Show HN: Highbrow – Bite-sized email courses delivered to your inbox daily

http://gohighbrow.com

by gohighbrow • 11 years ago

78 31 11 years ago

gohighbrow.com

mpweiher• 11 years ago

"Develop a new good habit with emails delivered to your inbox every morning"

First good habit: not having spam I react to in my inbox every morning.

harperlee• 11 years ago

One of the things of being on an european time zone is that when an american assumes that he's going to write you in the morning, it actually does it just after lunch :)

Joke aside, it would be awesome for this to have two things: 1) The ability to set a delivery hour 2) The ability to not receive emails on weekends

Apart from that, it's an interesting way to apply spaced repetition / exposure to knowledge.

gohighbrow6• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! We plan to carry out features like time/days of an email delivery soon. Hope you'll enjoy!

desireco42• 11 years ago

I had same thought :)

danielparks• 11 years ago

I'm not really sure how this is a personal knowledge hacking tool, but mini-lessons or articles emailed to me everyday might be interesting. I signed up for paradoxes.

It's an awful lot of courses to pick through when you're signing up. Maybe just offer the five most popular to start?

gohighbrow6• 11 years ago

It's a great idea, thanks!

CodeWriter23• 11 years ago

I'd suggest the 5 best quality courses, and a "More.." button. The "buzzfeed" comment elsewhere leads me to believe the other guy picked one of the courses that was not curated as well as what I chose, which is the basis of my suggestion.

I've received one highbrow email thus far, and I am happy for reading a good quality blog post instead of having to sift through serps and junk blogs for myself, and also to learn about some new resources in my area of interest. I totally get the one thing at a time, 5 minute per day commitment, I think it's a great idea.

dalys• 11 years ago

I also second this. A good approach may be to show 3-5 subjects (e.g. Philosophy, Startups, Architecture) and highlight one of the courses that would be the best beginners course. So if I'm interested in philosophy it's very easy to just see immediately where I could/should begin and click just one button. Going in to feature creep here but; as I just signed up I haven't completed a course yet, obviously, so I don't know what happens then, but it would be great (for retention etc.) to be recommended a natural next course to take as well. Dumb it down for the user even more. Actually what I would do is to have a button in the last email of a course that would read "Continue with GREATEST PHILOSOPHERS IN HISTORY". So just one click and I would be in the loop again.

I definitely got in to a "oh this is nice.. and this too.. and these two would be cool..". At the same having the full catalogue of courses available is good of course, but don't overwhelm the first time user.

I would test having the "popular courses" feature, or something like proposed above, just under your headline actually. So it's super easy to see what the site is really about without even having to scroll. That would show off the kind of content you have and even though your name is Highbrow, it might not be clear if you're teaching out nail painting techniques or philosophy when I just read the headline and the feature list you have.

Great idea anyway and nice execution. :)

leadgen• 11 years ago

good luck...loved the idea!!!

mikegioia• 11 years ago

This is off-topic, but does anyone look at their website without javascript enabled? For some reason you actively suppress the content with a loading image even though it's fully rendered beneath that overlay.

    <script>
        document.getElementById( 'preloader' )
            .style
            .display = 'block';
    </script>

That's all you need to do :)

gohighbrow6• 11 years ago

thanks! we'll definitely try it.

MrAlmostWrong• 11 years ago

I was wondering why there was even a loading image in the first place. Not like this is a web app. It's a simple content site so I just expect the next page to load.

If anything the spinner makes it seem like the page loads even slower.

Looking at the source the site uses WordPress. Couldn't you just slap in a plugin like WP Super Cache and have everything cached up and loaded up instantly?

gohighbrow6• 11 years ago

Thanks for an advice. It's a default settings of this wp theme, I guess. We'll try to use WP Super Cache plugin to make a site loading faster.

valvar• 11 years ago

Misleading name, in my opinion. Looks almost like a collection of buzzfeed articles, served with delay via e-mail.

jszymborski• 11 years ago

I agree, and I think it's disappointing because it had potential.

e.g Have a course on Cathedrals, e-mail me a picture of a cathedral everyday/week, and offer the same uniform info for each one... like Country, Style, Influences, Year, and a general short description.

versus

Have a courses on "famous paintings" and e-mail me with paintings I obviously already know about (hence "famous").

pashkentiy• 11 years ago

All the best guys, e-learning is always a good idea

rhubarbcustard• 11 years ago

Nice work, love the layout of the site and the courses look interesting. Maybe some info on who put each course together would be useful? I've signed up to the short story course.

It was a dark and stormy night....

dmolony• 11 years ago

Why do we have to sign up for anything? Just make it a browsable list of interesting articles.

mholt2• 11 years ago

I think having the articles come to your inbox on a regular basis is a more interesting, novel approach than me having to scan them myself. Feels more personal.

m3h• 11 years ago

"You can only subscribe to one course at a time". Beats me.

gohighbrow6• 11 years ago

We want you to form a good daily habit and not tire yourself out at the same time. Thus, you can subscribe to only one course at a time and take all the courses one by one.

mholt2• 11 years ago

If you don't already, maybe you should explain this on the site. Maybe allow the user to sign up for 2 or 3 courses at a time if they really want to though? You could still warn them before they try to bite off more than they can chew...

jpd• 11 years ago

You could coalesce the other courses.

  Day1: Course1
  Day2: Course2
  Day3: Course3
  Day4: Course1
  etc,...

wingerlang• 11 years ago

Using gmail I guess you could fix that with the + thing. Might work with other services also, but I only use gmail.

SpaceInvader• 11 years ago

The idea is not bad, set of topics is interesting and seems to be enjoyable. I do reading everyday during my lunch break so I look forward to this.

kenko• 11 years ago

I don't think there could be anything more middlebrow than this.

abhididdigi• 11 years ago

This is good, but how do I add multiple lessons? I don't see how to do it. It's not very user friendly.

nastygibbon• 11 years ago

This. I'd love to subscribe to more than one lesson at a time.

gohighbrow6• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, you can't. Highbrow is a one-course at a time deal. We want you to form a good daily habit and not tire yourself out at the same time. Thus, you can subscribe to only one course at a time and take all the courses one by one.

aml183• 11 years ago

Awesome stuff!

Show HN: Highbrow – Bite-sized email courses delivered to your inbox daily

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