A problem you'll face is that teachers probably wont be allowed to run email addresses of students through a third party site like that.
I know for definite su8ch things would be frowned on in a lot of institutions here in the UK: probs in the US too.
Another major problem I suspect your going to face is that there are quite a few full on school management systems coming into use (there is a big one kicking about that plenty of schools in the UK have but I forget the name offhand). It's kinda hard to see the advantages of a one off system like this in that context.
Dont get me wrong it's a nifty system if you can convince people to use it. But I think that might be hard.
In terms of commerical prospects that might be even tougher - will you charge per teacher? (possibly unpopular) or will you allow a school/institution to license a bulk lot of accounts to hand to it's teachers?
After reading some comments, I just want to give some words of encouragements.
Don't worry too much about your bloated competition such as Blackboard. I am currently a college student and I hate having having to check blackboard. I would much rather have assignment and announcements emailed to me. Most students are lazy like that too. However there are several things that schools need.
-roster page where students can email the whole class or select number of students
-discussion board
-some communication channel for parents, parents heavily invested in their child and a lot of them have zero clue of what they are learning
-A simple class page incase the student wants to login and get their assignments without their clutter of their email.
We're concerned about the 3rd party fear, but there seems to be some recent precedence here. Gmail and Hotmail have seen a lot of adoption by schools and there are a number of medium to large schools which host Blackboard for smaller local schools. If this proves to be a serious blocker to adoption, we can talk about inside firewall installs.
As for the finer details of the monetization scheme, we are open to suggestions. Our current line of thinking is to offer a freemium model to teachers at a price subsidized by enterprise sales. We've got some ideas for features which will only be activated when a school buys into the system for all of their teachers and students, as well as some features that would benefit from being hosted and linked with other schools.
As the other poster suggested, teachers might not want to pay for your product. To really break [into] this market, you might have to make it free and look for other ways to monetize (which might open other doors of opportunity here..).
At least from my perspective, teachers don't pay for anything. Most of the education IT market here targets schools (in the UK), with price points to match.
I agree most solutions are fairly complicated (dashboard, moodle). A lot of UK schools are starting VLE (virtual learning environments) with this kind of functionality (albeit more complicated).
I agree about data protection issues although this must be possible to circumvent (probably with the school's consent). Students are typically blocked from accessing outside email at schools.
Selling in to the UK publicly-funded system is a pain. Distributors and VARs may help.
Yeh your potentially revenue model was what lost me a bit :)
My mother is a primary school teacher and so not quite what your after but her experience would probably scale to higher level education. So hopefully my ideas count as semi-insightful :)
I could see this being adopted by university professors in certain circumstances - but the idea of shelling out for it will definitely put them off (trust me - our lecturers claimed for EVERYTHING :D). Plus many universities already have custom portal software that the lecturers have to use (for whatever reason: usually in case of disputes etc.).
Same probably applies to (UK) secondary school (US = high school) level teachers (i.e. they wont want to pay). BUT in their case getting the school to pay for it on "expenses" would be next to impossible (budgets are super tight atm). As I see it this is probably your target market (definitely in the UK anyway) so if you can market it to the schools themselves you might have more success.
Some ideas for you (I apologise I only briefly scanned your app so they could be in place already :) plus some of this is relevant to UK schools and I have no idea how it works in the US - though I would bet it is similar). This also assumes your interested in grouping teachers by school :)
Firstly allow collaboration. In schools usually assignments are designed by one or more subject heads/organisers. If you let said co-ordinator upload all the assignments to somewhere all of the subject teachers can access and send them out to their students this would probably get you a lot of interest. Mostly because if the teachers / subject heads change the historical data is already there to make use of :)
One other idea is to allow some kind of grouping of gradings for a specific email address. One of a teachers BIGGEST gripes is collating reports for their students. If they could see all the awarded grades by subject in one click I bet you would get piles of "we love you" email.
But yes: the main way I see of selling this is pitching it as a "whole school" thing. Individuals, of course, might make regular use of it (perhaps this is your freemium model - free individual, pay-for school-wide collab features) but it is to schools I think you have to pitch it.
Sorry to ramble - it's too hot again :) hopefully something there is useful.
With regard to "It's kinda hard to see the advantages of a one off system like this in that context."
We see this as a major advantage. Most current systems provide (at best) mediocre solutions to the problems their users face. Instead of doing everything and having it all be mediocre, we took a single problem teachers have and solved it the best way we could.
I see that to a point: but a teacher always wants 100% the easiest path. If their "generate pupil report" button (guaranteed to be their #1 gripe writing reports :D you should here my mum are report time!) requires them to have used the inbuilt school system to set assignments then they will just use that - no matter how much better your way is (dont get me wrong, I think it's damn good - I wish we had had this kind of thing!)
I think my main point was that it is a 8great* way to approach this problem - but it needs a bit more on top of it to really sell it to a mass audience (IMO).
I could well be wrong, I have been many time before :)
Thanks for the feedback. We're trying hard to get all perspectives on this issue since we know we're tackling two major problems at once: designing an awesome web app and competing in an entrenched industry.
Again, the feedback is really appreciated, if you think of anything else be sure to let us know (founders@classlet.com)
Don't worry too much about your bloated competition such as Blackboard. I am currently a college student and I hate having having to check blackboard. I would much rather have assignment and announcements emailed to me. Most students are lazy like that too. However there are several things that schools need.
-roster page where students can email the whole class or select number of students
-discussion board
-some communication channel for parents, parents heavily invested in their child and a lot of them have zero clue of what they are learning
-A simple class page incase the student wants to login and get their assignments without their clutter of their email.
I know for definite su8ch things would be frowned on in a lot of institutions here in the UK: probs in the US too.
Another major problem I suspect your going to face is that there are quite a few full on school management systems coming into use (there is a big one kicking about that plenty of schools in the UK have but I forget the name offhand). It's kinda hard to see the advantages of a one off system like this in that context.
Dont get me wrong it's a nifty system if you can convince people to use it. But I think that might be hard.
In terms of commerical prospects that might be even tougher - will you charge per teacher? (possibly unpopular) or will you allow a school/institution to license a bulk lot of accounts to hand to it's teachers?