

Ask HN: Looking for feedback/advice on handwritr.com - deutronium

I've been working on this little site in my spare time which makes use of Amazon Mechanical Turk.  I got some really useful feedback from you guys off #startups last night, so thought I'd post here too.<p>Thanks!
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percept
Interesting idea. I wonder which businesses might be interested in the service
(assuming higher profit margins there since you're paying human workers).

Maybe attorneys, for discovered documents? Accounting? Or historical research?
Some authors prefer to write in longhand . . .

Do scanning companies ever outsource manual jobs?

For consumers, how about family histories or recipes? [There are companies
which create family cookbooks, for example.]

I think the site copy is like a first draft in its current state--a good
start, but could be shorter and punchier (copywriting's hard). Find out what
people are searching for in your niche and weave more keyphrases into the
text.

I also suggest working on the text layout to better distinguish your points. I
consider the remainder "good enough," with the possible exception of the logo.
But selling is more important--clearly and briefly explain what you're selling
and present a call to action (maybe make the "Go" action clearer).

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deutronium
Thanks a lot! You've given me lots of things to think about.

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user24
Great idea. Why not tack on an OCR package too for people who are scanning in
printed documents or screenshots that they want converting to text. You can
automate that. If the quality of OCR isn't good enough then you might be able
to reduce your turk costs by saying "correct this page" instead of "transcribe
this page".

Good luck!

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deutronium
Cheers, thats a nice idea i'll look into that.

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entreprenewb
Bump on this. I know that with medical transcription using speech recognition
and then a transcriptionist turnaround time can improve from around 4 or 5
hours to 20-30 minutes or less.

Along those lines, consider charging per line transcribed rather than per
page. Customers with short documents might balk at the price when they don't
need a full page transcribed. And using a standard transcription character
width means that you'll have more granular data.

And if you don't already have a terms of service (I didn't delve deep into
your site, but didn't see it readily obvious) you need one that informs the
user that the final documents are not guaranteed perfect and have some
agreement that will relieve you from the liability if the user doesn't review
their own document before using it in a professional capacity. A minimal error
in a legal or medical document that isn't reviewed could have costly
implications.

Lastly, two nitpicks: 1) you have the word "transcriber" on the landing page,
but "transcriptionist" is the more common term for the occupation (e.g.
medical transcriptionist) 2) The "Go" link in the header and footer isn't
descriptive. Why not have a link that says "Transcribe" or something more
readily meaningful than "Go"?

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deutronium
Thanks for your advice, I've just added a ToS and privacy policy based on it.

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Jabbles
<http://www.handwritr.com/>

Sounds like a nice idea, you may need more stringent rules on what constitutes
a "page" though.

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deutronium
Good point, possibly pricing could be based on word count instead.

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abyssknight
Wow, that's a great idea. The only thing I'd say you need is more information
about the service itself. Emphasize that _real humans_ are looking at these
documents, and explain the physics of the system a little more. That would
differentiate you from OCR and other silly handwriting recognition software.
Might want to flesh out a privacy policy too just in case someone uploads
their personally identifiable information or the plans to some kind of bad
thing.

~~~
deutronium
Cheers, thats a very good point.

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petervandijck
Looks like an AWESOME service. Now it's all marketing, you have to find groups
of people that are interested in this. (College professors?)

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DanLivesHere
That's kind of what I was thinking. I feel like I could market it (it's what I
do) but the margins could be too tight.

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deutronium
Hi Dan, I'd really like to talk to you about that, couldn't see any e-mail on
your profile, mind dropping me a mail at sales [at] handwritr.com?

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alastair
Neat idea. Not sure if you're already doing this but you could OCR the
document first and have the MT worker just fix the mistakes. This may reduce
your costs + provide a faster turn around.

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unohoo
look for some website templates at themeforest.com -- you can use them as a
base to increase usability.

~~~
deutronium
Cheers for the link, the original design was semi-based on one from there.
I've just switched to another from there, which I think looks nicer.

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DanLivesHere
How much are you paying AMT workers?

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deutronium
At the moment that is quite flexible, I'm thinking of creating different
pricing schemes to get jobs completed within set time frames.

