{"id":5184,"date":"2012-09-03T10:40:53","date_gmt":"2012-09-03T08:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=5184"},"modified":"2012-09-03T10:40:53","modified_gmt":"2012-09-03T08:40:53","slug":"textmaster-content-creation-and-translation-the-crowdsourced-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2012\/09\/textmaster-content-creation-and-translation-the-crowdsourced-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Textmaster \u2013 content creation and translation, the crowdsourced way"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nWhen I meet Benoit Laurent<\/a>, CEO of TextM<\/a>aster<\/a>, he\u2019s slightly out of breath and looking frantically at his watch. He explains to me that the reason he insisted on meeting at Gare de Lyon is that he and his wife live in Toulon (a 5 hour train ride away from Paris, on the Mediterranean coast) and that she\u2019s nine months pregnant. To say that he\u2019s on hot standby is an understatement!
\nTextmaster, founded in June 2011, is a truly international organization: Headquartered in Brussels, the CEO lives in Toulon, the CTO in Hong Kong, and two investors and co-founders are in Paris. Benoit waves away any question about communication \u2013 their team works seamlessly across these distances.<\/p>\n

Of Fotolia fame<\/h2>\n

Co-founders Thibaud Elziere<\/a> and Quentin Nickmans<\/a> are already rich and famous from Fotolia<\/a>, one of the leading photo marketplaces in the world. After enjoying the partial exit of Fotolia, they had some time on their hands, and decided to start (and fund) not one new startup, but five! Textmaster is one of those. Elziers and Nickmans share their time between Textmaster<\/a>, Mailjet<\/a>, Muxi, Mention<\/a> and Pressking<\/a>.\u00a0 Sounds challenging? Textmaster\u2019s CEO is quite happy with the outcome \u2013 he gets massively experienced co-founders on his team, that despite being part time at Textmaster, act as advisor, investor, team member, and mentor, with well-proven track records. Not to mention that their networks are immeasurably valuable too.<\/p>\n

Problem<\/h2>\n

The problem that Textmaster solves is that getting translations, copywriting, and proofreading is an expensive pain-in-the-ass at the moment. Certified translators are scarce, they overcharge, and underperform, while their qualifications are often irrelevant to the actual job requirements. In addition, if, for example, you are in Paris and you need to find a Dutch-to-Romanian translator, this can be very difficult to find, for obvious reasons. One of the challenges is also making sure that your translator is doing a good job. If you pay someone for a translation, odds are, you don\u2019t speak the language that\u2019s being translated to. So how can you be sure the translation is correct, and sounds like how a native speaker would say it? People end up relying on informal networks for this, which is unreliable and inefficient.<\/p>\n

Solution<\/h2>\n

Textmaster solves this problem by creating a global virtual workforce that is accessible through their website that are individuals that offer translation, copywriting and proofreading services. Quality of the writers and translators is established by standardized testing on the website (not certification!!) and feedback from prior jobs. This allows them to connect supply and demand in a very efficient way.
\nIn a sense, it\u2019s a crowdsourcing solution, but it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that they are a C2B \u2013 consumers turned workers offer themselves to businesses. In any case, the similarities to Fotolia are there \u2013 consumers turning themselves into professionals, crowdsourcing, global marketplace.\u00a0 By bundling translation and independent proofreading, they are also removing the pain of verifying a translator\u2019s work. In addition, they model themselves as a technology platform, with a strong API, inviting tight integrations with content creation platforms like WordPress and other CMS\u2019es.
\nStarted in June 2011, they are off to a good start: the community of workers is 26,000 people strong, and they are cashflow-positive. Their offering comes in three kinds: Basic (translation or copywrite only), Standard (translation\/copywrite + verification), and Expert (translation\/copywrite + verification + quality guarantee). \u00a0You pay for them with \u2018credits\u2019, that you buy in bulk \u2013 the more, the cheaper. In reality, the work ends up being 85% cheaper than traditional services \u2013 a massive savings.
\nSome of the areas where they don\u2019t shine are the more complex areas of the industry: for example, subtitles are translations that have to fit neatly into a specific number of characters by time unit, which makes it far more complicated than \u2018normal\u2019 translation work, requiring specific software to author it on. Other examples are translations of advertisements, where the translation is strictly limited to a number of characters and needs to be \u2018catchy\u2019 \u2013 a hard to qualify skill best left to the ad agency copywriters.
\nTheir competitors include Genjo, a Japanese \/ US company, Textbroker, a german\/US company, and Wordy \u2013 a Danish proofreading service. And the traditional translation and copywriting industry, of course!<\/p>\n

VC money? We don\u2019t need it! But we sure want it!<\/h2>\n

They are currently \u2018founder-funded\u2019 and cashflow-positive. They are shopping around for VC money, but are in the fortunate position that they don\u2019t need it! As one would imagine, this improves a startup\u2019s position at the negotiating table enormously \u2013 just like banks, VC\u2019s are most likely to give you money when you don\u2019t need it.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n

Textmaster is removing pain where it hurts \u2013 paying needlessly expensive translators where someone crowdsourced can do the job just fine. They are a true startup in the sense that they are proving a new business model \u2013 common sense dictates they will succeed. Will they ever replace complex translation jobs? Not likely, but they are at least giving them a run for their money!
\nAs a BONUS<\/strong>, Textmaster is offering the first 50 readers 1000 free Textmaster credits for signing-up to their service<\/strong>. \u00a0To receive the credits, first register here<\/a><\/strong>. \u00a0Once\u00a0you’re logged in, go to ‘Mes Cr\u00e9dits’ (My Credits) in the ‘Mon Profil’ (My Profile) section of the site and enter the promocode\u00a0RudeBaguette<\/strong>.
\n 
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I meet Benoit Laurent, CEO of TextMaster, he\u2019s slightly out of breath and looking frantically at his watch. He explains to me that the reason he insisted on meeting at Gare de Lyon is that he and his wife live in Toulon (a 5 hour train ride away from Paris, on the Mediterranean coast)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":64792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10563],"tags":[2746,834,3821],"class_list":["post-5184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tech","tag-interviews","tag-paris","tag-textmaster"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}