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Comment by mjaques | Hacker News Reader

I sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning: https://deckmill.com

Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation, etc.) and human reviews.

Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it, mostly customer support.

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I just downloaded your sample deck for Spanish. One of the sentences is:

  Front: I'm not happy.
  Back: No soy feliz.

This doesn't seem correct to me.

I'm not happy (right now) => No estoy feliz.

No soy feliz means something like "I'm not a happy person".

EDIT: I should have mentioned that I'm not a native Spanish speaker. It turns out I'm wrong here, and that either estoy or soy would work in this case.

You are correct, but I'd say this one is fundamentally ambiguous (I'm Portuguese myself, where this also applies), as it is a one-to-two mapping here. Without further context you can't really choose one or the other, so we just left it as is :).

I've always found it most painful trying to figuring out when to use verbs that translate to other verbs depending on context. It's just personal experience of course, so not sure if it really matters that much between all languages or types of learning.

Maybe a hint which one is intended in this case would be useful/possible or a hint that it could be ambiguous/other translation possible? I've built a couple of tiny tools for myself to learn languages and I've always run into the same issue with ambiguous translations. I usually ended up with adding some personal reminder or sometimes just (1)/(2) to resolve it, but I never found a consistent resolution for it.

Native Spanish speaker here (ES-MX, specifically, if it matters). I think this is one of the cases where a solid general rule breaks down in the specifics.

You are correct about the difference between "ser" (to be, permanently/over an indeterminate time) and "estar" (to be in a particular state right now). But "No soy feliz" sounds perfectly idiomatic to me, even for a relatively transient state of sadness. ("No estoy feliz" doesn't sound wrong to me either, but feels just slightly less natural than "No soy feliz" even in a context like "No soy feliz ahorita", with an explicit "right now").

As a note: "No estoy contento" (Also "I am not happy", or maybe "I am not in a good mood") is definitely "estoy", rather than "soy". No clue why "No soy feliz" does feel idiomatic.

Thanks for taking the time to write this. As you probably guessed, I'm not a native Spanish speaker. (I should have mentioned that in my comment!)

One feedback can you have tooltips/labels for the "Available Languages" section. Personally speaking my limited familiarity with flags makes it tough to find out how many languages are available.

Cool product. One bit of feedback: after downloading a deck, the page redirects away to "how to use our decks". This is confusing and not intuitive - my workflow was that I wanted to download the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced deck for one language and I had to navigate back to that language 3 times.

Huh, that's good feedback, thanks for pointing it out - I don't think we had considered the workflow of a user downloading all the decks back to back.

Linking to this comment from your Show HN, which describes how your decks are different from what people can put together themselves:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25678152

Why is there no pricing info?

I read through the entire site and was convinced there was no price, but when I came back to reply I found that there is an element at the top of the homepage (next to "No subscriptions. No frills.") that says "Get access to all our decks for just €15.99."

On the front page it says €15.99 for access to all decks forever, including updates.

Hmm, maybe we need to make the pricing pop more :D.

Definetly do that.

I completely missed it because the price was in the text in refular font and it wasn't on the Download page or anywhere else on the site. There's no Buy page, so the impression I was left with is that you have a sneaky onboarding that reveals the price after a sign-up... or something similarly shady. Not a very good initial impression.

> I sell cheap but high-quality

LPT: use "affordable" instead of cheap, it basically means the same thing but has a totally different connotation

I disagree, "affordable" is newspeak for "you're able to afford it", I don't want something that's merely affordable, I want something that's cheap!

> I disagree, "affordable" is newspeak for "you're able to afford it"

eeeh that's always been the meaning, what's newspeak about it ? What do you think the "afford" part of "affordable" is for ?

> I want something that's cheap!

That's ok, but then you probably don't want something that's "high quality" like the OP mentions, "cheap" is newspeak for "low quality"

Anyways, this is marketing 101

No. Affordable also means low quality, it just means low quality that costs more than it ought to.

Except, this is software, there's just about no correlation between charged price and quality.

I can sell you the same piece of software at different prices and it will be exactly the same quality.

How do you guys generally acquire customers?

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