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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. |