2,000 downloads

This is not an accounting blog, but I still like numbers ;) only one month was needed to double the number of downloads to 2,000 after passing the 1,000 goal, this was aided by the previously mentioned 100 downloads day. Still a long way to go, seems we are on a good track overall.

The first 100+ downloads day

The first version to cross this bar was 0.2.6 which did this achievement on the 17th of June. The numbers are adding up nicely and I am very happy of the progress that we have made in the last couple of months. There are active users with streams of bug reports and suggestion that are beyond our capability to handle at this point (although we are doing our best). Still – the road ahead is long and seems like its worth walking it.

1,000 downloads milestone

Today marks the 1,000 downloads mark for the Transposh wordpress plugin. Since the 0.2.0 release things have indeed started to move a bit faster.
However I did discover (yet again) a regression bug that crept back into my code.
I am staring the code for the client side of things, if this blog gives you weird alerts and errors, this is me at work :)
The google numbers now stand at 64,700 for the transposh search, the numbers were double that figure last week, and I guess they'll keep growing soon. Anyhow its much better than the 5 results transposh had before we started working :)

Winner of Startup 2.0

I am happy to inform my readers that Colnect, which was our beta site for our technology has recently won the prestigious European Startup 2.0 competition.

Amir Wald has presented Colnect to an enthusiastic crowd at Bilbao, Spain.

And was able to best the other 10 finalists with the following bright video presentation:


We at Transposh were very happy to be able to help Colnect get translated to 35 languages and believe that it was a part (even if a small one) in its recent success.

Small steps

Today we have reached 250 downloads, and progressing nicely. The product itself is moving forward, now supporting better integration of automatic translation which is quite unique.

Our plan is to keep the release train going fast, as it helps us receive feedbacks from real users and get things better, an example would be a bug report regarding integration with other scripts which allowed us to have a more compatible plugin, after some detective work ;)

See you at the next milestones

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 :)