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I published The Software Engineer's Guidebook two years ago. I shared more details on how I self-published the book, and the learnings from publishing in this post.
An unexpected highlight of publishing the book was ending up in Mongolia in June of this year, at a small-but-mighty startup called Nasha Tech. This was because the startup translated my book into Mongolian. Here's the completed book:
Here’s what happened:
A little over a year ago, a small startup from Mongolia reached out, asking if they could translate the book. I was skeptical it would happen because the unit economics appeared pretty unfavorable. Mongolia’s population is 3.5 million; much smaller than other countries where professional publishers had offered to do a translation (Taiwan: 23M, South Korea: 51M, Germany: 84M, Japan: 122M, China: 1.43B people).
But I agreed to the initiative, and expected to hear nothing back. To my surprise, nine months later the translation was ready, and the startup printed 500 copies on the first run. They invited me to a book signing in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, and soon I was on my way to meet the team, and to understand why a small tech company translated my book!
Japanese startup vibes in Mongolia
The startup behind the translation is called Nasha Tech; a mix of a startup and a digital agency. Founded in 2018, its main business has been agency work, mainly for companies in Japan. They are a group of 30 people, mostly software engineers.
Their offices resembled a mansion more than a typical workplace, and everyone takes their shoes off when arriving at work and switches to “office slippers”. I encountered the same vibe later at Cursor’s headquarters in San Francisco, in the US.
Nasha Tech found a niche of working for Japanese companies thanks to one of its cofounders studying in Japan, and building up connections while there. Interestingly, another cofounder later moved to Silicon Valley, and advises the company from afar.
The business builds the “Uber Eats of Mongolia”. Outside of working as an agency, Nasha Tech builds its own products. The most notable is called TokTok, the “UberEats of Mongolia”, which is the leading food delivery app in the capital city. The only difference between TokTok and other food delivery apps is scale: the local market is smaller than in some other cities. At a few thousand orders per day, it might not be worthwhile for an international player like Uber or Deliveroo to enter the market.
The tech stack Nasha Tech typically uses:
- Frontend: React / Next, Vue / Nuxt, TypeScript, Electron, Tailwind, Element UI
- Backend and API: NodeJS (Express, Hono, Deno, NestJS), Python (FastAPI, Flask), Ruby on Rails, PHP (Laravel), GraphQL, Socket, Recoil
- Mobile: Flutter, React Native, Fastlane
- Infra: AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
- AI & ML: GCP Vertex, AWS Bedrock, Elasticsearch, LangChain, Langfuse
AI tools are very much widespread, and today the team uses Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Junie by Jetbrains.
I detected very few differences between Nasha Tech and other “typical” startups I’ve visited, in terms of the vibe and tech stack. Devs working on TokTok were very passionate about how to improve the app and reduce the tech debt accumulated by prioritizing the launch. A difference for me was the language and target market: the main language in the office is, obviously, Mongolian, and the products they build like TokTok also target the Mongolian market, or the Japanese one when working with clients.
One thing I learned was that awareness about the latest tools has no borders: back in June, a dev at Nasha Tech was already telling me that Claude Code was their daily driver, even though the tool had been released for barely a month at that point!
Why translate the book into Mongolian?
Nasha Tech was the only non-book publisher to express interest in translating the book. But why did they do it?
I was told the idea came from software engineer Suuribaatar Sainjargal, who bought and enjoyed the English-language version. He suggested translating the book so that everyone at the company could read it, not only those fluent in English.
Nasha Tech actually had some in-house experience of translation. A year earlier, in 2024, the company translated Matt Mochary’s The Great CEO Within as a way to uplevel their leadership team, and to help the broader Mongolian tech ecosystem.
Also, the company’s General Manager, Batutsengel Davaa, happened to have been involved in translating more than 10 books in a previous role. He took the lead in organizing this work, and here’s how the timelines played out:
- Professional translator: 3 months
- Technical editor revising the draft translation: 1 month
- Technical editing #2 by a Support Engineer in Japan: 2 months
- Technical revision: 15 engineers at Nasha Tech revised the book, with a “divide and conquer” approach: 2 months
- Final edit and print: 1 month
This was a real team effort. Somehow, this startup managed to produce a high-quality translation in around the same time as it took professional book publishers in my part of the world to do the same!
A secondary goal that Nasha Tech had was to advance the tech ecosystem in Mongolia. There’s understandably high demand for books in the mother tongue; I observed a number of book stands selling these books, and book fairs are also popular. The translation of my book has been selling well, where you can buy the book for 70,000 MNTs (~$19).
Book signing and the Mongolian startup scene
The book launch event was at Mongolia’s startup hub, called IT Park, which offers space for startups to operate in. I met a few working in the AI and fintech spaces – and even one startup producing comics.
I had the impression that the government and private sector are investing heavily in startups, and want to help more companies to become breakout success stories:
- IT Park report: the country’s tech sector is growing ~20%, year-on-year. The combined valuation of all startups in Mongolia is at $130M, today. It’s worth remembering that location is important for startups: being in hubs like the US, UK, and India confers advantages that can be reflected in valuations.
- Mongolian Startup Ecosystem Report 2023: the average pre-seed valuation of a startup in Mongolia is $170K, seed valuation at $330K, and Series A valuation at $870K. The numbers reflect market size; for savvy investors, this could also be an opportunity to invest early. I met a Staff Software Engineer at the book signing event who is working in Silicon Valley at Google, and invests and advises in startups in Mongolia.
- Mongolian startup ecosystem Map: better-known startups in the country.
Two promising startups from Mongolia: Chimege (an AI+voice startup) AND Global (fintech). Thanks very much to the Nasha Tech team for translating the book – keep up the great work!
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