Achieving CLB 9 on My First Try Using My Joe Speaking App

This is a very personal milestone for me. When I first came to Canada, one of my main goals was simple but difficult: improve my English enough to handle work, daily life, and long-term life here with more confidence.

Speaking has always been my weakest part. I also feel CELPIP Speaking is harder for me than IELTS Speaking because every answer happens within a short fixed prep-and-recording window. For me, the most difficult parts were Task 3, Task 4, and Task 8, especially the image-description tasks where I was not always familiar with the everyday objects in the picture.

But I genuinely wanted to improve my speaking skills. That is also why I built Joe Speaking.

I Did Not Feel Confident After The Exam

To be honest, I felt terrible after the exam.

I had already started preparing myself for another attempt. By Saturday night, I had mentally accepted that I might have failed. I was thinking about what I needed to fix next, how to improve the full CELPIP practice flow, and how to make my own preparation more realistic.

Then the result came back.

I got the score I wanted on the first try.

That moment felt unreal. I was proud not only because I reached the target, but also because the way I reached it matched exactly why I started building Joe Speaking in the first place.

Making Speaking Scoring Less Uncertain

On my Joe Speaking practice dashboard, my 30-day average score was around 9.15. My first full-test-style practice attempt was 8.68, and the second was 9.45.

Seeing those numbers was important to me. It showed me that consistent practice data can help predict future performance and make the uncertain feel more certain.

The most useful part was not only doing more questions. It was being able to listen back to my own recordings, review the score and feedback, and then answer the same task again. Comparing my v2 answer with my v1 answer helped me see which problems kept appearing across attempts, such as hesitation, weak structure, unclear details, missing vocabulary, or repeated habits.

I also used Joe Speaking to record my daily practice, save useful vocabulary and answers into collections, and review them later with flashcards. This helped me turn scattered practice into a more structured review process.

Why This Means So Much To Me

I still remember the first time I met Dan. I shared my three personal goals in Canada 🇨🇦:

1. Improve my English to handle work and daily life, and achieve CLB 9
2. Become economically established, just like I was in Beijing
3. Build something wonderful

Now I have completed Goal #1.

Goals #2 and #3 are still in progress, but they feel closer than before.

CLB 9 was originally my 2025 target. I kept delaying the test because I became obsessed with building Joe Speaking. What started as preparation for my own goal became something bigger: a real product, a learning tool, and a way to turn my own weakness into something I could improve systematically.

I also remember Professor Nusa Fain replying during my 2024 annual review that she believed I could achieve it. I never imagined I would accomplish it in this way.

From A School Project To A Real Product

Joe Speaking started as my Technology Innovation Management project at Carleton University.

But it became much more than an academic project.

It became a product I used for my own goal. It became a system for practicing speaking with recordings, feedback, repeated attempts, full-test-style practice, saved collections, and flashcard review. It became a way for me to learn by solving a real problem in my own life.

So far, Joe Speaking has reached 799 total registered users, with 294 users in the past 30 days. It has helped over 250 users around the world.

Those numbers still feel early, but they mean a lot to me. I built it first because I needed it. Now other people are using it too.

A Different Way To Learn

To me, this is a small glimpse of the future of learning.

When you truly want to learn something, you do not just complete tasks. You solve your own real problems. You build new systems around them. You test those systems on yourself. Then, if they work, you share them publicly and keep improving them with others.

That is what Joe Speaking has become for me.

It is not just a practice app. It is a record of my own learning process, my own uncertainty, and my attempt to make speaking improvement more visible and more measurable.

I am still building. I am still learning how to grow organically. And I am still excited every time I see the product help someone move closer to their own goal.

One idea from Naval Ravikant resonates with me: the best sales comes from credibility, authenticity, and genuine enthusiasm for something you believe in.

That is exactly how I feel about Joe Speaking.

I built it to solve my own real problem. Now I can say that it helped me reach one of my biggest goals in Canada.

And that makes me genuinely proud.