Readlang – My Bootstrapped Language Learning Web-App
Published in 2014, this chronicle by @BenSS details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 65 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 51 comments
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 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! ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.