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Readlang, my language reading site

 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
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SteveRidout
Diglot
Groupie
Spain
readlang.com
Joined 4301 days ago

65 posts - 121 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish

 
 Message 33 of 131
25 March 2013 at 11:50am | IP Logged 
senor_smile wrote:
Might I recommend www . mijnwoordenboek . nl
for the Dutch sidebar dictionary? Superb work so far on this tool. This is amazing.
Any thoughts of open sourcing it to be hosted a la lwt?


Thanks, I'll look into using that dictionary, the downside is that the page doesn't
resize gracefully in a narrow panel like wordreference does, so there'll be a horizontal
scrollbar which is a bit ugly, but I suppose it's better than nothing. :)

As far as open sourcing goes. I like the idea of doing it for individual use but I'm a
bit scared of other people/businesses hosting versions which will prevent me making money
from it, I could use a licence which prohibits this but it still seems risky. I'm working
on this full time at the moment in the hope that one day it'll provide enough to sustain
continued development via user subscriptions (but currently signed up users will continue
to have free access). So for now no, sorry, but perhaps I'll rethink in future.
1 person has voted this message useful



lwtproject
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Netherlands
https://learning-wit
Joined 4911 days ago

149 posts - 264 votes 
Speaks: French, Dutch*, German, English, Mandarin
Studies: Italian

 
 Message 34 of 131
25 March 2013 at 4:39pm | IP Logged 
SteveRidout wrote:
... which will prevent me making money from it ...


I don't think that you will make a lot money out of such a language learning website. IMHO you will never earn so
much money that all the hours of work will ever get paid.

From my LWT Project, I can only say that I worked on it about five full months fulltime (around 1200 hours) in total.
If one wants to earn about 30 Euros per hour, which is a rather low "IT salary", that would be 36,000 Euros. You
need 300 customers paying 120 Euros per annum to have the initial investment payed. And that's only the
beginning. There are server costs, you need a service desk, etc.
1 person has voted this message useful



SteveRidout
Diglot
Groupie
Spain
readlang.com
Joined 4301 days ago

65 posts - 121 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish

 
 Message 35 of 131
25 March 2013 at 5:51pm | IP Logged 
lwtproject wrote:
SteveRidout wrote:
... which will prevent me making money from it
...


I don't think that you will make a lot money out of such a language learning website.
IMHO you will never earn so
much money that all the hours of work will ever get paid.

From my LWT Project, I can only say that I worked on it about five full months fulltime
(around 1200 hours) in total.
If one wants to earn about 30 Euros per hour, which is a rather low "IT salary", that
would be 36,000 Euros. You
need 300 customers paying 120 Euros per annum to have the initial investment payed. And
that's only the
beginning. There are server costs, you need a service desk, etc.


Thanks for your honest opinion. You may well be right, it's the first time I've started a
venture like this, and it's a bit of an experiment with no serious downside if it happens
to fail.

My goals are relatively modest, I don't need it to make a *lot* of money, your example of
36000 Euros per year actually sounds pretty good, especially since this could continue
even if I wasn't improving the site. (In reality though, I have enough ideas that I'll
*definitely* continue to improve it if it gets to that stage!) I'm thinking of charging
something more like 1 or 2 euros per month, or more for more advanced features, since I
think this is what I'd probably be willing to pay for such a service. So to reach your
example numbers I'd need 3000 paying customers! But there are a huge number people in the
world who could benefit from this, especially if it runs well on smart phones and
tablets, and has easier access to content than it does currently. Am I deluded? :)

Server costs should be pretty low, since a lot of the work is being done client side in
the browser, and the back end is pretty lightweight, a JSON API running on Node.js and
MongoDB.

I'm curious if you ever envisaged making any money from LWT, or was it destined to be
free and open source from the start?

Sorry if this is a bit off topic for the forum, I'd love to continue the discussion in
private if you're interested.

Steve,
steveridout@gmail.com
1 person has voted this message useful



schoenewaelder
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5579 days ago

759 posts - 1197 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch

 
 Message 36 of 131
26 March 2013 at 3:08pm | IP Logged 
From the moment I first saw the L***q website, I assumed that from then on, no self respecting language learning software would be able to do without a similar functionality, and that the owner of the site would become a zillionaire through licensing it to Rosetta Stone, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet.

SteveRidout wrote:
...I'm thinking of charging something more like 1 or 2 euros per month...


Pricing of online services is weird. I'm sure Ive read utopian articles about how we should only be paying a few cents for services, because the billions of customers will make it still profitable, but things that aren't actually free always seem to me a bit on the expensive side, usually over $10 per month, which I guess is a nice round number, but if you use the service for a year, then you can end up paying quite a lot, perhaps more than alternatives, for example Linux distributions often are either free, or you pay for support, or a rcommended monthly donation, which means that after a year you've ended up paying more than for Windows. Anyway, the point is, it would be quite nice to see a site that actually was only charging $1 per month.

Edited by schoenewaelder on 26 March 2013 at 3:11pm

3 persons have voted this message useful



Light
Newbie
Canada
Joined 4444 days ago

30 posts - 42 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: French

 
 Message 37 of 131
03 April 2013 at 12:46am | IP Logged 
Anybody else sign up and not able to log in? I've tried logging in a few times, nothing but failure. I'm almost sure I didn't make a typo, but even if I did there's no reset password option.

Neat site anyways.
1 person has voted this message useful



SteveRidout
Diglot
Groupie
Spain
readlang.com
Joined 4301 days ago

65 posts - 121 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish

 
 Message 38 of 131
03 April 2013 at 3:49pm | IP Logged 
schoenewaelder wrote:

Pricing of online services is weird. I'm sure Ive read utopian articles about how we should
only be paying a few cents for services, because the billions of customers will make it
still profitable, but things that aren't actually free always seem to me a bit on the
expensive side, usually over $10 per month, which I guess is a nice round number, but if
you use the service for a year, then you can end up paying quite a lot, perhaps more than
alternatives, for example Linux distributions often are either free, or you pay for
support, or a rcommended monthly donation, which means that after a year you've ended up
paying more than for Windows. Anyway, the point is, it would be quite nice to see a site
that actually was only charging $1 per month.


Yes, it's tricky. People I've talked to say $1 or $2 per month is too low, that the biggest
obstacle to overcome is for people to pay anything, and that it's better to charge $5 or
$10 per month, maybe it's true but I prefer the low pricing option, it just seems fairer.
Anyway, until I improve it enough to attract more free users it's all academic anyway!

Light wrote:
Anybody else sign up and not able to log in? I've tried logging in a few
times, nothing but failure. I'm almost sure I didn't make a typo, but even if I did there's
no reset password option.


Thanks for letting me know. I've added a password reset option now, so please give it a try
and let me know if it continues to cause problems.
1 person has voted this message useful



Yufina
Newbie
Finland
Joined 4930 days ago

7 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English
Studies: Japanese, Korean

 
 Message 39 of 131
05 April 2013 at 3:24pm | IP Logged 
Looks really interesting. But I like to see more languages especially, korean or japanese.
Started just using RWT and really like it.
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6616 days ago

9753 posts - 15779 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 40 of 131
05 April 2013 at 4:08pm | IP Logged 
SteveRidout wrote:
36000 Euros per year actually sounds pretty good, especially since this could continue even if I wasn't improving the site.
Oh god please no. Look at this forum.


4 persons have voted this message useful



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