
Launch HN: Virtually (YC S20) – Build live online trainings - ishbaid
My name is Ish and I&#x27;m the founder of Virtually (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryvirtually.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryvirtually.com&#x2F;</a>), a platform that allows anyone to build live online trainings with built-in support for payment processing, live classes, and student management.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t know if it was the product or the execution, but it didn&#x27;t gain much traction. I was lucky to be invited to interview at YCombinator for the summer 2019 batch but didn&#x27;t make it further in the process.<p>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 &quot;duct-tape&quot; Zoom, PayPal, Calendly, and a dozen different tools together. I pivoted the product to help make this easier.<p>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.<p>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.<p>We primarily use <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;daily.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;daily.co&#x2F;</a> 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.<p>One notable feature is our &quot;Live Room&quot; which is an always-on conferencing room that is embedded within your Virtually classroom.  With the tool, you&#x27;re able to manage multiple concurrent live classes at the same the same time each with its own &quot;Live Room.&quot;<p>If you or someone you know is trying to build a live online training program, we&#x27;d love to talk to you. Feel free to reach me at ish@tryvirtually.com.<p>I&#x27;d absolutely love to hear any feedback that you might have and will be around all day to answer questions!
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optemization
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.

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ishbaid
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.

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ninenines
Congrats Ish on the launch.

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

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sova
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.

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ishbaid
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.

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anonAndOn
Minor bug: The pricing link
([https://tryvirtually.com/pricing](https://tryvirtually.com/pricing)) never
stops loading.

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ishbaid
More than a minor bug We'll get this fixed right away. Thanks for the flag!

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wytian
Just fixed this! - Wesley, Eng at Virtually

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hankchinaski
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?

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ishbaid
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.

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paulie_a
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.

~~~
ishbaid
Thank you!

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codegeek
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 ?

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ishbaid
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.

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frequentnapper
what makes you say that Zoom is most reliable? Did you evaluate google meet,
etc.?

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codegeek
As someone who sells Online Learning Platforms, I can confirm that zoom is the
most reliable and popular right now. Initially I hated zoom but I have
personally tested at least 10 different tools and zoom beats them overall with
a perfect balance between usability, performance and most importantly: cost.

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bestnameever
what are your thoughts on Adobe Connect?

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ciberado
I've delivered some sessions with Connect. It has a very very nice
implementation of dynamic rooms, but both it's UX and user interface are
outdated.

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).

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bestnameever
Thanks, I'm exploring twilio right now and it doesn't seem too bad to work
with but that is just me playing around with it. How it handles in the real
world could be a different story.

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sakibsauro
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
Thanks for the kind words!

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jason-festa
Could this type of service be extended to helping musicians? To give music
lessons, 1x1 or 1:many?

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ishbaid
1:man- certainly. For 1x1, you might be better off using a tool like Calendly

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ilovefood
Very good job, I signed up and will try it on a new course I am currently
working on :)

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ishbaid
Yay :)

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godzillabrennus
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.

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ishbaid
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.

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warmcat
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
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.

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andygcook
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
We've had a few companies are setting something like this up. It wasn't the
intended use case but could certainly work

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KorfmannArno
I'm still searching for a platform in this space, where I as a learner can
pick and choose classes from various hosts.

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ishbaid
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.

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pencildiver
Really well executed idea. Great timing too.

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ishbaid
Thank you!

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christudor
This could be perfect for us. I've just scheduled a demo for later today.

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hydershykh
Well executed Best of Luck

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Peer_Rich
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

