Congratulations on the launch! Very cool take on combining the structure of a personalized curriculum with voice chats.
Langua has both a chat mode and a voice mode for uninterrupted conversations to give learners flexibility. Our initial approach has been less structured which is ideal for intermediate / advanced learners. We have had a lot of demand from beginners for more structured and personalized learning paths, so we're rolling those out as well.
This exactly how we implemented the rules engine in Kevy. We construct an Elasticsearch query based on the rules selected in the UI. Then we use the scroll API to retrieve the matching documents.
If you are looking for an alternative to Mailchimp that uses Amazon SES with dedicated IPs under the hood, check out Kevy [0]. Full disclosure, I'm the Founder of Kevy.
We verify the domains of each of our customers and thoroughly review their sending practices to ensure their email sending reputation stays high. Futhermore, you can talk to a real person if you have any issues with sending / deliverability. If you are interested in a comparison of Kevy and Mailchimp, check out this blog post [1].
Excellent points - raising awareness by sharing these type of experiences is part of the reason why I've finally begun to blog. It's important not only for people of color working in or aspiring to work in the tech industry, but also for the demographic that doesn't understand what it's like to be a black unicorn in a tech world. It raises the empathy levels of everyone involved.
Thanks! This past weekend, I was able to tell Dennis how much he means to me, and I had to catch myself because I was beginning to choke up. It ended up being the inspiration behind this post.
Thanks for reading! I would love to go into more detail about what we talked about, but it varies so much from session to session. I could write an entire book on our conversations.
I'm on the Kickdrop team. We will always be releasing free drops for our users. That's something that will never change. From time to time, we will release premium (paid) drops. These will be drops that we've put a little more sweat into, and will be the best content we can provide. Thanks for asking!
We, Body Boss (http://bodybossfitness.com) didn't even have a product last time year, and we thought just having a good idea was enough for acceptance. In the past year, we've boostrapped like crazy, built a product, launched and acquired plenty of customers to validate our idea.
YC rejection for the 2nd year in a row has done little to dampen our spirits and ambition. Here's to another rejection that motivates us to succeed!
Congrats on your success--the site looks great! It loads pretty slowly for me though even with a decent connection. I'm in Australia, so that could be a factor, but I see a few quick optimizations you could do.
1 - Some of your images are huge. The ipad workouts image alone is 300kb, which is way too big. Of course you want them to be good quality, but you should be able to cut a lot of weight without any noticeable effect. The Fireworks Export Wizard is a good tool for this.
2 - Some of your images are unnecessarily broken up into lots
of separate img tags. The main landing page image with the helmets and devices has over 6 tags. You should combine images in order to have as few img tags as possible. It will reduce http requests and also give the browser less layout work to do.
3 - On a similar note, you have a bunch of small images like the player portraits that you could group into a spritesheet to further reduce requests.
4 - It doesn't seem like you're using a CDN? Something like Cloudfront or Cloudflare is quick to setup and will improve download time for your images drastically, especially for people who are far away from your server like me.
5 - You should put your javascript at the bottom of the body instead of in the head. You're not executing anything until the dom is loaded anyway, and putting at the bottom will allow the page to render before the js is downloaded and parsed, improving perceived load time. Use 'display: none' to initially hide anything that depends on the js to look right.
Just wanted to say that I'm nowhere near your target market but the landing page looks excellent, incredibly polished for less than a year's work. Best of luck to you!
But one thing. Your target market is "coaches and players"
Yet your "about" page is targeted toward either a) getting funded or b) people who are into tech, read HN, etc.
That's a problem. You start of with "Andrew Reifman" who is a "pixel perfectionist". This has nothing to do with anything that your target market (say the coach at my local high school team) would even remotely care about.
The one person "Darren Pottinger" who has some street cred is listed as number two.
I think Darren should be the prominent person on that "about" page with the rest of the team deprecated (smaller type) or even placed on a separate page. Perhaps get some "advisors" that are coaches, players or other users to fill space on that page as well. Give it some meat.
That page to me says "we are looking to build a company" not "we have the expertise to help players and coaches with our product".
If someone wants to invest - your team will matter. But it shouldn't be presented in a way that detracts from the product or service you are offering.
I agree, impressive landing page. Every application round I see someone as polished as this, and then realize to not take rejection to heart. Rejections, even at YC, will have their fair share of false positives.
Thanks for this presentation. I passed it along to our team's designer. Definitely provided clarity for us on how to go from design to development. For example, we weren't sure if it would be best to use images for the backgrounds of tableview cells and buttons or to use iOS coloring.
Congratulations on the launch! Very cool take on combining the structure of a personalized curriculum with voice chats.
Langua has both a chat mode and a voice mode for uninterrupted conversations to give learners flexibility. Our initial approach has been less structured which is ideal for intermediate / advanced learners. We have had a lot of demand from beginners for more structured and personalized learning paths, so we're rolling those out as well.
Best of luck with with ISSEN.