Ask HN: How do you get users (and keep them)?

Most books / talks will advocate finding your customers first, which means listening for problems that they have. It doesn't mean there can't be a solution on the market already, because competition in itself is validation that there's a need, but it means you need to be better than your competition in executing 1-2 particular features your customers want.

A common example is a large enterprise product having so many features that certain customers are turned off from the bloat; you could step in here, execute 1-2 features well, and sell that (provided customers want that).

You've quantified this - 20x cheaper, 1.2x better, 0.2x faster ~= 5x better. That's a "nice" rating, not quite a "wow". Enough for people to switch, but not yet at the level where they'd be idiots for not switching. But AI will be become cheaper and faster and it sounds like you can engineer it to get into 10x improvement. Your Show HN didn't really make the quality difference obvious.

I'd say the next step is finding your customer acquisition channel. Google will be big because they own a bunch of channels - Google Lens, google.com, GSheets etc. You can't compete on these. Microsoft Teams has a worse product than Slack but conquers the market because MS Office is such a powerful enterprise channel.

You can probably compete against DeepL, see how they're reaching out to customers.

Translation is used a great deal in the world today. I personally make apps, we use localization tools like Lokalise and Loco (confusingly, https://localise.biz/). These come with auto-translations, but they kinda suck. And since they're probably API-based and care a lot about pricing, you can try pitching your tool to companies like this.

There's a huge gap in the Indonesian market if you can tackle that. Indonesia is the 4th largest population in the world, has thousand of dialects. So it's a big market, and English is taught in schools there in a similar manner that American schools teach Spanish.

Here's a sample of something we had trouble with, "Don't forget to share your referral code or link so you can get attractive bonuses." becomes "Jangan lupa membagikan kode referral atau tautan Anda agar Anda bisa mendapatkan bonus-bonus menarik." A correct translation would be "Jangan lupa bagikan kode atau link referral-mu agar kamu dapat bonus menarik."

There's a critical mistake here: "Anda" means "you" in the same way that "They" means "she" in English. It's excessively safe, and the capital A is also grammatically incorrect, so it becomes a clear watermark that this is a robotic translation. The Google translation basically becomes "Don't forget to share forward your referral code or Your connection so that You may obtain various bonuses."

Claude and GPT both have the same issues. Gemini gets this right, but it's aware of the bad translation and tries to justify that the bad translation is suited for formal. DeepL is popular in Indonesia because it's the most accurate so far.

Anyhow, even if you're not proficient in Indonesian, you might look into similar huge markets. Does Brazilian Portuguese make sense? Arabic is widely spoken too.

Speaking of middle eastern languages, Coleman Barks's translation of Rumi is one of the most popular in the world. It's also heavily botched. As a Muslim, I know that it doesn't even really make sense in context even though I speak no Persian. But Barks is an excellent poet in his own right and rewrote Rumi as his own poetry.

The Arabic world is a rich source of poetry, and I find that AI has a lot of potential to getting it right, but you have to tell it to keep the meaning and feel of the original. While western "poetry" is seen as romantic, Arabic poetry may also be similar to rap battles with two parties roasting one another. The religious type have both love and roasting. Al-Ghazali is a favorite and a major reason I got into Arabic. Translations are a relatively new thing; much of the early Islamic nations just chose to learn Arabic because it was less effort than translating.

Sorry for the rant, hope it helps.