ishbaid's comments

Looks awesome! Great work team.

During the past decade of working in startups, I've always struggled with the very first step... finding a great business idea.

The approaches that I've seen all feel too random. The idea tree is a solution I created for myself using concepts I learned studying Computer Science (traversing trees, Breadth-first search, depth-first search, etc...).

The concept is to make finding great business ideas more scientific. I've found the "idea tree" an incredibly useful framework.

That being said, it's still in its infancy stage. Anything that doesn't make sense? Is anything worth elaborating on?

I'd love to hear any feedback you all might have for me.

I've been using Fastgen for the past month or so and really enjoy it for basic use cases.

It's pretty much the fastest way to spin up an API. I'd really love to see how this adapts to serving more advanced use cases in the future.

Great work, team!

Peervine

We're really building for bootcamps and online schools who need attendance data to know who's on track to finishing the program and who's at risk for falling.

it's also useful to communities who want to learn how to better engage members and which types of zoom events drive the most engagement

There's always risk of a big company doing this, but in general, no. We're not worried.

Most startups die by suicide, not homicide.

I totally see your confusion. Our intended audience is online cohort-based programs.

Think online courses, bootcamps, or private commmunities.

Google calendar is great for 1-on-1 and small groups, but when you're managing hundreds of zoom events for a number of different subgroups within a larger community, it's a nightmare.

I'm Ish, the founder of Virtually https://www.tryvirtually.com/calendar. We're the easiest way to manage Zoom events for private communities.

Managing virtual events for more than a few people is a pain. Either you paste emails from spreadsheets into Google calendar or you rely on internal mailing lists, which get out of date and make calendar invites hard. If you want to do events for subgroups, or send out reminders, or track attendance, it gets worse. We make it all easy, for both one-off and recurring events.

We initially built Virtually as an LMS (Learning Management System) for online bootcamps in YC's S20 batch. However, over the past year we learned that our users love us specifically for managing their events. So we split out our events manager into its own product.

We've got an API that can sync with any database, for example to keep track of rosters or roles, and a Zapier integration is coming. Also, the same technology can be used to send out announcements in a targeted way. This will be a prominent feature in an upcoming release.

Our customers include some top cohort-based programs like Building a Second Brain, Flockjay, and Ali Abdaal's PTYA. Building a Second Brain used us to manage 150 live sessions for 1500 students. Throughout their 5-week program, we facilitated 7900 session joins. I would love to hear any feedback that the HN community might have for us!

Thanks for your support, Kwin! We still plan on using Daily as our primary conferencing solution with Zoom as an additional option for users.

Big fan of the product that you and the team are building.

Thank you!

We've tested dozens of video conferencing tools and while many are quite good, we haven't found one that's as good and consistently reliable across the globe as Zoom.

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.

Yay :)

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Thank you!