My Ongoing Online AI Business: The Story of AI PEPEGO
Following my series on failed ventures, I’d like to introduce you to my “ongoing” business.
When I started building this product, honestly, no one around me thought I could make money from it. Nobody believed people would actually pay for this service.
The Pain Point That Started It All
It all began with my own frustration. As a non-native English speaker who uses English professionally, I understand how challenging it can be for Korean native speakers to follow English speeches or lectures in real-time.
The biggest problem with existing free AI translation tools (Google Translate, DeepL, Naver Papago) was that they would lose track after recognizing and translating just a few sentences when dealing with longer speeches. While they work fine for short conversations - like talking to a foreigner - they become useless for lengthy content like foreign language lectures or speeches.
https://youtu.be/CfrYWpi-dzU?si=DW6a8liOT6bCnPXr
Recent LLM models can do speech recognition, but they don’t provide real-time translation. Or when they do speech recognition, they tend to ignore what you’re saying when responding.
As someone who invests in US stocks, I often need to listen to speeches by the US President or Federal Reserve Chairman. I can’t count how many times I wished for a tool that could listen and translate simultaneously in real-time.
Building the Solution
So I built it - a tool that provides real-time speech recognition and simultaneous interpretation for over an hour. I named it “PEPEGO,” inspired by Naver’s Papago, with a penguin face as the logo.
This was my first time implementing payment functionality with my business registration, which came with many challenges. To add payment features to a web app, you need approval from payment platforms.
First, I needed a Korean business registration. For payment methods, I eventually integrated LemonSqueezy and Toss Pay. I also applied for KakaoPay in the middle of development, but since it was taking longer than expected, I went with Toss Pay, which only took a few days. I planned to add KakaoPay later, but due to various circumstances, I never did.
Marketing and Results
For post-launch marketing, I focused on content marketing - uploading videos to blogs, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Perhaps due to the specific nature of language tools, once uploaded, these videos consistently gained views and brought in users over time.
I tried paid marketing on Instagram and Facebook, but the performance marketing results weren’t as good as expected.
The results: Over 1,100 unique visitors, 70+ signups, and several paying customers.
Was This a Failure?
Is this small number a failure? Was building this product a mistake?
I don’t want to call it a failure. It’s a product that still generates revenue without any ongoing effort from me. More importantly, it gave me invaluable inspiration for building SaaS products online.
Looking Forward
Moving forward, I’m committed to creating better, more profitable products that truly help people and make a positive impact on the world.
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