Swiftin

I’ve created a product that can compete with DeepL and Google Translate—one that offers even more features than they do—designed specifically for people who work with international clients and audiences.

For freelancers, travel agents, and language teachers...

And of course, there’s one catch: marketing. I just couldn’t build the right sales funnel, and I didn’t prepare any tutorial videos.

It wasn’t until later, after analyzing everything, that I tried to make sense of it all. The conclusion is that building the product was the easiest part—even though it took me six months...

I decided to look for a partner who would take on this part, simply because I wasn’t ready.

Site: https://swiftin.dev

CWS: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fhfnfmakgcoolkaalffgdijedkdgegad?utm_source=item-share-cb

Honestly? Best feedback I've gotten all month.

Here's what nobody warns you about building something new: there's no playbook to copy. Marketers who run on playbooks hit a wall the second your product doesn't fit a template they've already run ten times.

For a while that scared me. If a pro doesn't know how to sell this, am I building the wrong thing?

Then it flipped. No playbook means I'm the one who gets to write it. Nobody knows this product and these users better than me. I'm in it 12 hours a day.

So I stopped hunting for someone to hand me the answer and started running my own experiments in public. Posting, testing hooks, watching what actually lands.

Slower. Messier. But this week it produced my first paying customer, which is more than any borrowed playbook ever gave me.

If you're building something genuinely new: the missing playbook isn't the problem. It's the moat.

Did you ever find a marketer who got your weird product, or did you end up becoming the marketer yourself?

swiftin.dev

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

Hey IH 👋

Quick milestone and a confession. Swiftin (my browser translator that lets you read and reply in any language without leaving the page) just crossed 1,000 users.

And it's made almost $0.

Here's the honest breakdown of how I got here.

A year ago I lost a $3,000 client on a freelance marketplace. Not because I was worse, because I was slow. The client wrote in German and I kept bouncing between a translator tab and the chat while someone faster took the job. That pain is why I built Swiftin.

People showed up. 1,000 of them. But I made a rookie mistake: I built the product and the audience, and never built the funnel between them.

What was missing:

• No onboarding that shows more than 1 of the 10+ features

• No moment where the value actually clicks

• No reason or trigger to upgrade

• No way to catch the "this just saved me" moment and make the ask right there

So I got great at the top of the funnel and ignored the rest. 1,000 users is a vanity number until there's a path behind it.

Where I'm at: rebuilding the road from free to paid before chasing any more traffic. The lesson I'd tattoo on day one: getting users is easy, getting them to pay is the actual product.

Question for the IH crowd: for those who cracked free to paid, what was the one change that actually moved conversion? Onboarding, paywall placement, the upgrade trigger, something else?

Building in public. Appreciate any war stories.

https://swiftin.dev/

I just wanted to talk to people naturally. So I built SwiftIn to scratch my own itch.

I didn't want to build just another translator. I wanted a tool that would actually help me learn while I communicate, without feeling like I'm studying.

Now, I'm picking up the language much easier than before. The workflow is super simple but incredibly convenient:

When I read: I see the original text side-by-side with my native language, which helps my brain link words together naturally.

When I write: I type in my own language, and it smoothly translates my thoughts into whatever language my interlocutor or the community uses.

It no longer feels like a barrier. It just feels like I’m finally part of the conversation.

I’m curious for those of you who hang out in international communities or work with global clients: how do you deal with the language barrier? Do you rely on standard translators, or have you found a better workflow?