

Ask HN: Review our startup - Classlet.com - sgk284

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.<p>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."<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Thanks.
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ErrantX
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?

~~~
snprbob86
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?

~~~
ErrantX
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.

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richesh
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!

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icey
Clickable: <http://www.classlet.com/>

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

~~~
sgk284
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
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
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
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.

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ieatpaste
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
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
*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.

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izak30
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
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.

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

Let students do the pitching for you.

~~~
snprbob86
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
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.

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proee
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
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.

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rickharrison
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.

~~~
ujjwalg
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
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.

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utsmokingaces
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!

~~~
sgk284
Thanks for the feedback!

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Maciek416
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!

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natrius
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.

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bdmac97
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
That's okay. We're looking for a challenge. And we have a couple ideas on how
to tackle this.

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js3309
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
Does my reply to icey help?

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

Thanks!

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

~~~
sgk284
Do you like using Blackboard though?

~~~
zackattack
no

