Ask HN: Looking for feedback/advice on handwritr.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873596

by deutronium • 16 years ago

12 19 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've been working on this little site in my spare time which makes use of Amazon Mechanical Turk. I got some really useful feedback from you guys off #startups last night, so thought I'd post here too.

Thanks!

DanLivesHere2• 16 years ago

How much are you paying AMT workers?

deutronium9• 16 years ago

At the moment that is quite flexible, I'm thinking of creating different pricing schemes to get jobs completed within set time frames.

petervandijck• 16 years ago

Looks like an AWESOME service. Now it's all marketing, you have to find groups of people that are interested in this. (College professors?)

DanLivesHere2• 16 years ago

That's kind of what I was thinking. I feel like I could market it (it's what I do) but the margins could be too tight.

deutronium9• 16 years ago

Hi Dan, I'd really like to talk to you about that, couldn't see any e-mail on your profile, mind dropping me a mail at sales [at] handwritr.com?

deutronium9• 16 years ago

Thanks! Colleges where one of the places I thought of targeting too.

Jabbles• 16 years ago

http://www.handwritr.com/

Sounds like a nice idea, you may need more stringent rules on what constitutes a "page" though.

deutronium9• 16 years ago

Good point, possibly pricing could be based on word count instead.

percept• 16 years ago

Interesting idea. I wonder which businesses might be interested in the service (assuming higher profit margins there since you're paying human workers).

Maybe attorneys, for discovered documents? Accounting? Or historical research? Some authors prefer to write in longhand . . .

Do scanning companies ever outsource manual jobs?

For consumers, how about family histories or recipes? [There are companies which create family cookbooks, for example.]

I think the site copy is like a first draft in its current state--a good start, but could be shorter and punchier (copywriting's hard). Find out what people are searching for in your niche and weave more keyphrases into the text.

I also suggest working on the text layout to better distinguish your points. I consider the remainder "good enough," with the possible exception of the logo. But selling is more important--clearly and briefly explain what you're selling and present a call to action (maybe make the "Go" action clearer).

deutronium9• 16 years ago

Thanks a lot! You've given me lots of things to think about.

user24• 16 years ago

Great idea. Why not tack on an OCR package too for people who are scanning in printed documents or screenshots that they want converting to text. You can automate that. If the quality of OCR isn't good enough then you might be able to reduce your turk costs by saying "correct this page" instead of "transcribe this page".

Good luck!

deutronium9• 16 years ago

Cheers, thats a nice idea i'll look into that.

entreprenewb• 16 years ago

Bump on this. I know that with medical transcription using speech recognition and then a transcriptionist turnaround time can improve from around 4 or 5 hours to 20-30 minutes or less.

Along those lines, consider charging per line transcribed rather than per page. Customers with short documents might balk at the price when they don't need a full page transcribed. And using a standard transcription character width means that you'll have more granular data.

And if you don't already have a terms of service (I didn't delve deep into your site, but didn't see it readily obvious) you need one that informs the user that the final documents are not guaranteed perfect and have some agreement that will relieve you from the liability if the user doesn't review their own document before using it in a professional capacity. A minimal error in a legal or medical document that isn't reviewed could have costly implications.

Lastly, two nitpicks: 1) you have the word "transcriber" on the landing page, but "transcriptionist" is the more common term for the occupation (e.g. medical transcriptionist) 2) The "Go" link in the header and footer isn't descriptive. Why not have a link that says "Transcribe" or something more readily meaningful than "Go"?

unohoo• 16 years ago

look for some website templates at themeforest.com -- you can use them as a base to increase usability.

deutronium9• 16 years ago

Cheers for the link, the original design was semi-based on one from there. I've just switched to another from there, which I think looks nicer.

abyssknight• 16 years ago

Wow, that's a great idea. The only thing I'd say you need is more information about the service itself. Emphasize that real humans are looking at these documents, and explain the physics of the system a little more. That would differentiate you from OCR and other silly handwriting recognition software. Might want to flesh out a privacy policy too just in case someone uploads their personally identifiable information or the plans to some kind of bad thing.

deutronium9• 16 years ago

Cheers, thats a very good point.

alastair• 16 years ago

Neat idea. Not sure if you're already doing this but you could OCR the document first and have the MT worker just fix the mistakes. This may reduce your costs + provide a faster turn around.

Ask HN: Looking for feedback/advice on handwritr.com

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