steveridout

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 guessing Sublime Text doesn't have a server component, there's a big difference there). It sounds risky from my point of view. Am I still obliged to keep providing you the service in 20 years even though you only paid once?

2. The people willing to pay up-front are probably the ones most likely to stick around for the long term and provide a lot of recurring revenue. (Hypothesis - may not be true.)

3. More one-off payments makes my revenue graph much spiker and less predictable.

That said - perhaps you're right. If people are much more willing to pay up front I should trade some of the predictability of SaaS for the lucrative but volatile one-off payments. Something to consider when I revisit pricing.

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 would need to fetch the content from other websites instead of each user's browser doing the work.

Until I have a better solution, for now you could resort to copying and pasting articles you'd like to read into the upload page: http://readlang.com/upload - it's not ideal perhaps, but should get the job done.

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 word boundary detection, pinyin transliteration, or word frequency lists. Arabic is in "beta" because there were some issues with "right to left" text. I think this is working pretty well now though, haven't had complaints in a while, so I can think about bringing that out of beta soon.

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 made Readlang to serve my own needs as a self motivated learner. I feel like I have a reasonable barometer for what's useful and what will appeal to individuals. Creating something for business would be more difficult and less fun for me personally.

2. There's still a hell of a lot of room to grow with individual language learners.

3. Even if the profit is lower, I can probably reach a larger user base with a freemium consumer product. I think that the quantity of feedback and data that this provides helps me create a better product. (On the other hand - I'm sure the revenue that may come from a B2B product would also help!)

4. I can always try selling to businesses later. And with a proven, popular consumer product this should be an easier sell.

Regarding the name & branding. I'm sure it's not optimal but I'm not an expert in this and it was the best I came up with. I'm going to run with it in the short term at least.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement!

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 recall just 10 words per day, which is a very small amount which should be doable every day. If they do this they'll build up an "X day streak" - similar to what Github or Duolingo do.

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, so I then revert to the lower price

3. I now have a bunch of old users paying a higher price, and they might be annoyed when they see the price has gone down. At a minimum I'd need to alter their payment plans to give them the new cheaper price in future

I guess it wouldn't be that difficult. Still, it wasn't long ago since the last price rise and for now I'd rather focus on growing and retaining the customer base.

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 the URLs which would likely be interesting to other language learners.

Note that I consider these individual words and URLs to be private, but in aggregate, if multiple people visit the same URL, that anonymous data is sharable. I currently rank the most popular domains that people translate words from for each language within Library -> Web Sites: http://readlang.com/links (it isn't completely automatic, every now and then I need to manually approve new entries in the list - that reminds me - I haven't done it in a while!)

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 just put it into maintenance mode.

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 paid has stayed at roughly 1.5% the whole time. But the product has been improving too. If I charged the current price 2 years ago when the product wasn't as polished, the conversion rate would probably have been lower. But I can't know for sure.

Didn't have a full time job. I saved up and have lived fairly frugally. I did take a break to do contract work in 2014.

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 not sure how people manage to hold down a full time job and build a startup on the side. I can imagine doing it while working a job which wasn't mentally demanding. But people working as full time programmers, I can only guess that they don't give 100% at work, or perhaps they have more energy than I do!

I've considered taking on the occasional short contract. But I'm not actively looking, I've got enough to keep me occupied with Readlang right now. (Plus, I've got a 1.5 month old baby, and they tend to reduce your free time!)

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 feels wrong to do this for price, and with current conversion rate it would take ages to get meaningful results anyway. I'm hesitant to push price too high because lowering it back down would be tricky. Existing users paying a higher price would be annoyed. Also, at this stage I think increasing the user base would be more valuable long term compared to milking the current users for more money. I've been wondering if I could add a higher priced tier in future for more advanced features.

- Yes! I definitely want to recommend texts to people based not only on difficulty, but also on interest. This is something that will become more valuable with more users and a larger, higher quality library of texts. It isn't highest priority right now, but hopefully in future.

- Yes. I developed some features to target at teachers managing a class of students: http://blog.readlang.com/2014/02/12/readlang-for-teachers.ht.... I got a bunch of teachers using it with real classes but decided to abandon the idea because: 1. The response was positive but usage wasn't what I'd hoped. 2. Focus. As one guy I've got enough on my plate making an awesome product for self motivated individuals. Diluting my focus and the focus of the product seems like a very bad idea.

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 are hard-core users who really do use it all the time, for whom the churn rate will be much lower.

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 to fetch any site they like, and I don't like the idea of my server fetching content from any arbitrary website.

4. Would add extra bandwidth and load on my server.

That's very true.

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 over https (try it - https://readlang.com), and at one point I redirected all http traffic to https, but there was a big problem. I use external dictionaries in an iframe to provide additional definitions and these are almost always only available over http: https://readlang.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/279539...

It worked OK for a short while, but then Chrome and Firefox both refused to display http content within a https page. Chrome displays a very subtle shield icon that the user must click on to reload the page allowing mixed content. This is far too unfriendly to expect my users to do, so I had to resort to using http again :-(

Of course, the ideal solution would be for me to have access to dictionary definitions so I could integrate them properly instead of using an ugly iframe, but with 50+ languages supported, that's a tall order!

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 subscribers is about 20%.

Yearly churn of yearly subscribers is about 50%.

When I ask why people leave, virtually everyone has the same story - they really liked the product, but they didn't have the time to devote to their language studies right now.

I'll dig into some of the other metrics you suggested in a future post.

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 obviously isn't advanced enough for it to set off alarm bells. I just ran it past my girlfriend who says that it indeed doesn't sound native. I should have checked that before using this quote. Oh well.

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!

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 marketing means writing blog posts and engaging on social media (mainly reddit, facebook, twitter).

I tried some paid advertising experiments a couple of years ago but they didn't work well at all. May try another experiment this year now that the product is more polished and has a higher value.

It's simpler than you think. It uses Google Translate to translate the word or phrase you select and the context isn't used. This works surprisingly well most of the time. Of course it does fall down, and can be confusing beginners who don't have a good grasp of the basic grammar. For intermediate and advanced users who just need the occasional gap filled it it's great, and they can usually tell when the translation isn't correct and either expand the phrase to add more context, or make use of the additional sidebar dictionary: https://readlang.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/279539...

That is exactly how it works now - users drag to select a sequence of contiguous characters. I haven't tried learning Chinese myself so I don't have a good handle on how pleasant this is to use.

True, this can appear very quickly for users who translate a lot of phrases.

You get unlimited single word translations and flashcards for free, so the free plan is actually very usable. But if you want to translate more than 10 multi-word phrases / day, you need to upgrade to premium.

Thanks for the feedback!

I agree it would be nice to include examples of how Readlang fits into a different people's language learning process. Here are a couple of articles I found online:

- http://www.languagesurfer.com/2015/01/14/readlang-review-six...

- http://www.alexstrick.com/blog/2015/9/surviving-middlebury-h...

To answer your questions...

| 1. is there a good way to programmatically pull out flash card information (as say a JSON object)? Is the export to Anki as a csv/tsv?

Export is by CSV (or you can specify your chosen delimiter) and you can choose from a number of different fields. You can't export data from the spaced repetition algorithm since I felt it would make the UI confusing. But you can access this data via the API: https://github.com/SteveRidout/readlang-api

| 2. How fleshed out is support for Chinese? What should I expect from it being in beta?

Chinese, Japanese, and Thai aren't that well supported at the moment. The main omissions are:

- Lack of "word" boundary detection (these languages don't use spaces to separate words) - Lack of Pinyin translations - Lack of word frequency lists to prioritize flashcards by usefulness.

| 3. I was intrigued by the video player functionality, clicked the "Find something to watch now" on the features page. Clicked blindly. Arrived on a page of text in Spanish. Backed up. Realized that it was a mix of text articles and video articles. Scrolled down to a video article. Was very impressed with the player, but thought with a little less patience I may have missed it. This seems like an incredible feature (similar to fluentU's approach), and one that the link should take people to with as little friction as possible!

Thanks, glad you like it! I agree these should be more discoverable. BTW: These videos are all added, sync'd, and shared by Readlang users using the web-app, here's a short guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szcvArpfxWI

I make software to help language learners generate flashcards for SRS while reading or watching videos: http://readlang.com

It works as a browser extension for reading web-pages or you can upload texts and whole novels to read via the web-app. You can then click-to-translate words and phrases that you don't understand, and it generates cloze flashcards for use in it's own flashcards, or for export to apps like Anki.

Would love to hear feedback from anyone who tries it!

This is a side project of mine inspired by Soulver: http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/

It's pretty basic at the moment but is useful as an alternative to a calculator app, and as a way to share calculations online, e.g. here's a little SaaS monthly revenue calculator: http://notepadcalculator.com/s/ba8c945e65a6816f63b253272b7c9...

Interested to see if others find this useful. Criticism welcome!

> Nowadays every master chess game ever played in the history of chess fits easily on one DVD, uncompressed.

If someone created a mobile app containing this database, I would certainly appreciate those multiple gigabytes of data being compressed.

I owned an A500 and later a pimped out A1200 (with an 80Mb hard drive!) back in the 90s and really loved them. I learned programming using AMOS and Blitz Basic. I dabbled with 3D modelling and rendering using Imagine. And of course there were so many awesome games - Lemmings, Populous, Civilisation, Monkey Island, Mega-lo-Mania, Speedball 2, Worms, Sensible Soccer, Hired Guns, the list goes on...

But around the time Doom was released on PC, it seemed like the Amiga's graphics performance, once so ahead of its time, had fallen far behind. I switched to a Pentium 60 PC and apart from the occasional twang of nostalgia have never looked back.

I'm really curious what the motivation is for those die hard Amiga fans and hackers now, so many years later. Is it nostalgia, the community, the technical challenge of working within the system's limitations? What is keeping you around?

Original author here, thanks for posting my little calculator to HN - pity it didn't get many upvotes, although can't say I'm that surprised since it's very basic!

Hope to do some work to improve it one day.

Thanks for sharing this!

I checked out your pricing plans and the way you differentiate plans based on visitors / day jumped out at me since it goes against advice I read recently from the UserVoice team. They used to price based on number of users who can vote but (in their own words)...

"This was a huge failure. It created what I call a success penalty: the more successful you were in activating your users to give you feedback the more expensive the product became. On some level this made sense but since no one knew how to estimate this future usage it just created uncertainty about committing to a product without knowing the future cost of it. It was especially problematic because we were often working with young companies who didn’t know or were very optimistic about their future active user levels (and equally optimistic about what % of them would engage on UserVoice and give them feedback). It put us in the awkward position of tempering a customer’s enthusiasm about their use of our product (aka “There’s no way you’ll have 300K people on your site in 60 days time”). When we removed the usage limits, which were designed to drive upgrades, we actually saw that upgrades increased 33%!"

Link: http://500.co/the-data-behind-purchasing-behavior-at-uservoi...

Turning English websites into a Spanish learning experience is a neat idea, because as you say it fits into peoples current habits. It's definitely worth exploring but currently Readlang's focus is learning from real native texts. I'm trying not to lose focus and to Do One Thing Really Well (TM).

I agree that procrastination is a huge problem. I'd prefer try to tackle this by introducing more opportunities for learners to encounter Spanish texts, one way to do this would be to create a browser homepage with recommended Spanish websites, texts, videos, and practice exercises.

> It's just a guess, but I think a lot of people would benefit if this step gets streamlined. It's already cool that it doesn't require restarting the browser, and making it even more seamless would be awesome. A user has only to click on the install button on the Chrome extensions pages and that's it. No further intervention.

It's already very simple to install the Chrome extension, and once installed I think it's correct that it requires a click to activate on a webpage since it does take resources and slow down the page, so I wouldn't want it working on every web-page.

For the bookmarklet - I completely agree that it isn't intuitive, the experience on mobile browsers is particularly horrible, but web-developers have limited control over this without better support from the browsers.