Launch HN: Virtually (YC S20) – Build live online trainings
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!
43 comments
[ 20.1 ms ] story [ 631 ms ] threadpre-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.
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.
In the future, this will be a much more integrated process with our existing software/tools.
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 ?
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.
We'll continue to evaluate new tools and integrate with whichever our users tell us they want. At the moment, they tell us that they want Zoom.
Hi Ish, thank you for choosing Daily. We really appreciate it. We monitor our own call quality and reliability, that of all the other API services, and that of Zoom. We think we're making progress towards getting to Zoom's gold standard of call quality and reliability everywhere in the world except China.
We currently have server clusters in seven global locations and are adding three more this month. We're moving all of our calls over to web socket signaling that terminates in the cluster nearest to each user (rather than terminating to AWS US-West-2).
And, most importantly, we're about to ship a public version of our call logging and telemetry tools. This will allow you to look at each of your calls and, if anything impacted the user experience, understand exactly what happened and why.
(China, The Great Firewall, and what you have to do in order not to be blocked some of the time in China is a big topic.)
Big fan of the product that you and the team are building.
The presenter ability for arranging the interface options for the session may look like a good idea when you think about it until you realize everybody wants to take their approach for it (different styles, different monitors, or even different priorities depending if the chat is being used or the interaction is done with the cameras).
Overall, I prefer any other tool (and I've also used zoom, teams, chime, and jitsi).
A hosted LMS like this with a Wordpress integration to allow best of both worlds is what the industry needs.
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.
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.
Considering you are building on top of zoom et all, you can try making your bandwidth costs close zero by leveraging the data feed of Zoom or Google Meet itself by being a browser extension
We did they same and are able to enhance learning experience on top of zoom/meet quite a bit by tinkering with the video,audio feed being fed to them without putting a hole in the pocket(due to bandwidth costs), in turn gains being translated to the customers and being able to add enhancements super quickly.
Congratulations once again and Good luck, from India