How to find your identity as an LSP?

Max Morkovkin 00:00 Okay, anti panel polls. Here we are. And NIR is also here ready to share with us his wonderful presentation I saw near also enjoyed the panel discussion and was really good, if you're about that will ask me or just now how he feels about it. Nir Sabato 00:26 Okay, near you Hello, can you guys hear me? Max Morkovkin 00:31 Yes can hear you sorry for making you wait. But I saw that you enjoyed this panel discussion, right? Nir Sabato 00:36 Actually, I really enjoyed it. And I didn't know I mean a lot from home, Oregon is the organizers, you do the great job, because I'm going to speak a lot about MMT and how to train machine translation agents so that I couldn't ask for a better and better context for my, my session. Max Morkovkin 00:56 Yeah, really nice. It's a hot topic, what to say. Alright, so near, let me just give a kind of introductory view. So you could get started. Right, so near the head of strategy at one hour translation, and his topic will be about how to find your identity as an LSP. I think everybody heard about one hour translation and how it has been evolving from a generalist transactional speed to a machine translation training partner for some of the world's largest online companies. So yeah, near it's time for you, given the mic to you, you can now share the screen. And just our attendees to send your questions in session, we will be glad to answer your questions after you're finished his presentation. So you're the mic to you. Nir Sabato 01:51 Alright, great. So I'm going to share my screen. And we don't have a lot of time. So let's try to be very precise and to the point. And let me start by brief introduction about myself. I'm the head of strategy in one hour translation. My current role, I'm typical, strategy role. So I'm leading the strategy for the company, initiating new growth engines and responsible for the strategic partnerships. In the I'm actually new to the localization world. In the past, I worked at Fiverr. The largest freelance marketplace for digital services, went IPO last year, and was a strategy consultant and an Israeli leading consulting firm. Other than that, I enjoy Netflix, Spotify and Twitter. And so we also have participants from Spotify and the events. So that's, that's awesome. And a lot of backpacking, so I'm either traveling or planning my next big trip. So that's a little bit about me, just as an interest for you. So you'll get to know me a bit. Why? Let's start with a question. Alright, so why does a clear identity as an LSP really important? We thought a lot it, we thought a lot about it for one hour translation. And after a few, the experience of the game we shared, we discovered a few insights that I like to share with you. One is we found that when you have a clear identity, we find clients coming to us and not instead of us chasing them trying to win the business that it goes the other way around. So that's one thing. Second thing is that you gradually become a trusted adviser. So it's not just about here's the job, please do it and send it to us back. But you become a real partner. When you become really good at something, then the clients are looking for your feedback. We have a clear and getting clear, unique selling proposition over our competition. And I think the one thing that is very important is that once we actually win the business in the niches that we're expanding to the fulfillment process is actually pretty easy to handle. So it all comes down to more markets and more clients that we're winning because we're expanding to specific niches, and I want to take this session to pick one niche that we did very well in the past few years. And kind of share how we got there and and what was the logic behind it. So let's move on. The question is how do you identify the right niche for you? And when we started, when, when our translation was started, it started really as almost a b2c company. So started in 2008 was three college friends that had this idea of, let's connect professional translators with translation buyers, over the internet, something that's quite new at the time. And, and the and the idea was that the focus on two main things, one was to build a very diversified and large freelance community of professional translators. And the second was to invest in technology. So technology was really the core of one hour translation. This is what at the time really differentiated us between a one hour translation from the traditional translation agencies at the time, and we grew with time, so it started very, very big to see with time we went up market and serving now more and more enterprise clients. And we always remain generalists. And this is an important topics we had, we operated in a lot of countries, we served many different verticals, we're not specifically focused on one many different language pairs that we supported. And, and basically was kind of seen as a translation, one stop shop, we could translate your game, but also your privacy policy and your legal contract and your marketing materials. And, and everything. That was good to a certain point. And then we started to think of what niches what smaller is in the market we can expand into. And the truth is that we did three main things right from the beginning. And that was the traditional way. One is that we spoke with the industry experts, and to be telling the truth, we are blessed as an industry to have such knowledgeable and smart consultants and experts in this industry. I'm guessing some of them are here participating in this conference. And they gave us a lot of insights and interesting direction to direction to think about. The second is we'll listen to the trends in the market. So we spoke with a lot of clients, we read a lot of articles, and really try to see where the market is going because we wouldn't be in the right place. And we also did a lot of analysis, segmentation, market sizing all those textbook, textbooks methodologies. The interesting part, and this is what I want to share with you is our secret sauce. What was really proven for us to be very, very helpful. One is that we listen to our clients. So we actually, and I'll speak more about it, we actually analyzed what we're doing today, what we're doing at this given time point is time times point to really realize how our clients are using us and for what the second part was to identify what unique assets do we have. So why does our clients really come to us and wherever they're choosing us. And the third part was to invest to get invest in our core platform. And not just in the in the outside, not just in the marketing and sales, but really invest in the product in the platform. And I'm going to touch a little bit about each one of those key ingredients and kind of walk through the story of how we did it. So one thing that was very important to us is that we looked at our product portfolio, the client portfolio and the type of projects that we did. And we realized that with time, we saw those projects that were very unique to us. So think of us as a transactional LSP that companies that translated websites and legal documents, all kinds of things. And then we realized that we have a specific type of project, which is growing from one year to the other that we didn't really focus on. And when we investigated into it, we realized that there's a certain segment of corporate clients that couldn't manually translates all of their content. So they had, you know, huge volumes of content, and most of it either user generated content that didn't really control and was generated in a massive pace, or just endless product catalog with product descriptions and and reviews and things like that. And these clients needed these instant real time translation. But they also took them stuff very seriously. So they couldn't really accept the general generic machine translation products that were out there. And there was a, there's a need in the market, which has now become more and more clear for high quality and scalable and affordable solution. And this is where clients came to us to help them in improving and training their machine translation agents. So it started from using our talent to evaluate which kind of talent and our expertise to evaluate which machine translation would work best for them and for their content and for their language pair. Then, if it was our clients, then train the engines with our translation, memory and glossary in all the past projects that we did. But the third step was really to use us as a platform to translate unique pieces of content and feed the machine with the unique translation with the unique piece of content that no one translated before. And that could really make this is where our clients made the jump, the leap into machine translation did really perform much better than the generic ones. And they also had more and more requirements, just like the panel we heard before, in evaluating and comparing in data labeling in really try to teach the machine more than just if it's good or or bad translation, we invested a lot in our platform. The second second thing I told you is that we, the reason that was really interesting for me as a strategy guy, the fact that we as a b2c player, were so strong in this niche is interesting. But the fact is that, as a generalist LSP, we actually had a lot of advantages that are relevant to be the partner for machine translation projects. We had a direct management and relationship with our professional translators, super fast turnaround time. Pricing that was simple and affordable. We definitely supported high volumes and wide coverage of language pairs. And we had all our procedures of, of QA and verticals. And the all those points that were that are critical for an online generalist player actually became super important when you help major internet players to translate high volumes of user generated content in a wide variety of topics, to train their machine. So that was the moment when we realized that those unique projects that we're handling, they're not here by mistake, it's not a random choice of a localization manager somewhere, they actually come came to us because we have something very unique in the market to offer. And what we did is that we invested a lot in our core capabilities. So a lot of players in the market when they want to enter a niche, they spend a lot of time in focusing on marketing and sales, like get me those deals and Windows clients. And here's the target, let's do it. But we obviously did that as well, right. But we actually invested a lot on the platform, on the on our procedures and how we manage the community and the recruitment processes in the huddle, brief, high scale and high volume of projects. And once we did that, that really what was created was for us created the edge on these projects. So we created the platform that was so flexible that we could really create really interesting and complex workflows where we get a source document from a client and then run it in two different engines. One would we would post edit the other we would evaluate versus a human translation that we did, but only after we went through the QA process, and then did the final evaluation and data labeling and all these pretty much advanced workflows, but in in a scale and in a variety of language pairs. And that was something that investing in our platform in this way really made the fulfillment process. Super easy for us. The Hear it goes back to the the identity question. And once we realized that we that we're positioned well to succeed in this niche, it actually was much bigger than just running those projects. It really changed us as a company. So we moved from very short term engagements. Remember the b2c b2c model that we worked in the past to long term partnerships from small transactional projects of 40 or $100 per client moves for mega projects in the hundreds of 1000s, even millions of dollars per year from from a single client. And move from self serve to high engagement introduced salespeople and account managers and program managers and, and really the those internal functions that were necessary to handle those kinds of relationship. And instead of just focusing on the matchmaking between translation buyer and there, and a freelancer, focus more on those advanced workflows and manage him. It's in scale and variety of language pairs. Recently, we decided that this logic is very good for us the logic of seeing what our clients are asking us to do and are using us for understanding our assets and investing in our platform that we realized that there's a lot of localization services that we can provide, because everybody's saying that localization is more than just translation. And it's kind of funny, because we're were named when our translation, but the truth is that a lot of our clients, especially those with the high engagement, and the rich relationships, are asking us to do a lot more than just translation. So if you ask me what's next for us, then we're gonna expand our service portfolio to areas where we see demand from our existing clients. And we feel that our platform of connecting freelancers, and, and, and buyers and enterprises is something that can be can be used, and be improved to deliver these kinds of projects. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna close this session with something for you. And is these are the this is the secret sauce, right? These are the three questions that we're asking ourselves when we want to expand our services to new nice. One is, what unique projects something that is out of the ordinary that your clients are asking from you to you. And the thing is that they're probably not getting it somewhere else. The second theme is do you have the assets and trailing, they will help you deliver such projects at its substantial scale. And the three is what can you do? Third question is what can you do in order to improve your capabilities, and really become number one, delivering these projects. With that in mind, I think that this is my angle, on and one hour translation angle on choosing your identity. I'd love to open this to questions, and speak a little bit about so I'm going to stop sharing my screen Max Morkovkin 18:41 near Thank you very much for giving so much interesting, important information in the short time adjusting your presentation for us to keep up with the timing. Thank you so much, really appreciate it. It's an honor to know Nir Sabato 18:58 well, you know, I told you, I was a management consultant. I love making presentations. It's just for me the whole The whole purpose of this event is just the opportunity to create one more good looking presentation. Max Morkovkin 19:14 I feel it and I see our attendees in the chat. Also say that this presentation is great and appreciating you. So let's take a look on the questions we have already in our q&a part. So near the question from Richard Varga Why did you choose to stop be their one stop shop and again finding a niche right so Nir Sabato 19:44 I will say this, we didn't really choose to stop being a one stop shop. Okay, so still our bread and butter the business that that is the easiest and most clients know us for is the It is this, I would say plain vanilla translation. A lot of company, a lot of companies, a lot of clients come to us and ask for it. But we realize that there are certain areas in the market that are left unanswered. And we were just happened to be in this really good starting point, just because our assets, not because of anything else, that clients were already asking us to provide services. So it's an interesting concept. It's expanding our services to a niche. So it's kind of counterintuitive. But we see it as an expansion. We're not leaving everything we did behind and ditching it. We're just this is part of our, our expansion strategy. So I hope that answers your question. Max Morkovkin 20:53 Okay, good. And if not, guys, you're welcome to join the smart tech community and keep asking the questions, and near will help you to expand on that. So another question from Sultan ghaznavi. Did you have to cut off any business streams in order to make these strategic changes? What did the revenue loss look like? And how was it justified? Nir Sabato 21:17 If any? Right, so we didn't really cut business lines. So lesson will be the the business of one hour translation, the traditional, okay, the b2c model is still working great for us. We still have people, that product managers and people in the marketing team and delivery team, they're working solely on that. So this is part of our business, it will never go away. So it's it's a service that we only see growing each year, and a lot of happy customers. We did allocated resources, dedicated resources to open up new and expand our product portfolio and our services portfolio. So as for Rana, we're translation, this is really a matter of expansion and not just shifting. And I understand it's it's, I think it's not an easy ride. So I think what's interesting to say here is that we didn't expand it because we didn't have any other choice, right? It's not like our our normal business was done, we wanted to shift and find a different different type of business to be working on. It was more the fact that we recognize that if we will invest in a specific niche, we'll be able to solve a real problem that not a lot of companies can console, as good as we're doing it today. Max Morkovkin 23:02 Good. Thank you. Thank you. We'll have to wrap up on that moment. And we'll ask near to answer the rest of the questions in smart get community. Nir Sabato 23:14 Absolutely. I would love to do so. And as I said, I'm new to this industry. So I've been in strategy my whole life, but in localization, it's a new chapter for me. So love to connect LinkedIn SmartCAT forum. I love those discussions. And it's really important for me, and really interesting. So thank you for being the host of such wonderful event. Max Morkovkin 23:37 Yes. Thank you for joining us today. It was a really great presentation.