Ask HN: Review our startup - Classlet.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review our startup - Classlet.com

30 pointssgk28449 comments

Brandon (HN @snprbob86) and I met at Google two years ago. We became fast friends and decided to do a startup. Luckily, we attended the same university, so we spent a few short weeks hacking up a prototype.

We interviewed for YC summer 2008, where we presented a similar vision of Classlet.com, but with a very different plan of attack. We were not accepted, but pg and team encouraged us to keep at it. Their expert opinion? "[Ultimately] what put us off was the difficulty in selling it to universities. This is one of those cases where existing solutions suck for a reason."

At the time, we both had well-paying fulltime job offers on our desks and graduation was fast approaching. We accepted them so we could bootstrap, but it also forced us to move to opposite coasts. Life got real busy real quick, but we kept working at it.

In October, I went to Brandon with an idea for a simpler approach with the explicit goal to initially sell to teachers directly. Long distance collaboration significantly slowed things down, but one Sunday at a time we built Classlet Assignments.

I'm now planning on moving to Seattle near Brandon to make bootstrapping easier and we are going to apply to YC again this fall. Whatever happens, we'll keep at it, but would appreciate any feedback you guys have.

Thanks.

A problem you'll face is that teachers probably wont be allowed to run email addresses of students through a third party site like that.

I know for definite su8ch things would be frowned on in a lot of institutions here in the UK: probs in the US too.

Another major problem I suspect your going to face is that there are quite a few full on school management systems coming into use (there is a big one kicking about that plenty of schools in the UK have but I forget the name offhand). It's kinda hard to see the advantages of a one off system like this in that context.

Dont get me wrong it's a nifty system if you can convince people to use it. But I think that might be hard.

In terms of commerical prospects that might be even tougher - will you charge per teacher? (possibly unpopular) or will you allow a school/institution to license a bulk lot of accounts to hand to it's teachers?

(there is a big one kicking about that plenty of schools in the UK have but I forget the name offhand).

SIMS.net

no, that's not it.... I think it begins with an M. Grr. I'll have to ask a friend who will know :P

got it :) It's called Moodle.

I'm not from the UK and I don't know anything about this but it appears this should be sims.co.uk

The name of the product is SIMS.net:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMS.net

We're concerned about the 3rd party fear, but there seems to be some recent precedence here. Gmail and Hotmail have seen a lot of adoption by schools and there are a number of medium to large schools which host Blackboard for smaller local schools. If this proves to be a serious blocker to adoption, we can talk about inside firewall installs.

As for the finer details of the monetization scheme, we are open to suggestions. Our current line of thinking is to offer a freemium model to teachers at a price subsidized by enterprise sales. We've got some ideas for features which will only be activated when a school buys into the system for all of their teachers and students, as well as some features that would benefit from being hosted and linked with other schools.

How would you approach it? Why?

Yeh your potentially revenue model was what lost me a bit :)

My mother is a primary school teacher and so not quite what your after but her experience would probably scale to higher level education. So hopefully my ideas count as semi-insightful :)

I could see this being adopted by university professors in certain circumstances - but the idea of shelling out for it will definitely put them off (trust me - our lecturers claimed for EVERYTHING :D). Plus many universities already have custom portal software that the lecturers have to use (for whatever reason: usually in case of disputes etc.).

Same probably applies to (UK) secondary school (US = high school) level teachers (i.e. they wont want to pay). BUT in their case getting the school to pay for it on "expenses" would be next to impossible (budgets are super tight atm). As I see it this is probably your target market (definitely in the UK anyway) so if you can market it to the schools themselves you might have more success.

Some ideas for you (I apologise I only briefly scanned your app so they could be in place already :) plus some of this is relevant to UK schools and I have no idea how it works in the US - though I would bet it is similar). This also assumes your interested in grouping teachers by school :)

Firstly allow collaboration. In schools usually assignments are designed by one or more subject heads/organisers. If you let said co-ordinator upload all the assignments to somewhere all of the subject teachers can access and send them out to their students this would probably get you a lot of interest. Mostly because if the teachers / subject heads change the historical data is already there to make use of :)

One other idea is to allow some kind of grouping of gradings for a specific email address. One of a teachers BIGGEST gripes is collating reports for their students. If they could see all the awarded grades by subject in one click I bet you would get piles of "we love you" email.

But yes: the main way I see of selling this is pitching it as a "whole school" thing. Individuals, of course, might make regular use of it (perhaps this is your freemium model - free individual, pay-for school-wide collab features) but it is to schools I think you have to pitch it.

Sorry to ramble - it's too hot again :) hopefully something there is useful.

As the other poster suggested, teachers might not want to pay for your product. To really break [into] this market, you might have to make it free and look for other ways to monetize (which might open other doors of opportunity here..).

At least from my perspective, teachers don't pay for anything. Most of the education IT market here targets schools (in the UK), with price points to match.

I agree most solutions are fairly complicated (dashboard, moodle). A lot of UK schools are starting VLE (virtual learning environments) with this kind of functionality (albeit more complicated).

I agree about data protection issues although this must be possible to circumvent (probably with the school's consent). Students are typically blocked from accessing outside email at schools.

Selling in to the UK publicly-funded system is a pain. Distributors and VARs may help.

Don't worry too much about your bloated competition such as Blackboard. I am currently a college student and I hate having having to check blackboard. I would much rather have assignment and announcements emailed to me. Most students are lazy like that too. However there are several things that schools need.

-roster page where students can email the whole class or select number of students

-discussion board

-some communication channel for parents, parents heavily invested in their child and a lot of them have zero clue of what they are learning

-A simple class page incase the student wants to login and get their assignments without their clutter of their email.

-Clear subject lines for emails that are sent out

dunno how that got posted twice (see above)...my bad.

After reading some comments, I just want to give some words of encouragements.

Don't worry too much about your bloated competition such as Blackboard. I am currently a college student and I hate having having to check blackboard. I would much rather have assignment and announcements emailed to me. Most students are lazy like that too. However there are several things that schools need.

-roster page where students can email the whole class or select number of students

-discussion board

-some communication channel for parents, parents heavily invested in their child and a lot of them have zero clue of what they are learning

-A simple class page incase the student wants to login and get their assignments without their clutter of their email.

-Clear subject lines for emails that are sent out

submit to http://AppUseful.com

With regard to "It's kinda hard to see the advantages of a one off system like this in that context."

We see this as a major advantage. Most current systems provide (at best) mediocre solutions to the problems their users face. Instead of doing everything and having it all be mediocre, we took a single problem teachers have and solved it the best way we could.

I see that to a point: but a teacher always wants 100% the easiest path. If their "generate pupil report" button (guaranteed to be their #1 gripe writing reports :D you should here my mum are report time!) requires them to have used the inbuilt school system to set assignments then they will just use that - no matter how much better your way is (dont get me wrong, I think it's damn good - I wish we had had this kind of thing!)

I think my main point was that it is a 8great* way to approach this problem - but it needs a bit more on top of it to really sell it to a mass audience (IMO).

I could well be wrong, I have been many time before :)

Thanks for the feedback. We're trying hard to get all perspectives on this issue since we know we're tackling two major problems at once: designing an awesome web app and competing in an entrenched industry.

Again, the feedback is really appreciated, if you think of anything else be sure to let us know (founders@classlet.com)

Good job guys. This is very helpful to students and to teachers if they are willing to adopt it. Keep it up.

I work with one of the biggest "supplemental education" companies in US on a regular basis to design / develop their software solutions.

One thing I have learned is that teachers and students don't have control over what system the district/university wants them to use. The sale has do be done at the higher level. In some organizations the teacher's employment contract forbids them from introducing new tools that is not "supported" by the organization.

This is how companies like Blackboard, etc. have made it big because they sold their system to the decision-making groups and circumvented teachers and students.

You need to think about this as you market and sell your product, find a school district or university willing to give your service a shot.

Good Luck!

Clickable: http://www.classlet.com/

Also, maybe you should include a description of what Classlet actually is (in addition to the history of it).

Good point. Wasn't sure if it was better to see if we designed the site well enough that people could figure it out without us telling them.

Classlet makes handling assignments easier for teachers and students. We've got a whole bunch of features that most of the competitors don't have:

1. Students never need to register, only the teacher does 2. Students never even need to visit the site, they can do everything through email 3. Anything that can be passive, is. In most other systems, you constantly need to check if you've gotten a grade or if an assignment has been posted. We don't make you check, instead we let you know by email (and working on other channels too) 4. The teacher can do all of the grading within the web browser. They don't need to download a hundred individual doc files and open each one in word. Instead, they do it all from one page. 5. We keep a timeline for each student for each assignment. You can see any submissions they've made, if they submitted late, if they submitted an older version, then a newer version (teach has access to all versions), we mark if it was submitted late, etc... 6. And we try to make it easy to facilitate a discussion between the teacher and student.

Those are 6 of quick things off of the top of my head that set us apart from the competition.

Thanks for the feedback.

If sounds like you have a good handle on what your product brings to market that others don't. Distill this down to some good marketing copy for the website.

Thanks for the feedback. Yea, the two things we're really missing on the front page are "Why should you use this?" and "How do you use this?". We're talking about adding a video and some concise copy like you recommended.

Make sure to spend time on the copy. A video is a nice sell from the emotional aspect, as it can engage your senses and build excitement, but good copy is a much faster way to communicate key features.

I asked my friend, who is a teacher, about using the service. She had replied that it is too difficult to discourage cheating on Math-related assignments (she still has students hand-write).

A potential idea would be to have students do there assignment online, and have a "playback" button to show the student working. A crude cheating measurement (or genius measurement) would be the time between answer submission and the time to completion.

Cheat detection is a successful industry also. I know that many existing solutions integrate with services such as <http://www.turnitin.com>. We are tracking requests for this kind of functionality; maybe as a premium feature?

*I apologize for the previous grammatical mistake.

From my friend's point of view, your service will not be considered without cheat-protection so I don't think it should be appropriate as a premium feature. I may be wrong, but my take on freemium is to allow the user to recognize the value when under the free plan and the use of premium to make things faster, larger, or better. In that vein, I would suggest automated grading for absolute or relatively absolute answers as a premium feature (i.e. integral x = (x^2)/2 or a single US founding founder would be part of a set {Thomas Jefferson, James Adams, ... }). That way, grading is completely automated. I'm sure teachers will pay for such a feature.

From What I know (from a teacher who I sent to your site):

E-mail may be super effective, but you may have more luck selling to teachers if their students don't need an e-mail address; if they can put in their (pseudo)name or 'school number' and a passcode or some such to upload to an online interface. (w/o an e-mail... w/o storing personally identifiable information of students online, etc)

We'd love it if teachers didn't have to input any information at all! Unfortunately, email addresses are the only universally accessible means of communicating with students when we aren't integrated with their school systems. It also fits better with the typical student's workflow.

2 words for you to ease user acquisition: Facebook API.

Let students do the pitching for you.

although as their model doesnt require the students to access the site (i.e. have an account) and seeing as most schools I know would never use Facebook to send out assignments it's probably not the way to go.

We're hoping we can mobilize students as a marketing force, but we're not sure how to do it.

This first "application", Classlet Assignments, doesn't even require students to create their own account or visit the site (they can, if they prefer). How would you integrate the Facebook API or other social platforms with this application?

We'd also like to build other applications, including ones which target students, but we'd like to get one application right before we build others. Do you have a suggestion for a student-centric application (or features) which would drive viral adoption and could help convince schools to buy?

I am not sure buddy, but I know that is where students reside.

However, you guys could try several approaches:

-Bottom Up: Ask students to submit their .edu email or login via Facebook connect, and you will notify them once a class is added (this is a bit of false advertisement because at this point you don't even have ties with their professors). But as the number of students for each school becomes significant the school board will be more willing to listen ("75 students at XYZ sign up to ....").

-Top Down: Close the registration process and start to pitch to one school at the time. In other words, adopt an enterprise sale's model. It may take you much longer to close one sale, but you are guaranteed to have revenue from every client.

Feature Request:

Include a check option for "corrupt document uploads" when attaching assignments (just in case I need a few more days to finish my assignment). Otherwise, nice work!

Haha nice suggestion :) Thats one of the perks of having assignments viewed in the browser, everyone sees the same thing and no one can claim they didn't know it was corrupt.

Thanks for the compliment too.

One of the main problems behind getting the universities to switch is because of how heavily invested they are in a product. For example, I go to Penn State and they have a whole team around supporting our system (Angel). Penn State even modifies the code base to support our school specifically so they would never switch over after all the time/money invested. But good luck, I never even go on Angel anymore because I hate it so much.

One of the ways we're tackling this is by letting teachers use Classlet without needing their institution to support it. Any teacher can hop on and start using classlet immediately, which is great because I've never met a teacher who likes their universities' current solution.

I'm curious, how large is this support team and what do they do? What modifications have they made to the software?

As an aside: Angel was recently acquired by Blackboard.

I go to pennstate as well and I completely agree with you on this. I hate angel because it sucks.

I am a part of a startup Watermelon Express and we are developing a platform Web/Desktop/Mobile which syncs, has chat rooms, secure system and content. Even if the universities don't accept it as a universal platform, we are hoping students will use it because of the convenience factor. It is not mentioned anywhere on our website, because it is still 2-3 months away from beta launch.

I almost did something similar to this during this past year. Perhaps we could have a chat when school starts up again in the fall and I could tell you about some of the things I found.

I love the design and the font. You should definitely save the list of students emails. Have a page where it has the class roster and be able to email students individually or groups of students.

Be sure to submit it to http://AppUseful.com also!

Thanks for the feedback!

Simple and easy to understand. I like your website. I would agree with YC's expert opinion, in that your biggest problem is attacking a market where the dominant player is fairly entrenched. They do suck though, and maybe this is your greatest opportunity. Good luck!

Suggestion: It's easy to see how creating an assignment works with the "try it now" link, but it'd be nice to have a demo of the grading interface as well without the user having to create an assignment.

Ouch, that is going to be a pretty tough sell IMO. As others have said the schools have so much invested in whatever software/process they use they will be unlikely to switch.

That's okay. We're looking for a challenge. And we have a couple ideas on how to tackle this.

can you tell us more about your startup idea? You explained a lot about how you got started but i'm not sure if you really pinpointed what your idea is.

Does my reply to icey help?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679018

Thanks!

well my university used blackboard chalk so I don't really see a need for this

Do you like using Blackboard though?

no

Reply on news.ycombinator.com