6 ms·

Reboot. Relaunch. Redesign. Pivot. Sunset. Shutter. The Knack, a web app, story.

87 points by anthony_franco 15y ago

angryasian 15y ago
why wouldn't you try to release it for free, and figure out another business model. I can think of a few off the top of my head. Your only issue should be to gain users first, as you have an adoption problem or more like how do I show people the long term benefits of doing something different and new. Its about educating your users, which is hard by itself. Maybe we didn't ruin the web, we just weeded out those that are not creative enough to figure out how to make money from it.
- seltzered_ 15y ago
  There may be other ways to package it before releasing it for free as well. Remember, patio11 manages to charge mostly teachers $30 (although not monthly) for bingo card software, but it took him 4 years of learning and optimizing to get there.
  - studiofellow 15y ago
    I'm familiar with the Bingo Card guy (Patrick McKenzie). I read his blog. What he's accomplished is definitely impressive. I think the difference is that he's providing something teachers already use, need, and look for, as opposed to a "new" kind of software solution. (Online gradebooks aren't that new, but they still are not in use by the majority of teachers.) Maybe I didn't hit on this hard enough in the blog post—teachers just are not a ripe audience for software in general.
    - hokua 15y ago
      I have to second Patrick. I sell a Mac app to alot of teachers for $20, and sell about 100/month. While not big bucks, not bad either.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- studiofellow 15y ago
  What business model would you suggest? No business model or creative monetization strategy is going to change the audience's predisposition against paying. I'm a bootstrapper looking to build a profitable business, not someone chasing an acquisition or an IPO. Ending up with 1000 users who aren't paying me is no better than where I am now, is it?
  - angryasian 15y ago
    you've already admitted to doing freelancing while keeping the project going. You could of kept doing that. Theres companies that will pay for sponsorships if you have a 1000 dedicated teachers using your application. You said teachers pay for supplies, well you could make affiliate money. You could figure out how to get deeper discounts on bulk supplies teacher's are regularly buying and take a cut. You could ask for donations. Once you have a 1000 people hooked on it, I have no doubts that you could think of a premium feature that opens new features to these users that they'd be willing to pay for. Again its about getting those users and showing them the benefits first.
    - drewcrawford 15y ago
      It's an opportunity cost issue. The choice isn't go big or go home. The choice is work on this some more or [insert-new-project]. Which is more effective: to plan, host, and field support requests for a product that has no monetization strategy? Or to roll the lessons learned into a new project instead? The fact that there might be some value in 1000 users down the road doesn't mitigate the fact that he's learned a bunch of lessons that will inform his next product from the beginning.
  - patio11 15y ago
    Your audience will happily pay for software. See http://www.bingocardcreator.com http://www.bingocardcreator.com : over $100k sold to teachers. They even happily paid for your software: 10 paying users out of a hundred is a pretty nice conversion rate. Your problem is the denominator there. You need to scale it up to the point where the numerator becomes meaningful to you. A related problem is, on watching your presentation, I don't think you solve a problem teachers actually have. No teacher gets up in the morning and goes "Dang, but for my crushing lack of simple data tools, I'd be ready for today."
sycr 15y ago
With a monthly burn of only $150 though, why kill it? The all or nothing approach seems stubborn to an outsider. Maybe it doesn't generate a full time income, but you only need 30 users to break even every month. That seems like an achievable goal.
- studiofellow 15y ago
  This is exactly what I thought when I launched. A year later, 30 users is looking a lot less realistic. The $150/mo isn't a big deal. I'd just rather focus my efforts on something else that is more likely to succeed.
  - bdunn 15y ago
    Stack those bricks :-)
Hisoka 15y ago
I feel for you. You have good intentions and want to make something that actually improves the quality of education, a noble goal... The problem is that sometimes what people need vs what we want is different. We want to throw money at gambling, and tabloids, when in actuality we're better off spending that money on other things that could improve the quality of life.
keeptrying 15y ago
If you read Sean Murphys blog and the posts that he writes in Lean Startup Circle Google groups, he gives a lot of techniques on how to figure out what a user means when they say or do some particular thing. For my particular startup I have a lot of users who say - "I dont think I would be a potential customer but I really want to be on the site when you launch". Then I ask them for money right there and then discounted 50% from waht we will charge when we release and have had a few people actually give us the money. So we are going to launch this idea on Oct 15.
tabbyjabby 15y ago
Your startup failed because teachers hate technology? Your startup failed because you couldn't make teachers love the technology you were providing. Or you didn't go to the right people. Maybe you should've gone straight to the schools.
- studiofellow 15y ago
  My startup failed because I built it for the wrong people. I didn't mention this in the post, but I did approach schools in my area and offered a free pilot program. After a couple days of emails and cold calling I couldn't get a single taker.
  - craigvn 15y ago
    The lesson is that you need to make sure you have a market before wasting time building a product. Most tech guys get this the wrong way around (but don't really care cause they like building stuff).
    - studiofellow 15y ago
      You're right. Next time around, I'm starting with a landing page and email list, and I'm only coding if I get a decent level of interest. I spent way too much time on this without knowing if I was on target.
AretNCarlsen 15y ago
In the vein of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", no teacher ever got fired for storing all of their students' data locally, whether on a personal PC or a physical gradebook. I have worked with businesses that do not want to store data in the cloud (Amazon, Salesforce, etc) if the data is at all confidential. They have a point: the risks of local data storage are serious but intuitive, whereas the average person has only your word regarding the safety of the cloud. And teachers, like doctors and bankers, have auditors that they would have to persuade to accept the new technology. I would not be surprised if the post mortem reveals that some teachers brought this app up with their administrators, who responded, "That app would be handy for you, but if there is theft or corruption of your students' data, how would we defend ourselves in the ensuing lawsuits? 'The developer seemed reliable?'"
- jcampbell1 15y ago
  I make my living selling software to teachers, and the privacy issue comes up about 1 in 20 sales. It is an issue, but not a deal breaker. If a teacher has an online grade book they can share with parents, and it gets results, then teachers will buy the software. Irrational lawsuit paranoia is a real problem, but it is not the reason this product failed.
spolsky 15y ago
Success does not come from Getting Real, or from Lean Startups, or from any other business book. It doesn't come from sitting in your room reading Inc. Magazine or Joel on Software. It doesn't come from great typography or presentations worthy of Steve Jobs. I'll bet if you look at your server logs, you'll see that this post on Hacker News got you more traffic than you've had since you launched. I would guess you got about 35,000 humans listening to your story tonight. Get it? It's a story. It's about the story. Sitting around the campfire telling stories. You can reboot, relaunch, pivot, A-B test, Go Lean and Get Real in your room until the end of time but until you have a story to tell you're not interesting and if you're not interesting nobody will pay attention: not poor teachers, not rich teachers, not anybody. OK, congratulations, you have now learned one thing about business. If you'd like to learn another couple of thousand send me an email and come work for me in New York; it looks like you're a pretty decent product designer and programmer.
- staunch 15y ago
  This is not an example of someone following the advice of the smart people and failing. This is someone not following advice and making most of the common mistakes people warn about. He's a sole founder, working part-time, in Colorado, on a problem he doesn't have, in enterprise software, for schools, with no distribution plan, no team, no domain expertise, in a niche market, and giving up after 1 year. Of course, he still could have succeeded, but he definitely stacked the deck against himself.
  - studiofellow 15y ago
    A couple of your points are narrow-minded. I have to live in the bay area, work on a team, and work on it full time to build a viable business? Come on, there are other paths to success. Your points about domain expertise, and working on a problem I don't have are right on. I learned the hard way it's way harder to build software to meet someone else's needs. (Even though 3 immediate family members are teachers, including my wife.)
    - prawn 15y ago
steve8918 15y ago
I really don't like the part where the author rags on teachers. "I didn’t realize there is a stigma amongst teachers—that they deeply resent having to spend money on their classrooms and careers. Many businesses, both online and off, have special discounts and freebies for teachers. This has warped teachers’ sense of value and fostered a sense of entitlement." Sorry, but why the heck should a teacher have to pay for their own classroom? If I were forced to pay for my keyboard at work, or my monitor, should I not be pissed? Teachers, especially ones that are starting out, are dirt poor, and for some reason they need to spend money on their classroom? Nonsense. As sense of entitlement? How about a sense of what's fair. I didn't like the attitude at all. "I feel for them. I really do. But they’re still terrible customers." Or, in other words "Teachers refused to pay for my product, so they suck." I would say the author was guilty of a cliched mistake that many startups make: he built a solution for a problem that no one was interested in, or at least interested enough to pay for.
- prawn 15y ago
  Exactly. Shows how important it is to bounce your concepts off the right people before you start. Everyone should quickly learn that the guy that says "Yeah, that's awesome!" with dollar signs in their eyes every time is the worst with feedback.
  - studiofellow 15y ago
    Yep, I totally fell for it. The Running Lean book I linked in the post was really helpful to me on that point.
- mnutt 15y ago
  I don't think he resents them as much as he just realizes that he had mistaken assumptions. He heard that teachers often pay for their own supplies, but what he didn't know was that teachers hate doing it.
  - studiofellow 15y ago
    Exactly.
prawn 15y ago
That's a lot of resentment for a group of people who simply didn't want to hand over their hard-earned for something you offered them but that they couldn't justify.
maukdaddy 15y ago
As someone who worked in Infosec at the 3rd largest district in the nation let me add something: - Most, if not all, schools prohibit teachers from storing student data in external (non-school based) systems. In fact, our teacher/staff AUP strictly forbid using systems other than the district-provided systems for anything involving student information.
jdkunesh 15y ago
You missed your market. Look at your benefits list: Demonstrates student growth. Reveals teacher effectiveness. Use data to inform your instruction. Creates beautiful and insightful graphs automatically. Detailed report card for every student. Organizes documentation for easy access. Faster and easier to use than any other gradebook. Teachers already do all this in a way that is approved by their district via the tools provided for them. And, speaking cynically, they certainly don't want to reveal their effectiveness nor do they want to adjust lesson plans according to data. That said, as a parent, I would want this kind of information about my child because I could use it to hold my child's teacher accountable. In fact, if I could share it on Facebook or a Yahoo! group (I'm a member of one for my daughter's class), it would help the community evaluate their kids and their instruction. Call me crazy, but that's my 2 cents.
rpg 15y ago
I'm with steve8918 on this --- complaining about your customers not liking tech shows that you missed the point about their technology needs. Like... what if your school ALREADY has a system and you need to live with it? What if graphs aren't necessary, or even helpful? I get graphs that show where my kids grades on a standardized test compare to the scores of other kids in their cohort. These graphs are both trivial to make, and essentially useless at conveying information not contained in the raw numbers. Also, it's CRITICAL to understand the difference between USERS and CUSTOMERS. If you sell something into schools, the SCHOOL BOARD is your CUSTOMER. The teachers are your USERS. You'd better make sure you can sell to the CUSTOMERS. If you think about it, this explains why most school software is so astoundingly horrible: the CUSTOMERS don't ever have to use it! My hat's off to anyone who wants to sell to this market --- I sure don't have the courage or masochism for it.
- studiofellow 15y ago
  What you're describing with users vs customers is pretty standard in education. My approach was that teachers would be both customer and user. I probably did confuse the two a bit in my post. To clarify, my point is that teachers are bad customers, but probably deserving users.
onan_barbarian 15y ago
At first, this seems to be the bog-standard "I built something that people said they want, but then they didn't buy it" post-mortem. However, dig deeper and you will be delighted by gems like these: "This is a farce. Talking about tech and being on the Twitter make teachers look good to administrators and to the public. They can add “Technology Committee Member” to their resumes and congratulate themselves for being innovative. But using tech to do work requires a small minimum of effort and change, and any amount of these is too much for teachers." "I didn’t realize there is a stigma amongst teachers—that they deeply resent having to spend money on their classrooms and careers. Many businesses, both online and off, have special discounts and freebies for teachers. This has warped teachers’ sense of value and fostered a sense of entitlement." I applaud this subtle rhetorical device. The author understands that this readers may well be distracted by feelings of sympathy. So, he has carefully filled his post with nuggets like these so that we can focus on the substance of his post, rather than mawkish sentiments like: "How sad that a nice person can work hard for a year on a startup and not succeed".
- nsfmc 15y ago
  The conflict that's weirdest for me is that he internally conflates mindshare, educational reform, etc with him earning cash money. It's as if he believed there was a direct correlation between his rising income and teachers' decreasing entitlement. And now that he hasn't earned any significant cash, he can claim that teachers/education have a warped sense of value... right.
knowledgeworker 15y ago
Nice story. Interesting view on problems and how people define them. Problems can be defined and constructed by workers as a method of explaining systemic or personal failures and they become devices to explain other issues relating to their own motivations and sense of satisfaction in their work. Maybe that's the trick - working out how solvable and how 'real' the problem is.
danmaz74 15y ago
There are many very good insights in the comments already. I would add that the website doesn't work hard enough to establish credibility and trust, which is very important when dealing with a service where reliability is very important (I guess that you have a lot of manual input to do, and you don't want to lose your work...). I'll add that my father (a retired teacher) sold some educational software that he created himself for years and it was mostly teachers who bought it to use in the classroom. He didn't make a lot of money (also because you could download the same software for free from the internet), but some teachers were definitely willing to pay for something that they valued for their work - at least here in Italy, but I guess that's also true in the US.
fady 15y ago
joel: great points. "If you'd like to learn another couple of thousand send me an email and come work for me in New York; it looks like you're a pretty decent product designer and programmer." - for some reason i love that you see his talent and want it. if he were to come to NY and work for you, that would be a story to tell around a campfire...

why wouldn't you try to release it for free, and figure out another business model. I can think of a few off the top of my head. Your only issue should be to gain users first, as you have an adoption problem or more like how do I show people the long term benefits of doing something different and new. Its about educating your users, which is hard by itself. Maybe we didn't ruin the web, we just weeded out those that are not creative enough to figure out how to make money from it.

seltzered_ 15y ago
There may be other ways to package it before releasing it for free as well. Remember, patio11 manages to charge mostly teachers $30 (although not monthly) for bingo card software, but it took him 4 years of learning and optimizing to get there.
- studiofellow 15y ago
  I'm familiar with the Bingo Card guy (Patrick McKenzie). I read his blog. What he's accomplished is definitely impressive. I think the difference is that he's providing something teachers already use, need, and look for, as opposed to a "new" kind of software solution. (Online gradebooks aren't that new, but they still are not in use by the majority of teachers.) Maybe I didn't hit on this hard enough in the blog post—teachers just are not a ripe audience for software in general.
  - hokua 15y ago
    I have to second Patrick. I sell a Mac app to alot of teachers for $20, and sell about 100/month. While not big bucks, not bad either.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
studiofellow 15y ago
What business model would you suggest? No business model or creative monetization strategy is going to change the audience's predisposition against paying. I'm a bootstrapper looking to build a profitable business, not someone chasing an acquisition or an IPO. Ending up with 1000 users who aren't paying me is no better than where I am now, is it?
- angryasian 15y ago
  you've already admitted to doing freelancing while keeping the project going. You could of kept doing that. Theres companies that will pay for sponsorships if you have a 1000 dedicated teachers using your application. You said teachers pay for supplies, well you could make affiliate money. You could figure out how to get deeper discounts on bulk supplies teacher's are regularly buying and take a cut. You could ask for donations. Once you have a 1000 people hooked on it, I have no doubts that you could think of a premium feature that opens new features to these users that they'd be willing to pay for. Again its about getting those users and showing them the benefits first.
  - drewcrawford 15y ago
    It's an opportunity cost issue. The choice isn't go big or go home. The choice is work on this some more or [insert-new-project]. Which is more effective: to plan, host, and field support requests for a product that has no monetization strategy? Or to roll the lessons learned into a new project instead? The fact that there might be some value in 1000 users down the road doesn't mitigate the fact that he's learned a bunch of lessons that will inform his next product from the beginning.
- patio11 15y ago
  Your audience will happily pay for software. See http://www.bingocardcreator.com http://www.bingocardcreator.com : over $100k sold to teachers. They even happily paid for your software: 10 paying users out of a hundred is a pretty nice conversion rate. Your problem is the denominator there. You need to scale it up to the point where the numerator becomes meaningful to you. A related problem is, on watching your presentation, I don't think you solve a problem teachers actually have. No teacher gets up in the morning and goes "Dang, but for my crushing lack of simple data tools, I'd be ready for today."

sycr 15y ago

With a monthly burn of only $150 though, why kill it? The all or nothing approach seems stubborn to an outsider. Maybe it doesn't generate a full time income, but you only need 30 users to break even every month. That seems like an achievable goal.

studiofellow 15y ago
This is exactly what I thought when I launched. A year later, 30 users is looking a lot less realistic. The $150/mo isn't a big deal. I'd just rather focus my efforts on something else that is more likely to succeed.
- bdunn 15y ago
  Stack those bricks :-)

Hisoka 15y ago

I feel for you. You have good intentions and want to make something that actually improves the quality of education, a noble goal... The problem is that sometimes what people need vs what we want is different. We want to throw money at gambling, and tabloids, when in actuality we're better off spending that money on other things that could improve the quality of life.

keeptrying 15y ago

If you read Sean Murphys blog and the posts that he writes in Lean Startup Circle Google groups, he gives a lot of techniques on how to figure out what a user means when they say or do some particular thing. For my particular startup I have a lot of users who say - "I dont think I would be a potential customer but I really want to be on the site when you launch". Then I ask them for money right there and then discounted 50% from waht we will charge when we release and have had a few people actually give us the money. So we are going to launch this idea on Oct 15.

tabbyjabby 15y ago

Your startup failed because teachers hate technology? Your startup failed because you couldn't make teachers love the technology you were providing. Or you didn't go to the right people. Maybe you should've gone straight to the schools.

studiofellow 15y ago
My startup failed because I built it for the wrong people. I didn't mention this in the post, but I did approach schools in my area and offered a free pilot program. After a couple days of emails and cold calling I couldn't get a single taker.
- craigvn 15y ago
  The lesson is that you need to make sure you have a market before wasting time building a product. Most tech guys get this the wrong way around (but don't really care cause they like building stuff).
  - studiofellow 15y ago
    You're right. Next time around, I'm starting with a landing page and email list, and I'm only coding if I get a decent level of interest. I spent way too much time on this without knowing if I was on target.

AretNCarlsen 15y ago

In the vein of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", no teacher ever got fired for storing all of their students' data locally, whether on a personal PC or a physical gradebook. I have worked with businesses that do not want to store data in the cloud (Amazon, Salesforce, etc) if the data is at all confidential. They have a point: the risks of local data storage are serious but intuitive, whereas the average person has only your word regarding the safety of the cloud. And teachers, like doctors and bankers, have auditors that they would have to persuade to accept the new technology. I would not be surprised if the post mortem reveals that some teachers brought this app up with their administrators, who responded, "That app would be handy for you, but if there is theft or corruption of your students' data, how would we defend ourselves in the ensuing lawsuits? 'The developer seemed reliable?'"

jcampbell1 15y ago
I make my living selling software to teachers, and the privacy issue comes up about 1 in 20 sales. It is an issue, but not a deal breaker. If a teacher has an online grade book they can share with parents, and it gets results, then teachers will buy the software. Irrational lawsuit paranoia is a real problem, but it is not the reason this product failed.

spolsky 15y ago

Success does not come from Getting Real, or from Lean Startups, or from any other business book. It doesn't come from sitting in your room reading Inc. Magazine or Joel on Software. It doesn't come from great typography or presentations worthy of Steve Jobs. I'll bet if you look at your server logs, you'll see that this post on Hacker News got you more traffic than you've had since you launched. I would guess you got about 35,000 humans listening to your story tonight. Get it? It's a story. It's about the story. Sitting around the campfire telling stories. You can reboot, relaunch, pivot, A-B test, Go Lean and Get Real in your room until the end of time but until you have a story to tell you're not interesting and if you're not interesting nobody will pay attention: not poor teachers, not rich teachers, not anybody. OK, congratulations, you have now learned one thing about business. If you'd like to learn another couple of thousand send me an email and come work for me in New York; it looks like you're a pretty decent product designer and programmer.

staunch 15y ago
This is not an example of someone following the advice of the smart people and failing. This is someone not following advice and making most of the common mistakes people warn about. He's a sole founder, working part-time, in Colorado, on a problem he doesn't have, in enterprise software, for schools, with no distribution plan, no team, no domain expertise, in a niche market, and giving up after 1 year. Of course, he still could have succeeded, but he definitely stacked the deck against himself.
- studiofellow 15y ago
  A couple of your points are narrow-minded. I have to live in the bay area, work on a team, and work on it full time to build a viable business? Come on, there are other paths to success. Your points about domain expertise, and working on a problem I don't have are right on. I learned the hard way it's way harder to build software to meet someone else's needs. (Even though 3 immediate family members are teachers, including my wife.)
  - prawn 15y ago

steve8918 15y ago

I really don't like the part where the author rags on teachers. "I didn’t realize there is a stigma amongst teachers—that they deeply resent having to spend money on their classrooms and careers. Many businesses, both online and off, have special discounts and freebies for teachers. This has warped teachers’ sense of value and fostered a sense of entitlement." Sorry, but why the heck should a teacher have to pay for their own classroom? If I were forced to pay for my keyboard at work, or my monitor, should I not be pissed? Teachers, especially ones that are starting out, are dirt poor, and for some reason they need to spend money on their classroom? Nonsense. As sense of entitlement? How about a sense of what's fair. I didn't like the attitude at all. "I feel for them. I really do. But they’re still terrible customers." Or, in other words "Teachers refused to pay for my product, so they suck." I would say the author was guilty of a cliched mistake that many startups make: he built a solution for a problem that no one was interested in, or at least interested enough to pay for.

prawn 15y ago
Exactly. Shows how important it is to bounce your concepts off the right people before you start. Everyone should quickly learn that the guy that says "Yeah, that's awesome!" with dollar signs in their eyes every time is the worst with feedback.
- studiofellow 15y ago
  Yep, I totally fell for it. The Running Lean book I linked in the post was really helpful to me on that point.
mnutt 15y ago
I don't think he resents them as much as he just realizes that he had mistaken assumptions. He heard that teachers often pay for their own supplies, but what he didn't know was that teachers hate doing it.
- studiofellow 15y ago
  Exactly.

prawn 15y ago

That's a lot of resentment for a group of people who simply didn't want to hand over their hard-earned for something you offered them but that they couldn't justify.

maukdaddy 15y ago

As someone who worked in Infosec at the 3rd largest district in the nation let me add something: - Most, if not all, schools prohibit teachers from storing student data in external (non-school based) systems. In fact, our teacher/staff AUP strictly forbid using systems other than the district-provided systems for anything involving student information.

jdkunesh 15y ago

You missed your market. Look at your benefits list: Demonstrates student growth. Reveals teacher effectiveness. Use data to inform your instruction. Creates beautiful and insightful graphs automatically. Detailed report card for every student. Organizes documentation for easy access. Faster and easier to use than any other gradebook. Teachers already do all this in a way that is approved by their district via the tools provided for them. And, speaking cynically, they certainly don't want to reveal their effectiveness nor do they want to adjust lesson plans according to data. That said, as a parent, I would want this kind of information about my child because I could use it to hold my child's teacher accountable. In fact, if I could share it on Facebook or a Yahoo! group (I'm a member of one for my daughter's class), it would help the community evaluate their kids and their instruction. Call me crazy, but that's my 2 cents.

rpg 15y ago

I'm with steve8918 on this --- complaining about your customers not liking tech shows that you missed the point about their technology needs. Like... what if your school ALREADY has a system and you need to live with it? What if graphs aren't necessary, or even helpful? I get graphs that show where my kids grades on a standardized test compare to the scores of other kids in their cohort. These graphs are both trivial to make, and essentially useless at conveying information not contained in the raw numbers. Also, it's CRITICAL to understand the difference between USERS and CUSTOMERS. If you sell something into schools, the SCHOOL BOARD is your CUSTOMER. The teachers are your USERS. You'd better make sure you can sell to the CUSTOMERS. If you think about it, this explains why most school software is so astoundingly horrible: the CUSTOMERS don't ever have to use it! My hat's off to anyone who wants to sell to this market --- I sure don't have the courage or masochism for it.

studiofellow 15y ago
What you're describing with users vs customers is pretty standard in education. My approach was that teachers would be both customer and user. I probably did confuse the two a bit in my post. To clarify, my point is that teachers are bad customers, but probably deserving users.

onan_barbarian 15y ago

At first, this seems to be the bog-standard "I built something that people said they want, but then they didn't buy it" post-mortem. However, dig deeper and you will be delighted by gems like these: "This is a farce. Talking about tech and being on the Twitter make teachers look good to administrators and to the public. They can add “Technology Committee Member” to their resumes and congratulate themselves for being innovative. But using tech to do work requires a small minimum of effort and change, and any amount of these is too much for teachers." "I didn’t realize there is a stigma amongst teachers—that they deeply resent having to spend money on their classrooms and careers. Many businesses, both online and off, have special discounts and freebies for teachers. This has warped teachers’ sense of value and fostered a sense of entitlement." I applaud this subtle rhetorical device. The author understands that this readers may well be distracted by feelings of sympathy. So, he has carefully filled his post with nuggets like these so that we can focus on the substance of his post, rather than mawkish sentiments like: "How sad that a nice person can work hard for a year on a startup and not succeed".

nsfmc 15y ago
The conflict that's weirdest for me is that he internally conflates mindshare, educational reform, etc with him earning cash money. It's as if he believed there was a direct correlation between his rising income and teachers' decreasing entitlement. And now that he hasn't earned any significant cash, he can claim that teachers/education have a warped sense of value... right.

knowledgeworker 15y ago

Nice story. Interesting view on problems and how people define them. Problems can be defined and constructed by workers as a method of explaining systemic or personal failures and they become devices to explain other issues relating to their own motivations and sense of satisfaction in their work. Maybe that's the trick - working out how solvable and how 'real' the problem is.

danmaz74 15y ago

There are many very good insights in the comments already. I would add that the website doesn't work hard enough to establish credibility and trust, which is very important when dealing with a service where reliability is very important (I guess that you have a lot of manual input to do, and you don't want to lose your work...). I'll add that my father (a retired teacher) sold some educational software that he created himself for years and it was mostly teachers who bought it to use in the classroom. He didn't make a lot of money (also because you could download the same software for free from the internet), but some teachers were definitely willing to pay for something that they valued for their work - at least here in Italy, but I guess that's also true in the US.

fady 15y ago

joel: great points. "If you'd like to learn another couple of thousand send me an email and come work for me in New York; it looks like you're a pretty decent product designer and programmer." - for some reason i love that you see his talent and want it. if he were to come to NY and work for you, that would be a story to tell around a campfire...