From Golden Kitty to 1M Downloads: Lingvanex’s Journey to B2B Success

Three years ago, Lingvanex launched on Product Hunt, quickly earning the Golden Kitty for Audio and Voice Tool of the Year. Today, over a million app downloads later, our team reflects on this remarkable journey.

The Birth of an Idea

We have been developing machine translation solutions for several years and the inspiration for our new app came from a common challenge faced by our team members living in Asia.
Many of them struggled during phone conversations in languages they didn’t fully understand.
“Not all customer support centers and local establishments had English speaking staff, so at times solving problems took a great deal of time. We all have been in this situation at least once in our lives and thought that it might be a good idea to try and make an app that would translate both ends of the conversation during the call,” - says our CEO Aleksey Rudak.
We decided to move ahead with this idea and soon had a working prototype that translated the dialogue between two parties into their respective languages.
“It certainly wasn’t perfect, but we knew that no amount of brainstorming could give us what we needed to truly improve: real-world user feedback”.

Finding a Home on Product Hunt

We started looking for a platform that would give us a chance to interact with an open-minded audience, and that’s when Product Hunt came into the picture.
“Being new to this environment, we didn’t really know what to expect. However, right from the beginning it was clear we were in the right place. From the day we launched, Product Hunt community members started calling us from all over the world using our app, talking in their native languages and suggesting improvements.”
The feedback poured in for weeks, providing us with invaluable insights into user needs. Based on these suggestions, we tweaked the interface, integrated an auto-reply detector, and introduced a log feature to view conversation transcripts.
These enhancements ultimately led to the creation of the Phone Call Translator that won the Golden Kitty award in 2020.

A Game-Changer

“Little did we know how lucky this turn of events was. This win came at a time when we were ready to take the company to the next level and all we needed was an idea and an opportunity”, says our CEO Aleksey Rudak.
After a few weeks our team started to receive emails from businesses seeking to use the app for client support services.
They wanted to know if they could scale our app to accommodate multiple operators simultaneously.
“That was our lightning bolt moment since it gave us an insight on how we can develop as a company. There is a whole B2B world out there, waiting, where successful translation is paramount for establishing connections, procuring new business partners and sealing deals.”

The Power of Feedback

At that point, our team shifted the focus to refining speech recognition and translation features that were the heart of the app. Also, ensuring the safety of the solutions, became a prime objective.

“We received many questions regarding data security, since it’s obvious that companies don’t want any third parties to get hold of their information. This demand set a new bar for us, urging to create an on-premise solution that would work completely offline”.
After three years the company has firmly established itself in the B2B market, providing machine translation solutions to both startups and esteemed corporations.
“Our journey taught us not to fear presenting our product, even if it still might need some fine-tuning. After such a great first experience on Product Hunt we know that the platform users are ready to offer us their feedback and encouragement.”

Tradition of Innovation

Over the last three years, Lingvanex has launched all its new products on Product Hunt, including speech recognition software, on-premise translation software, cloud API, and SDK.
“It has become a good tradition. We always share exciting news with the Product Hunt community looking forward to their feedback which has been instrumental in our evolution.”
In a world where communication is key, Lingvanex is proud to be at the forefront, helping businesses bridge language barriers and connect across cultures. And the Golden Kitty was just a beginning of our real adventure.