https://www.tryvirtually.com/

A virtual classroom builder

We’re building tools to power online trade schools. With our software, anyone can build a “Lambda School for X” business.

Primarily, we bring together the most important components of any modern online school: admissions, live conferencing, payment processing, student/community management, and income share agreement tracking.

New York, NY / New York, NY

We built and launched this software in mid-November of last year. Since then, we’ve become the host for five online training programs.

In total, these programs have generated $1,570 in revenue with over 200 student participants.

The recent COVID-19 virus has created a surge of interest for this product and led to a large amount of interest from instructors and professors looking to build their virtual classroom. We’re doing our best to onboard them onto our software.

I’ve been full-time since leaving my software engineering role at Facebook in March of 2019. Since then, the company direction has changed 2–3 times after valuable insight from customers until eventually settling on this iteration in mid-November, 2019.

Yes, five different training programs are using Virtually as their primary hosting platform. In total, over 200 students have participated in these online training programs.
These programs are largely being led by online creators with large online followings.

We’ve applied before with different iterations of the same company.

Our biggest learning has been that just selling online courses doesn’t cut it for most content creators. In order to attract high-ticket customers, online educators must turn to provide premium options to their students which includes real-time support either in 1-on-1 or group setting rather than just pre-recorded video.

On the consumer side, we learned that for consumers to pay high-ticket prices ($1,000+) for any online educational program, it has to have very high ROI, often meaning transformational for their life and/or career. We’ve decided to double down on empowering career education, specifically mid-career education.

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For the past year, I’ve built intimate relationships with 30+ influential content creators and online educators. From them, I’ve learned the pains of building an internet business.

We originally built this software to power our own training programs, but over time we had clients reach out and ask if they could use it to host their own classes/memberships.

As such, we’ve generalized the software so that it can be used by any individual/organization.

We take the engineering out of building an online trade school so educators can focus teaching their craft. Our tool streamlines the administrative side of running an online trade school by creating an all-in-one solution for admissions, payment processing, live conferencing, and student management.

Content creators are hacking together a few different tools to replicate this experience on their own: Zoom, Calendly, Facebook groups, Google forms, etc..

Companies like Lambda School, Flockjay, and Jumpcut are building these tools from scratch which requires a tremendous amount of engineering effort.

Soon anybody and any organization, not just venture-backed startups, will be able to start risk-free online trade school. Yay!

We’re not seeing majors players in this space, but companies that are most equipped to take on this space:

• Mighty Networks
• Teachable
• Lambda School

We fear Teachable the most due to their access to a rich pool of online creators.

It’s important to note here that online courses don’t cut it for career-changing education.

A few things really:

1. Online trade schools are the future. Online courses are a generally ineffective medium for job training as only 13% of those bought are ever finished. For career-changing education, students need a project-based environment with direct access to the instructor and peers (for accountability and social pressure).
2. Mid-career education and job retraining will continue to become increasingly important. Only 27% of college graduates land a job related to their major. This along with a host of other factors is leading to record job dissatisfaction rates; however, students aren’t willing to enroll in expensive 2–4 year-long programs to fix this problem. They want a more lightweight solution that helps them pick up new skills without the high cost of traditional universities.
3. Income Share Agreements are essential for any mid-career educational programs to work. Unlike undergraduate programs, which can be financed through the support of your parents and/or student loans, the risk of transitioning to a new career after undergrad is drastically higher. ISA’s help de-risk this transition by requiring students to only pay the institution back if they are successful.

It’s free to accept the first ten students. From there, we charge $25 / month for every additional cohort of ten students.

There are about 5.3 million active online educators, creators, and organizations that we think could leverage this technology to create virtual classrooms. If we, specifically, target online mid-career education, our total addressable market is $6.36 billion with room to grow if we expand to enterprise or government training opportunities.

Most of our initial users have come from my pre-existing relationships with creators. We’ve generally found that content creators are vocal about the software that they enjoy using and for that reason we expect they will be our biggest engine for growth.

Yes. We’re a Delaware C-Corp

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I was a previous Software Engineer at Facebook and write all our code.

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We want to access the mentorship and network that comes with Y Combinator brand as we think it would greatly accelerate our trajectory to become a massive technology company.

I won the YCombinator hackathon in 2018 (Astral Trade); also have attended Startup School the past three years and have experienced, first-hand, the value in the YCombinator community.

YCombinator hackathon + Startup School + YC Podcast