I'd rewrite one client message six times and still sound like a translated cereal box

Hey IH 👋

Confession. English isn't my first language, and for years I was sure that was a competence problem. It wasn't. My ideas were fine. My sentences just came out assembled from spare parts.

The expensive part: I lost projects to people with half my experience, because their replies sounded confident and mine sounded like a hostage note. You can't really measure that, but you feel it every time someone smoother gets the "yes."

I tried the obvious thing, writing more English, harder. It just took longer to sound the same kind of off. Translators didn't help either, since I'd be copy-pasting into a separate tab and the tone came out robotic anyway.

So I built a thing for myself (yes, another founder scratching his own itch). I type in my own language, it rewrites the message right in the input field, in a tone that doesn't scream non-native. Not magic. Sometimes it's too polite and I rough it back up. But I stopped rewriting the same message six times.

The lesson I keep coming back to: your competence and your second language are two different things, and most tools fix the wrong one.

Non-native founders here, how do you handle it, write in English directly, or think in your language and translate in your head?

P.S. the thing is called Swiftin if you're curious: swiftin.dev