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I bought back my acquihired startup

steveridout.com

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Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#31

Post by selcuka »

Small suggestion: You may want to fix your DNS configuration which currently only resolves readlang.com and not www.readlang.com. This might confuse some visitors (it confused me when I typed readlang and pressed Ctrl+Enter):

    ~ $ dig a www.readlang.com
    
    ; > DiG 9.10.6 > a www.readlang.com
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#32

Post by steveridout »

selcuka wrote: post #31

Small suggestion: You may want to fix your DNS configuration which currently only resolves readlang.com and not www.readlang.com. This might confuse some visitors (it confused me when I typed readlang and pressed Ctrl+Enter): ~ $ dig a www.readlang.com ; > DiG 9.10.6 > a www.readlang.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER

Thanks! I'll fix this

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#34

Post by nextaccountic »

steveridout wrote: post #27
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not related to the buyback but more generally to Readlang, how did you select the pricing? I've noticed a sort of bimodal distribution of prices in language companies with the sleek/modern looking ones centering around 5$/month, and more traditional companies going for 20$/month for seemingly the same service (so the latter not presented as a luxury alternative to the former). Wondering if you did any A/B testing or…

Not a ton of methodology behind it! I started at $10 per year, then gradually raised prices as the product got better, always keeping existing subscribers happy by grandfathering them. At one point it was $4.99 every 3 months, which is the plan my mum is still on :-) For a brief time I offered a lifetime subscription for $100 and sold a few but felt uncomfortable offering to keep the service running forever with no f…

Highly polished it depends, but mainstream products certainly won't cater to the long tail of niches. Some niches are still large enough to be profitable for a smaller product, others aren't (and will hardly be supported by any product at all)

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#36

Post by CobrastanJorji »

sverhagen wrote: post #29
ewalk153 wrote: post #8

Warms my heart to see a big company make this deal with the author rather than just shut it down. Bravo Duolingo.

I often think about this precise scenario. There are so many cases and times where a big company shuts something down that would be perfectly viable at a different scale. My previous company got acquired by Verizon and then shut down because it didn't scale to a $1B business within five years (or something like that). I'm not claiming it was a viable business in the first place (it probably wasn't) but now we'll neve…

I worked for a tiny, independent project for a giant corporation for a couple of years. It absolutely would have worked as a 2 or 3 person company but it was definitely the wrong place for a dozen engineers as part of a giant corporation. They shut it down, but now I'm wondering whether they would have entertained a small offer to buy it. Probably not, but I guess I'll never know.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#37

Post by paxys »

sverhagen wrote: post #29
ewalk153 wrote: post #8

Warms my heart to see a big company make this deal with the author rather than just shut it down. Bravo Duolingo.

I often think about this precise scenario. There are so many cases and times where a big company shuts something down that would be perfectly viable at a different scale. My previous company got acquired by Verizon and then shut down because it didn't scale to a $1B business within five years (or something like that). I'm not claiming it was a viable business in the first place (it probably wasn't) but now we'll neve…

From the company’s perspective it’s a straightforward calculation.

Considering that this will only apply to failing products, the price they can expect to get for it is negligible, more so considering the buyer is going to be a handful of regular employees rather than a big company. So selling vs killing makes no material difference to their bottom line.

On the other side, there’s a mountain of due diligence they have to do to make sure that the decision is sensible. Is the product tied to the company’s brand at all? Will it reflect badly on them if the new owners decide to take it in some different direction? Or can it be used to compete with the company in the future? Does it have user data? Are they in accordance with the TOS and a thousand data laws when selling it to someone else?

So from the business side the sensible answer is usually to just kill the product.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#39

Post by scarface74 »

No direct comment about buying the startup back. But I had never heard of this site before today and I am trying to learn Spanish.

Also, the creator seems like it’s a simple sustainable business model - I give them money and I get a useful service without any advertising or dark patterns.

He will be getting my money.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#40

Post by akudha »

Congrats. Anytime I see someone work on something they truly love, it feels good. It is my dream too.

Is it okay to ask, do you pay for the dictionaries you use? The homepage says "translate words and phrases" - do you use some kind of translation API, like Google?

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