I'm curious why with $20K MRR it will take a Kickstarter to create a mobile app.
I also added a breakdown of costs to another comment deeper in this thread, in case that's of interest.
I've become the de facto internationalization expert at several companies and it's always rough. Everyone wants sentence structure to be simple and will fight you when you insist on something like interpolation instead of fancy string concatenation. Like Yoda, you will sound. Hmm!
And then there are straight up dodges like using Arabic numbers for everything in Japan because they have multiple counting systems. Apples and humans use different words when counting.
At the very least you will hire outside people to do the translations after you get the code in place to utilize them.
In Chinese, the Arabic numerals wouldn't get you out of this, as they replace the number, but not the measure word:
3 apples -- 三个苹果 -- 3个苹果
3 people [needing to sit in a restaurant, or being honored, or what have you] -- 三位 -- 3位.
3 cats -- 三只猫 -- 3只猫.
Will an Arabic number replace both the number and the measure word in written Japanese? What's being dodged?
[1] The ordinary measure word for 人 is 个, the same as for apples. 位 is more formal.
> In modern Japanese, cardinal numbers are given the on readings except 4 and 7, which are called yon and nana respectively. Alternate readings are used in month names, day-of-month names, and fixed phrases. For instance, the decimal fraction 4.79 is always read yon-ten nana kyū, though April, July, and September are called shi-gatsu (4th month), shichi-gatsu (7th month), and ku-gatsu (9th month) respectively. The on readings are also used when shouting out headcounts (e.g. ichi-ni-san-shi).
For names and fixed phrases, there's at least an argument that e.g. "shi" is just a part of the word historically descending from a then-current word for 4, as opposed to the word for 4 being different when it identifies April. (That argument definitely won't apply to headcounts, though.)
The decimal example made me curious whether decimal numbers like 4.79 might ever be written out in kanji rather than Arabic numerals. Decimals are enough of a recent foreign import that I might expect them not to have a native, character-based representation.
I don't fully understand it, but that is what a native speaker told me.
Paper is counted in "sheets" or "reams," for example. "I want a sheet of paper" is distinct from "I want a paper" -- outside of the context of a newspaper, the latter would be considered grammatically incorrect.
It's just that in Japanese, these are more or less standardized based on the kind of thing you're counting, so 個 for small, discrete objects, 匹 for small animals, 本 for long, thin things, 冊 for bound sheaves of paper, etc.
So as an example, an English interface could say something like "4 umbrellas", and the Japanese version could get away with something like "4 傘 [kasa, meaning 'umbrella']" if it's a list, but if it's in prose, you definitely need to be able to say "傘4本 [lit. umbrella 4-count-of-long-thin-object]" or something similar depending on the context.
>>> Japanese doesn't just have different measure words, but also different number words depending on the thing being counted.
You're talking about the measure words, not the number words.
For every four things I can catch that other people wouldn’t, There’s at least one thing I haven’t even heard of. Though in this case as long as the noun isn’t being interpolated I think there’s a simple in a fix for it.
You are much better off hiring someone with experience, and if you can afford it, a proper specialist.
I have a successful business, but it's at risk from competition if I don't build a new factory/buy some new equipment/produce promotional videos.
These are my current revenues (I might be able to pay you back) and these are my projections (I believe I will continue to be able to pay you back).
At any rate, do you believe his recurring costs, however you quantify them, are likely to be anywhere near $20k a month? It seems very likely that this is a profitable venture.
2018 costs:
48% to salaries and contractors (my wife and I are the only people on payroll, and draw $60k salaries for ourselves)
12.1% to operations (health insurance, renting a desk at WeWork, minimal travel, lot of SaaS subscriptions, misc equipment and other costs)
7.5% to PayPal fees (I really need to renegotiate this)
4.9% to AWS
4.2% to payroll taxes and other business administration
23% to profit (goes to saving up to quit my job last year, finish my book, and then dedicate ourselves to this full time)
Hope that's useful! Let me know if you have any other questions about this stuff and I'll do my best to be as transparent as I can without revealing every little detail.
Update: I should also mention that the salary we draw is in now way sufficient to actually support a family of 4 in Berkeley, so since quitting my tech job last October, we've been draining our savings and preparing to find a way to turn this little business into something that could sustain us longer term. I call it our flying rickshaw (the opposite of a rocketship). Outcome still uncertain.
And yes, PayPal fees are taking money from your children.
There's definitely stuff I can do to make AWS cheaper. Starting with just remembering to pre-pay for my instances ahead of time. One of my least favorite things to do is to log into the AWS console, so I try to do it as little as possible.
The CPU intensive part is due to autosave. When a lot of people are writing concurrently (even on the order of hundreds), that was usually what would take down the site in the old days. The site is weird in the sense that there are 10x more writes than reads, and then doing all of the linguistic analysis, badge granting, stats generating cause spikes when they happen as well. I'm @buster on Twitter if you want to continue the discussion there.