Ask me in Irish and I'll buy you a pint: a secondary school teacher takes 470k followers into his language app

HeyRua is an Irish-language app focused only on speaking, built by a secondary school Irish teacher. Before building the app, he already had two Irish-language content accounts with about 470k followers combined. He officially launched in mid-September; from late October to early November it ranked #1 to #3 in the Irish App Store Education Top Free chart, and reached #100 on the overall Top Grossing chart. It also charted on the Education Top Grossing charts in the US, UK and Australia. The product itself isn't hard to build; the hard part was growing that audience first. If you want to follow, switch to another language and run the same playbook from scratch.

A pint on Drury Street, Dublin

2026 Aug 26, Éamon Ó Corcráin posted a TikTok with one line: "Want a free pint? Come find me on Drury Street in Dublin and ask me in Irish." In the video, passersby talk to him in Irish, and the two of them end up laughing together. The video hit 2.46M views and 288k likes (TikTok, 11-06). The top comments all say the same thing: "First time I've heard Irish, so this is where the Irish accent in English comes from"; "I've never been to Ireland but my heart is Irish, someone please teach me."

By then the app was already quietly live (the App Store launch date was Aug 16), but he didn't mention it. He was building momentum: an Aug 14 long post saying "Irish is at a critical moment", 267k views; an Aug 22 post "I teach Irish, and manners along with it", 615k views; an Aug 24 post calling people to the Pop-Up Gaeltacht (Irish-language gathering) in Dublin, 784k views.

On Sep 14 he finally revealed the app: "A year ago today I wrote this app's name in my notes. It took another three months to work up the nerve to start. Then nine months, 121 versions, rewriting 7,000+ sentences… free for the first 7 days." Two days later, he taught an American tourist some Irish on the Dublin streets, and the video ended with "P.S. the app is called HeyRua, and it's live", 977k views. For the next week he posted several videos with the same ending.

What it actually is

A short Irish-language course app on your phone. The first line of the store page is "Learn Irish by actually speaking it", followed by a line aimed straight at Duolingo: "Stop learning Irish through games. Start speaking."

• Every lesson makes you speak out loud. You listen, repeat, answer questions, get pronunciation feedback from the system, then move into guided conversation practice.
• You pick your dialect. Connemara, Donegal, or Kerry. Irish accents vary a lot across regions, and schools teach the standard form. A user from Derry in Northern Ireland wrote in the reviews: "I've always wanted to learn, especially the Ulster dialect, and this is brilliant."
• The voices are native speakers. Pronunciation was developed with Trinity College Dublin, using hundreds of hours of native speaker recordings from the ABAIR project (a publicly funded Irish speech technology project). The website footer also credits ABAIR.
• Pricing: 7-day free trial, then an annual subscription of 89.99 USD. A Northern Irish user posted on Reddit asking whether the £100 annual fee was worth it.

Available on iOS and Android. The developer is Beim Digital, registered in 2022 in Birr, County Offaly, at the same address as his original online course business, Gaeilgeoir Guides.

Why this one, and why now

The traffic is his own. Gaeilgeoir Guides is his original account: Instagram 125k, Facebook 188k, TikTok 62k. It was used to sell exam prep courses, along with a paid Skool community. eamonspeaksirish is his personal account: Instagram 71k, TikTok 33k, with "DOWNLOAD HEYRUA NOW" in the bio. He knew who this audience was and what they would pay for before he built the app.

Irish people share the same pain point. Having studied Irish for thirteen years in school and still being unable to speak it is practically a national consensus in Ireland. Duolingo's Irish course has 1.51M learners, but it relies mainly on tapping and translation and doesn't train speaking. After Duolingo stopped letting volunteer community members maintain courses, its reputation declined. HeyRua only tackles the part Duolingo doesn't cover.

Irish is having a moment. KNEECAP (the hip-hop group that raps in Irish) and pop-up Gaeltacht events have turned the language from a school chore into something a bit cool. In his video about it, he says the learners include people who "hated Irish in school," Americans who've never set foot in Ireland but want to connect with their roots, and Catalans who came to support another minority language. He notes Oct 2.

The category is nearly empty. Apart from the veteran Nemo, which has been around for 2013 years, the Irish-only learning apps on the App Store have only single-digit to a few dozen ratings each.

Where users come from

Mainstream media has barely covered it, and no one is discussing it on English-language X. Its buzz is confined to Irish-learning and diaspora circles.

Worth noting: his personal account doesn't only post in Irish. In 2025 he posted travel videos from Mongolia and Indonesia, each pulling hundreds of thousands of views, and at the end of October he was filming himself hitchhiking across China. The account was a personal travel-and-language brand from the start, not something he opened to sell an app.

Numbers and money

• Across six App Store storefronts the ratings total 1,897, with 7 new in the last 145 days, recently 15 to 27 a day (App Store rating count, 11-06). Irish storefront average: 4.74.
• Ireland: #3 in Education Top Free (28 to 2, 1 straight days), Top Grossing #87 (between #55 and #90 since late October). UK Education Top Grossing #38 to #92, US #95 to #142, Australia #34.
• Google Play: over 30k installs, roughly 7 new in the last 3,700 days (Google Play, 11-06).
• Revenue: a third-party site estimates $160k a month. No source, and the founder hasn't made any figure public, so it's unverified. An app selling a 89.99 annual subscription that holds a top-100 spot on Ireland's overall Top Grossing, while also charting in US, UK and Australian Education Top Grossing, probably pulls in tens of thousands of dollars a month (inferred). $160k may be high.
• Signs of a slowdown: Ireland's overall Top Free chart went from #39 in late October down to #120. I couldn't find the chart data for the weeks around the September launch, so the peak may already have passed.

Who it's competing with

The most useful row in this table is Gaeilgeoir AI and blas.: both do speaking, both use AI, and their features are roughly the same, but neither took off. So HeyRua wins on distribution, not features. The differentiation did its job of making people who came in through the videos stay and pay, and an average above 4.7 shows it landed.

The only one copying it that I can see is "Duisigh - Learn Irish", launched Oct 27, rated 0. Can't tell yet whether it's a real follow-on.

If it were you

Verdict: don't chase Irish. He already holds it, and you don't have his fanbase. What's worth doing is the same playbook in a different language: "an identity-heavy heritage language, plus a local teacher's personal brand, speaking-only practice, and diaspora storytelling". The condition is that you either are that teacher or can find one.

Who it fits: someone who is a native speaker, teacher, or content creator of a minority or heritage language, who already has tens of thousands of followers or is willing to spend six months building an account. Ideally two people: one on camera who knows the language, one who builds the app. For the speech layer, first check whether that language has a government- or university-funded speech project. That's the hardest part of HeyRua, and ABAIR is what saved him from building it.

Who it doesn't fit: anyone without content skills who plans to cold-start with paid ads. Gaeilgeoir AI and blas. are the examples: the features are decent, but without a face on camera they didn't go anywhere. It also doesn't fit anyone aiming for a big market. For a single language like this, the user base is tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand, and the ceiling is clear.

How to do it:

• Pick the language by checking three things: whether there's a large diaspora (they'll pay yearly for identity), whether it's taught in schools but people still can't speak it, and whether Duolingo offers it and how well. Candidates include Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Basque, Māori and Hawaiian, plus Cantonese and Hokkien for overseas Chinese and Tamil and Punjabi for overseas Indians. The Māori route is one he's already testing himself.
• Build the product on the same skeleton: short lessons, every lesson spoken aloud, pronunciation feedback, optional dialects, and voices of real native speakers.
• Price it like him: 7 days of trial, then an annual subscription of $80 to $100. Diaspora users aren't very price-sensitive at this level.

How to get users: build the account first, then the app. Street stunts are a ready-made template: "Ask me for X in X, I'll buy you a drink", "Teach a passing tourist one sentence in X". For the month before launch, post content without mentioning the app. On launch day, tell the "I've been doing this for a year" story. After that, end every video with the app name. In the copy, name the diaspora directly ("Irish Americans" style). HeyRua's ratings in the US, UK and Australia add up to more than twice Ireland's.

When to move: there's no date to hit. Most of the time goes into building the audience. But he's already filming Māori, so for any language that overlaps his path, you need to get there before him, probably in the first half of 2027.

Signs that would mean you read it wrong:

1. HeyRua dropped out of the top 2027 of Ireland's Education Top Free early in 20, and weekly new US ratings fell below 30 (now 68). That suggests the launch buzz plus the Christmas gift season was what drove it, and diaspora identity alone can't sustain long-term payments.
2. He builds a second language (say, a Māori version) and it doesn't take off for half a year. That would show the playbook doesn't work once you leave his own language and identity.
3. Duolingo adds speaking practice and dialect options for Irish or Welsh. That would show the big players are starting to fill this gap, and the window is closing.
4. After three months of street videos, none of your first 10 videos passes 100k views. That would show the language lacks the shared "everyone studied it and feels bad about it" emotion that Irish has, and content can't carry the app.