenges we ran into
Marketing, and not in the way I expected.
The obvious parts were hard on their own: social media, onboarding after install, the paywall. But the real problem was my own positioning.
I led with "many languages, for multilingual learners," because that is the thing only this app does. What people heard instead was that it has no specialty. Apps built for one language, or for one narrow purpose, are reaching more users than I am. Being the app for everyone learning anything turned out to be a weaker message than being the app for one specific person.
So I am changing where I aim. I am learning Spanish myself, so I am focusing on Spanish speaking learners first. Win one market, then widen. It is the ordinary way to do this, and I stopped trying to skip it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A demo video of the app passed 230,000 views on YouTube, and the post announcing it passed 115 likes on X. I made that video myself, from screen recordings of the real app, and it reached far more people than anything else I have made. https://youtube.com/shorts/0XmcnehfWLs
Shipping at all is the other one. iOS and Android at the same time, alone, and then continuing to ship rather than stopping at launch, with real testers reading every release.
And the core idea works. One card holding one meaning across several languages sounds simple and is not, because every language wants a different reading, a different example, a different way of being wrong. It holds up now.
What we learned
That being unique is not the same as being wanted, and that attention is not the same as installs.
230,000 people watched the app work and downloads did not follow. Revenue did not follow either. That gap is the most useful thing I have learned in this whole project, because it tells me the problem is not the idea and not the video. It is everything between someone being interested and someone still being here a week later.
The other lesson is the positioning one. The multilingual card is the thing no one else has, and I assumed that would carry the app on its own. It does not carry acquisition. People look for the app that was built for their exact situation, and "all languages" reads as "not yours."
The feature stayed right. The order I said things in was wrong.
What's next for mulvolin
A web version, so the cards are not locked to the phone.
And a Chrome extension. Most vocabulary apps let you turn a word into a card from wherever you actually meet the language: a web page, a YouTube video, a subtitle. That is where words come from now, and mulvolin should be there.
And the funnel. The video proved people want to look. Now I have to earn the install and the second week.
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