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Three Years as a One-Man Startup

• zongitsrinzler 11y ago
  I am in a similar position myself. Me and a friend have been developing a SaaS for 3 years while also working full time. Lately things have started looking up though! Having a steady 400% yearly growth is awesome, this could really turn into something big in a few years. Btw, how much time do you spend on developing vs marketing?
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Must be very tough to start something like this while still holding down a full time job. Hard to say how much time is spent developing vs marketing. Probably something like 90% design, development, user support, and 10% marketing. Where marketing means writing blog posts and engaging on social media (mainly reddit, facebook, twitter). I tried some paid advertising experiments a couple of years ago but they didn't work well at all. May try another experiment this year now that the product is more polished and has a higher value.
    • zongitsrinzler 11y ago
      Having a full time job is a timesink, thankfully I find it easy working abnormal hours. Plus on the other end it gives me a good salary + whatever I make on my own. Regarding marketing we are in a similar spot. Only 10% of time goes to marketing and paid advertising doesn't work. I recommend reading Traction (http://tractionbook.com/ http://tractionbook.com/), it gives you a good model on how to go about growing your company.
      • jryan49 11y ago
        Do you have a life outside of working though?
    • apapli 11y ago
      If you have the time, Hubspot offer a free "inbound marketing" certification course. It's about 4 hours worth of videos and might help you with your marketing planning. It's totally non-product focused so you can apply the methods they teach with any technology (although theirs of course does it all very well). Good stuff with your software and I enjoyed reading your post. You need to increase your pricing though - and it seems to me you haven't fully figured out the true value of your product, so that you can "value price" it. Email me if you'd like help putting the value proposition together. (My contact details are in my HN profile). I'm by no means an expert in what you do but I've been in sales for 15 years... so can probably still help you a bit.
• timrpeterson 11y ago
  I admire your commitment.
• fabrigm 11y ago
  I don't think that spanish quote is real...
  • thwd 11y ago
    It's obviously a best-effort from someone who's learning Spanish through Readlang.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    I assure you it's from a real user, and one who says that Spanish is easier for her than English. Then again, looking at her name I would guess she's Polish rather than Spanish. I found it perfectly understandable but my Spanish obviously isn't advanced enough for it to set off alarm bells. I just ran it past my girlfriend who says that it indeed doesn't sound native. I should have checked that before using this quote. Oh well.
    • daraosn 11y ago
      I'm native Spanish speaker, the problem is at: "grande trabajo"... should be "un gran trabajo", then it would sound legit.
      • Kurtz79 11y ago
        I would say that the fact that is not grammatically correct makes it more legit, since if it were fabricated any decent translator would have it done perfectly :)
    • fabrigm 11y ago
      Must be that!
• wheels 11y ago
  Being a little pedantic, but I think the usage is important: Profit is not counted before wages. Wages are the primary expense in a software company. This means that the company is sort of break-even, but only when paying below market rate wages. Perhaps a little confusing is that the term "ramen profitable" is mostly a euphemism, not actual profitability.
  • beachstartup 11y ago
    in a one or two man shop this is actually called the sdi: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/resources/sellers-discretionary-income/ https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/resources/sellers-discre...
  • jakobegger 11y ago
    The owner of a business is not an employee (at least in Austria). Therefore a one man company doesn't pay any wages. The owner just gets the profit that the company makes.
    • pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      AFAICT he's in Madrid, Spain? Anyway, it's different in the UK, a company needs a minimum of 2 officers, you can be a sole-trader though. A sole-trader takes drawings from their business account, but it's not necessarily the whole revenue less costs - you might be saving for capital investments and you wouldn't want to pay income tax and Nat.Ins. on that money. In the UK the owners of a company can be employees too, you can then get money as wages as well as getting dividends as an owner. [Disclaimer: I'm not a financial advisor, check this detail before relying on it.]
      • srgseg 11y ago
        In the UK you can have a one person limited liability company, where the same person acts as the sole director and the company secretary. That sole director can either be an employee and a director or just a director. The difference is that their portion of income from being a director will be in the form of dividends, and the income from being an employee will be salary.
• aboodman 11y ago
  Neat use of an extension! (Long ago, I led the design of the Chrome extensions platform)
• nautical 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing .. Its a great inspiration !
• birken 11y ago
  The raw numbers of sign-ups and revenue are interesting as a broad health check, but they don't really provide enough context to give you meaningful feedback of what your chances of continued growth are like. The stuff I'd be more interesting is data points like: Of the people who sign-up, how many of them are still active in a month? How many of the people who are active in a month become paid users? How many of the paid users are still paying after 6 months? How important is this product to the paid users? Do they regularly refer their friends? How many people would sign up for your premium membership at $10/month? $20/month? If people are churning left and right, then I'd be less excited than if all the paying customers loved it, but it just hasn't been marketed broadly enough.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Thanks for the advice. Churn is higher than I'd like and that's going to be a big focus for me this year. There's a lot to do to make the product more sticky. Rough figures at the moment are: Monthly churn of monthly subscribers is about 20%. Yearly churn of yearly subscribers is about 50%. When I ask why people leave, virtually everyone has the same story - they really liked the product, but they didn't have the time to devote to their language studies right now. I'll dig into some of the other metrics you suggested in a future post.
    • morgante 11y ago
      > they really liked the product, but they didn't have the time to devote to their language studies right now. It sounds like you've fallen into the trap of an aspirational product, like gym memberships. People want to need it, but often they don't.
      • steveridout 11y ago
        Yep, you hit the nail on the head. It's likely that this product will always have a highish churn rate because of that. But with low running costs, and a large enough supply of new users, it could still be a good business. Also, there are hard-core users who really do use it all the time, for whom the churn rate will be much lower.
• math 11y ago
  "I wonder if I’m hurting my chances of future employment by working so long on my own." Based on my recent experience getting back in the game after 5 years of self directed projects (not all of them software related) I would say definitely don't worry about this... you have something good to show for your time (i.e. readlang) and the skills required to make it are sought after. Most other job candidates will not be able to show this degree of self determination / initiative. Just come across as hyper enthusiastic and you'd be set.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    That's what I guessed, but it's easy to doubt yourself when you've been out of the game so long. Thanks for the reassurance!
  • daraosn 11y ago
    I can confirm, worked on my projects after college, didn't work as expected, but with all the gained experience I found jobs as full stack consultant very easily, and for the last 3 years I saved some bucks. Now from this year I'm working back again on my projects. Carry on Steve, the reward can be big! Just one concern: are you working with more people? That's the only thing I regret from my ventures back then, I was also solo-preneur, now starting to make teams and delegate more and more, and I think that's the way to go...
    • tudorw 11y ago
      I second this one about hiring, you may be helping their dream happen too :)
    • hanniabu 11y ago
      Can you recommend any books or articles in particular on how to scale operations from solo to a small group? I've been thinking about this for a while and I can't get my head around it in seeing a way to do it without forgoing pay in order to pay the new employee and hoping to acquire more clients to give us both work and repeat with another employee and so on. This just doesn't seem efficient though.
• austinjp 11y ago
  Kudos to the author for being open and honest about ReadLang's turnover and his projections. As he says, people usually play these cards very close to their chests. Personally I find it very encouraging to know that I'm not the only person who's grappling with the question of how long to stick with a minimally profitable project.
• wiradikusuma 11y ago
  Related, could someone shed some light for my dilemma: If you're making a freemium (upgrade using in-app) mobile app that, every time you spend $5 in FB, you consistently get ~100 new users, but none of them ever upgrade (let say you're targeting people who apparently can't afford to pay), what would you do? It's like a "good problem to have" (predictable user acquisition), but it's still a problem (no money coming).
  • peteretep 11y ago
    You split test your upgrade CTA until you find something that works. If you can't find anything that works, you find a source for "higher quality" users, unless there's an inherent benefit for you in having users.
    • wiradikusuma 11y ago
      thanks, but what's CTA?
      • peteretep 11y ago
        Call To Action
  • AngrySkillzz 11y ago
    Is it possible that you aren't getting real people as new users? I don't know how you do your metrics, but it's possible they are bots/clickfarmers/etc.
    • wiradikusuma 11y ago
      they are real, because they post content and I review manually.
• polemic 11y ago
  Hey this is great - something I've been looking for. A small thing: could you please support https, especially for logins?
  • steveridout 11y ago
    I would love to switch the whole site to https, but it's not that easy. The login request is always sent via https, even when you are using the site over plain http. So your password should always be encrypted. The site does work over https (try it - https://readlang.com https://readlang.com), and at one point I redirected all http traffic to https, but there was a big problem. I use external dictionaries in an iframe to provide additional definitions and these are almost always only available over http: https://readlang.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/279539-changing-the-dictionary https://readlang.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/279539... It worked OK for a short while, but then Chrome and Firefox both refused to display http content within a https page. Chrome displays a very subtle shield icon that the user must click on to reload the page allowing mixed content. This is far too unfriendly to expect my users to do, so I had to resort to using http again :-( Of course, the ideal solution would be for me to have access to dictionary definitions so I could integrate them properly instead of using an ugly iframe, but with 50+ languages supported, that's a tall order!
    • amatix 11y ago
      > The login request is always sent via https, even when you are using the site over plain http. So your password should always be encrypted. Though it doesn't stop someone (eg. malicious software on a wifi router) altering the login form itself to submit passwords to a different URL...
      • VeilEm 11y ago
        If a router can change the HTML it can load JavaScript and so it's already game over.
      • steveridout 11y ago
        That's very true.
• mokkol 11y ago
  I love it to read honest reviews of products I use and love! Nice work Steve!
• bsoni 11y ago
  Good on you Steve! Reading something like this is quite encouraging. I too left my day job and one of the things that I am focusing on is my own projects. I make apps and in the last few months I haven't made more than 20$. Anyway, working on my apps gives me more time for contributing to open-source and writing blog posts explaining how I solve problems, which can be rewarding on it's own. Cheers for sharing your story and good luck! Bhuman
• dennybritz 11y ago
  Great job, I admire you for sticking with for so long despite the (slower than expected?) growth. You must be really passionate about what you're building, which is what counts most. I'm an avid language learner myself. Here are a few things I'm thinking. You probably have thought about these yourself, but anyway: - Have you ever thought about increasing the price? I find $5/month to be at the very low-end for something that a language learner may be using regularly. If I find the product useful I'd be happy to pay $25/month or more for it. Increasing the price also has the side effect the you'll get "serious" language learners to sign up, which is probably what you want. - Have you thought about recommending appropriate texts your users based on their difficulty? I don't know anything about Chrome plugins, but I assume that you can collect data about which pages and texts users are browsing, how often they're clicking on stuff, and so on. That sounds like very valuable data that you could use to add more value and data network effects to your product. - Have you thought about selling to organizations (schools, classes, meetup groups) instead of individuals?
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Thanks very much. - Increasing price. Yes, it started at only $10/year, and I've gradually increased it as the product has improved. It's very difficult to know the optimal price. I use split testing for some things but it feels wrong to do this for price, and with current conversion rate it would take ages to get meaningful results anyway. I'm hesitant to push price too high because lowering it back down would be tricky. Existing users paying a higher price would be annoyed. Also, at this stage I think increasing the user base would be more valuable long term compared to milking the current users for more money. I've been wondering if I could add a higher priced tier in future for more advanced features. - Yes! I definitely want to recommend texts to people based not only on difficulty, but also on interest. This is something that will become more valuable with more users and a larger, higher quality library of texts. It isn't highest priority right now, but hopefully in future. - Yes. I developed some features to target at teachers managing a class of students: http://blog.readlang.com/2014/02/12/readlang-for-teachers.html http://blog.readlang.com/2014/02/12/readlang-for-teachers.ht.... I got a bunch of teachers using it with real classes but decided to abandon the idea because: 1. The response was positive but usage wasn't what I'd hoped. 2. Focus. As one guy I've got enough on my plate making an awesome product for self motivated individuals. Diluting my focus and the focus of the product seems like a very bad idea.
• dhoe 11y ago
  Thanks for making Readlang. I love it - one day I thought, I'd really like a product that does x, y, and z, and Readlang does exactly it and more, so I'm happy. I have a premium subscription, but the only reason I got it was that I wanted the product to not disappear :) The features you get with the premium subscription would not have been a reason to upgrade for me at all. I don't know if this is a problem (I used to feel that way about Evernote as well), but maybe something to consider.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    I've had this feedback a few times. Others have said they paid more to support the app rather than for the extra features. One question - do you translate many multi-word phrases? If you do then you would find the free plan restrictive. If you mainly translate single words then the free plan is probably fine. May consider restricting the free plan a bit more in future. For now I'm happy to have a lot of free users to help spread the word and grow.
    • dhoe 11y ago
      Almost never, it's almost all single words for me.
  • andrelaszlo 11y ago
    +1 I even made a prototype (roughly two years ago) that looks _a lot_ like Readlang. I wasn't motivated to continue because I mostly wanted to learn French, not build this app, none of the apps I tried (Duolingo comes to mind) worked well with the way I like to learn. This is even better than my fantasy, the ability to upload ebooks, for example :D Great job. You have my subscription! Good luck!
• hobo_mark 11y ago
  Hi Steve, always love your posts but I have a question, are working on this full-time? Do you have major features planned? Have you ever thought about focusing on maintenance on i.e. weekends while working a "regular" job?
  • steveridout 11y ago
    I did put it into maintenance mode for about 4 months in 2014 while I did a freelance gig. During that time I did no new development, just fixing the odd bug and user support. I wouldn't consider a full time job at the moment. I'm not sure how people manage to hold down a full time job and build a startup on the side. I can imagine doing it while working a job which wasn't mentally demanding. But people working as full time programmers, I can only guess that they don't give 100% at work, or perhaps they have more energy than I do! I've considered taking on the occasional short contract. But I'm not actively looking, I've got enough to keep me occupied with Readlang right now. (Plus, I've got a 1.5 month old baby, and they tend to reduce your free time!)
    • Alan01252 11y ago
      I'm assuming you get a lot of support financially from your partner / have a big runway? I can't imagine living on £9k a year without such? How do you survive? edit: I Worry this comment comes across the wrong way. I've been desperate to do a startup for years, but the financial aspect of it has always scared me. I was told at a Hacker News meetup that I probably don't have the entrepreneurial spirit, which the more I think about it, the more I agree with. I'm curious as to how your mindset works :)
      • steveridout 11y ago
        We both contribute equally, and we live in Madrid where cost of living is relatively low. Two people living together can live on £9K / year here no problem (that's about 1000 euros / month each). That said, I do have savings that I've been eating into. I've never felt the need for lots of money to be happy. What I really value is being able to do interesting work that I'm proud of. So I'm very motivated to make money to the extent that it provides freedom to work on interesting things. And perhaps even to contract people to help out. I guess that's a philosophy shared by many of the people here.
• sail 11y ago
  This is inspiring Steve. Did you try different price points? Do you have data to share about this? Did you have a full-time job while you were building it?
  • steveridout 11y ago
    I've increased prices gradually from $10 / year to the current $48 / year or $5 / month. It's really hard to give you good data since the numbers of conversions are relatively low. The conversion rate from signup to paid has stayed at roughly 1.5% the whole time. But the product has been improving too. If I charged the current price 2 years ago when the product wasn't as polished, the conversion rate would probably have been lower. But I can't know for sure. Didn't have a full time job. I saved up and have lived fairly frugally. I did take a break to do contract work in 2014.
• ChicagoBoy11 11y ago
  Amazing work - This is a very inspiring story, and I hope things continue to look up for you. Just my $.02 as a user who came to your site: The landing page is still unfortunately very confusing - what I wanted to do most is to just try it out really quickly to see how it looked. But, it took me a while (after I had scrolled through to the bottom of the site) to understand that I had to click the start learning. Then, thre was the sign-up modal that showed up on the other page; From how it came up, it felt to me like I had no option but to sign-up, and I would've turned away at that point. BUT, because I had read a couple of your posts, I knew it was possible. So I tried clicking outside of it and then it worked. Then, I picked a language and then I had this list of items which were not clear to me what they were, exactly (from the blogs I knew this was the library). So, I clicked on one. And then it was beautiful. Like, no joke, the actual reading experience was... perfect. It worked... flawlessly. Your core product is very, very good! It is definitely your strongest asset. Don't hide it behind the splash page, then sign-up-modal-you-have-to-dismiss, then the library UI... get users to experience your core product as quickly as possible... that'll get 'em hooked!!!
  • Vivtek 11y ago
    I have to agree with this. I'm a language junky myself - I live in Budapest, have lived in Germany and Puerto Rico, and last year I discovered and fell in love with Duolingo (why yes I do want to be practicing and learning six languages at once), so I'm basically 100% your target demographic. I also followed the link to the site - the "try it right now" on the Spanish email quote is a truly fantastic idea, and well-executed - but for the low-information user (i.e. me) your UI was a tad confusing. Requiring me to sign in to look at phrase translations was also off-putting, even though I can only assume this is some kind of research usage restriction.
    • steveridout 11y ago
      Sign-in for phrase translations is because that's one of the limits of the free plan, you get 10 / day for free and you can upgrade to premium for unlimited. I could try to make it more seamless by imposing this limit based on cookie or IP address if they aren't signed in yet. Would love to know what else you found confusing about the UI?
• eloisant 11y ago
  Does it really take you fulltime to maintain it now that it's developed? Couldn't you keep it alive by working a few hours a week, and take on contracting jobs in addition to get additional income?
  • steveridout 11y ago
    I could certainly do that. But even though it's a very useful app right now I don't consider it fully developed. I have a huge list of improvements I'd like to make. And I don't expect the current growth to continue if I just put it into maintenance mode.
    • orky56 11y ago
      Based on opportunity cost alone, do you think you could work part-time/contract work and have some additional development resources to work on your backlog? Have you been able to assess whether the new improvements will increase retention/monetization/user acquisition and ultimately the top line? As someone who also did a one-man show these questions helped me prioritize and create the appropriate leverage.
• rloc 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing this and keep trying ! I've been also working alone on a project for 3 years in my spare time (SaaS). I'll soon switch full time on it. News are usually full of startup stories funded with millions. As readers we're blinded with only the tip of the iceberg when the real hard work and pain is rarely mentioned. It's great to read a true story like this and for people like me it gives a invaluable point of comparison both in terms of personal experience and business success. It's also a source of encouragement.
• galfarragem 11y ago
  I wouldn't be worried about it: your app is useful to a lot of people and I can't see that changing soon. It's one of the few extensions that I keep instaled even without using it right now. And again, "it's only because the lack of time/motivation". It's for sure something I'll come back to in the future.
• Fede_V 11y ago
  Did you consider adding an option for a one time purchase? I really don't like re-occuring subscriptions if I can at all avoid them, but I'd happily buy something like this (like I payed for sublime, etc).
  • steveridout 11y ago
    For a short time I had a lifetime membership option for $100 and then later at $150. It even had a few takers. But I removed it mainly because: 1. It feels strange to promise to provide an ongoing service for a one-off payment (I'm guessing Sublime Text doesn't have a server component, there's a big difference there). It sounds risky from my point of view. Am I still obliged to keep providing you the service in 20 years even though you only paid once? 2. The people willing to pay up-front are probably the ones most likely to stick around for the long term and provide a lot of recurring revenue. (Hypothesis - may not be true.) 3. More one-off payments makes my revenue graph much spiker and less predictable. That said - perhaps you're right. If people are much more willing to pay up front I should trade some of the predictability of SaaS for the lucrative but volatile one-off payments. Something to consider when I revisit pricing.
• ensiferum 11y ago
  You're doing a good job. I've spent 10 years building a product in a very very saturated domain and I've made about $400 out of it. But that doesn't really matter, since I primarly wrote the application for myself.
• randomsearch 11y ago
  Hey Man, just my thoughts on this. Looks like a great product. I may use it later this year as I'm learning Spanish. However, your business model is weak, because people are fickle and don't stick with language learning (I should know; I've been learning Spanish for 6 years on and off). Plus, the more you use your product, the less you need it. However, there is a much better target market: businesses. I know a whole bunch of foreign nationals in the UK who have earned money working on rather basic translation tasks for web businesses. I can imagine a tool like this would be hugely useful for those businesses. Sure, I can go use Google translate, but having a polished user experience in-browser looks a lot nicer and more professional if a customer is watching me use it. So, I say this year focus on selling to SMEs. If you get just a few major business contracts, it will dwarf your income from regular users. You're looking for companies that work a lot on the web and interact with organisations overseas, possibly speak a little of the relevant foreign language but can't afford to pay for bilingual speakers. Random thoughts: - the travel industry - travel agents, companies that organise tours, tourist visitor centres, accommodation agents, etc. Anyone who might want to quickly check a foreign website. - government, particularly anything interacting abroad or with non-native speakers. - SME exporters - journalists - researchers Final point - I'm not so keen on your branding. Learning a language is an exciting, potentially life-changing experience! It can increase your employability and open your eyes to entire new cultures. This is an amazing thing. "Readlang" does not say that to me. However, it's a good name for a business interacting with the corporate market I suggested above, so it may not need changing... Good luck, I think what you're doing is awesome and you should definitely stick with it!
  • tinco 11y ago
    Small addition: Maybe focus on languages that most people want to learn, Dutch should not be in such a short list especially where mega languages like Mandarin or Arabic are missing. As I write this I realize there's actually fugitives trying to learn Dutch, but that's a harsh market to try and profit from unless you target the government.
    • steveridout 11y ago
      Chinese and Arabic are both there, within the admittedly long and difficult to navigate language selector! They are both in "beta" and hence further down the list. The reason Chinese is in beta is because it doesn't have word boundary detection, pinyin transliteration, or word frequency lists. Arabic is in "beta" because there were some issues with "right to left" text. I think this is working pretty well now though, haven't had complaints in a while, so I can think about bringing that out of beta soon.
• pkofod 11y ago
  Great story, good luck!
• oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  As someone whose dream is to do something similar, is it too rude to ask how much money you started off with and what other income you have, if any?
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Yes, society generally deems it rude, but I don't :-) I'd managed to save about £40,000 GBP by the end of 2012. Then in 2014 I took some months off from Readlang and earned roughly £30,000 GBP doing some contract work. No other sources of income. I've never been close to running out of money, if I did I would certainly ease back on Readlang and look for more freelance work. BTW: The freelance work I did wasn't using technology I enjoy or want to focus on in future, and was offered to me without having to look for it. I did it because of the money and because I liked the people. I've never actually had to actively look for freelance gigs myself. So I'm still not sure how easy it is to find good clients with interesting work.
    • oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
      Thanks for the info! I have, coincidentally, almost exactly the same amount in savings, although I don't have one single idea I'd like to pursue - yet. I currently work for a small start-up also working in the education sector (albeit more directly). The general story isn't too dissimilar to yours, though, in that it's been a bit of a slog for not a huge amount of profit, although things are slowly looking more and more promising. I wish you continued success with Readlang.
• goqu 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing your story. Fingers crossed your product takes off seriously and you achieve your goals.
• alco 11y ago
  I tried to use the Chrome extension to read a Spanish website but it doesn't work unless I enable 3rd party cookies. That's quite rude. I cannot allow a single extension to compromise my browsing experience by letting anyone set 3rd party cookies. Could you please add a field on the site where I could paste the URL of a webpage? That would work for me as a workaround to using the extension.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    I understand where you're coming from, but it's for purely technical reasons. The extension just plain wouldn't work without this enabled. I avoided the "paste a URL" solution because that would mean that my server would need to fetch the content from other websites instead of each user's browser doing the work. Until I have a better solution, for now you could resort to copying and pasting articles you'd like to read into the upload page: http://readlang.com/upload http://readlang.com/upload - it's not ideal perhaps, but should get the job done.
• consta 11y ago
  Congrats man! This is the first time I stumbled upon your extension and I have to admit, it is pretty neat and useful. I too have created one vocabulary trainer extension, but haven't released it as it way too unpolished and I am using a paid dictionary. However, do you mind sharing some of your stats? Which language pairs are mostly used on Readlang?
  • steveridout 11y ago
    From the entire user base (mostly free and not active users right now), here are the top 6 languages people are learning: - English - 16,037 - Spanish - 13,840 - French - 5,857 - German - 5,187 - Russian - 1,776 - Italian - 1,760 The first language is almost always English, except for those learning English, whose first languages are: - Russian - 3,799 - Spanish - 2,263 - English - 1,440 (haha - this shouldn't be allowed and the users will get a notification when they try to translate something) - Italian - 1,220 - Chinese - 713 And of the paying subscribers, here are the top 6 languages: - Spanish - 174 - French - 105 - English - 89 - German - 86 - Russian - 47 - Italian - 24
• radarsat1 11y ago
  Oh wow, this is _exactly_ what I've been looking for lately. You might want to work on your advertising, because I've literally been looking for exactly this, because I'm currently learning Spanish, and never came across your app. I thought about asking Instapaper or someone to implement clickable word translation, or even considered writing my own web app.. I'm stupid enough that I never even thought about turning it into a business. But I'm happy that now I don't have to! I'll test it on my Android e-paper tablet for you and post a review.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Cool! I've been thinking of getting an Android eink tablet to try Readlang on. I'd love to hear how it goes! If you don't mind, after giving it a whirl, let me which model you have and how well it works :-) The word is getting out about Readlang. There's no paid advertising and I'm a n00b at marketing but slowly learning. It seems to be growing, but please lend a hand by telling your friends :-)
• iraphael 11y ago
  When I first saw the article I was excited for it, because I thought Readlang had an "immersion"-type feature, where it translates every page I visit to french and un-translates on demand. Not saying that would work better, but it's something I thought would be cool.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    There was another Chrome extension that did what you're describing: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion-for-ch/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl/reviews https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion... Was covered in Lifehacker here: http://lifehacker.com/5907432/language-immersion-for-chrome-teaches-you-a-new-language-while-you-browse-the-web http://lifehacker.com/5907432/language-immersion-for-chrome-... Seems like it's broken now though. I have a hunch he was trying to use Google Translate without paying for their API. Either that, or he really was paying for the API which is unsustainable for a free extension. I don't think it's a great idea anyway. If you want to learn French, you should read French written by a native speaker, not a machine translation of English into French. Readlang uses machine translation as an aid to understanding native texts, which is far more acceptable IMO.
    • iraphael 11y ago
      I understand the limitations, but I was excited to be able to read sites I usually visit while still immersing myself in the language.
• KTamasEnty 11y ago
  This is really cool. The free demo and the $5 price was just enough to convert me to a paid user for at least for a month. Seriously, this is exactly what I was trying to get to work in a desktop ebook reader or on my Kindle, but unsuccessfully. Any chance for integrating the Yandex Translate API? (I am learning Russian. The MT quality between Google and Yandex for Russian is sort of a toss; I would say 70% of the time Google is better, but 30% of the time Yandex is.)
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Interesting. I've been thinking of incorporating extra translation services for premium users. Microsoft Bing would be another one. It would be nice to show alternative translations although not sure how the UI would work yet. No promises at the moment but I like the idea!
• ThomPete 11y ago
  Well done! I have a profitable sidebusiness and so I feel I can relate. You have proven a need for your product and you've done it the best way you can. You built it for yourself and it turns out other people like it too. If your growth trajectory continues you can be doing 6 figures in a couple of years. If you have the patience and can support yourself I would recommend you do that. Now here comes the tricky part. To grow your company into those 6 figures and beyond, you probably now have to stop building for yourself and start building it for other people too. But good luck it's great to see others out there doing things from scratch.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Thanks for the advice. I encourage feedback all the time and always take user suggestions into account. Sometimes I feel it's best NOT to act on too many suggestions since it leads to too much complexity and bloat. Like most things it's about getting the right balance.
• 5ersi 11y ago
  Your extension is similar to many other instant-translation extensions on Chrome store. I.e. Google Translate extension (which I use and am quite happy with) is free and has 5M+ users. IMHO your real problem is that Readlang do es not offer enough features that would differentiate it from other free offerings.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Do the other extensions: - Store all your translations, along with their contexts, to your account? and have a accompanying web-apps which let you: - review those translations with flashcards, prioritizing the most frequent words in the language, and utilizing a spaced repetition algorithm so that you spend more time on the words and phrases you find difficult? - export of those flashcards for use in other apps such as Anki - upload novels to read in a distraction free, paginated reading interface which works well on mobile devices? - watch videos with sync'd transcriptions? - share and vote on native texts and videos with a community of language learners? If so, please let me know! And if you didn't realize any of the above - I take the blame for not communicating it better on the landing page. The problem is that overwhelming users with info usually isn't a great idea either. Hard to strike the right balance. I don't expect everyone who installs the Google Translate extension to install Readlang - since mine is targeted mainly at intermediate and advanced language learners.
    • erroneousfunk 11y ago
      The flashcard feature caught me by surprise, and I loved it! I just started playing around with the in-page translations, went back to the site, and was very pleasantly surprised! Much better than any of the language learning browser extensions I've used before!
• simonswords82 11y ago
  Hey Steve, great product and as a fellow bootstrapper and somebody who wants to learn a language (Spanish) you've got my attention. I was looking around your site and checking some bits and couldn't help but notice that there's not a lot of SEO specific marketing activity on the site. I couldn't help but feel that there must surely be some very common phrases in various languages that people naturally tend to search for online when they have an interest in a language. If your site could provide this information, you might rank well and people would naturally progress to try your app? I also thought there there must be LOTS of content on your site that people have curated for their own learning that you might (without breaking privacy of course) be able to capitalise on for search engine ranking. I'm thinking something along the lines of the music lyric websites where people tend to submit their content and it's publicly visible? You would need to curate it, but it just seems like madness that there's so much well organised translated content that is currently locked away from Google's view. Tell me to shut up if this isn't an area of marketing you're interested in, but maybe something in the above will spark an idea. Regardless, all the best with this, it's lovely to see another semi-UK based bootstrapper on he HN homepage :)
• NumberCruncher 11y ago
  Awesome product! 10 years ago when I moved to Germany I had a similar learning system. I read books, I highlited the words I wanted to learn and once or twice a week I wrote them up in a small book. After a while a wrote a small VBA flashcard app for tracking my progress and randomizing the words. And that took a hell lot of time. With an app like yours I could have saved 30-60 minutes every week (2-4 hours every month) which is worth of 20-40€ a month (on minimum wage). That´s why a recommend you to spend way much more time marketing your app and finding the right customers, which means: - already learning languages (don´t get fooled by "If I had enough time, I would use it") - learning languages because they have to (living abroad or working international) - saving 2-4 (or more) hours a month is worth them at least 10€ (no students spending more money on boose than on books) IMHO you can find a lot of young professionals on forums like the "new in wahetever city" groups or expat groups in facebook. Good Luck!
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Thanks very much! I've had many responses from people who had an idea to create something like Readlang, but only a handful who actually built their own app like you did :-) I agree I need to get better at finding those ideal customers, for whom Readlang should be a very easy sell.
    • ZenoArrow 11y ago
      Your article on HN reminded/convinced me to sign up, have just done so. One thing I noticed is that the 'Premium' option is quite hidden, I wouldn't have gone looking for the 'Pricing' page unless I was following this HN discussion. I do think your pricing options should be more prominent. Perhaps you could have a 'Go Premium' link in the top bar for those who haven't signed up for this yet?
    • NumberCruncher 11y ago
      Actually I was yesterday thinking about rebuilding my old app for the web, but if your app works fine I'm gonna pick me an other pet project. :) Anyhow, I signed up for a premium account. I couldn't figure it out how I can terminate the account if I take the monthly payment plan. You should make this clear at the beginning of the sign up process and not at the end: http://imgur.com/XFm13o9 http://imgur.com/XFm13o9 and should also put it here: http://readlang.com/termsOfService http://readlang.com/termsOfService I anticipatied some trust but I generally don't sign contracts without knowing how I can get out of them. This may scare the customers off. If I were you I would do this: - instead of building new features I would make the site look professional, this means all the boring stuff which makes you money, like easy sign up, better landing page (for that part you already have tons of advices here), a proper terms of servie, privacy policy, etc. and after that I would go hunting customers until I doubled the revenue - or I would find somebody who has experince with the business side of this, I would share the profit with him (the 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing) It is up to you, but if you want to stay a one man show you have to learn how to make online business. Otherwise you have to find a business guy. Good Luck!
• kamaal 11y ago
  >>I wonder if I’m hurting my chances of future employment by working so long on my own. You built a business, designed and built a product grounds up, you made profits, you have users. You did this all alone. You are in the top 1% of the product/engineering managers out there. Believe me, those who do not hire you have more to lose. Any sensible company would want to hire a person like you.
• beat 11y ago
  Oh man, I feel your pain! I'm three years into bootstrapping a company - still pre-revenue. Most of it has been done while dayjobbing in the enterprise. On the positive side, things are changing rapidly. I've recently picked up two valuable co-founders, so I'm not alone and have more bandwidth. The current revision is strong and on its way to production-ready (the last revision I thought was a beta, but it turned out to be an alpha and a learning experience, sigh). The product is really targeted at the enterprise space, and between the three of us, we have over 50 years of enterprise computing experience. My co-founders are with me because they've directly experienced the pain that drove me to writing it. Hopefully, in a year, we can all make a living at it. But it's going to suck for a while, because we're also all three used to the incomes of enterprise contracting, and we all have kids in college. This is why older founders are so rare - it's really a huge financial risk in a way that startups aren't when you're in your 20s.
• overcast 11y ago
  As someone currently working their ass of on a new project launch, this is inspiring. I think what you've made is pretty impressive, and the I dig the name. However, three years in, is it really consuming that much of your time that you can't use this as a very big supplemental income? 16,000 pounds is nothing to scoff at for extra income. Especially if your day job can be consulting. I think once you nail down the marketing(which I think you're lacking), this can easily become your primary source. Well done, and stick with it!
• placeybordeaux 11y ago
  Huh, I had a very rough prototype of a similar project, but never actually moved much past that. Congrats on bringing readlang to the world!
• jkaunisv1 11y ago
  This is really cool! I'm starting to practice my Japanese again and on the lookout for different tools to help. Thanks for sharing your numbers and story. Super helpful as somebody trying to bootstrap my own thing.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Good luck. Small warning that the experience learning Japanese may not be as good as with other languages since it can't detect word boundaries, doesn't offer Furigana transliteration which I'm told is pretty important, and doesn't have word frequency lists. Still, please try it out and let me know what you think!
    • jkaunisv1 11y ago
      Yeah, I expected to find it in the beta section given all the difficulties it presents as opposed to say, Spanish. I have a ways to go learning Kanji before I'll be able to properly use it but I'll definitely be in touch with feedback when I do.
• going_to_800 11y ago
  The story is nice and congrats for not giving up. However, I think you are on a level where you need to take a decision, would this become a real business or you'll keep it like it's now. As a side project it's awesome, as a business not so much. IF you want to make a business from this you need to start thinking on how to market, price and develop new features for clients that will pay more or at least to find ways to get power users. I saw on a reply of yours that you don't want to add some business requested features because individuals don't want them or you don't want them. Well, do you want higher revenues, higher growth or do you want to keep it like it's now(not saying that current state is bad)? Saying also that you know what's more useful is quite wrong, it's a mindset you need to change, once you target someone that is not you, you must at least assume that they have different needs. Even though individuals don't want those features, they are not the ones who'll bring the most money and if you really wanted you could create a business version like many other SaaS do, and you know this. From your replies I sense that you want to focus on individuals, that's great. In this case, forget about pricing, revenue, etc focus on building the user base, more likely a good stream of word-of-mouth sign ups. That's what most B2C apps do.
• kriro 11y ago
  Would you mind sharing your technology choices (languages, libraries, frameworks) and maybe why you picked the technology and if you'd do something differently now? Seems pretty cool, congrats.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    ## back end - Servers running Ubuntu hosted at Linode (outages recently have been worrying) - NGINX - NodeJS & express framework - MongoDB replica set with primary, secondary & arbiter ## front end - BackboneJS - JQuery - gulp for build & deploy script - RequireJS for modules It's been going fairly well on the whole. This is my first web-site with a back end, so I don't have experience with Python, PHP, MySQL, etc... to compare it to. Given that, it's hard to say whether I'd choose differently if I started again. I would probably play around with PostgreSQL since a relational DB may suit my needs better. Also, MongoDB can be worrying. I added a replicaset member running the latest stable version 3 with the WiredTiger storage engine to try it out but it kept crashing - not what you want from a database! I'm still using the older, very disk-space hungry version 2.6.x for now.
• DrNuke 11y ago
  Many solopreneurs develop slightly underachieving or barely profitable IT businesses. It is often a problem of time or committment or strategy or resources but, more often than not, it is not a fully viable business. That said, it may still come good for some passive income and, if a cat can't bark, three or four cats may still make a dog. He knows how to make a cat already, so the implied value of his current barely profitable business is higher than the nude money it is making just now.
• SeoxyS 11y ago
  For what it's worth; really cool product! I wonder if you could get hooked up with some language schools or teachers so that they'd use it for homework assignments.
• moron4hire 11y ago
  > I regularly question my decision to continue pouring so much time into Readlang. I wonder about the lucrative life of a contractor, or the cushy job of software developer at a large tech company. I wonder if I’m hurting my chances of future employment by working so long on my own. This has been on near constant loop in my head for the last year. It's really, really hard to be productive when you're worrying about the future. I don't know if I could do this if I wasn't married. I mean, I'd probably be living in a rural hell-hole somewhere and getting by financially, but that would ruin me emotionally.
• personomas 11y ago
  Listening is another great way to learn a foreign language. I recommend adding the ability to hear a passage. Create functionality for people to read a transcript and input it.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    People can share YouTube videos with sync'd transcriptions which are great for this. Check out this selection for German: http://readlang.com/shelf/5649d1fe60a4e5ef42f258ad http://readlang.com/shelf/5649d1fe60a4e5ef42f258ad Songs tend to be popular, here are a couple of good ones: http://readlang.com/library/551261a4573e272265223327 http://readlang.com/library/551261a4573e272265223327 - Je Veux, by Zaz - French http://readlang.com/library/55da3bacfe102b520f05d9ba http://readlang.com/library/55da3bacfe102b520f05d9ba - Lento, by Julieta Venegas - Spanish
    • personomas 11y ago
      It seems you're only uploading free content that's already been spoken. Instead, I think you should have a button on every text [1] with something like: "[count] listen now" (where count is the amount of uploaded natively spoken texts read by native/proficient speakers of the language.) But if nobody has uploaded a "listen now", then it's a button that says "0 listen now". Of course then, have a button right next to that one, that says "read text?" with a picture of a microphone. Which can be used for people to upload the spoken text. Written translations Do the same thing, but with written translations. Therefore, people can translate the text to their native language and upload it to the community for other people to read. Finish/next button Next, I think you should add a finish/next button to the top of the text OR to (one of the) the sidebar(s). I know there's one at the bottom. Add one to the top/sidebar. Clicking the finish/next button should go straight to the next text. Instead, you seem to hound people with 3 straight pop-ups! Then return them to the list of text. Wrong, in my opinion. Take them immediately to the next unfinished text that they haven't read yet. Sharing via social media Move the share on social media dialog to each text page, just always present. Don't make the user click past it everytime they read a text. Congratulations Stop congratulating people when they did something, or keep it to a minimum don't make them click past it. In general, I just think you're not utilizing the community enough. Use them to upload free and quality content. That way, they become more engaged, and you get free content. [1] by text, I mean the foreign language text that they're trying to learn, for example: http://readlang.com/library/568a5501ddb6ae5b165d2c33/from/0 http://readlang.com/library/568a5501ddb6ae5b165d2c33/from/0
• cristal 11y ago
  Keep up the good work. Already referred it out to a bunch of people. Think it will work great overseas where people actually need to learn another language for work. I have referred it to the people who live in Italy and work for me to help them learn english faster.
• philliphaydon 11y ago
  I just tried to create a trial account and sign in with Google isn't working :(
  • philliphaydon 11y ago
    Ahh it seems to be broken on a couple of pages. Selecting to view all languages seems to always break login from that page for me. But going to the phrase from his blog post it works fine. Strange.
    • steveridout 11y ago
      By "selecting to view all languages" do you mean clicking on the "I'm learning" selector at the top of http://readlang.com/dashboard http://readlang.com/dashboard ? I'm trying to reproduce this but I can't, although I do have error logs that show some users are getting google sign in related errors - if you could give me instructions to reproduce this bug I'd be really grateful!
• gamerDude 11y ago
  Just some quick feedback. When clicking on the link in medium to translate the spanish text, it went to the readlang library page and I could click around on the words to get translation. This wasn't immediately obvious to me because I accidently clicked a phrase first and it told me I had to sign up. I considered leaving at that moment, but pushed through and got the one word translation so I understood what it did. I liked that a lot. But reading through the comments, I realized I missed out on the core product. That it is a browser extension and I could do this anywhere on the web. Without HN comments, I would've never gotten that from the example because I thought it was a bit cool, but didn't see the use case and thus didn't visit the splash page. I'm not your target market, but now that I know what it does I will probably tell people I know who would be interested. My recommendation would be to make it super easy to understand what is going on in any of your demo's. Especially if you plan on going that route in the future. Best of luck!
  • steveridout 11y ago
    One problem is that there's no one "core" reading experience. The distraction free e-book style reader in the web-app and the extension both have similar usage. The small quote I linked to isn't at all representative of the kind of text people typically read. So not the ideal introduction to the product I agree, but it did was a neat way to get a lot of people to click through into the app to see it working. Thanks for your encouragement!
• asfandyaar 11y ago
  Oh wow! This is something I always wanted, but I never knew it existed!
• hellameta 11y ago
  your main page would seriously benefit from several 1 line phrases in various languages that you can translate right there on the page. so basically what you show in (#2 Click to Translate) should be an embedded within the page itself. you obviously don't need the extension if it's on your own page. you won't know until you try but I'm going to call it out now that it will increase your conversion rates
• maximgsaini 11y ago
  Hey Steve, This is really inspiring, man!! I know what its like. I would suggest that you keep going at it. Especially since things are finally working out. I see you mention user support as a potential time suck in one of your comments. I founded a startup which essentially provides user support on behalf of busy founders. I'd be willing to offer free support credits to you (in addition to a helpdesk software which is free for all) if it would make life easier for you. I'm hoping it might save you some time. We love people who bootstrap and let me know if we can help in any way. My email is in my profile. You can check us at: busibud.com I know how hard it is for a solo founder to take care of everything himself and what it feels like to put 15 hours a day without an end in sight.
• omahane 11y ago
  This is an incredible product, which I of course just now heard about. I have shared it with my family. But I was wondering if there's a way to get a family rate.
  • steveridout 11y ago
    Good idea! If you want to a discount right now for upgrading two accounts, do the following: 1. On the checkout page, there's an "I'm feeling generous" button which increases the yearly price from $48 to $60 (idea borrowed from NewsBlur) 2. After upgrading, email steve@readlang.com letting me know the email address of the other person, and I'll upgrade their account manually. This'll work out at $30 each instead of $48. If you have an odd number of people, email me and we'll work something else out.
• paki123 11y ago
  This is an idea, but have you thought of opening donations on your personal site or even on readlang? That way, for people who don't want to use the product, but want to help, can just donate a few bucks?
• erroneousfunk 11y ago
  I love the product and am still trying it out while learning Russian (very tempted to purchase a subscription, and it's sitting in my toolbar, which is a good reminder). A couple feedback things about the website because you seem to be receptive to it, after reading some of your comments in this thread: The "loading" page was a bad first impression for me. It was super fast, and I wouldn't have minded at all if the page were loading "normally" during that time, but the fact that you put up a loading page reminded me of Flash sites and over-developed crap in the mid 2000's. It was odd, and not in a good way. The site design, as another person pointed out, needs a little work. I know that you like serif fonts, and want it to feel "warm" and inviting and non-threatening, but you have to be really careful about piling too much on at once, especially when you're trying to promote how fantastic and slick the extension is :) The rabbit logo was a little childish. Rabbits connote "speed" books connote "learning" but the logo design itself didn't really make me say "Oh, super fast, slick, easy learning in a browser extension I should definitely download and trust with my personal data!" I put together an example of what might be improved (note: the logo here is just something random I found on Google images. Probably super duper copyrighted!) http://i.imgur.com/Ix7ubvR.png http://i.imgur.com/Ix7ubvR.png Getting rid of some of the border-shadow/rounded corner stuff might help, as well. It looks a little out-of-date with modern design trends. Not saying you need a trendy site, but you probably want something a little more timeless :) Also, adding a little more variations on the "green" theme could probably help. I really like this website for color palette inspirations: https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/ https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/ Loved the About page, the testimonials, and the obvious care that you had in the product. After exploring the site and installing the extension, it felt like a really cared-about (if that makes sense) well-maintained company and product. The fact that you had your personal address and mobile number there was awesome! Not a designer, I'm a software engineer, so take my advice with a grain of salt!
• mcnamaratw 11y ago
  Wow. You've built a business with real cash revenue that's been increasing 300% per year, and approaching the threshold where it could support you. That's a very impressive achievement that very few people have ever matched.
• AndrewMBliss 11y ago
  I have just tried the Web-App. I find it is a really good app. It has high accuracy in translating from Chinese to English. It is a really big surprise since even Google Translate cannot perform this well. Maybe the developer need more cooperation with the NGO learning organizations. He can get more support and fund in this way. Keep on and I think people will love it!
• devspaper 11y ago
  This is a great app,some time I really want to quite my job and do my own project like him,but I don't really know what is stoping me to do it,maybe I just don't have the courage.
• knocte 11y ago
  How does it feel to know that your product, some day, may become obsolete? I mean, you cannot deny the fact that real-time translation tools are improving a hell of a lot (you can watch some video about a demo from Microsoft already doing this through Skype). So there will be one day in which everybody will be able to communicate with everybody without learning languages at all :)
• fasteo 11y ago
  >> En primeras palabras quiero decir, que me gusta muchísimo tu pagina. Es de verdad grande trabajo. Don't know who wrote this; these are Spanish words, but as a sentence, it is barely understandable.
• timwaagh 11y ago
  how did you survive? or are you already rich and just doing this for fun? i mean you got to pay rent/mortgage&stuff... only if i lived with my parents could i survive on so little money. lots of people including myself would do this if they were able. I'll do this some day when my landlording project earns enough (now its just enough to live for free but i still need my salary) & I dont have any chick. in any case congratulations on your succes :) . its a great achievement.