Ask HN: Review my startup - Smooth Bulletin | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my startup - Smooth Bulletin

9 pointsvital10110 comments

I've been working on this project for the better part of 10 months. Its to the point where I would love to get some feedback from HN.

http://www.smoothbulletin.com - Marketing Site

http://demo.smoothbulletin.com - Demo Front End

http://demo.smoothbulletin.com/admin/ - Demo Admin (u:demo@smoothbulletin.com, p:demo)

What is Smooth Bulletin?

Smooth Bulletin takes the pain out of academic catalog management. Our academic catalog management system(ACMS) is easy to use, easy to manage, and easy for students. Academic catalogs are almost universally awful to use and their quality rarely reflects the quality of the institution that they represent. Smooth Bulletin helps schools put their academic catalog on the web in a way that they can be proud of. If the school needs help, we’re happy to provide customization and integration services.

What sort of feedback am I looking for?

- Pricing: I honestly have no idea how to price this. I understand that colleges have LOTS of money, but are they willing to spend it on a product like this?

- Product: Is this a good product? Valid niche?

- Marketing: I need ideas for where to go from here. I have lots of feature ideas, but what I really need are marketing ideas. Are there any higher education tech conferences that I could get a booth at? Are adwords a good way to go? Cold calls? Cold emails?

- Funding: I've bootstrapped up to this point and will continue to do so, however is it worth pursuing funding for this?

- Other forms of learning: I'm thinking of expanding into corporate learning catalog management. Maybe government learning stuff too. Essentially if there is a curriculum for learning, Smooth Bulletin could manage it. Good idea? Bad idea?

Thanks!

I think this definitely has potential, but there are a few issues:

Is this only for searching/displaying courses, or is this used for registration also? If it's the latter, this is mission critical software for big enterprises. Price accordingly.

Even if you're only searching/displaying courses, I think your pricing is way too low. Selling a solution to an entire university is going to be expensive. Probably more than a year of revenue at your top-line price.

Maybe you should target individual departments within a university for the service if you want to continue at these price points. However, I think you should ditch the High School offering price. Maybe a <1000 tier, a <5000 tier and a >5000 tier.

I think what you really need to figure out is who are you trying to sell this to, and more importantly, how much it's going to cost to sell to them. That should really influence your pricing strategy. I wouldn't write another line of code until you figure this out.

Good luck!

Thanks for taking a look. Its mostly for searching for courses, majors, degrees, etc. Ideally we'll have tight integration with existing ERP systems, but I think prices we'll need to rise too (you're probably the 20th person to tell me that today!).

I agree with you about ditching the high school offering and then differentiating price a little bit more based on college size.

I know that I want to sell this to colleges, but the harder part is how much is going to cost to sell. I think smaller colleges are the lower hanging fruit, but it's still going to be a quite the courtship to make the first sale.

Great job on the site, it looks very well done.

As for your feedback goes, I'm concerned that you've spent 10 months on a project but don't seem to know the market at all. Have you talked to any schools about it? What made you start the project? Do you have prior experience working with ACMS?

I think your first goal should be to understand the administrative side of catalog management. How do they store/manage catalog information? Is this going to be easier to maintain than their current system? Can you make it easy to port from old systems? How do their systems connect with Bursar office, etc?

I think the biggest problem you will have is that catalog systems are probably integrated into larger ERP systems. Unless you can solve the integration problem you are probably going to have a very hard time selling this.

I have talked with a few people that work in campus IT about their catalog management systems. The general feeling is that they wish there was something better out there. I have a little experience with ACMS from the admin side, but most of my experience comes from the student-facing side, which is generally pretty awful.

I completely agree that I need to understand the administrative side of this better. My only problem is that I can't get access to existing systems. I'll probably need to find people who deal with this on a daily basis to get that information.

I do plan on having a nice REST API for importing from old systems. I also intend to write middleware for importing from the current big players. I was inspired to add that to my to-do list by how easy BitBucket made it to transfer all of my private repos over from GitHub.

Good point about existing ERP systems. I'll have to look into how integration with the big players(SAP, etc) in that arena works.

Thanks for the feedback!

Wow this looks very well thought out. One small thing would be that the image of the browser in the mac at the top of the marketing site is very hard to see. I always like being able to see up close what the product looks like. I suspect you can increase engagement/conversions simply by blowing that image up or just zooming in on part of the browser window there.

Also, once you click demo, things get a bit confusing. If the demo users need to go to http://demo.smoothbulletin.com/admin/ to actually start testing things out, make that a clickable link and call attention to that so users know thats where they need to go right now.

Good point about the mac image. I was worried that people would want to see the "10,000ft" view, but it turns out you can't see much from up there.

I will make it a lot more obvious how to start testing the admin.

Thanks for the feedback!

Maybe this is there somewhere, but something I'd want to see are degree tracks/plans. That is, when I got my degree, there were 4 different ways to get it depending on whether I was going for BA, BS or whether I was going to declare a minor or not.

So for students, that would be a great tool to have, to help sort and plan which course would be required given what you wanted to do. Your site could have a nice visualizer for which classes to take for a given track (e.g., B.S. Physics Minor in Math, B.S. Physics no minor, etc). The key here would be to make it easy to swap in/out electives and to order the classes based on pre-requisites.

EDIT The site does look nice, btw.

I'm so happy that you mentioned that. I've been busy building out the infrastructure to do just what you're talking about. Unfortunately it's pretty complicated so it's taken me awhile. The first step was the ability to get majors/minors in the system. My next step is making the degree programs more useful by being able to add required core courses, etc. Once that is in place, I can move on (finally) to graphing out paths for students.

I already have linkage between pre/co requisite courses, so almost everything I need is in place. I'd also like to integrate with universities existing systems so that I can have what courses the student has already taken available and merge that into the graph automatically.

Additionally (rambling now), I'd like to get cost per credit hour info from the university, and allow students to say "I'd like to get a B.S. in Computer Science from University X. What is the cheapest way to do this?" and have the option of mapping things out from a start at a community college and transferring versus starting at the 4 years school.

Thanks for the feedback!

Sounds awesome. The $$$ per track and comparing to schools would be awesome too.

Seems like you've got a good handle on things and have some good ideas. The design is nice as well. Best of luck to you!

clickables

http://www.smoothbulletin.com - Marketing Site

http://demo.smoothbulletin.com - Demo Front End

http://demo.smoothbulletin.com/admin/ - Demo Admin (u:demo@smoothbulletin.com, p:demo)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com