Ask HN: Next steps for professional translation startup
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Site description

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Linguaquote was created to provide a platform for quality Language Service Providers (LSPs – both freelance and agency) to present themselves and be compared in terms of expertise, location and price in a quick to use interface with no registration.

The LSPs displayed have all been pre-approved by national translation associations, higher education, translation specific qualifications and finally vetted on-site to ensure that only established professionals are displayed to buyers.

This is not the case on other platforms, even the largest of these, and it should remove a lot of the doubt and uncertainty in sourcing translation. Just pick your linguist with the matching expertise (aerospace, financial, legal, medical etc. etc.) and budget level or location and make a start.

For multi-language projects I will create a new user role for buyers to save their project details and store their files in their dashboard, if they’d rather register and do so. As it stands quotes are generated on an individual language by language basis.

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https://www.linguaquote.com

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Despite being a long-time tinkerer, I’m no designer or coder (as you’ll see!) and I’ve put this together with Drupal (6), a custom module and lots of contributed modules as a ‘solo founder’. Bootstrapped is the name of the game.

I’ve 150 free users since launching earlier in the year, and now I’m looking to move out of MVP mode. I’ve got a D7 version in the works (removes need for custom module, all handled by CCK, if you’re into Drupal) and will incorporate the above-mentioned project management dashboard for buyers.

Now, I don’t want perfection-paralysis or feature-creep to set in, of course, before a wider roll-out, and I know enterprise plan users will mainly want a decent amount of leads coming in rather than project management tools, but I still tend to think that it would help justify the spend if users could manage multilingual projects. It would have the added benefit of retaining and staying in contact with buyers through their accounts.

Should I hold back on marketing and sales until this new version is complete? Or would my MVP be enough to continue testing reactions and feedback?

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Other information

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- I’ve been blogging semi-regularly on relevant topics to try to improve search traffic and create a voice, but with few backlinks that’s not kicking in yet (several months in) – I’m only sharing links online to the translation community

- This translation community is very wary of overly commercial startups, as more unscrupulous sites have managed to damage the industry’s reputation in the past (and present…), so convincing linguists that I’m ‘on their side’ (I’m a translator too!), trying to make the industry more accessible to buyers and less dominated by the large agencies with marketing budgets like pirate treasure hordes, is an uphill struggle

- As they are so wary of commoditization and profiteering (possibly in part because it’s such an academic profession), retweeting/sharing is rare if I post from the Linguaquote account, but more common if I post under my personal account

- But the site was well received by the mailing list of the UK's largest translation association

- A recent Adwords experiment didn’t go brilliantly, probably meaning I need to work on my Adwords campaigns, conversion processes, or raising awareness of the utility of the site – a targeted mail campaign might help with this?

- My top-end pricing tier is based on patio11’s ‘don’t leave money on the table’ idea from his podcast with Amy Hoy [1], but perhaps I’d find this price hard to justify to buyers at present (even if one sale a month would cover that cost with ease)

Your questions and comments are very welcome; how’s it looking, and what next?

[1] www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/18/kalzumeus-podcast-ep-2-with-amy-hoy-pricing-products-and-passion/