Success of iPhone app boggles Coralville software firm

Launching a top- selling educational iPhone app has been a learning experience for a Coralville company.

“Memorize Words for Spanish” from Componica became one of the top five iPhone education software applications at the end of February, and remains in the top 25.

Paid downloads of the $6.99 language app from Apple's iTunes store soared to 700-800 per day at the peak, Componica co-founder Steven Mitchell said. That's about the number of downloads it sold in one month a year ago.

Mitchell said Componica has learned some lessons about the iPhone app market since it introduced the Spanish learning app, but still isn't sure if lady luck didn't play a hand in the product's success.

Componica lowered the price of the app and stepped up its marketing game with the help of a consultant. It sent free copies of the app to technology bloggers, and news releases to media that reviewed iPhone products. It also adopted a more eye-catching product icon the consultant recommended.

Sales took off this year after the software got some favorable reviews, and free downloads of the “light” version of the app improved.

“It goes through this strange feedback loop,” Mitchell said. “We noted a huge increase in the free version and one week later, this massive influx of people buying the full version. That caused it to come up on the front page of the site, which caused an even bigger increase.”

When Apple's rankings of education software apps listed their product in the top five, “we were in shock,” Mitchell said. “We just kind of stared at it for a while.”

Some users have already learned more than 4,000 Spanish words with the app. Mitchell said he's received positive feedback from his decision to include medical terminology, which emergency medical technicians have used to communicate with patients in Spanish.

The system displays and pronounces each word, flashcard style, then prompts the users at regular intervals to recall it. The idea is to refresh the memory at the point in time when a normal user would begin to forget the word.

An updated version of the software allows customers with some Spanish knowledge to skip over words they already know.

Componica is now working on a Russian language and a French language version of the app using the same basic template. Componica had no problem finding a Russian speaker, since Mitchell's wife is from Russia. He couldn't find a native French speaker with the voice he wanted locally to record the French vocabulary, so he drives to Chicago with a portable sound studio on a regular basis for recording sessions with a French speaker.

Componica was founded in 2004 as a consulting firm specializing in software that helps machines recognize sound and visual patterns. Mitchell is a fan of the iPhone, but none of the company's developers use iPhones because they said they can't get a signal at the University of Iowa's technology incubator at the Oakdale campus.

“We're all using Google Androids,” Mitchell said. “It's kind of ironic.”