How to get your administrators excited about EssayTagger

You (hopefully) want EssayTagger at your school. And we would both rather see schools and districts pay for the licenses.

To that end, we've developed a new slideshow presentation aimed specifically at administrators. It gives a quick overview of how EssayTagger works and then dives deep into what administrators care about most: data and Common Core!

View the slideshow

Share the slideshow with your administrator and encourage them to send any questions my way (all of my contact info is provided at the end of the presentation).

We see a trifecta of benefits for teachers, administrators, and -- of course -- students. If we can get administrators excited and onboard, we can all be happy campers!

Pricing changes for 2013

With EssayTagger's growth and evolution it's time to revise our marketing emphasis and pricing model.

Reaching maturity
EssayTagger launched at the 2011 NCTE conference in Chicago as a bare-bones site that was built primarily around our innovative grading app. In the early days we were in "Open Beta" and all accounts were completely free. We then shifted to early adopter discounted pricing while continuing to expand our feature set at a nonstop pace. And because we are a cloud-based service every single feature upgrade we make is instantly available to all users (think how Google Drive constantly evolves vs installed software like Microsoft Word that forces you to buy upgrades).

The site is now a full end-to-end solution from configuring a Common Core-aligned rubric all the way to statistical analysis of your grading results and student-by-student Common Core-aligned progression tracking.

Instructors from nearly 1,000 different schools across 60 countries have graded thousands of essays in EssayTagger.

Latest addition to the team: Mike, Visual Designer

I've tapped Mike, a former co-worker, to be our visual designer for the interactive Flash portions, the Website look-and-feel, and the EssayTagger logo!

Here are a few samples of his work:

Print work for Sony

I almost worked for these guys (or their parent company) in Austin, TX!

Mailer for the company where I met Mike: AlphaDetail, Inc.

Check out the rest of Mike's online portfolio here: mikegracedesign.com

I have reasonable aesthetic sensibilities (I am, after all, a photographer), but I really don't have the chops to be a full-blown visual designer. Having a professional visual designer of Mike's caliber working for us is a huge win; we'll look much more established and impressive than we would if it was just me hacking elements together in my spare time.

That being said, we're still a tiny organization. I'm the only full-time employee. Mike has a full-time day job and is contributing what he can in his free time. Since Mike is a friend of mine and a believer in the project, we've been able to work out an arrangement where his compensation will come in the future. This preserves our tiny cash reserves while giving Mike incentive to see us be successful; he'll profit as we profit.

I'll see if I can get Mike to occasionally post here as he develops and refines the visual design for EssayTagger.com!

I'm going all-in!

As of today I have resigned from my teaching and coaching positions. Building EssayTagger.com will be my sole focus for the foreseeable future.

I agonized over this decision for months, but it essentially boiled down to the push and pull of two factors.

The first was that it was becoming clear that I could not function to the best of my ability in my current environment. I loved everything that was going on inside of my classroom, but--as most teachers are well aware--the frustrations outside of the classroom can become toxic and unbearable. I was working way too hard to be that unhappy.

But I don't want to dwell on past frustrations. This space is about looking ahead, working toward an exciting future.

And that's where the second part comes in.

A friend's photo, but a familiar sight. Poor Jess!

My mentor told me that grading essays was by far the worst part of being a high school English teacher. I'm sure you teachers out there know well where he's coming from. I certainly felt that pain when I had 102 Senior English Lit synthesis papers come in on the same day.

While crawling through those papers I began to dream of ways to make grading more efficient. And then a killer idea crystalized.

As the days and weeks and months went by it became more and more clear that I needed to pursue this idea. It IS the future of grading essays.

As a result, I'm pushing forward with an incredible amount of excitement that far outweighs the frustrations of the past.

I hope those of you who are teachers will forgive me for stepping off the front lines. But I believe in this product that we're building and I am confident that it will improve teachers' lives (how exactly will EssayTagger.com help you grade essays more efficiently? Well, we're still in stealth mode so you'll have to wait a few more weeks to find out).

So while I may no longer be directly impacting students, I am hoping to directly impact teachers (and, let's be honest, make a modest profit along the way!).

I also knew all along that this company would require my full attention; there was no way that I could build it in my free time and still teach and coach. I mean, "free time"?! What free time?! This was always going to be a full-time commitment.

The future looks bright
I am, by nature, a very risk-averse person. I hate gambling. I generally focus more on avoiding the worst-case scenario than shooting for the best-case scenario. It's not very exciting or sexy, but I play it safe.

And yet I have resigned from my job and am launching this startup company with zero fear. I am not up late at night, biting my fingernails, wondering if I'll default on my mortgage. Maybe I should be. Maybe I'm a fool.

18"?! Just give up!

But I know the pain that teachers feel when grading papers and I know that this product we're building can be a huge help. I know that the technology hurdles are daunting--especially since I'm about five years out of date on the latest programming tools and trends!--but I'm confident that I can overcome them. And, as you'll see in the coming weeks, I have access to some incredibly gifted and resourceful people that will be involved in the business.

I'm too optimistic and too excited about all of this to be nervous or scared. The opportunity here and the possibilities are so great that they've overridden my conservative, risk-averse nature.

I know that our profession needs as many dedicated, talented people it can find. I'd like to think I was one of the ones that fit that bill. And I am sorry to leave the ranks. But if I--if we--can make this project a reality... well then we'll all have reason to celebrate.

The plan
Obviously we are already a few weeks into this project. Luckily I've got my brother-in-law on board to help with the business side and I've been reaching out to people I know who can help out on the technology side.

We are tentatively planning a modest round of financing in mid-August to cover operating expenses for the first seven months. That's also the target for a working demo or site beta so we can show the investors what it is they're investing in.

Early September is the target for the actual site launch. We would likely begin with an open beta period for a month or so as we polish off the rough edges and continue implementing more features.

By October we should be fully up-and-running, focusing hard on spreading the word and attracting new users.

We've already figured out how to run the company for a ridiculously tiny amount of money. mostly thanks to crazy advances in technology and the fact that we'll only have one full-time employee: me! A small additional financing round will probably be necessary in March to bridge us to the point where we're making a profit.

I would like to give this company at least a year to see where we end up by September 2012. Because of the low costs of the operation, we don't need insane adoption rates to reach the break-even point. Our initial goal is to hit 1,000 paid users within the first 12-18 months; by Web terms that's just a drop of water in the ocean. There are about 125,000 high school English teachers in America, 114,000 Social Studies teachers, and untold tens of thousands of university instructors and professors that might benefit from our product. And we're just looking to nab 1,000 of them, initially.

I like our odds.


One final pic: At the peak of her insanity, Jess posted this photo with this caption:

"I r helpin u grade, cuz my grammer iz better than theirs."

And no, cats trained to grade essays is not the solution I have in mind. Though I think maybe Flynn here should be our mascot!

Hello, EssayTagger!

Thanks to Keith for that great introduction a few weeks back. Truth be told, my involvement here started over the dinner table and I managed to successfully insert myself in the business. I guess that negotiations class in b-school did come in handy!

All joking aside, this project hits two of my passions: education and technology. Education because - well, who doesn't care about education? I was blessed with a great education with some wonderful teachers back in my time, and I've always wanted to give back to improve the quality of education and teacher's lives. And technology because that's always been my interest from the first day I laid fingers on an Apple IIe back in grade school. My career to date has been on the business software side of things, so I'm looking forward to doing something really amazing to help people (and not just some organization's bottom line).

I'll be posting occasionally about education, the business as well as my non-programmer perspectives on technology. Chief Everything Officer? COO? Whatever my title, I want to have some fun and make a difference!!

A Big Decision: Use a traditional Web host or commit to Google App Engine (GAE)?

Oh tradeoffs, why must you torture us so?

 
The dilemma:
One of the hundreds of things on my to-do list is to figure out Web hosting. For what we want to do a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or cloud VPS seems like the best option. A standard Tomcat host environment won't work because our current designs rely on having OpenOffice installed as a service that we can make calls into. A VPS solution essentially gives us a fresh server that may or may not even have an OS installed on it yet and we can install and configure it however we like.

A VPS setup gives us that freedom and a cloud-based VPS gives us scalable horsepower. Awesome.

But what happens when the server instance crashes? What happens when the database crashes? Presumably a VPS (and certainly the cloud variety) would have redundant-enough distributed/RAID data storage, but what happens if we do suffer data loss?

Any half-decent dot-com needs to have recovery strategies in place to handle any possible calamity, regardless of how unlikely they are.

And here's our first problem: I'm not much of a hardware guy. I really do NOT want to muck through all of this.

But even if we had the world's greatest server admin, we would merely be in good position to recover from disasters when they happen; no one--no matter how good--can make server disasters disappear altogether.

And a VPS--or any Web host or colo option--requires too much machine/environment maintenance and disaster recovery.

The solution(?): Google App Engine
The best way to offload these concerns seems to be to run your code off of Google App Engine (GAE) instead of a traditional Web host/Web server.

Corporate email accounts via Google Apps

I set up the EssayTagger.com email accounts today through Google Apps. I already use Gmail for my personal mail and my school district transitioned to Google Apps-hosted services last semester.

As far as I'm concerned, Google Apps for your organization is a no-brainer. My overall philosophy for EssayTagger.com is to leverage as much outside expertise as possible--which is another way of saying: offload as much as possible, wherever practical. Yes, I know how to do a whole lot of the tech stuff on my own, but there's a lot of it that I shouldn't be doing on my own because other people can do it better and more cost-effectively.

Domain name purchased!

It's hard coming up with a good domain name these days. We decided that our domain name should:

• Describe the service.
• Be professional and appropriate for both teachers and students.
• (no goofy, random names--like google, moodle, GoDaddy, etc.)
• (and nothing that suggests teacher laziness: FasterGrading, EasyGrading, etc)
• And yet still be at least a little memorable.
• Be reasonably easy to spell since students may be typing in the URL.
• Last, but not least: be available for purchase!

In the early phases when I was first playing with this idea I grabbed WritingBrilliance.com. But I think you'll agree that it's too long and too prone to misspellings.

After a lot of brainstorming and a lot of registrar lookups we ended up with: EssayTagger.com.

It fits all of the criteria reasonably well and, as you'll see in the coming weeks, it really does describe our service.

I went with Register.com as my registrar. I've used them for most of my other sites and I've been happy with them. I'm put off by the flashier registrars and their marketing campaigns.

First addition to the team: Yutaka, Chief Everything Officer

I'm the guy with the educational vision and the tech know-how.

But I kind of hate dealing with a lot of the nitty-gritty business details. But this project will get nowhere without someone solid working the biz side.

Enter Yutaka.

He is a UC Berkeley graduate and has an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and over 15 years of experience with a strong focus on software--everything from modeling client data/organizations to sales to business development. He's already doing an amazing job investigating and planning and projecting everything that needs to be done to keep us on target.

Oh yeah, and he's my brother-in-law.

Yutaka posing with my sister and their daughter. Photo by Kenny Nakai.

I love the title I've given Yutaka: Chief Everything Officer. But he tells me that in reality I would be the CEO (the traditional Chief Executive Officer role) and he would be more like the COO.  In these early stages we're playing things a bit loosely but obviously everything will be formalized and solidified in the coming weeks.

Watch this space for blog posts from Yutaka!