Hey, I'm Steve, the creator of Readlang

Introductions
#1

Hello everyone, I’m enjoying the podcast and looking forward to getting involved in this community.

I’ve spent the past 16 months single handedly creating the site Readlang, a freemium SaaS web-app for reading and learning languages. It has 4,500 users (126 paying), gets great feedback and is generating revenue, but still only a trickle, and nowhere near enough to earn a living. All the advice I’ve heard since I started this suggests that a B2B product would have been the smarter route to actually making money, but too invested to give up just yet!

I’ve just written an epic blog post summarising this journey so far: Readlang - My Bootstrapped Language Learning Web-App - it’s pretty damn long, but I’m open with my numbers so you should find it interesting. Would love to get feedback or advice!

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#2

Welcome! Look forward to your insight here…

#3

B2B might be where the money is but those B2B apps can be boring to work on. And to talk about at a party when someone asks, “so what do you do?” :smile:

#4

Yeah, that’s very true. Consumer products are definitely cooler.

Note to self: checklist for vetting my next startup idea:

  • Could it return a liveable wage within 6 months?
  • Will it make me sound sexy at parties? :smile:
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#5

Oh I don’t know, I find my boring business app fascinating. I’ve also got the kernel of a party pitch, something about changing the world one multinational at a time…

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#6

Awesome concept. You said you have paying customers, what are they paying for?

#7

Currently single word translations are completely free, but multi-word phrases are limited to 20 / day on the free plan. To remove this limit, you need to pay either $4.99 / 3 months or $14.99 / year.

I’m probably going to restrict the free plan more and raise prices soon to see what effect that has.

1 Like