A friend and I launched a startup and I'm looking for some feedback. I know people on TWW are note afraid to share their opinions - so figured I'd deal with the flames and see what people think.

My company is http://www.sharednotebook.com. In short, we reward students for taking (and sharing) good notes through profit sharing. We utilize the google Adsense API (http://code.google.com/apis/adsense/) to share the revenue. The better notes you post, the more views they will get, and hence more clicks on the ads - which means more money for the poster. Our current split is 50/50.

Our real goal is to provide quality notes (thru rating systems etc) and facilitate collaboration/info sharing between students. Our first avenue is through course notes, however if we get a bit of validation on our idea, we have a bigger vision for what this could become.

What I'm looking for is some feedback, good and bad, from students and web app users. Thx in advance.

11/3/2008 7:50:14 PM

Quote :

"note afraid"

also, how well do you think professors will take this

why go to class when you can just get the notes from someone else?

11/3/2008 7:55:45 PM

needs more flagrant cheating if you want to make any money at all

[Edited on November 3, 2008 at 7:57 PM. Reason : morals are for bad businessmen]

11/3/2008 7:56:04 PM

Have you done any actual analysis of the business model you're talking about?

Think about how much money the average student would require as a worthwhile incentive to go through the trouble of typing up their notes nicely and formatting them for inclusion on your site. Then, if you consider the amount of money generated by each ad click-through and average click-through rates of similar sites, you can calculate how many views would be required to generate that amount of money. Since each set of notes uploaded is an extremely niche piece of information (at best, we're talking about a semester's worth of notes for ONE section of ONE course at ONE school; at worst, one lecture's notes for that section), I guarantee the potential audience for a given file is way too small to make it worth the uploader's trouble. You can debate whether the notes have a shelf life beyond that semester, but from the student's perspective preparing the notes, they aren't thinking that far into the future when considering their potential monetary gain.

Also consider the wide variety of substitutes. Most viable are notes from friends in the same class or a professor's notes if they make them available (more and more common these days online). Next up are textbooks, wikipedia, other books, and a host of other sources of information that would make it much easier to get the necessary information. Many universities also have their own programs like this in place through distance education or other means which would be more accessible or more easily-discovered than your site. Did you do any research on systems like this already implemented at universities?

So in the end, I highly doubt you'll be able to get the required number of users on either end, either note-providers or ad-clickers, to make this a worthwhile venture.

[Edited on November 3, 2008 at 8:08 PM. Reason : ]

11/3/2008 8:08:30 PM

Not flaming just giving my opinion on areas that can be improved.

1. The UI needs some serious work.

a) Shadows, the way they're being used on your site, are seriously outdated. I'm referring to the shadow that goes around the outside of the site layout.

b) Rounded corners is not used well. they are more like jagged edges and not rounded corners. I find that any where from a 3px to 5px rounded corner is very clean and be sure to save them the right way so that they're 1) optomized and 2) crisp/clear

c) login box needs to be more visible. Because logging in OR creating an account are one of the two most important things on the opening page. I think they both need to be rethought as far as location and layout. I like the idea of what you've done so far with the 'join sharednotebook' link (very facebook in appearance) but you need to incorporate the join and login together maybe on the center of the page.

d) opening page again: If i didn't read this thread and happen to stumble upon your site...at first glance I would have no real idea what the purpose of the site is and I would probably move on to something else.

e) underlines on your site indicates its a link...which is good BUT you also used an underline for the 'rating' column. You should remove that.

f) again with the login. you have two floating links to register and for login yet you have a login box always visible on every page. What you can do is have 'register' and 'login' in the left column for all pages so you can either login without having to be directed to another page or you can 'quick create' an account without being redirected to another page.

g) put a small border around the ads. I feel like its almost too blended into the site with some ads, almost like you're trying to trick me into clicking on it.

h) view source made me cry.

i) how do i get back to the home page? My instinct was to click on your logo in the top left BUT the only part of the logo that links back to the home page is the books...not the rest of the image. that whole image should be a link to the home page.

2) Evernote

What you need is something similar to Evernote (or work with evernote) where you can scan in hand written notes and the site can generate text documents on the fly.

[Edited on November 3, 2008 at 8:11 PM. Reason : .]

11/3/2008 8:08:43 PM

wow thanks for the quick feedback, some helpful stuff here. Will address in order:

evan: Your right, most professors/universities we have talked with don't like it initially. However, the possibility that students will use it to "cheat" does not mean the idea does not have value and shouldn't be pursued. In the "bigger vision" that I mentioned in my first post, we have some ideas to combat this and provide value to professors/universities. Not looking to get feedback on the ideas we have about that, plus you could get into a philosophical argument about this that never ended. youtube is in similar boat.

Shadowrunner: We are aware that LMS apps exist to share content/info, and we could always integrate LMS functionality into our app. We feel we offer something that no one else does - sharing the revenue with people (and potentially educational institutions) for content they already have (and probably already have in electronic formats).

I agree with you that it may seem to not be worth the effort. However, we feel the trend is going towards taking notes on word processing device. So if your are already taking the notes, its really no effort to post them. I remember clicking on ads in those old banner rotation schemes in college just to make 10 or 20 bucks. I agree, we need to make it easier to post notes - and we are working on it. If we make it easy for people to post notes (via formats that they are already takin them in), and produce output that Adsense parses - the contexutal ads will be better, and will increase the clickthrough rate. You as an individual wont get rich, but you will get some income for posting what you already have. We also hope to for students from other universities to look at your notes. Your notes will probably be of value for a few semesters - and will show up on google searches. In short, yes we did analysis - you wont get rich, but money can be made. Once we get more users and more real data, we may increase the revenue share and provide additional bonuses based on traffic/click thru. Plus additional function we are looking to add, will hopefully draw more users, and we can pass some the revenue onto the content producers.

RSXTypeS: thanks man, great feedback. As you have pointed out, we did not spend muchtime on UI. Neither I or my partner are usability/UI experts. We spent most of our time implementing function to get a decent product out to the wild. If we get some user validation, we will go back and spend more time. At this point I don't think we are losing users because of our UI...maybe I'm off tho. With that being said I will def. implement some of the stuff you suggest.

We struggled quite a bit (and still struggle) with what to put on the opening page. We try to portray what we do in a short concise manner, and make it easy for people to register. We really looked at sites that work, and notice most have a "slogan" and then an about/more info link that goes into more detail. We didnt want to put too much "about" info on the main page. If you have a sample of a site or two that does this effectively, please share...

Source...yea, looks shitty - but thats partly cuz of the framework that we use. Trust me it looks really good in our source - maintenance is what we really care about here, not what end result looks like. Have you seen some of the google pages source? not pretty. Or were you talking about how we inline javascript and css stuff? again this can be attributed to the framework we are using. If neither of these are what you were talking about, being more specific would help me out.

Evernote - nice, didnt know about, will look into.


[Edited on November 3, 2008 at 11:51 PM. Reason : s]

11/3/2008 11:49:40 PM

Doubt the business model alot ... 5% clickthrough at ~.30 a click (at 50%) payout means I get .75 per 100 users who view my notes... and since a class has on average about 100 users, lets say 200 for your sake, we are talking about 1.50 per class session (for taking really good notes, assuming everyone in the class uses them). Those are some pretty impressive assumptions too...

Additionally, I agree that the front page lacks a catchy draw ... nothing to tell me why I need to use the site.

See http://www.mint.com/ ... thats a pretty decent home landing page.\

-- I should know ... I suck at such things too ...

11/4/2008 12:09:45 AM

Any business model based on advertising is not a business model.

Plain and simple. Find a way to monetize the content.

11/4/2008 12:51:53 AM

Quote :

"Doubt the business model alot ... 5% clickthrough at ~.30 a click (at 50%) payout means I get .75 per 100 users who view my notes... and since a class has on average about 100 users, lets say 200 for your sake, we are talking about 1.50 per class session (for taking really good notes, assuming everyone in the class uses them). Those are some pretty impressive assumptions too..."

And that even assumes that all 100 people in the class USE this site and see your notes. Realistically, most classes are probably less than 40 people; huge intro survey courses may be the most likely source of need for a service like this, but they're not everything. Further, substitute sources for this information are more plentiful when dealing with introductory-level material, so the site will face much stiffer competition with those courses.



Do you really get the 100,000 daily pageviews required by Google to use the Adsense API, or did you sign up before they put that policy into effect? I find the pageviews hard to believe, given you don't even have 65 pages of notes on the site.

Regarding the front page... there's not even any indication other than a context clue (the titles of the highest ranked notes) that by "notes" you mean notes from a college academic course. It's really very unclear, I agree with the other comments in the thread that the front page needs a thorough rewrite.

Check your grammar and spelling; I've seen several misspellings, missing words, missing apostrophes and more on the FAQ, Promote, and terms pages.

Have you considered that clickthrough rates may be lower than average? College students disproportionately use Firefox, so they're more likely than the general population to have tools like Adblock that won't even display your ads.

You may want some manual filtering of your highest ranked notes page, at least until you have more users and more notes overall. Right now one of them is horribly formatted and broken, and another isn't even notes, just a collection of sample questions with no answers.

Ad placement is suboptimal; having an ad all the way down at the bottom of a lengthy page is next to useless. It would get more play just after the Note Information.

The way you have it set up to be all-inclusive of 1700+ schools, and to only search by school or textbook, means that unless the site was Facebook-popular, 95+% of searches will result in no results. That's going to turn off your user base with a quickness, and those people will never come back, keeping you from ever gaining the critical mass you so desperately need. You should pick a few large universities to heavily promote at, and you should allow searching by keyword or subject now, not later. At least then you might get at least one result; psychologically, even if it's not a relevant result, it keeps the user from seeing the site as completely dead and empty.

In summary: a site business plan needs not only a profitable model once the user base is in place, but also a realistic incentive to make sure the user base grows to get to that point. Right now, 99.99% of your target audience will find nothing of value once they do a search, and that means no one will be around to click on anything.

11/4/2008 1:21:01 AM

You would be best served to charge $1.00 or something for the class notes/per class or whatever that would add up to be for a semesters worth of notes and discount it by 20% for incentive to buy in "bulk".

You need a business model that is pay per download. The pay per click adsense crap is a ripoff to the user and the owner of the site.



[Edited on November 4, 2008 at 9:59 AM. Reason : .]

11/4/2008 9:59:14 AM

Quote :

"also, how well do you think professors will take this why go to class when you can just get the notes from someone else?"

who cares about the prof's?

11/4/2008 10:03:58 AM

^ Depending on the school, and Im looking toward the private domain, the professors can actually have copyright ownership on their lectures and exams. To add, thats not an appropriate or conducive mentality to take. Would you like professors saying, "Who gives a fuck about students?"

In the public domain this is a lot harder for a professor to do due to the sheer nature of a public university.

I was in a pre-med honor frat for 3 years. We went through this similar issue with trying to establish a test bank, old school style, file cabinet, etc. Yes it pissed off the professors however the University (UNC) actually defended our position. Unfortunately I cant remember too much about it because this was 5 years ago or so, but I hope that helps in that notes arent nearly as sensitive as exams.

Copyright is a bitch... you guys might need to get some legal feedback before pursuing this much further.

11/4/2008 10:20:28 AM

Quote :

"Since each set of notes uploaded is an extremely niche piece of information (at best, we're talking about a semester's worth of notes for ONE section of ONE course at ONE school; at worst, one lecture's notes for that section), I guarantee the potential audience for a given file is way too small to make it worth the uploader's trouble."

Yeah, a couple people have said it already but it needs to be restated. I could see uploading notes for an entire book title that could be shared nationwide. I would have used that like crazy in college if there were cliff notes or highlighted sections of lit books, history books, etc.. But notes for just a class? That's what girls are for.

11/4/2008 10:39:42 AM

^ dont forget all the classes that switch to the new edition of the book every fucking semester, devaluing the resale value of the book, and sucking the funds of current students like a 2 dollar whore.

But yea, it limits the scalability of the function of the site.

I could see this as a feasible project longterm, but after a lot of effort and advertising.

11/4/2008 10:42:46 AM

Quote :

"not pretty. Or were you talking about how we inline javascript and css stuff? again this can be attributed to the framework we are using. If neither of these are what you were talking about, being more specific would help me out."

I'm talking about the inline javascript, css, the use of tables for layout control etc...this stuff really matters especially for SEO.

[Edited on November 4, 2008 at 11:13 AM. Reason : .]

11/4/2008 11:13:23 AM

Quote :

"Any business model based on advertising is not a business model. Plain and simple. Find a way to monetize the content."

Yeah! Like TV, or Radio, or Newspaper!

11/4/2008 11:44:24 AM

^None of those are based solely on advertising.

TV has licensing and syndication, plus networks are huge media conglomerates
Radio is the same way, plus most radio is a glorified prop to sell records for the major labels they are tied to.
Newspapers charge a subscription fee in addition.

And all of those mediums do their own advertising in-house. Internet advertising through google is completely different. People do not respond to ads online the same way they do on television, radio, or in the newspaper

11/4/2008 1:29:20 PM

We never said it couldnt be part of a business model ... Just cannot solely be the business model.

11/4/2008 7:54:02 PM

good stuff everyone - thanks for the constructive comments.

We got in before the 100k limit. The ad revenue share is not intended to get the student rich - as many people said getting 50% of a click is not much. However, our intention is to give back. We have thought about ways to reward students other than the ad rev share - however the ideas we have rely on having a decent user base. Most successful startups will tell you the user base is the most important thing, once you have that you can "figure out how to make money". We are trying to make money - but we are not greedy - our goal is to share the wealth. The best we can do for now is through adsense (if you sit down and go over the logistics of payment, that alone is huge amount of work - adsense handles all that for us today for free).

With that said, the business model is feasible. Companies do make lots of money off ads. We also have partnered with companies to sell/rent text books (another rev stream for us). Again if the user base grows, there are lots of other opportunities to make loot.

With that said, we do really need to rework the front page to keep the users we attract. I'll work on that.

Do you feel getting paid is the only incentive that is big enough to entice people to post notes?? I remember posting notes (homework help) on forums when i was in school like 4yrs ago. I didn't get paid anything. I know to get a large base some incentive is needed - what would it take for you to post notes? 100% of the ad rev on ur page instead of 50/50? One idea we were thinking of, is we would allow students to specify that they offer tutoring services, so when other students see good notes - they could hire you to tutor them... stuff like that. We really want to level the playing field by distributing the info for free, and find ways to reward students so they are loyal to our site (we r not just trying to promote "cheating" to get rich). We also don't like the 1 time payment (aka will give you $100 to post your notes). That is just a ploy to grow the site - once the site is big enough, they will cut that ish, and hoe you out.

RSXTypeS - yea we coulda done a better job with design/layout control. Again we chose not to spend out time there. Only 2 of us, didn't want to have to give away the % of equity (or time) that would be required to get a truly good UI person. If we start to grow, we will def address it.

I am friends with a few lawyers - I have consulted them quite a few times.

So I think I got why would you not use this site. So far I got:
-you would get to the front page, not know what it is and leave
-there is no existing content. You would look for a note in one of your classes, not find it and consider site worthless
-not enough incentive (ad revenue is not enough)

What would make you want to use the site? What incentive is required for you to actually post notes?

[Edited on November 4, 2008 at 8:52 PM. Reason : asdf]

11/4/2008 8:50:30 PM

There is always the glass door approach.

Make someone post class notes before they can access other class notes. IF you get people going, its a way to quickly increase your content, if it works.

glassdoor is the only site I know like that that I've used.

11/4/2008 9:01:03 PM

^that is a good way to bring people on the site, but it requires content to already be there.

There are several fundamental problems with a data service like this:

1) You have no editorial staff. The entire basis of your site is being able to provide useful, accurate information to your users.

You need to have subject matter experts, or at the least a moderation system in place to ensure the quality and accuracy of content being posted. You can go the way of wikipedia and rely on good community moderation to improve quality (which will take years, because you need content and enough of a userbase to gain legitimacy), or, you need to hire an editorial staff like webassign, blackboard, webct, etc.

2) You have a huge problem of duplication of data, without any system to correlate, link, combine or condense it. If 5 students from a course submit notes, how will you combine those into a single set that is accurate? How does that affect your reward system? This will get extremely complicated because you can't logistically reward everyone for duplicated notes, but if you only reward the first to the pole, then you will have problems getting everyone to submit quality information.

3) There's no way to cross-index notes for similar subject matter. Same classes, different schools, how can you leverage all the disparate data to help?

All of these problems can be solved by subject matter staff (editors!), but since you have no business model to even staff a designer, I don't see how you can possibly afford to moderate the quality or organization of the content.

11/4/2008 10:16:00 PM