Ask HN: What can I do with unwhiteboard.com?

3 points by kewball 12 years ago | 4 comments

I was inspired by this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7520216 a while back and decided to turn it in to a service where you email whiteboard photos to an unwhiteboard address and receive a processed clean pdf in return.

I created it because I thought it would be fun. I don't see it as something that I could turn in to a service that people would pay for.

My question is what now? I did a Show HN yesterday with not much response. Where else could I try get some users for this? Or perhaps this is a solution to a problem that does not exist.

taprun 12 years ago |

You have a service that allows me to send in pictures of a whiteboard to get clean PDFs.

OK, what's the benefit to me as a user? If you can't answer that question, you'll have some issues getting users to sign up. Does it save me time, make me more money, reduce my headaches?

Maybe professors / whoever writes on whiteboards aren't your customers. For instance, When I was in college, the staff would pay people to take notes for disabled students. What if you set up a service where colleges could just have those types of people take snapshots of the board at various intervals. Then disabled students wouldn't have to worry about taking notes. You might even be able to get some grants, free press from non-profits and federal agencies.

It also might be interesting to think about how SlideShare and Flickr and other "send us files with pictures in them" type companies sell their products to the masses.

helen842000 12 years ago |

Could you do this in the form of a smartphone app too? Open the unwhiteboard app, take a whiteboard photo and the filter is to process the image in to sharp text on the white background. I guess combining it with Evernote in some way would make the image content searchable with OCR.

You could use the domain as a good landing page to showcase the app. I think making it an e-mail service makes it harder to monetize.

Alternatively could you go from image to editable text straight away so students can add to / amend and the words. e.g to save copying down what the lecturer has written, they snap it and it is usable text immediately.

FYI Your landing page looks good but you need to show the end result without having to click on a link. Also you need to use the word 'legible' not 'eligible' in your headline.

kewball 12 years ago | |

eligible != legible. Oh the shame! Thanks for the feedback. Saving to evernote and even trying to do some OCR myself are things I am considering.

aspidistra 12 years ago |

Maybe:

* Find education forums and target teachers or lecturers.

* Broaden the tech from "whiteboard photos" and target students looking to digitize lecture or field notes.