Ask YC: Please review my first startup, Soshiku | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Please review my first startup, Soshiku

soshiku.com

40 pointsbazookaaa57 comments

First and foremost, awesome clean design. Also the copy on the homepage is very clear and concise. I know what it is, what it does and whether or not I might like to try it after about 10 seconds. Kudos.

Have it marked to dive in deeper later.

Nice work. I agree that tts refreshing to see a service where I understand what it does in 10 seconds.

While I agree for the most part, I think it'd look better if the logo appeared directly on the darker blue background as opposed to being boxed in white with a blue outline. Otherwise, it looks great.

Agree except the "sign up" button needs to be above the fold.

The big button on your front page says "Take A Tour". "Sign Up" is tucked way down at the bottom and requires scrolling (it is also in the top menu bar sure, but it isn't as visible there). I knew I didn't want to take a tour since I figured I got the service from the blurb, but wasn't sure what else to do from the home page.

The largest button is not only the most visible activity, but it's also an implicit suggestion to your users. Do you want people to sign up, or do you want them to take a tour? Plant the idea in their mind with design.

Smaller notes: I have no idea how to generate that funky calendar I saw in the tour, or to tell the system that I've completed an assignment once created. Also - just to be picky - the header colors really don't work for me. Blue and green and another blue, and another blue and dark grey and light grey? Multiple borders and banners? If you aren't working with a designer, try keeping the site simple and iterate towards a more attractive site. Design that adds complexity works against the impression of simplicity and usability (it communicates money). I believe your logo against a simple white background would be more attractive to potential users than the ruckus up there now. Simpler design would also call more attention to the content you really want users to see.

+1 on elevating the importance of the "Sign Up" button.

If you'd have said "review my app", I would've said it's awesome. Great job.

But the moment you call it a startup, I have to ask how you make money. So, how do you plan to make money? Students are poor, and cheap, and I'm not sure ads would fit it even if you had the traffic.

You're right, I should have used "web app" instead. There are ads (which doesn't hurt to have), but I'm thinking of other means of monetization. Thanks for the feedback.

You could sell study guides based off what homework they are saving.

No, then you're in the content business. And students won't like you for profiting off their work.

A suggestion and a possible monetization idea - don't sell to students. Make schools your target. They buy a copy of your app and put it on their servers. Make it possible for teachers to push out assignments to it.

It also makes the thing actually useful for me -- I don't want to have to remember to add the assignments to it myself. I already know what my assignments are and I don't have time to type them into yet another place.

+10 if I could. This is much better than selling to students. I know a couple startups selling to schools, and there are difficulties there too (like actually closing the deal), but if you want to monetize, this strategy is worth a shot.

both orib and steveplace have good suggestions that I'd like to expand on.

For study notes, I think an Amazon affiliate model would probably work best. Ebay would be tempting (i.e. potentially cheaper) but likely to throw up less relevant results.

As for packaging up and selling to schools - great, but even greater would be to provide schools with their own hosted version instead. They set up a CNAME off their domain pointed at a hosted version and students can work within their own schools. This would also work for colleges.

Very good design. You are obviously very talented.

However, I don't think your site solves the problem better than a pen and a piece of paper.

I'm going to paraphrase a quote I read once: "the web is your hammer, and everything looks like a nail." Every problem is not best solved via the web. I think this may be one of those cases. But I could be wrong.

Either way, great looking site and good luck.

Pen and paper won't text me when I have an assignment coming due...

Your right. But it's very easy to carry around a to/do list, piece of paper in your pocket and keep an eye on things. Never failed me. The drop rate of SMS's is 2% or so on the other hand(not to mention dead batteries, lack of coverage, silent ringers, etc.). I've also seen many businessmen at the top of their fields using paper: a very simple, reliable and effective method.

I'm not saying this is a bad idea. It's definitely something useful. I just think it's not a great business idea. I think you have demonstrated great abilities, and you could put those to work on harder, more profitable problems.

Failed me all the time; I would've used this in a second.

Except - if you are working on a project and Soshiku has a Facebook app you can just add your classmates to it and have communication be central and clear.

Unlike the real world where you often call one person and that person calls another person in the group and so on. Where there is no central repository for sharing links/resources for the school assignment.

Soshiku has a great design and fills a sizable need in my opinion, getting schoolwork done. I for one, probably would have used it in high school.

Very nice look. A pixel level gripe, for you: Can you get rid of the blue line fragments between the 'h' & 'i' and the 'i' & 'k' in the logo?

Thank you for all the wonderful comments.

Zacharye, that certainly was my goal. :)

Aston, yes I'll fix that right away.

Siong, thanks for the suggestions. You can (mostly) do all of that by adding partners to your account, and then using the discussion pane on the assignment page. And for "peer pressure", a users' total grade does show on their public profile.

About monetization: for now I'm focusing on just unobtrusive AdSense ads, but I'm definitely brainstorming about the future.

Jbenz, yes it's 100% free and I plan on keeping it that way. Should I replace "But that's just the tip of the iceberg." with "And it's totally free." with, say, a yellow highlight?

Maybe some communities features like: 1. add someone who is in your class or taking the same subject. 2. discussion board. 3. and, the evil thing: peer pressure - you can see who has finished their homeworks but you are still working on something else.

Good looking app. Stands out as distinct and memorable.

The name is a bit obscure and hard to remember. Might hurt word of mouth (which could be a big deal on campuses).

I'd recommend getting rid of the adwords. Highly doubtful that they'll make you much money, and its a big distraction.

An alternative monetization approach would be to search for keywords on peoples pages and have a sidebar that recommends books (on amazon affiliates) based on the keywords on their notebooks. Call it a book recommender. Fairly easy to parse out keywords and query recommendation on amazon, and you could even run this as a cron job nightly. Here's a good libary: http://www.caliban.org/ruby/ruby-aws/

Nice move focusing on email, sms, and facebook integration. This is the key features that will keep people using your app. More than any fancy html management interface. May be worth looking at iPhone/mobile interface and meebo support for chatting with partners.

Just a few random thoughts. Hope they are helpful.

Very clean interface, the app works smothly, etc.

BUT

This is not useful to me as a student if I have to enter all of my assignments manually. If I know what to enter, why do I need to be reminded?

If there were some way to import assignments and classes from somewhere else, then it would be very useful. I don't know how feasible that would be, but there's no way I'd use Soshiku without that feature.

That's why I made it so users can add assignments via email or SMS. So when they're in class, for example, they can add it from their phone and not to have to worry about it.

i think it would be useful to have public lists of schools/class numbers that are created by users in those classes. then allow adding public assignments so anyone else in that class can just "join" the class on the site and have the list of assignments automatically shown to them. sort of like adding a public calendar to ical (btw, does your site export to ical format?)

last.fm shows you calendar events for concerts by artists you listen to. when another user adds an upcoming concert for that artist, you're automatically notified of it just by being a listener of that artist. your site would probably have these group memberships more defined, but same concept. that way you eliminate the duplication of data by 10 users in the same class entering the same assignment, and the 1 user that wasn't paying attention in class automatically gets notified of the new assignment.

What did you use to implement the SMS service?

I'm just using an email gateway now, so carriers are limited. Hopefully that will change in the future.

Have you seen textmarks.com?

That's a definite step in the right direction, but I think it's inadequate. As it is, I know what my assignments are without entering anything, ever. What exactly would compel me to start entering all my assignments manually? Other than the fact that I can do it with a very shiny app?

I'd like to see it geared towards professors and teachers rather than students. Students frankly don't care unless a professor says "I put the assignment on Soshiku" in which they can also turn it in there.

Also, look into whether or not www.quizlet.com has an API so you can help students collaborate not just on homework, but on studying/quizing too.

Hah! I had the same idea in college, and even registered a domain name (ssure.com, as in pre.ssure.com). I was going to revolve it around the idea of assignments and work amounting to 'pressure' on you, and your job was to complete stuff and reduce this pressure.

Seems that this is implemented very well. Will check it out in a deeper fashion soonish.

I think its a very good concept and, from my personal research with my own start-up, an industry with a lot of potential for growth. The question is, what is it that will seperate you out specifically from the rest of these CMS and similar systems? I'm not just talking about Blackboard or other enterprise only systems, there are a growing amount of these free/open-source systems. Also, how do you expect to reach your audience. The internet is big and even advertising about it on the side of Facebook or some other place isn't going to get that many people. (Most of the time students aren't going to opt to go out of there way to setup something like this.)

The layout fails on Google Chrome. It shows the "Simple Assignment Tracking" etc. chapters each on separate vertical space, and "Partner Up" goes below "Sign up" and "Take the Tour"-buttons.

Yes, I blame Chrome and not your site.

Update: I find the images on http://soshiku.com/tour a bit too big -- the page is really big right now (i.e. lots of pixels). Lots to scroll even on a 1920x1200 resolution.

An me nagging about such small detail proves that you overall design works for me!

Thanks for the feedback. I'll make the tour multi-page. Strange that it doesn't work in Chrome but works fine in Safari. Sure wish I had a PC so I can debug in both Chrome and IE!

I suggest: http://www.crossbrowsertesting.com/

Gives full access to virtual machines with different versions of Windows and different browsers. I tried it, bought some credits and loved it.

Awesome work. I just graduated last year or else I would be using that right now.

One suggestion would be to have the Tour be a multi page process, so there isn't so much scrolling, also I am a sucker for videos demonstrating functionality. Just something real simple showing how to do each of the different functions.

I work at a university so I will be recommending it to any students I meet. Great work.

I like the marketing material you have on the site to explain the different features. It looks patterned off of 37Signals, but hey, it works. I'm curious to what going up to random college students on campus and demoing the site to them on the spot would bring to you.

How are you planning to monetize this? Hitting up the PTA or college groups?

Excellent design. Good implementation. Expand it to work projects or find a way to make it appeal to freelancers. Etc. :)

I think he'd be better off staying focused in the market he's in; there is already a TON of these for freelancers/work projects.

As a college student, I thank you.

However, one thing I would personally change is a small usability issue I noticed on the Courses page. I would like to be able to add a course, and not have to navigate back to Home to be able to add a new assignment. I think it would just really clarify things a bit better.

Is everything a startup now? Every time someone makes an application, it's a fucking startup...

The design is nice, but it looks like a secret love affair with 37signals products. I guess some might say that's a plus...

I'll also echo the comment that I'm not sure this is particularly useful/needed.

In my opinion, it can be called startup because if it will really take off, it will basically require constant maintenance, because the users will always bug with something. In that sense it's a business/startup.

You could sell this to a school. I am taking 3 classes, which means 3 different websites and several PDFs. It would be great to have everything in one place automatically in a web page plain text format.

There are lots of more complicated tools for this (Blackboard, Moodle), but I've yet to see a super simple to the point one... interesting idea.

Blackboard is HIDEOUS and bloated. I'd love to see someone dethrone them.

Students, teachers, administrations, and IT departments agree! Blackboard is a monstrosity!

Does the name "Soshiku" have a meaning? It sounds very Japanese to me but I'm drawing a blank on an exact meaning. My conjugation is pretty weak these days.

Sort of. It's derived from the word "soshiki" which means "organization" (I hope it's the verb kind of organization). I saw the word a long time ago, and in my head somewhere along the way, before I made the site, I turned it into "soshiku". I do like that better.

JDIC to the rescue! First given definition of "soshiki" (そしき) [組織]

組織【そしき】 (n,vs) (1) organization; (2) structure; construction; (3) tissue; (4) system;

(1) 役員評議会が組織されて新提案を協議した。 An executive council was formed to discuss the new proposal.

Looks like そしき is a nominative word which can be used as part of a compound verb, as in 組織する [to form an organization]. (soshiki-sarete in the example given is in the tense "was-formed / was-organized").

I love variety in both human and computer languages.

Digressions aside, I like the name. And the site itself looks fantastic. Good luck!

It is also very close to the word for funeral (soushiki).

I closed the browser as soon as I noticed the logo. Sorry...I cant bring myself to look at another clone web 2.0 logo.

Good luck with the site though.

I take it the service is free? Slip the word "free" into the homepage content somewhere.

Great design. It look professional because it's so simple.

Very cool. It's useful, nice and neat. I wish I had something like this in college.

I'll definitely use it when (if?) I start a Masters degree.

Fantastic, clean design. I'm adding courses now, I'll let you know how it goes by the end of the term, heh.

Great design, forwarded the link to my little brother.

How do you make money? Book sales?

Nice design that provides immediate comprehension.

Understood it in a few seconds!

Excellent.

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