Catch Budapest is a platform whose biggest goal is to create progressive, smart, accessible and fun Hungarian learning material that helps you converse in the language with confidence, regardless of your age, gender, location or "language-learning genes".
Here is why we are starting a Steady account:
Our Situation
We have created Catch Budapest in 2017 after Flo started learning Hungarian. We had a great start and we have developed an enthusiastic community of wonderful Hungarian-learners that we are really proud of.
We have created tons of free Hungarian lessons, a Hungarian audio course, have written plenty of articles about language learning tips, as well as visiting Hungary and Budapest and have published two books since we started.
We also send out one Hungarian word a day to learn every day, for free.
We know two things by now:
1) We want Catch Budapest to continue for a long time. The testing is over, we have readers, followers and a community and love what we do. We want to go on, for a long time to come.
2) In order to make this work, we need to make Catch Budapest self-sustaining. The "fund Catch Budapest with Juli's and Flo's savings" was fine for the last two years, but it's not sustainable. Our savings are super unimpressive. If we and Catch Budapest want to go on for a long time, we need to be self-sustaining.
We have thought a lot about this and have considered several options for financing this project. We know for sure that we don't want to use ads and you might have noticed that all our emails and webpage are completely clean of ad-clutter. By now we have two options:
-Our products
Our books, the Smart Hungarian Audio Course and the Short Stories Reading Course we are working on right now definitely help, but they don't even get us half of the way to self-sustainability. Maybe if we had more time to put money into more efficient advertising it would be enough, but as of now, it isn't. We are spending most of our time creating amazing content and material for you, instead of advertising mediocre content and products.
-Donations
Generous readers have sent us donations ever since we have a tiny PayPal button in our daily Hungarian words and we are eternally grateful for that, but we thought that doing it in an organized way with Steady is a better way, so that's what we are trying right now.
Steady works in a way that readers can donate a chosen amount per month and decide on being billed monthly or annually. So any small amount is really helpful for our cause.
What We'll Use the Money for
Our initial goal is 500€. That money plus the income from our products will be enough to keep Catch Budapest going. Here are our costs:
-Hosting. Having our webpage and articles online costs money and needs to be robust enough to support even our highest pikes of traffic.
-Emails, including One Hungarian Word a Day. Our Email service provider is MailChimp, that's how we can send you One Hungarian Word a Day as well as our Hungarian-learning tips per email. Every email we send and subscriber we have costs us money.
-Web development. There's always something unexpected coming up in the world of running a website and ours is no exception. We are not programmers and have to pay someone to fix what went wrong.
-Facebook "boosts" and Google Ads. We use these to reach more people with our material and to let our articles be seen.
-Us, Juli and Flo. We need to continue to eat, drink, clothe and turn lights on as we create Hungarian-learning material. We're minimalists however and don't need much.
That's the basics and with these covered we can keep going.
Anyway, thanks for being here, learning Hungarian with us and supporting us with anything you can!
Juli & Flo