Mate translate app full#
Mate translate app mac#

“I approached my classmates at my university to make versions for other platforms like Safari and the App Store. He decided to take advantage of the demand he was seeing for Mate by porting it to other platforms. In 2016, Alex’s funds were running low and his other projects hadn’t panned out. “I was playing around with other things like game development.” “I had the luxury that I was young and didn’t have commitments,” he says.

Mate translate app full#

“It had magically grown to 130,000 users and I had a whole inbox full of people asking for improvements,” he says.ĭespite a large customer base, Alex didn’t monetize Mate at the time. An example of Mate’s full-page translation He nearly forgot about it, but then, two years later, he had another peek and was blown away. He created a Google Chrome extension and then uploaded it to the Chrome Web Store. While this would have been an idle thought to most, Alex had been coding since he was 13. “I got tired of copying and pasting everything into Google Translate and I felt it would be cool to just double click on words to get the translation.” “I was reading a lot of blogs, articles, and Wikipedia pages in English to learn,” he says. Like many, he spent hours reading content online he’d run through Google Translate. Developing Huge Solutions at 16īack in 2012, 16-year-old Alex was in high school in Ukraine learning English in the hopes of studying abroad for university. Here’s how they went from another no-name translation app to a featured product for iOS.

Mate translate app mac#

He decided this was the perfect time to monetize.Īfter years of maneuvering in a hotly competitive app market, Alex and his cofounder, Andrii, pushed their way to the top of both the Mac and iOS App Stores to make $250,000 last year. When he checked how it was doing, it had reached 130,000 customers despite zero updates. After uploading it as an extension on the Chrome Web Store, he went to university and forgot about it for two years. Instead of cutting and pasting, Mate translated text in his browser window. By the time you’ve copied and pasted a piece of text into your translator and then put it back in context, you’ve lost two minutes and broken your flow.Īlex Chernikov created a simple browser extension called Mate when he was 16.

Are you learning a new language? Then you probably know the pains of using online translation services.