#260 Pairaphrase Co-Founder Rick Woyde on Building a Language Technology Platform

Rick Woyde, Co-Founder of Pairaphrase, joins SlatorPod to talk about his entrepreneurial journey co-founding a language technology platform (LTP) focused on simplicity and accessibility.

Rick describes identifying early adoption of Google Translate among businesses and spotting a gap for a platform that served both non-technical users and professionals without the complexity of traditional LTP tools.

The Co-Founder highlights that Pairaphrase now serves diverse clients, from US schools translating educational documents to corporations managing multilingual content, with SaaS-based offerings and annual subscriptions.

He outlines how the AI boom has expanded the market for translation software and how Pairaphrase integrates generative AI to enable file translation via ChatGPT, custom GPT models, and prompt-based original content creation. 

Rick emphasizes the growing importance of language variety, the flexibility of LLMs, and the ability to quickly meet niche language requests. He also discusses the challenge of adding features without overcomplicating the UI, prioritizing automation of complex tasks in the background.

The Co-Founder shares how Pairaphrase grew largely under the radar through SEO and content marketing before expanding its marketing team. He acknowledges challenges from changes in Google’s search landscape and notes growing referrals from AI tools like ChatGPT.

Rick closes by previewing upcoming developments, including a proprietary GPT designed to deliver high-quality, customizable translations and the launch of a mobile real-time speech translation app.