Readlang – My Bootstrapped Language Learning Web-App (opens in new tab)

I love this story because it shows the true reality, for most people, of starting your own company. It is a long haul of trying and re-trying things and looking at the results. There is a lot of joy when you see the graph move up, and a lot of self doubt when it stagnates or moves the other way.

One thing that rubs me wrong with HN is a general feeling it creates in my gut that my projects isn't valid because It's taken us 5 years to get stable. I feel like the pattern is to take a bunch of people's money, blow through it and then quit when your idea didn't work in 6 months. Then repeat. No point in sticking with something unless it's an instant smash hit.

Steve, I think your idea is pretty solid and there surely must be customers out there like schools that will add large numbers of accounts. If you can build it to where you can sit on the beach doing support then what a great life that could be! All the best to you.

Great writeup and kudos to getting something off the ground. Some back of the envelope calculations.

Let's assume you want to make $100k/year. Which is a pretty decent life in most places.

Right now the numbers are showing about $8.30/paying customer. To hit that target will require ~12,000 more subscribers. Not a crazy number.

But, at the conversion rate of .51% (126/24,717 uniques->paying) that means you'll need to get ~298 million uniques to your site (or 56 million signups). That's tough. Getting the entire population of the U.S. to come check out your site requires a huge marketing budget.

If you can convert all signups into paying customers (currently at 2.7% conversion) that goal becomes much closer. About 19% of all uniques are turning into signups (paid or otherwise). That's pretty good. If all of them were paying that's better than 1/3rd of the way there.

So really, for this to work for 1 full-time person to make $100k, conversions free->paid need to go up significantly, but probably pricing needs to go up as well and/or the tiered structure needs to be rethought.

Great job Steve! Very encouraging and inspirational to read your post. I am usually a passive reader and mostly a consumer when it comes to blogs or stackoverflow/quora. Today I felt to post a comment because it really hit close. I too was doing very similar to what you wrote about. I have been building and managing http://www.marathimitra.com/ - an Indian language learning website for over last 10 years. I did make an attempt to make a business of out it for 18 months (from 2012 through 2013) but was unsuccessful and then went back to a full-time coding job. During those 18 months, I too did almost similar hacks, initiatives and improvements that you mention: mailchimp, paypal subscriptions, UI improvements and more. In the end I just was too tired of doing everything myself. I did bootstrap it myself and all along the 18 months and many more years before that I was the sole designer, programmer, project manager, content aggregator, marketing and sales person. It took a toll on me.

The big lesson I learned is that it is extremely important to have a co-founder. It would have been awesome if I had another person working with me equally invested as me with different skill set and that could have allowed me to last even longer and kept me going.

I wish you good luck and many best wishes.

Thanks for sharing a great story. Best.

I'm also running a bootstrapped language-learning site, but focused on Mandarin Chinese (http://www.fastchinese.org/). It's interesting how similar my experience has been. It's tempting to start blogging and do a write-up of my experience like this one, but I'm not ready to take on the overheads that blogging brings with it.

I think one thing that makes language learning difficult is that users are almost guaranteed to eventually churn. Either they reach a level where they have no further need for online learning, or they give up/lose interest.

It's a particularly difficult space right now, as VC-backed ventures like Duolingo have set expectations of irrational business models ($0 pricing/advertising) and are taking a lot of the oxygen out.

I think the future looks a bit brighter. Duolingo as it currently exists seems very far from being sustainable. I see 4 ways that the Duolingos' of the world might go (the "translation services" model is a bit unrealistic, in my view):

1. They'll start charging and become the next Rosetta Stone.

2. Rosetta Stone will acquire them. Probably the most likely outcome given the prominence of Duolingo, the extent that it must be impacting on RS, and the upside to RS if they did acquire Duolingo.

3. They'll fizzle out. According to CrunchBase they've raised ~$40MM and have 12 employees. Their marketing budget must be quite massive, and their headcount is likely to grow.

4. They'll become ad-supported, which would probably make them sustainable but not nearly profitable enough that it would make their investors happy.

Original author here. Great to see it appear on Hacker News, please feel free to ask questions!

Really nice story. I find it inspiring. Just keep up with the great job! I think it could grow really big.

P.S. I find it really inspiring, so much that I'll add it to my weekly newsletter which I send on Sundays (shameless plug: http://startupitis.com/).

I thought you were on to something with creating a product for language professors for a second. I have been thinking about making a product for the language space. If I did it would be targeted towards the teachers and language teaching institutions. Like someone commented, there will be eventual churn on the consumer side. The teacher's job is to teach students language, how well they do that is another conversation, so when you sell to a teacher it seems more likely they'll continue using the product for as long as they are teaching.

I was thinking about making a similar product (http://ciaocards.com/), so it's very interesting to see such a thorough post on your journey with your app. When I was evaluating my idea I was mostly worried about a small revenue (B2C, hard to market, not crucial when learning languages) which I see unfortunately is the case here. I wish you getting more traction and customers!

Language learning is hard work, and most people fail quickly at it once they realize it'll be several hundred hours before they'll be at a useful level. That's probably why it's so hard to make money with a product primarily tailored to the needs of intermediate and advanced learners. Learner attrition means that most people attracted by the idea of language learning don't make it that far.

I've tried Readlang briefly and thought the look of the site was much nicer than the clunky interface sported by LingQ, but I still didn't feel ready to make free reading a major part of my study as a ~B1+ self-learner of Spanish. Most texts for natives, even children's books like Harry Potter, are still very slow/difficult to read at my current level.

Import tools are nice, but the content I stumble on is often too hard for me to read efficiently. What I really need is help finding stuff I like that is only ~5% unknown words so I can read more fluidly/enjoyably. I'm not sure how to tackle the problem, but if you can crack the content discovery nut it will make the tool more accessible to lower level language students at the "widest" portion of the language learning funnel.

Another thing I've noticed is that Readlang seems very "quiet". Other platforms like Duolingo and LingQ have active user forums where people can share their experiences and problems. It'd be nice to have a discussion place to swap suggestions, get encouragement, and (most important) see testimonials/success stories.

Anyway, good luck. I hope the product is still around when I'm more advanced and ready to make reading a bigger part of my study.

Wow, pretty detailed stuff. I suspect I may have saved myself a lot of grief if I had seen more articles like this when I quit my job a few years back. I have spent more time than he has and earnt less money!!!

Hi Steve,

I also have a language learning startup at http://www.nihongomaster.com which is targeted purely for Japanese learners. Your post is an interesting read because I've gone through all the phases you've detailed. It's a uphill battle but overall a great experience.

I emailed you so we can keep in touch. I think entrepreneurs in the language learning space can help each other out and encourage each other to succeed.

Nice work, Steve!

It's great to see someone making money with this; I have a similar project for Japanese + English[1] which is more of a hobby site right now, but I'll start following readlang.com more closely.

[1] http://macaronics.com/

Nice work steve! Be sure to follow up with any pricing changes and their effect.

Is there a tl;dr for that post? On skimming it, the story sounded so harrowing, I'm not sure whether you are planning on keeping the site open or not. Bottom line: Is it still worth signing up?

Well gosh that's a long blogpost. If I were you I would have split it up in to several posts, by theme or something. ;)

Why not add advertising, you could possibly add in-context ads, and google adsense ads, and make some extra cash.

ok, I was going to email you, but I'll post a couple of suggestions here so others can agree or disagree.

You've got just shy of 5000 users, but how active are they? How many daily/weekly/monthly active users do you have?

If you've got a decent number of active users then those are people that can potentially become paying users. So ditch the unlimited free version. Yes - ditch it.

Look at your weekly active users and see how many words they each translate. Presumably there is some kind of distribution, where 80% of users translate <100 words per week, then you have some power users that translate 1000 per week. Start with them and start telling them they need to pay to keep using Readlang once they have translated 80% of the words that they usually translate. A nice pop-up with a simple call-to-action asking them to pay. A:B test the pop-up message. You've then got dynamic pricing that is based on individuals' use habits.

Start with the power users and work backwards towards your regular users. See what happens as you get closer towards the 100 words/week guys.

If completely removing the free option is too aggressive for you, maybe once they reach the word limit they can dismiss the "pay to continue" pop-up but then it comes back every 5 words they translate after that. Try both strategies - experiment - see what works best.

You've only made $1k so far. I don't think there is any harm in being a bit more aggressive. You've build a good product - now is the time to test monetisation rather than adding features.

On the CRM side, you have done a little bit with Mailchimp, and that the reminders are opt-in. Make them opt-out.

Ditch Mailchimp. Make a $50 investment in customer.io - that will allow you to do CRM against 5000 users. Hit them with one email to all (which will use up half your 10k email allowance) with the most compelling email you can draft. Then use your remaining 5k emails to hit those that responded to your first email regularly and based on their actions (customer.io is really good when you get that right). /edit - just noticed extra emails on customer.io are really cheap so it's the user number limitation you really pay for. In that case send as many emails as you need to do some very active CRM experimentation for a whole month.

Reminds users that they have a text they have just started but not looked at again. Remind them they need to do flashcards everyday etc etc

Remember - if nobody complains about the price of your product, it's probably too cheap.

Lastly, make an iPhone app that works offline and allows translation of single words via an offline dictionary and includes the flash-cards which then syncs with your account when back online. I'd pay for that! ;)