Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online https://ift.tt/3l3c6XN

Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online Hey HN! I’m Uday, and I co-founded Epihub [0] with Kwasi and Michael ( https://epihub.com ). Epihub is Shopify for teaching online. Our software lets you schedule, meet, and bill clients from your own website. 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 both a private school in Connecticut while running a non-profit tutoring program in Latin/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'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't. 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's: bringing the actual business online. 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? 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). 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). The stack actually borrows a lot from our original product: it’s an Elixir/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/reserve to handle bookings from prospective clients. It'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.) If there’s anyone running a coaching, tutoring, or training business, or coding bootcamp, we'd love to hear how we could support your team. You can also book a personal onboarding with Mike over Zoom ( https://ift.tt/2E722wo ). 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. [0]: https://epihub.com [1]: https://ift.tt/2QkahFL [2]: https://ift.tt/1toYW87 August 20, 2020 at 02:50AM

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Launch HN: Quell (YC S20) – Immersive gaming and combat workout https://ift.tt/2FAJIMt

Launch HN: Quell (YC S20) – Immersive gaming and combat workout Hey HN, We're Cam, Doug, Lorenzo and Martin, co-founders of Quell ( https://quell.tech ). Quell is an immersive fitness game which guides players through an exciting, effective combat workout at home. Players fight enemies with a low-cost wearable which uses smart resistance bands to simulate real combat training. Our aim is to be Peloton meets gaming meets boxing, at 1/10th of the price. We launched on Kickstarter yesterday, and would love it if you checked us out! Here’s the link: https://ift.tt/3kWx4Yp... We started building Quell because for us, exercise wasn’t fun; it was work. We’d tried all the stats tracking apps and the cycling simulators, but they weren’t treating that root problem. Over time, as the novelty wore off, we were left with the feeling that working out was still boring and uncomfortable. As big gamers, gamification seemed like an obvious solution. We looked at what was happening in this space and felt that exercise games tended to compromise on the exercise or the game. We believed that, if we could get both right, we could make something we’d want to play. Everything in the market was focussed on running, cycling or yoga/pilates, so we went with boxing as a more intense and cathartic alternative. We realised that Quell could be a real business when we started talking to people about exercise. Everyone was facing the same two problems: obstacles, and a lack of reward. The absence of immediate rewards when you exercise means that you have to propel yourself using long-term benefits, and most of us are bad at this. On top of that, seemingly small barriers like weather, travel, set-up, knowledge and equipment sharing have a massive impact on people's ability to commit. The team started working together in February, but we all had other things going on. Cam had just left his career in management consulting to do a design master’s. Martin was wrapping up his PhD in sensor tech at Oxford. Doug was building a business providing remote working and development retreats. Lorenzo was doing a design master’s to pursue a career in prosthetic design. None of us had the financial stability to make this our full-time job, so we decided to develop the product over a year or two in our spare time. After a month, we applied to YC with zero expectation of being accepted. Our idea was basically a punching bag with a screen, and we knew it wasn’t where we wanted it to be. We saw the YC application as a forcing mechanism to put some rigour behind the business, and an exciting experience to go through. Then Covid hit, and the target market went from ‘people who don’t like exercise’ to ‘people who don’t like home exercise or running around the same park every day’. We went into overdrive, using all of our days off and lunch breaks to develop the product. Despite all this effort, the pace was glacial. All the workshops closed during lockdown, so we had no tools. We were separated in different parts of the UK, trying to build hardware via Zoom. Then YC accepted us, and we could finally focus! We left our jobs and degrees. Everyone moved into Cam's apartment. We bought a 3D printer, a sewing machine and a bunch of electronics and textiles. We spent all day every day looping through talking to users, collating insights, designing and prototyping. We learned that no one wanted the hassle of a punchbag, but everyone loved the idea of feeling the satisfying physical resistance of punching something at home. We built a wearable which applied customisable resistance to punches through swappable elastic bands, and it landed well. We started looking at computer vision to translate player punches into the game, but our potential users hated the idea of setting up a camera. After hundreds of hours spent punching the air in our living room, we found that we could get high-accuracy, low-latency gesture recognition through a neural net applied to inertial measurement units in the gloves. We made a quick video and website with our first prototype (link here: https://ift.tt/31d4nPf... ), then started advertising on Facebook and Instagram to see how it landed. The response was incredible, with CPA coming in 75% lower than our benchmarks. We opened pre-orders to test whether these people would convert and got fifty orders in the first month. After drafting our bill of materials, we settled on a price of $200 for the wearable and $10/mo in subscription fees, which works out at less than half the average gym membership. With 55m active gamers paying for a gym membership pre-covid, we estimate a market size of $18bn. With the financials sorted and the early market validation complete, we felt confident in building towards a Kickstarter. For the last month, we’ve been working hard on turning ideas into concept art into game content, making the product look and feel good, shooting the video, writing the copy, pricing, costing, and growing our sign-up list. We launched our Kickstarter yesterday, and have recieved over $60k in pledges in our first 24 hours. You can check out the full video of our new prototype at https://ift.tt/3kWx4Yp... . We’re continuing to develop the hardware and the game in parallel, and would love to hear what HN loves and hates, as well as any questions you might have. We’ll be on here every waking hour (UK time) to respond as soon as humanly possible. Thank you! August 19, 2020 at 08:24PM

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