Technical co-founder needed for Studeous
We're looking for a co-founder for Studeous, a web start-up.
Studeous is the SalesForce.com of the e-learning industry--we provide an easy way for teachers to manage their classes online on our web platform, as opposed to typical enterprise e-learning systems. We're looking to commodify e-learning.
We have users, we've already made sales, and we're in the process of raising capital.
We're looking for a super hacker who is an expert at:
MySQL
System/Server Administration
Scaling/Optimization
CSS
Coldfusion experience would be preferred, but is not completely necessary
Overall great product dev skills
We launched in private beta last March, and we need more hands on deck.
We are located in the Dallas/Austin, Texas area.
You can contact Jeff West at [email protected] for more information.
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Also, if you're in beta since march, it's a bit late to find a technical cofounder don't you think? You're looking for an early employee, perhaps?
In this case, one cofounder already likes Cold Fusion and developed in it, so it makes sense that he's looking for another cofounder with the same taste in programming.
As I said, early employees are a different matter. They need to be shaped around - well, around the technology co-founder who wrote the whole product in a storm of caffeine fuelled fury.
What is the fire burning in the pants of your market? (And who is your target market -- you've got teachers and students and school admins, please pick one.)
The first thing I see what I visit your site: "You've never seen elearning like this before." As a teacher, how does that help me?
I can tell what you're doing. You are trying to position yourself as a competitor in the marketplace. You are coming from a position of weakness when you do this.
Features page: "Just go ahead and try to outfeature us." WTF are you even talking to? How does that apply to me as a teacher? When did more features make a project better?
Forget your competition and get yourself into the boots of a teacher. Feel the pain a teacher feels when they aren't using your software.
Where are the testimonials from teachers that are raving about your software? "Last year, I couldn't get my students to stop chatting with each other during class. This year, I signed up for Studeous, set everything up and 95% of my class is logging in each day and 85% are actually talking to each other on the message boards. I'm absolutely giddy!"
WebCT and blackboard (the competition) are utterly unusable from a teacher and student perspective. I'd love to use something different if I ever have the need for more than just HTML. The main thing I'd like is a grade management system when I deal with large courses.
However, I'm almost certainly not permitted to use a grade management system besides the one my university provides, certainly not a third party one. That would violate student privacy.
Another problem is that commercial software can't (legally) add all the features of blackboard:
http://www.blackboard.com/patent/FAQ_013107.htm
Are you allowed to use a notebook?
My brother is a very good ColdFusion programmer. He got his start in the language because it was what I was programming with at the time. (Don't forget, around '99 when I got my start, there was Perl, ASP and Coldfusion as serious contenders.)
I ask him, "Why don't you give PHP or Rails a whirl?" "No interest." And so he focuses his effort in refining his ColdFusion skillset. He does Ajax and does CSS design with the best of them.
I don't know any hacker who doesn't have an intense, irrepressible interest to learn new stuff - languages, frameworks, whatever. I also don't know a single hacker who hasn't learned well over half a dozen languages to a proficient level. And no, CSS and AJAX don't count (unless the Javascript is taken to a scary level). Sounds like your brother is a designer with some coding skills, not technical co-founder material.
Any programmer worth his/her salt should be always learning newer technologies that might be useful to him/her. Having a favorite is different than not wanting to learn anything else.
The trick with this market is finding a way to squeeze out a profit. There's a very limited amount individual teachers are willing to spend, but selling to districts is a major undertaking - think dedicated salespeople working for a year or more on each account. They don't much like small companies either.
The other big issue is legacy system support. Districts won't buy a LMS that doesn't integrate with their student information system, which is unfortunate since the SIS vendors jealously guard access to their walled garden. (They all have their own LMS products now and don't want their customers buying yours.) We poured man-years into this problem and only covered a tiny subset of the products out there. It's a huge potential morass.
Pretty much everyone working in this field recognizes how bad the products are, but not always the reasons. The users - teachers and students - don't have much input into the decision-making process. Endless sales cycles ensure high prices, and that means the decisions are made by administrators at the district office who never come anywhere near the software. It takes years to make a dent in this market.
I'd go with COBOL and RPG. They represent the most solid UI kits available with many users (i.e. Banks).