Hi! My name is Kirill Danchenko. I work professionally in design and software development and co-founded Astroshock and Readymag.
Those who know me personally know how passionate I am about learning languages. Over the past few years, I have fully immersed myself in Spanish and Catalan (being a native Russian speaker who has studied English since childhood) and began actively learning words I came across in books, movies, and conversations. I underlined them, took screenshots, saved them in notes — but in the end, everything was scattered across different places and inevitably got lost and forgotten. At some point, I wanted to bring it all together — in an app that would serve as the perfect personal dictionary.
But Wordbox is more than just a place to write things down. It is a dictionary with superpowers. You can add words not only manually, but also with the help of artificial intelligence or by exchanging them with other users. You can dive deeper into words and see additional information about them: part of speech, pronunciation, definition, usage examples, synonyms, antonyms, and more. You can engage with words in different ways: flip through them as flashcards, read phrases and stories built around them, do exercises, challenge friends to word duels, and much more in the future — because the more contexts you encounter a word in, the better it sticks.
Together with the team, we made sure Wordbox works on any device — phone, tablet, or laptop. We paid a lot of attention to design, so that essential actions are always within reach and require minimal effort. We also wanted words to be the true protagonists of Wordbox, which is why typography plays a role just as important as the interface. The Robert typeface by the wonderful Contrast Foundry — bold, refined, and expressive — looks especially great in flashcards.
A huge thank you to everyone who subscribes to the paid version. You not only get more of the product's superpowers, but also help it grow and improve. My dream is for Wordbox to become the standard when it comes to building vocabulary — and each of you brings that dream closer.
Thanks as well to everyone who contributed to the product at different stages, especially: Sasha Pervushin, Anna Färber, Ilya Kuvenev, Dmitry Aleksashin, Anton Repponen, Alan Temiraev, all angel investors, and the entire Astroshock team.
And special thanks to those who weren't afraid to challenge me, nitpick details, and offer honest criticism — I truly value it and look forward to more.
