Snapclass Blog

Snapclass is our thing.

[snapclass-blog]

Everyone makes mistakes, but in my opinion there are only two things that matter:

How quickly you realize you’ve made a mistake.

Finding a resolution and implementing it.

It sounds easier than it is and it can be especially tough in business. What’s the best way to discovering your...

[snapclass-blog]

Mistakes DO NOT matter

Everyone makes mistakes, but in my opinion there are only two things that matter: 

How quickly you realize you've made a mistake.

Finding a resolution and implementing it.

It sounds easier than it is and it can be especially tough in business. What's the best way to discovering your mistakes? The usual suspects, listening to feedback, data and being objective. However, finding mistakes is a double edged sword. On one hand you are likely in the best position to realize there is a problem. On the other you are so far down the rabbit hole it's hard to be objective if you are having a problem. It's a tough place to be.

Last week we launched Snapclass. Just 36 hours after launching I realized a major mistake; our pricing model. The pricing plan was well thought out, but it missed the mark. Specifically, we chose not to include a free version of our software, which was stopping people from trying it. We thought the free trial period would be enough to get people in the door, but that turned out to be wrong. 

Whether you run a startup or an established business, every choice you make could be a mistake. In fact, most of the time you'll have a better chance at choosing wrong then choosing right. Don't worry about making them, worry about fixing them.

[snapclass-blog]

Snapclass launches - Helping companies easily bring education and training online

We built Snapclass because it should be easier for businesses to bring their training and educational content online. We built Snapclass because it should be easier for businesses to bring their training and educational content online. Before Snapclass if you wanted to teach or train online you had two options. First, Skype/Hangouts + PayPal + Gmail + Dropbox and whatever other software you needed to conduct your teaching. Yes it was free, but it was also very inconvenient and it's not very professional sending someone to your "Hangout." Second, spend a ton of money on an enterprise solution that has more bells and whistles than you need and requires a full time tech team to setup and support. We thought we could do better. Snapclass lets businesses easily bring their education and training content services online - no developers needed. Getting started is simple and requires as much time as it would take to setup a Facebook account. Why are you trying to build this infrastructure anyway, shouldn't you be focusing on your core business? What do we do? The short version is: "We make your business look very impressive." The long version is we are Amazon Webstore for education and consulting services. There are over 100,000 educators and consultants that need a web presence - which we provide in a customizable way for $200+ per month. Yes that's right Snapclass lets you brand it all. 

What's next? We just launched on Feb 6th, so there is much more to come. Very soon we will be introducing an API for a more customized experience. Shortly after we hope to include options to add and sell recorded content. We realize the importance of building a product in line with the needs and desires of our customers so if you have suggestions please email us.

[snapclass-blog]

Simplicity in Online Education

Online Education has become almost a buzz word in the startup community lately. And for good reason. Our increasingly interconnected word has opened up some really interesting possibilities to disrupt a gigantic, and seriously old industry. Snapclass came about because of some personal needs and wants and one of those was a longing for a less messy environment in which we can teach and learn. 

I'm the UX and Front-End Designer and Developer here at Snapclass. From the beginning we realized the need for simplicity in what we were building. Most applications that have been designed and built in this space so far have been overly bloated and flat out complicated to use. At least that has been our observation. There's no reason something nice and simple can't exist to solve this problem.

Maintaining simplicity while designing anything is really tough. Especially in a fairly complicated space like online education. We've had many discussions (some quite heated) about what needs to be included from the feature and functionality perspective. We want to keep the features down to what is really needed. There's always an argument for what should be added and we have those, and will continue to have those, discussions internally as we move forward. We don't want Snapclass turning into a user experience mess. We want you to be able to figure out how it works very quickly so that you can get to what is actually important, teaching and learning.

Now, I say that we want to keep things simple, but that doesn't mean we're done. Quite the opposite. We're really just getting started. We've built a very simple, basic yet completely functional version and we are now entering an iteration loop. We don't plan to change the core of our product any time soon, but we'll be constantly making improvements with that idea of simplicity ever in the back of our minds.

Online education in the current state feels so complicated. This doesn't need to be the case. The main idea with just about every education startup is to change the educational system in some way or change how we learn and teach in the general sense. We can knock down geographic, demographic, and financial barriers with the technology we now have access to, but by building these overly robust applications in an attempt to solve the problem we're building a new barrier for users. People get scared the first time the hop into an online classroom with buttons and switches and messages popping at them from all directions. I've seen in and I've experienced it.

We should be in the business of removing barriers and not creating new ones. Unfortunately, we will always be fighting this to some extent given the nature of the platform we're working on and I'm not so sure we can ever completely remove all the roadblocks, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. There is room for simple to use yet extremely useful online education applications and that's what we're going for here at Snapclass. 

We're running some tests with class subjects at the moment so please check out our class listing and sign up for the classes you'd be interested in. We'd love to hear what you think. 

We also appreciate any feedback on any front so please don't hesitate to contact us.

[snapclass-blog]

The 5 "F"s of Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Personally it's my favorite holiday. Partly because of the 4 "F"s, family, friends, food and football. That's what Thanksgiving is all about.

But over here at Snapclass, we're introducing the 5th "F", feedback and looking for your help. Our users are pulling us in a lot of different directions and we want you to help clarification! What's most important to you?

How you can help?

It's easy, go to Snapclass and sign up for the classes you'd be interested in taking. Don't see what you're looking for let us know. We're also open to any other feedback? 

What happens next

Based on your feedback and interest we'll create and schedule classes with expert teachers. Don't worry we'll make sure they are awesome. Remember all of our classes are taken online and are live. You can take a class in a group or 1 on 1, it's up to you. 

This feedback will help us curate the best possible teachers for you.

Thanks!

Scott and Team Snapclass

[snapclass-blog]

Become Rich as a Byproduct

Rodrigo

Eight years ago in the summer of 2004 I studied abroad in Shanghai. While I was there I met another student named Rodrigo. Rodrigo was from Spain, spoke marginal English and always had a smile on his face. Rodrigo loved to have a good time, he'd party all night, explore all corners of Shanghai and if he had time he'd show up to class. Over the course of the semester I'm not sure he ever got any work done, but I am almost certain he had the best time. Looking back now I NEVER thought I would be getting business advice from Rodrigo, but I did.

One year ago Rodrigo was in Chicago on business and gave me a call. I hadn't heard from him in a long time and jumped at the chance to see him. He asked me to meet him at his hotel at 8pm and we'd go out for a drink (code for "get ready for a late night"). I showed up at his hotel, walked into the lobby bar and there he was having a great laugh with a bunch of strangers. Same old Rodrigo... or so I thought.

Rodrigo and I ended up at Maestro's having an overpriced martini and talking about the last eight years. Three years ago he had realized that his current line of work didn't fit him and he wanted to pursue his passions. Rodrigo wanted to save cities energy and he had an idea to do it. So he quit his job and over the course of the next 2 years he created, grew  and successfully implemented his idea in many cities. I was amazed. He told me to "figure out what you believe in an you’ll become rich as a byproduct." My mind had been blown.

What does "rich" mean?

I met Rodrigo when he was 17. He was now 25 and more successful than nearly any one I knew. I was amazed. How did he go from the party animal I had met Shanghai to successful businessmen all the while staying the happiest guy in the room? "Doing what I believed in has made me rich. Being rich has nothing to do with money. I am genuinely happy working. I love it. Even if I failed I'd be rich," he told me. To Rodrigo, being rich was being happy.

Happiness

After Rodrigo and I parted ways I thought about what he said for a long time. What made me happy? What did I believe in? I had no idea and the more I thought about it the more lost I became. Eventually I realized there was no quick answer and that a lot of people search their whole life for these answers, so I stopped looking so hard.

Happiness varies from person to person and comparing yourself or your business to others is a sure fire way to make you unhappy. There is alway someone bigger, always some one better and always someone smarter (Unless you're Apple). Who cares? The real question is, what makes you happy? I'm happy when I get up in the morning excited for the day ahead. In Steve Job's famous Stanford commence speech, he says..

“I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

If you are not happy at work right now you are failing yourself. In fact, if you're not happy in any aspect of your life right now you are failing. Change it now.

Enjoy the ride

I started approaching my days differently, both personally and in business. I wrote down the tasks that would make me happiest to complete each day and did my best to get them done. Please note that these tasks weren't always enjoyable, but they made me happy to complete them. I also started thinking about my startup, Snapclass, as a person, an actual human life. Snapclass was born, is currently growing, hopefully will mature and sadly one day it will die. All businesses and people go through the same cycle. The experiences, people, problem solving, excitement and learning are your reward. So sit back, be happy and enjoy the journey. Strive to do what makes you happy everyday and before you know it you'll be rich. 

[snapclass-blog]

Body Language (20 minute challenge)

I recently just started blogging and I quickly found that it’s hard to just start writing. I found myself with writer’s block, struggling to choose a topic and worst of all I was wasting time. So I decided to challenge myself. I’m giving myself 20 minutes to write this blog post. I have no topic selected at this point, Ready… set… go…

Let’s talk body language. Have you ever had a conversation and you see their eyes start to wander? What does this mean and what should you do? Well let’s break down the situation…

It’s you: Reflect on what you were saying. What were you talking about? Are you pitching your business, talking about something inappropriate or are you just being boring and uninteresting? If you’re pitching your business, this is a sign you should probably work on the pitch!  

It’s them: Some people love to talk and hate to listen. Unless they are sharing gold, move on. Conversations are meant to be interactive; if they are doing all the talking it’s a lecture or a sales pitch, not a conversation. Example: Ever listen to someone talk about their business for 10 minutes and as soon as the topic switches they disengage. Interesting fact about these types of people, they tend to end conversations as soon as their lecture/pitch is done. So if they don’t end it, excuse yourself and move on.  

Random: Sometimes the wandering eye just happens and it’s nothing to worry about. They could be facing the door and there is a constant flow of people distracting them. Perhaps someone of interest either personal or professional walked by. This happens, assess the situation; if it was random proceed as planned.

Conversations usually have a natural end, don’t fear the end, but embrace it and move on to meet new people.

The blog post took me 36 minutes to write and edit, so I failed the 20 minute challenge. Next post will be about what I learned from this exercise. 

[snapclass-blog]

Don’t Hire Where it Hurts – Hire Where it’s GOING to Hurt

Four months ago Snapclass had a problem, a big problem. Our site looked like s*^t! We had focused all our energy and resources on building the technology, neglecting the design. How could we have spent 6 months building this and let it get so bad? Now we had list of design work a mile long and it was slowing development down. So I went looking for a great designer to join our team, turns out I was looking for the wrong person. 

First of all, finding a good designer isn’t easy, especially if you don’t know where to look AND you’re bootstrapped. I tried Built in Chicago, hiring agencies, Dribbble, Craigslist, Reddit, my network and numerous other things, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. I had wasted time and energy on something that shouldn’t have been so difficult. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve encountered with Snapclass and after one month I gave up. I decided to patch the problem by finding a freelancer to do the design. After 3 weeks of working with our freelancer the pain was gone, but I realized we actually had a much bigger problem.

We needed a full time Front End Developer to make the endless number of iterations and optimizations to our site.  This couldn’t be patched, and it needed to be fixed – NOW. The whole time I was focusing on our current design problem and I hadn’t realized that the real problem was the Front End Development yet to come. 

Maybe I’ll chalk this one up to inexperience and some first level thinking. We had major design pain, but it was short term and all that was needed was a patch. We had larger problem lurking just out of sight. Think of problems in a broader sense. Be sure to ask yourself where it’s going to hurt, not just where it hurts right now.

[snapclass-blog]

Finding a Technical Co-Founder

I’m a non-technical founder with a business idea and guess what, NO ONE CARES -especially developers! If you’re a non-technical entrepreneur and you expect developers to give up lucrative opportunities to be a part of your idea, you’ve got some work to do! So how does a non-technical founder find and build a team? It’s not easy…

Step 1: Do you have a really good idea? Marinate on your idea over night, how do you feel the next day? How about the next week? If you’re still in love with it, proceed to Step 2.

Step 2: If your idea made it past Step 1, congrats I’d guess that 50%+ don’t make it this far. Now it’s time to breath some life into your idea. Write an executive summary, draw a few sketches of your vision and talk to people in the industry. Go an extra step and answer the questions top incubators ask on applications. (Ex. What real problem are you solving? Market size? Revenue model, so on... )

Step 3: But wait, how does this help me find a technical co-founder? It doesn’t, but you need a damn good understanding of your business idea to be taken seriously by anyone. Now you have a fighting chance.

If you’re like most entrepreneurs you don’t have a ton of money to spend on a development team, so how do you get a technical co-founder on board? Developers like to solve problems. Again, developers like to solve problems. Sell them on the problem. For Snapclass the idea was to give teachers the ability to host live classes via web cam or phone. But the problem was designing a system that allows teachers to charge for his or her knowledge. Pitch the problem not the idea.

Finding a technical co-founder is difficult, but it’s not impossible. Do the legwork if you want to be taken seriously and be prepared for rejection. If you have a great idea and the determination, you’ll find your co-founder.

[snapclass-blog]

Office Hours vs Classes

In the coming days we will be releasing an update the current Snapclass platform. The current version of our site only allows instant 1 on 1 connections via web cam or phone. However, after listening to our users this falls short in terms of user experience. As we grow there are times when few or no people have been "Live" in our market. To make Snapclass more interesting, fun and useful we rolling out our next version. Here is what you can expect.

The addition of "Scheduled Classes." Now anyone can schedule and create classes in  just a few minutes. Users will be able to browse classes by topic or search. 

Our most exciting addition is adding "Multiple Participants" when hosting a class. This will make classes more affordable, giving everyone a chance to hear from bigger name experts and influencers.

Dividing Office Hours and Classes. Currently Snapclass only offers, Live, 1 on 1 classes. Well we've decided to call these office hours. We believe this is a very powerful feature that will add tremendous value to our site in the future.

These 3 changes will improve the user experience for our users when the live marketplace is limited. We encourage you give both a try and are always open to feedback and comments!

Cheers,

Scott

[snapclass-blog]

I Didn't Feel Like Reading

Thursday June 28th, 2012, after 20 years (Prodigy baby!) of using the internert I'm writing my first blog. Here we gooooo!

In October 2011, I had an idea. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was struggling to figure out how to use a few elements in Photoshop.  Actually I had no damn clue what I was doing, but I was determined to figure it out. I just had some basic questions, but for someone new to Photoshop they seemed impossible and monsterous. So I did the first thing everyone does, Google... tons of help if I want to read all day in the hopes of finding what I wanted... nope not gonna happen. Youtube... ok that actually helped, but I still had questions and the comment section looked like... you get the point. I just wanted to ask a real person, someone who knew the answers to my questions. Someone I could have a 2 sided interactive conversation with. I didn't want to wait, I wanted it now and I was willing to pay for this. And so the seed was planted.

So I marinated on the idea for a few days (Always marinate your ideas!). After a few days of marinating I still loved it so I did the natural thing, I told my friends.  One of those friends was Ryan, a full stack developer internet super hacker. Ryan loves coffee, dogs, the interwebs and not much else. To my suprise he loved it. So the next few months were similar to what I imagine a husband and wife talk about before having a baby. Lots of what ifs, some HUGE numbers thrown around, planning, comprimises and coming up with a name. And in early January 2012, Snapclass was born.

It's been roughly 7 months since Snapclass was born. These months have been filled with hard work, mistakes, failures, pivots, more mistakes, disappointments, more hard work, bugs, more mistakes, but we are finally gearing up for a public Beta. And so I've decided to start this blog to correct an oversight/mistake I just realized I was making. You see Snapclass helps influencers connect with their audience providing payment processing, scheduling and facilitating this connection via secure phone call or webcam. Today it dawned on me, that I don't have a blog, I'm not an influencer and I can't even use my own product the way it was intended. Oops. Well it's time to fix that! 

From now on I'll be writing about Snapclass, THE GOOD: our big wins, realizations, accomplishments and the ups and downs of running a start up. Of course THE BAD: failures, mistakes, disappointments. I'll try to keep it light and original, because after all the whole idea behind Snapclass started because I didn't want to read.

Cheers,

Scott