The New Lingohub - The journey behind the code
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Have you seen the new look on our website today?
It's been an exciting day for us at Lingohub. In the last weeks (or really: months), we've been working on something new. And today's the day to share the news with you.
In the last decade, Lingohub has evolved from a small founding team of two developers to a company with a translation management software that is used by hundreds of teams and developers around the world, making the software translation process less messy.
Let me take you on a quick journey.
How everything started
The idea of Lingohub really dates back to 2008. More than a decade ago, I was working as a software developer for various technology companies and experienced problems with translations and the painfully chaotic translation process.
As a developer, I would send a YAML file to translators asking them to provide translations for new product features or new languages we supported. But then I always got back Microsoft Word files. With that approach, I had to manually copy/paste every single text back to the YAML file.
As a developer, I hated to deal with translations.
I thought - this process is not normal.
During the years of 2009 and 2011, this painful process kept coming back over and over again.
In November 2011, I was at a cocktail bar with Markus (my future co-founder), and I told him about this problem. As he understood the pain points and use case I was describing, it was at this point and time, that we both agreed to quit our jobs. As naive and enthusiastic as a developer with a fresh idea can be, we started working on what will become Lingohub.
We left our jobs and set out to build the first version of Lingohub that went live in August 2012.
Why we do what we do
In the beginning we believed that we need an outside investment to get our product and company off the ground. And taking VC money seemed to be the solution for that.
Pretty soon, though, we discovered that it doesn’t really feel right for us. As we were more focused towards building solutions that provide real value for our customers (and less focused on numbers crunching for investors), our vision of bootstrapping became clear.
Ever since, we are on a journey to help our customers succeed. What this really means is that we help them expand their software products.
Language connects people and, therefore, we believe that Lingohub helps makers to bring their applications to a global audience by providing them a better and faster way to manage and maintain translations.
How are we doing this?
Software makers fight the manual tasks of software translations by automating as many steps as possible in translation management. This allows teams to ...
- be faster and more efficient
- avoid errors in translations = improve text quality
- reduce the overhead in adding new languages
And in the end, providing a multi-language software product, means more happy customers on your end.
The Lingohub promise
At Lingohub, all our work is anchored by this promise of “You create - Lingohub translates”.
We support you in your translation management efforts by storing, managing, and translating your content.
All in one place. As simple as that.
We believe that this credo helps you, as developers, product managers, or simply makers, to focus on what’s really important: To build better software that serves your customers. We take care of the translation part.
P.S. If you want to learn more about how we do this, go and check out our new features page or developers' documentation.
A year ago, we started thinking about how we could express this promise in a new way. And today, we're taking a first step by rolling out our new website.
This is more than just a design makeover. We believe that this is a better, more accurate representation of who we are.
Same same, and better.
We’re certainly not the first company to redesign a website. But we think the design and technology decision we made says a lot about who we are as a company.
Two things make us particularly proud and say a lot about how we are as a company:
1. Our customers: We’re proud of our customers, you keep us excited and inspired. You, who have been with us since the very beginning. The amazing teams that have been growing with us in the previous years. And yes, you - who just joined our community.
With your trust comes great responsibility - we will always help you succeed in your own adventures.
2. Sustainability: We are fully bootstrapped. When we started with Lingohub, we started from scratch, and we wanted to build something sustainable and calm. Up until today, our bills are paid by our customers. No outside investments, 100% bootstrapped. Everything that we do goes directly into building something of value for our customers.
Where will this bring us?
To be honest: I don’t know. We don’t have super-duper hyper-growth plans for Lingohub. We don’t want to be another tech unicorn. We grow with our customers; we grow with you.
We keep doing our best to keep Lingohub on the pulse of productivity and development tools. And we are eager to keep our promise of helping you with translation management.
On the move for 2020
We listened closely to the feedback of our customers and partners. That having said, we are currently working on some big new updates. Those updates will arrive later in 2020 and are centered around the following topics:
- Editor: The new Editor will provide better context for translators, allowing them to secure higher translation quality faster.
- Mobile: Accelerate your mobile app translations with Lingohub’s new mobile toolkit
- Native GitHub workflow: No more manual work, such as adding new branches or merging branches.
We are excited about what’s ahead of us & to take this journey in 2020 with you.
Best,
Helmut
P.S. Go and check out our new website. And please let us know what you think. You can tweet us at @lingohub or send us an email at [email protected]. We can’t wait to hear your feedback.