Our founder, Linus Kullänger explains how everything started, how these first five years have been – and what lies ahead for Care to Translate.
What inspired you to start Care to Translate, and what were your goals when you first began?
In the beginning it was a selfish goal as an aspiring medical student, to connect better with my patients.
I wanted to understand them, their problems, concerns, wishes and thoughts. And I wanted them to understand me and my thought process so that we could plan their care together.
Follow up: you started with a non-profit, what convinced you to start the company?
A non-profit is 100% dependent on peoples engagement in their free time. It takes great commitment and only works until a certain point.
And with the case of Care to Translate, we had too ambitious goals, with a tight time plan, rising tech demands and developing an app is costly.
Therefore we found that starting a company would get us to where we wanted much faster with a better result.
Can you describe some of the challenges and obstacles you faced during the early years of Care to Translate, and how you overcame them?
It was very difficult to know what to focus on and keep focusing on the right things. You want to do so much at the same time and you feel that you should already have done this and that task a year ago. The way to overcome them was to plan the work and the goals thoroughly and work a lot with time management and iterating during the journey to accomplish them. You have to be realist and megalomaniac at the same time, which can be difficult.
Is there any or several individuals that have been key to get support from and in what way?
I would say that each and everyone of our team members and investors have contributed so much to the success of Care to Translate. I have felt great support from each and everyone. The list of key supporters is extremely long but to mention a few I would say that Patrik Blomkvist at KIIAB was an important catalyst in the early start, Ivar Strömberg, Fredrik Rosengren and Olof Berglund from STING Accelerator helped us build a solid and effective company.
How has Care to Translate evolved and grown over the past 5 years, and what changes have you seen in the language translation market or industry during that time?
We started with a bottom up approach engaging the grass-root healthcare professionals which turned out to be a successful method.
Now we get organic growth from both individuals working directly with patients to health care leaders around the world. From focusing on providing a simple but medical verified tool directly to end-users, Care to Translate is now providing a platform solution to patients, healthcare individuals and huge healthcare organizations around the world.
We have seen the translation industry grow and develop very fast, with no slowing down in sight. Globalization and digitalization of almost all industries has put a lot of pressure on scaling fast to as many languages as possible. The demand for translation services is rising constantly.
What are some of the key lessons you've learned as a startup founder in the language translation field, and how have they helped your business succeed?
Listen to your customers and end users. Involve them in the development of your products. I have seen a lot of examples of other companies misunderstanding the basic needs of the customers, just going their own direction therefore putting a lot of effort and resources on wrong things.
You have to focus on a FEW clear goals with realistic deadlines and then stick to them not to get distracted by all other opportunities appearing all the time. But you also need to evaluate your progress on the way to reaching your goals and not be afraid to kill your darlings.
Dare to be disruptive with a megalomaniac mindset.
What enables you and your team to achieve so many milestones every year?
We have a clear company vision that permeates all our goals and milestones. We focus on an effective and agile organization, iterating and improving our way of working every other week. We focus on having fun on our way to reach our milestones and we take care of each other.
What are your plans for the future of Care to Translate, and how do you plan to continue growing and evolving in the coming years?
Our plans are to solve all language barriers in healthcare globally and we have just started. We will focus on scaling our platform so it will be easy to access for individuals and healthcare organizations worldwide.
We are on a mission to disrupt the healthcare translation industry and set a new standard for how language barriers can be overcome between healthcare providers and patients globally.
Do you have any message for the users of the app and/or all individuals who have been part of your journey so far?
Thank you so much for all of the support and thank you for helping us make healthcare more equal for everyone.
We are only at the beginning of our important journey. Stay tuned for disruptive news!
