Comment by dennybritz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dennybritz | Hacker News Reader

Great job, I admire you for sticking with for so long despite the (slower than expected?) growth. You must be really passionate about what you're building, which is what counts most. I'm an avid language learner myself.

Here are a few things I'm thinking. You probably have thought about these yourself, but anyway:

- Have you ever thought about increasing the price? I find $5/month to be at the very low-end for something that a language learner may be using regularly. If I find the product useful I'd be happy to pay $25/month or more for it. Increasing the price also has the side effect the you'll get "serious" language learners to sign up, which is probably what you want.

- Have you thought about recommending appropriate texts your users based on their difficulty? I don't know anything about Chrome plugins, but I assume that you can collect data about which pages and texts users are browsing, how often they're clicking on stuff, and so on. That sounds like very valuable data that you could use to add more value and data network effects to your product.

- Have you thought about selling to organizations (schools, classes, meetup groups) instead of individuals?

Thanks very much.

- Increasing price. Yes, it started at only $10/year, and I've gradually increased it as the product has improved. It's very difficult to know the optimal price. I use split testing for some things but it feels wrong to do this for price, and with current conversion rate it would take ages to get meaningful results anyway. I'm hesitant to push price too high because lowering it back down would be tricky. Existing users paying a higher price would be annoyed. Also, at this stage I think increasing the user base would be more valuable long term compared to milking the current users for more money. I've been wondering if I could add a higher priced tier in future for more advanced features.

- Yes! I definitely want to recommend texts to people based not only on difficulty, but also on interest. This is something that will become more valuable with more users and a larger, higher quality library of texts. It isn't highest priority right now, but hopefully in future.

- Yes. I developed some features to target at teachers managing a class of students: http://blog.readlang.com/2014/02/12/readlang-for-teachers.ht.... I got a bunch of teachers using it with real classes but decided to abandon the idea because: 1. The response was positive but usage wasn't what I'd hoped. 2. Focus. As one guy I've got enough on my plate making an awesome product for self motivated individuals. Diluting my focus and the focus of the product seems like a very bad idea.

> I use split testing for some things but it feels wrong to do this for price

You can do the A/B testing only on the pricing page. For ex, A would display $5 and B would display $10. When the user get to the checkout display always the lower price and tell the user he got a discount. You can measure the % that get to the checkout and the bounce rate at the checkout.

That's a simple but great idea! I've pondered the difficulty of A/B testing price before and had not come across it (or thought of it myself). Thanks.

Glad I could help, its not my idea tho... credits to: http://www.abtestingbook.com/

Why not grandfather current users in at the current price and only increase the price for new users?

If you need to drop the price back down then drop the price for all existing users too. If you're charging monthly this is easy.

Yeah, this would be my recommendation as well. Others have taken this approach and it just makes people like you even more because they get to feel like early adopters who are being rewarded - and you actually then lose nothing at all.

I always grandfather users. And it's easy when raising prices. The old users get to keep the old cheaper price and are happy.

I was referring to the difficulty when I:

1. Raise prices too high

2. Conversion rate and revenue is harmed, so I then revert to the lower price

3. I now have a bunch of old users paying a higher price, and they might be annoyed when they see the price has gone down. At a minimum I'd need to alter their payment plans to give them the new cheaper price in future

I guess it wouldn't be that difficult. Still, it wasn't long ago since the last price rise and for now I'd rather focus on growing and retaining the customer base.

Yes, alter the payment plan. Old users find out their subscription price has dropped -- that's a happy surprise not an annoyance. Assuming monthly billing. Yearly might be more complicated; perhaps extend the subscription length.

>Existing users paying a higher price would be annoyed.

Just put them back on the cheaper plan and refund them the difference, if this ever happens. It's an easy fix.

I second the price increase idea - or perhaps another tier for usage. Ideally the free tier should be enough for a very casual users, or enough to test, but once they get serious they are incentivized to purchase something. You could try doing a timed trial too - 30 day for free usage perhaps. As others have mentioned I wouldn't worry too much if you need to lower prices in the future - as long as you reduce the monthly fee that your older customers get I am sure they will be happy.

Also what kind of marketing are you doing? Often with projects that one is passionate about the drive is to build more features as opposed to build a user base. I think your product is developed enough feature-wise (I am certainly looking forward to trying it now that I have heard of it), and so I wonder what you are doing to build your user base. Off the top of my head I would suggest talking to people in language learning forums & communities, creating a newsletters / reminders to keep your existing users engaged, and possibly running targeted advertisements if you haven't already.

I am sure you have thought about it, but how about pricing it per language? It might be a good idea to price it at $50 per language.

Also the on-boarding is a bit difficult, I should be able to see a few words / phrases before I install a plugin. FYI I have never installed a plugin other than an Adblocker

"Also, at this stage I think increasing the user base would be more valuable long term compared to milking the current users for more money. "

It is much, much easier to convince a user who is already paying you money to pay more than it is to convince a brand new person to start paying you at all.

The trick is that most people won't be happy paying more for the same product - so you need to find ways to up-sell new products and features to your existing userbase.

This is another place where "business" accounts could be useful. If you were to launch a more expensive product aimed at businesses, you could market it to your existing individual users. The chances are some of them would be able to convince the company they work for to shell out - and a testimonial from an existing employee is going to be much more effective than a cold-call sales process.

You considered a trial where you keep a low price for 3-6 months then a higher one? They see both in the beginning with no trickery. Just a clear indicator they try it cheap and keep it inexpensively.

Forgive me for jumping in with yet more unsolicited advice, but I can't help thinking that all your users should be paying at least $5 per month.

An example transition plan:

* switch new users to a free trial -> sign up to $5/month for continued access * observe conversion rate from trial users to paying customers * perform `conversion rate x existing active user base` calculation * send apologetic email to existing users pointing out that free != sustainable, with offer to grandfather in free access to any who feel strongly enough to send you a personal email about it

Your price points are out out touch with reality.

I've been using readlang for about a year now, and while I love the product, would never pay $25 a month for it.

It's a great product, but $25/mo is 3x more than a netflix subscription, over 2x the cost of 1TB on Dropbox, etc.

This not to mention that the vast majority of users are students and people trying to train themselves to be able to work or study in new countries.

Hundreds of dollars a year might not be a lot to you, but I assure you it is for the vast majority of people who would want this product.

Total revenue from the users who are willing to pay this might still be higher than the amount of users he loses who are not willing to pay $25 a month.

I'm not saying $25/mo is a good price point, however, personal experience has taught me that (at least on products I've launched) increasing prices has always led to more revenue and profit.

Please don't expect an indie software developer to be able to compete price-wise with Dropbox or Netflix.

There's (still) plenty of space in the market for boutique software offerings. I think it's his marketing that needs tweaking, not the pricing. Getting better copy and better targeting could mean 10x more revenue, at which point he can think about cutting prices.

I'm not expecting him to compete with dropbox and netflix, I'm just giving examples of what consumers are thinking when they compare the money they are spending to the value they are receiving for it.

I'm also merely giving my feedback as someone who (1) has a very good salary (2) enjoys readlang and uses it nearly daily (3) enjoys supporting indie software developers, that even I personally would balk at paying such a steep price, as the value would not be worth it to me.

I think feedback from consumers like myself can be valuable, as I also know others who use readlang, and none of them have anything more than a part-time job or PhD stipend which would price all of those people out of the software as well.

Also, I did not say to tweak the pricing, I was responding to the suggestion above to raise prices 5x what they are currently, and that I thought it was a bad idea.

I'd never sign up for $25 a month. That's ridiculous. The value isn't there.

Where his pricing is now is good, and I'm seriously considering getting on board.

Steve - For the love of god, do not listen to any of this! You should 2x or 3x your prices.

Focus on the users that get the most utility out of the product, and relentlessly focus and optimize for them. There's plenty of value there for people that truly want to learn another language. These price comparisons to Netflix are comically misleading.

Agreed. At an absolute minimum, they should be doubled. If someone is going to buy this, it's worth at least that.

If you're serious about learning a language, and it's a tool that you're going to use every day that actually helps you learn, then $25/mo is a good deal.

I pay $30/month for FluentU.com just to watch embedded Youtube videos with the Spanish transcription beneath it as it plays:

http://www.fluentu.com/spanish/videos/#difficulty

ReadLang.com ($5/mo) has much better tech for video transcriptions (Google Translate API can translate idioms and phrases like "lo que ..." instead of only individuals words).

For example, check out http://readlang.com/library/538e3607eef55e3f75000e2c/scroll/... (Extr@ - Episode 1)

An idea for OP is to split apart text and video as a first-class distinction in the Library UI. I didn't even know ReadLang had videos until I was already a subscriber - I thought it was purely for text and websites.

If you can boost the amount of video content, I imagine you can boast about your video transcription offering like FluentU.com does which is the reason they got me to pay $30/mo to them.

One thing I like about the language-learning field is the subscription model. Living in Mexico, I was paying $15/mo for Fluencia.com without actually using it. "Why would I cancel? Surely I'll start learning Spanish any day now!" I finally buckled down and starting hitting the Spanish hard and ReadLang is an essential part of my kit.

I agree that the value isn't there for $25/month but charging $5/month isn't going to make him any money either. I would change this so customers get one (basic) lesson per language for free then have to pay to keep going. For that I would charge $75 for the year on each language. That would be a small bump on the annual but he'd be getting paid up front.

> I assume that you can collect data about which pages and texts users are browsing

If a plugin tangential to browsing history collects all my browsing history, then I'm not going to install that plugin.

If it was changed to do that, then just outright making the plugin free and selling browsing histories might be more profitable than trying to sell the plugin.

I agree. Just to reassure people, Readlang does not collect your entire browsing history. It does store all the URLs for the words you actually clicked on to translate. This is probably more useful for my use case anyway, since these are the URLs which would likely be interesting to other language learners.

Note that I consider these individual words and URLs to be private, but in aggregate, if multiple people visit the same URL, that anonymous data is sharable. I currently rank the most popular domains that people translate words from for each language within Library -> Web Sites: http://readlang.com/links (it isn't completely automatic, every now and then I need to manually approve new entries in the list - that reminds me - I haven't done it in a while!)

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