[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Virtually (YC S20) - Build live online tr...
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Launch HN: Virtually (YC S20) - Build live online trainings
My name is Ish and I'm the founder of Virtually
(https://tryvirtually.com/), a platform that allows anyone to build
live online trainings with built-in support for payment processing,
live classes, and student management. The journey to starting
Virtually began last year while I was trapped in a winter storm. I
was playing around with some video conferencing software and was
very impressed by how far it had come in recent years. With not
much else to do, I started brainstorming about what could one day
be possible with better conferencing technology. An obvious use
case seemed be education. I thought perhaps the best teacher for
any niche topic might not actually be someone in the same city or
state as you, but, instead, could be someone across the globe.
Better video conferencing could lead to more accessible as well as
more affordable education. The thought was powerful enough that I
decided to quit my job at Facebook to start working on Virtually
the next month. My main mission was to enable infrastructure for
live online education. The very first iteration of the product
allowed for content creators to monetize their time by selling
1-on-1 appointments. I don't know if it was the product or the
execution, but it didn't gain much traction. I was lucky to be
invited to interview at YCombinator for the summer 2019 batch but
didn't make it further in the process. I started to explore other
applications of the same technology. One place where it seemed a
live component could have added more value was in the world of
online courses. In 2019, almost all online courses were pre-
recorded. There were a select few experimenting with the live
format (Building a Second Brain for example) and it seemed like
these courses were receiving significantly higher levels of
engagement than traditional online courses. When I dug a bit
deeper, I discovered that building live online courses was
inherently difficult. Either you were a venture-backed startup and
could afford to hire engineers to build out custom technology or
you had to "duct-tape" Zoom, PayPal, Calendly, and a dozen
different tools together. I pivoted the product to help make this
easier. Fast-forward to today- my team and I are working to build
Virtually, a React web app (powered by Next.js) that allows
individual to build live online courses with built-in support for
conferencing, payment processing, and student management. Current
course hosting platforms (Teachable, Kajabi, Thinktific, etc.)
primarily focus on pre-recorded content. We decided to focus on
live online classes as our research showed that live classes
generally have higher completion rates. In addition, we
hypothesized that live learning would help drive higher content
retention through virtual meet-ups, office hours, mastermind
groups, etc. We primarily use http://daily.co/ for video
conferencing but allow users to substitute Zoom or any other
conferencing link. We also integrate with Google Calendar to make
it easier to schedule live sessions. One notable feature is our
"Live Room" which is an always-on conferencing room that is
embedded within your Virtually classroom. With the tool, you're
able to manage multiple concurrent live classes at the same the
same time each with its own "Live Room." If you or someone you
know is trying to build a live online training program, we'd love
to talk to you. Feel free to reach me at ish@tryvirtually.com. I'd
absolutely love to hear any feedback that you might have and will
be around all day to answer questions!
Author : ishbaid
Score : 80 points
Date : 2020-08-04 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
| anonAndOn wrote:
| Minor bug: The pricing link (https://tryvirtually.com/pricing)
| never stops loading.
| ishbaid wrote:
| More than a minor bug We'll get this fixed right away. Thanks
| for the flag!
| wytian wrote:
| Just fixed this! - Wesley, Eng at Virtually
| andygcook wrote:
| Do you have any examples yet of companies using this for user
| training classes? Would be an interesting way to do scalable
| group onboarding.
| ishbaid wrote:
| We've had a few companies are setting something like this up.
| It wasn't the intended use case but could certainly work
| ilovefood wrote:
| Very good job, I signed up and will try it on a new course I am
| currently working on :)
| ishbaid wrote:
| Yay :)
| hydershykh wrote:
| Well executed Best of Luck
| jason-festa wrote:
| Could this type of service be extended to helping musicians? To
| give music lessons, 1x1 or 1:many?
| ishbaid wrote:
| 1:man- certainly. For 1x1, you might be better off using a tool
| like Calendly
| hankchinaski wrote:
| Interesting idea, I don't have a course yet but i'm working on
| it. what kind of support do you have for "income share
| agreements"? is that US based only?
| ishbaid wrote:
| We have a servicing partner that helps with ISA's. When our
| user's request it, we help kickoff that process. Not sure if
| they support international ISA's but I'll certainly ask.
|
| In the future, this will be a much more integrated process with
| our existing software/tools.
| warmcat wrote:
| I am fine with having a lot of options for online education. The
| biggest question for me is how do you make your child sit in
| front of the screen at home and pay attention to the class?
| ishbaid wrote:
| Inherently it's up to the teacher to make the class
| interactive. We as humans don't learn by passively consuming
| content as studies have shown over and over.
| christudor wrote:
| This could be perfect for us. I've just scheduled a demo for
| later today.
| pencildiver wrote:
| Really well executed idea. Great timing too.
| ishbaid wrote:
| Thank you!
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| The idea is great but the customization that comes with Wordpress
| is too valuable for many course creators.
|
| A hosted LMS like this with a Wordpress integration to allow best
| of both worlds is what the industry needs.
| ishbaid wrote:
| Totally. For creators that want the ability to fine tune the
| experience, a plugin is probably better.
|
| The problem arises when you start to duct-tape too many
| solutions together. This creates a very fragmented experiences
| for students and a large amount of admin overhead of course
| creators.
|
| When this happens, we almost always see creators drop the
| wordpress plugin in favor of an existing platform.
| KorfmannArno wrote:
| I'm still searching for a platform in this space, where I as a
| learner can pick and choose classes from various hosts.
| ishbaid wrote:
| We're not quite the best solution for that as we're inherently
| not a marketplace, but I'm certain a player will emerge in that
| space shortly.
| optemization wrote:
| timely as i'm about to figure out how to host online courses for
| my productivity coaching business. your explanation makes a lot
| of sense. from a podcast with austin alred of lambda school, i
| heard that live courses boosted engagement dramatically.
|
| pre-recorded content is attractive because it's one and done and
| doesn't require management beyond occasionally updating. a bunch
| of creators are looking to decouple time from income.
| productivity youtuber with sub 1mil followers is making 1k+ per
| month from one course on skillshare.
|
| since pre-recorded stuff is passive income vs live presentation
| is active, i think it would be helpful for you to communicate the
| monetary (hopefully positive) impact of doing live courses versus
| a pre-recorded ones.
| ishbaid wrote:
| What we've discovered that selling pre-recorded courses isn't
| necessarily "passive Income."
|
| Yes, you don't have to spend your time actively teaching, but
| do have to feed the sales funnel and create awareness for your
| product.
|
| With live courses, while your time is spent more on actively
| teaching, you're able to charge nearly 3x as much because you
| are providing real time support.
|
| In addition, while students initially come for the content,
| they stick around for the community.
| sova wrote:
| Say a student misses a "live session" -- it's probably simple
| enough for them to go back and watch it? I mostly wonder about
| the videos, can I keep them and export them for archival purposes
| later? Can they be shared freely once a course is no longer
| offered, for example? Thanks it looks very nice and the interface
| is slick. The only rough edges I can detect are the "add your own
| image" headers and they are only a smidge away from full clean. I
| would like more imagery to explain what part of navigation I am
| currently in, but once I've read the titles it is clear where
| things sit.
| ishbaid wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. We've created a place with the "Past
| Events" tab for you to store past recordings. You can certainly
| use/distribute these however you like.
| Peer_Rich wrote:
| I've personally worked with ish and I can say this team is really
| trying hard to get everything right. The platform has gone
| through incredible changes! hats off, keep it going. much needed
| product in this current environment and beyond
| diegobanovaz wrote:
| awesome product! If you are planning to host an online / on-
| demand school, it's the right product for you!
| [deleted]
| sakibsauro wrote:
| honestly I've been thinking about the necessity for something
| like this for a while now, especially since the pandemic hit.
| solid product, solving a real problem in the community rn and
| really good timing. extremely optimistic about the future. best
| of wishes guys!
| ishbaid wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words!
| paulie_a wrote:
| I think the timing might be right considering the massive shift
| that has occured in remote learning and work.
|
| I had a startup that did something very similar about 6 years
| ago. The execution and timing were both wrong.but the idea had a
| lot of promise to not just be another lms no one cares about.
|
| I think the concept is fantastic and I wish you the best of luck.
| codegeek wrote:
| disclaimer: I run a business in Online Learning space where we
| provide a more traditional style LMS platform mostly to B2B.
|
| At first, I thought you guys were building the actual virtual
| training tool but after checking out your landing page, it seems
| like the problem you are solving is to provide a simpler way for
| people to manage their entire Live trainings including user
| management, ecommerce/memberships, payments etc BUT the actual
| tool is 3rd party like daily.co, zoom etc, correct ?
|
| I am asking because we get a lot of clients asking for similar
| stuff but they specifically are also interested in the tool
| itself which is a really hard technical challenge to solve. But
| what you guys are solving also has a huge need for sure, so great
| job launching this.
|
| Also curious as to why you chose daily.co as the default virtual
| tool ?
| ishbaid wrote:
| Thank you! Ultimately, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel.
|
| We're never going to create a better conferencing solution than
| Zoom or a better community platform than Slack.
|
| What we're trying to do is act as a layer on top of these tools
| that brings everything together for an educational use case.
|
| We decided to go with Daily because it was the quickest to
| integrate with and allowed us to create an in-browser
| experience that we could customize in the long-term.
|
| But we're realizing now as we expand internationally that
| nothing is more reliable as Zoom. As such, we're building zoom
| integration right now.
| frequentnapper wrote:
| what makes you say that Zoom is most reliable? Did you
| evaluate google meet, etc.?
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(page generated 2020-08-04 23:00 UTC)