I started classparrot.com after I won startup weekend about three months ago.<p>Site was up and running one week later. We got great press. And an average of 50 teachers signing up per day. Our customers love what we do, and we have several paying schools and teachers. We definitely made something that people want.<p>The code is built on rails 3.1. It's clean and readable, but no test coverage. We use twilio on the backend.<p>Even though there's tons of competition out there, and the space is getting crowded, I think classparrot has huge potential. It needs a good hacker who is willing to play around with the business model and payment plans to find a sweet spot. And continue to build out features and reach out to new customers.<p>I'm giving it away to the right person, because I want to focus 100% on devbootcamp.com and I want classparrot's customers to be taken care of.
It's a great idea. Only thing is that the person who agrees to develop it further has to realize they will be assuming the twilio fees for all your existing customers as well, which would be $5 for each new teacher, plus $2 a month per teacher - assuming a large number of them are starting with the free service.
As a devbootcamp.com inaugural class hopeful, I'm glad to see your commitment to the project. (BTW, last I heard there were still a few seats remaining for Dev Bootcamp. If you were considering applying, I encourage you to take that step today!)<p>Just one question: What do you plan on doing with the $1 from your "exit"? :-)
Here are the stats
<a href="http://admin:twisted@classparrot.com/stats" rel="nofollow">http://admin:twisted@classparrot.com/stats</a><p>Main expenses are hosting: $36/month on heroku, and phone numbers: $15/month for twilio<p>The twilio bill can be calculated by dividing the number of Single Texts by 100
"[...] tech companies build their products with rails: Linkedin (I think their main "product" is written in Java), Twitter (who dropped a lot of Ruby code for Java/Scala with a thin web layer left), Amazon (Their "product" is written in Rails?)"<p>I wish people would not bend the truth in such a way for marketing purposes.
A friend and I just left our jobs to do a startup in education. We both have about 4 years experience working with LMS and ELARs and are interested in the possibility of integrating your business into ours. If you'd like, we could talk over email about the details of my business, monetization plans, etc. to see if we'd be a good fit (perhaps, if the value added is significant enough we could keep a free model for classparrot, etc).<p>I am going to PM you my email.
I'll take it! In all seriousness I am extremely interested in the idea. I am a programmer who has been considering startups in the education space and I think classparrot is something that could really make an impact on modern schooling.<p>Additionally, I have a team of talented programmers ready to get behind the project and capital is not an issue for us. You can email me at sawsym at hotmail.com. Thanks for your consideration.
While I'm not interested in taking this, I am very curious as to the metrics and trying to sift through the data to find useful information, like the number of unique SMS addresses sent to, and how many times on average each user sends messages, and to how many students. Is it a teacher sending to 1 class of 30, a lecture of 200, or the entire day's worth of student (multiple classes, but it's the same assignments and due dates). If anyone picks this up I would be willing to try to sift through the data or add the logging code to get the data (email in profile). I don't know what the stats page already has since it's breaking on me.<p>My immediate thought was to try to shift as many messages to email as you can, either through email direct or email->SMS. Then you could split the plans into X emails, Y SMS per month for $Z. That way you could tier the plans, potentially creating something for schools to buy to let all their teachers use.
It looks like a great idea and website. Me and two friends are going to graduate soon from a BS in Computer Engineering and we love to hear more details (expenses!). We are seriously considering a startup but we lack a good idea. We have some knowledge in: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, DB (SQLite, MySQL), Linux, Apache, Javascript, HTML and CSS (including using Bootstrap). Please contact me here: <a href="http://goo.gl/kgLWc" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/kgLWc</a> so we can share details if you're interested. Thanks.
I'm a partner at a small but mature think-tank and business consulting company in Boston. We are an idea company at heart and have a strong track record in growing technology based joint ventures. In this case I would personally put the right people in the right seats to really get things rolling. If you'd like the business to evolve while you're working on devbootcamp, give me a ping at le@cirrosystems.com. I would love to chat more.
We sent email, we're waiting for reply, this can really help our charity be successful right around the world www.essere.com.au ...we're already working with kids low self stream and living skills problems around the world, now we could help them with classroom problem too.. we really need something like this.... we can save kids life with this.. thanks for the update twilio you guys are awesome.... Timmy Holt :)
Hi Shereef,<p>I sent you an e-mail a few days ago about my interest in your offer. Did you receive it? I'm sure you've got a lot of messages to respond to, but I just want to make sure you got my response.<p>Drew
<a href="http://goo.gl/bERYB" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/bERYB</a>
Hello - how much custom rails code is currently used on this site? I am interested in this project, but only work on the .net platform.
My inclination would be todo a ground-up rewrite, leveraging the work you have done - do you feel strongly about keeping it in rails?
I would hate to look a gift horse in the mouth but, whom will be retaining the other 20%? Just curious.<p>All considering I'm interested -- I operate a hosting provider and would love to take this off your hands to help out the users and keep it rolling.