Success is a terrible teacher
This blog is being re-published with permission of uTranslated, a Pitt student startup that is in the current cohort of the AlphaLab business accelerator. To learn more about uTranslated and its platform for high quality translation services, visit www.utranslated.com
There are worse problems to have, really, but it is the truth. uTranslated had a good bit of early success. We had won a couple pitch contests and received overwhelming feedback and evidence during our initial research that a translation marketplace was, in fact, something people wanted. People were excited about an “Uber for translators.”
Months passed and we rode high when we won the Blast Furnace Demo Day competition at the University of Pittsburgh’s Innovation Institute. We didn’t change much at all for the next couple of months. We thought we had a solid plan – a great model. Then it began.
“You don’t have Russian, so what languages do you have?” Potential customers often came with requests for a language we didn’t have. We foolishly and vaguely marketed ourselves simply as a “translation marketplace” – implying that many languages were available on our platform. We had 5, but people only seemed interested in one of them: Chinese. All too frequent stumbles here forced us to make it extremely clear that we only had 5 languages. Why? Well, we only found quality translators for 5 languages.
Local accelerators turned us down, told us to quit. We didn’t know what we were doing, they politely informed us. On demand interpretation services took so many man hours to coordinate so we made the decision to drop that from the model and focus on document translation. At this point, we thought we had the focus people said we needed.
The worst blow came at a pitch competition at our university. The largest one. We practiced to death, refined our model, and crafted our best work yet and best ideas for the business. We had even had customers at this point!
We lost. Badly. But without that we never would have gone back to the drawing board like we did. We scrapped the other languages, and ended up with English and Chinese only. This gave us headway and focus. But what differentiated us? We had some very nice features that made us different, but everyone wanted to know what that “one thing” was – our “secret sauce.” By this time we’d lost our third developer. We were fortunate to have recruited highly talented developers, but they shared in our vision only until a Fortune 500 company snatched them away. At this point I locked myself away for months to learn enough coding to build something that worked – enough to prove the concept. The time to make a decision on whether or not to keep this going was drawing near.
We worked tirelessly as we applied to Alphalab as many expressed their doubts that we would get into the most selective accelerator in town. We refined our model even more. Had all the numbers and data under the sun, but what was it that made us any different? Somewhere around 4am the night before our interview with Alphalab doubt really set in. What I had made any sophomore CS major could have whipped up in an evening, and there’s lots of freelancer websites where you can find a translator, but then it occurred to us: it’s really hard to get on our platform. The weed-out exam Lujing had made had only a 10% pass rate. Only 15 translators made it through. Fifteen really good translators. That was our ‘secret sauce.’ This, coupled with our peer review process allows us to guarantee quality in an industry where customer may never know how good the work is. The fact that our technology makes quality affordable is just gravy.
We got into Alphalab but we are yet to keep doing the same thing. We try lots of things – some work, some don’t – but we never lose sight of why we started uTranslated in the first place: to make the translation industry a better place for all. Now, revenue doubles every month. Our business model has evolved and continues to. Our recent successes make for some exciting announcements we’ll make in the future, but most of these things have been rabbit holes we probably spent too much time in. But that’s okay. I wouldn’t be typing this from a conference room overlooking the East Side of Pittsburgh without our failures.