I've been working on this project for the better part of 10 months. Its to the point where I would love to get some feedback from HN.<p>http://www.smoothbulletin.com - Marketing Site<p>http://demo.smoothbulletin.com - Demo Front End<p>http://demo.smoothbulletin.com/admin/ - Demo Admin (u:demo@smoothbulletin.com, p:demo)<p>What is Smooth Bulletin?<p>Smooth Bulletin takes the pain out of academic catalog management. Our academic catalog management system(ACMS) is easy to use, easy to manage, and easy for students. Academic catalogs are almost universally awful to use and their quality rarely reflects the quality of the institution that they represent. Smooth Bulletin helps schools put their academic catalog on the web in a way that they can be proud of. If the school needs help, we’re happy to provide customization and integration services.<p>What sort of feedback am I looking for?<p>- Pricing: I honestly have no idea how to price this. I understand that colleges have LOTS of money, but are they willing to spend it on a product like this?<p>- Product: Is this a good product? Valid niche?<p>- Marketing: I need ideas for where to go from here. I have lots of feature ideas, but what I really need are marketing ideas. Are there any higher education tech conferences that I could get a booth at? Are adwords a good way to go? Cold calls? Cold emails?<p>- Funding: I've bootstrapped up to this point and will continue to do so, however is it worth pursuing funding for this?<p>- Other forms of learning: I'm thinking of expanding into corporate learning catalog management. Maybe government learning stuff too. Essentially if there is a curriculum for learning, Smooth Bulletin could manage it. Good idea? Bad idea?<p>Thanks!
I think this definitely has potential, but there are a few issues:<p>Is this only for searching/displaying courses, or is this used for registration also? If it's the latter, this is mission critical software for big enterprises. Price accordingly.<p>Even if you're only searching/displaying courses, I think your pricing is way too low. Selling a solution to an entire university is going to be expensive. Probably more than a year of revenue at your top-line price.<p>Maybe you should target individual departments within a university for the service if you want to continue at these price points. However, I think you should ditch the High School offering price. Maybe a <1000 tier, a <5000 tier and a >5000 tier.<p>I think what you really need to figure out is who are you trying to sell this to, and more importantly, how much it's going to cost to sell to them. That should really influence your pricing strategy. I wouldn't write another line of code until you figure this out.<p>Good luck!
Great job on the site, it looks very well done.<p>As for your feedback goes, I'm concerned that you've spent 10 months on a project but don't seem to know the market at all. Have you talked to any schools about it? What made you start the project? Do you have prior experience working with ACMS?<p>I think your first goal should be to understand the administrative side of catalog management. How do they store/manage catalog information? Is this going to be easier to maintain than their current system? Can you make it easy to port from old systems? How do their systems connect with Bursar office, etc?<p>I think the biggest problem you will have is that catalog systems are probably integrated into larger ERP systems. Unless you can solve the integration problem you are probably going to have a very hard time selling this.
Wow this looks very well thought out. One small thing would be that the image of the browser in the mac at the top of the marketing site is very hard to see. I always like being able to see up close what the product looks like. I suspect you can increase engagement/conversions simply by blowing that image up or just zooming in on part of the browser window there.<p>Also, once you click demo, things get a bit confusing. If the demo users need to go to <a href="http://demo.smoothbulletin.com/admin/" rel="nofollow">http://demo.smoothbulletin.com/admin/</a> to actually start testing things out, make that a clickable link and call attention to that so users know thats where they need to go right now.
Maybe this is there somewhere, but something I'd want to see are degree tracks/plans. That is, when I got my degree, there were 4 different ways to get it depending on whether I was going for BA, BS or whether I was going to declare a minor or not.<p>So for students, that would be a great tool to have, to help sort and plan which course would be required given what you wanted to do. Your site could have a nice visualizer for which classes to take for a given track (e.g., B.S. Physics Minor in Math, B.S. Physics no minor, etc). The key here would be to make it easy to swap in/out electives and to order the classes based on pre-requisites.<p><i></i>EDIT<i></i> The site does look nice, btw.