Creator of the Readlang here. I started this at the very end of 2012, and save for a few months contracting have been working on it full time since, doing everything myself. Growth has been slower than I’d like but just enough to keep me motivated.
It's a freemium webapp, originally designed to reduce the frustration of practicing my Spanish by reading novels, and later adapted to work on any webpage as a browser extension.
I always appreciate it when people share details about their business, so here are some numbers from the first 5 months of 2015 (Jan - May):
Google Analytics - Sessions: 120,000, Unique visitors: 53,489
Signups - 13,658
Revenue - $4768 (average of $953 / month)
Not spectacular, but when I look back, it took 16 months to make the first $1000 (http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped-l...), and right now it’s making more than that every month! It’s a long road but I’m very excited about it’s future.
Wow, these are the stories we need to hear more of!! I'm a bit tired of the overnight success stories getting all the attention.
If such an awesome product has taken so long to make something in the region of 1000 dollars a month then perhaps creating a startup is not as easy as so many people make it out to be...
Totally agree. For most people, even on HN, it is really hard to identify with all those multi million dollar fundings and billion dollar buy outs. This on the other hand, shows what is possible by one person and how it is not that easy to build something nice and useful.
I hope OP keeps publishing posts on what worked, traffic stats, revenue stats etc.
This is another site that was bootstrapped (I believe) http://www.forvo.com/ and seems to be doing quite well (though the quality is debatable sometimes)
I'm vaguely trying to learn spanish using Duolingo, but haven't been very diligent. I was hoping your chrome extension could be a more passive way of learning that integrates into what I already do, and which would let me stick with it as a result.
Unfortunately, the current version isn't. Unless I'm using it wrong, here's the process of learning spanish with your extension:
- I'm on a page
- I decide to learn spanish
- I click the extension button
- i click random words and see the spanish word for it
There's a lot of friction (I have to steps 2 and 3) for not a lot of pay off (I can choose to click words and see what the spanish version is). Also, the fact that it gets in the way of every link means I immediately turned it off.
May I suggest an alternate version:
- on every single page the extension is active
- pick some number of words (1% maybe?) to translate into spanish, while keeping the text in english. Underline them in green and let me mouseover if I don't understand
- when I'm reading the text, I will come across these spanish words and learn them in context
Much lower friction, and doesn't get in the way so I won't turn it off.
Readlang is intended to be used in reverse - you should be using it to read Spanish articles, and clicking on the words and phrases you don't understand to translate them to English. Learning from actual native Spanish texts is vastly preferable to machine translated Spanish. Of course the downside is that you need to:
a) have some ability in Spanish already
b) develop a new habit of visiting Spanish websites. You can get an idea from the most popular sites visited by Readlang users here: http://readlang.com/es/links (I've been thinking of exploring another idea for an extension which hijacks the Chrome "new tab" page to encourage this habit)
Unfortunately, I don't think you can learn, for example, Spanish by translating pages to Spanish. You have to read pages in Spanish and translate from it, otherwise you're learning Google-Translatese, not Spanish.
There's a lot of nuance, idioms, etc that translations can't give you, not to mention that they're usually, very, very wrong.
At least personally, I've always been horrible at remembering nouns/verbs in Spanish. I never did listen to any of my teachers and spend time memorizing the 10 or so words per week that I was supposed to. Even still I don't listen to Duolingo and practice consistently.
My lack of vocabulary is directly related to my conversational fluency. It would definitely be nice to randomly see Spanish words in an English sentence while I'm going about my day. Next time I'm trying to speak to someone in Spanish, I may remember some of these words, be more confident about my sentences, and keep the conversation going longer. Honestly, even if I use the words slightly incorrectly (because they are Googleese) at least I'll have said something and have more conversation experience to learn from.
In Portuguese, I just used ReadLang (under C2, Master setting, w/o signing up) and saw the word 'conduzisse' which translated simply as 'lead'. The verb conduzir can also be to conduct, to guide, and to drive. The verbal tense is first/third-person singular imperfect subjunctive, which is important in meaning and context. What I wish to say with my comment is that perhaps the app is best for learning before reaching the advanced stage because this is when we pass from Translatese to real fluency.
I did try Italian, in which I'm intermediate, and found the app useful. The song section is a nice touch, too.
FYI, I discovered this a week or two ago and when I tried to pay using PayPal something timed out and I was unable to complete the transaction. I tried several times, and I don't think it was a PayPal issue. Eventually I just gave up.
That's a bit worrying - do you know at what stage it stopped working exactly? Please get in touch (steve@readlang.com) with some more details and I'll be happy to upgrade you for a couple of months for free.
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.
Great to see your language learning website! I'm developing similar ideas all the time, but I'm having trouble earning the first dollar.
A few questions:
Do you feel trying to do every language is effective? Do you have trouble with any particular languages? Do you feel google translate is good enough for learners?
On your site you seem to say audio was a mis-step. Will you be giving it another go?
Is doing every language effective? Most of them cause me no/very little extra effort so I figure why not. The danger is that learning some of the languages gives a worse experience and may negatively impact the users' impression of the entire product. e.g. the site isn't great for Japanese and Chinese which should have extra features such as Furigana/Pinyin, and smart word boundary detection (they don't use spaces to separate words).
Is google translate good enough? Depends. It's certainly not good enough to trust 100%, which is a big issue for beginners. But once you have a basic level of understanding you can generally tell from the context whether a translation makes sense or not. If you're not convinced, you just need to open the extra popup/sidebar dictionary, and I encourage users to check and correct any translations the first time they encounter them in the flashcard section.
I added the YouTube feature very early on, when the rest of the site was rougher round the edges, and felt I should have concentrated more on the core reading experience. Now though, I'm glad the feature is there, it's great for listening practice, some people get satisfaction from syncing and sharing videos, and it's one extra way to impress people when demoing the site.
Regarding plain audio - this isn't on my immediate TODO list but I agree it would be cool. Personally I'd love to listen to podcasts + transcriptions to help me learn.
It might be interesting to offer the reverse: incremental translation of source material that's in the reader's known language, into the target language.
That is, simply by switching into the mode, each page the user visits would have some of its words translated to the target language. They'd have distinctive styling, and a simple hover or click would show the original word. You'd always be reading a mosaic of both languages
As they hover/click for clarification less often, more and more words would be target-translated... building the new language vocabulary over time.
Of course, this doesn't teach the new language's syntax/ordering... but even that could maybe be incrementall mixed-in over time. Perhaps when there's a clear 1:1 sentence map, a sentence could (with some probability linked to how many words have already flipped) flip to the target-language's order-of-presentation, even if most of its individual words are still native.
Amazing job, I'll become soon one of your paying customers :)
After playing with it for a while a first suggestion. I noticed that it's possible to export the frequency of the words so you have this information, for my use case it would be very useful to have this information in the word list (when the word is expanded).
This is because when I'm reviewing the words in my word list and deleting those I feel are not very usual so I can concentrate on those that are, however this is done just by guesswork as I don't really know which words are more common, having easy access to the frequency of the word in the word list would allow me to do it in a more efficient way.
You shouldn't feel the need to delete infrequent words like this manually.
The flashcards use the frequency to prioritize the useful words first, so provided you have a large enough pool of translated words you will never see the really infrequent ones. (The exception is that if you star any word, it will be bumped to top priority)
Agree it could be nice to show the frequency information in the word list somehow, but it needs to be subtle / hidden enough not to clutter the UI.
Do you do some kind of text processing, before or after sending the words to Google Translate? Do you analyze the translation mistakes, in order to iteratively improve the results? How much do you pay for the API?
I don't do any processing - the phrase goes directly to Google.
Users can edit the translations so I'm accumulating data which could be aggregated in future to improve translations, but not doing that at the moment.
and stumbled across your comment. I thought it was neat (I'm using -not- TransOver for the moment).
Here's what I can think of, off the top of my head, but first some background:
I'm acquiring Spanish right now and simultaneously scratching the surface of German, Russian, Hebrew, and Persian. They have a lower priority, but I'm making progress.
As you may have noticed, English is not my first language. I learned it out of necessity (resources I needed were in English).
I read a lot, and in the beginning, my head hurt as I read stuff written in English. I had MediaDico on my computer to translate from English to French.
I struggled with idioms (I needed to read several examples of an idiom to get the gist of it)... But I can pin-point the exact moment where my learning was about to soar: I was in the living room and I decided that my computer experience had to shift to English. This means that even when I was to search for stuff, I'd do it in English. My brain bled. Something trivial to search for in a language I knew, something I already had the keywords ready, not in my mind but in my fingertips, to search Google for, would take me way longer to think about, formulate, and come up with keywords for, in English.
What would be cool is this:
- A user doesn't have to click on on a word to translate it. The extension makes a sort of histogram of the most used words or expressions (a frequency list of the page), and automatically translates them. Since they're the most used words or expressions on the page, the person will be exposed to them often: "accidentally on purpose" rote repetition. This will be useful for the next step:
- The extension _remembers_ (keeps a list of) which words (should) already have been learned by the user (which words he has been exposed to the most), and in subsequent pages will display them in the target language without the user doing anything. They will no longer be displayed in the user's language.
- The first message it displayed was that I had to drag some link, etc.. Why is that?
- I had a message saying "This is a very large page". Maybe the extension can translate stuff the user is most likely to see first, and as the user browses, it does stuff.. Think Python generators.
Hmm, sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but from your suggestions it's not clear if you realise that the extension is intended for reading in your target language and translating occasional words to your native language.
e.g.
> ...and in subsequent pages will display them in the target language without the user doing anything. They will no longer be displayed in the user's language.
The idea is that to learn Spanish, you read Spanish webpages, so everything is displayed in the target language at first, and you click to get the English translation.
Detecting words which are unusually frequent in the page you're reading, and automatically adding a translation to the first instance is a cool idea.
> The first message it displayed was that I had to drag some link, etc.. Why is that?
I think you're referring to the bookmarklet that needs to be installed to translate webpages, this is an alternative to the Chrome extension and works on almost all browsers.
> I had a message saying "This is a very large page"
Yeah, this is pretty ugly, should think of a nicer solution.
>Hmm, sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but from your suggestions it's not clear if you realise that the extension is intended for reading in your target language and translating occasional words to your native language.
I think the idea is that to learn Spanish, you read not only Spanish webpages, but even the webpages you read that happen not to be in Spanish can become so.
The way you intend your extension to work assumes the user is already on a Spanish webpage. This assumes the user has overcome procrastination and reads pages in his target language often.
Now, as a language learner yourself: What percentage of all people who want to learn a language does that case represent? How many overcame procrastination and practice everyday?
These are the users who don't need help and would be fine.
The biggest problems in language learning are two:
- Procrastination.
- Weak, infrequent and/or sporadic exposure.
Just imagine if in addition to catering to those serious users the way you do now, you can annihilate learners' worst problems and serve the whole 99% of people who've had "I want to learn X" on their mind for 5+ years but have been too intimidated, or think it's too hard..
They're on a page in English sprinkled with foreign words in context. They get value with every single page they read. If they don't understand a word, the only effort they make is click on it. If they somehow read a sign in the streets or see something in TV in the target language and they recognize it, they will have a smile and that will be a turning point. This is where they'll feel "It works". It has more significance because they've tried to learn that language years ago with a bunch of arcane methods, and weren't even able to do the smallest things with it.
Discomfort threshold to the prospect of reading pages in the target language is decreased by the page.
Your extension isn't one that translates words on a webpage, it is as an extension that minimizes friction to learn a langue. It can do it in a variety of ways and already does a great job with the flash-cards. Everybody hates doing the legwork and you're getting them to "Read it and it gets saved".
>I think you're referring to the bookmarklet that needs to be installed to translate webpages, this is an alternative to the Chrome extension and works on almost all browsers.
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.
This is for more accessibility. There a lot of people who don't know what a bookmark is, or bookmarklet for that matter.
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.
It's a freemium webapp, originally designed to reduce the frustration of practicing my Spanish by reading novels, and later adapted to work on any webpage as a browser extension.
I always appreciate it when people share details about their business, so here are some numbers from the first 5 months of 2015 (Jan - May):
Google Analytics - Sessions: 120,000, Unique visitors: 53,489
Signups - 13,658
Revenue - $4768 (average of $953 / month)
Not spectacular, but when I look back, it took 16 months to make the first $1000 (http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped-l...), and right now it’s making more than that every month! It’s a long road but I’m very excited about it’s future.
Any questions or feedback, please fire away!