Building AI Applications in 2025: What You Need to Know First
O.Translator
Feb 16, 2025
In 2025, the greatest opportunities lie in the AI sector
3. Additional Value of AI Products
4. Do not fear others' first-mover advantage
In 2025, the greatest opportunities lie in the AI sector
With the advent of DeepSeek in 2025, AI applications are rapidly permeating everyday life, redefining industries from programming, education, and healthcare to industrial control and finance, becoming a revolutionary wave following the mobile internet.
Numerous small teams and startups are leveraging AI to develop new user experiences and product value, making 2025 undoubtedly the breakout year for AI applications. As a member of a small team, the O.Translator team has utilized AI to complete millions of document translations worldwide since 2023. Here is a summary of our experiences, which we hope will inspire you.
1. Cost, cost, cost
Small teams must live within their means
For startups, limited resources are the norm. Large-scale investment may lead to financial pressure and getting stuck due to lack of positive feedback. Therefore, making small investments to gain positive feedback and then increasing investment later is a pragmatic approach.
The O.Translator team leveraged its technological advantage to create the first Minimum Viable Product (MVP) at an extremely low cost, launched the initial version of the website with almost zero budget, and supported subsequent optimization and marketing through user-paid revenue. This model helped us steadily expand our user base.
This is what I talked about: 'Small cost investment—positive feedback—increased investment—more positive feedback.'
Leverage team advantages to build a low-cost system.
Our technical capabilities allow us to develop solutions independently without relying on expensive external systems, reducing costs and enhancing product control.
If the team has stronger operational advantages, they can initially use social platforms to explore the market, leveraging existing platforms (WeChat, Douyin, TikTok) to create a content ecosystem. Once a certain customer base is accumulated, they can gradually build their own technical systems.
Do not get caught up in areas you are not proficient in at the beginning, as it wastes both cost and time.
2. Cold Start and Marketing
Cold Start
Leveraging High-Authority Platforms
In the early stages of content marketing, it is crucial to choose platforms with high authority:
- Domestic Platforms
Leverage platforms like Zhihu, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu to enhance professional opinions and product exposure.
- International Platforms
Share content on globally renowned platforms like Medium and Reddit to quickly increase brand awareness.
O.Translator initially used platforms like Zhihu and Medium, and these articles brought in many early users.
Zhihu: How to use ChatGPT to translate documents (PDF/EPUB/DOCX/PPTX/XLSX/SRT/XLF/AI/INDD)?
Zhihu: How to use PDF.js to extract text position/color/font information from a PDF?
Medium: Translating Documents with ChatGPT: A Comprehensive Guide
Advertising Placement
Advertising placement (such as Google Ads) can increase user attention, but budget management must be done well. By combining team strengths with precise advertising and word-of-mouth marketing, ensure effective returns on investment. However, in the early stages of the product, focus should be on product refinement and market exploration, and it is not recommended to invest heavily in advertising.
O.Translator did not place any ads in the first few months, only publishing professional articles about document translation on various platforms. The users from these channels were sufficient to complete the full process of validation and iteration. Many users also gave us a lot of feedback, and through these iterations, we improved and stabilized the system components before starting to advertise on Google.
Content Marketing
Website Blog
In the first phase of the cold start, we did not establish our own blog system but published articles on high-authority platforms. About six months later, we began to set up the official website blog. Since we are in the translation business, the website blog was designed from the beginning to support languages from more than a dozen countries and regions.
- Optimize the official website blog SEO to increase organic traffic.
We use AI to optimize SEO, including keyword selection, titles, content, internal and external links, etc. We will discuss the topic of SEO separately later.
We do not use AI to write a large number of marketing articles. This might be useful, but we believe it would undermine the professionalism of the website. We still insist on manually editing the blog outline (of course, we let AI provide some outline suggestions, but we review and modify them), and then use AI for refinement.
- Original content can demonstrate professionalism
On the official blog, try to combine original content with SEO keywords as much as possible. It is necessary to conduct some in-depth thinking or display around your own business. This not only allows users to better understand you but also can improve the website's ranking.
Dig deep into long-tail keywords around the business field to avoid fierce competition with popular keywords, which is very cost-effective.
Video operation
2 months ago, we launched a YouTube channel with content focused on translation tutorials and translation effect demonstrations. Currently, the traffic brought by this channel is not much, but it also meets our expectations.
If your business is in a more lifestyle-oriented sector, you must pay attention to video marketing, especially on traffic platforms like TikTok.
Currently, we are only using the Youtube channel as a video tutorial platform and have not deeply explored its traffic potential, but video operations cannot be ignored.
3. Additional Value of AI Products
What is additional value?
O.Translator is an application-based product that does not have its own AI translation model. It uses cloud models like GPT, Gemini, and Claude to perform AI translation.
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Additional industry experience or resources
In addition to AI translation capabilities, document translation requires another crucial ability: document parsing, processing, and restoration, which is the additional value we provide.
Through technological accumulation, we not only support more than 30 formats but have also achieved industry-leading levels in key areas such as document parsing, text positioning, and font recognition. Especially in PDF translation and typesetting, OCR recognition capabilities, and even the translation of EPUB e-books up to 500M, these are our core advantages that allow us to distance ourselves from competitors.
Products that rely solely on algorithmic shells can easily be surpassed by competitors offering lower prices and better experiences.
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Direct communication with customers
In O.Translator, users can directly contact our developers via Email or Discord, which is very important. Users can receive responses promptly, and we can provide feedback and solve users' problems in the first instance.
Our clients are spread across the globe. When users encounter problems, we guarantee a solution within one day. If we cannot resolve it, we will provide an explanation. In reasonable circumstances, we will even refund the user's payment before negotiating. This method of communication makes users trust us. Our repurchase rate is very high, and a small team should leverage the advantage of quick action.
Focus on core functionality
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Clarify the criteria for prioritizing tasks
During the product brainstorming phase, we often come up with many creative ideas. At this time, it is necessary to prioritize those ideas that serve the core product functions.
For example, after we launched the first version of O.Translator, we listed more than ten things we wanted to do. For each item, we would ask ourselves, 'Will doing this improve the quality of document translation?'
- Developing a terminology database, optimizing post-editing, and offering a free preview feature can enhance the effectiveness and experience of document translation, thus their priority is increased.
- Voice extraction and translation, and document output conversion are bonus items that can be appropriately deprioritized.
- Adopting a subscription model might increase short-term revenue, but it does not significantly enhance the translation experience, so it is ranked last.
In this way, we continuously adjust the TODO LIST, systematically expanding functions around document translation, and this process will not stop.
4. Do not fear others' first-mover advantage
Understanding the limitations of first-mover advantage
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Flexibility and differentiated competition of small teams
First-mover advantage often only applies to large companies with abundant resources. In reality, small teams are more likely to find a unique position in niche areas and quickly adjust their strategies.
Clayton Christensen mentioned in 'The Innovator's Dilemma' that large companies often miss new opportunities due to their stubbornness in sustaining innovation when faced with disruptive innovation. Although initially low-cost and positioned in the low-end market, disruptive innovations gradually capture the mainstream over time. Small teams can find breakthroughs from the sidelines, leveraging flexibility and low-cost advantages to gain positive feedback.
Small teams should leverage their flexibility and experiment with disruptive innovations.
Clarify your own advantages and strategic positioning.
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Follow a differentiation strategy.
Do not worry about the first-mover advantage of large companies; instead, take an indirect approach:
- Identify your area of expertise and core product advantages, focusing on document translation and processing technology.
- Maintain sensitivity to market feedback, and gradually build an unassailable competitive barrier through continuous product adjustments and iterations.
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Control costs and obtain positive feedback.
Take small teams as an example: by continuously optimizing products, reducing costs, and obtaining positive user feedback, they can achieve a virtuous product cycle and gradually establish a foothold in the market.
Conclusion
The above outlines the growth journey of O.Translator over the past year. If you want to use AI to transform existing business processes, we recommend you start now. Follow the principles of 'cost control and focus on core,' quickly build an MVP, and continuously iterate by receiving positive user feedback to develop core functions and unique value.
If you don't take the first step, you will never have the opportunity to iterate.
