3 ms·

Ask / Offer HN: Startup for hire?

• cadalac 14y ago
  Good luck with your startup guys. Obviously it's a small market, but the world is just waiting for better educational resources. Do you have any plans to expand and offer more topics? I could see your startup being a kind of premium wikipedia.
  • gingerlime 14y ago
    we think so too. Maybe not premium wikipedia (yet), but even a good place to train and improve your memorization could be a good enough start...
• JoKer--777 14y ago
  Hi, my name is Johannes. I'm also part of kenHub. Just wanted to mention here that even though your background might not be in the medical field and you don't have to learn anatomy, you propably know people who are. So you could spread the word over the known channels about us. This would help us a lot.
• jayrobin 14y ago
  Your product looks quite good, though I can't say I'm too keen on the name! If you're not already, I'd suggest aggressively reaching out to any educational establishment that might have an interest to solicit feedback and sell your product. Speak directly to lecturers and provide them with unique discount codes to offer their students. Maybe setup an affiliate system? Give people a reason to sell your product for you. At any rate, good luck - I can see a lot of effort went into building this.
  • gingerlime 14y ago
    Thanks! we're already doing some of that, but there's certainly more that we can do. Currently, we can't imagine a single thing will suddenly bring us a flood of subscriptions... hence the more realistic / pessimistic post on HN to get a project going to help us fund this.
• nanijoe 14y ago
  Have you guys considered releasing this as an iPad app?
  • gingerlime 14y ago
    Our app uses responsive web design, so it works well on all platforms (PC, tablet, smartphone). In future we might want to extend it and build a proper app though.
• spencerhawkins 14y ago
  Hey guys, my name is Spencer Hawkins, I'm the co owner of hawki games and a google glass explorer. We've got a medical app for google glass that you would be perfect for. And are you interested in selling that anatomy app? I'm going to be a med student next year and could sell the hell out of it. I'd be interested in buying equity either way. You should change the name to something descriptive yet simple and make a big push into social media. All med school classes have Xxxxx school of medicine class of 2017 groups on Facebook this time of year. Infiltrate! Advertise. Your product is amazing and I'm going to sign up myself. spencerhawkins@gmail.com
• manglav 14y ago
  I would convert from a B2C to a B2B company. Focus on partnering with existing medical school on a subscription basis to supplement their textbook. Easily charge $10 / student / year. While in the end, the same student is being helped, the rate of adoption skyrockets due to a "me-too!" affect. All medical schools are in a race, and if one school has a tool, the others just have to have it. All you need are two or three schools to get started, and you can give a discount for it initially. In the meanwhile, I am also working on a project myself, and could use an experienced team to help build the prototype. Let's discuss both projects! Email in profile. edit: This is essentially SRS for anatomy? Cool, good idea. Nice detailed pictures as well.
• lsiebert 14y ago
  Some unsolicited advice: Don't sell to students. Or teachers. Students and teachers don't have money. They won't convert from free. big institutions do. Parents do. Tutorial programs do. Sell to text book companies or departments/schools, or parents/tutoring companies. Easiest way to pivot is towards parents/family. Make it easy for parents/grandparents to give an account to their kid or kids. Alternatively you could try to get a research grant funding a comparison of class of students learning with your software with a class learning without it.
  • zerr 14y ago
    Oh, how I wish someday Teacher to become AAA profession with AAA compensations, as it should already be...
  • gingerlime 14y ago
    Thanks Isiebert. You raised some very valid points there. Universities / publishers is probably a better model for the future. But selling to them however is very hard and long, and our content currently covers around 30-40% of the whole anatomy. So universities/publishers are reluctant to buy-into this right now. Also without some research to 'prove' that it works better it's even harder. Parents/grandparents are a good angle too - but we're not exactly sure how to reach those. Reaching students, who might be actively searching for anatomy learning material, is hard enough... Reaching their families might be even harder. And how would those family members know that this is what their beloved actually need?? So it's a tough problem for us right now. On the other hand, we have students who are willing to pay for this. Even when we had around 10% of the content, perhaps because it was good enough for them. And we see a pretty steady week-on-week growth in our active subscriptions of around 8% per week. Those students already pay for anatomy atlas and textbooks, so it's not unheard of for them to pay for the learning materials to help them study. The numbers are still low, and that's why we're looking for some sort of a stop-gap funding via some freelance work. But we believe, and our data so far suggests, that within around 6 months we should hopefully be "ramen profitable"[1]. [1]http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
    • 14y ago