steveridout

My traffic is probably too low to earn significant referral income right now, but it may be a decent idea in certain cases.

One place where I've considered adding affiliate links is dealing with copyright violations. People have shared translations of Harry Potter in different languages which I've removed, and I thought that it would be cool to leave the first few pages and put an affiliate link to amazon to buy the item. And in future it would be awesome to actually sell novels and graded readers directly via Readlang.

I wouldn't email my customers to advertise another service since it seems way too spammy, but I could imagine referring to another service if I thought it was really useful. I've been thinking of pointing beginner learners to Duolingo since I think it could complement Readlang, but since it's a completely free service it's not exactly a revenue generating idea!

You can upload whatever you like for your own private use, but publicly sharing copyrighted content is obviously not allowed.

Really, that's crazy. So is your dad the Chris that went to visit my dad in Asturias, Spain earlier this year?

I really should dig into my analytics to determine the churn rate.

My acquisition costs are basically free for a base line of about 10 signups per day plus sporadic increases from blog or forum posts. But this is nowhere near enough to generate significant revenue.

In future I'll experiment again with advertising and with optimising my site for revenue to know whether I can make advertising profitable.

Thanks, that's a very useful list.

2nd cousins?! Are you serious?

Awesome, thanks for the link! I love Seth Godin's philosophy in the few talks of his I've watched, will give that a read.

Just checked out your current project http://pitcher.io/ which seems relevant to the discussion - classy move on not trying to promote it in your comments! Looks like it might be useful to help manage a social media presence, I've just signed up to your mailing list.

Thanks, funnily enough I started a tiny Facebook ad campaign to familiarise myself with it just yesterday. Need to put in some work to make the facebook page and ad more attractive before drawing any conclusions about its effectiveness though.

I agree the amount of targeting you can do is very cool.

That's very true. I was planning to revisit the pricing once the product is a little more polished and I remove the beta label. Your suggestions make a lot of sense.

I think the most important focus for now should be to grow the userbase, and I do worry a little about restricting growth with an increased price and also the current usage restrictions on the free tier.

Education as a form of marketing is a great idea, but takes a considerable investment of effort to do well. I'd need to hone my skills at writing and teaching to attract a large audience and it could easily turn into a full time job all by itself. Will give it some thought though.

You're correct that money is a problem, I can't afford to spend a lot of money on ads until I reach the point where they generate enough subscription revenue to be profitable. Polishing the product to bring it out of beta and then raising the price could help here.

I actually did run a tiny experiment with $20 on Google adwords, but I wasn't impressed because:

- I had to pay over ¢30 per click. - It gave me a high proportion of users using IE <= 9 on which the site doesn't work properly.

I'll probably work on a new ad in future. Do you have any suggestions apart from Google Ad-words that may be appropriate?

I know some marketing is necessary just to get an initial user base. But after that, with a sufficiently awesome product, wouldn't the strategy of spending your effort converting existing users into superfans who promote it for you be effective? This approach appeals to me, especially given my limited resources.

It would be nice to have someone in charge of community management and marketing, but I don't have the money to pay for it without taking investment, which up until now I've been resisting.

For information on other features of the site, here's the landing page including a short intro video: http://readlang.com/landing-page

Feel free to ask if you have any questions!

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!

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!

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!

I recommend installing Console 2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

And msysgit (https://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list?q=full+inst...) which includes the "git bash" shell. It's got almost all the basic unix tools installed by default.

http://readlang.com - an online eReader for language learners.

I've been working on this full time, completely solo, for nearly 11 months now. It's lets you import any content to read, provides low friction translations so you can concentrate on enjoying the content, and has a spaced repetition system to learn words and phrases with flashcards.

It's getting some early traction now with 2300 users, 45 of whom are paying, and really good feedback.

The danger is that it's very possible to memorize 100s of answers like this without having any idea of how the code is working.

Imagine if instead of static flashcards there the SRS worked on items like:

- puts

- the '+' operator

- variables

- functions

Then an algorithm would generate problems incorporating those concepts. The exact same problem would never appear twice so you can't learn by rote and it ensures you actually learn the concepts. Your progress on each concept would be tracked by the SRS algorithm to help schedule your learning.

I think this would be a huge improvement on static flashcards.

I think spaced repetition software, which typically involves flashcards, is great for memorising a large quantity of facts. E.g. for learning foreign language vocabulary, anatomy, etc... For this kind of learning it can really save you time, especially when you have 100s or 1000s of items to remember.

Using flashcards to learn mathematics, computer programming, physics, or anything requiring more creative or analytical thought is not so useful. For these subjects the number of raw facts required is usually smaller, and the thought processes, concepts and problem solving ability are much more important.

However, spaced repetition could be beneficial to these more creative and analytical subjects if it was applied more dynamically. In this case the units to learn could be the rules, laws, concepts which can manifest themselves in different ways within different problems, instead of being static flashcards. Does anyone know of software which works in this way?

My interest in this stems from http://readlang.com, a site I'm working on at the moment for learning foreign languages. I use SRS to keep track of words, but in future it could be nice to think about applying SRS to grammatical concepts too.

It's still early days and I'm more focused on growing the user base right now.

Saying that, since last month I put a daily cap on phrase translations for free users and a 'Readlang Supporter' plan at $10 / year for unlimited translations and to support development through the beta period. So far I've had 13 payments, a total of $130, which I'm pretty happy with since a) the user base is currently small (about 500 signed up since I added the payment option), b) it's validation that people are willing to pay for the service, and c) I've got a lot of ideas for improving it in future.

In case anyone is wondering, the site he is referring to is: http://www.wordchamp.com/lingua2/Home.do

Articles like this scare me. I've been working for 8 months full time now on a bootstrapped website for learning vocabulary via reading (http://readlang.com). I've been advised a few times that it's extremely hard to make money with this kind of site but for now I'm ploughing ahead anyway. Reading this gives me pause for thought but as long as I've getting good feedback I'm happy to keep going and see where it might lead.

Even in the worst case though, I hope that I wouldn't ever need to shut down the site, and that it could at least pay for it's hosting costs and be automated to keep running with minimal maintenance.

Thanks, yes I'm relying on Google Tranlsate at the moment, but eventually I'd like it to recognize word families and verb conjugations. I use it for Spanish and regularly edit the generated verb flashcards to indicate the correct conjugation.

I completely agree with this.

I've created the site Readlang (http://readlang.com) to allow learning vocabulary in context by reading uploaded content, translating, and using SRS flashcards which include the original context.

It's in public beta and would love to get feedback if anyone tries it out.

I've been working on this solo for 6 months. It's my first web project with a back end, implemented in node.js and MongoDB, which I'm learning as I go.

I'm hoping for it to generate money via subscriptions at some point but for now I'm building a small user base, getting feedback, and iterating.

Would love to get some feedback or answer any questions.

no

How about the google apps route as an alternative to freemium?

1. Give it away for free for a long period to build a user base, get feedback and iterate.

2. After a while, switch to paid only for all new users. The old users continue for free so no-one has a right to get annoyed.

Seems a pretty good option to me.

Thanks for your thoughts.

You're right there's a lot of activity in this space, language learning tools seem to be a common itch that developers like to scratch :)

I think Readlang's unique position is that it provides a very streamlined workflow compared to the alternatives, it tries to remove unnecessary friction and lets you concentrate on either reading or learning. e.g. to do something similar to Readlang with other tools you may need:

- LWT (the user needs to run the server software themselves with XAMPP or similar) + Anki

- LingQ (seems OK, but a bit expensive ($10 / month) and personally I think the UI has too much clutter, and I don't like having all the words I know/don't know highlighted in the text, it distracts me from enjoying the content)

- Manually switching between tabs when reading to translate and build flashcards in Anki or similar

Maybe there are other tools that I'm not aware of. Thanks for your links, I especially like the idea of chineselevel.com and I've been thinking along these lines for Readlang - estimating the users proficiency based on the words they translate and suggesting content of the appropriate difficulty. My big missing link at the moment is built in content on the site, I'll probably look into finding good public domain / creative commons content soon.

I'll send you a personal mail now...

Edit: one of your links may contain a typo: http://duable.com/ - this URL is for a brand advertising company

You're correct, it uses Google Translate to generate the in-line translation, and offers a more in-depth translation from wordreference.com in a sidebar (for the language pairs it supports). I find the Google Translate result good enough to get the meaning the vast majority of the time, which is enough to enjoy reading. When you start to learn each word, it's very much encouraged to verify and edit each translation the first time the flashcard appears. I agree that blindly accepting and learning the google translate results would be a very bad idea. I'll also investigate different dictionaries and translation services as the project progresses.

The relevant bits of forum discussion:

--- Quote LWT ---

I don't think that you will make a lot money out of such a language learning website. IMHO you will never earn so much money that all the hours of work will ever get paid.

From my LWT Project, I can only say that I worked on it about five full months fulltime (around 1200 hours) in total. If one wants to earn about 30 Euros per hour, which is a rather low "IT salary", that would be 36,000 Euros. You need 300 customers paying 120 Euros per annum to have the initial investment payed. And that's only the beginning. There are server costs, you need a service desk, etc.

--- My response ---

Thanks for your honest opinion. You may well be right, it's the first time I've started a venture like this, and it's a bit of an experiment with no serious downside if it happens to fail.

My goals are relatively modest, I don't need it to make a lot of money, your example of 36000 Euros per year actually sounds pretty good, especially since this could continue even if I wasn't improving the site. (In reality though, I have enough ideas that I'll definitely continue to improve it if it gets to that stage!) I'm thinking of charging something more like 1 or 2 euros per month, or more for more advanced features, since I think this is what I'd probably be willing to pay for such a service. So to reach your example numbers I'd need 3000 paying customers! But there are a huge number people in the world who could benefit from this, especially if it runs well on smart phones and tablets, and has easier access to content than it does currently. Am I deluded? :)

Server costs should be pretty low, since a lot of the work is being done client side in the browser, and the back end is pretty lightweight, a JSON API running on Node.js and MongoDB.

Wow, living in Spain at the moment I often get the problem where videos aren't viewable outside the UK, but I didn't realise the opposite problem could exist!

Looks nice. Spotted some glitchy behavior if you click multiple nav dots at the bottom in quick succession though.

Doesn't putting the browser in IE8 compatibility mode work? I guess it sucks for an end user to need to use a developer feature like this but could be the best option.

All the owners of the site would need to do is add this line to their HTML and it throws IE9 and later into IE8 compatibility mode:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

I was surprised to notice that the BBC website does this. I noticed because a bookmarklet I wrote which requires IE9 won't work on the BBC site, which was quite disappointing.