Tolgee

Tolgee is an open-source tool that makes the localization process (l10n) of web apps written in modern JS frameworks faster

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Category:
Web App
Published:
November 5, 2022
Pricing:

Discount Code

Web App
November 5, 2022

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🥳 Interview with the founder...

Tell us a little bit about your background and how you became a founder?

I’ve been playing around with web development since I was 13 years old. Since then I was really passionate about it. I felt I could build anything. I worked in multiple companies on many projects and I found out that localization is a problem that is not solved yet. Or at least not the way I want it to be solved. So I founded Tolgee.

How did you come up with the idea?

In one company, where I worked before, developers were always forgetting about localization. Most of the time, when code returned to the developers it was due to missing translations. So we started to think about delegating localization tasks to other non-developer team members. But we found it challenging, since non-developers, cannot work with versioning systems, and there was no way to do localization without that. So I started to think, about how to enable users to modify the localization texts directly in the App, which is translated, and how to enable them to just click `n` translate the string. A few years later I decided to write my master thesis on this topic. I made a working solution and later we founded the company.

How did you get your first 10 users?

For a project like Tolgee, it’s really hard to get the first users to really use it for their app development. Tolgee is not just some project productivity tool, which you can try for a month and if you’re not satisfied, you leave. You actually integrate Tolgee into your app. And since then, you have to use it for app development. So your app relies on Tolgee. This is a big commitment for the users and for us as well. So thank all who did this commitment at that time. From the beginning, a lot of people told us, that we should promote it more and we should reach the customers and convince them to use Tolgee, but the project was incomplete and it’s hard to promote the product in that state. You basically spend a lot of resources on the marketing of something, which is not really suitable yet for most of the users you target. So how we got the first 10 customers? We’ve promoted the project on Reddit, we messaged people on LinkedIn, we added ourselves to Awesome lists on GitHub, we enhanced our SEO, but most importantly we were working on the product.

What was the biggest challenge you faced while building Tolgee and how did you solve it?

I could write here about technical challenges we had, which was definitely a lot of work we’ve done there. But the biggest challenge is definitely to keep up. In the beginning, it’s hard and since the company doesn’t even exist or it’s small enough, there is a lot of space to just give up and do something else. I am glad we didn’t.

What’s your goto tech stack at the moment? and why?

We are using Spring Boot and Kotlin on the backend and Typescript/React on the frontend. For deployment, we use Kubernetes on DigitalOcean and their hosted Postgres DB. Before I founded Tolgee I worked in Oracle, and I’ve mainly used Java there. So it was kind of natural for me to write Tolgee in Java, but later I found Kotlin and in some time I fell in love with its great syntax and features. We chose typescript on the frontend since we want to be safe and React because it has a great ecosystem, it’s easy to use and we used it before. We use DigitalOcean for the deployment because it’s very easy to set up and it’s reliable enough.

Would you consider selling the project in the future?

Yes. But it’s not why we are doing that. We all love to work on such a project and it’s a great experience, but I can imagine that in 10 years I would be interested in starting something new, going through similar stuff I did with Tolgee, but with a lot more experience from both business and tech world.

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Tolgee

Tolgee is an open-source tool that makes the localization process (l10n) of web apps written in modern JS frameworks faster

Category

Web App

Published on

November 5, 2022

Pricing

Discount Code

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