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I bought back my acquihired startup

steveridout.com

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Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#71

Post by steveridout »

wwweston wrote: post #41

> It turned out that people were using Readlang for card testing fraud. After I helped them to fix the problem How does one fix the card testing fraud problem? Certainly you can refund people after the fact, but it seems to me any point where small-dollar service/product can be purchased by card is vulnerable and you'd have to kinda guess whether the usage makes sense?

The ideal fix was to upgrade the version of Stripe checkout. At the time though I was looking for a quick solution and was scared to update the Stripe libraries for fear of accidentally breaking something else. So here's what I did:

- First I tried adding an IP address based rate limiter to the signup and payment routes, and required that all users had translated at least one word before being allowed to upgrade. It stopped the attempts for a few hours, but then they started back up again.

- Next, I used a more drastic approach, which would prevent all payment attempts from all IP address if we received more than 10 failed payment attempts within a 1 minute window. Still didn't work.

- Next, I changed the thresholds to 4 failed payment attempts within 5 minutes, and this finally worked!

Since buying Readlang back, I've updated the Stripe checkout to the latest version, turned off the circuit breaker, and haven't had any further problems.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#72

Post by thelittleone »

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…

There are similar examples within companies. For instance, I led the establishment and growth of a ~50m cyber security practice for a US vendor in a region. Ended up ~22% EBIT. Unfortunately the software business is >65% so my business was diluting regional performance. I got the call to slow down growth so I left. Ultimately they shut down the services altogether and gave it to channel. I offered to buy the services business but they weren't interested.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#73

Post by steveridout »

ginnungagap wrote: post #53
steveridout wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point! I just made the first mention of Readlang into a link to the website: https://readlang.com It's a web-app and browser extension to help people learn languages by reading texts or websites in the language they are learning, get helpful translation hints and definitions to aid comprehension, and then to practice the new vocab with flashcards.

The concept looks extremely interesting, but (like the vast majority of language learning tools) Albanian is not supported. I might give it a try for German though

I'm planning to add some more languages after improving the UI. Right now the dropdowns to select languages feel unwieldy with so many options. If you want me to let you know when I get around to adding Albanian, email me at $MY_FIRST_NAME@readlang.com or send a message via https://readlang.uservoice.com/.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#74

Post by dboreham »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #59
inamberclad wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dig has the worst output I've ever seen in a CLI tool. Fantastically useful when I've bothered to learn it, but it's just not intuitive. I always forget what everything means. What am I looking at here? The _lack_ of an answer section?

It's very verbose by default, but that's when/why you use it. If you just want to know why something doesn't work, you use ping. $ ping nxdomain.example.com ping: nxdomain.example.com: Name or service not known $ ping example.com PING example.com(2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946 (2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946)) 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946 (2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946):…

dig +short enters the room.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#75

Post by mokkol »

vidarh wrote: post #67
steveridout wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

I think it slightly works different with a dating app. In theory, if the app works you don’t need it anymore. So in their case, it is confident to offer a big discount.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#76

Post by conradfr »

vidarh wrote: post #67
steveridout wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

At one point my gym offered (out of the blue and only by text) lifetime membership for something like a year or two of the regular monthly price.

They folded nationwide less than ten months later.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#77

Post by dustymcp »

vnorilo wrote: post #61
actually_a_dog wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are 2 very different places :)

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#79

Post by steveridout »

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…

That's wonderful to hear! I hope you find it useful. If you have any feedback after using it for a while please let me know!

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#80

Post by steveridout »

emsixteen wrote: post #66

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.

Yeah, this is a problem. Anyone is free to share texts to the public library and there's no quality control, just an upvoting feature to try to surface the best content at the top. I accept that the public libraries are a mess at the moment and it's not easy to identify the high quality content there. Lots of room for improvement!
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