Automated AI localization for web & mobile apps

🎤 Full Interview: Max Prilutskiy, CEO @ Lingo.dev

Listen on Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Watch on YouTube

Founder Story & Vision

Max Prilutskiy is the co-founder & CEO of Lingo.dev, a developer-native localization platform that lets teams ship all languages in the same release, without derailing timelines or diluting brand voice.

Started coding at nine. Led engineering at Typeform. Shipped and exited Notionlytics. Across roles, Max saw the same pattern: features were ready; translations weren’t. The “i18n gap” kept stalling launches, burning budget, and blurring tone. Lingo.dev was built to make language ship with the feature, not after.

Why now & what’s the big bet

Market shift, customer pain, bold vision.

Global users expect day-one parity. Legacy translation workflows force file handoffs, long queues, and re-deploys turning “launch” into “lag.”

The bet: treat language as a build-time artifact and fold translation into the release process. When voice and glossary are set once, and only changes are translated, teams recover ~1 week per feature and unlock new-market revenue sooner.

🧩 Real-World Use Cases

How it works in the wild

• Same-day global feature launch

  A product team shipping a pricing update in English would wait a week for translations. With Lingo.dev, the new/changed copy was translated and reviewed in their normal workflow, and the update shipped to all target languages the same day.

• Big React app, zero refactor

  A large component library traditionally required months of i18n rewrites. By moving localization to the build step, the app became multilingual without invasive code changes, cutting months of foundational work.

• Brand voice at scale

  A consumer app locked tone, key terms, and product nouns once. Subsequent releases stayed on-brand across 42+ languages, with fewer post-release edits and cleaner support signals from new markets.

Outcomes to expect: faster launches, fewer blocked tickets, better consistency, cleaner forecasting.

What you’ll learn:

• How Max navigated repeated “feature-ready, translation-late” stalls and redesigned the release loop.

• Framework for making language a build artifact (voice/glossary once; translate only changes; release together).

• Real tactics behind reducing Time-to-All-Locales (TTAL) and reviewing translations inside your current workflow.

• Lessons on hiring for judgment (not keystrokes), fundraising with one exponential traction slide, and operating with focus.

• How Lingo.dev is solving translation delays without asking teams to change how they ship.

Some Takeaways:

• Tactic: Make “all locales together” part of your Definition of Done.

• Insight: The blocker isn’t translation. It’s the process outside your release loop.

• Workflow: Set tone/glossary once. Translate diffs only. Approve quickly. Ship one release to all markets.

• Next step: Pilot on one high-traffic journey (onboarding/pricing) and track TTAL + % tickets blocked.

In this episode, we cover:

00:32 — Founder Intro and Mission

01:16 — Hackathon Spark and Insight

02:12 — The Localization Bottleneck Exposed

08:30 — Auto PRs, Same Workflow

09:00 — Build-Time Multilingual Compiler Unlocked

09:50 — From Weeks to Same-Day

17:42 — Exponential Slide, Ten-Day Raise

23:34 — Hiring for Judgment First

39:40 — Operating Discipline: No-News Habit

54:13 — Closing Lessons and Next Steps

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Find Case Studies of all other episodes here.