10 ms·

I bought back my acquihired startup

336 points by mokkol 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nicky0 4y ago
Dude made Duolingo Stories! One of my favourite features of Duo.
williamstein 4y ago
Great post! (However, I just read the entire post and I still have no idea what readlang is.)
- steveridout 4y ago
  Good point! I just made the first mention of Readlang into a link to the website: https://readlang.com https://readlang.com It's a web-app and browser extension to help people learn languages by reading texts or websites in the language they are learning, get helpful translation hints and definitions to aid comprehension, and then to practice the new vocab with flashcards.
  - ginnungagap 4y ago
    The concept looks extremely interesting, but (like the vast majority of language learning tools) Albanian is not supported. I might give it a try for German though
    - steveridout 4y ago
      I'm planning to add some more languages after improving the UI. Right now the dropdowns to select languages feel unwieldy with so many options. If you want me to let you know when I get around to adding Albanian, email me at $MY_FIRST_NAME@readlang.com or send a message via https://readlang.uservoice.com/ https://readlang.uservoice.com/.
waboremo 4y ago
What a nice story, I wonder if they negotiated much on offers or if it was really a simple low ball for duolingo to get rid of. Generous if the latter! To be that attached to your idea after all this time is also very impressive. Most people would have just abandoned it and moved on, even if it was making decent money.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > if it was really a simple low ball for duolingo to get rid of At 4K MMR it was probably a pain in the ass for Duolingo to maintain and the reason for acquisition was hiring the developer and avoiding a potential concurrent (which in the end never realized) so I'd imagine it was a very easy buy. And I'm not saying that as a criticism of ReadLang, I think it's a great tool actually.
  - steveridout 4y ago
    Yeah, it was pretty easy. Relatively low offer and not much negotiating. From their point of view it wasn't worth maintaining. I'm just very happy they offered it back to me instead of shutting it down.
ewalk153 4y ago
Warms my heart to see a big company make this deal with the author rather than just shut it down. Bravo Duolingo.
- steveridout 4y ago
  Yep, I've got nothing but good things to say about Duolingo :-)
  - smcin 4y ago
    As an acquirer of startups, maybe. As a viable language-learning app (on the freemium tier), it's mixed and getting worse. I'm a 3.5-year Duolingo user. See the 2/2023 HN post "How Duolingo reignited user growth" [0] describing how they/ the former CPO aggressively traded off reducing the utility for actually acquiring language vs too much gamification (not all users want 'Candy Crush' levels of gamification), user growth, leaderboards, challenges, cutesy animations, inventing silly revenue streams like 'streak protect' (all prior to the 7/2021 IPO, ticker 'DUOL'). Duolingo locked the Chinese course mid-2022 [1], that means no more fixes ever, no corrections, the broken or missing audio (and answers, and hints) stay broken or missing, all discussions (users helping users, handy links to third-party sites) are frozen. For no good reason. They don't give a hoot for gamifying valuable user contributions which add/improve course content/fix mistakes. If any of you were contemplating paying for DL Chinese before they locked it on the charitable basis that they'd fix the broken bits someday after they'd banked the IPO loot, well obviously not now. (Here's e.g. Langoly's list of "The 11 Best Apps to Learn Chinese (Mandarin) Fluently" [2]) By comparison the Spanish course is alive and being improved; they added Stories. TL;DR: optimizing the product to juice up metrics like DAU prior to the IPO is good for valuations, but is not a great long-term approach to a language learning app and its community. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435 [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/zjnwmh/why_is_chinese_a_very_poorly_maintained_course/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/zjnwmh/why_is_chi... [2]: https://www.langoly.com/learn-chinese/ https://www.langoly.com/learn-chinese/
    - steveridout 4y ago
steveridout 4y ago
Hi! Steve here. Happy to hang around here for a while if anyone wants to ask anything! :-)
- waboremo 4y ago
  Yes I have a brief one, sorry that it's not specifically related to Readlang! You kind of stopped blogging as much when you joined Duolingo, what would you say were the biggest factors why? I'm assuming Duolingo weren't super restrictive on what you could post so that might not be the big reason, but I could be wrong!
  - steveridout 4y ago
    Good question! There was a lot to do and I was kept busy just with internal communication, so didn't feel the urge to share externally so much. Also, getting outside attention didn't feel as important given my role at the company compared to when I was alone running my own project. I actually remember asking them how restrictive they would be when it comes to sharing when I joined and they said they weren't as secretive as Apple, but that they weren't completely open about everything either. If I had had the urge to post anything I would have run it past people before publishing details about what our team was working on, and it would have probably been fine. But in the end, like I said, I was always busy and blogging fell by the wayside. (I was never a naturally prolific blogger anyway)
    - waboremo 4y ago
      Thank you for answering! The internal/external rift is so interesting and perfectly reasonable. Hard to spend time self editing after an exhausting day, and guess that's where places like Twitter really shined. Yet I wish that gap could be bridged somehow, it feels like many great posts with overlooked details are left unwritten because of the lack of external validation combined with internal hurdles. Meandering now, but your blogs are enjoyable reads and that's the most envious quality I have of writers!
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
schnebbau 4y ago
I had not heard of Readlang before, but I had heard of similar tool Toucan. I assumed they pioneered this type of tool, but evidently not.
- steveridout 4y ago
  Tucan actually works in reverse compared to Readlang. Say you're a native English speaker learning Spanish. With Tucan you browse the English websites you're already used to browsing, and it'll automatically translate some of the words to Spanish to sprinkle in a bit of practice that fits within your normal routine. It's a nice idea (actually this is the first one I saw doing the idea: https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/3/2995523/google-language-immersion-chrome-extension https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/3/2995523/google-language-im...) but for me it didn't stick. I found it weird to be learning isolated Spanish words out of their normal context, and pretty soon it just became annoying to have these Spanish words popping up everywhere. Maybe it works for some people though. With Readlang the idea is that you read actual websites in the language you're learning. If you're learning Spanish you might read El Pais or BBC Mundo for example. And to aid you, you can click on the odd word or phrase you don't understand to get a translation in English. It's intended for intermediate and advanced learners. Unlike Tucan you need to seek out texts to read in your target language, and Readlang offers a list of popular sites in each language to help you there: https://readlang.com/es/links https://readlang.com/es/links, but there's obviously more friction than something like Tucan which fits into your normal English language browsing routine.
  - schnebbau 4y ago
    Interesting, thank you for the explanation. I tried Toucan a year or so ago and just as you said, it was weird and didn't stick for me either. I will try Readlang!
czbond 4y ago
@steveridout Interesting post and journey, thanks for posting. Readlang - what would you say is the user persona you're going for? I need to learn (tourist) French. I'm not going to read sites about "where is the bathroom?", for example.
- steveridout 4y ago
  It's mainly for intermediate and advanced learners who want to tackle longer texts. I originally made it so that I could read novels in Spanish. Readlang may not ever be appropriate for complete beginners. But it could do better at providing stories written in simple language appropriate for beginners in specific situations like yours. Right now there is a public library of shared texts: https://readlang.com/fr/library https://readlang.com/fr/library, and a list of popular websites: https://readlang.com/fr/links https://readlang.com/fr/links. But you're largely left to your own devices to find content, which adds friction for new users and isn't ideal.
  - czbond 4y ago
    Very cool - thanks! Best wishes on building - product build is one of the most fun pursuits in the world!
mountaineer 4y ago
This is great, I love to see these work out. This type of re-acquisition can be difficult to see through to completion. The acquiring company has moved on and doesn't want to spend resources on dealing with it. I had tried to do this too at one point but then then newish CEO of the company we were trying to buy it back from was gone and we sorta gave up.
- steveridout 4y ago
  Sorry to hear that. I imagine it would have been a lot harder in my case if we'd actually integrated Readlang with Duolingo, sharing user accounts and that kind of thing. Luckily it was quite separate. I was a little stressed dealing with accountants and tax stuff here in Spain, and worrying that the technical transfer would go smoothly. But dealing with Duolingo was super easy.
domlebo70 4y ago
Are you able to disclose the price Duolingo paid for a 4k MRR bootstrapped app?
- steveridout 4y ago
  It was a mix of cash and stock options which vested over a few years. There was a confidentiality clause in the contract so I can't be super specific. But I asked ChatGPT what a typical price per employee is in an acquihire and it gives the following answer. I'll just say that the common range it gives doesn't sound crazy to me. > In general, the price per employee in an acquihire can range from $100,000 to over $1 million, with a more common range being between $250,000 and $500,000 per employee.
NKosmatos 4y ago
Nice story, with a good ending. Never heard of Readlang before, but for sure I’m going to give it a try. Bravo Steve and well done on getting back your “creation”.
selcuka 4y ago
Small suggestion: You may want to fix your DNS configuration which currently only resolves readlang.com and not www.readlang.com. This might confuse some visitors (it confused me when I typed readlang and pressed Ctrl+Enter): ~ $ dig a www.readlang.com ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> a www.readlang.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 65131 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1280 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.readlang.com. IN A ;; Query time: 62 msec ;; SERVER: 2406:3400:41e:5a80::1#53(2406:3400:41e:5a80::1) ;; WHEN: Fri Mar 24 10:06:36 AEST 2023 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 45
- steveridout 4y ago
  Thanks! I'll fix this
- inamberclad 4y ago
  dig has the worst output I've ever seen in a CLI tool. Fantastically useful when I've bothered to learn it, but it's just not intuitive. I always forget what everything means. What am I looking at here? The _lack_ of an answer section?
  - jdhendrickson 4y ago
    +short is your friend.
    - rjmunro 4y ago
      But why can't it be --short (or --quiet) like every other tool, so that I then have a chance of being able to remember it the 2-3 times/year I need it?
  - selcuka 4y ago
    Yes, it's horrible. It helps if you know the actual syntax used in zone files, and yes, it's the lack of an answer section. Alternatively use the short format as suggested by another comment: $ dig a www.readlang.com +short readlang.com. 139.144.234.197 Although now it's a bit too short and you can't see the record types (CNAME, A). Sigh.
twodave 4y ago
Cannot unsee the fact that this guy's name is basically stdout with some extra letters in it.
- colecut 4y ago
  What everi
scarface74 4y ago
No direct comment about buying the startup back. But I had never heard of this site before today and I am trying to learn Spanish. Also, the creator seems like it’s a simple sustainable business model - I give them money and I get a useful service without any advertising or dark patterns. He will be getting my money.
- steveridout 4y ago
  Yep, I like the fact that it's a simple business model with well aligned incentives. It's a direct relationship between me and my customers. I keep getting paid as long as the site continues to be useful. I also send an automated "Readlang account renewed" email every time I receive a renewal payment. Most SaaS products don't do this for obvious reasons, but it sucks when I realize I've been paying a subscription for something I'm not using, and I don't want to do that to my customers.
akudha 4y ago
Congrats. Anytime I see someone work on something they truly love, it feels good. It is my dream too. Is it okay to ask, do you pay for the dictionaries you use? The homepage says "translate words and phrases" - do you use some kind of translation API, like Google?
- steveridout 4y ago
  Yeah I use the Google Translate API for the translations. You can also embed a custom dictionary of your choosing in an iframe in the sidebar: https://blog.readlang.com/2013/11/07/custom-dictionaries.html https://blog.readlang.com/2013/11/07/custom-dictionaries.htm... And recently I've added a feature to get context-aware definitions from the ChatGPT API, but this is just for premium users in English, Spanish and French for now.
  - akudha 4y ago
    I have so many ideas for word games etc, but they all would require dictionary usage. How does one get free or affordable access to dictionaries?
wwweston 4y ago
> It turned out that people were using Readlang for card testing fraud. After I helped them to fix the problem How does one fix the card testing fraud problem? Certainly you can refund people after the fact, but it seems to me any point where small-dollar service/product can be purchased by card is vulnerable and you'd have to kinda guess whether the usage makes sense?
- base 4y ago
  There a lot of ways to reduce, just some ideias: turn on 3dsecure authentication whenever available. Check user location vs card location. Validate cvc code and postal code. Check for user activity and user signals (user agent, screen size etc) on the website, and other methods.
- steveridout 4y ago
  The ideal fix was to upgrade the version of Stripe checkout. At the time though I was looking for a quick solution and was scared to update the Stripe libraries for fear of accidentally breaking something else. So here's what I did: - First I tried adding an IP address based rate limiter to the signup and payment routes, and required that all users had translated at least one word before being allowed to upgrade. It stopped the attempts for a few hours, but then they started back up again. - Next, I used a more drastic approach, which would prevent all payment attempts from all IP address if we received more than 10 failed payment attempts within a 1 minute window. Still didn't work. - Next, I changed the thresholds to 4 failed payment attempts within 5 minutes, and this finally worked! Since buying Readlang back, I've updated the Stripe checkout to the latest version, turned off the circuit breaker, and haven't had any further problems.
siliconc0w 4y ago
Working in a larger company it's sad to see all the perfectly viable projects canned because they aren't billion dollar businesses. I wonder if there is a marketplace play here where companies can easily resell and offboard these kinds of companies rather than kill them off.
mydriasis 4y ago
I cannot wait to use your website tomorrow. I've been dying for a resource to learn Serbian outside of the only book that exists ( pretty much ) and my own efforts in getting flash cards, childrens' books, etc. together. You're seriously a life saver, I cannot wait to try this out. I wish I had heard of it a year ago. _Thank you_. You have produce a connection to my heritage and ancestry that nobody else has, and I really appreciate it.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  > You have produce a connection to my heritage and ancestry that nobody else has, and I really appreciate it. Awww, this is such a precious sentiment <3 it always makes me happy to see people's lives changed like this online~
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  Wow, how is it that there's only one instructional book to learn Serbian? There are many books to learn Norwegian out there (which I'm familiar with because I have learned a bit of Norwegian in the past), and fewer people speak it than Serbian.
  - vnorilo 4y ago
    Norway's economy is 7x that of Serbia (from Wolfram Alpha) and the Nordics do invest in this sort of thing.
    - dustymcp 4y ago
      Those are 2 very different places :)
  - mydriasis 4y ago
    I just think there's a lack of interest, which is a little sad. The culture is rich and fun, and the language is rhythmic and poetic. I wish more people would try to connect with their Slavic history!
- vis52 4y ago
telchior 4y ago
Hey, that's great! I was a Readlang subscriber for a few months last year and often had the thought "why isn't this better?". It even has a place on my (long, cluttered) list of potential ideas to work on. So I'm happy it will be revived and improved! Also, here's the note from my list on what I wished Readlang would do: "check out how News in Slow Spanish (newsinslowspanish.com/) turns each word into a hyperlink. Hovering over it gives you an instant popup. This is a way better experience than Readlang, which requires you to click each word to get its translation."
- steveridout 4y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion! I think in that case I'd probably want it to automatically combine certain adjacent words into phrases, which is definitely doable with AI but could be expensive to do for an entire text vs just paying for the words and phrases you click to translate like it does at the moment. Also, newsinslowspanish only turns some of the content into links - it makes an assumption as to which words you'll know and which ones you won't, which may not be valid. If you turned the entire text into their style of hoverable links it could look cluttered. You'd want more subtle ones. In fact, it would be very much like Duolingo Stories, which does work well! I'll think about this.
  - telchior 4y ago
    Yes, I'm sure it'll take some subtlety to do this well. My struggle with Readlang was always that it just doesn't provide the whole meaning -- for instance, a correctly translated phrase doesn't necessarily tell me what the individual words mean. IIRC I got to where I'd use both monitors: one with original language+Readlang, and one with Google Translate applied to see individual words, and yet another tab on that window to look up words as needed. My dream Readlang would have been one where I could quickly context-switch or change to see all of that, but it would probably require some significant client-side data and programming to achieve.
wiercin 4y ago
OMG, I love this product is exactly what I've been looking for. This is awesome!
emsixteen 4y ago
Congratulations on what sounds like an ultimately positive experience. Cool to see Norwegian on the site, but the very first Library thing I went in to had an error in the Norwegian. I don't really understand how the site works, but that put me off a bit.
- steveridout 4y ago
  Yeah, this is a problem. Anyone is free to share texts to the public library and there's no quality control, just an upvoting feature to try to surface the best content at the top. I accept that the public libraries are a mess at the moment and it's not easy to identify the high quality content there. Lots of room for improvement!
cogitovirus 4y ago
Why do you think Readlang stagnated when it was under Duolingo’s ownership? What were the main factors that prevented it from reaching its full potential?
- steveridout 4y ago
  Basically it's because I don't think Duolingo wanted the product so much as they wanted me. No-one used the term acquihire at the time but I was under no illusions that that's what it was. I did think that I might push to develop Readlang at Duolingo, but it never seemed like an attractive proposition for a bunch of reasons. I think it would have needed to grow at least 100X to start getting interesting within Duolingo. Not to say this was totally impossible but it seemed like a tough job. Also, some of the things that Readlang does, like browser extension and public sharing of texts, feel a bit "wild west" compared to the rest of Duolingo which is more curated and controlled, so it's not clear exactly how Readlang would have needed to change to fit in. I figured that if I tried this and integrated it tightly within Duolingo, and then failed to grow sufficiently, then the risk of it ultimately shutting down would have increased. Also, I had other exciting projects to work on there which seemed more valuable for Duolingo, and therefore better for my reputation within the company, so I was happy to work on those!
Major_Grooves 4y ago
I am so glad to hear about this. Readlang has always been one of my favourite language tools and I am sure you can grow it up to to be a pretty decent sized service, with decent MRR. Let me know if you are ever in Berlin and we can meet up again!
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jatinarora26 4y ago
What a wonderful full circle moment! More power to you!
Voklen 4y ago
There seems to be no Firefox extension, are you ever planning on creating one? The most I could find was a thread with a link to a corrupt extension https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/suggestions/4808864-firefox-extension https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/suggest... I'd love to try it out but I can't seem to use it (also if making a extension I'd feel a lot more comfortable getting it off the Firefox Addons from addons.mozilla.org)
- steveridout 4y ago
  You can use the bookmarklet, which you can drag into Firefox's bookmarks bar from this page: https://readlang.com/webReader https://readlang.com/webReader It works almost exactly the same as the Chrome Extension.

336 points by mokkol 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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nicky0 4y ago

Dude made Duolingo Stories! One of my favourite features of Duo.

williamstein 4y ago

Great post! (However, I just read the entire post and I still have no idea what readlang is.)

steveridout 4y ago
Good point! I just made the first mention of Readlang into a link to the website: https://readlang.com https://readlang.com It's a web-app and browser extension to help people learn languages by reading texts or websites in the language they are learning, get helpful translation hints and definitions to aid comprehension, and then to practice the new vocab with flashcards.
- ginnungagap 4y ago
  The concept looks extremely interesting, but (like the vast majority of language learning tools) Albanian is not supported. I might give it a try for German though
  - steveridout 4y ago
    I'm planning to add some more languages after improving the UI. Right now the dropdowns to select languages feel unwieldy with so many options. If you want me to let you know when I get around to adding Albanian, email me at $MY_FIRST_NAME@readlang.com or send a message via https://readlang.uservoice.com/ https://readlang.uservoice.com/.

waboremo 4y ago

What a nice story, I wonder if they negotiated much on offers or if it was really a simple low ball for duolingo to get rid of. Generous if the latter! To be that attached to your idea after all this time is also very impressive. Most people would have just abandoned it and moved on, even if it was making decent money.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
> if it was really a simple low ball for duolingo to get rid of At 4K MMR it was probably a pain in the ass for Duolingo to maintain and the reason for acquisition was hiring the developer and avoiding a potential concurrent (which in the end never realized) so I'd imagine it was a very easy buy. And I'm not saying that as a criticism of ReadLang, I think it's a great tool actually.
- steveridout 4y ago
  Yeah, it was pretty easy. Relatively low offer and not much negotiating. From their point of view it wasn't worth maintaining. I'm just very happy they offered it back to me instead of shutting it down.

ewalk153 4y ago

Warms my heart to see a big company make this deal with the author rather than just shut it down. Bravo Duolingo.

steveridout 4y ago
Yep, I've got nothing but good things to say about Duolingo :-)
- smcin 4y ago
  As an acquirer of startups, maybe. As a viable language-learning app (on the freemium tier), it's mixed and getting worse. I'm a 3.5-year Duolingo user. See the 2/2023 HN post "How Duolingo reignited user growth" [0] describing how they/ the former CPO aggressively traded off reducing the utility for actually acquiring language vs too much gamification (not all users want 'Candy Crush' levels of gamification), user growth, leaderboards, challenges, cutesy animations, inventing silly revenue streams like 'streak protect' (all prior to the 7/2021 IPO, ticker 'DUOL'). Duolingo locked the Chinese course mid-2022 [1], that means no more fixes ever, no corrections, the broken or missing audio (and answers, and hints) stay broken or missing, all discussions (users helping users, handy links to third-party sites) are frozen. For no good reason. They don't give a hoot for gamifying valuable user contributions which add/improve course content/fix mistakes. If any of you were contemplating paying for DL Chinese before they locked it on the charitable basis that they'd fix the broken bits someday after they'd banked the IPO loot, well obviously not now. (Here's e.g. Langoly's list of "The 11 Best Apps to Learn Chinese (Mandarin) Fluently" [2]) By comparison the Spanish course is alive and being improved; they added Stories. TL;DR: optimizing the product to juice up metrics like DAU prior to the IPO is good for valuations, but is not a great long-term approach to a language learning app and its community. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435 [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/zjnwmh/why_is_chinese_a_very_poorly_maintained_course/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/zjnwmh/why_is_chi... [2]: https://www.langoly.com/learn-chinese/ https://www.langoly.com/learn-chinese/
  - steveridout 4y ago

steveridout 4y ago

Hi! Steve here. Happy to hang around here for a while if anyone wants to ask anything! :-)

waboremo 4y ago
Yes I have a brief one, sorry that it's not specifically related to Readlang! You kind of stopped blogging as much when you joined Duolingo, what would you say were the biggest factors why? I'm assuming Duolingo weren't super restrictive on what you could post so that might not be the big reason, but I could be wrong!
- steveridout 4y ago
  Good question! There was a lot to do and I was kept busy just with internal communication, so didn't feel the urge to share externally so much. Also, getting outside attention didn't feel as important given my role at the company compared to when I was alone running my own project. I actually remember asking them how restrictive they would be when it comes to sharing when I joined and they said they weren't as secretive as Apple, but that they weren't completely open about everything either. If I had had the urge to post anything I would have run it past people before publishing details about what our team was working on, and it would have probably been fine. But in the end, like I said, I was always busy and blogging fell by the wayside. (I was never a naturally prolific blogger anyway)
  - waboremo 4y ago
    Thank you for answering! The internal/external rift is so interesting and perfectly reasonable. Hard to spend time self editing after an exhausting day, and guess that's where places like Twitter really shined. Yet I wish that gap could be bridged somehow, it feels like many great posts with overlooked details are left unwritten because of the lack of external validation combined with internal hurdles. Meandering now, but your blogs are enjoyable reads and that's the most envious quality I have of writers!
JoshTriplett 4y ago

schnebbau 4y ago

I had not heard of Readlang before, but I had heard of similar tool Toucan. I assumed they pioneered this type of tool, but evidently not.

steveridout 4y ago
Tucan actually works in reverse compared to Readlang. Say you're a native English speaker learning Spanish. With Tucan you browse the English websites you're already used to browsing, and it'll automatically translate some of the words to Spanish to sprinkle in a bit of practice that fits within your normal routine. It's a nice idea (actually this is the first one I saw doing the idea: https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/3/2995523/google-language-immersion-chrome-extension https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/3/2995523/google-language-im...) but for me it didn't stick. I found it weird to be learning isolated Spanish words out of their normal context, and pretty soon it just became annoying to have these Spanish words popping up everywhere. Maybe it works for some people though. With Readlang the idea is that you read actual websites in the language you're learning. If you're learning Spanish you might read El Pais or BBC Mundo for example. And to aid you, you can click on the odd word or phrase you don't understand to get a translation in English. It's intended for intermediate and advanced learners. Unlike Tucan you need to seek out texts to read in your target language, and Readlang offers a list of popular sites in each language to help you there: https://readlang.com/es/links https://readlang.com/es/links, but there's obviously more friction than something like Tucan which fits into your normal English language browsing routine.
- schnebbau 4y ago
  Interesting, thank you for the explanation. I tried Toucan a year or so ago and just as you said, it was weird and didn't stick for me either. I will try Readlang!

czbond 4y ago

@steveridout Interesting post and journey, thanks for posting. Readlang - what would you say is the user persona you're going for? I need to learn (tourist) French. I'm not going to read sites about "where is the bathroom?", for example.

steveridout 4y ago
It's mainly for intermediate and advanced learners who want to tackle longer texts. I originally made it so that I could read novels in Spanish. Readlang may not ever be appropriate for complete beginners. But it could do better at providing stories written in simple language appropriate for beginners in specific situations like yours. Right now there is a public library of shared texts: https://readlang.com/fr/library https://readlang.com/fr/library, and a list of popular websites: https://readlang.com/fr/links https://readlang.com/fr/links. But you're largely left to your own devices to find content, which adds friction for new users and isn't ideal.
- czbond 4y ago
  Very cool - thanks! Best wishes on building - product build is one of the most fun pursuits in the world!

mountaineer 4y ago

This is great, I love to see these work out. This type of re-acquisition can be difficult to see through to completion. The acquiring company has moved on and doesn't want to spend resources on dealing with it. I had tried to do this too at one point but then then newish CEO of the company we were trying to buy it back from was gone and we sorta gave up.

steveridout 4y ago
Sorry to hear that. I imagine it would have been a lot harder in my case if we'd actually integrated Readlang with Duolingo, sharing user accounts and that kind of thing. Luckily it was quite separate. I was a little stressed dealing with accountants and tax stuff here in Spain, and worrying that the technical transfer would go smoothly. But dealing with Duolingo was super easy.

domlebo70 4y ago

Are you able to disclose the price Duolingo paid for a 4k MRR bootstrapped app?

steveridout 4y ago
It was a mix of cash and stock options which vested over a few years. There was a confidentiality clause in the contract so I can't be super specific. But I asked ChatGPT what a typical price per employee is in an acquihire and it gives the following answer. I'll just say that the common range it gives doesn't sound crazy to me. > In general, the price per employee in an acquihire can range from $100,000 to over $1 million, with a more common range being between $250,000 and $500,000 per employee.

NKosmatos 4y ago

Nice story, with a good ending. Never heard of Readlang before, but for sure I’m going to give it a try. Bravo Steve and well done on getting back your “creation”.

selcuka 4y ago

Small suggestion: You may want to fix your DNS configuration which currently only resolves readlang.com and not www.readlang.com. This might confuse some visitors (it confused me when I typed readlang and pressed Ctrl+Enter): ~ $ dig a www.readlang.com ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> a www.readlang.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 65131 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1280 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.readlang.com. IN A ;; Query time: 62 msec ;; SERVER: 2406:3400:41e:5a80::1#53(2406:3400:41e:5a80::1) ;; WHEN: Fri Mar 24 10:06:36 AEST 2023 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 45

steveridout 4y ago
Thanks! I'll fix this
inamberclad 4y ago
dig has the worst output I've ever seen in a CLI tool. Fantastically useful when I've bothered to learn it, but it's just not intuitive. I always forget what everything means. What am I looking at here? The _lack_ of an answer section?
- jdhendrickson 4y ago
  +short is your friend.
  - rjmunro 4y ago
    But why can't it be --short (or --quiet) like every other tool, so that I then have a chance of being able to remember it the 2-3 times/year I need it?
- selcuka 4y ago
  Yes, it's horrible. It helps if you know the actual syntax used in zone files, and yes, it's the lack of an answer section. Alternatively use the short format as suggested by another comment: $ dig a www.readlang.com +short readlang.com. 139.144.234.197 Although now it's a bit too short and you can't see the record types (CNAME, A). Sigh.

twodave 4y ago

Cannot unsee the fact that this guy's name is basically stdout with some extra letters in it.

colecut 4y ago
What everi

scarface74 4y ago

No direct comment about buying the startup back. But I had never heard of this site before today and I am trying to learn Spanish. Also, the creator seems like it’s a simple sustainable business model - I give them money and I get a useful service without any advertising or dark patterns. He will be getting my money.

steveridout 4y ago
Yep, I like the fact that it's a simple business model with well aligned incentives. It's a direct relationship between me and my customers. I keep getting paid as long as the site continues to be useful. I also send an automated "Readlang account renewed" email every time I receive a renewal payment. Most SaaS products don't do this for obvious reasons, but it sucks when I realize I've been paying a subscription for something I'm not using, and I don't want to do that to my customers.

akudha 4y ago

Congrats. Anytime I see someone work on something they truly love, it feels good. It is my dream too. Is it okay to ask, do you pay for the dictionaries you use? The homepage says "translate words and phrases" - do you use some kind of translation API, like Google?

steveridout 4y ago
Yeah I use the Google Translate API for the translations. You can also embed a custom dictionary of your choosing in an iframe in the sidebar: https://blog.readlang.com/2013/11/07/custom-dictionaries.html https://blog.readlang.com/2013/11/07/custom-dictionaries.htm... And recently I've added a feature to get context-aware definitions from the ChatGPT API, but this is just for premium users in English, Spanish and French for now.
- akudha 4y ago
  I have so many ideas for word games etc, but they all would require dictionary usage. How does one get free or affordable access to dictionaries?

wwweston 4y ago

> It turned out that people were using Readlang for card testing fraud. After I helped them to fix the problem How does one fix the card testing fraud problem? Certainly you can refund people after the fact, but it seems to me any point where small-dollar service/product can be purchased by card is vulnerable and you'd have to kinda guess whether the usage makes sense?

base 4y ago
There a lot of ways to reduce, just some ideias: turn on 3dsecure authentication whenever available. Check user location vs card location. Validate cvc code and postal code. Check for user activity and user signals (user agent, screen size etc) on the website, and other methods.
steveridout 4y ago
The ideal fix was to upgrade the version of Stripe checkout. At the time though I was looking for a quick solution and was scared to update the Stripe libraries for fear of accidentally breaking something else. So here's what I did: - First I tried adding an IP address based rate limiter to the signup and payment routes, and required that all users had translated at least one word before being allowed to upgrade. It stopped the attempts for a few hours, but then they started back up again. - Next, I used a more drastic approach, which would prevent all payment attempts from all IP address if we received more than 10 failed payment attempts within a 1 minute window. Still didn't work. - Next, I changed the thresholds to 4 failed payment attempts within 5 minutes, and this finally worked! Since buying Readlang back, I've updated the Stripe checkout to the latest version, turned off the circuit breaker, and haven't had any further problems.

siliconc0w 4y ago

Working in a larger company it's sad to see all the perfectly viable projects canned because they aren't billion dollar businesses. I wonder if there is a marketplace play here where companies can easily resell and offboard these kinds of companies rather than kill them off.

mydriasis 4y ago

I cannot wait to use your website tomorrow. I've been dying for a resource to learn Serbian outside of the only book that exists ( pretty much ) and my own efforts in getting flash cards, childrens' books, etc. together. You're seriously a life saver, I cannot wait to try this out. I wish I had heard of it a year ago. _Thank you_. You have produce a connection to my heritage and ancestry that nobody else has, and I really appreciate it.

LoganDark 4y ago
> You have produce a connection to my heritage and ancestry that nobody else has, and I really appreciate it. Awww, this is such a precious sentiment <3 it always makes me happy to see people's lives changed like this online~
actually_a_dog 4y ago
Wow, how is it that there's only one instructional book to learn Serbian? There are many books to learn Norwegian out there (which I'm familiar with because I have learned a bit of Norwegian in the past), and fewer people speak it than Serbian.
- vnorilo 4y ago
  Norway's economy is 7x that of Serbia (from Wolfram Alpha) and the Nordics do invest in this sort of thing.
  - dustymcp 4y ago
    Those are 2 very different places :)
- mydriasis 4y ago
  I just think there's a lack of interest, which is a little sad. The culture is rich and fun, and the language is rhythmic and poetic. I wish more people would try to connect with their Slavic history!
vis52 4y ago

telchior 4y ago

Hey, that's great! I was a Readlang subscriber for a few months last year and often had the thought "why isn't this better?". It even has a place on my (long, cluttered) list of potential ideas to work on. So I'm happy it will be revived and improved! Also, here's the note from my list on what I wished Readlang would do: "check out how News in Slow Spanish (newsinslowspanish.com/) turns each word into a hyperlink. Hovering over it gives you an instant popup. This is a way better experience than Readlang, which requires you to click each word to get its translation."

steveridout 4y ago
Thanks for the suggestion! I think in that case I'd probably want it to automatically combine certain adjacent words into phrases, which is definitely doable with AI but could be expensive to do for an entire text vs just paying for the words and phrases you click to translate like it does at the moment. Also, newsinslowspanish only turns some of the content into links - it makes an assumption as to which words you'll know and which ones you won't, which may not be valid. If you turned the entire text into their style of hoverable links it could look cluttered. You'd want more subtle ones. In fact, it would be very much like Duolingo Stories, which does work well! I'll think about this.
- telchior 4y ago
  Yes, I'm sure it'll take some subtlety to do this well. My struggle with Readlang was always that it just doesn't provide the whole meaning -- for instance, a correctly translated phrase doesn't necessarily tell me what the individual words mean. IIRC I got to where I'd use both monitors: one with original language+Readlang, and one with Google Translate applied to see individual words, and yet another tab on that window to look up words as needed. My dream Readlang would have been one where I could quickly context-switch or change to see all of that, but it would probably require some significant client-side data and programming to achieve.

wiercin 4y ago

OMG, I love this product is exactly what I've been looking for. This is awesome!

emsixteen 4y ago

Congratulations on what sounds like an ultimately positive experience. Cool to see Norwegian on the site, but the very first Library thing I went in to had an error in the Norwegian. I don't really understand how the site works, but that put me off a bit.

steveridout 4y ago
Yeah, this is a problem. Anyone is free to share texts to the public library and there's no quality control, just an upvoting feature to try to surface the best content at the top. I accept that the public libraries are a mess at the moment and it's not easy to identify the high quality content there. Lots of room for improvement!

cogitovirus 4y ago

Why do you think Readlang stagnated when it was under Duolingo’s ownership? What were the main factors that prevented it from reaching its full potential?

steveridout 4y ago
Basically it's because I don't think Duolingo wanted the product so much as they wanted me. No-one used the term acquihire at the time but I was under no illusions that that's what it was. I did think that I might push to develop Readlang at Duolingo, but it never seemed like an attractive proposition for a bunch of reasons. I think it would have needed to grow at least 100X to start getting interesting within Duolingo. Not to say this was totally impossible but it seemed like a tough job. Also, some of the things that Readlang does, like browser extension and public sharing of texts, feel a bit "wild west" compared to the rest of Duolingo which is more curated and controlled, so it's not clear exactly how Readlang would have needed to change to fit in. I figured that if I tried this and integrated it tightly within Duolingo, and then failed to grow sufficiently, then the risk of it ultimately shutting down would have increased. Also, I had other exciting projects to work on there which seemed more valuable for Duolingo, and therefore better for my reputation within the company, so I was happy to work on those!

Major_Grooves 4y ago

I am so glad to hear about this. Readlang has always been one of my favourite language tools and I am sure you can grow it up to to be a pretty decent sized service, with decent MRR. Let me know if you are ever in Berlin and we can meet up again!

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jatinarora26 4y ago

What a wonderful full circle moment! More power to you!

Voklen 4y ago

There seems to be no Firefox extension, are you ever planning on creating one? The most I could find was a thread with a link to a corrupt extension https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/suggestions/4808864-firefox-extension https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/suggest... I'd love to try it out but I can't seem to use it (also if making a extension I'd feel a lot more comfortable getting it off the Firefox Addons from addons.mozilla.org)

steveridout 4y ago
You can use the bookmarklet, which you can drag into Firefox's bookmarks bar from this page: https://readlang.com/webReader https://readlang.com/webReader It works almost exactly the same as the Chrome Extension.