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/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://vip.epihub.com/reserve).
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
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?
Why not go all the way with the Shopify analogy and call it Teachify?
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.
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!
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!
In all seriousness, the product looks great and I wish you the best.
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.
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.
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.