Technical co-founder needed for Studeous | Hacker News Reader

Technical co-founder needed for Studeous

17 pointsjwest20 comments

We're looking for a co-founder for Studeous, a web start-up.

Studeous is the SalesForce.com of the e-learning industry--we provide an easy way for teachers to manage their classes online on our web platform, as opposed to typical enterprise e-learning systems. We're looking to commodify e-learning.

We have users, we've already made sales, and we're in the process of raising capital.

We're looking for a super hacker who is an expert at:

MySQL

System/Server Administration

Scaling/Optimization

CSS

Coldfusion experience would be preferred, but is not completely necessary

Overall great product dev skills

We launched in private beta last March, and we need more hands on deck.

We are located in the Dallas/Austin, Texas area.

You can contact Jeff West at jwest@studeous.com for more information.

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When looking for your technical co-founder, don't specify the technologies. This is not a job ad. Your start-up will be shaped around your co-founder's skills, not the other way around. You want the best co-founder you can get - technologies are irrelevant.

Also, if you're in beta since march, it's a bit late to find a technical cofounder don't you think? You're looking for an early employee, perhaps?

I think it's fine to specify the technologies, it's kind of like online dating. You specify your "interests" to find other people with common interests.

In this case, one cofounder already likes Cold Fusion and developed in it, so it makes sense that he's looking for another cofounder with the same taste in programming.

Online dating kinda sucks. Are you sure that's a metaphor you'd like to build your cofounder relationship on?

That's only valid if the existing co-founder is capable of (literally) pulling the entire company product out of his ass, if he needs to. If he feels he's not capable of it, then he needs to adapt to the person who is capable of writing the entire product by themselves in their technology of choice - because that's the kind of person you want as a technology co-founder.

As I said, early employees are a different matter. They need to be shaped around - well, around the technology co-founder who wrote the whole product in a storm of caffeine fuelled fury.

From a marketing perspective:

What is the fire burning in the pants of your market? (And who is your target market -- you've got teachers and students and school admins, please pick one.)

The first thing I see what I visit your site: "You've never seen elearning like this before." As a teacher, how does that help me?

I can tell what you're doing. You are trying to position yourself as a competitor in the marketplace. You are coming from a position of weakness when you do this.

Features page: "Just go ahead and try to outfeature us." WTF are you even talking to? How does that apply to me as a teacher? When did more features make a project better?

Forget your competition and get yourself into the boots of a teacher. Feel the pain a teacher feels when they aren't using your software.

Where are the testimonials from teachers that are raving about your software? "Last year, I couldn't get my students to stop chatting with each other during class. This year, I signed up for Studeous, set everything up and 95% of my class is logging in each day and 85% are actually talking to each other on the message boards. I'm absolutely giddy!"

>What is the fire burning in the pants of your market? (And who is your target market -- you've got teachers and students and school admins, please pick one.)

WebCT and blackboard (the competition) are utterly unusable from a teacher and student perspective. I'd love to use something different if I ever have the need for more than just HTML. The main thing I'd like is a grade management system when I deal with large courses.

However, I'm almost certainly not permitted to use a grade management system besides the one my university provides, certainly not a third party one. That would violate student privacy.

Another problem is that commercial software can't (legally) add all the features of blackboard:

http://www.blackboard.com/patent/FAQ_013107.htm

I'm almost certainly not permitted to use a grade management system besides the one my university provides, certainly not a third party one. That would violate student privacy.

Are you allowed to use a notebook?

IMHO the ColdFusion requirement is more likely to get you a failed enterprise guy instead of a hacker that actually enjoys the work.

Yeahh.. probably true. I don't know of a single decent hacker who enjoys working with ColdFusion

Don't be too hasty in judgment.

My brother is a very good ColdFusion programmer. He got his start in the language because it was what I was programming with at the time. (Don't forget, around '99 when I got my start, there was Perl, ASP and Coldfusion as serious contenders.)

I ask him, "Why don't you give PHP or Rails a whirl?" "No interest." And so he focuses his effort in refining his ColdFusion skillset. He does Ajax and does CSS design with the best of them.

I personally don't use ColdFusion but I guess there are some CF haters around these parts. I guess that why you were downmodded. But please as hackers we love certain bits of technology and swear by them or perhaps swear at them lol(PHP comes to mind). I understand you as my brother also loves the ActionScript family of languages. And does not have any interest learning anything else.

It was probably downmodded because of the "no interest" in learning anything else.

Any programmer worth his/her salt should be always learning newer technologies that might be useful to him/her. Having a favorite is different than not wanting to learn anything else.

Having "no interest" in learning other languages is a serious bad mark against your brother, I'm afraid. He might be a "very good" programmer, but he'll never be great - never be a "hacker", by pg's definition.

I don't know any hacker who doesn't have an intense, irrepressible interest to learn new stuff - languages, frameworks, whatever. I also don't know a single hacker who hasn't learned well over half a dozen languages to a proficient level. And no, CSS and AJAX don't count (unless the Javascript is taken to a scary level). Sounds like your brother is a designer with some coding skills, not technical co-founder material.

Interesting product. I worked on a web-based LMS (not Blackboard) for several years.

The trick with this market is finding a way to squeeze out a profit. There's a very limited amount individual teachers are willing to spend, but selling to districts is a major undertaking - think dedicated salespeople working for a year or more on each account. They don't much like small companies either.

The other big issue is legacy system support. Districts won't buy a LMS that doesn't integrate with their student information system, which is unfortunate since the SIS vendors jealously guard access to their walled garden. (They all have their own LMS products now and don't want their customers buying yours.) We poured man-years into this problem and only covered a tiny subset of the products out there. It's a huge potential morass.

Pretty much everyone working in this field recognizes how bad the products are, but not always the reasons. The users - teachers and students - don't have much input into the decision-making process. Endless sales cycles ensure high prices, and that means the decisions are made by administrators at the district office who never come anywhere near the software. It takes years to make a dent in this market.

ColdFusion experience is not a requirement, only preferred and not absolutely necessary. If you've got the skills and you're interested, let us know.

at that stage you need to start looking for employees, not co-founders. Just call it a CTO position and give the person stock options.

Wow, asking for coldfusion? You might as well build it with classic ASP. In a matter of years you will not find any host but your own to support your end-of-life legacy product.

I'd go with COBOL and RPG. They represent the most solid UI kits available with many users (i.e. Banks).

How do you plan to compete with Blackboard? Do you have a plan for dealing with their patents on eLearning?

Wouldn't take much to dethrone Blackboard at my institution.

There's little evidence their patents are meaningful at all. Almost always, the best course is to ignore patents entirely and forge ahead. Most software patents are unenforceable.

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