SmartGrade

Following up on the update from last weekend, one Instagram teacher/influencer agreed on doing a sponsored post with a tiny demo of SmartGrade. We agreed on a few bullet points for her Instagram stories, and she delivered yesterday [0].

Some stats:

• Number of followers on her Instagram account: 28.8k
• Number of new followers on the @smartgrade Instagram account: 8
• Number of visits to smartgrade.net: 50

Even though it's an interesting learning, the numbers are much lower than what I had in mind.

Some hypotheses I have:

• No interest for the app on this channel (maybe at all)
• The video feels too staged. I think coming up with a set of bullet points made the too mechanical and not very relatable
• There were many unrelated stories on her account before and after the demo, which might have discouraged people to watch it through
• Teachers are on summer vacations, and rightfully thinking about other things (I know I would!)

[0] https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/18063335044099545/

Over the last month, I have been focusing almost exclusively on generating content and reaching out to users for feedback and marketing. Here are some lessons and stats:

Emails
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I have been manually writing emails to teachers with an online presence on Instagram ranging from 1k-30k followers. On the emails, I have been very direct: "This is who I am, this is what the app does and the reason I am reaching out to you to ask if you would be open to discussing a sponsored post about it".

• Emails sent: 32
• Email responses: 7
• Positive responses: 3 (1 out of my budget, 2 negotiating)
• Negative responses: 4 (3 don't use multiple choice tests, 1 uses a competitor)

Some of the responses are very professional and oddly similar - they send back a "media kit" with values for posts/stories/blog post, so far all in the same style, with the same fonts and colors even. Makes me think some teachers are following a "recipe" for becoming a teacher influencer, which I thought was very interesting on its own.

Instagram DMs
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I initially sent DMs for teachers asking for feedback and answers to a Google Form I put together with questions like:

• What grade to you teach?
• Do you use multiple choice tests?
• Do you use any apps?
• Does this screen with exam statistics make sense?
• Want updates?

I only received 7 responses and they are mostly positive. Here's a public link to the raw data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1207oTjRANfYdNRlFgWxiXIm72jK8nViNq8FFDtIlHig

Then I switched gears and started asking about the possibility of a sponsored post:

• DMs sent: 44
• DMs responses: ~10

Out of the responses, two interesting things happened:

• @busy.science.teacher did a instagram post and a video on her stories for free. Afterwards, I commissioned a longer video tutorial from her, which is now live at https://smartgrade.net (https://vimeo.com/342587643). It turned out a little longer than I expected (even after editing), so for the next one I will keep it much shorter, around 1-2 minutes. I also really appreciate the fact that she has been mentioning @smartgrade in a few related posts and directing people to me for questions;

• @yourclassroomhelper did a couple of posts and stories, and even a 10-minutes demo of the app (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2FRbyA8keE). It was really nice because it was completely organic - I didn't suggest anything like it. She did because she liked the app and thought it was valuable for her audience, which I thought was amazing. In the tutorial, she also compares with the biggest competitor (ZipGrade) and I was happy to hear that, even though SmartGrade has fewer features, it's more pleasurable to use. The moment I heard it I thought about the "build half a product, not a half-assed product" maxim and how important the distinction is. I also got incredibly rich feedback both from the video and from her messages, some of which I have already implemented in the app.

Medium
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Wrote a total of 5 short blog posts of various formats to test the waters. So far, very few views (28 over the last 30 days), with virtually no traffic to the website.

Seasonal effects
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Teachers calendars are very seasonal/cyclical. Right now, because of the summer break, the interest in multiple choice tests is as low as it gets, as shown on Google Trends for Scantron (a test scanning machine) and ZipGrade (biggest competitor):
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today 5-y&geo=US&q=scantron,zipgrade
Going forward, I think it makes sense to coordinate the biggest marketing efforts with these peaks of interest. For now, I will keep generating content and partnerships to have a better online presence when the next peak happens.

Ads
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I experimented with both Google Ads and promoting Instagram posts. I made a trial run targeting middle/high school science teachers in the US. I didn't spend more than $50 overall. It's clear that I will have to invest more effort into optimizing the campaigns if I choose to go that route, because the naïve approach was not effective at all.

In an effort to go where the users are, I set up an Instagram account (https://instagram.com/smartgrade) with photos and videos of the app in action. I started following and interacting with as many teachers as I could. To my surprise, many were open to answering some of my questions and a few were even excited about sharing the app on their feed! This was the first time strangers downloaded the app, which was very exciting. Around 15-20 people installed on each platform.

After listening to one of the indie hacker's Podcast episodes, I decided to learn a little bit about content marketing and I ended up setting up a Medium account (https://medium.com/@smartgrade) and writing a little about technology and education.

iOS app got accepted and published on AppStore.

Published version 1.0.0 on Google Play.

After tinkering with the concept for a long time and doing a (very!) quick market/competitor analysis, on this date I wrote the first line of code for SmartGrade. It was the initial image processing code that was eventually going to support both the iOS and Android apps.