Show HN: Homeroom, a new edtech startup – any advice appreciated | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Homeroom, a new edtech startup – any advice appreciated

homeroom.me

5 pointsanishdhar10 comments

My two friends and I recently started an edtech started called Homeroom (it's live at homeroom.me) to promote collaboration and discussion in the classroom. It's a free online website that acts as a forum for students and teachers to answer each others' questions and discuss classroom content. We launched about three days ago and we've gotten about 900 total users including students just in a few schools we've reached out too in the bay area.

Does anyone have any advice on how to best reach out to teachers in other districts? We've been cold emailing teachers for now and seem to have a hit or miss with them. When we get a chance to explain ourselves teachers are really interested and we can usually get them to sign up with a class. Any advice would be much appreciated! More detailed info can be found at https://angel.co/homeroom.

Ask yourself: who has access to lots of teachers?

You should get in touch with teachers' unions, Boards of Education, and classroom supply stores. If there's some way you can partner with textbook companies, that might also be an indirect path to users.

You should also check out Q&A sites or forums that have sections for educators to ask one another questions. There may even be teachers looking for you, and they might be congregating there.

Your product sounds like Piazza. My computer science department uses it extensively - combination Q&A, announcements, and a sort of ticketing system for the TAs. It's a great tool. It's a powerful and innovative place to take fairly standard web application technology.

Why should I use your product instead of Piazza?

If you believe you can beat Piazza, then figuring out how Piazza got its marketshare might be a good place to start. I gather they have decent penetration in the higher ed market.

Thanks a lot for the feedback. My name is Abhishek Fatehpuria and I'm also a cofounder with Homeroom.

Theres a couple reasons why we think we're better than piazza.

1) Our discussion software yields higher quality discussion by having a more steady stream and well organized posts. 2) We're releasing more features which enables even more collaboration and discussion. Piazza only goes as far as posts and answers. We are going to do a lot more very soon. 3) Our target market right now has actually been the K12 market. We find that the softwares in that space right now are not that good and its incredibly fragmented.

That being said, I use piazza in school and I love it, and we know its pretty entrenched already in the higher-ed not K12 market.

Please let us know if you have more questions/feedback

Try your institution. Ask around. That's the best way to grow. But like the other person said, there is already Piazza. There is also edX which many top-tier universities are beginning to use. There is also BlackBoard. The high-ed market is pretty crowded and fragmented to me. For example, some departments choose to use BlackBoard while some don't care at all. Most of the time it's up to the professor to choose. Think for a bit. The actual solution to these question is not all that subtle, but you need a solid product that people can rely on first. You need a PaaS and a SaaS.

I think this text should be on the homepage: "Homeroom creates a secure environment for students and teachers to bring intellectual discussions from class and other parts of their educational experiences to the web. "

The first thing you show is a signup page. Why would I sign up if I find no value in the site?

"Where the world comes to learn"

If it's a forum, learn from stackoverflow, reddit, 4chan, etc: give everyone your content, and if people find value and want to contribute, they'll sign up.

Yeah, I was pretty fuzzy on what exactly the software is/does.

A video would be awesome. I would understand them wanting to provide some layer of security for students/teachers by not allowing open access, but a demo area or even some screenshots would solve the "What am I signing up for?" problem.

true, thanks for the feedback! I agree it is hard to understand the product simply from looking at the first page, we have an about page at http://www.homeroom.me/about and screenshots at https://angel.co/homeroom, but we'll definitely create some sort of video or demo where we can show teachers how exactly the website is used.

I worked for a collaborative ed-tech startup from 2012-2013. Happy to talk about it / give advice, my email is in my profile.

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