In a world of founders on the hunt for the latest trend and mythical product-market-fit, one startup chose to stick to its guns. On a herculean 4 year journey to solve a universal problem, the concept of ‘permanent beta’ was born. Don’t miss the story of Babelverse’s unorthodox approach.

1. Overture

2. Salut!
@mayel2b @josef
@babelverse

3. Prelude

5. Building blocks

6. Curiosity, Breaking stuff, Experimenting

7. Learn through doing, not books

8. “Houston we have a problem”

9. Living in Greece

10. Lost

11. Bureaucracy!

12. Cuisine

13. ?
?
Business meetings

14. Events & Conferences

17. Phone a friend

18. 2011

19. “Post-It Note Model Canvas”

20. Legend: Babelverse’s XP
Community
Product
Awareness
Business

21. Babelfish?
Tower of Babel?
Reverse Babel?
Babelverse!

22. Vision
Our vision is for everyone to be able to truly
communicate and understand each other, while
simply speaking their own native languages.

23. Mission
Assemble a strong community of millions of members
around the world. Achieving on-demand interpretation in any
language pair.
Making it affordable and easily accessible to the largest
number. Creating a fair source of income for the community.

24. Overnighting It
(Internal 24h Hackathon)

25. #helpJapan

26. 150
volunteers
4
hours on
average

27. - #helpjapan
- Minimal UI
- Usable right away
- API to the rescue
- Human translation

28. Faking it

29. Faking It

30. Prototype

31. Overnighting It - The Sequel

32. Press
release

33. 1,000
people
tuned in
from 80
countries

34. Overnighting It - The Sequel
- Press Release
- Rudimentary quality control
- 100’s of Volunteers
- Sparked Curiosity

35. “The Dropdown”

36. Cutaway

37. Community Skill Level
- Differentiating skill-sets
became fundamental

38. - “Fair trade”
- Taking cost of
living into
account

39. Launching It
(Beta)

40. Shed
3 months rapid product development

41. Rapid Product Development

42. Rapid Product Development

43. Rapid Product Development

44. Official
partnership

45. Donations

46. - Official partnership
- Ran full 2 days service
No more faking
- Paid pro interpreters
- Minimal revenue via virtual ticket
sales & donations
- Community localisation

47. Interlude

48. OH! One more
Showing off our non-existing mobile app

49. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVSyOQVWrpo

50. Selling It

51. Live
streaming
product

52. Entirely
localised in
each language
Global
conversation

53. Virtual
Booth

54. Enterprise Clients / Partnerships

55. Live streaming product
- Many requests
- Most of our time on Pre-sales &
Customer service
- Non-scalable
- Working to someones else’s spec

56. Interlude

58. World Languages Project
A collaborative effort powered by individuals
and organisations to compile a comprehensive
and media rich database of all languages,
dialects and accents.

59. Epiphany

60. Babelverse is NOT an app. IT IS a
community, with matchmaking,
transactions and trust mechanisms.

61. API
Build a few apps on our own API
Let 3rd parties (partners, enterprise,
developers) build other use cases

63. We currently live here

64. Fuck the product!
Build the solution!