The 64,000

Running posts at the rate of exponential growth in the number of downloads seemed like a good idea at the time, however - this time it took 8.75 months to double the number of downloads again and to reach the 64,000 goal.

The community of users is constantly growing, and we would have made more released of the plugin in the near future had we not been working our off, on getting the proxy code out, you can notice the small translation widget on the side of this blog, which might actually lead you to the alpha pages of the service.

We'll probably do some more posts here and on our facebook page, probably before reaching the 128,000 goal, which will hopefully take less time this time.

We will finish with a small poem for our dedicated readers:

grow, grow, grow you project

make it support the stream

happily happily happily

this is not a dream.

32,000 downloads, and another post

Hello there,

Yes, about 6 months later, the milestone has been reached, and now it seems like there's a healthy community of transposh users. Lots have changed in the plugin and the code is constantly improving (although not as fast as I hoped, maybe I should hope for no progress and be positivly surprised at the 64k post).

So far the revenue model has proved useless, and the total income is below $10. Many users decide to either keep the links (thanks guys). Write their own widget, or simply have no ads. All of which I am happy with. The downside of this is that no money makes progress slower, and I hope that it will change in the coming months.

On other fronts, a personal issue I had has slowed development considerably for the last few months, this has now passed ( ;( ) so now I have more time for the project, and I am using it to think of the coming directions. One of the decisions was to do a full trac scan and create meaningful milestones. This is work in progress, but I really enjoy it as there's so much information and directions in there that are so exciting, I wish I could implement each and every request but I am trying to keep things in focus.

What will the next version bring? The next major will hopefully be a UI redesign, with many of the tickets on the trac closing there, this milestone is marked as 0.7 and will be the best milestone to date. Any ideas, bugs, money will be happily accepted.

Don't worry, be happy now.

Is there a revenue model?

Well, there might be one, but I will have to keep looking for it, or at the least be very patient with the implementation of one.

The recent attempt made was to offer users to exchange the link in the widget for some ad replacement, after a few days this has not yet proved its worth as a solid business model. I guess I'll have to wait and see.

On the product front, progress has never been faster as more and more features creep in and more and more bugs are weeded out. There are still so many things to do and so little time....

16,000 downloads post

Yes, promised a post at 16k, and here it comes. This time it took 4 and a half months to get to this milestone. With the current rate of growth, it will take 6 months more to get to the 32k milestone.
The product is beginning to shape up nicely, becoming better and better, and I am starting to think about if this will ever be able to grow into a service that is monetized. I have received many offers for donation in exchange to the backlink removal. I am not going in that direction, as this will not be substantial and will not make a living of this. The idea is to provide a real value added to bloggers (and/or readers) so that they will be happy to purchase this service. A few ideas exist, but nothing has not hit me as the holy grail yet, if any reader have his own set of ideas, this would be something I would love to hear.
Next up is more, yes, more of everything. Better integration with wordpress will be coming soon, including themes and comment integrations. I also hope that we'll be able to provide support for third party widgets and support another CMS besides wordpress in the coming future. The features continue to creep in as well, and the improved interface for translators will be the main goal there.
We are more "social" than before, you can follow us on twitter, facebook and here too. Show your support, it helps.

Disasters bring people closer

I have just finished releasing v0.4.2 for Transposh, aka the answer ;) This release brings in the support for Haitian language. Which was released by the Microsoft Translator Team two days ago. The reason they released it is probably the horrible earthquake which struck Haiti about two weeks ago. First, kudos to them on their efforts. This is the first time the MSN translator team has beaten Google translate to a language release that I know of, this has reminded me the not so recent release of Persian support by Google following the Iranian election scandal.
It seems like world events help bringing people closer together, and there's no better way than translation tools, as I guess that the mutual goal of everybody in this field is to achieve better understanding (and world peace, maybe).
I hope both teams will add support for more languages, without the need for bad stuff to happen.

4,000 downloads

I'll be reporting in multiples, so don't worry - next time is 8,000. It took two more months to get to 4,000 downloads yesterday. There have not so many releases in between, and the current rate seems to be somewhere around 20 new downloaders a day. The rating on the wordpress site has improved as I guess a few users probably read the how to donate section (mainly - vote your opinion of the project). I hope that as the summer vacation comes to an end, the release train will be back on track and that the new goal will be reached faster.

Alpha release

The time has finally come, our alpha version is finally out and may be downloaded directly from wordpress plugin directory.

A lot of work was done on the background, like preparing packaging and the various websites that are needed, like the product website, blog, forum and developer site (not all is complete yet).

The product is still alpha quality, but it works rather nicely and gives any wordpress site owner the option to translate his site to any language quickly - while getting help from his users. The idea behind such a release is to receive feedback and improve accordingly.

You are welcomed to try it out yourself, any ideas are welcomed.

Admiting failure, moving on

It is not easy to fail, but I have. In the recent months I tried to raise funds from Israeli VCs.
Many told me not to do it, for multiple reasons, with the top one being "the market is low, and so are chances". And indeed - they were right.

I got many rejections at the preliminary stage and did succeed to move onwards with some VCs, only to get the rejections later.

In themselves rejections are divided to various groups. One being - we don't care or not really into investing these days - please go away. Another is the rejection that comes from finding the flaws in the plan (there are no flawless plans) and pointing the simplest one out. This is probably the reason for tip #1 of the day - never start dealing with any VC on the associate level, it leads nowhere.

The third type of rejection is the one that comes from smart people, that have really sunk their teeth in your plan and could not get themselves to invest, this is the type that tells you - please prove me wrong and we'll meet in the next round, which although is quite annoying is still better than the first two types.

However - there are some good news, the process was lengthy and I learned a few things from it. It helped me think of what we'll do next and what goals I should reach.

We'll bootstrap transposh, and with a little luck be able to announce our alpha product in the coming weeks. Funding will wait till we mature a bit.

If anyone wants tips and tricks regarding Israeli VCs, contact number of various partners and just a bit of knowhow - feel free to contact me - its a free service for fellow entrepreneurs :)

Transposh logo

After a few iterations I have decided to go for the following logo for transposh.


Some technical stuff - created on inkscape 0.46, the original is a .svg file which takes about 14k uncompressed.

Hope you like it, any comments are welcomed.

Transposh is starting

The domains have been registered today and are being hosted on google services, for now this will suffice (I hope)

the domains used are:

• transposh.com - Everything that will relate to transposh the company, news, mail, blog and company related materials
• transposh.net - this domain will serve the transposh web services and proxy
• transposh.org - dedicated to the transposh open source packages, trac and developers
• transposh.info - documentation and whitepapers about the technology

I have also created accounts on linkedin and facebook - feel free to stay on touch