Comment by eranation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eranation | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com