On this page I’ll post regular updates about the status of my newest project: Free German For All which aims at enabling anyone to learn German for free. The project started on April 1 2025. The newest updates you’ll always find on top of this page.
April 23-30: End of First Month
I got my email plan down to 280 USD / mo as I sorted out half my subscribers who didn’t open any mails. Daily subscription numbers to my courses are at ~200 people. Slightly under the hoped for 300 but still 6,000 per month. By the way, if you want to see a graphical representation of the project check out the project’s landing page here. This month I covered 758 USD (=7.58%) gross (600 USD net) of the necessary 10k goal coming from monthly support memberships and the rest from one time sales (1216 USD one time payments + 194 USD payment plans) adding up to 2.168 USD gross. I also made 100 USD in one time contributions “buy me a coffee” since I added this option this week. That means I’m at 22,68% after one month. Not too shabby if you ask me.
I got 36,680 students enrolled since April. Up 3,048 this week. YT and LinkedIn numbers I’ll check again in a couple of weeks.
My two initial LinkedIn posts; will post another update there later today and then switch to monthly posts.
Post 01 (~429 impressions this week)
Post 02 (~440 impressions this week)
And I got 12 new 5-star reviews/ratings on Google <3
What’s Up?
I’ll also get Reddit ads going still this week and will soon start a new teaching/coaching project for a group of up to 5 women where I coach them for 10 months, financially supported by a student of mine who prefers to stay anonymous to the public. We share the cost for this, while my investment is mainly my time.
April 12-22: End of Hype
The sudden rise in subscribers caused my email program to put me up 4 tiers. I pay now 400 USD per month only for kit.com. I looked into sendy which would reduce this to 10 USD per month but it takes time to transfer my emails there. And it’s pretty technical so there’s some issue with the mx records. I’ll get there. For now the extra investment is doable.
In the last 2 days over 20k subscribers were cleaned out aka unsubscribed from my lists bec. they didn’t open any email. My guess is that they were mainly signing up bec. things were free. I have about 250-300 new enrolments every day. That’s what I expected and is still a 30x increase from before (10 a day max).
I got 500 active students per day – up from 50 – which is lovely as well and 10 new reviews resp. 5-star ratings on Google.
I’m seeing “smartergerman is free” on reddit occasionally and will consider paid ads there. Reddit is a tough crowd though. They really don’t like ads so I have to do it the right way.
My two LinkedIn posts are performing well and are still getting attention after 2 weeks:
Post 01 (~3000 impressions so far)
Post 02 (~1700 impressions/day)
My YT channel is slowly getting more subscribers. I’m at 94k subscribers. Hoping that at 100k YT will take me more seriously but I’m also planning new content as recently I have bitterly neglected that channel as I’m just not a YouTuber and never want to become one:
I’m also getting a handful of lovely responses to my emails and my project. People are happy to get the opportunity to work with my courses.
In regards of conversion there’s still more work to be done. I’m at 38 core support members now, 2 of which paid for a full year. Only one premium member so far. That’s 6% of my short term goal of 10k. At this speed I would reach my short term goal after 367 days. Still looking doable.
UPDATE 5hrs LATER:
There was a surge today possibly due to an affiliate promoting my work. I got 543 new subscribers as of 22:15 and three more Core Support Members: now 41. I also made the support memberships much easier to find based on a student’s feedback and I fixed a broken link in the in-course support grid (every 5 lessons).
April 08-11: Amazing start + Normalization
Daily sign ups are now down to an expected 300 per day. To give you an idea, before this project I had about 10 sign ups per day. That’s a 2.900% increase.
Of the 30.000 new people, 33 have enrolled in the trial of my Core Membership plan ($9,90) and one enrolled in my Premium Membership plan ($29,90). At this rate I’ll reach my goal of 10k steady revenue in about 12 months (considering churn, ignoring change for the worse or the better of this rate). I need a steady 1.000 Core Members or 333 Premium ones to keep SmarterGerman running and to keep being able to offer my language courses for free.
The first reactions are looking promising but the truth will show up at the end of the honeymoon 😉
April 01-07: Launch + YT Video + Reddit + 1st Influencer
I launched this video announcing this project: German for free for all. It spread quickly to Reddit.
On April 5, Herr El-Deep, an Egyptian TikToker posted this video causing roughly 30.000 people to join SmarterGerman over the next 4-5 days.