I’ve been building Phrasing now for around three years. I’ve been launching it over and over for a year now, and it’s always crickets. Weeks, months, years of sleepless nights for less than 100 clicks.

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get to me on some level every time. Getting no response is even more frustrating than negative ones. But I can’t say it’s ever set me back or slowed me down. If anything, it always ends up as just more fuel in the fire, and before the day is done I’m back at it with a vengeance.

So how do I, and more important how can you, keep going when nobody else seems to care? How can you become unyielding?

In my experience, it comes down to something very fundamental: intentions.

Intentions innately dictate success. If your intentions rely on external validation, then the lack there of can be devastating. If your measure of success lies in the hands of others, your moral hinges on the roll of a dice.

My intention with Phrasing is to build the best language learning app. To make it possible to learn more languages, more fluently, in less time. To increase our collective linguistic capacity. To turn my own impossible dreams into realistic ones.

Phrasing’s success as a business may be tied to profits and users, but it’s success as a product is entirely within my control. I’ve been using Phrasing for over a year now to genuinely make progress in a ridiculous amount of languages – many of which would have been nigh impossible to crack without Phrasing.

After one year, I’ve managed to:

• learn to read and write the Arabic, Greek, and Devanagari script with remarkable proficiency 🇮🇱🇬🇷🇮🇳

• finally make sense of Arabic grammar 🇮🇱🇲🇹 (thanks Maltese!)

• get surprisingly comfortable with agglutination 🇹🇷🇰🇷

• wrap my head around cases 🇸🇮🇪🇪 and SOV sentence structure 🇹🇷🇯🇵

• internalize hundreds of kanji/hanzi 🇯🇵🇨🇳

• increase my French vocabulary 🇫🇷

• refresh some Italian and Portuguese 🇮🇹🇵🇹

• start interjecting some off handed phrases into conversations 🇪🇸🇬🇧

• familiarize myself with the basics of several new languages 🇨🇳🇹🇷🇬🇷🇸🇮🇪🇪🇳🇱🇵🇹

• learn the phonetics of even more 🇬🇧🇮🇹🇫🇷🇪🇸

• train my ear to actually pick out individual words in every language I’m learning (no more jumbled strings of sounds)

• acquire thousands of new words

• ingrained hundreds of new grammar patterns

The embedded chart reads:

• Total time

• May 25–May 24

• 11d 18h 23m

• time spent

• Day

• Week

• Month

• Year

On top of that, those who have tried phrasing have truly enjoyed it. The ardent support I get from random internet strangers paying me money tells me that my experience is not a fluke.

So in this regard, I know I’ve already succeeded. And with each passing day, I keep making more progress.

The learning compounds. The app gets faster. The explanations improve. The bugs reduce. The algorithm evolves.

So every time it feels like I’m shouting into the void, I can just open up phrasing and balk at the progress I’ve made.

Intentions matter. They innately dictate your metrics of success. Intend to do something you yourself can validate. Intend to do something tangible. Intend to solve your own problems; to change your own life in a meaningful way.

Because if you do, you can dictate your own success. Then it’s only a matter of telling the world about it.

Set your intention correctly, and you become unyielding.