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Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#31

Post by tylerscott »

urs wrote: post #22
tylerscott wrote: post #9

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!

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?

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!

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#32

Post by urs »

PanosJee wrote: post #16

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

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.

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#33

Post by urs »

trailrunner46 wrote: post #30
urs wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#34

Post by trailrunner46 »

urs wrote: post #33
trailrunner46 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 wit…

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.

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#35

Post by 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!

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#36

Post by mmackay »

untilHellbanned wrote: post #27

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?

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).

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#37

Post by pottertheotter »

untilHellbanned wrote: post #27

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?

Yeah, I find this name very confusing. I would never guess it has anything to do with teaching, but that's not the bad part. Epi is a common shortening of epidemiology. To me it screams some sort of epidemiology/public health platform. So "epihub" has a reasonable connotation that has nothing to do with their brand that they will have to actively fight.

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#38

Post by vladsanchez »

mmackay wrote: post #36
untilHellbanned wrote: post #27

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?

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 w…

This rationalization only works for you. I also concur that "Teachify" will be more compelling and more brand-able. Change it! ;-)

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#39

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mmackay wrote: post #36
untilHellbanned wrote: post #27

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?

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 w…

epigrammar works as sort of a nice play on words when you consider epigram. But epihub does not.

Teachify is much better. The only point against it is it isn't very euphonious but then neither is epihub.

Maybe edify, since it is already a word. But I think even so Teachify is better because everyone gets immediately sort of what your problem domain is.

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#40

Post by sah2ed »

urs wrote: post #21
chopraaa wrote: post #14

Would've been super useful if you mentioned what countries you currently support. I went to sign up and closed the tab feeling disappointed.

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?

> 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/

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