steveridout

13 ms·

91.
by 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&
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by 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
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by steveridout 11y ago
There was another Chrome extension that did what you're describing: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion... Was covered in Lifehacker here: http://lifehacker.com/590743
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by 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 promi
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by 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 lan
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by steveridout 11y ago
Point taken - I clearly need to work on streamlining the landing page and first run experience. Thanks for the feedback! :-)
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by 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
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by steveridout 11y ago
Just to clarify. I certainly listen to my users. I may even err too much on the side of adding everything they ask for, leading to a more complicated product. (e.g. here are the completed items on Readlang's uservoice page: https:&#x2
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by 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 so
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by 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 gettin
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by 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
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by 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 gue
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by 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
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by 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 wor
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by steveridout 11y ago
You may be correct. But I'm not ready to focus on businesses right now because: 1. Businesses would want features that individuals don't care about. More importantly, they would want features that I don't care about . I ma
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by steveridout 11y ago
True, agree completely. I designed Readlang's Activity Monitor with this in mind: http://blog.readlang.com/2015/09/10/new-learning-activity-st... It's meant to encourage people to translate or recal
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by steveridout 11y ago
I always grandfather users. And it's easy when raising prices. The old users get to keep the old cheaper price and are happy. I was referring to the difficulty when I: 1. Raise prices too high 2. Conversion rate and revenue is harmed,
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by steveridout 11y ago
I agree. Just to reassure people, Readlang does not collect your entire browsing history . It does store all the URLs for the words you actually clicked on to translate. This is probably more useful for my use case anyway, since these are
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by 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
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by 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
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by 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
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by 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 fe
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by 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
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by steveridout 11y ago
I thought about that but don't like the idea: 1. As you say, could be against t&c. 2. Tons of requests for the dictionary page coming from my server's IP address may lead to being blocked. 3. The user can edit the URL template
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by steveridout 11y ago
That's very true.
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by 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 ove
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by 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 subscrib
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by 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 o
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by 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!
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by 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 ma

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