Hi folks,
When our classes went remote, I struggled to stay motivated; the tools we used didn’t not play nice with one another. It was lonely.
So I built Barbra to give students all the tools needed to study together in one place. I wanted to get the best parts of Anki, Notion, and Duolingo and just make them work for all learners.
The tool is free. And you can find it at https://barbra.io At Barbra, students have their notes and flashcards together. They can also set a daily studying goal, and hold each other accountable to it by competing for streaks.
The tool is pretty bare-bone and doesn’t work so well on mobile, but I would love to hear your feedback. What do you think?
Ughh, that looks nauseating. We will definitely fix that and replace it with auto-playing videos. We shouldn't have used gifs there, its a compression artifact I think.
Thanks for asking. Yes we are, but we want to always have a super generous free-tier. We were looking into charging educators for using Barbra in the classroom with more features (like tracking, permissions, etc), and also charging power-users (people with a lot of flashcards and notes) a small subscription fee of around 5-8$ a month.
Hmm yes. Could be good. We are trying to build this "study group template" library. So we are putting the notes and flashcards from our university lectures up for free in the platform. Maybe asking students to do so too for their lectures and then giving them money based on how many people use it would be nice.
> charging power-users (people with a lot of flashcards and notes) a small subscription fee of around 5-8$ a month
Don’t charge that little monthly. Maybe $30 a quarter for more than 5,000 text flash cards or $50 for that plus photos and videos. No one has yet made a success of flash cards with a real big company. Anki is one guy. Remembr.it focuses on Chinese vocabulary. Memrise needs to figure out a way to make real money because they took VC.
Good luck. Counting to $40,000 a year in $8 increments is really hard. Don’t handicap yourself by charging so little.
Thank you. Quizlet is definitely an inspiration. Our benefit is that you can write notes and flashcards in one place and share them easily in study groups. And the study groups motivate each other through visible daily goals. Quizlet only offers flashcards.
If I recall, you can pretty easily share decks on Quizlet, at least years back when I used it. Is the difference with this that theoretically if I were in a study group we could work on editing them together, and then sort of 'compete' with each other to achieve daily goals (sort of like Memrise)?
Exactly right. It is not only about sharing a final product, but rather about creating it together. And then competing to see who shares and learns the most.
Nice looking website, but may I ask: are these tweets legit? There's no username or permalink, and a quick search didn't return anything… I'm always concerned by products endorsed through fake testimonials. I'm all for asking friends to help out, but disguising it as legitimate user feedback seems a bit disingenuous.
Yes, I think you should at least display them as what they are: testimonials from friends, not tweets from happy users.
Whenever I see a collection of (legitimate) user tweets, it gives me reassurance that a) the product is liked b) the product has been around for a while c) the product is popular. A company will always praise its own product. But if users start to do it publically on Twitter, it's an honest recommendation that is worth a lot in my eyes. It's like a grassroots movement. But if you fake it, it feels like astroturfing.
You still have GTM, Hotjar and Fullstory included by default, without opt-in and no way to opt out. This significantly reduces your trustworthiness for me, as well as my willingness to try out or recommend to others what looks like a pretty useful tool.
Consider if you really need all that analytics, and whether it's worth the invasiveness (edit: and GDPR breach, you being located in Germany). Page hits, sign ups, created flash cards and other usage is something you have available without any of those tools.
Thanks for letting us know. We are removing Hotjar. And we don't use GTM (we forgot we had it) so that is also gone. We use Fullstory just to track bugs and it helps us a lot – I hope that is ok.
Similarly to many here, I can't get the website to work, but I'll still ask a question:
How is this different than Quizlet and Anki? (Obviously with Anki sharing isn't as straightforward but is possible (there's even a website hosting Anki flashcard sets))
In Barbra the main difference is that you can take notes and have your flashcards in one place. I noticed I often had to transfer my class notes from Evernote and copy them into Anki. That was a huge hassle.
Another point is that in Barbra sharing flashcards and notes is the default. You invite people, set goals together, and then collaborate on everything. I noticed we always sent photos of notes on Whatsapp to others before tests, and that was a hassle as well. So we built thinking of these 2 things.
This sounds great! That always bugged me about Anki. I knew it could
be done so much more conveniently.
I would suggest redoing the intro video, with better acoustics, less "umm" and "so anyway...". The site and product look really polished so it kinda sticks out.
Anki supports creating cards from LaTeX notes via an add-on[0], and for importing from a plaintext-based format there is a command-line tool[1]. After that, one can use Anki’s accompanying shared decks feature to make a deck available to others[2].
Admittedly, all of those options aren’t entirely hassle-free or discoverable.
Exactly. It takes 100 add-ons to get this to work. We just wanted to make it so that I can highlight a text and say "create a flashcard" and then it is all done.
We also offer more tests options as you can do Memrise-like multiple choice test or an Anki-like card-flip test.
Is that something that you find useful? :) I know some passion are avid Anki-ers so I would love to get your take on it.
I value integration flexibility and want to control or at least know exactly the spaced repetition algorithm I am using. Additionally, I believe a hosted service without trustworthy end-to-end encryption is a no-go for personal knowledge management. So far I’ll stick with org-drill and Anki, it works for me (not using any add-ons).
This is neat and like the intro. If you don't mind sharing what is your front-end ui stack (for example, for building the user interface, navigation, panes, etc).
Thanks for letting us know. Weird. Just tested and it worked here. We just scaled up more resources, so maybe it should be better now if you hot reload. Are you logged in? :)
It was the name of a great primary school teacher I had. Well. Her name was Barbara, but then we changed it to Barbra to make it sound more like a company name... The good thing is we can rock to the tune of that Barbra Streisand song.
Hitting "enter" instead of clicking the button in registration form does not work. Unsubscribe link in registration confirmation E-Mail does not work. Login does not work (gives 404). But landing page looks nice.
This is just a beginning of your jurney of not working features, unfortunately. I've played with this for few minutes, and basically this is not even beta :(
I am rooting for this, but this is just too early.
You should have a "TRY DEMO NOW" button where I get to play with a demo sandbox. I just want to click around for a bit and I'm too disinterested to make an account.
I signed up and then got a bit confused when I had to create a hub. Might be a good idea to have an example image or video on the right side of the form to illustrate what it is and how it's going to look after I create it.
Agreed, we want to remove the Hub thing altogether for normal users. We recycled the permissions system from something we were working on last year, and that is why we have it.
Hubs work well for schools (e.g. harvard.barbra.io), but doesn't feel very useful for individuals.
If you want me to agree to your TOS or PP on the sign up page, at least provide a link to them THERE.
Also, when returning from "Sign up" or "Sign in" via the back button, the logo and both "Sign up" and "Sign in" buttons and the footer with the links to TOS and PP are missing, need to refresh.
Our tool does everything Anki does, plus it let's you organize your notes and decks in one place and create them collaboratively with others in a group.
It also lets you set a daily learning goal to hold you accountable to learning.
Props to the designer for creating a really clean interface :) I can really see this becoming like slack for schools vs. a Quizlet. I was a harcore Quizlet user, but for me it always lacked the opportunity to group study. I think you guys are onto something
87 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadWhat do you think? :) is it fair?
It could look like this (mockup) https://imgur.com/JVdhnco
What do you think? :)
Don’t charge that little monthly. Maybe $30 a quarter for more than 5,000 text flash cards or $50 for that plus photos and videos. No one has yet made a success of flash cards with a real big company. Anki is one guy. Remembr.it focuses on Chinese vocabulary. Memrise needs to figure out a way to make real money because they took VC.
Good luck. Counting to $40,000 a year in $8 increments is really hard. Don’t handicap yourself by charging so little.
Specially during Covid we need to figure out how to stay alive without necessarily fundraising.
Best of luck!
Whenever I see a collection of (legitimate) user tweets, it gives me reassurance that a) the product is liked b) the product has been around for a while c) the product is popular. A company will always praise its own product. But if users start to do it publically on Twitter, it's an honest recommendation that is worth a lot in my eyes. It's like a grassroots movement. But if you fake it, it feels like astroturfing.
Consider if you really need all that analytics, and whether it's worth the invasiveness (edit: and GDPR breach, you being located in Germany). Page hits, sign ups, created flash cards and other usage is something you have available without any of those tools.
[1] https://www.fullstory.com/resources/gdpr-and-fullstory/#how-...
How is this different than Quizlet and Anki? (Obviously with Anki sharing isn't as straightforward but is possible (there's even a website hosting Anki flashcard sets))
In Barbra the main difference is that you can take notes and have your flashcards in one place. I noticed I often had to transfer my class notes from Evernote and copy them into Anki. That was a huge hassle.
Another point is that in Barbra sharing flashcards and notes is the default. You invite people, set goals together, and then collaborate on everything. I noticed we always sent photos of notes on Whatsapp to others before tests, and that was a hassle as well. So we built thinking of these 2 things.
I would suggest redoing the intro video, with better acoustics, less "umm" and "so anyway...". The site and product look really polished so it kinda sticks out.
We are recording a new video right now. That one we just made for our YC application.
Admittedly, all of those options aren’t entirely hassle-free or discoverable.
[0] https://tentativeconvert.github.io/LaTeX-Note-Importer-for-A...
[1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Anki::Import
[2] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/
We also offer more tests options as you can do Memrise-like multiple choice test or an Anki-like card-flip test.
Is that something that you find useful? :) I know some passion are avid Anki-ers so I would love to get your take on it.
[0]: https://github.com/lervag/apy
We are using React.JS, Apollo and GraphQL.
For the text editor we are using Slate which is pretty good. And other than that we use emotion for styling :)
Our backend is Go, Postgres and Couchbase.
The site looks great.
Edit: now works in brave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWhtcU4-xAM this one? :)
It's the first thing that came to my mind as I read the title
I am rooting for this, but this is just too early.
We truly just started, but brutal feedback helps, so thank you :)
Hubs work well for schools (e.g. harvard.barbra.io), but doesn't feel very useful for individuals.
Also, when returning from "Sign up" or "Sign in" via the back button, the logo and both "Sign up" and "Sign in" buttons and the footer with the links to TOS and PP are missing, need to refresh.
It also lets you set a daily learning goal to hold you accountable to learning.
Shows nothing on social media. Consider adding some meta data and og and twitter data so it'll show more data and an image when shared.