Ask HN: I cannot afford to scale…

Don't be afraid of charging for something the brings value to the table. I see a little bit of both, crappy apps charging huge amounts of $ and awesome apps almost for free. It amazes me how can companies or developers put so lower prices and something that probably took them a lot of time to create. So, if your app is awesome, users recommend it, charge it for the right price. You might loose cheap clients, but you highlight yourself from the competition.

The big issue is not that you cannot afford to scale.

It is that your business model cannot scale - effectively, you are hand crafting widgets, not leveraging technology to increase productivity.

Adding another translator, adds approximately one unit of capacity. Another document, well, that adds approximately one unit of work. Sure, growth can occur arithmetically, but there is no possibility of exponential or even geometric growth.

To make the issue more intractable, the iOS ecosystem provides less opportunity to acquire and apply more efficient tools - there is a significant degree of rigidity in the technology stack (i.e. you can't employ a tool written in LISP easily in order to improve throughput).

What you have is ownership of a small business - which is entirely consistent with your initial goal of owning a company. And you are facing the same issues all small businesses face - the problem of hiring people who might not do things exactly the same way you would.

Good luck.

Two things I would recommend:

1) Charge more. Lots of other people have said that too. If you have to turn away customers, then you know you can raise your rates. You need to do a/b testing on this (i.e. high-low) until you find the proper rate at which the number of customers is balanced by the price you charge.

2) You need to automate some stuff. If I were you, I would invest a little time into writing a simple tool where you can enter the corpus of text and translate it via Google Translate. If you set up your tool to allow multiple inputs, you can easily start a project by filling in all the text to be translated and hit "Go". Afterwords, you just go through each translated entry and correct things. This should be significantly easier than doing every single thing by hand, over and over.

1. Raise your prices 2. Find someone locally to help part time with translation. In this economy, there have gotta be some good bi-lingual people who need some extra cash irregularly to do translation. 3. Create a system to make the process more scalable, so that the person doing the translation doesn't need to know anything about programming. 4. Find more hours in the day and push yourself until you do have enough fulltime work for a second person. 5. Setup good relations with app developers that you've already worked with. They are going to keep creating apps, and their new apps, updates, etc... will all need translation. This can help make work more steady.

A good strategy for pricing in this situation is with an "express service." This allows you to keep your existing "list price" but of course the delivery time for that will go up by days/weeks/etc. Your express service has a guaranteed quick delivery at a much higher price. You now have a way to capture a premium for customers that are in a rush. It's a win-win with no risk of downside due to a complete price change.