[pigbucket]

Completely missing from your postmortem (from which I learned a lot and for which I am very grateful) is the fact that the service you offer, to judge from the demo alone, is frankly not very good. Perhaps your analytics show that few visitors bothered to look at the demo, so maybe the point is moot, but I think the demo is awful, and if I wanted to take over this business, I would completely redo it, or remove it altogether (sometimes it’s better not to show the product!).

I’m not talking about the implementation, which is great. I’m talking about the actual advice given in the demo, which you are offering as an example of the kind of thing students should be willing to pay for. The first comment is, essentially, use “and” instead of “&.” The second is, in effect, “make this bit a separate paragraph, and tie it in better.” And so on. The advice is generic or, when concrete (as in the case of “use and”), banal. There is very little of it. And there is very little of value in it. And since it’s a bit of a struggle to read the handwritten text of the sample essay, it’s even harder to tell if the generic advice is relevant--except in the case of the advice given for the conclusion, which is so general as to be universally applicable, which is not to say it is good advice.

I got a sense from your postmortem that you in part want to blame your lack of success on students not being interested enough in their own studies to pay for your service. I’ve taught thousands of students, so I know well how few are willing to write out practice exams, and how few of those are willing to seek out feedback. But a very small percentage of a very large number can surely translate to a modestly profitable business (especially, in this case, if you had plans to expand into the huge American market and into the college essay review business, which is what my crummy site is trying to do). God knows it’s hard to get students engaged, but the ones who visited your site were looking for something, and I don’t think they found something worth paying for.

[timruffles]

Interesting. Looking at the demo now you're right: the first bit of feedback on screen is trite, and the rest is a bit wishy-washy.

I had a look at the analytics, and most people went for more info rather than the demo. However, those pages are really, really bad and sparse. Should have worked on those a lot - I remember I was planning to add tutor profiles.

Software myopia again. BTW if anyone wants to look at the analytics let me know and I'll give them access.

[ivansavz]

I would be interested to hear more about the web analytic.

Also, I am wondering if anyone has tried the "fliers on campus" or "ads on message board" advertisement campaign for a e-learning or tutoring-related website. I would like to know how to know what kind of visitors one can expect from the idea mentioned earlier by jdietrich.

[Vivtek]

Another problem with the demo is that it's hard to find. This sounds dumb, because there's a big star-flash thing saying "Look at the demo here" - but I tend to ignore star-flash graphics as marketing fluff, and it appears to be the only link to the demo.

Then, when I got to the demo, it loaded slowly because the images on the page were large. It was difficult to understand immediately just what I was seeing. After a while, I managed to get a mindset that could interpret what I was seeing and I ended up loving the technical flair - but as a customer, not a Hacker News post-mortem fan, I think I would long since have been lost.

Probably, instead of a demo, a cartoon of some sort would have presented the idea better, like (1) snap a picture of your essay with your camera, (2) upload it with our easy interface, (3) see comments by our staff of starving PhDs, standing by. Something fun and non-threatening. That could sell.

There's a great deal of techie myopia in this site, and I speak from a similarly myopic standpoint. All credit to you, Tim: the actual site is really quite nice from a technical standpoint, and it really can't be seen as wasted effort, because this is definitely going to be a point in your favor with any venture you do later.

[slowcpu]

Another troubling fact is that the advice given in the demo also suffers from numerous grammatical errors. This is unlikely to give a potential customer much confidence in the quality of the advice.