So far Alex and Andrii have kept the team small. On the app stores, Mate offers their entire app with all the above features free for seven days before requiring payment. Mate Pro features phonetic transcriptions, articles for nouns, and a phrasebook where you can create lists of words you want to learn. If you choose to purchase the pro version, you gain access to dozens of extra features geared to help the aspiring language learner. For browser extensions, Mate runs a freemium model providing their basic text look-up function free of charge. The majority of Mate’s business is through its browser extensions for Chrome, Opera, Safari, Edge, and Firefox. Neither Google nor other apps like DeepL have the integrations we have.” Especially on iOS, our users adore that they can read websites without having to copy-paste. “I would say the translation quality isn’t much better than Google Translate,” says Alex. For the rest, Mate uses the Google Translate API. Mate has an API for the six most common languages on the platform (Alex says they make up 80 percent of all translations). “When working with a language that’s not your mother tongue, you can save 30-50 interactions per day with our service.” “We integrate nicely on the native level with any website,” says Alex. Instead of copy-pasting a word into Google Translate, customers double-click any word to translate it right from their browser window. Mate is a translator app targeted at expats, language learners, and digital nomads. While the other apps all ended up being scrapped, Mate stuck around and grew into the almost quarter-of-a-million-dollar business it is today. One step at a time, the duo collaborated to create and sell app versions of Mate, monetize users, and experiment with other apps. We ended up becoming real cofounders and we started a real company.” Today, he’s kind of our all-in-one, DevOps, CTO, and Project Manager. “I studied abroad in Ukraine for a semester and we met there,” says Alex. However, one of them, Andrii, stuck around and went on to become Alex’s cofounder. Most of the classmates who helped him eventually moved on to other things. We made these versions for other platforms but it still wasn’t making money.” “I approached my classmates at my university to make versions for other platforms like Safari and the App Store. He decided to take advantage of the demand he was seeing for Mate by porting it to other platforms. In 2016, Alex’s funds were running low and his other projects hadn’t panned out. “I was playing around with other things like game development.” “I had the luxury that I was young and didn’t have commitments,” he says. “It had magically grown to 130,000 users and I had a whole inbox full of people asking for improvements,” he says.ĭespite a large customer base, Alex didn’t monetize Mate at the time. An example of Mate’s full-page translation He nearly forgot about it, but then, two years later, he had another peek and was blown away. He created a Google Chrome extension and then uploaded it to the Chrome Web Store. While this would have been an idle thought to most, Alex had been coding since he was 13. “I got tired of copying and pasting everything into Google Translate and I felt it would be cool to just double click on words to get the translation.” “I was reading a lot of blogs, articles, and Wikipedia pages in English to learn,” he says. Like many, he spent hours reading content online he’d run through Google Translate. Developing Huge Solutions at 16īack in 2012, 16-year-old Alex was in high school in Ukraine learning English in the hopes of studying abroad for university. Here’s how they went from another no-name translation app to a featured product for iOS. He decided this was the perfect time to monetize.Īfter years of maneuvering in a hotly competitive app market, Alex and his cofounder, Andrii, pushed their way to the top of both the Mac and iOS App Stores to make $250,000 last year. When he checked how it was doing, it had reached 130,000 customers despite zero updates. After uploading it as an extension on the Chrome Web Store, he went to university and forgot about it for two years. Instead of cutting and pasting, Mate translated text in his browser window. By the time you’ve copied and pasted a piece of text into your translator and then put it back in context, you’ve lost two minutes and broken your flow.Īlex Chernikov created a simple browser extension called Mate when he was 16. Are you learning a new language? Then you probably know the pains of using online translation services.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |