And if you'd like to contribute, we've got a few interesting projects in the works, including building a free writing section with NLP! You can reach me at peter (at) quill (dot) org
This is actually nice looking and has a great purpose. Maybe they didn't select you because there's no billion-dollar exit strategies for education services..? I think it could make a really great product though.
We are a nonprofit. We are a commercial nonprofit, and intend to make a sustainable revenue, so we really don't fit into the nonprofit mold. We probably would have had a better chance as a for profit. The nonprofit app was surprisingly sparse.
Ah. Well, as they say on YC they are being extremely selective with non-profits and considering them to be "charity" (their own words). I personally wouldn't take it to heart at all if YC didn't select your company.
This is interesting! Why didn't you put simple words correction (as in the homepage) instead of the user having to retype the whole sentence in the exercises?
The core idea here is that by writing out a complete sentence you learn the context in which a word is being used. For example, if you're learning "There are elephants at the zoo", you need to learn not only the word "There", but also the context "There" + "are elephants at the zoo". Writing out a complete sentence helps bind the concept to the context.
nice homepage. i love the text on the mission page actually. why nonprofit? can you try selling this to schools? my team also embrace the "learn by writing" concept and recently launched www.dailythem.es -- we are reaching out to English as a Second Language students and schools in Asia to develop something more classroom specific because teachers just don't have time to grade enough students' essays
We are a commercial nonprofit, and we do intend to sell to schools. We're a nonprofit because we're looking to build a sustainable revenue, but we are not looking for an exit. Our main focus is on collaboratively building educational resources, and being a nonprofit encourages people to volunteer their time to contribute.
Thanks! The YC bump would be nice, but it doesn't really make a difference. Focus on the experience you're creating for your users, and the rest is marginal.
http://uguru.me - We are a team of technical UC Berkeley students graduating in January. We have a couple of funding options but our first choice was YC.
I'm not a huge fan of the differentiators in your pitch. Last minute help and non-monetary compensation seems like it'll run into logistical and scalability issues. Not taking a cut of the money makes me wonder how you'll make money. Take away these differentiators and you end up with another tutoring service.
yeah, if we had known about all those ideas, we wouldn't have bothered with pplrep. There was another similar idea called "honestly" or something. Our YC application, it wasn't even serious and they asked us to make a video last minute yesterday cause we never bothered with a video. I made one in my dark apartment on the spot. Honestly, if pplrep was actually working out and we had impressive user growth, we'd never apply to YC because $11,000 or what have you for 7% is not something I'd be interested in.
@crazytony, if your startup is already working out, influential people will come to you.
Also, where did I explicitly state that YC was only about money? I don't even think you can say I implicitly meant that or assume it was the gist of what I said.
How do you intend to solve it? If few people are on your site, nobody treats reputation on it as a real reputation. If nobody treats it as a real reputation, nobody will come.
There are dumb ideas, and it can be useful to point out their weaknesses in a constructive manner. However, using the word retarded to describe something in a negative way is both childish and derogatory.
Here's an eloquent description of why what you said is inappropriate. When saying retarded, “What we mean is that he is as stupid as someone who is mentally handicapped, and we mean that in the most derogatory sense. The implication is that the only characteristic of mentally handicapped individuals is their stupidity."
Don't take his use of the word "retarded" so literally. People might take offense to the word but understand that he doesn't mean it as an actual slight toward people with real mental disabilities.
Have you considered that you weren’t chosen because of your attitude instead of your project. Your comment here (as well as your name...) betrays a certain... outlook on the world.
It's not just about the ideas, it's also about the team, the people at YC have said as much in their press releases of the past. I would look inward before looking at your project.
Hey, that's an awesome idea! Really really awesome.
A bit of unsolicited feedback: It would be great if you could start offering whole "cataloges" of websites (e.g. [1] ) in some way. I hope you guys are thinking about my need for discount quality whisky!
Just last night I asked my girlfriend if she would find something like this useful. (We had been eying a piece of furniture that was on sale, when suddenly on refreshing the page the sale disappeared...)
hey i like your idea but i think there's some things you can do to make it better. i've thought about similar ideas but had issues with how tech would stall in the case with retail/fashion products (the only market I would recommend you start off at).
Thanks. We are working on an API version of it. http://blog.sekai.io/ Right now we are just making a text->action API so developers can use it to control internet of things, later we are going to integrate voice api if there is a strong need.
Personally, I'd love to use this if it can provide context to my photos. No one gets context right. Couple that with discovery and you have a winning proposition.
I don't think the rejection has anything to do with the product itself. I reckon they got a lot of applications this year they wanted to fund that drowned out a lot of the other applications (such as mine, to ally different story though:)).
Appreciate the feedback. The challenge seems to be wrapping a revenue model around what amounts to a feature (context). The obvious play is to provide the common utility (backup/storage) which puts me in competition with the big dogs and storage is a bad business when you really get into it.
Originally had planned this as an app but took the idea to a startup weekend competition (we won) and mentors there were pushing me to find a monthly revenue model.
Now that YC has came and gone I may revisit simply building this as an app.
NOOOOOO!!! Don't give up! You could, monetise context. So, for instance, I'm looking at a pile of photos from Glastonbury from when I was at university. If you can tag the photos as from Glastonbury and intuitively know that Eminem performed there in 2007 (he didn't!), you could enable commerce on the content itself - Eminem one-click song downloads from 2008.
Think about it.. Same goes for you being with someone whose birthday pictures you're looking at and you can provide a context to them. Gifting is an area you can charge advertisers for. Think fashion!!! We take pictures all the time!! If you could provide the context to where the pictures were taken, the store it was taken in, and how there is a discount going on in that store, it would be amazing! Use the context of the photos, for instance, as 'subscriptions' to these contexts.
To elaborate, think of this scenario. I took a photo at H&M on Regent Street in London and then at Next further along the road. Since I took at photo at H&M, you can 'subscribe' me into H&M offers, etc. And same goes for Next. So when there are offers, an ongoing sale or either of the brands just looking to reach out to customers, you could be the conduit for them!!!!!!!!! THAT IS WORTH A LOOOOOTTT OF MONEY!
I too think you shouldn't give up. Just because there may be other competitors doing something similar -- even giants you feel you could never tackle -- doesn't mean you don't have something unique to offer that the competition doesn't.
Also, even if you don't topple the competition, who cares? If you have a product that others are interested in, your product has the ability to be much less successful and still yield you more of an income, just because you have much less overhead than the giants.
Worst case, you'll come out of it having gained a lot of experience -- you'll know the technology better, and will have learned some good life lessons. Then you'll be better prepared for the next YC app!
Hi, I co-founded a company that works on a similar idea, just from a slightly different perspective (focus on storytelling, not so much the aggregation):
http://memoarc.com/
I think the problem with that is that everyone under the sun offers that same exact service.
Facebook does it, Dropbox does it, Google does it, Apple does it. There's nothing you can really do to usurp such entrenched and cohesive services who offer it as a part of their broader platform.
I agree from a utility perspective, our differentiation is our ability to determine context about the photos, knowing for example that you were tailgating at a 49ers game rather than simply saying you were at a certain lat/lon on a given date. Once we know that we can supplement the UX with that context.
This is where I wish there was some, even a few words or a sentence, feedback.
We had 8 different alums look over the application and only one raised the competition issues (I think our system differences were clearer when you read the application). Consistently we heard about weakness of my co-founder experience wise and questioning of our 70/30 equity split.
Was it the idea? The team? Possibly the fact that YC has already funded a company very similar to us (Snapjoy) and another recently (Loom)?
Sorry, but do you realize that the "designer feedback" in your screenshot is beyond useless?
Feedback should be descriptive, not prescriptive. "Spacing is good" and "this is clear" don't really add much, nor does "header?", especially without the designer's thinking.
I think the price point here doesn't make sense for the type of feedback you're showcasing in the screenshot.
Other than that, could be a cool product if done well. I know designers who, with good guidelines, could do this kind of thing really efficiently and well.
really appreciate the feedback, and i agree.. the feedback needs to skew towards "useful things you can do to improve your site, preferably the easiest things to do"
TBH: they were the first two reviews we got done and that is what the designers came up with.. we wanted to soft launch and improve rather than wait for the 'perfect sample'
we've since run about 10 more (actually getting a bunch of websites to review from HN) and the reviews are getting better so we'll be replacing those samples soon...
one thing that we've seen from these reviews is that there are some great projects out there that need website help - sometimes i think people lose site of the fact that even a small startup can look as big as Apple if they have a decent website.
(also note i'm a dev not designer - we started this idea because i've needed it countless times on projects i've been working on)
our thought on this would be mainly for people to check outsourced work is not way out of line.
in a 30-60 minute review you can't get too deep, but you can give a general opinion of the overall quality of the code and whether or not the developers are way out of line.
it might be more a sanity check for non-tech website owners.
as a side point, there should be a point where you can comment that "things look good", but i agree the designer should have to comment on why they look good..
Not bad. However, any decent front-end guy will likely hack his way directly in the browser to see how things would actually look like. Build an extension that allow them to snapshot their CSS/DOM hack on actual code (I believe there are already a few doing similar things) and send that back to users instead of a simple document. Probably more actionable for the potential customers.
HN, we're an open source nonprofit, and we'd like to collaborate with other developers. Check out our code here: https://github.com/empirical-org/quill
And if you'd like to contribute, we've got a few interesting projects in the works, including building a free writing section with NLP! You can reach me at peter (at) quill (dot) org