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I bought back my acquihired startup

steveridout.com

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Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#81

Post by robocat »

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…

The yearly plan is discounted because it allows self-funding and retains control, versus VC dilution. Explained here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw (I am not working at present, but I rewatch this every once-in-a-while because it is an amazing talk!)

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#82

Post by steveridout »

cogitovirus wrote: post #78

Why do you think Readlang stagnated when it was under Duolingo’s ownership? What were the main factors that prevented it from reaching its full potential?

Basically it's because I don't think Duolingo wanted the product so much as they wanted me. No-one used the term acquihire at the time but I was under no illusions that that's what it was.

I did think that I might push to develop Readlang at Duolingo, but it never seemed like an attractive proposition for a bunch of reasons. I think it would have needed to grow at least 100X to start getting interesting within Duolingo. Not to say this was totally impossible but it seemed like a tough job. Also, some of the things that Readlang does, like browser extension and public sharing of texts, feel a bit "wild west" compared to the rest of Duolingo which is more curated and controlled, so it's not clear exactly how Readlang would have needed to change to fit in. I figured that if I tried this and integrated it tightly within Duolingo, and then failed to grow sufficiently, then the risk of it ultimately shutting down would have increased.

Also, I had other exciting projects to work on there which seemed more valuable for Duolingo, and therefore better for my reputation within the company, so I was happy to work on those!

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#83

Post by milosmns »

vis52 wrote: post #62
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.

That's a good tip because it is in fact the same language with various dialect and naming differences, similar to the many flavors of English we have today or different variants of German. Montenegrian is the latest addition to the family.

However, everyone I know has a common understanding about this, so I'm not sure who would be reluctant to admit that it is the same language... outside of the very few extremist groups of course :)

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#84

Post by akudha »

steveridout wrote: post #68
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.

I have so many ideas for word games etc, but they all would require dictionary usage. How does one get free or affordable access to dictionaries?

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#85

Post by mejutoco »

brianwawok wrote: post #45
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Remake it with a clean codebase. Version 2 is always better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#87

Post by smcin »

steveridout wrote: post #17
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.

Yep, I've got nothing but good things to say about Duolingo :-)

As an acquirer of startups, maybe.

As a viable language-learning app (on the freemium tier), it's mixed and getting worse. I'm a 3.5-year Duolingo user.

See the 2/2023 HN post "How Duolingo reignited user growth" [0] describing how they/ the former CPO aggressively traded off reducing the utility for actually acquiring language vs too much gamification (not all users want 'Candy Crush' levels of gamification), user growth, leaderboards, challenges, cutesy animations, inventing silly revenue streams like 'streak protect' (all prior to the 7/2021 IPO, ticker 'DUOL').

Duolingo locked the Chinese course mid-2022 [1], that means no more fixes ever, no corrections, the broken or missing audio (and answers, and hints) stay broken or missing, all discussions (users helping users, handy links to third-party sites) are frozen. For no good reason. They don't give a hoot for gamifying valuable user contributions which add/improve course content/fix mistakes. If any of you were contemplating paying for DL Chinese before they locked it on the charitable basis that they'd fix the broken bits someday after they'd banked the IPO loot, well obviously not now. (Here's e.g. Langoly's list of "The 11 Best Apps to Learn Chinese (Mandarin) Fluently" [2])

By comparison the Spanish course is alive and being improved; they added Stories.

TL;DR: optimizing the product to juice up metrics like DAU prior to the IPO is good for valuations, but is not a great long-term approach to a language learning app and its community.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/zjnwmh/why_is_chi...

[2]: https://www.langoly.com/learn-chinese/

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#88

Post by steveridout »

smcin wrote: post #87
steveridout wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I've got nothing but good things to say about Duolingo :-)

As an acquirer of startups, maybe. As a viable language-learning app (on the freemium tier), it's mixed and getting worse. I'm a 3.5-year Duolingo user. See the 2/2023 HN post "How Duolingo reignited user growth" [0] describing how they/ the former CPO aggressively traded off reducing the utility for actually acquiring language vs too much gamification (not all users want 'Candy Crush' levels of gamification), user g…

I agree that there can sometimes be a tradeoff between retention and learning. But having been on the inside the overwhelming impression I got was that Duolingo really does care about teaching effectively. They have a whole Learning Area with multiple teams dedicated to this and I believe the CEO and exec team really care about it.

Obviously Duolingo isn't perfect but they're very aware that there's still lots to improve. And sure, maybe their approach to gamification isn't for everyone, and that's fine, since there are many people who do like it!

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#89

Post by vidarh »

conradfr wrote: post #76
vidarh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's a good exception - if someone put of the blue appears to push a big discount, it can reflect a high cost of raising capital.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#90

Post by wongarsu »

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…

> Considering that this will only apply to failing products

Companies like Google often shut down products that would be called incredibly successful if they were a startup or small business. In $BigCorp, the yardstick is their main moneymaker, and if you are less profitable and don't fit in the larger strategy you can get cut simply to help the company keep focus on what's important.

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