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Comment by azarias | Hacker News Reader

Hello everyone! I would really love to hear any and all feedback. As a bit of context, a few months ago, I made a really difficult decision---turning down a faculty job at an Ivy League CS school after my phd---to work on a startup with a few great guys. Meritful is the first iteration, and I will be grateful for your time and feedback.

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"If you are a student, Meritful helps you build a professional network, and an online resume to impress colleges and employers. If you are a teacher or mentor, Meritful helps you run projects and engage with students"

I believe LinkedIn works because for one if it's main use cases, there are two matching parts in the graph: 1. If you are looking for the next step in your career, we'll help you find it through search & recommendations 2. If you are trying to find the right candidate for your position, we'll help you find it through search & recommendations

Your use cases for students and teachers aren't like LinkedIn's - they aren't two sides of the same coin. How do the teachers make the Meritful better for the students like recruiters do for employees on LinkedIn?

University admissions counselors make the Meritful better for students, and we are talking to those people. But teachers have a lot of face time with students, and can be a vehicle for students to learn about Meritful. If a teacher has a class project, it would make a great entry on the portfolio, and a nice way to share with the rest of the class...so, we were looking at the distribution channel. Your comment on two sides of the graph spot on.

Take a look at Rypple too, they're a social performance tool Salesforce bought with a lot of ideas that were neat. You might be able to go pretty far with badging and achievements here. I'd think trying to "replace" a report card might work well.

Also - what do your monetization plans look like? I don't think this is something to take lightly. You'll never be able to charge teachers much for the service. Maybe enough for a lifestyle business though, if that's what you're interested in.

Edit: Perhaps college recruiters? Generally they'll pay a lot to convince students to apply. They recoup it in application fees though :) You may also be able to charge parents of graduating seniors some kind of college search tools.

This will always be free for schools and students.

College admissions (especially the not top-50 colleges) spend a lot of money convincing students to come to their school. We hope to give them a very targeted avenue to reach out and recruit students. You're right...this is a really important issue.

How is this different from linked in, other than they have millions of users? Seems like another Facebook for XXXXX type idea.

The main reason we wanted to do this is that LinkedIn is designed to highlight one key currency...work experience. In contrast, this is not necessarily the most important experience in high school.

So the idea was to create a platform where students can document and share their projects and activities in a rich way, while getting feedback from their peers and mentors---along the way building a professional network.

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