I ran a SaaS app for 17 years. A true story.
Before 2009, I taught English. Out of sheer necessity, I started doing Part-Time Translator . I hung around http://proz.com and even won a translation contest there.
July 2009: I wrote a word add-in in vba that called Google Machine Translation. I built it for myself and named it “Google Translate for translators.” Little by little, I started thinking about selling it. I mentioned the idea on excelhome and got mocked for it. I wrote posts about my "inventions" on proz.com. Not long after, my first paying users showed up. I still remember Bill Gray, Michael Jackson (yes, really), and Tor Rustad—those last two still use it today.
Here it how roughly the first versions looks!
Yes, that's right. I made a tiny program. I wrote a post. Got 59 replies and some paid users. I guess it's a simpler world back then!
Late 2009: I rewrote it in vb6 and it "grew" like this:
And it grew and grew and soon there were not enough space in one interface. Tabs came to the rescue!
Early 2010, I went Beijing for Chinese New Year and complained to my little brother about how painful vb6 was—and how unreliable the system hotkeys were. He suggested rewriting it in autohotkey.
From 2010 to 2011, development was brutal. My hair fell out in clumps. This time I built a pop-up UI. Back then, machine translation was phrase-based: for each phrase in a sentence, users could pick different translations and even tweak the word order. Looking back now, all that effort feels like it went to waste.
In 2014, I basically let both projects fend for themselves.
In early 2017, Shali was born. Suddenly it felt like we never had enough money, so I picked gt4t back up, put my head down, and worked like crazy—eventually creating my “secret sauce”: using glossaries to correct machine translation.
This feature was highly praised by http://proz.com kudoz champion Michael Beijer—a big-bearded, tattooed guy—who said it beat you-know-who by a mile. With an influencer like that talking it up, sales shot up.
And come to appreciate the icon for GT4T I created before the era of AI. This represents the best of my artistic skill and taste!
Still this is a kind of success story. GT4T still is alive. It brings in around 2000 USD monthly, steady and stable.
It's very different now. It utilizes the power of AI and gives translation suggestions by keyboard shortcuts like this:
It is also a file translator that translates the largest number of file formats. It's a real local-first app, handles files locally and It doesn't upload users files.
Well. That's the story of a 17-year app with moderate success. I hope you guys enjoy it. This is a work before AI. It's really hard handling formats like .PDF and .docx files.
It’s all about AI now, and I tried to keep up with all the excitement and vibed two other projects. But I don't seem to be able to repeat my "success" sadly :-) They are:
https://chinaready.site Make your websites load faster by back-proxying them to premium routes.
https://just-vibe.it Help you save on AI costs on vibe-coding.
What's changed and what's not? I feel lost. Maybe I am too old? I am in my 50s 🥲