eType… free software that completes and translates words as a user types in various languages

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

Daniel Scalosub is the founder of eType, free software that completes and translates words as a user types in various languages.  Daniel is also the co-founder of DSNR, DMG, and bezecom, all of which are Israeli based companies.  His experience and expertise is in online advertising and marketing as well as building successful Internet ventures.  Daniel is clearly passionate about business and shares some of his thoughts on his blog at Scalosub.com.

eType, recently featured on TechCrunch, is an auto-completion writing tool which generates high probability word choice suggestions and translation while you type.  It allows users to type faster, with greater confidence and allows you to select from the best word choices possible.  eType is currently in beta, but you can request an invite at eType.com.

MO:

eType is in beta at the moment. What is the ultimate vision for eType? Will it continue to be free post beta? What will your revenue model look like?

Daniel:

Our vision for eType is to change how people type and reduce illiteracy of users for which English is not their native tongue. As the English language is becoming more and more dominant we see international users stuck in their attempts to improve their writing abilities. eType is intended for both improving your spelling in your native language, as it completes words in Spanish, German, French and Russian to name but a few, but also helps such people in non-English speaking countries to type in English and immediately see the translation in their native tongue.

We intend to keep eType free, and in fact we currently do not have a revenue model as we are focused on improving the product and generate traction. We believe that at this point we shouldn’t build the company around the business model but rather build a great product first.

MO:

eType is quite a handy tool and works across software such as browsers and word processing applications. Where did the idea for eType come from?

Daniel:

Early in 2009 both myself and Nino Ransenbeg my partner, retired from day-to-day active roles in our companies. I decided to polish up my programming skills and started to learn C#. I worked through the exercises in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 that, among many other things, completes variable names so the program doesn’t fail as a result of misspelling a variable. At the time, we were also thinking about raising some money for DSNR Media Group and we were working on our presentation. When I got to writing the slide about our Methodology, I started to type “Met”… and waited for the dropdown menu to complete my word. That didn’t happen. Eureka! eType was born, and from there on I started planning the software and assembled the team to turn eType into a viable product.

As a side note, we named the software at first ePyte (eType spelled backwards) as the domain eType.com cost was close to $50K. Just before launching our beta, we finally bought the name and the rest is history.

MO:

Daniel, to quote your blog, you have said, “I never had a chance to get proper education and I prefer learning by reading books and doing things as opposed to talking about them.”  What is your educational background and do you attribute the lack of formal education to your success in some way?

Daniel:

I had a great conversation about this issue with a colleague of mine the other day. We discussed whether formal education helps entrepreneurs succeed. When an entrepreneur wants to learn something new he doesn’t care about getting a grade, he’s interested in solving the problem and his curiosity is his drive to overcome obstacles. I have barely finished high school and I never got a degree. The only time I did try to get a degree, I enrolled to study economics but when I walked into the classroom and saw people copying homework from each other, I knew this wasn’t the right place for me.

MO:

You co-founded DSNR in 2001.  Was this your first indication that you were an entrepreneur in the making?

Daniel:

Actually I had a spectacular failure, before I started DSNR with my partner Nino Ransenberg. I was involved in a venture in 1999 with Chen Yerushalmi called “Zoomgo”. “Zoomgo” was a community website back in the crazy .com years. We built a website with chats, forums and personal homepages capabilities and thought, like many companies at the time, that if we would build a good site people would come. We even thought at a certain point that if we would drive enough users to the site, they will create a set of rules, similar to a constitution, a voting system, judicial structure etc. and that will lead us to our ultimate goal, that was to register our website with the UN as the first virtual nation (yes, I do mean the United Nations). As you can imagine, that never materialized and eventually the entire site and business was scrapped, and so were our dreams and the money raised by my partner Chen.

My failure also helped me focus my entrepreneurship strategy that I shouldn’t build a company and rely on “If you build it they will come” strategy/prayer, but rather work more methodically by starting small, ensuring customers love and use our products and services and then scale up the business model.

MO:

As mentioned, you have a few ventures other than eType that you have founded or co-founded, DSNR and DMG as well as bezecom.  Although these companies are based in Israel, the target market for these companies appears to be English speaking, USA based users.  Is that correct?

Daniel:

Yes, our companies are based in Israel but with international (not just the US) target market. All three companies are very different from each other. DSNR is a direct-to-consumer marketing company, buying advertisement online and then funneling leads to call centers that we own and operate. DMG (DSNR Media Group) is a separate company that was built from our experience in buying online advertising, and we turned something that we did for ourselves to a service we provide to other companies as well, DMG currently serves over 20 billion banner impressions per month and is considered to be one of the largest advertising networks in Europe. Bezecom is a company that sells international IP telephony services to Israelis living outside of Israel, and DSNR Labs is the developer of eType our latest startup.

MO:

You have proven success with several ventures.  What are some of the largest challenges you have faced as an entrepreneur and what words of encouragement do you have for others?

Daniel:

My experience has been mostly in the online world but it may be applied to other fields as well. Every new venture introduces new challenges. The entrepreneur’s role is to find a sustainable business model that works and then scale up the business. The discovery method is derived from optimizing the product via short customer validation iterations and then getting those customers to use and pay for the product/service. The person who influences me the most these days is Steve Blank and his step-by-step method to build a startup. It’s not a bulletproof system, but it sure takes some of the classical mistakes out of the equation and increases the chances of success. Some of the things that we did in our earlier companies such as customer validation and keeping your startup lean are issues Steve Blank, Eric Ries and others are addressing in the “how-to startup” movement that is quickly growing these days.

The most important thing though, is what I tell my kids, “The world is not equipped to handle perseverance” (meaning that if you try sufficiently many times, odds are you will prevail)