steveridout

I loved 2 player Lemmings!

Another Amiga game we played a lot which required 2 mice was The Settlers.

Is it possible that a high quality camera with a small sensor could actually be preferable to a full frame camera like a 5D in this particular case? My thinking is that it might be hard to get more than a sliver of the image in focus with a full frame camera. Does anyone with more experience know if this is true?

Thanks! It worked fine to get some initial feedback and users. A few months later I added some limits to the free plan and offered a premium subscription, currently at $5 / month or $48 / year. Around 2% of free signups end up converting to paid.

Alongside the "Install Web Reader" link there's a "Start Learning" link which will take you into the web-app and allow you to sign up. I figured "Start Learning" would be more inviting than "Sign Up" but this is something it might be worth AB testing.

These got Readlang's first 100 users:

1. This post to a language learning forum: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T...

2. This post to r/LanguageLearning: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1b08ly/re...

If there's a subreddit where your potential audience hangs out that's a good bet. Try to be honest, humble, and non-spammy.

Creator of Readlang here. This extension is a little different to mine since it works in the other direction. Readlang allows you to read articles in your target language more easily by offering tap-to-translate. This one gives you occassional exposure to target language words while reading articles in your first language.

Nice work so far.

I'm not convinced by this approach since I prefer to learn Spanish words in the context of Spanish sentences, but I haven't given it a fair shot. Of people who have tried this or similar extensions, did you a) find that you learned much? and b) keep using it for a prolonged period?

Hmmm, I'm worried that you're right. But $20,000 is at least 10 times what I'm comfortable spending at this stage.

Is there no option in between fiverr and $20K that would be a worthwhile investment?

Thanks - I like it!

I'll do a split test and let you know how it goes.

I did develop some features for teachers and got a few of them using it with their classes. Despite a few shows of interest, no-one actually paid anything for it. On top of that, they wanted a bunch of features that would take my time in development and support, leading to a weaker product for individuals.

Creating a product for schools and businesses requires creating:

1. A great experience for the learners.

2. A great experience for the administrators and teachers.

I'm focussed on part 1, and building a business around it selling direct to individuals. I can always add part 2 later.

By "selecting to view all languages" do you mean clicking on the "I'm learning" selector at the top of http://readlang.com/dashboard ?

I'm trying to reproduce this but I can't, although I do have error logs that show some users are getting google sign in related errors - if you could give me instructions to reproduce this bug I'd be really grateful!

One problem is that there's no one "core" reading experience. The distraction free e-book style reader in the web-app and the extension both have similar usage.

The small quote I linked to isn't at all representative of the kind of text people typically read. So not the ideal introduction to the product I agree, but it did was a neat way to get a lot of people to click through into the app to see it working.

Thanks for your encouragement!

Good idea!

If you want to a discount right now for upgrading two accounts, do the following:

1. On the checkout page, there's an "I'm feeling generous" button which increases the yearly price from $48 to $60 (idea borrowed from NewsBlur) 2. After upgrading, email steve@readlang.com letting me know the email address of the other person, and I'll upgrade their account manually.

This'll work out at $30 each instead of $48. If you have an odd number of people, email me and we'll work something else out.

Good luck. Small warning that the experience learning Japanese may not be as good as with other languages since it can't detect word boundaries, doesn't offer Furigana transliteration which I'm told is pretty important, and doesn't have word frequency lists. Still, please try it out and let me know what you think!

## back end

- Servers running Ubuntu hosted at Linode (outages recently have been worrying)

- NGINX

- NodeJS & express framework

- MongoDB replica set with primary, secondary & arbiter

## front end

- BackboneJS

- JQuery

- gulp for build & deploy script

- RequireJS for modules

It's been going fairly well on the whole. This is my first web-site with a back end, so I don't have experience with Python, PHP, MySQL, etc... to compare it to. Given that, it's hard to say whether I'd choose differently if I started again. I would probably play around with PostgreSQL since a relational DB may suit my needs better. Also, MongoDB can be worrying. I added a replicaset member running the latest stable version 3 with the WiredTiger storage engine to try it out but it kept crashing - not what you want from a database! I'm still using the older, very disk-space hungry version 2.6.x for now.

People can share YouTube videos with sync'd transcriptions which are great for this. Check out this selection for German:

http://readlang.com/shelf/5649d1fe60a4e5ef42f258ad

Songs tend to be popular, here are a couple of good ones:

http://readlang.com/library/551261a4573e272265223327 - Je Veux, by Zaz - French

http://readlang.com/library/55da3bacfe102b520f05d9ba - Lento, by Julieta Venegas - Spanish

We both contribute equally, and we live in Madrid where cost of living is relatively low. Two people living together can live on £9K / year here no problem (that's about 1000 euros / month each). That said, I do have savings that I've been eating into.

I've never felt the need for lots of money to be happy. What I really value is being able to do interesting work that I'm proud of. So I'm very motivated to make money to the extent that it provides freedom to work on interesting things. And perhaps even to contract people to help out. I guess that's a philosophy shared by many of the people here.

Sign-in for phrase translations is because that's one of the limits of the free plan, you get 10 / day for free and you can upgrade to premium for unlimited.

I could try to make it more seamless by imposing this limit based on cookie or IP address if they aren't signed in yet.

Would love to know what else you found confusing about the UI?

Yeah, there's such a difference between a startup like this and contracting. When contracting, you work, you get paid, nice and predictable. With this kind of startup where it's growing say 4X per year, you may earn very little at first, but if you don't follow through when it looks promising and grow it for a few years, what was the point in starting in the first place? The reward on this kind of project is so delayed. You work, nothing, you work more, minuscule revenue, you work more, some pocket money, you work more, you get paid decently, you work more, you're rich!

Or, more likely, at some point the growth stops, and it was all for nothing.

We're actually doing a geek lunch tomorrow, usual time and place, do come along!

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's about getting the right balance.

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 language is almost always English, except for those learning English, whose first languages are:

- Russian - 3,799

- Spanish - 2,263

- English - 1,440 (haha - this shouldn't be allowed and the users will get a notification when they try to translate something)

- Italian - 1,220

- Chinese - 713

And of the paying subscribers, here are the top 6 languages:

- Spanish - 174

- French - 105

- English - 89

- German - 86

- Russian - 47

- Italian - 24

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/5907432/language-immersion-for-chrome-...

Seems like it's broken now though. I have a hunch he was trying to use Google Translate without paying for their API. Either that, or he really was paying for the API which is unsustainable for a free extension.

I don't think it's a great idea anyway. If you want to learn French, you should read French written by a native speaker, not a machine translation of English into French. Readlang uses machine translation as an aid to understanding native texts, which is far more acceptable IMO.

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 promises at the moment but I like the idea!

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 language, and utilizing a spaced repetition algorithm so that you spend more time on the words and phrases you find difficult?

- export of those flashcards for use in other apps such as Anki

- upload novels to read in a distraction free, paginated reading interface which works well on mobile devices?

- watch videos with sync'd transcriptions?

- share and vote on native texts and videos with a community of language learners?

If so, please let me know!

And if you didn't realize any of the above - I take the blame for not communicating it better on the landing page. The problem is that overwhelming users with info usually isn't a great idea either. Hard to strike the right balance.

I don't expect everyone who installs the Google Translate extension to install Readlang - since mine is targeted mainly at intermediate and advanced language learners.

Point taken - I clearly need to work on streamlining the landing page and first run experience. Thanks for the feedback! :-)

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, for whom Readlang should be a very easy sell.

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://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/status/..., and more suggestions come in via private channels too)

The thing is choosing which users to listen to. For now, I've decided to make an awesome tool for individual learners. So I'm listening more to them, as well as my own gut feeling.

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 sources of income. I've never been close to running out of money, if I did I would certainly ease back on Readlang and look for more freelance work.

BTW: The freelance work I did wasn't using technology I enjoy or want to focus on in future, and was offered to me without having to look for it. I did it because of the money and because I liked the people. I've never actually had to actively look for freelance gigs myself. So I'm still not sure how easy it is to find good clients with interesting work.

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 getting out about Readlang. There's no paid advertising and I'm a n00b at marketing but slowly learning. It seems to be growing, but please lend a hand by telling your friends :-)

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. If you mainly translate single words then the free plan is probably fine.

May consider restricting the free plan a bit more in future. For now I'm happy to have a lot of free users to help spread the word and grow.