On the topic of resource allocation, one of the major things that needs to be considered is people power, as people are the ‘resources’ you’re talking about in a topic such as this. For us, there is no point putting 3 people on content creation when only one of those people is a content expert. There is also inversely no point putting 3 people on app development when only one of them has any knowledge of how to develop an app.
This could be construed as an issue of hiring, but the reverse situation is that we hire 3 content experts, and are then stuck in the situation of having a revolving loop of 3 people arguing that maybe want to teach things in 3 different ways and it actually stagnates the content development rather than speeding it up. Compounding on that, not one of them have the ability to create an app or website, so that possibility gets removed from the table completely.
I think you’ll find that with most companies that only have a handful of people, those people will each have one very specific job, and adding extra people to those teams may not actually increase the speed of anything getting done, as there is a soft cap on the speed that any one particular thing can be produced due to it needing to go through various quality control steps.
The above scenario I believe is something that applies to any similar business, and not something that should be taken as me defending Bunpro. It’s more just a ‘this is what it’s like behind the curtain, not everyone is qualified to do everything’ statement.
As for the app, as has already been mentioned, one of the huge benefits is offline support, and similar things that will be possible in the near future, such as local storage of audio etc for use whenever the student wants, regardless of their connection status.
As for vocab, this is something that has been implemented to go hand in hand with grammar, not be distinct from it. A prime example of this is the way that our example sentences have been written. If you check some of them out, you’ll notice that N5 words use a lot of N5 grammar, N4 words use a lot of N4 grammar, N3 words use a lot of N3 grammar, and so on and so forth. I’d go so far as to say that Bunpro’s vocab is the only vocab service in the world that is designed to actually help you get better at reading at the same time and at the same pace as you’re learning the grammar. Open the grammar search, jump to an N level, look at a handful of points, then look at a handful of the sentences from the vocab in that same level. Sure it may not be perfect yet, but once we get the logistics of grammar searching sorted out within every sentence on the site, you’re going to have hundreds and in some case thousands of examples of every single grammar point on the site, and I personally think that’s pretty exciting!
There is a long term goal, and while the team may be chugging away towards it on different tracks, we’re all going to be meeting at the same station at the end. This you can be assured of .
P.S - This is not an attack on your post at all, I actually super appreciate you posting it, as communication about our goals and how users interpret those goals is really important to us! Rather than the actual allocation of our resources, is there any way that you think we can be more communicative about the way that we implement each new feature and why?