Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

I think the product looks awesome, but I would never use it. (I am a student.)

Here's why: For me, it appears to attempt to solve the problems of: a calendar, reminders, and school-related task management.

During the first week of each class, I "process" the syllabus by adding the major assignment due dates (usually 3-5 over the course of a quarter), and exam dates to my Google Calendar. This is a pretty quick process. It's so little overhead that I think setting up a sharing system with others to try to share the data is actually more overhead. (I have used a setup like this for 10 years myself, and I expect most students have something similar.)

I get text-message based reminders a week in advance for these special events (a separate calendar from my usual one for easy color differentiation). The professors always list and review contents of major exams and details of upcoming projects already anyway.

And finally, my student / project tasks are managed separately in another system alongside all my other projects and areas. It never made sense to me to separate the student side when really my entire life is project-based. For this type of system, I've used text-based GTD, Wunderlist, Taskpaper, etc.

That said... If I could sign into your app the first week of my class and have all this done automatically for me, I would be very happy.

Thanks for the feedback! Those are some great points, and something that we've been discussing for some time.

We're experimenting with a couple marketing strategies. Our primary strategy has been to focus on students for a grassroots adoption, hence the silly marketing copy and the koala logo. We've been handing out t-shirts and posting funny flyers on various college campuses.

In addition, we are talking to professors to encourage them to officially adopt Tabule in their classrooms. The teachers that are currently using Tabule are seeing a large increase in student participation, since they feel more comfortable asking questions. It also provides the students with an official source for due dates that's collaboratively maintained, so it should always be correct.

The biggest problem is, like you mentioned, the students that are most likely to be organized and post content to Tabule are also the ones that have less of a need for a system like ours. That's why we are starting to lean towards focusing more on marketing directly to instructors, although that is a much harder market to reach and to convince to try new technology.

Having said that, I think you would still find Tabule useful over organizing assignments yourself in Google Calendar because if an assignment is announced later in the semester and isn't on the initial syllabus or if a due date changes, you're more likely to have the correct information if you and your classmates are using Tabule.

Hi, I'm a (fellow) cofounder at Tabule.

You make a lot of valid points. As guptaneil alluded to, the ideal case would be if we could get teachers to post their assignments on Tabule. Teachers for the most part already post assignments online, but the education market lacks a good central homework management system that aggregates assignments between classes.

What we're trying to achieve is to bridge to that ideal case with student-submitted assignments. There's an interesting dynamic at play here, because inputting all of one's assignments is trivially better (perhaps even worse if we consider switching cost) than using Google Calendar. For the second person to join the course though, the experience is already better, because all of their assignments are already available to them. It's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem. If my assignments aren't already in the system, then there's no immediate value for me, but there will be for everyone that comes after me.

No idea how your actual finance side works, but the obvious way to solve this seems to be to offer a reward to the first student to enter assignment data for each class. A couple of checks would be necessary, i.e, reward is only valid after two other students confirm the data, to prevent students just adding junk. Have you considered something like this? Market it like 'all your assignment dates ready for you, or get a red bull on us!'

Guptaneil and etrinh, I appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

Regarding a reward-based or gamification system, this is an excellent idea. Of course, it would not necessarily be monetary. To give a specific example, Dropbox has become very good at gamifying their recruitment by posing their challenges for expanding storage space. A similar adoption here could be interesting. I plan to follow Tabule's development and adoption curiously.

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