Wax Lab was ready back in April. But I wasn’t sure anyone needed a dedicated calculator for candle making, so I kept putting off the launch.
In the meantime, I was looking into where people were interested in making candles and deciding which languages to support. Portuguese made the list. Later, half of the first purchases came from Brazil!
Why Brazil made the list
I asked ChatGPT which countries and languages showed the most interest in learning how to make candles.
I wanted to find out where people were searching for candle recipes, wax and fragrance ratios, and help with the calculations. That was what I had built Wax Lab for.
Brazil came third on the list of recommended markets, behind the US and Germany. This was a suggestion about where to focus, not a verified global ranking of search volume.
That gave me something to test. If people in Brazil were looking for help with candle making, it made sense to offer them Wax Lab in Portuguese.
I translated more than the app
I translated Wax Lab into Portuguese and made App Store screenshots in Portuguese too. I wanted people to understand how the app could help them before they even installed it.
At that point, I had an idea about where the demand might be and a localized app. I didn’t have any purchases to back up the decision yet.
I still had doubts
An interest in candle making doesn’t necessarily mean someone wants a separate app for the calculations. And wanting to download an app doesn’t necessarily mean being willing to pay for it.
I needed to launch it to see what would happen. Once the app was live, the first answers started coming in.
Three out of six purchases
When I checked where the first six in-app purchases had come from, three were from Brazil.
I expected Brazil to show up. I hadn’t added Portuguese at random. But I hadn’t expected it to account for half of those first purchases 😅
Of course, those numbers don’t tell me how many purchases were down to the localization itself. I don’t have a version without Portuguese to compare against. And six purchases aren’t enough to tell me what demand will look like over time.
But they gave me a reason to keep going. There were people in Brazil willing to pay for something I had made.
People found it themselves
The best part was that those first customers found Wax Lab through App Store search. At that point, I hadn’t shared a link to the app anywhere or paid for advertising.
After half a year of second-guessing, that felt better than I expected.