Why Only the Uncomfortable Succeed in Japan – Jeff Sandford – Wovn.io

The translation and localization industry has seen some impressive innovations over the past decade, but in many ways, it has remained stubbornly resistant to change.

Today we sit down and talk with Jeff Sandford co-founder of Wovn.io. The Wovn team has developed a way to take the pain out of web localization and translation. They promise to do it all with a single line of code.

We talk a bit about the mechanics of web-site localization and state of the industry as a whole, and we also discuss some important but surprising differences between with makes compelling UI/UX design for Japanese and for Western users, and what kinds of tasks machine translation can really be trusted with.

Jeff also explains why he decided to start a company with someone he had never meet.

It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Show Notes for Startups

Why website translation is important but often overlooked Why Jeff chose to start a company with someone he had never met How to combat Japan's "Design by Committee" problem Why you should not trust machine translation for e-commerce When you need to change from a bottom-up to top-down sales strategy The challenges of working with Japanese enterprise customers as a startup Advice for foreign engineers and founders who want to come to Japan Why Japan needs to get uncomfortable

Links from the Founder

Wovn.io homepage Wovn.io on Twitter Wovn.io on Facebook

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Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 86.

Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.

Today we’re going to talk about something that you and I, and probably everyone else listening right now has struggled with. Translation and localization. It’s been an industry that has both seen some impressive innovations over the past decade, but is also somehow quite resistant to change. Localization is a part of business that almost every firm has to deal with, but almost no one looks forward to. It’s a lot like dealing with lawyers in that way, I suppose.

Well, today we sit down with Jeff Sandford, cofounder of Wovn.io who say they’ve developed a one line of code method for taking the pain out of localization and translation. We talk a bit about the mechanics of website localization and the state of the industry as a whole, of course. We also talk about the important and surprising differences between what makes great UI/UX with Japanese and western users. And what kind of tasks machine translation can really be trusted with. And Jeff shares a story of what made him decide to start a company with a cofounder who he’d never even met before.

But you know, Jeff tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor, and get right to the interview.

[pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ]

[Interview]

Tim: Cheers.

Jeff: Cheers.

Tim: So I’m sitting with Jeff, cofounder of Minimal Technologies and the creator of Wovn.io. And thanks for sitting down with me today.

Jeff: Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Tim: Wovn.io at a high level is simply localization for a website. But it’s more than that. It’s more interesting than that so why don’t you tell us a bit about what it is.

Jeff: So often people when you tell them you do website localization, they think translation, which it actually isn’t. Translation is a very integral part of it, but what we focus on is the system of localizing a website. So let’s say you have an English website, and you’ll like to create a Chinese version or Spanish version of that website, we handle all of the details of actually creating those versions, and also managing them and serving them to users.

Tim: Now there’s a lot of companies that are doing that, but you guys have a particularly interesting approach to it. The Wovn.io promise, as it were, is the ultimate in simplicity, right?

Jeff: Right.

Tim: It’s a single line of code copied into your webpage.

Jeff: Exactly. Yes. In the simplest case, you can really take a website, even a relatively large website, and have the entire thing translated within minutes. That’s the promise. That’s the goal. Right?

Tim: You get little pieces out of JavaScript code. You sign up a Wovn.io. You get your API key. You put that code in your website, and suddenly the whole website is Wovn.io enabled?

Jeff: Yes, that’s it.

Tim: And how do you localize? How do you translate? How do you actually get the Chinese and the Japanese onto the page?

Jeff: Okay, okay. So the next step is actually creating those translations and putting them in place. So what a lot of people do, especially larger websites or people who have websites that constantly change, is they use our automatic translation features and automatic page creation features. So you turn those on, and we will automatically add all the pages on your website. We’ll automatically translate all of your content and publish it for users to see. Now if you don’t want to do it automatically, you can also all the pages added for you, and then go and translate everything yourself. A very common use case is to do the automatic translation, and then go back and edit, and modify it, and improve it yourself.

Tim: Well, that would make a lot of sense. But actually tell me a bit about the use cases. Tell me about your customers. Who’s using Wovn?

Jeff: A lot of our customers tend to be surprisingly ecommerce sort of sites and larger websites here in Japan. Surprisingly enough, Japanese companies haven’t quite gotten on board with localization yet on their websites. And specifically it’s the Tokyo Lymbix, which is coming up. It has really lit a fire under them to start working on this.

Tim: Well ecommerce makes sense because that way someone puts up a new product, it’s automatically translated into two or three additional languages, and they can go back and refine that later.

Jeff: Exactly, and you can see right then the cost benefit of it as well.

Tim: Right. And so who else it? Like a travel industry site or is it a—

Jeff: That’s another one. Travel industry, tourism in general, and then also restaurants or things that have a lot have a lot of foot traffic from tourists and things like that is also pretty common. Hotels is another one.

Tim: And about how many clients do you have now? How many sites are being translated or being localized by Wovn.io?

Jeff: Alright, so this changes all the time, but I think right now—

Tim: Hopefully it’s going up.

Jeff: It is going up. I think currently it’s about 8,000.

Tim: Alright.

Jeff: So yeah, 8,000 websites.

Tim: Okay, and of those 8,000 sites, how many are paying and how many are on the free tier?

Jeff: Good question. So right now the paid ones are definitely on the smaller side of it.

Tim: They always are.

Jeff: Well, definitely. It’s that most of our paid users are Japanese right now.

Tim: I want to dig down into that a little bit later, and talk about your overall sales and marketing strategy. But before we do, let me back up a bit and let’s talk a little bit about you.

Jeff: Sure.

Tim: You cofounded this company in 2014 with Hayashi-san?

Jeff: Yes.

Tim: Well, let’s back up a bit. What brought you to Japan the first time?

Jeff: Good question. This is the question you always get as a foreigner in Japan.

Tim: It’s obligatory.

Jeff: Initially, I just really wanted the experience to live outside of my home country. I had a computer science degree, so I could have been a developer. But I had this fear that if I jumped into a career in English, I would never learn Japanese. I did not want to get stuck in an English bubble, which a lot of people do here.

Tim: It’s easy to do here.

Jeff: Especially with the internet these days. It’s so easy to live in your own world in Japan. Because of that, I decided to do something I knew I really wouldn’t enjoy that much to force myself to learn Japanese so that I can work in a Japanese company or in a company that I could speak Japanese. So I started out by being an English teacher. I did it for about two and a half years. Had enough of that.

Tim: Yeah, two years is a pretty—

Jeff: Yeah.

Tim: Yeah, it’s a tough job.

Jeff: I don’t hate it, but it’s definitely not what is going to be my career, and I definitely knew it wasn’t going to be so I wanted to move forward. But definitely I think teaching is much more difficult than people give it credit for.

Tim: It’s a tough, tough job.

Jeff: I’ve always done some freelance for development and things so after that, I continued to kind of work full-time. I lived in Japan for a little bit doing freelance web development, actually. And then I had some awesome weddings back in the States. So I’m back from some weddings, actually. So when I was back in the States for that, that’s when I got connected with Takuharu Hayashi. We actually had a few Skype meetings, and decided over Skype to do it. One of my good friends here, a guy from New Zealand is the one who said, “Hey, Jeff, there’s this guy who is looking to cofound with somebody. He’s looking for somebody who speaks English, or someone who’s foreign, who has experience globally. So what do you thing?” So I connected with him. We decided to do it before even seeing each other. We decided over Skype. I came to Japan to work, to cofound with this person, and I never met this person.

Tim: Okay, and the company you two have built is a very multinational team, right?

Jeff: Yes.

Tim: Usually when I see start-ups in Japan that have a good multicultural team to them, it’s usually foreign engineers and Japanese support and sales. And it’s that kind of how it’s worked out for you guys?

Jeff: It is similar, actually.