Selam

A gamified Amharic app that turns passive understanding into active fluency.

Role

Product Engineer

Tools

Claude, Google Antigravity, Gemini Flash & Figma

Team

Just me 💻

Duration

3 Weeks

Context

Amharic is spoken by over 50 million people, yet it's missing from Duolingo, Babbel, and every other major language app. The handful of resources that do exist are text-heavy, outdated, and strip the language from the culture it belongs to.

That's the gap I set out to close. There's a large, underserved audience, from people learning Amharic for the first time to those who grew up around it and want to actually speak it, and nothing modern built for them. Selam is my answer: an app that treats Amharic with the polish of a mainstream platform and teaches the culture right alongside the language.

Early traction

Launched on the App Store July 2026. Selam has pulled 200K+ organic views on TikTok and hundreds of installs, with trial-to-paid conversion rates above industry average.

What's next

Amharic is the start. Next is Android, Tigrinya, and Oromo, on the way to a platform for the East African languages no one else is building for.