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Creator of the Readlang here. I started this at the very end of 2012, and save for a few months contracting have been working on it full time since, doing every

Creator of the Readlang here. I started this at the very end of 2012, and save for a few months contracting have been working on it full time since, doing everything myself. Growth has been slower than I’d like but just enough to keep me motivated. It's a freemium webapp, originally designed to reduce the frustration of practicing my Spanish by reading novels, and later adapted to work on any webpage as a browser extension. I always appreciate it when people share details about their business, so here are some numbers from the first 5 months of 2015 (Jan - May): Google Analytics - Sessions: 120,000, Unique visitors: 53,489 Signups - 13,658 Revenue - $4768 (average of $953 / month) Not spectacular, but when I look back, it took 16 months to make the first $1000 (http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped-language-learning-web-app.html http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped-l...), and right now it’s making more than that every month! It’s a long road but I’m very excited about it’s future. Any questions or feedback, please fire away!

etewiah 11y ago
Wow, these are the stories we need to hear more of!! I'm a bit tired of the overnight success stories getting all the attention. If such an awesome product has taken so long to make something in the region of 1000 dollars a month then perhaps creating a startup is not as easy as so many people make it out to be...
- steveridout 11y ago
  Who said it was going to be easy? ;-) It's cliche I know, but most "overnight successes" involved years of hard work.
- vijayr 11y ago
  Totally agree. For most people, even on HN, it is really hard to identify with all those multi million dollar fundings and billion dollar buy outs. This on the other hand, shows what is possible by one person and how it is not that easy to build something nice and useful. I hope OP keeps publishing posts on what worked, traffic stats, revenue stats etc. This is another site that was bootstrapped (I believe) http://www.forvo.com/ http://www.forvo.com/ and seems to be doing quite well (though the quality is debatable sometimes)
a-williams 11y ago
I really like the video feature. Seems like a great way to improve listening skills.
transpy 11y ago
Do you do some kind of text processing, before or after sending the words to Google Translate? Do you analyze the translation mistakes, in order to iteratively improve the results? How much do you pay for the API?
- steveridout 11y ago
  I don't do any processing - the phrase goes directly to Google. Users can edit the translations so I'm accumulating data which could be aggregated in future to improve translations, but not doing that at the moment.
Jugurtha 11y ago
This is interesting.. I was reading this cool thread a couple of days ago (some really useful stuff): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5965081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5965081 and stumbled across your comment. I thought it was neat (I'm using -not- TransOver for the moment). Here's what I can think of, off the top of my head, but first some background: I'm acquiring Spanish right now and simultaneously scratching the surface of German, Russian, Hebrew, and Persian. They have a lower priority, but I'm making progress. As you may have noticed, English is not my first language. I learned it out of necessity (resources I needed were in English). I read a lot, and in the beginning, my head hurt as I read stuff written in English. I had MediaDico on my computer to translate from English to French. I struggled with idioms (I needed to read several examples of an idiom to get the gist of it)... But I can pin-point the exact moment where my learning was about to soar: I was in the living room and I decided that my computer experience had to shift to English. This means that even when I was to search for stuff, I'd do it in English. My brain bled. Something trivial to search for in a language I knew, something I already had the keywords ready, not in my mind but in my fingertips, to search Google for, would take me way longer to think about, formulate, and come up with keywords for, in English. What would be cool is this: - A user doesn't have to click on on a word to translate it. The extension makes a sort of histogram of the most used words or expressions (a frequency list of the page), and automatically translates them. Since they're the most used words or expressions on the page, the person will be exposed to them often: "accidentally on purpose" rote repetition. This will be useful for the next step: - The extension _remembers_ (keeps a list of) which words (should) already have been learned by the user (which words he has been exposed to the most), and in subsequent pages will display them in the target language without the user doing anything. They will no longer be displayed in the user's language. - The first message it displayed was that I had to drag some link, etc.. Why is that? - I had a message saying "This is a very large page". Maybe the extension can translate stuff the user is most likely to see first, and as the user browses, it does stuff.. Think Python generators. All my best !
- steveridout 11y ago
  Hmm, sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but from your suggestions it's not clear if you realise that the extension is intended for reading in your target language and translating occasional words to your native language. e.g. > ...and in subsequent pages will display them in the target language without the user doing anything. They will no longer be displayed in the user's language. The idea is that to learn Spanish, you read Spanish webpages, so everything is displayed in the target language at first, and you click to get the English translation. Detecting words which are unusually frequent in the page you're reading, and automatically adding a translation to the first instance is a cool idea. > The first message it displayed was that I had to drag some link, etc.. Why is that? I think you're referring to the bookmarklet that needs to be installed to translate webpages, this is an alternative to the Chrome extension and works on almost all browsers. > I had a message saying "This is a very large page" Yeah, this is pretty ugly, should think of a nicer solution.
ecdavis 11y ago
FYI, I discovered this a week or two ago and when I tried to pay using PayPal something timed out and I was unable to complete the transaction. I tried several times, and I don't think it was a PayPal issue. Eventually I just gave up. Love the site, though.
- steveridout 11y ago
  That's a bit worrying - do you know at what stage it stopped working exactly? Please get in touch (steve@readlang.com) with some more details and I'll be happy to upgrade you for a couple of months for free.
pbiggar 11y ago
I'm vaguely trying to learn spanish using Duolingo, but haven't been very diligent. I was hoping your chrome extension could be a more passive way of learning that integrates into what I already do, and which would let me stick with it as a result. Unfortunately, the current version isn't. Unless I'm using it wrong, here's the process of learning spanish with your extension: - I'm on a page - I decide to learn spanish - I click the extension button - i click random words and see the spanish word for it There's a lot of friction (I have to steps 2 and 3) for not a lot of pay off (I can choose to click words and see what the spanish version is). Also, the fact that it gets in the way of every link means I immediately turned it off. May I suggest an alternate version: - on every single page the extension is active - pick some number of words (1% maybe?) to translate into spanish, while keeping the text in english. Underline them in green and let me mouseover if I don't understand - when I'm reading the text, I will come across these spanish words and learn them in context Much lower friction, and doesn't get in the way so I won't turn it off. WDYT?
- Nadya 11y ago
  So something like this? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion-for-ch/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion...
  - pbiggar 11y ago
    Yes, awesome, thanks! It doesn't get the translations perfect AFAICT, but I think it's good enough to keep activated!
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Unfortunately, I don't think you can learn, for example, Spanish by translating pages to Spanish. You have to read pages in Spanish and translate from it, otherwise you're learning Google-Translatese, not Spanish. There's a lot of nuance, idioms, etc that translations can't give you, not to mention that they're usually, very, very wrong.
gojomo 11y ago
It might be interesting to offer the reverse: incremental translation of source material that's in the reader's known language, into the target language. That is, simply by switching into the mode, each page the user visits would have some of its words translated to the target language. They'd have distinctive styling, and a simple hover or click would show the original word. You'd always be reading a mosaic of both languages As they hover/click for clarification less often, more and more words would be target-translated... building the new language vocabulary over time. Of course, this doesn't teach the new language's syntax/ordering... but even that could maybe be incrementall mixed-in over time. Perhaps when there's a clear 1:1 sentence map, a sentence could (with some probability linked to how many words have already flipped) flip to the target-language's order-of-presentation, even if most of its individual words are still native.
- steveridout 11y ago
  Sounds like you might like the Language Immersion chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion-for-ch/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl/related https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion...
laurieg 11y ago
Great to see your language learning website! I'm developing similar ideas all the time, but I'm having trouble earning the first dollar. A few questions: Do you feel trying to do every language is effective? Do you have trouble with any particular languages? Do you feel google translate is good enough for learners? On your site you seem to say audio was a mis-step. Will you be giving it another go?
- steveridout 11y ago
  Is doing every language effective? Most of them cause me no/very little extra effort so I figure why not. The danger is that learning some of the languages gives a worse experience and may negatively impact the users' impression of the entire product. e.g. the site isn't great for Japanese and Chinese which should have extra features such as Furigana/Pinyin, and smart word boundary detection (they don't use spaces to separate words). Is google translate good enough? Depends. It's certainly not good enough to trust 100%, which is a big issue for beginners. But once you have a basic level of understanding you can generally tell from the context whether a translation makes sense or not. If you're not convinced, you just need to open the extra popup/sidebar dictionary, and I encourage users to check and correct any translations the first time they encounter them in the flashcard section. I added the YouTube feature very early on, when the rest of the site was rougher round the edges, and felt I should have concentrated more on the core reading experience. Now though, I'm glad the feature is there, it's great for listening practice, some people get satisfaction from syncing and sharing videos, and it's one extra way to impress people when demoing the site. Regarding plain audio - this isn't on my immediate TODO list but I agree it would be cool. Personally I'd love to listen to podcasts + transcriptions to help me learn.
eranation 11y ago
It is pretty impressive and very usable. I see a great future for it. My comments: 1 - it is not clear which words go into "my words" e.g. I mark one, then the one after, but I don't want it as an idiom, I just want two separate words. 2 - this causes some confusion when going to the flash cards I get (imagine it's in a foreigh language) "the plane", "the plane is" "plane is taking off" "plane is taking of the ground" - each in a single "flash card item". I'm sure it's due to me abusing / testing marking words I don't have UI / UX solutions to both issues sadly, I'm sure you gave it a lot of thought. Otherwise, this is a great, fully functional website, and I wish you will make a lot of money. I'm tempted to become a paying user. Looking at DuoLingo's recent valuation, I would say that there is a market for this. Great example of a real bootstrapped SaaS. Hope you get to see it grow further. Sounds like a valid YC submission if you ask me, worth a shot...
- steveridout 11y ago
  1 - good point, the best way to achieve this at the moment is to click to unhighlight the first word before clicking the second one. Even after clicking to unhighlight, the word will still remain in your word list, the idea being that it usually doesn't hurt to collect too many words, and the decision on which words to keep, and which to discard shouldn't take up valuable brain cycles while reading. The flashcards will prioritize the high frequency (most useful) words for you and if any extra words you don't want appear at that stage it's quick to delete them. 2 - the way it's meant to work is that if you select "the plane", then extend it to "the plane is", the larger phrase will overwrite the shorter one. It's definitely true that testing the translation feature can result in a lot of garbage appearing that you don't want. I could add a collect words ON / OFF setting but obviously that would complicate the UI, so I'm resisting it. Thanks for your feedback. I actually applied to YC with this a couple of years ago but the product was very immature, I'm a solo founder and I didn't get invited for interview. I'm more inclined to bootstrapping rather than taking VC which seems to be the path most (all?) YC companies take. I may re-apply for summer 2016 though since it sounds like an amazing experience.
nfc 11y ago
Amazing job, I'll become soon one of your paying customers :) After playing with it for a while a first suggestion. I noticed that it's possible to export the frequency of the words so you have this information, for my use case it would be very useful to have this information in the word list (when the word is expanded). This is because when I'm reviewing the words in my word list and deleting those I feel are not very usual so I can concentrate on those that are, however this is done just by guesswork as I don't really know which words are more common, having easy access to the frequency of the word in the word list would allow me to do it in a more efficient way.
- steveridout 11y ago
  You shouldn't feel the need to delete infrequent words like this manually. The flashcards use the frequency to prioritize the useful words first, so provided you have a large enough pool of translated words you will never see the really infrequent ones. (The exception is that if you star any word, it will be bumped to top priority) Agree it could be nice to show the frequency information in the word list somehow, but it needs to be subtle / hidden enough not to clutter the UI.

etewiah 11y ago

Wow, these are the stories we need to hear more of!! I'm a bit tired of the overnight success stories getting all the attention. If such an awesome product has taken so long to make something in the region of 1000 dollars a month then perhaps creating a startup is not as easy as so many people make it out to be...

steveridout 11y ago
Who said it was going to be easy? ;-) It's cliche I know, but most "overnight successes" involved years of hard work.
vijayr 11y ago
Totally agree. For most people, even on HN, it is really hard to identify with all those multi million dollar fundings and billion dollar buy outs. This on the other hand, shows what is possible by one person and how it is not that easy to build something nice and useful. I hope OP keeps publishing posts on what worked, traffic stats, revenue stats etc. This is another site that was bootstrapped (I believe) http://www.forvo.com/ http://www.forvo.com/ and seems to be doing quite well (though the quality is debatable sometimes)

a-williams 11y ago

I really like the video feature. Seems like a great way to improve listening skills.

transpy 11y ago

Do you do some kind of text processing, before or after sending the words to Google Translate? Do you analyze the translation mistakes, in order to iteratively improve the results? How much do you pay for the API?

steveridout 11y ago
I don't do any processing - the phrase goes directly to Google. Users can edit the translations so I'm accumulating data which could be aggregated in future to improve translations, but not doing that at the moment.

Jugurtha 11y ago

This is interesting.. I was reading this cool thread a couple of days ago (some really useful stuff): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5965081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5965081 and stumbled across your comment. I thought it was neat (I'm using -not- TransOver for the moment). Here's what I can think of, off the top of my head, but first some background: I'm acquiring Spanish right now and simultaneously scratching the surface of German, Russian, Hebrew, and Persian. They have a lower priority, but I'm making progress. As you may have noticed, English is not my first language. I learned it out of necessity (resources I needed were in English). I read a lot, and in the beginning, my head hurt as I read stuff written in English. I had MediaDico on my computer to translate from English to French. I struggled with idioms (I needed to read several examples of an idiom to get the gist of it)... But I can pin-point the exact moment where my learning was about to soar: I was in the living room and I decided that my computer experience had to shift to English. This means that even when I was to search for stuff, I'd do it in English. My brain bled. Something trivial to search for in a language I knew, something I already had the keywords ready, not in my mind but in my fingertips, to search Google for, would take me way longer to think about, formulate, and come up with keywords for, in English. What would be cool is this: - A user doesn't have to click on on a word to translate it. The extension makes a sort of histogram of the most used words or expressions (a frequency list of the page), and automatically translates them. Since they're the most used words or expressions on the page, the person will be exposed to them often: "accidentally on purpose" rote repetition. This will be useful for the next step: - The extension _remembers_ (keeps a list of) which words (should) already have been learned by the user (which words he has been exposed to the most), and in subsequent pages will display them in the target language without the user doing anything. They will no longer be displayed in the user's language. - The first message it displayed was that I had to drag some link, etc.. Why is that? - I had a message saying "This is a very large page". Maybe the extension can translate stuff the user is most likely to see first, and as the user browses, it does stuff.. Think Python generators. All my best !

steveridout 11y ago
Hmm, sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but from your suggestions it's not clear if you realise that the extension is intended for reading in your target language and translating occasional words to your native language. e.g. > ...and in subsequent pages will display them in the target language without the user doing anything. They will no longer be displayed in the user's language. The idea is that to learn Spanish, you read Spanish webpages, so everything is displayed in the target language at first, and you click to get the English translation. Detecting words which are unusually frequent in the page you're reading, and automatically adding a translation to the first instance is a cool idea. > The first message it displayed was that I had to drag some link, etc.. Why is that? I think you're referring to the bookmarklet that needs to be installed to translate webpages, this is an alternative to the Chrome extension and works on almost all browsers. > I had a message saying "This is a very large page" Yeah, this is pretty ugly, should think of a nicer solution.

ecdavis 11y ago

FYI, I discovered this a week or two ago and when I tried to pay using PayPal something timed out and I was unable to complete the transaction. I tried several times, and I don't think it was a PayPal issue. Eventually I just gave up. Love the site, though.

steveridout 11y ago
That's a bit worrying - do you know at what stage it stopped working exactly? Please get in touch (steve@readlang.com) with some more details and I'll be happy to upgrade you for a couple of months for free.

pbiggar 11y ago

I'm vaguely trying to learn spanish using Duolingo, but haven't been very diligent. I was hoping your chrome extension could be a more passive way of learning that integrates into what I already do, and which would let me stick with it as a result. Unfortunately, the current version isn't. Unless I'm using it wrong, here's the process of learning spanish with your extension: - I'm on a page - I decide to learn spanish - I click the extension button - i click random words and see the spanish word for it There's a lot of friction (I have to steps 2 and 3) for not a lot of pay off (I can choose to click words and see what the spanish version is). Also, the fact that it gets in the way of every link means I immediately turned it off. May I suggest an alternate version: - on every single page the extension is active - pick some number of words (1% maybe?) to translate into spanish, while keeping the text in english. Underline them in green and let me mouseover if I don't understand - when I'm reading the text, I will come across these spanish words and learn them in context Much lower friction, and doesn't get in the way so I won't turn it off. WDYT?

Nadya 11y ago
So something like this? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion-for-ch/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion...
- pbiggar 11y ago
  Yes, awesome, thanks! It doesn't get the translations perfect AFAICT, but I think it's good enough to keep activated!
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Unfortunately, I don't think you can learn, for example, Spanish by translating pages to Spanish. You have to read pages in Spanish and translate from it, otherwise you're learning Google-Translatese, not Spanish. There's a lot of nuance, idioms, etc that translations can't give you, not to mention that they're usually, very, very wrong.

gojomo 11y ago

It might be interesting to offer the reverse: incremental translation of source material that's in the reader's known language, into the target language. That is, simply by switching into the mode, each page the user visits would have some of its words translated to the target language. They'd have distinctive styling, and a simple hover or click would show the original word. You'd always be reading a mosaic of both languages As they hover/click for clarification less often, more and more words would be target-translated... building the new language vocabulary over time. Of course, this doesn't teach the new language's syntax/ordering... but even that could maybe be incrementall mixed-in over time. Perhaps when there's a clear 1:1 sentence map, a sentence could (with some probability linked to how many words have already flipped) flip to the target-language's order-of-presentation, even if most of its individual words are still native.

steveridout 11y ago
Sounds like you might like the Language Immersion chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion-for-ch/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl/related https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion...

laurieg 11y ago

Great to see your language learning website! I'm developing similar ideas all the time, but I'm having trouble earning the first dollar. A few questions: Do you feel trying to do every language is effective? Do you have trouble with any particular languages? Do you feel google translate is good enough for learners? On your site you seem to say audio was a mis-step. Will you be giving it another go?

steveridout 11y ago
Is doing every language effective? Most of them cause me no/very little extra effort so I figure why not. The danger is that learning some of the languages gives a worse experience and may negatively impact the users' impression of the entire product. e.g. the site isn't great for Japanese and Chinese which should have extra features such as Furigana/Pinyin, and smart word boundary detection (they don't use spaces to separate words). Is google translate good enough? Depends. It's certainly not good enough to trust 100%, which is a big issue for beginners. But once you have a basic level of understanding you can generally tell from the context whether a translation makes sense or not. If you're not convinced, you just need to open the extra popup/sidebar dictionary, and I encourage users to check and correct any translations the first time they encounter them in the flashcard section. I added the YouTube feature very early on, when the rest of the site was rougher round the edges, and felt I should have concentrated more on the core reading experience. Now though, I'm glad the feature is there, it's great for listening practice, some people get satisfaction from syncing and sharing videos, and it's one extra way to impress people when demoing the site. Regarding plain audio - this isn't on my immediate TODO list but I agree it would be cool. Personally I'd love to listen to podcasts + transcriptions to help me learn.

eranation 11y ago

It is pretty impressive and very usable. I see a great future for it. My comments: 1 - it is not clear which words go into "my words" e.g. I mark one, then the one after, but I don't want it as an idiom, I just want two separate words. 2 - this causes some confusion when going to the flash cards I get (imagine it's in a foreigh language) "the plane", "the plane is" "plane is taking off" "plane is taking of the ground" - each in a single "flash card item". I'm sure it's due to me abusing / testing marking words I don't have UI / UX solutions to both issues sadly, I'm sure you gave it a lot of thought. Otherwise, this is a great, fully functional website, and I wish you will make a lot of money. I'm tempted to become a paying user. Looking at DuoLingo's recent valuation, I would say that there is a market for this. Great example of a real bootstrapped SaaS. Hope you get to see it grow further. Sounds like a valid YC submission if you ask me, worth a shot...

steveridout 11y ago
1 - good point, the best way to achieve this at the moment is to click to unhighlight the first word before clicking the second one. Even after clicking to unhighlight, the word will still remain in your word list, the idea being that it usually doesn't hurt to collect too many words, and the decision on which words to keep, and which to discard shouldn't take up valuable brain cycles while reading. The flashcards will prioritize the high frequency (most useful) words for you and if any extra words you don't want appear at that stage it's quick to delete them. 2 - the way it's meant to work is that if you select "the plane", then extend it to "the plane is", the larger phrase will overwrite the shorter one. It's definitely true that testing the translation feature can result in a lot of garbage appearing that you don't want. I could add a collect words ON / OFF setting but obviously that would complicate the UI, so I'm resisting it. Thanks for your feedback. I actually applied to YC with this a couple of years ago but the product was very immature, I'm a solo founder and I didn't get invited for interview. I'm more inclined to bootstrapping rather than taking VC which seems to be the path most (all?) YC companies take. I may re-apply for summer 2016 though since it sounds like an amazing experience.

nfc 11y ago

Amazing job, I'll become soon one of your paying customers :) After playing with it for a while a first suggestion. I noticed that it's possible to export the frequency of the words so you have this information, for my use case it would be very useful to have this information in the word list (when the word is expanded). This is because when I'm reviewing the words in my word list and deleting those I feel are not very usual so I can concentrate on those that are, however this is done just by guesswork as I don't really know which words are more common, having easy access to the frequency of the word in the word list would allow me to do it in a more efficient way.

steveridout 11y ago
You shouldn't feel the need to delete infrequent words like this manually. The flashcards use the frequency to prioritize the useful words first, so provided you have a large enough pool of translated words you will never see the really infrequent ones. (The exception is that if you star any word, it will be bumped to top priority) Agree it could be nice to show the frequency information in the word list somehow, but it needs to be subtle / hidden enough not to clutter the UI.