English/2017-12-12

Write sentences with new vocabulary

• You work at the grocery store, every second week-end.
• At the outset of snow storm, my shovels were still in the shed.
• They boasted about how good there wine was.
• This was a major setback in our trade relation with the UE.
• After they read the press release, this project was launched in a knee-jerk reaction.
• Even if I had been hungry, I wouldn't have eaten this meal­.
• If you had been there, you would have understood all the remaining work that needs to be done at a glance.
• The night before the weeding ceremony, the spouses can not see each other. The future husband can not even have a glimpse of the wedding dress!
• Could you explain to us where this tradition is coming from?
• This tradition is one of the seminal mystery surrounding the wedding night.
• The value of my investments fluctuate on a see-saw fashion since 2008.

Write a story that involves teething problems

When you start a company, even with the perfect idea, you experience many teething problems.

I am part of a company, named ThingCAD, that creates a software to design electric schema. We started a couple of years with two people and we had a few teething problem.

For starters, we had to find a business model. While the companies in this sector usually sell their products in the ten thousands of dollards range, and with yearly support fees, we chose to go for a free version, and asked for a monthly fee for an upgraded product. We had to fix the price for this upgrade, as well as the options that are only available on the upgraded version.

On top of that, we needed to distinguish which features were important for the clients. This was hard to guess because we needed to have client's feedback to gather this knowledge, but it was hard to meet clients if the requested features were not working...

Next, we had to guess how many clients we would have, in the short and in the long term. Based on this, we adapted our expenses that would correspond to these revenues. This was hard to guess correctly, and we needed to adapt when we had real data.

To summarize, we had teething problems are unavoidable, but they can be reduced if we adjust at every step of our product development.