We spent months building infra instead of marketing — honest take on what went right and wrong

We're two technical founders who decided to build a localization platform from scratch — competing with tools like Crowdin that have years of enterprise infrastructure behind them.

Here's what actually happened:

We started with GitHub sync as the core workflow. It worked, but we quickly realized most teams find file-based workflows too slow. So we pivoted to a CDN-first approach — translations served from the edge, publish from the dashboard, live globally in seconds.

That CDN layer turned out to be more powerful than we expected. We can now show customers which languages get the most traffic, which countries are requesting which locales — real data to decide which markets to expand into next.

We also built a Content CMS (multilingual help centers, blogs, docs), MCP integration so AI agents can manage translations, and SDKs for Next.js, Remix, Expo, Flutter, Swift.

The honest part: we're engineers. We spent 2+ months heads-down on infrastructure and kept pushing marketing to "next week." We have real customers and real CDN traffic, but we're way behind on telling people we exist.

Curious if other technical founders hit this same wall — how did you balance building vs. getting the word out?