A historical moment

In sales, it is fundamental that if you achieve something, you talk about it. While my Hungarian mind still has some reservations about bragging and being in the centre of attention - it is pretty far away from our culture -, I reserve those reservations for private life.
Last night when I looked at the group buy on proz.com, I was very pleased. For the first time ever in history, we sold over 80 copies of memoQ within four days, while SDL only sold 78 within a much longer period. This is nothing short of a historical moment! I have never seen a tool outperforming Trados before on a proz.com campaign.

Translators are very hard to convince, as it is simply not possible talking to everyone in person, offering training to everyone, etc. When we started the company, we identified a couple of thought leaders among translators and we kept in touch with them on a regular basis. They have helped us shape memoQ, and we saw that they were satisfied when they bought a copy. We still keep in touch with these people and others who suggest features and report usability glitches, and this dialogue is still crucial, but it is not possible to talk to everyone. We found that many expert users started using memoQ, but we also found that it was hard to convince those people who weren't experts. They probably needed a simpler value proposition than "eye for details" or "interoperability". After signing on the experts, there was a temporary decrease in freelance sales, but as I see our freelance sales going up very fast since memoQ 4.5, I believe LiveDocs was the key.

We will continue to add impressive functionality for translators too (we have a lot of ideas), keeping up with our balanced approach of giving value to translators, language service providers and enterprises with each new version. We still have a lot of ideas. With this blog entry, I would like to say a public thank you to every translator who decided to jump on the memoQ bandwagon. We know that there are still things that can be improved in memoQ (just like in any other tool), and we appreciate all your feedback. Also, if you are a non-tech-savvy translator, please share your thoughts on what makes a translation tool attractive to you. Thank you. I hope that many such group buys are to come!