
Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online - urs
Hey HN! I’m Uday, and I co-founded Epihub [0] with Kwasi and Michael (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;epihub.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;epihub.com</a>). Epihub is Shopify for teaching online. Our software lets you schedule, meet, and bill clients from your own website.<p>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&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;t.<p>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&#x27;s: bringing the actual business online.<p>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?<p>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).<p>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).<p>The stack actually borrows a lot from our original product: it’s an Elixir&#x2F;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&#x2F;reserve to handle bookings from prospective clients. It&#x27;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.)<p>If there’s anyone running a coaching, tutoring, or training business, or coding bootcamp, we&#x27;d love to hear how we could support your team. You can also book a personal onboarding with Mike over Zoom (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vip.epihub.com&#x2F;reserve" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vip.epihub.com&#x2F;reserve</a>).<p>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!<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;epihub.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;epihub.com</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Backward_design" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Backward_design</a>
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nanna
A very exciting project and, as a somewhat alienated university instructor
I'll be spending time thinking about it's possible uses for me. A couple
comments though.

1\. 'Sell your class on Zoom' is a total turn-off for me. As is 'Schedule.
Meet. Bill.' As a teacher I do not 'sell' education - I'm not a Sophist ;) - I
teach, and for that I would ideally like to get paid, but this is not a
conventional commodity-based transaction and so the language of sales is
jarring. Partly this is semantic, 'sell' may work for wine tasting instructors
but not for humanities tutors. But also partly the issue is that I may not
want to sell my teaching. Perhaps I am gaining experience, and want to set up
a model class, to build experience and confidence?

2\. I don't understand why Zoom needs to be so tightly integrated. This isn't
just a classic HN comment about Zoom, it's the fact that there's already an
excellent learning environment called BigBlueButton out there and it's Jitsi
based. Have you considered integrating that?

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untilHellbanned
Great idea. Not crazy about the name though because it doesn’t evoke anything.
I would consider changing.

Why not go all the way with the Shopify analogy and call it Teachify?

~~~
mmackay
μὴ φρόντιζε (don't worry): we have a reason! I used to teach Greek and Latin,
and our very first product, Epigrammar, took its inspiration from Classical
antiquity: the English word “epigram” comes from “ἐπί” (epi) and “γράφειν”
(graphein) meaning “to write upon” (historically, epigrams were written upon
household items such as broken pottery or sea shells). With Epigrammar, we
wanted to digitize the ancient way of writing upon things, so instructors
could give their best feedback once and repurpose it everywhere. Now, with
Epihub, we're still focused on helping instructors (fun fact: Aristotle was a
tutor to Alexander the Great), but at the same time, we also want to help
people build hubs for knowledge (ergo, Epi-hub).

~~~
minxomat
Epihub sounds more like a map of epipen sale points or something like that.
Definitely 0 association with teaching.

~~~
bilbopotter
Yep Epipens was where I went too

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grahamburger
I have been using clarity.fm, they offer a subset of these features. Overall I
really like Clarity, primarily because the product is very simple and doesn't
try to do too much.

I have two problems with Clarity though, and I'll be trying out epihub for
these reasons. The first is that the conference bridge that Clarity provides
is just a voice bridge, which I actually really like for simplicity's sake,
but it's POTS only and sometimes international callers have a hard time
connecting or have audio problems. The billing is based on the length of the
conference call, so it's not super easy to back out to a Zoom call. Second,
Clarity doesn't really support anything like a 'class', only one-on-one
sessions, and I'd like to start doing classes.

Looking forward to giving epihub a shot!

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tylerscott
As a former provider on Helpouts
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_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
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?

~~~
tylerscott
Oh yeah, the graveyard behind Google is massive. haha

Honestly, I can't recall much outside my area of expertise. There were quite
a few fitness folks on there, though.

I wound up doing maybe a dozen or so "Helpouts" and it was a good experience.
I still have my hoodie!

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puranjay
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
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.

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eydis
Congrats on all your hard work, this looks great. I just signed up and am
clicking my way through it, to understand how it works.

One question, regarding subscription. I only see a premium plan, for
£15.00/mo. Are there different levels of subscription? I only ask because I am
thinking of teaching Icelandic online, well, I do teach Icelandic online but
currently only to one student and am feeling a bit overwhelmed by how to
upscale, made the website, created YouTube content, but, not sure what to do
next and whether I'll manage to spread the word enough to justify committing
to a monthly cost or whether to give it up and just keep to that one student.

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hevelvarik
This is exciting. Are you planning or do you already provide a mechanism for
discovery? Meaning a means to browse the available service providers along
with reviews or the like?

I’ve read that Shopify is doing something similar now, and while for them this
comes rather late in their product life cycle, for your product I’d think it
more important and thus worthy of earlier consideration.

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BRSChess
This is awesome for scheduling all my chess training classes and very useful.
When are you guys rolling out a mobile app? Very cool

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implfuture
Awesome demo video, really excited to see where this goes! Are there any use
cases that people complain zoom is insufficient for?

~~~
urs
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.

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rexreed
I'm wondering if this will be useful for an online conference we're putting
together where we need to schedule 1:1s with presenters for expert sessions.
How customizable is the text that appears (Students, Tutorials, etc. ) that
wouldn't be appropriate in a conference setting?

~~~
urs
I think it could work, we haven’t tried it for a conference, but email me
directly (first name at company name.com) so we can make sure you’re setup
right.

To answer your question, not only is every single string of text customizable,
but so is every icon. So you can rebrand and redesign it however you please
and the interface will update.

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adampate
Really cool product! Refereed my family of teachers -- excited to hear more
about their experiences.

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trailrunner46
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!

~~~
urs
Thank you, to be honest Abinsthe and Apollo go together incredibly well.

I think coming from Rails and switching out controllers for resolvers made
adjusting to building SPAs far easier. I still think building routing on the
client side feels strange, but it’s way easier when GraphQL just gives you one
endpoint to hit and with Apollo you just query exactly what you need.

~~~
trailrunner46
Yes, Abinsthe is quite incredible! I have used it with react and vue and had
some success. However lately whenever liveview is the right fit I find myself
fist pumping all over the place. Something magically about writing most of
your code in elixir and only sprinkling JS when needed. Your site is very ui
heavy so I imagine it needs to have a lot of js strictly client side so a SPA
makes sense (I just find the mental overhead of having to deal with a js
framework front end and a elixir backend tricky).

~~~
urs
Yeah the original application borrowed heavily from our first product which
predates LiveView so we stuck with what we knew. Our first product actually
predates contexts and schemas in Phoenix. We started working on it around the
time Phoenix was deprecating models from 1.2 to 1.3.

LiveView is incredible, but I haven’t used it enough to know the shortcomings.
From the outside looking in, it does seem nice to work with a view that’s
already nicely coupled with the app.

~~~
trailrunner46
Makes total sense, I only used LiveView for a new project that I started
within the last year, I can imagine it being tough to only use a little bit in
an existing app, especially if its SPA hitting an api. Cool to see you evolved
as Phoenix evolved.

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PanosJee
Congrats for the launch! Sounds quite similar to Learnworlds. What are the
main differences?

~~~
urs
Thanks for the question. So a pretty big difference from the outset is the
type of customer we focus on (again, correct me if Learnworlds is different).

Where Learnworlds is focused on creators who want to build courses that are
asynchronous. We are focusing on live instruction particularly with businesses
that have already been handling live instruction so teams of tutors, trainers,
teachers, and coaches.

In many ways Learnworlds is quite similar to Kajabi, Teachable, and a whole
host of other great tools for building online courses.

In our case, we started with thinking about existing businesses where a
primary concern is team management as the instruction is live. Coordinating
live instruction already requires a pretty different software stack from an
online course.

In a coaching business of twenty tutors, you have to manage twenty instructor
schedules against schedules for your students, figure who is owed what, who
you have to bill, and provide space for live online instruction.

The last few months, particularly in New York, have made this coordination
problem far worse as these businesses look to move online while trying to keep
their branding and identity front-and-center.

—

Now a number of our users have already asked to be able to sell online
courses/materials, and we have been experimenting with blending asynchronous
online courses with live instruction, so it’s on the roadmap. Right now,
however, our focus is uniquely bringing existing businesses with live
instruction online.

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abhishektwr
Very timely. Just signed up.

~~~
urs
Awesome! Feel free to reach out directly or sign up above with Mike and we'll
be happy to onboard you personally.

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atonse
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.)

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chopraaa
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
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?

~~~
sah2ed
> _Any particular countries you 're looking for?_

The COVID-19 situation will probably persist for a while so why not enable
billing for as many territories as possible?

I haven’t used them but I think a service like Paddle might be a decent
compromise for handling billing in countries not yet supported by Stripe.

[https://paddle.com/](https://paddle.com/)

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mxstbr
Congratulations on the launch Uday and team!!

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wondergirl
Amazing stuff here.. when do you launch India? And would you be launching
regional language capabilities?

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hankh18
Exciting new pivot! Glad to see y'all are doing well, and congrats on getting
in to YC! -Hank (from Elab)

~~~
koppong
Thanks for the kind words, Hank; it's great to hear from you!

-Kwasi

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tarun_anand
This sounds like Classplus in India. Is there a reverse concept arbitrage
going on here?

