Another thread popped up today on Hacker News about the cost and effects of internationalization – a fellow entrepreneur found that he could get cheap translations on Second life. Similarly, we recently translated Gaia GPS’s app description to various languages using Mechanical Turk, and we also had great results.
A week ago, I compiled some charts from Appviz to summarize the effects of translating our description (we didn’t internationalize the software).
I should point out a couple of things though:
- These charts are now a week old, and the translation impact is a bit better than these charts represent.
- This data is muddled because at the same time as we did translations, we released a new version of our app, and it has been phenomenally popular in the US. We have gone from ~75th place to 13th place in Navigation, and our revenues are up to almost 200/day from ~30/day, with a new record coming everyday.
- We also increased our price from $1.99->$2.99 right when we released, prior to rising up the rankings.
So, we are seeing massive changes in all of our stats right not, but ceterus paribus, our revenues went from 10% internationally to around 30%, and we’re definitely getting our money’s worth from the translations. Between the translations and the new release, it’s pretty exciting times for us. We have enough cash for ramen at least 🙂
