The Goal: Get Recurring Usage

Posted on October 25, 2025  •  3 minutes  • 443 words

Aiming to Get Recurring Usage

Nowadays, everyone is empowered to build software, and that is really cool to see. One thing I’ve always struggled with is going beyond the initial MVP into something that people use regularly. Tarvingo is the start of an exploration that I’m doing, where I will stick with the product for a while, and I’ll continue speaking with potential users to get a deeper understanding on what the difference is between a product that is just “pretty cool” and a product where users come back on a daily or weekly basis to interact with it.

Tarvingo, the Current State

Tarvingo enables everyone to learn a new language through storytelling. You select a scene and your character, and you drive the narrative of the story in the language you are learning.

At the moment, I’m my own user, and I’ve been doing live user interviews, where people interact with the app while I’m there. I’d say this is the current state of things:

• User interviews tend to go beyond the 30 minute time slot because people continue to interact with the app even after our time is up.
• However, the app does not see repeat usage outside these user interviews

This tells me that there is something here that people find enjoyable, but at the same time, it’s not enough for them to come back the next day.

This is a demo of how the app looks like at this point in time:

The Goal of this Exploration

My focus right now is to get to a place where someone visits Tarvingo and interacts with it the first time, then within the week, they open the app again to use it for language learning. I’m going to pick “10 Weekly Active Users” as a tangible goal to aim for as a start.

Summarizing the Starting Point

So at this moment, I have an app that I’m able to show to people. I’ve observed in my user interviews that the app does get smiles and laughs out of people, and I sometimes need to be the one to say “I have to go, so let’s stop here”, which tells me that the app is genuinely engaging. However, people usually do not revisit the app on their own.

I think this is a good time to start documenting an exploration like this. It’ll be a resource for me to revisit in the future, and it will be a case study for others who are also curious about the things I’m exploring here.

If you’d like to try it out, this is a light-hearted scene about a treasure on a rickety bridge: https://app.tarvingo.com/join/34YlHUoSn2YOCkKi30oEU4VOWJm