Getting Closer to Launch

Why This? Why Now?

I'm a product of the US public school system, and it wasn't great for me when I was young. The problem with traditional education is that for each subject in a given year, the kid gets one teacher and one textbook. And if the kid doesn't get a good grade, they're conditioned to think that they are dumb (at least if you had the self-esteem I had as a kid...sounds whiny but whatever, I'm being open).

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is that people learn differently. Now I Get It! can help everyone learn about the amazing science that's going on in the world - without having to read complex scientific articles themselves.

This is possible because AI is so good at translation - not only from English to French, but from jargon to layperson, or prose to software.

Now I Get It! is a translation app. Cutting edge science should be accessible to everyone.

Cool Response

Now I Get It! was my first post on Hacker News, and it hit #1 on the Show list. There was terrific engagement - some very positive, some negative - but all constructive. In fact, there was so much interest that I opened up slots for hundreds of papers to be processed on a first-come-first-serve basis. This cost me a few hundred bucks but was totally worth it because I got to see all the creative ways people wanted to use the app.

Many people uploaded scientific papers, which is the whole purpose of Now I Get It! But some experimented with internal architecture documents. Others posted travel itineraries. Several posted documents in different languages.

Why Not Launch Today?

It's easy to launch a free product. You just put it out there. That's how this Now I Get It! started but there's been so much interest that I need to turn it into a real product. That means charging money for it.

One of my convictions is that as soon as I take the first dollar from somebody, I want to make sure that I take care of them. And when you go through the list of things you need to take care of customers, you realize that the product is not just the cool parts of your application. It's actually all of the backend operational things, which sometimes require more work than the product itself, at least during the setup phase.

So in between my consulting gigs, family obligations, and trying to get a bit of sleep and stay fit, I have been working on the following things to get this product out the door:

• Improving the outputs by improving the prompts.
• Added a security layer to protect against bad actors.
• Added support for different types of article translations.
• Added a wait list so I get a sense of demand and can notify people when the product launches.
• Making things look better. That includes the website as well as adding support for things like LaTaX formatting of equations.
• Architecture improvements on AWS so this app can scale globally.
• Added lots of logging and database tables so that I can keep track of everything that's going on.
• Added a feedback mechanism so people can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to the results as well as add comments. This will help the app improve over time.
• Added a blog section so you can follow along with my journey of developing, launching, supporting, and growing a product. If Now I Get It! turns into a success, this will be a cool story. And if I can't get enough customers to sustain it...it will still be a cool story.

Many more, incremental improvements. In fact it seems that every time I close one issue I get ideas for two more.

What's Left To Do?

There are two big items I need to solve before going live:

User Accounts

I already have user accounts working in the development environment and I think people are going to really like this feature. Every registered user will get their own gallery and all translations will be private by default. The user can then choose if they want to share generated pages or make them public.

I haven't pushed this to production yet because I want to release it at the same time as I release the pricing model. Meaning, User Accounts + Pricing = Launch.

Pricing Model

A lot of thought has gone into the pricing model for this product. I could make this a traditional subscription product where you pay a certain amount of money each month - but I hate subscriptions. They makes sense for business tools that you use every day but not for niche products like this. In fact you may not use it every month. I know that if I'm a customer of a niche product and I don't use it for a month but I get charged for it anyway, I feel that the company behind that product has bad intentions. They're not seeing things from the my point of view; they're not empathizing with the customer. I don't want to be part of that problem. I want to be part of the solution.

I've decided to use a pre-paid credit purchase model. I'm still tweaking the details but the gist is that you can pay a certain amount of money for get a certain number of translations (a translation is what I'm calling the convertion of a paper into a webpage). Simple.

Someone on Hacker News suggested adding a Donate button to the homepage. I love this! The idea is that if visitors don’t have papers they want to process themselves—perhaps because they don’t know where to find them (like my mom)—they could donate instead. I’d then use some selection process (TBD) to choose interesting scientific papers, translate them, and publish them in the public Gallery.

Tentative Launch Date: March somthing

Stay tuned! Be sure to join the waitlist if you want to know as soon as we're live.