Show HN: textlaundry.com | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: textlaundry.com

textlaundry.com

91 pointsmassim51 comments

  > As a student, I couldn't stand my required english courses.
  > Textlaundry has helped me to improve my writing immensely
  > and now I'm getting fantastic grades. The best part was that
  > it was so cheap!  -- Lisa Paul

This quote led me to think that students who use this service are anti-intellectual lazy cheaters with tight fists. Ironically, the quote has at least one basic editing problem ("English")! This quote doesn't capture what professional editing is about. Surely there is a more positive way to express the value proposition.

  - Empty TITLE tag.
  - Favicon is a "P" icon?
  - Put 5-10px padding on the textarea.
  - 100% satisfaction guaranteed icon needs transparency.

The design is fine but very, very generic. Nothing relates to a laundry. Why not a clothes line with text documents cleaned, pegged and sparkling in the sun?

If you get some resistance in the HN feedback, IMO it is because the service seems slapped together. I like the automatic pricing calculator but I don't know that anything else but the domain name is going to be memorable. If the design shows a bit more personality, I think that would help.

It might've been funny if you had replied to each HN comment with a re-write of what they'd written to show the benefit of the service...

We just launched recently, and we rushed this out to validate our idea. So far, it's going pretty well and love all the feedback we've gotten. We've added those things to our list of things to fix. Thanks for the advice all the advice.

I was just wondering who were the "professional" editors. Some credentials might increase the trust in your service.

This exactly. Why the anonymity with web service vendors? I was looking at fiabee.com the other day and "About Us" and "Contact" give the impression that the business owners have something to hide. Even the blog is written "by admin". Why not use the name listed on the domain registry that anyone can look up? Doesn't inspire confidence.

I agree completely. Is this service farmed out to Mechanical Turk with the supposition that more eye is equal to higher quality? Or do you legitimately have qualified individuals reviewing these submissions?

I agree. A turk-based proofreading system might not be a bad idea- a few layers of suggestion verification and you could get a pretty good first-pass proofreading out of it. However, the lack of transparency makes this more than a little shady.

We're going to be writing more information about our proofreading process and adding examples of our work soon. That's a totally fair point.

Only taking input by text box is pretty bad. You need to be able to accept common word processor file formats.

Targeting students is also ethically questionable. Planning to open a sideline where you help "proofread" math homework next?

File uploads are definitely in the pipeline, this is only our MVP. No math proofreading, for now.

Colleges provide "writing centers" where people (presumably upperclassmen in a relevant degree program) offer proofreading. I don't see how this is much different.

That service is free, this is not. Often times the student proofreading your paper has already taken the class and off much more guidance to what that particular teacher/professor is looking for. An anonymous web service, while convenient, doesn't have that added benefit.

How is a college writing center free?

Campus writing centers provide tutoring and feedback. They don't just fix it for you.

Well for one you don't have to be in college.

Clearly, I meant for students in college, which was the subtopic of discussion.

Hey, congrats on launching. The service looks interesting. I'll have to keep it in mind next time I need proofreading help.

One small piece of feedback: Your #headline-wrap and #stage-wrap styles have overflow: hidden defined while the other top level divs do not. This makes it so that when the browser is smaller than your content, scroll bars appear but your main content is hidden beyond the window width and appears cut off when scrolling.

Without seeing any examples of improved text, my first thought was that an API/Wordpress/Gmail plugin would be awesome.

Though before I pay, it would be nice to see some examples of improved text.

Thanks bigethan, we keep hearing this and are going to put up some examples up.

Dividing by quality "Good, Great, and Excellent" is weird to me. What metric distinguishes the different options? If I only check "Good," will you edit my text while watching television instead of devoting your full attention to it?

I would get rid of the quality gradient altogether, instead ensuring your users that all of your work is "excellent." If you still want an extra tier to your pricing, I guess you could do what translation services do and charge per revision or by number of people the text passes through, but the idea that you simply aren't trying as hard if I check "good" doesn't sit well.

The quality gradients are actually tied to number of revisions/number of people who proofread the text. We'll put up more information about the way we proofread and how they relate to the different options for quality.

I would word it differently then. Using the term quality in a sliding scale manner leaves doubt in my mind. I want to know all your work is excellent.

I am replying so that textlaundry know that not everyone is like parent: i.e., I am fine with "Pick a quality: good, better, best" (or "Pick a quality: good, great, excellent"). In fact, I do not like it when vendors pretend that everything they offer, even the cheap stuff, is the best that it can possibly be. I tend to conclude that the vendors\ is either deluded or insincere.

But yeah, if textlaundry can convey in that row of radio buttons (terminology?) that "great" service means that the text is worked on by more editors than work on text using the "good" service, that would be an improvement.

There is a glaring typo on the front page. The section titled "Fully anonymous and secure editing" contains the following sentence:

"Your confidential documents will be kept in our secure servers and can only accessed by you and our team."

I'm no professional proofreader but I think that "can only accessed" is non-English.

Fail.

You made your point in the first two lines; I think your comment would be much better without the last two.

Here's the first association I make with text laundry: money laundry.

Then there's a testimonial about a student who's too lazy to do his assignment and uses external help.

I don't know what's your target, but if you're looking to appeal to companies I think you're off.

Cool service!

To echo a few other comments, I'd love to see examples. Specifically, I hope examples could explain the following:

1) What kind of changes are suggested? Spelling corrections? Grammar corrections? Improved sentence structure? Improved paragraph structure? Some combination of these? Something else?

2) What's the difference between good vs. great vs. excellent? The quality of the proofreader? The amount of time spent proofreading? The number of times something is proofread? A concrete example would be very helpful.

Also, I think showing a list of the types of documents you can proofread would be helpful. It might just be me, but when I saw "document" I started thinking about college essays or work-related documents like letters of reference. Then I saw a testimonial that mentioned blog posts and thought "oh yeah, I could use this service for those as well!" You might miss some customers who don't realize your service is very open-ended.

Hey lpolovets, I agree that's not clear yet. We actually provide all of those depending on the document we get. Some of them need more thorough editing, while other documents just need basic proofreading. The good/great/excellent corresponds to how many editors your text will be read by. Someone else suggested that we change it to that to make it clearer. Thanks for the comment.

I didn't quite know what to expect when visiting the site with a name textlaundry.com As tacky as it sounds proofreadmypaper.com would be much "cleaner" (excuse the irony).

Props on launching. I think your provide a useful service. I love the idea of submitting my paper immediately and getting a quote.

Thanks! The name is tentative, and just something we went with for now to test the idea. The instant quote is something we noticed no one else had, so it was something we could stand out with.

Is the Terms & Conditions page just copy/pasted from elsewhere?

If not, things like the following are very concerning:

  > Advertisements. textLaundry reserves the right to display advertisements on your blog unless you have purchased an Ad-free Upgrade or a VIP Services account.

Yeah sorry, that's from Automattic's terms and conditions, we can't access your blog :P We'll change the wording soon.

Wait... Sorry, but you ... didn't proofread your ToS?

Really?

Congrats on launch. The instant price calculator is slick.

I notice it's on Rails. Shoot for an API and a Wordpress plugin. Both could be jets for this type of business.

Would be interested for such service but like others mentioned you need to add some examples of what you guys can do.

This is a great idea, we'll put up some examples of our work up soon!

how do you guys handle the editors? like I was thinking about a different idea where I need multiple people to handle the projects. it seems quite a lot of work to either code a complete backend or distribute the stuff manually.

I'm interested in knowing if there are any similar services.

There are a few but I'm confident we have one of the lowest price points per word (if not the lowest). A google search for "proofreading service" turns up a few.

http://mygengo.com/

I run http://www.ShinyEnglish.com for a smaller niche: cover letters.

http://www.serv.io/edit - 1.3c per word.

nice job! nice design to streamline proofreading.

Thanks!

I could pay for this. When did you launch it?

We launched a couple of weeks ago - still testing the waters and seeing what kind of demand there is for a product like this, especially in academia.

IP scanned after visiting this site.

Be careful using the verisign logo if you're not actually a client (which it appears since you're using an image, and not the verifying script). Also, paypal name shows Edison Labs, which is confusing given it doesn't match your domain name

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is just a cobbled together CMS front-end with clip art icons and generic photos for what appears to be a proof-reading service, am I correct? Or am I missing some sort of technological breakthrough?

yes, it seems to be a service for proof reading. what's your point?

It's seems to be a [very] poor attempt at creating a webpage with a form for an offline service. (Not much in the way of hacking, per se)

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