Comment by steveridout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveridout | Hacker News Reader

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Congratulations!

I quit my job about 19 months ago and had the luck to get immediately re-hired by my former employer as a freelancer for a few months on a much higher rate (http://steveridout.com/2012/12/30/a-welcome-delay.html). This, combined with living in Madrid now instead of London, has given me enough runway to live cheaply for another 2 years if needed.

I've been working on my current SAAS project http://readlang.com for 11 months now and despite showing a lot of promise it's still not even ramen profitable. I'm still feeling very hopeful about it though and while it's looking promising have every intention to follow through to see where it leads. May write a blog post about this as it approaches it's 1st birthday.

I'd say your 6 months is on the short side for creating and selling a product of your own, and would recommend you try to find consulting gigs to save up some more money first if this is the road you're considering. If you just meander and hop between a bunch of projects for a few months I fear that in 5 months time you'll be looking to take for a normal job again, perhaps running back to your old company! (I've actually done this before - I took a year off with no plan, didn't focus on a project, and ended up re-joining the same job I'd left.)

Anyway, good luck, look forward to see what you can create!

This is exactly what I was looking for! I recently moved to Germany and I'm learning German and I'd love to do it through reading. I was about to sit down and patch together an epub reader to do this, but now I don't have to.

Here's some feedback if you'd like it :)

I just subscribed to the $9.99 per year version. However, I was mentally preparing myself to pay more, since it was very useful. I would have liked to try it out for longer though. The most useful part of it were the multi-word/phrase translations and I could only try out a very small number before it popped up the "subscribe" notification.

So to sum up, I signed up because it was just $10 a year, but would have paid more if I'd gotten to try it out for a short while longer.

All the best!

Thanks, yes I'm always very happy to get feedback, especially from paying customers :)

The current pricing is partly an experiment to see if people will pay, and it turns out that 1 in 30 of those who sign up do at the moment. It's also to ensure that if the site explodes in popularity I won't lose money through Google Translate API costs. I plan to increase the price at some point (but not for current subscribers) although not sure what it should be exactly. What would you think of $4/month or $30/year options?

I'll think about increasing the 20/day phrase limit, I really need to dig into my analytics a bit more to see what the usage patterns are on this. Roughly how long did it take you to reach the limit and how much longer would you have liked?

Thanks again!

It took me about a minute before I was prompted to create an account and another minute before I was prompted to sign up for a subscription. I'd gotten through about 4 sentences in total (I clicked a fair bit since I'm still learning the language).

I'd happily pay $4 a month / $30 a year. I really like the Chrome extension as well. Here are some of the features I'd thought of adding to my (now cancelled) project:

Being able to see the meaning and usages of a word with a hover of some sort. I find it annoying to keep clicking on the right hand side to pull up the definition. Additionally, a number of definitions are just not available.

Something I find myself doing a lot is selecting and trying to right click. The 8 word limit on phrases means I'm stuck with typing stuff into Google Translate. For longer sentences context gets lost and so the translations are not accurate.

Being able to collect personal word lists. This is great for learning which is my primary intended use.

Keep in mind that I'm a beginner and the requirements of someone at an intermediate level might be very different.

Hope this helps and I'm looking forward to using it even more!

Adding a hover pop up after selecting a word/phrase could be a nice feature. It would be easier to implement if I had my own database of definitions/translations instead of relying on external dictionaries in an iframe like the current sidebar. Note that one of the reasons I've avoided implementing important features on hover so far is to ensure that everything works well on touch devices.

Not sure how to enable selecting text in a nice way given the current UI. Would probably need a way to temporarily disable the current word selection feature. Hmmm... actually one way would be to add a keyboard modifier to temporarily enable native OS selecting for advanced users without cluttering the UI for regular users.

Personal word lists: I've avoided tagging, folders or lists for organising words so far because I don't think I'd personally use them, but it's certainly something I'll consider for the future, especially if enough people request it.

I'll keep your suggestions in mind, and if you want to encourage the development of any specific feature please add or vote for it on the uservoice page: https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/filters...

Thanks again!

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