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.
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
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.
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 Either you paste emails from spreadsheets into Google calendar or you rely on internal mailing lists, which get out of date and make calendar invites hard.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!