Part 1: How it all began (broke to profitable in 5 months)
I’m thrilled to write the first post on our new Medium publication. I personally have been reading Medium for over a year now, and I found some amazing articles, blogs, howtos, opinions and stories here.
My name is Pavel and I’m the CTO at Localization Guru. In this first article I want to share with you our story. We will also share here articles describing what challenges do we experience while building a modern translation agency suited for 21st century.
We will also share HOW-TOs on particular problems, usefull tools we are using for converting documents between different formats and also “behind the scenes” blogs with pictures from our office, conferences we attend, and also explain how we optimize our workflow to deliver projects faster while keeping the quality high.
How it all started
The story began when my co-founder came to me talking about a new idea of creating a portal like freelance.com (now upwork.com), only if would be purely focused on hiring freelance translators.
The idea sounded reliable and simple, so I put a team of two more developers together, and in a month or two we had a really simple MVP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product). After that, the next challenge was waiting for us — raising venture capital to pursue our new product full time.
We applied to couple of incubation programs which were funded by money from EU Jeremy program. It was quite a tedious process which required creating a Pitch deck, Business plan, Cashflow analysis, Go-to market and growth strategy, last but not least some revenue projections.
We created all these materials for the first time, and as you can expect, the overall quality of these was basically very poor. Another boring pitch-deck, abstract business plan, no real strategy whatsoever and financial projections.. were basically bull-sh*t.
From ~300 hundred startups to 8 finalists
To our surprise from hundreds of startups, we ended up in the TOP 30 and from there we were one of the projects that made it to the investment! Now it sounds like an easy process, but it involved never-ending pitch-deck adjustments, Skype calls, financial projection-redos and explaining our business-assumptions over and over again.
We were finally able to nail it with my co-founder travelling to Budapest dealing with investors in-person and me having a Skype-call from Thailand, where I was on vacation on the last week before the decision.
We raised a 30.000 EUR investment!
We joined a 4-month incubation program from Digital Factory (http://digitalfactory.vc/) where we had to finish and test our product. However, we spent 80% of the time going to startup competitions and only 20% on building our business. But we were able to finish our product in 3 months and “put it out there”.
After 2-months of testing, we discovered that there were some major flaws in our business assumptions and customers were not happy with how the service worked.
We decided to take drastic-measures and we rebuilt the whole service from scratch. From a portal where you directly hired translators based on their profiles, we created a full-service agency that covers everything for you.
Imagine it like this:
You can order a translation of a PDF document (with pictures) from English to 15 languages through an automated online portal (https://app.localizationguru.com/order/). In 2–3 days, you receive 15 editable word documents with the same layout to your inbox!
Our clients love it!
We almost bankrupt.
But back to the story. After rebuilding our translation service we were almost out of cash. We had to focus on 100%-business.
After we had our priorities straight, we slowly began acquiring several SME customers. And after 5 months of hard work, we were able to close our first Fortune 500 customer! WOW!
We acquired a Fortune-500 customer!
From being almost broke to Fortune-500 customer in 5 months. A start of our journey made us excited but humble; taught us several tough lessons but also brought us one of the most interesting times of our lives.
Build your own venture from scratch is not easy, but I’m looking forward for the future challenges that this journey will bring us.
Localization Guru (Professional Translation Services) is a on a mission to simplify translation services. Strongly supporting innovation, Localization Guru helps clients from over 15 countries translate into over 60+ languages. Our clients include Fortune 500 companies right through to start ups like Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (http://hyperloop.global/)..
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