

Ask / Offer HN: Startup for hire? - gingerlime

Hi, we are the team behind kenHub - (www.kenhub.com).<p>TL;DR - Talented team of 3 looking for a short-term project (Ruby on Rails / Django) to do from Berlin, Germany.<p>Longer version:<p>Our project is going for about a year now, and we see good traction and growth. However, it still has some way to go before we are financially stable (hopefully in about 6 months according to our estimates).<p>Meanwhile, we ran out of cash. We can look for investments, but decided that we are much better at building apps than convincing investors and negotiating deals. Our startup is not looking for exit. We're trying to build a business to help students study anatomy. This makes us much less attractive for investment anyway...<p>We work great as a team, use agile methodologies and can deliver high quality code fast. 
We have great experience in RoR, Django, HTML5/CSS3, responsive-web-design, system architecture, security and more.
To see some of our work - please check out our product at http://www.kenhub.com. We also created the open-source project Giraffe http://kenhub.github.io/giraffe/ and contributed to a couple of other open-source projects.<p>If you're looking for a small team to help out, build your prototype, help optimize a bottleneck or make some great coffee (we are also skilled at latte-art) - then please get in touch.<p>or if you have some bright idea on how to sky-rocket our startup from growing 8% per week to %800 - we'd be happy to hear from you...
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lsiebert
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.

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gingerlime
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>

~~~
lsiebert
Don't assume parents need to buy this for kids who need it for their current
classes. Plenty of parents want to encourage their kids to be doctors.
Facebook might be able to target this, but I'm not a marketing guy, just
spitballing.

One niche might be immigrant communities and developing world middle class
families in places like south asia. It might be relatively cheap to get an
advertisement in an immigrant newspaper, even if you have to pay to have it
translated.

You could also see about bundling with other complimentary educational
offerings, and combining advertising dollars.

In any case, I think you have a good product that most people currently never
hear about. That seems a shame, and free lance, funding, or whatever I hope
you succeed. Please post again in 6 months with an update.

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jayrobin
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
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.

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JoKer--777
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.

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manglav
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.

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spencerhawkins
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

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cadalac
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
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...

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nanijoe
Have you guys considered releasing this as an iPad app?

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gingerlime
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.

