I've only played around with the website/webapp for about 30 minutes but it is very well executed. Very high quality content organized in an easy to grok fashion. Woulda liked more content on release/announcement but making an MVP worked out for them. +1 validation.
Very friendly design - I'm really liking the feel, simplicity, clarity, and welcoming vibe to the entire site, well done.
the concept is good and has value in my opinion (I signed up). I will have to give the content a go and see if the curriculum lives up to what I'd need/want.
Thoughts on monetization? I ask because I'd hate to see my learning environment become littered with distracting ads.
If you charge the lesson creators they will want to charge the students to recoup costs/make money. This is fine but it changes the entire dynamic of the website. The "web 3.0" example lesson plan becomes a moot example. All this information is free and the target audience most certainly is not going to be compelled to pay for this type of content. So your new target market becomes people looking for and creating "marketable skills" type of content. Content like lynda.com etc. Content that makes it clear students will get a return on their money.
I can see you building for traction and a lot of people setting up free lesson plans. Are these free lesson plan creators necessarily going to be the same market that would have a need for creating paid lesson plans?
I think the concept is solid, just doing some off the cuff thought exploration - good luck.
Your analysis is spot on, and our hypothesis is that if we can deliver a framework that makes online education much better, that there will be a variety of uses for it - everything from paid courses on SEO (in demand hi-tech skills), to free courses on fun things like "MacBeth in an hour" (launching later this week). Our plan right now is to implement an app store like model where educators can create courses for free, but if they want to charge for them, we get a % of the revenue.
This is unrelated to the larger educational app, but I hope "Startup 3.0" doesn't take off as a name. It's a more fad-based, ephemeral phrase that is being used to mean the same thing as "Lean Startup" (ie the intersection of Customer Development and agile product development)
Yeah we pretty much just put that up there last minute because we couldn't use the term "Lean Startup" (which is a Registered Trademark of Eric Ries). We're talking to Eric about fixing that.
This site makes a good impression, but what's the point of forcing people to sign up?
Okay, they just ask for name and email, but that information is totally useless unless they want to spam people afterwards, which would quickly destroy their reputation.
So the signup reduces their audience without any benefit.
We completely agree, and will probably change that in the future. We force signup now for 2 reasons: 1) Right now the most important thing for us is to establish product market fit. And the way we do that is by sending a survey after you take a course, and by seeing where you drop off - both require signup. 2) It lets us keep track of your state (so you can stop, start, come back), and allows you to participate in the exercise / notes, both key pieces of functionality in taking the course.
i like the product, signed up for the first lesson.
One thing that annoyed me was the popup that comes up before each section... if I wanted to go back to a different section or skip sections, the popup just slowed me down and didn't offer any real value. You should just add the popup text to the actual page itself. just my two cents.
Wow, this definitely has great value and will potentially do very well. I currently work part-time as a developer for an online school that launched last year. We have a niche market to which we offer specific courses which are needed for certification in their field. We did very well in terms of revenue the first year.
I’m assuming they will make their money by allowing teachers to charge for certain courses in return they’ll get a percentage. In other words, they’ll be a middleman.
SocratED certainly has a great advantage since their audience will not just pertain to a type of student, but rather anyone who wants to teach or learn. For example where I work now our flow chart is service->student, but with SocratED it’s service->teacher->student where (->) represents cash flow.
I also must add, love the UI, very clean and simple.
Beautifully executed - I can see this thing getting traction. A big congrats to the team! Though a reminder will be good, just in case I forget to check back. I know I want to go through the lessons but I am afraid it might just fall off my radar.
a nice product, though I think all the 'steve blank' stuff could really be provided in a single context of just watching the one full video.
A few notes.
1) on your home page, in chrome, the 'sign-up' button is showing up behind your footer
2) the 'read more' logo leads to the same videos as the page they are sourced from. If you don't have more information, don't put a 'read more' button.
I actually prefer the videos piecemeal. That allows me to go through the course in small chunks overtime rather than all at once. It also focuses on the content relevant to the lesson and simplifies.
I do agree that there should be biblographical info and the option to view the video in entirety. I put that in as feature request on the site.
