Heading into 2021, I want to make my app, JReader, bring in some cash to bear its own weight and maybe you want to help out?

Frankly put, JReader began as a half-hearted project to see if I could launch and market an app that would potentially make some money. The idea was that it’s really hard to get into practising reading Japanese because it’s really slow to figure out how certain Kanji are read and to look up their meaning in the dictionary.

JReader solves this through 2 main features, original short articles and a one-click dictionary lookup.

This simple concept has this far got me over 5.000 monthly users and around $20 monthly in ad revenues. This is enough to pay for the Apple developer account and google services I use. But, I think I’m onto something here looking at the (very positive) feedback I receive in Google Play and I want to invest a bit more into it.

However, I’m also at a point where my own efforts at coding would eat up too much time and I want to focus more on the designing and marketing aspects instead. So this is why I’m reaching out to you.

So, do you want to help 10x the user base of JReader and help Japanese students around the world get access to fun and bitesize content to practice Japanese with?

What’s the stack?

JReader now has three main components:

1. The backend serving articles (Node.js hosted in Firebase)
2. An author portal for writing articles (Angular 2 in Typescript)
3. An iOS and Android application is written in Flutter/Dart

I also want to add a lightweight website version in Node.js/Typescript.

You can find the released app on Google Play and App Store. See the full stack on stackshare.

Who are you?

I’m a developer of 15+ years myself and will still be involved in the development and architecture but mostly handling product management, design and the rest. I want to keep the app maintainable and I expect unit testing and refactoring to be done as part of any work that goes into the product. As mentioned, the product isn’t making more money than it costs to run so anything paid for comes straight from my own pocket so I’m looking for someone that is able to join at an affordable rate. What I can give in addition to a modest fee is good job experience and references, mentorship and a chance to make an impact for people who like the app.

Skills I’m looking for are:

• English fluency
• Flutter or Typescript (and Angular 2) or Node.js (and Express.js)
• Firebase
• Using and writing REST APIs
• Unit testing
• Toolset
  • Gitlab (and merge requests) (github experience is OK)
  • Slack
  • Figma
  • VS Code
  • Jira
  • Android Studio

Meritable experience:

• Studying Japanese (big plus)
• Clean code/architecture by Uncle Bob
• Docker
• Gitlab CI
• Admob
• In-app payments

Interested?

Drop me a line at david@greycastle.se and make sure to send me your github/portfolio link as well. Mention the please mention the reference code JReader2021 in the subject.

You can also find a bit more info at http://japapps.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/japaneseapps

Looking forward to hearing from you!