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Ask / Offer HN: Startup for hire?

10 points by gingerlime ↗ HN
Hi, we are the team behind kenHub - (www.kenhub.com).

TL;DR - Talented team of 3 looking for a short-term project (Ruby on Rails / Django) to do from Berlin, Germany.

Longer version:

Our project is going for about a year now, and we see good traction and growth. However, it still has some way to go before we are financially stable (hopefully in about 6 months according to our estimates).

Meanwhile, we ran out of cash. We can look for investments, but decided that we are much better at building apps than convincing investors and negotiating deals. Our startup is not looking for exit. We're trying to build a business to help students study anatomy. This makes us much less attractive for investment anyway...

We work great as a team, use agile methodologies and can deliver high quality code fast. We have great experience in RoR, Django, HTML5/CSS3, responsive-web-design, system architecture, security and more. To see some of our work - please check out our product at http://www.kenhub.com. We also created the open-source project Giraffe http://kenhub.github.io/giraffe/ and contributed to a couple of other open-source projects.

If you're looking for a small team to help out, build your prototype, help optimize a bottleneck or make some great coffee (we are also skilled at latte-art) - then please get in touch.

or if you have some bright idea on how to sky-rocket our startup from growing 8% per week to %800 - we'd be happy to hear from you...

13 comments

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cadalac
Good luck with your startup guys. Obviously it's a small market, but the world is just waiting for better educational resources. Do you have any plans to expand and offer more topics? I could see your startup being a kind of premium wikipedia.
gingerlime
we think so too. Maybe not premium wikipedia (yet), but even a good place to train and improve your memorization could be a good enough start...
JoKer--777
Hi, my name is Johannes. I'm also part of kenHub. Just wanted to mention here that even though your background might not be in the medical field and you don't have to learn anatomy, you propably know people who are. So you could spread the word over the known channels about us. This would help us a lot.
jayrobin
Your product looks quite good, though I can't say I'm too keen on the name! If you're not already, I'd suggest aggressively reaching out to any educational establishment that might have an interest to solicit feedback and sell your product.

Speak directly to lecturers and provide them with unique discount codes to offer their students. Maybe setup an affiliate system? Give people a reason to sell your product for you.

At any rate, good luck - I can see a lot of effort went into building this.

gingerlime
Thanks! we're already doing some of that, but there's certainly more that we can do. Currently, we can't imagine a single thing will suddenly bring us a flood of subscriptions... hence the more realistic / pessimistic post on HN to get a project going to help us fund this.
nanijoe
Have you guys considered releasing this as an iPad app?
gingerlime
Our app uses responsive web design, so it works well on all platforms (PC, tablet, smartphone). In future we might want to extend it and build a proper app though.
spencerhawkins
Hey guys, my name is Spencer Hawkins, I'm the co owner of hawki games and a google glass explorer. We've got a medical app for google glass that you would be perfect for. And are you interested in selling that anatomy app? I'm going to be a med student next year and could sell the hell out of it. I'd be interested in buying equity either way. You should change the name to something descriptive yet simple and make a big push into social media. All med school classes have Xxxxx school of medicine class of 2017 groups on Facebook this time of year. Infiltrate! Advertise. Your product is amazing and I'm going to sign up myself.

spencerhawkins@gmail.com

manglav
I would convert from a B2C to a B2B company. Focus on partnering with existing medical school on a subscription basis to supplement their textbook. Easily charge $10 / student / year. While in the end, the same student is being helped, the rate of adoption skyrockets due to a "me-too!" affect. All medical schools are in a race, and if one school has a tool, the others just have to have it. All you need are two or three schools to get started, and you can give a discount for it initially.

In the meanwhile, I am also working on a project myself, and could use an experienced team to help build the prototype. Let's discuss both projects! Email in profile.

edit: This is essentially SRS for anatomy? Cool, good idea. Nice detailed pictures as well.

lsiebert
Some unsolicited advice:

Don't sell to students. Or teachers. Students and teachers don't have money. They won't convert from free. big institutions do. Parents do. Tutorial programs do.

Sell to text book companies or departments/schools, or parents/tutoring companies.

Easiest way to pivot is towards parents/family. Make it easy for parents/grandparents to give an account to their kid or kids.

Alternatively you could try to get a research grant funding a comparison of class of students learning with your software with a class learning without it.

zerr
Oh, how I wish someday Teacher to become AAA profession with AAA compensations, as it should already be...
gingerlime
Thanks Isiebert. You raised some very valid points there.

Universities / publishers is probably a better model for the future. But selling to them however is very hard and long, and our content currently covers around 30-40% of the whole anatomy. So universities/publishers are reluctant to buy-into this right now. Also without some research to 'prove' that it works better it's even harder.

Parents/grandparents are a good angle too - but we're not exactly sure how to reach those. Reaching students, who might be actively searching for anatomy learning material, is hard enough... Reaching their families might be even harder. And how would those family members know that this is what their beloved actually need?? So it's a tough problem for us right now.

On the other hand, we have students who are willing to pay for this. Even when we had around 10% of the content, perhaps because it was good enough for them. And we see a pretty steady week-on-week growth in our active subscriptions of around 8% per week. Those students already pay for anatomy atlas and textbooks, so it's not unheard of for them to pay for the learning materials to help them study.

The numbers are still low, and that's why we're looking for some sort of a stop-gap funding via some freelance work. But we believe, and our data so far suggests, that within around 6 months we should hopefully be "ramen profitable"[1].

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html

lsiebert
Don't assume parents need to buy this for kids who need it for their current classes. Plenty of parents want to encourage their kids to be doctors. Facebook might be able to target this, but I'm not a marketing guy, just spitballing.

One niche might be immigrant communities and developing world middle class families in places like south asia. It might be relatively cheap to get an advertisement in an immigrant newspaper, even if you have to pay to have it translated.

You could also see about bundling with other complimentary educational offerings, and combining advertising dollars.

In any case, I think you have a good product that most people currently never hear about. That seems a shame, and free lance, funding, or whatever I hope you succeed. Please post again in 6 months with an update.