robert_mygengo

Developer-centric opinions are for Hacker News.

Sorry man. We all worked hard on this and were excited to get it out; it's been well-received by our users and I wanted to post it. Did not mean to offend.

My full blog post:

Today we have some great news.

It’s been more than three years since we started our company—just a couple of friends in an apartment. There are now over 40 of us, in Japan, the USA, Germany, the UK and China.

We offer translation into 24 languages. Several million words are translated every month. We have over 5,000 truly tested translators in all timezones. 95 percent of jobs began in less than 28 minutes after the order was placed. And 99.996 percent of jobs are successfully approved by our customers, who number in the thousands.

We’re proud to now provide both a simple translation tool for individuals, as well as a platform and API for others to build a multi-language web. Among our customers who go global by using our API are international apparel companies, car manufacturers, a vast number of E-commerce websites, CMS solutions, localization solutions, well-known tech blogs and many more.

In addition, we’ve seen a number of new companies built from the ground up on our API.

So now, back to the news. As you might know, the name myGengo was based on the Japanese word "Gengo" 言語 (with a hard "g") which means "language.” We added “my” to make the language more personal.

But today we simply become “Gengo.”

It’s shorter, handier and easier to remember. It represents the simplicity and power that we want to offer to all our users.

Gengo reflects the global aspirations and perspective of our users. And if you like to think of a future where cross-language communication is simple (we do!), it’s now a verb.

So Gengo your blog to Japanese. Gengo an email to Spanish. Just Gengo it!

Have fun,

Robert Laing & Matthew Romaine Founders, Gengo

P.S. Oh, and we also made some changes to our website. Hope you like them. Over the next few months you’ll see even more improvements. Don’t forget to check out what’s going on right now on Facebook, where we are celebrating the name change :)

There will be some Gengo people there for sure :)

This is not necessarily bad advice. However it's kind of arrogant.

While "the point of an internship is [...] to learn what kind of work or industry you want to be in once you graduate, to try things out and live in cool places." is partly true (especially in the current economy) it's a pretty naive way of looking at yourself.

If you're doing an internship, you're probably not a fully-fledged and employable person yet. You probably aren't ready to take on a huge amount of responsibility. The internship is there to teach you some of the other aspects of working with others in a real company (not a college project) that you simply can't get from college. Most 25 year olds don't have those skills. Don't forget that.

It's a lovely job market right now in Silicon Valley, but it won't be forever. The individuals that have a bit of humility respect the fact they need to learn throughout their career, and in the long run will do better.

I don't really understand why this is on the front page, or what the point of the article is (apart from a grumble). Not saying it ain't so, but struggling to care...

This theoretically true statement "There is no reasonable economic justification for a customer to offer anything but a low-ball figure. " can, in practice, be irrelevant.

So unless you are a savant, following the OP's advice in enterprise sales can result in you leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. Because customers (especially at the early stage) often have a perceived value for something that is far more than you realized, or they have a budget, and their price is the budget. Steve Blank has great examples of these situations throughout his career.

The OP's advice makes sense for consumer sales (and I think he should clarify this).

This book gives a rounded and intelligent set of tools that work in almost all situations — and will make you rethink the thoughts you thunk about pricing: http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Profit-Game-Smarter-Branding/d...

Reading this makes me feel treated like a kid. As if Asana staff will be leaning over my shoulder the whole day like creepy startup Jesuses.

Plus Donnie and Kim, peeking round the door, desperately fishing for compliments on their cooking :)

I get it, you're all lovely. But this is too much.

Best part of this for me is that I can now actually pay to watch something outside of the US from an artist I like. If you don't live outside the US or UK you probably don't realize how rare that is.

I don't want to in any way refute the referenced article or the findings of the air crash investigators, because clearly the pilots here behaved incorrectly and I am just an outsider.

However I think it's worth at least mentioning that both airlines and aircraft manufacturers have a vested interest and significantly more resources to put behind demonstrating that pilot error is the primary cause of any accident.

For instance in this case you have... • poor training (pilots unprepared for alternate law) • possibly poor UI (de-coupling of controls, insufficient communication that aircraft had lapsed to alternate law) • small-scale systems failure (pitots)

vs • incorrect response and continued failure to understand aircraft attitude (in turbulence, with no visual cues, in a situation which 'fooled' three pilots)

...which makes it an interesting one for manufacturer and airline to definitively defend, but I would guess that they can and will absolve themselves from liability.

Bad names are good for SEO. Good names have no intrinsic SEO value.

e.g. Twitter, Skype, Foursquare are all pretty good names. But have no SEO benefit.

e.g. local-activities.com is good for SEO, but I've already forgotten it, it's so generic.

So do you want to build a big business, or just a nice tickover organic traffic-based business. That's the decision. If it's the former, go for a great name. If it's the latter, go with SEO.

I think the name is one of the factors, but probably not the primary factor. But the point of the article is not really about search engine business models.

I generally agree with this. I think it's just a suggestion that it's worth thinking about if you're at all considering Chinese market entry, instead of assuming your name will just "work".

Esrauch is right — but they have not announced details.

Guess you could use our services for a different reason instead. But we'll live.

Disclosure: My company. Factual note: Not actually a Series A, was a conv. note.

Hey guys

We currently source our API's machine translation from Google, but we're going to be connecting to several other providers in the next few months. Depending on Google's pricing model we may or may not include them in the roster.

We think it's best to connect to our API, because you can 'upgrade' to human translation without switching out code (it's just a single parameter in an API call).

If you want to try us out, we're currently running a $25-credits-free campaign to switch to our API. http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/translation-apis-google-shuttin...

(CEO, myGengo)

Disclosure: I'm the CEO of myGengo

We offer machine translation for free, and we'll continue to do so... I don't really see how this is spam.

(Disclosure, I'm the CEO of myGengo)

We just this damn second announced a special offer whereby you can switch to our translation API and get $25 free credits (AND you'll continue to get free machine translation). Bit ironic that you posted your link just now.

Check it out: http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/translation-apis-google-shuttin...

Bit more background info here (I co-founded the company that the person blogging here is working for, s'pose he'd better answer about the pay :)) http://blog.500startups.com/2011/01/24/how-to-create-a-succe...

Visa: If you have a college degree and/or significant experience it helps a lot but we know people who've managed to self-sponsor with just the experience.

But working for a traditional Japanese company is normally a soul-crushing experience for foreigners. There are not a lot of startups here :)

Above error has been fixed. Designer's error, not the author of the post :)

The table in the article was designed to be clearer and simpler than the above explanation for most users, and also not to represent that Simplified Chinese is suitable for all customers, which would be a misrepresentation.

I don't think this is the point.

You may wish to offer both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, but that's a choice — and the article is clearing up the confusion that most non-Chinese have about which relates to which nations.

I think this is a nice point: >> 2) I like to periodically update my dashboards to a) combat trend blindness

Totally happens all the time

Yeah I am pretty happy about the fact that I got an acronym

Oh: we have Tim, our resident blog editor, review the posts and tidy them up, then schedule them for during the week. We share the posts so we can all have a look before they go up.

Image problems in Japan? Not yet... we're not super careful at the moment but we're also pretty sensible people too.

Programming talent: The yen is super strong right now, so what looked cheap a year ago ain't so cheap now. But even if you take this into account, Japan dev salaries are lower than the Bay Area. Healthcare/insurance costs are also much lower given Japan's national health system. I know one senior/CTO level developer who was happy to come here and work for a Japanese company for almost 1/2 the salary and one of the reasons why he was happy with it was the healthcare cost reduction for his family.

Fixed costs: Office rent — You must get used to having a smaller space to move around in than some of the cavernous office spaces that (successful) SFO startups enjoy. But all in all value for money is roughly similar to other big cities. As a guide, we pay about US$3,000/month for a 700sq ft office w/kitchen/bathroom etc.

Travel etc except for cabs is cheaper I think.

Food is, hmm. Well you can eat for really cheap, or you can blow all your dough on one meal. Up to you.

Utilities etc — probably the same as anywhere else.

Hosting, accounting, whatever — As you might have seen (http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2115203) we use a whole bunch of US services for this stuff. We pay about $400/month for our accountant.

I have to credit Steve Blank with that one — and I recommend his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany unreservedly.

Interesting. I think most of this stuff is not a core competency for a startup.

I guess my responses are:

1. Zendesk We needed a good system, not really outsourcing of support. So, we do our support in-house but we use the Zendesk SaaS system to manage it.

2. GetSatisfaction As above.

3. SendGrid Email deliverability was not a piece of expertise we had in-house, especially when we were 2-3 people. Now we're 10-ish, our sysadmin guys STILL don't want to do this stuff.

4. MailChimp Hand-coding HTML emails more than once was boring.

5. Apigee This is something we were on the fence about. The metrics visualization probably swung it.

6. String No-brainer :)

7. ExpressionEngine Still a bit of friction in the decision between self-coding or using EE. But it's the 'annoying' stuff that swings it like plugin availability for new functionality, rather than do-it-yourself.

8. Chartbeat Couldn't do this ourselves.

9. Mint Could do this ourselves, too cheap to bother.

10. PivotalTracker As above.

11. Salesforce Industry standard, makes sense to outsiders, reliable.

12. RightSignature Awesome. No point building ourselves. Legal worries too if we did.

13. Gotomeeting Yeah no way we want to build this.

14. Xero The non-enterprise stuff we do is billed through our own app. But Xero makes sense for invoicing and proper accounts. Risk is, if you build it yourself, you need to know GAAP inside-and-out AND still it's a concern for outside auditors I think.

15. Dropbox Yeah no way.

BONUS: Office Glico Well, we could get an intern to go to the mom&pop store every week. But no.

Finally, some love for the Gleec.