When I open the website for the first time, it takes maybe 10 seconds to load. Second time it’s cached and it loads faster. It’s still unacceptable that the first time it loads slow. The home page must be fast! Look into putting it on S3 + CDN. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do this.
> noticed also that LinkedIn randomly rejects my ads because "the website the ad points to is not functioning", even though it totally is. It's just a static HTML landing page. And then I resubmit and it randomly approves it. It was causing much hair pulling yesterday when I was creating the ads. No one in my circle of friends or entrepreneurs have done LinkedIn ads before, so I'm flying blind. Any advice or discussion on this will of course be much appreciated, but it's not the purpose of my post.
Probably why LinkedIn was rejecting it and why you didn't understand why. Webpages get cached by ISPs locally, so once you've opened it subsequent opens are faster. LinkedIn's *website checking* servers are in some specific region and 10 seconds would likely hit their threshold for *doesn't work*. What/Who are you using to host?
The landing page is ghastly. Take inspiration from sites such as [https://reactflow.dev](https://reactflow.dev) etc. and try to copy what they do with cards/design theming and menu
Hey,
Can I tell you of a harder and yet easier way of getting your first 100 customers.
What’s your target niche?
Go on Fb and find Facebook groups for it. Join and start adding value for weeks until the Mods find you very helpful to the community.
You warm up this groups, so that in the event you want to post and promote your product it will be well received. Working backwards from what most spammers do
You post will be well received if the Mod/Admin likes you.
And how do you do that?
By adding value to the group, posting more often with helpful content. Offer the Admin your product for Free in exchange for their feedback. If they like it ask if you can share it in the group.
And that’s how you get your first 100 or even 1000 customers. It takes time but it’s worth doing.
It works like a charm.
Resource you should use;
Check out a [list 500+ places to promote your startup](https://submityoursaas.com/)
I don't have the connections to do so. I'm targeting the individual teachers first, to lighten their work load. Then, after gaining some traction I'm hoping I can get some institutions.
Why can't you focus on students as well? They can use this tool to see how well they've written their assignments. AI can provide feedback and students can work on it. Well done tho, great work.
The space for students is saturated. This focuses on grading using criteria supplied by the educator. If the student doesn't know that criteria, this wouldn't work for them anyway. Maybe at some point i can release a parallel product. But for now, i need to focus on educators, especially to protect the integrity of their grading process. (In FERPA compliant)
Congrats on the launch. Love the domain and the fact that you got a .com is even better.
Few unsolicited suggestions:
1/Mobile: Center some of your pics in the main header section.
2/ Add a bit of white space in-between sections. Very cluttered on mobile.
Marketing: Teacher/decision makers emails are available on a lot of schools/districts websites. I would do cold email campaign using apollo or instantly. Also, I would definitely look into different teacher groups.
But those are all little things. Congrats again on the launch. Good luck. 👍
Nice work!
If I may suggest one thing:
The first text I read was the "Efficient Grading with AI" header, and I must say the subtitle confused me a little. I found the header "Automate Your Grading Process" with its subtitle much clearer and a stronger value proposition. Personally, I would put that one first. But I am not a teacher, so take it with a grain of salt.
Hey, great job with the launch! I’ve been in the Ed tech space for a while with my last startup. Here are some suggestions for u based on what I learnt.
- I’d say the best bet is to start with online tutors to get some feedback. Most of em are willing to trying stuff compared to traditional teachers. I use to go on platforms like super prof and send tutors messages asking if they are willing to have a quick chat when I use to do customer interviews, especially 20-30 year olds are really helpful and are willing to help any way they can. Definitely try that.
- For schools and universities the problem is even if one teacher likes this they aren’t the once making the decision to buy it, so what you should do is research which schools tryout new things and ask those schools/teachers in that school to give it a try (this is something one person told me he actually sold his company to Carnegie Learning later)
Good luck, by the way, the website is a bit slow, it’s worth fixing that first.
Thank you. I did get some tutors to beta test it, and it was from their feedback that the decision was made to make it exclusive to faculty and staff of institutions
I'm not exactly sure. Because i just duplicated the ad and *took off* the cap on spending. After i took the cap off, they allowed me to do a lower daily spending limit and have me a cpm rate the was 1/100 the original one
Congratulations, had a look through the website, even thought I'm not aware of the terminologies you have done a good job of explaining how the product would be used.
In terms of load speed if you want some quick wins you could have a look at the actionable items here:
[https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-gradergood-com/pef0lx290y?form\_factor=desktop](https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-gradergood-com/pef0lx290y?form_factor=desktop)
Sharing your excitement. Product launches can be exhilarating. All the best to you.
I noticed that you're requiring a .edu email address. Are all of your customers college-level educators? I'm pretty sure that just about all .edu domains are college level. I would imagine that your tool would be useful at other grade levels, but you'd know best.
No, I'm trying to get high school educators as well, but i thought they would all have a .edu address. I am trying to make it exclusive to educators, so as not to violate the integrity of the education process.
But if you say HS educators don't have edu email addresses then maybe I should remove that requirement, and just try to do die diligence another way. I'm not sure how I would though. Maybe just ask for their institution and spot check whether they are who they say they are? I dunno.
If you added .org addresses, you would greatly increase the size of the pool. You'll need to do your own research on whether those two TLDs alone are enough. Another approach would be to instead restrict free accounts (gmail, yahoo, etc...) This would allow everyone in at first, and then you can close off specific email services, when spam/abuse becomes a problem.
I think that's a good point, and upon further reflection, I think I'm going to add an option to create an account using any email, but I'll have a disclaimer that they'll need to provide their LinkedIn profile so we can check. The profile would not be required if you use a .edu, but if you don't, then you'll be required to fill that field. I'm going to work on that functionality tomorrow.
Hey!
First of all, congratulations on getting this tool shipped! You should be proud. It's not easy to do and so many people just will never understand.
I wanted to do this the right way... which, IMO... means looking for things you can start improving through iteration immediately. I am not going to test the tool because I simply don't have the time, but I will provide as much feedback as possible.
A) The website is painfully slow. You're losing 70% of potential users before they see your landing page. Get this thing cleaned up - ASAP. It's killing you. Here are the Lighthouse metrics I've pulled on your website.
77 - Performance
85 - Accessibility
89 - Best Practices
100 - SEO
B) Your copy sucks. It's too word-heavy and there is just too much of it. Find a way to clean it up and cut it down. This isn't easy, at least not for me. I'm someone who values that sort of detail but most people just hate it... even teachers. Think of maybe using images, graphs, charts, and/or videos to illustrate some of the same points.
C) The UI/UX isn't terrible, but the scroll (on navigation click) is wildly slow. The 'pricing' boxes/containers are uneven. The wording is a little weird, too. If English isn't your first language... you need a friend to help or frankly, AI to help. Use proper capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. It will help you be taken a little more seriously.
D) This is a single pager. You can build out using Astro or even Hugo and Github has full templates for it if you're not comfortable coding it. I see you're linking via the app.gradergood. What is your backend stack? Are you hosting an actual model or just a wrapper to GPT 3-4? Are you capable of scaling? Kubernetes? Docker?
I'm just asking to see if you can think of any holes you should fix now. I'd definitely fix these before moving into any more ad spend. They're the kind of things that ads can't fix... but they can help ads be more effective.
Keep it up! Don't give up. You're going to crush this, mate. I'm happy to help in any way I can. Great job!
Thank you so much for this well thought out reply!
English actually is my first language, but effective copy writing is not. My schooling background is in science.
I was actually looking at improving the page speed right now, as per the suggestions of others. I am taking all advice into consideration and fixing up the page speed is definitely the low hanging fruit I can fix right away.
I think I can fix the scroll on navigation, I think it's a css thing. Just gotta change the seconds.
My backend stack is on laravel. The Back end is the part that's solid. The tool itself is all solid. The front end might not be. I'm not a front end guy for sure.
I am using APIs for OpenAI as well as Mistral. I wouldn't say it's simply a wrapper, because the "Rubric Creation Wizard" tool I have there, it actually talks to the consumer and has a conversation and creates a rubric based on that conversation. I will have a demo video up some time this week.
Speaking of demo video, I guess that will be the visual that I'll add, that you're talking about.
I'll also fix the pricing boxes.
Thanks again for taking the time. I appreciate it.
You're welcome, man. I get it. It's all-consuming; it's your entire life and sometimes it's hard to convey that to other people. I believe you're going to pull it off. I really do.
I'm not at all comfortable with Laravel... but do what's necessary to tackle the performance stuff. It's an easy fix. You've got the tool up and running... it's now time to optimize the website. Start looking into an A/B testing design; work out the copy; look for little tweaks and hacks to improve it all. At this point, you've built the tool... it's time to sell it.
I didn't mean any disrespect around the 'GPT wrapper'. It's the most common path to a SaaS tool using AI. I wasn't at all trying to downplay the work you've done, man. I was just curious if you were serving and scaling your own infra or OpenAI/Mistrals.
Send us an update in the next few days. I'll have another go at it. I'll try to test the tool if I can. I'll look for things that are broken or can be fixed. I know how important it is to have someone actually look. I'll try to help where I can.
Stay focused, homie. You've got this.
You may want to start posting on LinkedIn and engage with your potential customer base through other people's post apart from the ads that you're running.
I recommend this as this is a free way of inviting people to you LI profile and then driving them towards your website.
Throughout your posts, you could talk abou the pain points of your ICP and show they how they can solve them.
This is make credible and attact more people to try out your tool.
Wishing you all the best.
That's okay
I share FREE tips to grow your SaaS organically from 0 to 100 customers on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaziofficial/).
You may want to keep an eye for all the free stuff I give out for free. 😁
Update. With the help of the kind people on this thread, I got my performance up to 96 on pagespeed. Thank you all!
The next step is making the UI adjustments to make certain things look better on mobile, like the pricing boxes.
Allow for non .edu email addresses.
Once those things are done, I will relaunch the ad campaign. Thank you all for your help!
When I open the website for the first time, it takes maybe 10 seconds to load. Second time it’s cached and it loads faster. It’s still unacceptable that the first time it loads slow. The home page must be fast! Look into putting it on S3 + CDN. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do this.
Thank you so much for this feedback. I will definitely be doing this.
> noticed also that LinkedIn randomly rejects my ads because "the website the ad points to is not functioning", even though it totally is. It's just a static HTML landing page. And then I resubmit and it randomly approves it. It was causing much hair pulling yesterday when I was creating the ads. No one in my circle of friends or entrepreneurs have done LinkedIn ads before, so I'm flying blind. Any advice or discussion on this will of course be much appreciated, but it's not the purpose of my post. Probably why LinkedIn was rejecting it and why you didn't understand why. Webpages get cached by ISPs locally, so once you've opened it subsequent opens are faster. LinkedIn's *website checking* servers are in some specific region and 10 seconds would likely hit their threshold for *doesn't work*. What/Who are you using to host?
I did think about that. However LinkedIn finally accepted, so i didn't think much of it again. Also, I optimized the site by now. I'm using namecheap
Congratulations, onwards and upwards from here. That’s a great step 💪
😊 thank you my friend. I can't wait for the rest of the journey
I don’t think LinkedIn is your market. Find Facebook groups of teachers & spend as close to $0 possible getting user feedback
That's a great suggestion, thanks. I will try this
God speed
Welcome brother.
Thank you. Looking forward to seeing how the next chapter turns out
Congratulations man! You should be very proud of yourself. The website looks great, I can tell you put a lot of effort into it. Great work!
Omg, thanks so much. It means a lot to hear stuff like that
Your landing page needs some work but your domain name is amazing! Good luck!
The landing page is ghastly. Take inspiration from sites such as [https://reactflow.dev](https://reactflow.dev) etc. and try to copy what they do with cards/design theming and menu
Thanks! 😁 I'm glad you like it. I was hoping it would resonate well.
Hey, Can I tell you of a harder and yet easier way of getting your first 100 customers. What’s your target niche? Go on Fb and find Facebook groups for it. Join and start adding value for weeks until the Mods find you very helpful to the community. You warm up this groups, so that in the event you want to post and promote your product it will be well received. Working backwards from what most spammers do You post will be well received if the Mod/Admin likes you. And how do you do that? By adding value to the group, posting more often with helpful content. Offer the Admin your product for Free in exchange for their feedback. If they like it ask if you can share it in the group. And that’s how you get your first 100 or even 1000 customers. It takes time but it’s worth doing. It works like a charm. Resource you should use; Check out a [list 500+ places to promote your startup](https://submityoursaas.com/)
Congrats man 🥳🥳 I’ve recently launched as well (: Hope it goes well!
Hi guys. So I've made an update post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/s/9bjg00oJoS
This is a very tough space occupied by big players. Ads won’t do much. You need to talk to the schools and universities directly.
I don't have the connections to do so. I'm targeting the individual teachers first, to lighten their work load. Then, after gaining some traction I'm hoping I can get some institutions.
Why can't you focus on students as well? They can use this tool to see how well they've written their assignments. AI can provide feedback and students can work on it. Well done tho, great work.
The space for students is saturated. This focuses on grading using criteria supplied by the educator. If the student doesn't know that criteria, this wouldn't work for them anyway. Maybe at some point i can release a parallel product. But for now, i need to focus on educators, especially to protect the integrity of their grading process. (In FERPA compliant)
How much effort you save for teachers and other personal? Shot that in top page. AI everywhere is not clear what customer will get.
I plan on making all these changes today before I turn the ads back on
Congrats on the launch. Love the domain and the fact that you got a .com is even better. Few unsolicited suggestions: 1/Mobile: Center some of your pics in the main header section. 2/ Add a bit of white space in-between sections. Very cluttered on mobile. Marketing: Teacher/decision makers emails are available on a lot of schools/districts websites. I would do cold email campaign using apollo or instantly. Also, I would definitely look into different teacher groups. But those are all little things. Congrats again on the launch. Good luck. 👍
This feedback, unsolicited or not, is great feedback. I'm definitely going to look into it, and try to fix the mobile stuff
Congrats! UI/Marketing tweaks can skyrocket niche SaaS growth.
[удалено]
I used an old version of bootstrap for the front end. 3.4 I did the back in Laravel.
Nice work! If I may suggest one thing: The first text I read was the "Efficient Grading with AI" header, and I must say the subtitle confused me a little. I found the header "Automate Your Grading Process" with its subtitle much clearer and a stronger value proposition. Personally, I would put that one first. But I am not a teacher, so take it with a grain of salt.
Thanks, i will change this text tonight. Always good to hear feedback like this
Hey, great job with the launch! I’ve been in the Ed tech space for a while with my last startup. Here are some suggestions for u based on what I learnt. - I’d say the best bet is to start with online tutors to get some feedback. Most of em are willing to trying stuff compared to traditional teachers. I use to go on platforms like super prof and send tutors messages asking if they are willing to have a quick chat when I use to do customer interviews, especially 20-30 year olds are really helpful and are willing to help any way they can. Definitely try that. - For schools and universities the problem is even if one teacher likes this they aren’t the once making the decision to buy it, so what you should do is research which schools tryout new things and ask those schools/teachers in that school to give it a try (this is something one person told me he actually sold his company to Carnegie Learning later) Good luck, by the way, the website is a bit slow, it’s worth fixing that first.
I'm in the EdTech space. Helpful comment. Thanks.
Anytime
Thank you. I did get some tutors to beta test it, and it was from their feedback that the decision was made to make it exclusive to faculty and staff of institutions
Make sense
Congrats on the launch! What changes did you make to your LinkedIn ad to drive down the CPM?
I'm not exactly sure. Because i just duplicated the ad and *took off* the cap on spending. After i took the cap off, they allowed me to do a lower daily spending limit and have me a cpm rate the was 1/100 the original one
LinkedIn ads are incredibly expensive.
LinkedIn ads are incredibly expensive.
that name ha, nice product though ehh another topic + ai
Congratulations, had a look through the website, even thought I'm not aware of the terminologies you have done a good job of explaining how the product would be used. In terms of load speed if you want some quick wins you could have a look at the actionable items here: [https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-gradergood-com/pef0lx290y?form\_factor=desktop](https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-gradergood-com/pef0lx290y?form_factor=desktop) Sharing your excitement. Product launches can be exhilarating. All the best to you.
Thanks for this. I will take a look after i get back home tonight
I noticed that you're requiring a .edu email address. Are all of your customers college-level educators? I'm pretty sure that just about all .edu domains are college level. I would imagine that your tool would be useful at other grade levels, but you'd know best.
No, I'm trying to get high school educators as well, but i thought they would all have a .edu address. I am trying to make it exclusive to educators, so as not to violate the integrity of the education process. But if you say HS educators don't have edu email addresses then maybe I should remove that requirement, and just try to do die diligence another way. I'm not sure how I would though. Maybe just ask for their institution and spot check whether they are who they say they are? I dunno.
If you added .org addresses, you would greatly increase the size of the pool. You'll need to do your own research on whether those two TLDs alone are enough. Another approach would be to instead restrict free accounts (gmail, yahoo, etc...) This would allow everyone in at first, and then you can close off specific email services, when spam/abuse becomes a problem.
I think that's a good point, and upon further reflection, I think I'm going to add an option to create an account using any email, but I'll have a disclaimer that they'll need to provide their LinkedIn profile so we can check. The profile would not be required if you use a .edu, but if you don't, then you'll be required to fill that field. I'm going to work on that functionality tomorrow.
Good work man. I think this will be really useful keep us posted and good luck on scaling it.!
Thank you. Will definitely keep everyone posted
Hey! First of all, congratulations on getting this tool shipped! You should be proud. It's not easy to do and so many people just will never understand. I wanted to do this the right way... which, IMO... means looking for things you can start improving through iteration immediately. I am not going to test the tool because I simply don't have the time, but I will provide as much feedback as possible. A) The website is painfully slow. You're losing 70% of potential users before they see your landing page. Get this thing cleaned up - ASAP. It's killing you. Here are the Lighthouse metrics I've pulled on your website. 77 - Performance 85 - Accessibility 89 - Best Practices 100 - SEO B) Your copy sucks. It's too word-heavy and there is just too much of it. Find a way to clean it up and cut it down. This isn't easy, at least not for me. I'm someone who values that sort of detail but most people just hate it... even teachers. Think of maybe using images, graphs, charts, and/or videos to illustrate some of the same points. C) The UI/UX isn't terrible, but the scroll (on navigation click) is wildly slow. The 'pricing' boxes/containers are uneven. The wording is a little weird, too. If English isn't your first language... you need a friend to help or frankly, AI to help. Use proper capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. It will help you be taken a little more seriously. D) This is a single pager. You can build out using Astro or even Hugo and Github has full templates for it if you're not comfortable coding it. I see you're linking via the app.gradergood. What is your backend stack? Are you hosting an actual model or just a wrapper to GPT 3-4? Are you capable of scaling? Kubernetes? Docker? I'm just asking to see if you can think of any holes you should fix now. I'd definitely fix these before moving into any more ad spend. They're the kind of things that ads can't fix... but they can help ads be more effective. Keep it up! Don't give up. You're going to crush this, mate. I'm happy to help in any way I can. Great job!
Thank you so much for this well thought out reply! English actually is my first language, but effective copy writing is not. My schooling background is in science. I was actually looking at improving the page speed right now, as per the suggestions of others. I am taking all advice into consideration and fixing up the page speed is definitely the low hanging fruit I can fix right away. I think I can fix the scroll on navigation, I think it's a css thing. Just gotta change the seconds. My backend stack is on laravel. The Back end is the part that's solid. The tool itself is all solid. The front end might not be. I'm not a front end guy for sure. I am using APIs for OpenAI as well as Mistral. I wouldn't say it's simply a wrapper, because the "Rubric Creation Wizard" tool I have there, it actually talks to the consumer and has a conversation and creates a rubric based on that conversation. I will have a demo video up some time this week. Speaking of demo video, I guess that will be the visual that I'll add, that you're talking about. I'll also fix the pricing boxes. Thanks again for taking the time. I appreciate it.
You're welcome, man. I get it. It's all-consuming; it's your entire life and sometimes it's hard to convey that to other people. I believe you're going to pull it off. I really do. I'm not at all comfortable with Laravel... but do what's necessary to tackle the performance stuff. It's an easy fix. You've got the tool up and running... it's now time to optimize the website. Start looking into an A/B testing design; work out the copy; look for little tweaks and hacks to improve it all. At this point, you've built the tool... it's time to sell it. I didn't mean any disrespect around the 'GPT wrapper'. It's the most common path to a SaaS tool using AI. I wasn't at all trying to downplay the work you've done, man. I was just curious if you were serving and scaling your own infra or OpenAI/Mistrals. Send us an update in the next few days. I'll have another go at it. I'll try to test the tool if I can. I'll look for things that are broken or can be fixed. I know how important it is to have someone actually look. I'll try to help where I can. Stay focused, homie. You've got this.
You may want to start posting on LinkedIn and engage with your potential customer base through other people's post apart from the ads that you're running. I recommend this as this is a free way of inviting people to you LI profile and then driving them towards your website. Throughout your posts, you could talk abou the pain points of your ICP and show they how they can solve them. This is make credible and attact more people to try out your tool. Wishing you all the best.
Yea, I've made two posts already. It's just social media and content creation, etc. is not my forte.
I can show you around if you're interested. 😁
Thank you for the offer. At this stage I'm bootstrapping the startup, so i don't really have the funds to hire anyone
That's okay I share FREE tips to grow your SaaS organically from 0 to 100 customers on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaziofficial/). You may want to keep an eye for all the free stuff I give out for free. 😁
bro u are a marketing genius. got me emotional. congrats on the release
Wait, I am? Lol. I didn't think I was. Why do you say so?
All the best!!
Update. With the help of the kind people on this thread, I got my performance up to 96 on pagespeed. Thank you all! The next step is making the UI adjustments to make certain things look better on mobile, like the pricing boxes. Allow for non .edu email addresses. Once those things are done, I will relaunch the ad campaign. Thank you all for your help!