5 ms·

Ask HN: Review our startup - Classlet.com

30 points by sgk284 17y ago

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.

icey 17y ago
Clickable: http://www.classlet.com/ http://www.classlet.com/ Also, maybe you should include a description of what Classlet actually is (in addition to the history of it).
- sgk284 17y ago
  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.
  - TrevorJ 17y ago
    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.
    - sgk284 17y ago
      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.
      - TrevorJ 17y ago
        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.
Maciek416 17y ago
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!
js3309 17y ago
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.
- sgk284 17y ago
  Does my reply to icey help? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679018 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679018 Thanks!
rickharrison 17y ago
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.
- sgk284 17y ago
  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.
- snprbob86 17y ago
  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.
- ujjwalg 17y ago
  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.
  - rickharrison 17y ago
    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.
ErrantX 17y ago
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?
- kierank 17y ago
  (there is a big one kicking about that plenty of schools in the UK have but I forget the name offhand). SIMS.net
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    no, that's not it.... I think it begins with an M. Grr. I'll have to ask a friend who will know :P
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      got it :) It's called Moodle.
  - emhc 17y ago
    I'm not from the UK and I don't know anything about this but it appears this should be sims.co.uk
    - kierank 17y ago
      The name of the product is SIMS.net: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMS.net http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMS.net
rokhayakebe 17y ago
2 words for you to ease user acquisition: Facebook API. Let students do the pitching for you.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  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.
- snprbob86 17y ago
  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?
  - rokhayakebe 17y ago
    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.
bdmac97 17y ago
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.
- sgk284 17y ago
  That's okay. We're looking for a challenge. And we have a couple ideas on how to tackle this.
utsmokingaces 17y ago
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 http://AppUseful.com also!
- sgk284 17y ago
  Thanks for the feedback!
ieatpaste 17y ago
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.
- snprbob86 17y ago
  Cheat detection is a successful industry also. I know that many existing solutions integrate with services such as <http://www.turnitin.com> http://www.turnitin.com>. We are tracking requests for this kind of functionality; maybe as a premium feature?
  - ieatpaste 17y ago
    *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.
proee 17y ago
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!
- sgk284 17y ago
  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.
richesh 17y ago
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!
zackattack 17y ago
well my university used blackboard chalk so I don't really see a need for this
- sgk284 17y ago
  Do you like using Blackboard though?
  - zackattack 17y ago
    no
izak30 17y ago
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)
- snprbob86 17y ago
  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.
natrius 17y ago
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.

30 points by sgk284 17y ago

icey 17y ago

Clickable: http://www.classlet.com/ http://www.classlet.com/ Also, maybe you should include a description of what Classlet actually is (in addition to the history of it).

sgk284 17y ago
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.
- TrevorJ 17y ago
  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.
  - sgk284 17y ago
    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.
    - TrevorJ 17y ago
      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.

Maciek416 17y ago

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!

js3309 17y ago

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.

sgk284 17y ago
Does my reply to icey help? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679018 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679018 Thanks!

rickharrison 17y ago

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.

sgk284 17y ago
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.
snprbob86 17y ago
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.
ujjwalg 17y ago
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.
- rickharrison 17y ago
  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.

ErrantX 17y ago

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?

kierank 17y ago
(there is a big one kicking about that plenty of schools in the UK have but I forget the name offhand). SIMS.net
- ErrantX 17y ago
  no, that's not it.... I think it begins with an M. Grr. I'll have to ask a friend who will know :P
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    got it :) It's called Moodle.
- emhc 17y ago
  I'm not from the UK and I don't know anything about this but it appears this should be sims.co.uk
  - kierank 17y ago
    The name of the product is SIMS.net: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMS.net http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMS.net

rokhayakebe 17y ago

2 words for you to ease user acquisition: Facebook API. Let students do the pitching for you.

ErrantX 17y ago
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.
snprbob86 17y ago
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?
- rokhayakebe 17y ago
  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.

bdmac97 17y ago

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.

sgk284 17y ago
That's okay. We're looking for a challenge. And we have a couple ideas on how to tackle this.

utsmokingaces 17y ago

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 http://AppUseful.com also!

sgk284 17y ago
Thanks for the feedback!

ieatpaste 17y ago

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.

snprbob86 17y ago
Cheat detection is a successful industry also. I know that many existing solutions integrate with services such as <http://www.turnitin.com> http://www.turnitin.com>. We are tracking requests for this kind of functionality; maybe as a premium feature?
- ieatpaste 17y ago
  *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.

proee 17y ago

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!

sgk284 17y ago
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.

richesh 17y ago

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!

zackattack 17y ago

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

sgk284 17y ago
Do you like using Blackboard though?
- zackattack 17y ago
  no

izak30 17y ago

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)

snprbob86 17y ago
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.

natrius 17y ago

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.