My Journey as a Founder

Having worked as a translator, I saw that the cost-driven industry was dominated by the translator-centric approach. Experience told me that translators, no matter how skilled, can’t be knowledgeable in every subject matter and great writers, no matter how eloquent, can’t be powerful in every style of writing.

So without a clue about launching a start-up and without even knowing how to read balance sheets, I founded Culture Flipper to put forth a new vision: translation and localization as a collaborative endeavor with translators, writers and subject matter experts equally contributing toward a common goal.

Within the first 3 years, Culture Flipper’s organic growth went from $0 to $170K MRR with only two languages, Korean and English, without funding or sales and marketing gimmicks. One of the biggest mistakes I made at the time, ironically, was that I was too focused on our product and people only, grappling with the question of how to modify and test out the workflows to produce stickier user traction in a target culture even further in different types of text daily while being completely negligent of diversifying the client base or increasing profitability.

As a result, the following 3 years was brutally challenging as experiments and collaboration meant more people to get it done, which meant more coordinating and more communication, which meant more conflict resolutions especially with different languages, cultural backgrounds and time zones.

Now in its 7th year, with 25+ languages, Culture Flipper is still bootstrapping to uphold our vision without external funding and influence. We are constantly experimenting ways to scale the seemingly unscalable craftsmanship and melding elements rooted in the humanities with technology.

This collaborative localization path I have chosen is not an easy one, and I am learning a great deal about what it takes to get multilingual communication right with my team every day.

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