The video actually threw me off. My cursor was right there, very confused for a sec - imo it's not separated enough from the rest of the experience for it to be entirely helpful, felt like more of a distraction. Just my $.02, cool site outside of that one small thing!
I run a price comparison site for textbooks, SlugBooks. There are two simple factors which impact slow adoption of digital books:
1) college bookstores. It's a distribution issue. Students are used to walking into the bookstore to buy something. The bookstore is used to selling them something. Digital books hurt that experience so there's an inherent disadvantage to bookstores promoting digital. This is as big a factor as any.
2) price. Publishers think they've priced digital books fairly, because they use the full retail value as their point of reference. Instead of paying $200 for a full retail copy, students will surely pay $100 for a digital rental, right? They fail to understand that digital books are going to be acquired online, meaning there is a greater chance students purchasing these books will be comparing prices. College bookstores which offer digital as an option even compare that price to their other (often more affordable) options, like buying it used. That $100 digital rental is frequently available for less than $60 on Amazon or sites like it.
It's not a feature problem, it's distribution and really bad pricing.
Until publishers pay attention to these things, digital will never catch on (regardless of how much they innovate technology).
Wrote this case study for Usabilla's blog. Hopefully it provides some design inspiration if you've been thinking of doing a reskin. We had a lot of fun with ours.
few takeaways (having just gone thru the same experience of launching our first app in July)
1) don't assume that because you're bootstrapping, you "have to charge something for the app". View free/paid as two different marketing channels (that's really all that they are). With free apps - they are ad, in-app purchase and/or lead supported - while paid apps support themselves. There is no right or wrong way to monetize, but by having one of each, you're eligible in both top app chart categories, which helps.
2) you may have benefited from this (or maybe you didn't) - but one thing that surprised me was the market for "apps gone free". We released our app as a free app at first, but once the downloads started to fall off, we figured "what the hell, let's make it paid" after which we rose even higher in the rankings on the paid side than we ever achieved on the free side. Then when paid installs started to fall off, we switched the app back to free, which had a surprising result: it got picked up by all of these "apps gone free" feeds (tons of blogs subscribe to app pricing updates - so it was suddenly eaten up by this niche market of users who download all of the apps that recently became free). Granted - these weren't engaged users, but it padded download stats for a few days. When that happened we experienced our best two free install days ever before normalizing again.
Interesting to see your stats, thanks for sharing.
Note that their stats about how rentals save students $1160 a year are sort of BS. On books where renting saves you a lot of money over the full retail price (which no one ever pays anyway), you can usually just buy the book outright for the same amount on Amazon (and then sell it back when youre done for a ridiculously lower total cost of ownership).
Typically there are 1-2 copies on reserve at the library, but you can only check them out for a couple hours at the time. With a class of 50+ students that's not a workable solution for most. And most don't even try anyway..
Some universities take it a step further and include the cost of textbooks in tuition. Be glad that isn't happening globally. That's the worst case scenario here - students are just billed for course materials without having any say in the matter.
Hey, thanks for this. There are corner cases where custom editions make sense, but overall they cause far more harm than good.
-The biggest issue is that custom editions segment the global secondary market for a given textbook into slivers of useless fragments. Instead of Campbell Biology, Regular Edition being bought and sold between Stanford students and students at every other college in the country (this significant supply drives the price down), Campbell Biology, Stanford Custom Edition is only ever going to be bought/sold by Stanford students. This hurts students in multiple ways: 1) the bookstore is the only place they can BUY the book from. Period. 2) the bookstore is the only place they can SELL the book too. Custom editions are a perfect storm for bookstores/publishers.
-Custom editions are cheaper than what the regular edition costs in terms of what the bookstore would charge for each, but if you compare prices on the regular edition online, there are usually significantly cheaper prices out there than what the custom is being sold for at the bookstore.
-In the rare case where a custom edition is being used, but a regular edition is acceptable - the bookstore presenting both options and telling you to pick one will almost never result in you considering that the regular edition would be cheaper online. By adding this extra noise, they artificially make custom books look more affordable.
I agree - there are tons of professors that are on the right side of this fight. Textbooks SHOULD be free. And the fact that custom editions are even adopted is proof that professors care about students. They're just a terribly poor solution which reinforces the problem instead of solving it.
Give the publishers credit - custom editions are a genius business move.
Yep, kayak for textbooks. You can either search by book or search by school/course. If you really want to get angry, look up MATH 203 at Medgar Evers College in NY. A textbook with a list price of $174 is being sold for $330 new, $240 used - available from online sites for less than $10.
There are over 16,000 classes across the country that can save >$100 on their books. Haven't run the numbers yet but the use of custom materials/access codes has EXPLODED, which prevents savings.
We are diff than other comparison engines bc of that course search component. Most students don't realize how easy it is to save (it's surprisingly daunting for students to do this the first time), we facilitate that process.
Custom editions and packaged access codes are the last futile attempt that publishers bookstores and professors have against cheaper Internet alternatives. The one thing your writeup didn't touch upon is digital textbooks- which the publishers actually love since eBooks are usually rentals, so the secondary markets like Amazon and AbeBooks are cut out.
I am from SlugBooks- a web app that compares prices between the college bookstore and online options for ~800 universities in US and Canada. This topic hits close to home. We've been watching bookstores and publishers do this for years, and it's only getting worse. When professors assign customized or packaged books, it becomes nearly impossible to save money through sites like Amazon.
The most surprising thing is how many professors eat up the bullshit that custom editions actually help. They're supposed to be champions of critical thinking. Profs WANT to save students money - that's why they opt for custom editions (since publishers tell them it will save their students money). It's just sad.
Kyro - I think it's ridiculous that people are so possessive of free design concepts, but one cool blog post to take a look at is Metalab's theoretical redesign of the Zappos homepage few year's back: http://metalabdesign.com/zappos/
They do a pretty nice job of explaining why and what they did - might be a nice framework if you're planning on justifying your decisions.
I personally find these designs more "fun to look at" than anything - it's always cool to see what and how someone who isn't a part of the day to day sees a product as. To me, these designs are just a super detailed pieces of user feedback. Keep going at it!
This reminds me of how Facebook was having issues with apps sending message spam within Facebook, so they prevented apps from initiating messages and instead forced apps to spam outside of Facebook (by just asking for and using your email). Out of sight, out of mind!
Important to note that unlike Apple's eBook offering, Amazon's diverse market selection makes their situation tough to compare. Amazon does provide digital books, but also sells physical versions and facilitates marketplace transactions of the exact same titles (when they're available in paper form).
Honestly - it seems like there's not really a premium for non-eng roles, so that might be why the threads haven't really arrived (I haven't noticed them either). Not to say any given startup can't use a rockstar marketer or biz dev - they just probably don't expect to get them from HN :) It seems that by most standards, hackers are engineers. I don't agree with that (and not saying anyone here necessarily does either) - but that might be another reason for it.
In my own experience (as a non-eng)- if you want to get a job at a startup outside of the engineering roles, you need to be a lot more proactive. That means emailing companies that you find interesting, and telling them why you find them interesting (do not send the same cover letter to every company without any mention of why you like their company - that's what people on craigslist do, and that's why a lot of companies are forced to use a jobvite/etc system).
Most startups have non-eng needs but don't know they need them until after they're hurting pretty bad. I've had the most success applying to companies (instead of jobs) - tell them what you're good at and why you like their product - if they think there's a fit, they'll get back to you. By applying to companies this way, you also manage to avoid a lot of the potential competition you'd have for the job once a formal job req/post has been generated (no one else even knows the job exists, because you just sent in your stuff and asked them to respond if they think there's a fit).
Do keep in mind - the more hype the startup has gotten, the more generic cover letters/resumes they get - so find a way to stand out, and understand it's a numbers game! Lucky for you, there's tons of startups that need great people in SV, so if you play the game enough, you'll get a job with an awesome company.
Hey - cool first version (the design is incredibly polished for a first version!). There are a few sites out there doing this (but in the mobile space) - Quixey's probably the biggest, but some other directories/review sites that might be worth looking at (if you haven't already) are FeedMyApp and AppStorm. Not saying this idea has already been perfected- but these other sites might provide some UX ideas beyond the MVP you built here.
I'm a huge fan of the hover on the search results page - very well executed. I think the browse by category on your homepage could be more clearly defined - I see what you did but the actual apps draw way more attention than the category titles, so there's a bit of a disconnect there (you feel like you're just browsing a list of featured apps, without much order to them, despite the fact that they're organized by category).