Charles Chin started WritePath in Taiwan after securing his first angel investment in 2009. Inspired by a common experience shared by applicants for overseas college admissions, Charles, a graduate of University of Wisconsin at Madison, created TopAdmit, a student application essay editing networking platform in 2010, and then went on to create TopSCIedit, making WritePath a cloud-based translation platform for high quality translation.
ASIA TODAY editor sat down with Charles to hear about WritePath's latest developments and its roadmap for 2016 and beyond.
1. What is your background and what was your startup vision for WritePath?
I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison campus, and upon returning to Taiwan worked at Asustek Computer, FedEx and other multinational companies. Recalling the time of applying for overseas universities inspired me to establish WritePath in 2009. After obtaining my first angel investment from the original co-founder of Sina.com in 2010, I devoted my energy in the creation of TopAdmit, a student application essay editing networking platform.
From the initial service of application essay editing to TopSCIedit, servicing medical articles editing to WritePath, a cloud-based translation servicing platform for businesses to provide enterprises quality translation. Customer demand laid a firm foundation on product developments and services, contributing to the growth of my business.
2. What are WritePath’s major milestones and awards?
WritePath won the Echelon Startup award in 2013, one of the earliest companies to win such an honor in Japan. 2014 was a winning year for WritePath, we led a team to participate in the Asia Pacific Entrepreneurship Competition to win the gold medal, then the Up-and-Coming Award for the Finnish competition Slush, and was selected for Asia America Multi Technology Association (AAMA) Taipei cradle program for entrepreneurs, recognized as the innovative enterprises in China, and acquiring Japan's leading early stage venture capitalist B Dash Ventures’ seed round investment. For 2015 we were recognized by the Future Commerce competition as the best platform for business innovation and the Special Jury Award.
3. Who are your clients?
We currently target technology and financial industries such as Investor Relations departments of listed companies and product marketing departments as our clients. A few Fortune 500 companies are already using our service but when promoting within the Taiwan market, SMEs become our focus. We currently provide localization for multi-languages servicing for marketing products, finance and technology. With the assistance of machine tools, glossary database, we hope to take the company global, becoming the leader within the industry to provide fast and reliable language support to businesses worldwide.
4. Who are your main competitors? Are they international or local service providers?
WritePath’s main competitors are regional translation agencies and our international level competitors include LionBridge and SDL. What sets us apart from the traditional translation agencies is that our fundamental business model is that we are technology-based, specializing in digital marketing and the use of cloud technology to integrate all resources to provide high-quality, relatively inexpensive and fast translation, our advantages over the current competitors.
5. What are WritePath’s main strengths and what is its vision for the future?
Our competitive advantage is being cloud-based, when customers use our platform, the platform itself not only provide translation but through shared accounts, allows customers access to track work progress and document management. The second is the exclusive development of translation memory and glossary management system T-Booster (translation booster), purpose is to enhance the translation quality, ensure consistency, and reduce the customer's translation costs. Since the commercial focus of the world has shifted to Asia over the recent years, the next five years we hope to expand within Asia such as Japan, China, having already representation in Beijing and Shanghai motivates the team to continue expansion.
For medium-range goals, we aim to become US market companies entering Asian market’s priority choice as the reliable service provider. We are currently focusing on the further development of technology and financial expertise and with our advantages, hope to achieve become all the company's path to the world.
6. Have you encountered challenges following your expansion into different markets?
The biggest challenge for translation industry is that typically files are still being handled through email or mail, in the forms of word or excel documents. This may work for individual clients but for enterprises of higher volume pose an extreme additional investment in time and manpower simply to process the request on both ends. Through technology, we minimize the manpower efforts to increase efficiency as clients can directly upload files onto WritePath’s platform. Our next challenge is to educate our local customers to embrace the concept of Service as a Service (SaaS). In the meanwhile, a more straightforward challenge we are currently facing includes being accepted within the Japanese market, as the culture prefers to work with local companies.
7. What are the barriers to cope with in terms of Asia’s language and cultural diversity?
Through our crowdsourcing efforts, we have recruited over ten thousand translators, focusing on finding native speakers from various cultures and professions to provide language support, establishing an open channel of communication platform system to amplify viral effect within the said community. Through this process we are able to identify language experts to provide customers with convenient, fast and high quality business translation services.
About WritePath
WritePath, a Taiwan startup of international team with the head office in Taiwan, with the focus of the market around the world. Team members of origins from United States, Germany, Taiwan, China, Japan, South Korea and Brazil, are well versed in national markets and consumer culture and work together in operating a world-class cloud translation writing platform. Our diverse team of culture and professional background also attracts many top translators and editors to become core of this organization, to provide customers around the world the highest quality of professional services. Our purpose as a cloud-based translation platform challenges the old with one standard pricing for all languages with one goal in mind, to assist corporate globalization around the world.
For further inquiry, please contact
Tina Lee
tina@writepath.co
https://www.writepath.co/en
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