[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) - Shopify for teaching on...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) - Shopify for teaching online
Hey HN! I'm Uday, and I co-founded Epihub [0] with Kwasi and
Michael (https://epihub.com). Epihub is Shopify for teaching
online. Our software lets you schedule, meet, and bill clients from
your own website. A few years ago, we started building a product
called Epigrammar, which was a collaborative document annotation
tool that let teachers rapidly give feedback to their students by
identifying trends in their feedback. Kwasi and I really wanted to
see if we could scale the tutoring experience to an entire
classroom, since my co-founder Mike was teaching Classics at a
private school in Connecticut while running a non-profit tutoring
program in Latin/Greek for public school students in New York. Mike
would try out our products that we had built over the weekend
during the week (sometimes to success), but oftentimes, things were
not actually helping him teach. That's when we'd go back to the
drawing board. We spent a few years experimenting with different
ideas in edtech trying to scale tutoring, as we obsessed over
Bloom's 2 sigma problem [1] including Superhuman for grading and
even a test generator that could build assessments based on
"backward-design [2]. We all lived together in Manhattan, built
stuff, and would send it out to Mike to see what worked and what
didn't. This spring, however, as COVID-19 shut down local
businesses across the city (we still live in New York), we realized
that there were much bigger problems facing tutoring, coaching, and
training businesses like Mike's: bringing the actual business
online. Whether you want to start up a coding bootcamp or run a
tutoring business, you need a handful of products that are
(ideally) white-labeled: a website builder, a way to process
application forms, a CRM, a system to book appointments, a
ticketing system for virtual classes, virtual classrooms,
invoicing, and paystub tracking. When we spoke with tutors,
coaches, and trainers, it was clear that there was a similar
problem facing many different but similar businesses. How do you
handle appointments? How do you handle virtual classes? How do you
manage your team's schedules? We spent our summer trying to build
everything end-to-end, and finally, we're excited to share that
product with you today. Epihub lets you build a website (or embeds
into your existing website) and also comes with a full system to
schedule, meet, and bill clients in one place (you can change all
the buttons, images, and language within your account to reflect
your business so you can rename your employees to instructors or
your currency to Solari). Similarly, you're working online with
individuals or groups, you can start teaching anyone on
username.epihub.com and easily grow your entire team by adding
additional seats for new instructors to manage their schedules and
paystubs. So far, we've been working with tutors, coaches,
trainers, but we have seen a bunch of interesting use-cases as well
(including someone who wants to set up Epihub for virtual wine
tasting and tours). The stack actually borrows a lot from our
original product: it's an Elixir/Phoenix application with a React
frontend. We have a Zoom and Google Calendar integration, so you'll
also see appointments and requests in your calendar, as each hub
comes with yoursubdomain.epihub.com/reserve to handle bookings from
prospective clients. It's like a Calendly built to scale your
team's operations by syncing up invoicing, paystubs, and virtual
classrooms. (Recently, we've been contemplating Liquid templating,
and we're considering building a Wordpress plugin. If anyone has
worked with Liquid, Kwasi and I would love to chat.) If there's
anyone running a coaching, tutoring, or training business, or
coding bootcamp, we'd love to hear how we could support your team.
You can also book a personal onboarding with Mike over Zoom
(https://vip.epihub.com/reserve). Finally, I've been a member of
HN for as long as I can remember. I've had my share of unfinished
projects, and things I've been a bit nervous to launch here. I
didn't think I ever would launch anything, so this is pretty
exciting. I'll be online all day with my co-founders to chat about
Epihub, tutoring, backward design, or Elixir in no specific order!
[0]: https://epihub.com [1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem [2]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_design
Author : urs
Score : 57 points
Date : 2020-08-19 19:50 UTC (3 hours ago)
| tylerscott wrote:
| As a former provider on Helpouts
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Helpouts) who was sad to
| see it go, I am excited to see more products like this. Good
| luck!
| urs wrote:
| I'm always amazed by the sheer number of products Google has
| built and sunset. I didn't actually know about this, but it
| sent me down a rabbit hole. What kind of work was most popular
| on Helpouts?
| puranjay wrote:
| How many all-nighters did you guys pull to launch at this time?
|
| In all seriousness, the product looks great and I wish you the
| best.
| urs wrote:
| This made me laugh so thank you, but in all seriousness, we
| started by working through the lifecycle of a customer from the
| top and push it to the end. The first part being, how do you
| meet and qualify a new client, to the last part where you're
| handling paystubs and invoicing clients.
|
| There are a ton of things I wish we handled better,
| particularly on-boarding where although it's self-serve, it
| needs work, but we did figure it's better to launch and learn
| from more users before building more software.
|
| The second thing was we used the product itself to onboard
| (vip.epihub.com/reserve), and again once we were users, we kept
| pushing until it worked well enough for us to train people on
| how to use our product.
| trailrunner46 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. As a fellow elixir enthusiast I wanted to
| say nice work integrating the client side and pulling this
| together, you are doing a ton of stuff all at once. I don't have
| a use case right now but still will poke around to see what you
| have built!
| zachgleicher wrote:
| Super cool! Looking forward to trying it out.
| urs wrote:
| Feel free to shoot me an email directly at first if I can help
| with any onboarding related questions.
| vdthatte wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!!
| urs wrote:
| Thanks! It's been a busy few months, but excited to get it out
| the gate.
| abhishektwr wrote:
| Very timely. Just signed up.
| urs wrote:
| Awesome! Feel free to reach out directly or sign up above with
| Mike and we'll be happy to onboard you personally.
| implfuture wrote:
| Awesome demo video, really excited to see where this goes! Are
| there any use cases that people complain zoom is insufficient
| for?
| mmackay wrote:
| Thank you for the kinds words, and so far, so happy with Zoom!
| But if you're using Google Meet, for example, and would like to
| stick with that system, you can also "Add Google Meet video
| conferencing" to Epihub appointments via our Google Calendar
| integration.
| urs wrote:
| Great question. We built the product originally to help us
| bring a tutoring business online as in-person instruction was
| impossible.
|
| Again, these were businesses built around live instruction so
| the only option was video. Zoom was the one place where we
| opted for an integration as there's simply no way we could
| build better video than Zoom given a limited (or unlimited)
| time frame.
|
| We actually built tooling inside to pick locations for your
| classes and appointments, but so far they have rarely been
| used.
|
| Next we had a bunch of tools from our first product in Epihub,
| but something we learned from talking to teachers and having
| built tools for instructors was that you really didn't need too
| much. Teachers know how to teach so the best tooling isn't
| something overly prescriptive, but something in a virtual
| classroom isomorphic to a real classroom like a virtual
| whiteboard.
|
| Again, we're really new, so we're still learning.
| hankh18 wrote:
| Exciting new pivot! Glad to see y'all are doing well, and
| congrats on getting in to YC! -Hank (from Elab)
| koppong wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words, Hank; it's great to hear from you!
|
| -Kwasi
| chopraaa wrote:
| Would've been super useful if you mentioned what countries you
| currently support. I went to sign up and closed the tab feeling
| disappointed.
| urs wrote:
| Yeah we're currently limited by Stripe Express, but we'll
| probably look to expand relatively soon. We've been looking at
| RazorPay for India or even enabling Stripe Standard accounts
| across the board. Any particular countries you're looking for?
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Hope you're looking at South Africa! They're still waiting
| for stripe but I think this would do well there.
| koppong wrote:
| Sorry to hear that! Just so you know, we support the US,
| Canada, Great Britain, and several EU nations! The full list of
| supported countries is on the page right after you create an
| account, but we'll move that information earlier in the
| onboarding flow.
| PanosJee wrote:
| Congrats for the launch! Sounds quite similar to Learnworlds.
| What are the main differences?
| [deleted]
| atonse wrote:
| Good luck! The product looks great and I'll spread the word
| around. (From a fellow founder that's using Elixir/Phoenix in our
| stack, but for COVID-response related stuff.)
| cgmelamed wrote:
| This sounds awesome, congrats!!!
| urs wrote:
| Thanks! Let me know if I can help with anything.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-08-19 23:00 UTC)