I just sent an e-mail to you. There might be other people contemplating starting a service like this, so as somebody who also considered it, I'll post the important parts here:<p>1. Most teachers are willing to help out students. Why would a student
pay for your service?<p>2. An obvious answer to the above is "we'll focus on the students that
have teachers that are unwilling to help". From my experience, that's
a small market.<p>3. You also have to consider that the ones who would be interested in
this service are ones who really want to have a good essay (I'll come
back to this later); the union of the two sets is even smaller. I'm
not entirely sure you would be able to churn profits from just this
subset.<p>4. Moving beyond teachers, how will you compete with EssayJudge? They
offer an amazing service for nothing. The quality of their service is
hard to beat already, and their price impossible to overcome.<p>5. How will you vet the quality of your "teachers"? If a student isn't
happy with the response, will you refund the money? What if your
customers are immoral? (I've found that the union of immoral people
and students is quite large.) Looking on HN, I see somebody mentioning "chargebacks"; that would indeed be a big problem.<p>6. What is your target market? Are you aiming for people who want to
buy ghostwriters, or are you aiming for people who simply want to get
a good grade (from "Doing well on essays is part of doing well in
school, and doing well in school leads to a better life!", that seems
to be your target audience), or are you aiming for people who really
want to improve their writing?
It seems that you're focusing on the penultimate, but is that really a
good decision? Why wouldn't they just hire a ghostwriter instead?<p>7. An easy answer is "they're pretty good writers already, they just
need that little bit of editing". If so, it looks like you're focusing
on the last group. That's where the money lies, but your advertising
doesn't seem to be targeted towards them.<p>This is by no means a complete list of the problems you'll face. You should probably have answers to many of these before starting/going forwards though.
I don't think the math works out well for you. The cost is 12 dollars per essay. If I understand stripe's fees, you will pay 65 cents per transaction. You are paying teachers via paypal, I do not know their fees but it will probably be in the ballpark of 50-60 cents to transfer 10 dollars. So 12 -10 - 0.65 - paypal fees = 0.75 to 0.85 profit per transaction. Not sure how automated everything is, but it seems like you will be doing a bit of work for what amounts to a large pack of gum.<p>Now consider chargebacks. Stripe charges a 15 dollar fee per chargeback. So for each chargeback you lose (15+10+1.25(transaction fees above) = 26.25 or so. I have a feeling you will have a larger than average number of chargebacks due to children borrowing their parent's credit card to get their essay graded.<p>I assume you are paying the teachers as independent contractors? Are you prepared to issue 1099's to all of them at the end of the year?<p>And not to sound too harsh but nothing on this site looks professional at all. It reads like it was written by a Nigerian scammer.<p>EDIT: fixed my math
This is a nice idea. However, I would suggest a better name. Skimling is derived from the word "skim", and "skim over" means to READ SUPERFICIALLY. This is not a good message to prospective students.<p>You need to think harder about quality control. A simple email-based dispute process is a start, but you need more. How about teacher rating? Teacher credentials, etc.
Hi everyone! I'm the sixteen year old founder of Skimling! I'm going to be launching this weekend, but wanted to get feedback from the HN community! Let me know what you think, and feel free to email me at jack@skimling.com if you have any questions!
I like the concept.<p>I would work on improving the copy, especially because this is a writing-related startup.<p>Fewer exclamation points and fewer words will help.
I understand that everyone does what they can to get ahead in school and as a parent I know everyone wants their child to succeed, but I can't help but feel that a service like this, especially if it becomes common, will be put kids with limited means at an <i>even greater</i> disadvantage compared to their more well heeled peers. OP: I know this is probably impossible, but any chance of "scholarships" or a pro-bono service for poor kids? In any case if it genuinely achieves greater understanding and isn't just a "pay a teacher to clean up my essay" service, I hope it's a success!
You might consider adding a "skilled writer" option for non-teachers to apply. This would allow people like grad students and retired teachers to participate. Just have an "upload resume" field.
Bah! I've had this idea for a long time; I just never took the time to build it.<p>Anyways, I would love to talk to you about some ideas I think would be helpful. It doesn't seem like you have any contact information on the site (a <i>big problem</i>), nor on your profile. If you want to talk, you can find my contact information in my profile.<p>I would definitely suggest adding your contact information on the site first. That'd be helpful for anybody who wants more information.
Interesting concept. Just a piece of advice that might improve conversions: I know you're using Stripe.js but you still should have an SSL cert on a payment page. And another thing with Stripe.js, don't use name attributes for the credit card input fields. That way they don't get passed through on the form submission.
I think an idea that could really push this over the top would be, for the teacher registration allow anyone with a .edu to register, let them identify their expertise (history, english, poetry etc.). When a student uploads a paper, the student identifies the category of the paper (history, english, poetry etc.) and that'll make it easier to match an editor. You could even let the student see a list of teachers, and select them based on the teachers profile.<p>Under this system, an important feature, down the line, is a rating system for the teachers to help students find quality editors.<p>Really cool idea that I definitely see scaling to even more complex project assistance. Maybe you could create a healthy teaching consulting ecosystem? Good luck!
Informal poll: is it within a teacher's rights to forbid the use of such a service on their assignments? You know, "I want to see YOUR work, not an underemployed English major's work." If I were a teacher and I thought my wealthier students were turning cash into better essays not thru tutoring (learning) but simply paying someone to spruce it up, I'd do what I could to ban the practice. It's not fair to other students and it makes it difficult or impossible for a teacher to accurately gauge a student's <i>own</i> skills.
Love the concept. Getting graded early is so important for students. It shows they really want to know what they are doing right or wrong before they hand in their assignments. After all, that's what learning is all about right? The grade itself is not as important as understanding what you can do better. This might shed some light on grading standards across different teachers as well.
This looks like a great product, but am I the only one to cringe at such an abuse of the word "platform"? Last I checked, a platform was a combination of hardware and software capable of running other software. Examples of actual platforms include iOS, Java, Windows and the Web.<p>There's no shame in building an amazing product that isn't a platform!
Most universities have free tutor services, including for writing. Also, most professors are willing to take a look at your work ahead of time and give you advice.<p>Given those two options why would a student pay for this service and why would the grad student work for you instead of their university's program?
Hi everyone! I'm in school right now and have to go to lunch, so I will not be able to respond to any additional comments until later. Thanks so much for checking out Skimling, and if I don't respond to your comment right away, I will have responses later tonight!