steveridout

I've just added Thai support, although because it doesn't use spaces to separate words, it works a bit differently to the other languages - you need to select each word or phrase at the individual character level. The same applies to Japanese and Chinese.

Also, I don't have word frequency lists for Thai so prioritisation of words by usefulness is missing.

Despite these shortcomings, I hope you find it useful!

Cool, just signed up - look forward to seeing it! :-)

If someone wanted to donate, it's easy to sign up for the $4.99 plan and immediately cancel auto-renewals.

I doubt there would be enough donations of less than $4.99 to make it worth adding the option.

I'd recommend writing a blog post, mainly because I want to read it, but it's true it takes time. I'm normally very bad at keeping up a blog, and I took 3 full days off to research and write this one. I'd be nice to stick to a schedule of writing a shorter post every week or two, but I'm not sure I'd stick to it.

I heard Louis Von Ahn (Duolingo ) say that they spent $0 on advertising, which sounds great - users love it so much that it spreads completely organically. But in reality they must spend a lot on all the blogging, social networking, and community management - which sounds a lot like marketing to me.

I'm also a bit skeptical about Duolingo's ability to sustain itself selling translations, but I think it's possible, and the product is really great so I'm rooting for them.

Although it's scary to be in the same space as Duolingo, I don't see them as direct competition at the moment, since Duolingo requires users to be much more active in either completing exercises or translating everything, whereas Readlang is centered around the more passive activity of reading. In fact people regularly recommend Readlang on the Duolingo forums as a complementary tool.

Very cool, thanks.

Well, as you see it's not an earth shattering amount, but thanks!

Just checked out your site. Looks cool and shares some similarities with Readlang. Intrigued by the crowd sourced translation engine - is there anywhere I can read about that?

Thanks, you make some good points.

Good beginner content is a big problem, I agree that recommending a stream of content with ~5% unknown words would be very cool. On the other hand, being a small indie developer, maybe it's better that I concentrate the smaller niche of advanced learners since I'm then not directly competing with Duolingo and other highly funded sites.

I would like Readlang to be more social, but haven't got around to it yet. I thought about adding disqus comments as a quick solution but they aren't ideal, requiring you to log in a second time.

It's probably more sensible for me to polish and optimise the current feature set first before adding social features.

You may be right. But on the flip side:

- I think churn on Readlang has the potential to be lower than more traditional courses, since it's impossible to exhaust the supply of novels and other reading materials, and reading is a habit that lasts a lifetime. Granted, you may not need the help of Readlang beyond a certain level, but I think that level is extremely high, and could take years or decades to reach.

- I have a fairly strong personal bias in favor of self study over teacher directed study. There are great teachers and I don't mean to diminish the work they do, but I believe that to learn effectively requires self motivation. (Good quote from Gibbon that Feynman uses in his Lectures on Physics: "But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.")

- Selling to students forces me to make the product better for reading and studying, which should be the primary goal. Selling to teachers will put an emphasis on features like the teacher admin panel that aren't directly useful to the student. (Analogous to Enterprise software, which sucks because it sells based on features useful to the administrators and not the employees that end up using it)

- If it's sufficiently good for independent learning, teachers will want to share it with their students anyway, in fact they already are, so they are still a useful marketing channel.

I'm not ruling it out in the long term, but for now, I'm sticking with individuals.

Correct, I'm certainly not content to carry on at the current level.

$100k/yr would be very nice, although I'd actually be satisfied with considerably less, especially since this has value to me beyond the money - I think it's a cool project which will be useful as a calling card no matter what happens. If I could reach $2000/month sometime this year I'd consider it a success!

Thanks for the advice!

Rough number of users signing in at the moment:

~110 / day ~360 / week ~900 / month

Google Analytics RETURNING visitors per month:

~1000 returning uniques ~3800 returning visits 28 min avg visit duration

I'll have a serious think about your pricing advice. I'm plan on increasing the price but removing the free plan scares me. I'm sure it will increase revenue in short term, but don't you think it would seriously harm growth? My current user base was formed largely due to people blogging and sharing on forums and social media. Isn't there a risk this would dry up without a very usable free plan?

I completely agree about sending more emails. It's been on my todo list for a while, I already have Amazon SES set up so I'm planning to roll my own solution to send lifecycle emails to boost engagement. ($50 / month sounds too much, although now I'm tempted to try the free plan just to get an idea of what I'd be missing.)

iPhone app - one thing at a time! I want to polish and optimise the current site first, but I agree an iOS app would be awesome.

Note: Readlang works well on mobiles as a web-app, on both Android and iOS you can bookmark it as a "homescreen app" and it then runs in full screen mode similar to a native app.

It's definitely staying open! Even though it's not making much, it's not costing much to run either and is profitable, so there's no reason to shut it down.

Also, it hasn't been harrowing! I've saved up enough money to live comfortably in Madrid, which is a lot cheaper than my old home of London. I'm learning a lot and really enjoying building this site, which I still think could have a bright future.

tl;dr Despite the lack of revenue, Readlang and I are doing just fine :-)

Haha, the next one will be shorter I promise! :)

You probably made a wise choice!

Nice landing page. I'm curious if you had a good solution for getting highlights from user's Kindle accounts. I looked into it briefly and found I could only access the highlights via a HTML page, but perhaps I missed something and there's a better way. If they provided an API that would be awesome!

Thanks for the encouragement!

I agree it can be good to stick with an idea you believe in, even if it isn't showing crazy viral growth.

Thanks for the analysis!

Pushing the conversion rate from signup to paid closer to 100% means crippling the free plan, probably killing the chance of viral growth.

There's definitely room for optimising throughout the funnel though.

Also, I could look into raising the price, offering additional features, etc. An interesting source of revenue could be selling books via the site, although I have a feeling that dealing with publishers would be difficult.

Original author here. Great to see it appear on Hacker News, please feel free to ask questions!

Me too, originally with gmail SMTP and now with Amazon SES.

Very easy to use and highly recommended!

I created this over a year ago with the intention to use it for:

1. An interactive camera tutorial. 2. A tool to help choose which camera to buy, emphasising the image quality and shallow depth of field that a large absolute aperture gives you.

Since I have no immediate plans to continue with this, I thought it would be cool to share the source code for anyone to play around with.

Enjoy! And feel free to ask me any questions.

I know what you mean, that it's easy to fool yourself and fall into marketing traps. But in this case of monitor resolution, there is a very noticeable difference (to me at least) between current desktop monitors and retina ones. If in 5 years some company tries to push the trend even further with 8K extreme retina or something like that I'm sure I'll be on your side, but for now, please, bring on the 4K desktop displays!

(Actually, when it comes to TVs I do think we're getting into overkill territory with 50" 4K displays, when for typical TV viewing distances 1080p is fine)

Exactly.

And for anyone who struggles to see the pixels on a typical desktop monitor, that's probably because a lot of tricks are used to disguise them. Try turning off anti-aliasing or sub-pixel font rendering and then tell me you can't see the pixels.

Bear in mind that higher resolution display != smaller UI elements. It gives you that option of course, but for most people the benefit is that fonts, icons and images look so much crisper and more readable.

You're definitely not the only one who thinks it's overkill. I've shown my retina iPad and MacBook to a few people who don't get the fuss at all. I guess this reaction could be due to a) not caring much about aesthetics, b) bad eyesight, c) not spending the time to get familiar with it and use it for some actual tasks. Myself, I think the screens are amazing, and each time I go back to my 23" 1920x1080 monitor is a little painful.

Thanks, I avoided rooting because I didn't want to spend the time and take the risk, but given the amount of frustration the it's given me I should have done it ages ago. If I wasn't about to receive a Nexus 5 I would definitely try this.

The problem is it doesn't always run fine. I've got a Samsung Galaxy S running Android 2.35 and it's a pain in the neck. It's slow and crashes regularly, requiring me to remove the battery to hard reset it. And the Samsung Kies software needed to update the firmware only worked on 1 out of the 4 Windows PCs I tried it on.

Got a Nexus 5 on the way, hoping that I'll have better luck with that.

Definitely not a dumb question, this is what immediately jumped into my head too. I imagine it's very difficult to get an answer to this. A controlled experiment is obviously impossible, but perhaps comparing results from a diverse range of cultures around the world could give a clue.

I'd be very happy with an 8-bit colour 2560x1600 24" monitor. It would be more affordable and way easier for graphics cards to run, why is no-one making one of these!?

I haven't tried it but I hear that http://www.italki.com/ is pretty good for online Skype lessons where the teachers are paid and have reputations as you describe. Completely agree that interaction with a real person is very important.

Thanks! Yeah, getting a little drunk may help, although there's definitely an optimal point after which it has the opposite effect!

Actually I'm living in Madrid now so kind of immersed, the problem is that my girlfriend and I tend to always speak English with each other and I don't need to use Spanish to work either. It's what led me to create my current project: http://readlang.com

I think the people who answered wrongly aren't thinking in a first principles, physics-based mindset, but just instead just recalling previous memories and reasoning in an intuitive, fuzzy kind of pattern-matching.

We've all seen images of pens floating weightless in space on films and TV, and we probably haven't ever seen pens falling on the moon. But the moon is in space right? so... yeah, why not, it floats.

And for the guys on the moon, well I haven't got any memories of astronauts without boots on, and those boots sure look big and heavy, they're special gravity boots, I'm sure I heard that on TV once, yeah, that's probably it.

The first principles approach of applying the concept of universal gravitational attraction probably isn't even entering their heads, even if they've been taught it.

This used to get on my nerves, how can people be so stupid? Why won't they just think for a moment!? But recently I've been focussing some effort on learning a language (Spanish) and realise that in that this case the first-principles style of learning that works so well for physics and maths is largely useless, and it's better to turn off the analytical side of your brain and not think too much, just keep exposing yourself, trying to communicate, and let your subconscious do it's stupid fuzzy pattern-matching, and it does a remarkably good job!

I've sent out a couple of emails with updates of new features to encourage existing users to stay engaged, another one is due pretty soon actually. And I'm in the process of adding an opt-in daily email reminder service which may also help with engagement. The more engaged users are the more likely they are to convert to paying customers.

I'm not tracking conversion rates from different sources, I'll look into that.

More testing of UX choices sounds like a good idea, so far I've just gone by gut instinct and user feedback. Was the fact that "Start Now" landed you straight into Trial Mode a bad surprise, would you have preferred a signup form at that point? Or perhaps a walkthrough tutorial?

OK, well nice to meet you :-)