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I bought back my acquihired startup

steveridout.com

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Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#61

Post by vnorilo »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #54
mydriasis wrote: post #48

I cannot wait to use your website tomorrow. I've been dying for a resource to learn Serbian outside of the only book that exists ( pretty much ) and my own efforts in getting flash cards, childrens' books, etc. together. You're seriously a life saver, I cannot wait to try this out. I wish I had heard of it a year ago. _Thank you_. You have produce a connection to my heritage and ancestry that nobody else has, and I r…

Wow, how is it that there's only one instructional book to learn Serbian? There are many books to learn Norwegian out there (which I'm familiar with because I have learned a bit of Norwegian in the past), and fewer people speak it than Serbian.

Norway's economy is 7x that of Serbia (from Wolfram Alpha) and the Nordics do invest in this sort of thing.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#62

Post by vis52 »

mydriasis wrote: post #48

I cannot wait to use your website tomorrow. I've been dying for a resource to learn Serbian outside of the only book that exists ( pretty much ) and my own efforts in getting flash cards, childrens' books, etc. together. You're seriously a life saver, I cannot wait to try this out. I wish I had heard of it a year ago. _Thank you_. You have produce a connection to my heritage and ancestry that nobody else has, and I r…

I would never say this in the Balkans but maybe take a look at Croatian/Bosnian resources as well.

Nobody wants to admit it but it is basically the same language, heck was called Serbo-Croatian a few decades ago.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#63

Post by steveridout »

telchior wrote: post #55

Hey, that's great! I was a Readlang subscriber for a few months last year and often had the thought "why isn't this better?". It even has a place on my (long, cluttered) list of potential ideas to work on. So I'm happy it will be revived and improved! Also, here's the note from my list on what I wished Readlang would do: "check out how News in Slow Spanish (newsinslowspanish.com/) turns each word into a hyperlink. Ho…

Thanks for the suggestion! I think in that case I'd probably want it to automatically combine certain adjacent words into phrases, which is definitely doable with AI but could be expensive to do for an entire text vs just paying for the words and phrases you click to translate like it does at the moment. Also, newsinslowspanish only turns some of the content into links - it makes an assumption as to which words you'll know and which ones you won't, which may not be valid. If you turned the entire text into their style of hoverable links it could look cluttered. You'd want more subtle ones. In fact, it would be very much like Duolingo Stories, which does work well! I'll think about this.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#64

Post by steveridout »

nextaccountic wrote: post #33
steveridout wrote: post #9

Hi! Steve here. Happy to hang around here for a while if anyone wants to ask anything! :-)

Does your ChatGPT thing just asks for the definition of the word or does it look at the context of a few paragraphs around i?

For now it provides the whole sentence that the word was in for context. It works pretty well but I'm sure it would be better if I gave it a little more. 2 or 3 sentences would probably be great, but obviously more expensive to run.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#66

Post by emsixteen »

Congratulations on what sounds like an ultimately positive experience.

Cool to see Norwegian on the site, but the very first Library thing I went in to had an error in the Norwegian. I don't really understand how the site works, but that put me off a bit.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#67

Post by vidarh »

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…

> One thing I noticed with some companies was that the yearly plan was very heavily discounted compared to the monthly one. To me that gave the impression of lacking confidence that monthly users will stick around long term, so I didn't want to do that.

It probably reflects reality, but I can see the point of showing lack of confidence in the product.

Not a language product, but Bumble (the dating app) at one point -- no idea if they still do it -- offered a lifetime membership priced at around 6 months of monthly subscriptions. I find looking for that kind of pricing can be highly instructive about a business and their competitive landscape, because presumably they'll have run their numbers and are expecting to earn more that way.

So it's not just signalling lack of confidence, but also giving away a very strong signal about the lifetime value of their customers.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#68

Post by steveridout »

akudha wrote: post #40

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?

Yeah I use the Google Translate API for the translations.

You can also embed a custom dictionary of your choosing in an iframe in the sidebar: https://blog.readlang.com/2013/11/07/custom-dictionaries.htm...

And recently I've added a feature to get context-aware definitions from the ChatGPT API, but this is just for premium users in English, Spanish and French for now.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#69

Post by steveridout »

scarface74 wrote: post #39

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.

Yep, I like the fact that it's a simple business model with well aligned incentives. It's a direct relationship between me and my customers. I keep getting paid as long as the site continues to be useful.

I also send an automated "Readlang account renewed" email every time I receive a renewal payment. Most SaaS products don't do this for obvious reasons, but it sucks when I realize I've been paying a subscription for something I'm not using, and I don't want to do that to my customers.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#70

Post by cs02rm0 »

paxys wrote: post #37
sverhagen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Will it reflect badly on them if the new owners decide to take it in some different direction?

I think there's still a flip side to these decisions. Google has an established reputation as a product killer, I'm sure the effect of that won't bring them down but it's there and I doubt handing a product off to someone else would either.

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