2.3 –
CHANNELSThe site is intended to unify the various tools required in the translation workflow, including customer account creation, file storage and downloads, and payment processing. In the future, it may be possible to diversify the types of services offered beyond the site, but for now, the website is the exclusive location where company services are offered. At the outset, a web application is the sole focus of software development.
Native mobile applications for Android and iOS will be available in the future pending financing availability, as those software platforms require different skillsets and therefore different developer teams. Mobile applications may be less relevant to this business model as word processing and spreadsheets continue to be in the domain desktops and laptops.
2.4 –
KEY ACTIVITIESPlatform Development – This requires a development team in order to continually add new features and fine tune existing ones. An important aspect of the company’s future growth depends on diversification of revenue streams.
Business Development – A sales team is required in order to promote the web platform and
draw in new clients. A large churn of single-order clients is expected, and therefore the company must be proactive in seeking business with organizations who can reliably make orders with regularity. The matter of what type of promotional activity the company should use in order to attract first-time customers is still under debate, but may include “first order is free”, or deals to that effect.
Talent Development – At the outset it will be difficult to attract and retain high-level expertise in required fields to perform translations. The company’s challenge is to source enough regular business from higher-paying customers to retain translators with specialized expertise.
Customer Relationship Management – The translation industry is an inexact process, and
customer needs will vary highly with each order. A major challenge will be to manage customer relationships appropriately in order to minimize failures in processing orders, whether those failures are in quality, speed, or misunderstanding requirements. Tools such as chat interfaces and customer surveys are essential in order to understand requirements, complete orders quickly, and produce happy customers who return again and again.
2.5 –
KEY RESOURCESIntellectual/Technological – The web platform itself. The platform is built on Angular, a
software development platform whose current iteration was released in 2016 and developed by internal teams at Google. Although its APIs are relatively new and are bound to experience some changes as the framework matures, Angular offers a full set of features for single-page applications under a permissive open-source software license. It is a popular development choice for the enterprise space and has been built with application scalability and the latest web standards in mind.
Human – This includes the development team required to build and maintain the web platform, constituting the company’s largest fixed-cost expenditure. It also includes a sales team, which is important for achieving company growth. The translation industry has low
barriers to entry and is highly competitive, and therefore the company must be proactive in acquiring new customers. The translators within the platform are obviously a critical human resource as well.
Financial – The company will have to spend its early-stage capital wisely and keep fixed
costs low. It will expend some effort acquiring customers at the outset, and due to the business model, a large percentage of them will be one-time customers. Therefore, in the early stage the company must wisely choose where to spend money and count on growth from word-of-mouth advertising.
2.6 –
KEY PARTNERSThe company’s partners include the various companies providing paid API services, and will increase as time goes by. These currently include:
Stripe + Braintree (payment processors) – These companies provide feature-rich payment
processing APIs, and using them together gives the company the capability to process transactions using credit cards, Paypal, Apple Pay, or Android Pay. The APIs work by forwarding customer data directly to their servers, which allows the company to maintain compliance with important financial data security standards and easily handle currency exchanges. In addition, the APIs offer such features as processing refunds, fraud protection, and analysis tools.
Mailgun (Email Service) – This service allows the company to avoid the issues involved
with creating its own automated email services. Customers require emails for important
aspects of website use including registration and order receipts. From the outset, Mailgun offers companies up to 10,000 free emails a month, with paid service for each email after
that.
2.7 – R
EVENUE STREAMSThe company expects to derive revenue from rendering services directly. Depending on consumer need and company policies, customers will pay for services upfront, in installments, or at a lump sum upon completion, with more favorable payment terms granted to larger orders and orders with repeat customers.
Revenue streams are characterized as low profitability and high-volume. Therefore, the company’s main challenge is to achieve sufficient scale to overcome its fixed costs. Credit should be collected within 30 days of order completion. The smaller the typical order, the lower the risk of uncollectible debt poses to the company. As of right now, it is still a major strategic consideration whether the company will focus on a higher volume of easierto-serve, lower-expertise translations or focus more on businesses and more exclusive expertise needs in the manner of a boutique consultancy.
2.8 –
COST STRUCTURESalaries – By far the most significant expense for the company. Building full-time teams of
developers, salespeople, and administrators is the most significant early-stage cost.
IT Infrastructure - IT infrastructure costs include hosting, Domain Name Services (DNS),
third-party email API services, and other miscellaneous costs. The company domain name has been already registered and will not need to be renewed for two years. The application is built using open-source frameworks with permissive licensing schemes and have no costs associated.
Marketing Budget – The company must spend a significant amount of funds in order to
promote brand awareness and drive traffic to the website. The marketing budget includes things such as purchasing Google AdWords or ads on Youtube. The marketing strategy should remain focused on social media and search, since those are more likely to deliver click-throughs to the site itself.
Legal Expenses - The company should expect to need the services of an attorney from time
to time. In the beginning, these requirements are for such things as company registration, drawing up contracts for the first employees, and reviewing End User Licensing
Agreements. Expenses are considered to go up considerably should angel investors/VC firms show interest in the company.
Miscellaneous – Always present. Significantly missing from the financial projections in this
business are costs associated with office space rental. The workflow of the company from the start is being designed around the idea that remote work can and should be prioritized to achieve significant cost savings.
C
HAPTER3 – P
LATFORMF
EATURESO
VERVIEWThe Wordparrot application in its initial stage is designed to provide four primary features for individual customers and B2B clients:
1) Convenience - Account registration via social media logins, file submission, and requesting quotes can all be done without any direct communication required with staff.
2) Security - Online payment through trusted 3rd-party payment processors provides a variety of different payment options, fraud detection, and compliance with financial data laws.
3) API integration – Interacting with the agency, tracking order progress, and uploading and downloading files is encapsulated within the application rather than being fragmented across different unrelated services (email, cloud hosting, and traditional bank payments).
4) Quality Assurance – Service quality and accuracy can be signaled in a variety of ways through website features, such as translator profiles, progress bars, and the ability to communicate with translators directly through the site.
3.1 – R
EGISTRATION PROCESS AND ENTERING THE SITESince the company is required to evaluate the needs of a client, it is necessary that a prospective client cannot submit files anonymously. Therefore, all clients are required to create an account. However, this requirement has its downsides. Users hate having to remember new logins and passwords for sites they may use infrequently or perhaps just once.
It’s a major inconvenience that will result in lost business for the site. Ideally, the registration process should present as little a barrier to a potential customer as possible.
Thankfully, the proliferation of popular social media websites such as Facebook allow our site to mitigate this issue. These sites offer public-facing APIs using the Oath2 Authentication Protocol. An important initial goal for the site is to offer potential customers the option of registering an account using their authentication data from social media sites. They will later have the option of adding/removing social media logins to their account, as well as to define site-specific login information if they wish. The company’s objective is to offer authentication mechanisms for Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Naver, & WeChat within the first 6 months of launch.
This authentication policy is subject to review at a later date, should the company find that account registration poses a significant barrier to new customers trying out the application.
Once logged in, the user is taken to the splash page. For now, the splash page contains basic information linking the user to different places in the site. In the future, we intend to derive marketing value from this front page. As the company’s ability to offer new and varied services grows, we can introduce our existing user base to bundling/upselling opportunities.
The updates feed is located to the side of the splash page container within the home page.
With this feed, the user can get up-to-date information about orders in progress that are pending on their account. The application has been designed to scale for organizations requiring multiple orders and language pairs simultaneously. If orders are small and only consist of a single document, then the update feature merely informs the customer and sends them an email when the order has been completed. However, with orders of larger complexity, the client can be informed when each document is finished, rather than waiting for all documents within an order to be finished and creating a lag time between completion of
3.2 – C
REATING AN ORDER AND SUBMITTING FOR QUOTEClicking on the ‘New Order’ link brings you to a page that introduces the basic flow of the order process. Going from the first order form to the payment screen requires four steps:
a) Provide important background information about the order b) Upload all files one wishes to have translated
c) Submit a quote and wait for a response d) Approve and make payment
The order flow is intended to mimic the commonly known aspects of popular e-commerce websites that sell products online, such as Amazon. Whereas some translation agencies open potential transactions with an exchange of emails and discussion of the parameters of the job, the website’s order flow is intended to reduce the amount of time and man-hours required to negotiate over the job, determine a price, and arrive at a decision.
In the future, the company will have some sales people to handle these responsibilities, as some customers will certainly wish to maintain this one-on-one communication pattern.
However, the process by which the company interacts should be oriented around technological capabilities and the advantages in automation and convenience that they bring.
One of the difficulties of applying the e-commerce order flow to a service industry is that services are not mass-produced and standardized in the way that products sold on Amazon would be. The needs of each client will be different. Ideally, the company should be able to accommodate a wide range of service needs, from short translations requiring a day or less, to longer orders requiring multiple employees and payment broken out into installments. The preliminary order form attempts to categorize the needs of the typical client
as much as possible before order submission. For clarity, the choice of languages available for service are referred to as “locales”. Every order features one and only starting language, or “locale origin”, and either one or many target locales which constitute “locale branches”.
Each branch requires one or more translators to be assigned to it to perform work.
The form has a number of selection menus designed to categorize the type of service required. In addition to specifying the locales required in the order, a number of options are available. Examples include:
Type: Translate (Convert a document from one language to another), Review
(Modify and polish an existing document without translation), Create (develop a document from scratch)
Process: Same (polishing a previously translated document), Single (translation
between two languages), Multiple (From one language to many languages)
Field: Academic (high school or college essays and applications), Publishing
(graduate level or Ph.D work intended for academic journals), Signage (Restaurant menus, billboards, and other publicly viewable literature), Marketing (brochures, flyers, press releases etc.)
Speed: Regular, Express (Express option will move the job to the front of the queue for the company’s translators. More developments on this will come later).
Successful submission of the background information form will save the prospective order’s data to the database for the first time. The user can leave the website and return at a later time, and the order will appear in the shopping cart. However, the user is required to submit at least one document per target locale before being allowed to submit a quote. This document or documents must conform to a number of pre-specified formats, such as PDF, DOCX, TXT or XLSX.
In addition to the file requirement, the user is allowed to upload a number of supplementary files for each branch. These are files that are not to be directly modified by the company’s translators in any way, but are simply permitted so that the translator may have more context and information about each order’s service requirements. For instance, if the customer is submitting an order involving some file translation, the supplementary file aspect allows the customer to include a memo specifying the translation requirements that has been provided by his or her superiors, rather than needing to write down these requirements for the translator and needlessly repeating himself or herself.
3.3 – P
AYMENT & RETRIEVING FINISHED PRODUCTAfter the client has customized their order and met the minimum uploading requirements, they can submit this order for a quote. This will enable the quote to be viewable by administrators on the administrator-only portion of the site. Administrators can download the files, review them, and make a judgement about a reasonable price to charge the client. This payment can be arranged to take place upfront or structured as installments. When the price is assigned, the client can receive an email about this quote, and their front-page feed will update to show that this quote has been issued.
For the time being (and subject to change in the future), the client is not allowed to directly choose a translator through the website interface. There is also no negotiation feature outside of the website to discuss price, although these conversations can occur outside of the site.
This is also subject to change in the future. If the customer agrees to the quotes, they can enter an e-commerce-like checkout page and choose their method of payment. They are allowed to simultaneously pay for any and all orders for which they have received a quote.
Payments are handled through one of two payment processors, Stripe and Braintree. Both providers offer conventional credit card charging, as well as a number of web-based payment systems. Braintree (a Paypal subsidiary) offers payments through Paypal, Apple Pay, and Google Wallet. Stripe offers payment via Alibaba’s Alipay, which is a critical component in any strategy for attracting mainland Chinese customers.
These third party payment systems allow the company to achieve cross-border compliance with legal regulations regarding consumer financial security. They also employ the latest machine-learning strategies for detecting and stopping financial fraud. Finally, they
are essential for promising financial security to clients – payment details are forwarded directly to trusted payment processors and never stored on the company’s servers.
Once an order has entered the system, it will become an order in process. The administrator will determine the translators required for the order and assign them to the order.
From the point of view of the customer, the website’s layout allows them to:
a) List all orders in process or completed, searchable by a number of terms
b) Monitor the individual progress of each order and download files when completed by translators
c) Use a web form to contact the company with any questions/concerns
d) Browse the profiles of translators assigned to the order, which include resume information, some biographical information, a photo, and samples of previous work Translators can update their progress if the order takes more than a day or two, and the order will display a rough estimate of completion across all files in process. When each document has a file uploaded (to indicate completion), the user’s front page feed will update to attract the user’s attention that the file is available. Finally, the user will receive an email as well as any feed updates when all documents have been completed.
C
HAPTER4 –
FINANCIAL PROJECTIONS4.1 –
DETERMINING PRICING&
MARGINSUnlike retailers selling physical goods, businesses that offer services to end consumers or other businesses often don’t know exactly what their costs will be, and therefore base their pricing on estimations. Translation is no different. The clearest method of pricing a translation service is to estimate the price of a document using a cost-per-word rate. This rate may be kept uniform across an order, or it may be discounted for larger orders.
Many translation agencies simply don’t offer information about their pricing structures upfront. For good reason – estimating potential labor cost (in man-hours) can vary highly even with documents of a similar length. Agencies making naïve cost projections based on document length may find themselves fixing up highly flawed documents at a loss. If they underestimate the appropriate price, the agency may also alienate their translator base by not paying at a value commensurate with the labor hours to produce a quality result.
The following is a small sample of translation agencies companies located in South Korea, Japan, the United States, UK, and Taiwan, and the prices they offer upfront on their websites. Although each company has its own method of categorizing orders, the statistics compiled here roughly correspond to each company’s ‘basic’ and ‘professional’ pricing tiers.
This data is not meant to offer a market-wide measurable average but simply to give the reader a glimpse into what kind of prices the market can currently bear (table 4A).
All figures are converted into USD using currency exchange rates from local currencies as of May 31st, 2017. In some cases, the prices are listed in USD rather than in the currencies of the company’s home country.
For the purpose of estimating revenue, this business plan will calculate using USD
$.09 basic and $.14 professional tier prices. This is not meant to be a scientific estimate, but
$.09 basic and $.14 professional tier prices. This is not meant to be a scientific estimate, but