
Readlang – My Bootstrapped Language Learning Web-App - BenSS
http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped-language-learning-web-app.html
======
jakejake
I love this story because it shows the true reality, for most people, of
starting your own company. It is a long haul of trying and re-trying things
and looking at the results. There is a lot of joy when you see the graph move
up, and a lot of self doubt when it stagnates or moves the other way.

One thing that rubs me wrong with HN is a general feeling it creates in my gut
that my projects isn't valid because It's taken us 5 years to get stable. I
feel like the pattern is to take a bunch of people's money, blow through it
and then quit when your idea didn't work in 6 months. Then repeat. No point in
sticking with something unless it's an instant smash hit.

Steve, I think your idea is pretty solid and there surely must be customers
out there like schools that will add large numbers of accounts. If you can
build it to where you can sit on the beach doing support then what a great
life that could be! All the best to you.

~~~
steveridout
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.

------
bane
Great writeup and kudos to getting something off the ground. Some back of the
envelope calculations.

Let's assume you want to make $100k/year. Which is a pretty decent life in
most places.

Right now the numbers are showing about $8.30/paying customer. To hit that
target will require ~12,000 more subscribers. Not a crazy number.

 _But_ , at the conversion rate of .51% (126/24,717 uniques->paying) that
means you'll need to get ~298 _million_ uniques to your site (or 56 million
signups). That's tough. Getting the entire population of the U.S. to come
check out your site requires a _huge_ marketing budget.

If you can convert all signups into paying customers (currently at 2.7%
conversion) that goal becomes much closer. About 19% of all uniques are
turning into signups (paid or otherwise). That's pretty good. If all of them
were paying that's better than 1/3rd of the way there.

So really, for this to work for 1 full-time person to make $100k, conversions
free->paid need to go up significantly, but probably pricing needs to go up as
well and/or the tiered structure needs to be rethought.

~~~
steveridout
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.

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

That's pretty reasonable. Of course pushing the numbers up means fewer people
will sign up at all (i.e. not every signup can be converted), so there'll be a
trade-off of some kind.

At any rate, it might be worth setting a top-end of what kind of growth you
might be able to expect and try and build your business model out that way.
Right now the number of uniques you need to come seems a bit high to me. Might
be worth modelling out what you could do with 1 million uniques, 10 million,
etc. and try and model around that, then go out and try and get those eyeballs
to your app. That kind of analysis can help you decide on marketing
approaches. 10 million, for example, might require some investment in actual
advertising, radio ads, late night tv etc. 1 million might be easier to do for
"free" \+ your time.

Some things that might help get more eyeballs on your site

Once you're satisfied with where the site/product is, you might think about
taking a few days and writing to sites like LifeHacker as well as language
learning sites, any reddit about languages (e.g. /r/korean) to help kick
things off (see below)

Other than time, these can be decent free ways to kick off some growth as
well.

 _note:_ I've gotten some decent notice through the following in the past just
by writing them with some information. Eventually most were able to carry it,
and often it spilled over into twitter and drove traffic for a while while the
news bounced around the globe. It didn't cost anything and was entirely free.

[http://lifehacker.com/](http://lifehacker.com/)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/](http://www.businessinsider.com/)

[http://www.killerstartups.com/](http://www.killerstartups.com/)

[http://feedmyapp.com/](http://feedmyapp.com/)

Also might get coverage in various newspapers tech sections, global news or
travel sections.

------
itpragmatik
Great job Steve! Very encouraging and inspirational to read your post. I am
usually a passive reader and mostly a consumer when it comes to blogs or
stackoverflow/quora. Today I felt to post a comment because it really hit
close. I too was doing very similar to what you wrote about. I have been
building and managing
[http://www.marathimitra.com/](http://www.marathimitra.com/) \- an Indian
language learning website for over last 10 years. I did make an attempt to
make a business of out it for 18 months (from 2012 through 2013) but was
unsuccessful and then went back to a full-time coding job. During those 18
months, I too did almost similar hacks, initiatives and improvements that you
mention: mailchimp, paypal subscriptions, UI improvements and more. In the end
I just was too tired of doing everything myself. I did bootstrap it myself and
all along the 18 months and many more years before that I was the sole
designer, programmer, project manager, content aggregator, marketing and sales
person. It took a toll on me.

The big lesson I learned is that it is extremely important to have a co-
founder. It would have been awesome if I had another person working with me
equally invested as me with different skill set and that could have allowed me
to last even longer and kept me going.

I wish you good luck and many best wishes.

Thanks for sharing a great story. Best.

~~~
steveridout
Thanks. I often wish I'd had a cofounder from the start, right now it's
difficult to give away a big enough stake away to someone else to make it
worth their while. For now I'm still hoping that sometime this year I'll be
able to grow revenues to a point where i can make a living, and that would
open the possibility to start hiring contractors to do some extra work, e.g.
Design, marketing, support.

Well done for continuing your project for so long, I'm sure you must have
learned a lot.

------
jfoster
I'm also running a bootstrapped language-learning site, but focused on
Mandarin Chinese ([http://www.fastchinese.org/](http://www.fastchinese.org/)).
It's interesting how similar my experience has been. It's tempting to start
blogging and do a write-up of my experience like this one, but I'm not ready
to take on the overheads that blogging brings with it.

I think one thing that makes language learning difficult is that users are
almost guaranteed to eventually churn. Either they reach a level where they
have no further need for online learning, or they give up/lose interest.

It's a particularly difficult space right now, as VC-backed ventures like
Duolingo have set expectations of irrational business models ($0
pricing/advertising) and are taking a lot of the oxygen out.

I think the future looks a bit brighter. Duolingo as it currently exists seems
very far from being sustainable. I see 4 ways that the Duolingos' of the world
might go (the "translation services" model is a bit unrealistic, in my view):

1\. They'll start charging and become the next Rosetta Stone.

2\. Rosetta Stone will acquire them. Probably the most likely outcome given
the prominence of Duolingo, the extent that it must be impacting on RS, and
the upside to RS if they did acquire Duolingo.

3\. They'll fizzle out. According to CrunchBase they've raised ~$40MM and have
12 employees. Their marketing budget must be quite massive, and their
headcount is likely to grow.

4\. They'll become ad-supported, which would probably make them sustainable
but not nearly profitable enough that it would make their investors happy.

~~~
steveridout
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.

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

~~~
kanwisher
I didn't see thai support . Any chance you will add that ?

~~~
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!

------
300
Really nice story. I find it inspiring. Just keep up with the great job! I
think it could grow really big.

P.S. I find it really inspiring, so much that I'll add it to my weekly
newsletter which I send on Sundays (shameless plug:
[http://startupitis.com/](http://startupitis.com/)).

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

------
the4dpatrick
I thought you were on to something with creating a product for language
professors for a second. I have been thinking about making a product for the
language space. If I did it would be targeted towards the teachers and
language teaching institutions. Like someone commented, there will be eventual
churn on the consumer side. The teacher's job is to teach students language,
how well they do that is another conversation, so when you sell to a teacher
it seems more likely they'll continue using the product for as long as they
are teaching.

~~~
steveridout
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.

------
drogus
I was thinking about making a similar product
([http://ciaocards.com/](http://ciaocards.com/)), so it's very interesting to
see such a thorough post on your journey with your app. When I was evaluating
my idea I was mostly worried about a small revenue (B2C, hard to market, not
crucial when learning languages) which I see unfortunately is the case here. I
wish you getting more traction and customers!

~~~
steveridout
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!

~~~
girasquid
No API, but someone has bundled up the scraping into a gem for you:
[https://github.com/speric/kindle-
highlights](https://github.com/speric/kindle-highlights)

~~~
steveridout
Very cool, thanks.

------
jurassic
Language learning is hard work, and most people fail quickly at it once they
realize it'll be several hundred hours before they'll be at a useful level.
That's probably why it's so hard to make money with a product primarily
tailored to the needs of intermediate and advanced learners. Learner attrition
means that most people attracted by the idea of language learning don't make
it that far.

I've tried Readlang briefly and thought the look of the site was much nicer
than the clunky interface sported by LingQ, but I still didn't feel ready to
make free reading a major part of my study as a ~B1+ self-learner of Spanish.
Most texts for natives, even children's books like Harry Potter, are still
very slow/difficult to read at my current level.

Import tools are nice, but the content I stumble on is often too hard for me
to read efficiently. What I really need is help finding stuff I like that is
only ~5% unknown words so I can read more fluidly/enjoyably. I'm not sure how
to tackle the problem, but if you can crack the content discovery nut it will
make the tool more accessible to lower level language students at the "widest"
portion of the language learning funnel.

Another thing I've noticed is that Readlang seems very "quiet". Other
platforms like Duolingo and LingQ have active user forums where people can
share their experiences and problems. It'd be nice to have a discussion place
to swap suggestions, get encouragement, and (most important) see
testimonials/success stories.

Anyway, good luck. I hope the product is still around when I'm more advanced
and ready to make reading a bigger part of my study.

~~~
steveridout
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.

~~~
istib
there is language immersion tool for that:
[http://www.everydaylanguagelearner.com/2012/05/09/why-i-
inst...](http://www.everydaylanguagelearner.com/2012/05/09/why-i-installed-
google-chromes-language-immersion-extension/)

------
etewiah
Wow, pretty detailed stuff. I suspect I may have saved myself a lot of grief
if I had seen more articles like this when I quit my job a few years back. I
have spent more time than he has and earnt less money!!!

------
tdondich
Hi Steve,

I also have a language learning startup at
[http://www.nihongomaster.com](http://www.nihongomaster.com) which is targeted
purely for Japanese learners. Your post is an interesting read because I've
gone through all the phases you've detailed. It's a uphill battle but overall
a great experience.

I emailed you so we can keep in touch. I think entrepreneurs in the language
learning space can help each other out and encourage each other to succeed.

------
dpapathanasiou
Nice work, Steve!

It's great to see someone making money with this; I have a similar project for
Japanese + English[1] which is more of a hobby site right now, but I'll start
following readlang.com more closely.

[1] [http://macaronics.com/](http://macaronics.com/)

~~~
steveridout
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?

~~~
dpapathanasiou
" _Well, as you see it 's not an earth shattering amount, but thanks!_"

I'm still encouraged that you managed to get _any_ revenues, so kudos for
that.

" _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?_ "

I do have a lot of data, and I'm still working through the best way to
leverage it and make it accessible.

I'd be happy to talk to you further, offline, so please feel free to email me
through the contact form.

------
adam-williams
Nice work steve! Be sure to follow up with any pricing changes and their
effect.

------
natch
Is there a tl;dr for that post? On skimming it, the story sounded so
harrowing, I'm not sure whether you are planning on keeping the site open or
not. Bottom line: Is it still worth signing up?

~~~
steveridout
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 :-)

------
Major_Grooves
Well gosh that's a long blogpost. If I were you I would have split it up in to
several posts, by theme or something. ;)

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

~~~
Major_Grooves
Actually it's a very good read. I'll glad you kept it as one post. Sorry I
didn't manage to read it earlier!

------
gremlinsinc
Why not add advertising, you could possibly add in-context ads, and google
adsense ads, and make some extra cash.

------
Major_Grooves
ok, I was going to email you, but I'll post a couple of suggestions here so
others can agree or disagree.

You've got just shy of 5000 users, but how active are they? How many
daily/weekly/monthly active users do you have?

If you've got a decent number of active users then those are people that can
potentially become paying users. So ditch the unlimited free version. Yes -
ditch it.

Look at your weekly active users and see how many words they each translate.
Presumably there is some kind of distribution, where 80% of users translate
<100 words per week, then you have some power users that translate 1000 per
week. Start with them and start telling them they need to pay to keep using
Readlang once they have translated 80% of the words that they usually
translate. A nice pop-up with a simple call-to-action asking them to pay. A:B
test the pop-up message. You've then got dynamic pricing that is based on
individuals' use habits.

Start with the power users and work backwards towards your regular users. See
what happens as you get closer towards the 100 words/week guys.

If completely removing the free option is too aggressive for you, maybe once
they reach the word limit they can dismiss the "pay to continue" pop-up but
then it comes back every 5 words they translate after that. Try both
strategies - experiment - see what works best.

You've only made $1k so far. I don't think there is any harm in being a bit
more aggressive. You've build a good product - now is the time to test
monetisation rather than adding features.

On the CRM side, you have done a little bit with Mailchimp, and that the
reminders are opt-in. Make them opt-out.

Ditch Mailchimp. Make a $50 investment in customer.io - that will allow you to
do CRM against 5000 users. Hit them with one email to all (which will use up
half your 10k email allowance) with the most compelling email you can draft.
Then use your remaining 5k emails to hit those that responded to your first
email _regularly_ and based on their actions (customer.io is really good when
you get that right). /edit - just noticed extra emails on customer.io are
really cheap so it's the user number limitation you really pay for. In that
case send as many emails as you need to do some very active CRM
experimentation for a whole month.

Reminds users that they have a text they have just started but not looked at
again. Remind them they need to do flashcards everyday etc etc

Remember - if nobody complains about the price of your product, it's probably
too cheap.

Lastly, make an iPhone app that works offline and allows translation of single
words via an offline dictionary and includes the flash-cards which then syncs
with your account when back online. I'd pay for that! ;)

~~~
steveridout
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.

~~~
Major_Grooves
Yep - agree it works well on iPads. I find the iPhone a little too small to do
good select on the text for translations, but on an iPad mini it was great.

wrt to CRM. Try to consider the $50 as an investment. You only need to add X
paying subscribers in one month to get a ROI. If you get them, then anything
after that is profit. If you don't, then you have learned a nice lesson for
only $50.

wrt to pricing - just experiment - take my least aggressive suggestion - allow
users to dismiss the notice. Or if you can, split test it.

I think one of the other commenters here is right - you can probably build
more of a sense of community around it. Perhaps it can be the place where
people really recommend good books for language learners. You already have the
voting etc. That then maybe leads you in to the publisher deals, which I don't
think would be as difficult as you imagine.

