I recently launched www.languagemodels.io, the first side project in my Dogme 95 series. In this blog post, I will explain why I created the project, and what I have learned.

Things I've learnt from launching so far:

1. It's a lot of fun getting to talk to a bunch of different users. It's pretty much the same kind of dopamine rush you get when someone swipes you on Tinder. Your brain goes "Woah, somebody likes you, here's some dopamine, good boy".

2. It's a lot of work to launch. You have to submit your application to a lot of different websites, fill in a bunch of forms etc. and it's pretty boring work.

3. No matter how ready you think your app is, it's not. Users will find the bugs, and they will complain.

4. You have to really make sure that people understand what exactly your website is selling. For a niche market such as the one I'm targeting, you have to quickly explain to users what the product actually is.

5. Niche-communities gives the best response. I submitted language models to Hackernews and different broad reddit pages. But the best leads came from announcing the site on forums that discussed chatbots in particular.

Why I created the site:

I was contributing to an open source library for Natural Language Processing. A Brazilian guy noticed my contributions and offered me a freelance job training a Portuguese and Hebrew language model for a couple of chatbots. I trained the models and the guy was happy. Then a Norwegian guy noticed my contributions and asked for a Norwegian model. Then a Danish guy.

I guess a lot of people need spaCy models for their native language. Hence, www.languagemodels.io was born.

Whenever somebody contacts me to get a language model, I respond instantly and try to provide the best service possible. All sales are handled personally by me. Later, I hope to make the model more scalable, but for now, this works just fine.