Episode with Ish Baid (Founder & CEO of Virtually)

Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Building Public Podcast. I'm your host KP, and today I'm joined by a very special guest, a good friend of mine, a founder, founder of a YC startup called Virtually, someone who geeks out just like me on the topics of education, edtech, cohort-based courses, and the future of online communities. So Welcome to the show, Ish Baid.

Hey, KP, great to be here.

Awesome. We were just chatting about a topic that I wanted to dive in, you know, before we started, and that is the notion of innovation and how it has crests and troughs, how there could be many, you know, false starts. There could be a lot of hype in the early days and suddenly wanes off. And I want to address it because I think last year was the year where everybody talked about CBCs, cohort-based courses, and it felt like it reached peak hype, both in terms of being on top of mind for consumers, but also being such a great revenue machine. And as we're seeing, all of us, the winter is coming, right? The courses. And now, I mean, I think a lot of creators are realizing, I just can't have that sustainable, that kind of growth that I had the first 3 months or 6 months. How do you feel about this as a topic level? And then we'll deep dive into specific things.

Yeah, I mean, KP, one of my favorite books I've ever read is this one called Loonshots. And the entire topic of the book is this idea of how innovation has these false starts where all— when we— when you really think about it, all the breakthroughs in history, they had this moment where it just seemed like everything came together and things clicked and then nothing. So it, I think, is a common theme we see over and over. And I think right before this we were talking about it, the internet, the rise of the internet. When we talk about the rise of mobile technology and smartphones, we talk about tablets. When you look at the VR and crypto. CBDCs is, I think, the most recent example. But I think even NFTs is experiencing the same thing where there's this idea of you see this really extreme rapid growth and adoption from the market before people really understand the use cases, the right use cases of the product. And what happens is right after this excitement, this growth is just not sustainable. So then very quickly afterwards, you see a drop-off. But what comes next is, I think, what is the most exciting part about any technological innovation, which is that steady, sustainable rope, something that is actually feasible for the long term. And that's the kind of innovation that we should be really striving for right now.

I love how you phrased it with other examples from history, right, including the dot-com and crypto and the latest being NFTs. I mean, I was shocked and we're recording this podcast in early November, and I was shocked that there was an unbelievable amount of activity in September and October in the NFT space on OpenSea or Rarible and all these other platforms. And end of October was a deep dive, a deep nosedive. And now Everyone's calling it the bear market, right? It's so interesting. And so the true enthusiasts, the people who fully get what the technology can do, will do in the future, are here to stay, in my view. But the people who were here for like a quick, you know, quick buck, or they were trying to do some kind of short-term transaction, are not going to survive this winter, right? And so, so tell us a little bit about CBDCs. And I want to understand like where the hype started, you know, or where the innovation first started. And why it is here to stay.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's such a great thing to talk about here because I think too many people get focused on this term cohort-based course without understanding kind of the fundamentals. Right. And then it's the same thing happening with crypto. Right. I think it's just this idea of like, you're totally right. I mean, we saw this happen in 2017. There was this hype period where you saw ICOs like every other week and then the market just fizzled out. But the true innovators who actually saw kind of, hey, there's, there's something really fundamental here about this idea of ownership, about not being able to forge, being able to verify a clear line of transactions. There's something really powerful there. And we're seeing, you know, one of the first applications there with NFTs. But, you know, who knows where else this will go from there? Right. This is just the very first application. So, yes, you're right. The people who are there just to get rich, they're not going to be dedicated for the long term. So they're just— they're going to get bored. They're going to move on to the next big thing. I think the real innovators are the people who this isn't They didn't join it for the fad. They were here before and they'll be here long after. And that's what we think about with CBCs. Again, we were working on this space long before CBCs was even a term, right? My background is I'm an immigrant. So my family immigrated from India to North America when I was just 5. And I had very, very early experiences with education that made me realize that something needed to be fixed. So my parents, they both had master's credentials. My dad had an MBA, my mom had a master's in English. And despite that, they ended up working very low-level jobs. My mom bagging groceries, my Dad was selling fax machines on the phone, and it was only through perseverance and grit that they worked their way up to what they're doing today. And now they're just crushing it. But they didn't do it because of the credentials or the education they had. They actually did it in spite of it. Mm-hmm. My mom learned to code at the same time I did by just watching YouTube tutorials. And for her, that put her on the path to running an engineering team at a healthcare IT company. For me, it put me on the path to becoming a software engineer at Facebook. And so I spent about 2 years at Facebook, but I just had the itch. You know, I have always loved building things and I, you know, at an early age I could really tell there was something broken about education. I could see the power of online education. I could tell that, hey, like if you could make education work online the way it does in person, you could make it so much more accessible and so much more affordable and you wouldn't be limited to learn from the people who were only in your zip code, right? And so I think that realization was so powerful. I decided to quit Facebook the next week, work on Virtually full-time. This is 2019. Right. So this is way pre-pandemic. This is way before CBCs are a thing. I just knew this idea of like, there's not a lot of people doing this live online education, but I think that was the missing ingredient. Like online education 1.0 was all about accessibility. It's like, hey, let's take all the information in the world and let's put it online. And that was a great first step. You know, you and the companies that fall into this education 1.0 category, you look at Udemy, you look at Udacity, you look at Coursera, MasterClass, it was all about accessibility. Right. Now, the second phase, I think really starts around 2017 when Lambda School enters the picture and they introduce one of the first completely online coding bootcamps. I saw what they were doing and I saw how big of a transformation this was happening. Most people take an online course, don't— they can't, they can't even finish it.

Right. I think the rates are about 4 to 5% completion.

Something ridiculously low. But you look at something like Lambda School at the time, you know, completion rates were something north of 75, 80%, and people were going from making minimum wage to 6 figures in under a year. Right. And I was like, we need more of this. Right. And so going back to your question here, kind of like the fundamentals, when you look at CBCs, it goes deep deeper than cohort-based courses and the format of these online courses. What's happening is something much bigger. And the fundamentals that I see it is this, this idea of like we're addressing adult education. And everybody talks about education's broken. They talk about K through 12, they talk about college, but adult education has been neglected for the better part of 100 years. Right. If you, once you graduate college, you know, you're expected that, hey, that, that education is enough for the entirety of your career, but that's just not true anymore. Industries are evolving so quickly and the people who actually need this education the most aren't getting it. So single moms, vets, high school dropouts, but you see, you know, like these boot camps are showing us that when you put education in the hands of these individuals, it changes everything. So, so I think that's, that's one part of the change that's happening here. The other part of it is who are the people who are creating these programs? They're not your traditional teachers. They're not college professors. They're not public school teachers. They're people like you and me, people who aren't teachers by trade, but they, they love teaching and they have a passion for it and they have expertise in this topic. And I think, I think, KP, you are a great, great example of these, like, new world instructors, teachers that are emerging. And I think this is the trend that we need to focus on, not specifically cohort-based courses, right?

Because that is the model, right? And the model could be different, right? I love that. I also— well, thanks for the compliment. And I know you share the same passion, you know, of teaching. But my other interesting thing around this trend is the best way to learn something, or the best person to learn something from, is a practitioner, in my view. That even though the learning model could be scrappy or not perfect or not as instructional that you would want want it to be like in a school, like in a hands-on something that's very, you know, like more structured, if you will. You know, decades ago there used to be this whole apprenticeship model. There used to be like trade schools. There used to be where you're learning by watching someone actually build a really cool table or a desk or a, like a carpenter, you know. And that kind of learning is something that I don't think, you know, has really seen the light in the tech world, right? Because most of the time you're learning from someone who stopped coding 20 years ago, and that's your, you know, online— I mean, that's your traditional school typically, right? My other funny story here is by the time everybody talking about no-code, and by the time no-code makes it to a school curriculum, we'll move on from no-code. So the gap between what they're teaching right now in schools for even for K-12 kids or even college versus the rate at which technology is advancing is so huge. And so the solution to this is finding and figuring out creators or practitioners of things, of skills that are valuable for the future and learning directly from them. Right. So that's where I'm very bullish about this trend, you know, to which, you know, virtually plays into.

I mean, it's so obvious, you know, that like we'll actually laugh about it in a decade or so where you look at traditional colleges and most people who are teaching at universities, they've never been in industry. Or if they have, it's been so long ago that those skills aren't even relevant anymore. Right. And so, I mean, that's one of the reasons that we're seeing such an explosion in terms of, well, bootcamps starting in 2012 and now CBCSNOW is this idea of like, hey, for the first time we're learning from people who are actually doing this on the job and they love it. And so it's this idea of they're in tune with the market. And so one of the things I, when I talk to people about bootcamps, I say that, hey, bootcamps, you learn really relevant industry skills from experts for a fraction of the cost, right? And so the CBDCs are the same. I think the biggest differentiation is bootcamps are really concerned with reskilling, and cohort-based courses really seem to be around upskilling.

Interesting. Wow, I never thought about the distinction that way. So what do you think is a bigger market? You think reskilling is bigger or upskilling is bigger TAM-wise?

Yeah, that's a great question. I would probably say it's upskilling. I come from my experience in the past year. Again, it's early. I will say that upskilling seems to be more important. Not saying that reskilling is not important, but it's how upskilling can be— it can fit in your life more. So when you actually look at a traditional bootcamp, these are intense programs. Like, you are full-time, 6 to 9 months dedicated to learning this new craft. And that can be transformational for somebody's life. But the problem is, most people— this is still hard. I mean, don't get me wrong. Yeah. It's so much better than if you had to, you know, stop what you were doing, move halfway across the country, move away from your friends and family, and go through graduate school. So it's better Right. You can do it from the comfort of your home, but still you're taking 9 months of your life and you're putting it on pause. Now, the reason that these lightweight upskilling programs are better is they just fit into more people's lives. They just like most, I think, cohorts in On Deck, they're lightweight 6 weeks to 6 month programs that teach you a very, very relevant skill and it fits into your life. It, it, you can take them nights, weekends, and you can do it while you're working a full-time job. So long term, I think upskilling just because of its accessibility, but Reskilling is not going away anytime soon.

Right. I love that. I love how you phrased it first as 2 distinct subcategories. And it seems to me like if you want the more intense approach, you go towards the bootcamp side. And if you want the more what works for you, works around your schedule and your lifestyle, you would take the upskilling approach, you know, either through a CBC or a fellowship. I love it. So I mean, the question that has to be asked around Virtually— I know I'm late to the introduction— introduce Virtually to us. Tell the viewers what it does, where it started. I know you kind of touched on it, you know, when you quit Facebook, but like where really it it in 2019 as an idea and then what it has evolved to today.

Yeah, yeah. And boy, have there been a lot of iterations. So, so okay, let's, let's go back to March of 2019. I just quit Facebook, I decide I want to make live online education happen. So what is, what is the first way for me to do this? So I go for some pretty low-hanging fruit, I realized, hey, you know, one-on-one coaching, that this, I think, could be the first use case that, hey, there's people out there who have these expertise, and they can monetize those expertise. So the very first version is a way for creators to monetize their time by essentially setting up coaching sessions with their fans. So that was iteration 1. Now iteration 2 is very—

What was the, what was the good about it? What was the bad about it? So

the good was that I think it was very clear that the people in the education, education-based content creators, they wanted a better way to monetize. So they were hopping on the call with me and they would engage, but one-on-one coaching wasn't particularly exciting, right? Actually, when you look at the 2 models at the time, it was courses or coaching. Coaching is high ticket, right? So you can anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 per coaching client, but it's not scalable. And then when you look at online courses, it's low ticket and it's highly scalable. And so what was missing was what's the best of both worlds, right? And that's when like CBCs really start to emerge where you're basically both high ticket and highly scalable. And so that, believe it or not, that's actually where I landed on for my second iteration of the product. So it's actually July of 2019 and I build something that's very reminiscent of today's Virtually platform, which is kind of all-in-one tool to build your school. So payments, live classes, student management, the product didn't look great. But that, I mean, it was still the right, very similar to what we do today. The market was just not ready, though. It's funny.

Who were these early customers?

Yeah, so lots of, lots of YouTubers, people teaching credit cards, social media management, a lot of them teaching how to, how to start a podcast, you know, people who had this audience and wanted to be able to monetize their skills and expertise. So now we're at kind of the second iteration. And what I realized is nobody really wants to use my software. So I just said, I'm going to use it. So I'm going to use the software to build my own core-based courses. At the time, we didn't have a really name for it, so we'd call them like multi-week masterclasses. And I didn't really have the domain expertise to be really teaching.

MWM, was that a thing? I'm just kidding.

MWM, exactly, exactly. It didn't, it didn't quite take off. It didn't have the same ring to it. And the first one I built was just, I was an interviewer at Facebook, so I just helped a lot of kids. To basically land a job at, at tech companies. So I would help prep them for technical interviews. That wasn't paid at all. That was just for me to test out the software. The second and third ones where I gathered, I had built relationships with a lot of YouTubers and content creators at this point. So I basically organized them into kind of an each would teach one session about something they were an expert on. So social media marketing and podcasting were the first 2 ones. And then where we really found gold was, uh, our third iteration of this program was we called it Creator School, and it was a small group of 10 creators and we helped— it was basically an 8-week program that helped accelerate their trajectory to becoming full-time creators. And we brought in these amazing, amazing speakers. We had Markian who has 5 million followers on Facebook Plus. We had Jordan Paris who runs a really large podcast, Jacob Foo. There were a ton of really big names there, but it was a model that worked. And it was— what I realized really worked about it was it was small, tight-knit, and everybody got to know everybody. And the reason it also worked was this idea of like, it was a topic that you couldn't learn in school. Mm-hmm. Because being a content creator, it didn't even exist 10 years ago, right? So you can't learn it in school, so you have to learn it from the experts. Right. So that's the thing is like, as we see this rise of CBCs, it's like not everything will make a great CBC. There has to be a very good answer to who— why is this instructor the right person to be teaching this? Right. And what is the topic that you can't learn this from, you know, traditional college class or even a class that's in person, right? With content creators, They're all so spread out. Most cities don't have enough of kind of a critical mass for there to have these like local geographic communities to form. So this is where it really starts to click for me. Like, oh wow, this format is working.

And the class size there was what, 10?

Just 10, 10 students. Wow.

Yeah, that's interesting.

But $600 per seat. Uh, and sold out.

So decent ticket size. I mean, it's not very expensive, but also not very cheap. It's a decent ticket size. And you had 10 as this, as part of this experiment. And how long was it? 8 weeks?

8 weeks. You got it.

And now the people you were inviting as special guests or whatever, Were they compensated or was it mostly a social capital kind of thing for them?

Yeah, I mean, we did pay them, but most of them weren't even looking for that, right? Yeah, I think, I think they just, I just built relationships with them. Yeah. And so it was just, I invited them and said, hey, you know, we'd love to have you come and talk about this one topic. And they were happy to.

So you kind of sort of did your own CBC with that, right? It's a smaller version of a CBC. And so how was the feedback from these

10 Oh, it was amazing, KP. I mean, you could tell like these people haven't, they haven't chatted with other people trying to become content creators. There was just this idea of like what brought them together was this like shared trauma, really. Like they were going through all the same struggles together. And to have people who've been in their shoes advise them and mentor them, it was life-changing for them. And the community is still like tight-knit to this day and they still collaborate in very interesting ways.

And so what was the next iteration after this? So you saw, you hit gold with this and you're like, okay, there's something here. What happened next? Well, remember,

The goal here was to start a software company, not, not an online school.

Of course.

So, so remember, but you were dogfooding it. I'm exactly all this time I'm dogfooding my own software. And as you'll notice that now it's, it's, it's a year later, it's, it's March 2020. And now it's so interesting. The product hasn't changed. The market has shifted completely. This is the interesting thing about product market fit is like you, most people focus on the product because like that you have a lot of control over the market less so, except in this case, the product didn't change and the market shifted entirely. The market came to us. And so we start to get people reaching out and trying to use platform and we couldn't build fast enough. So I brought on at this time I had raised a pre-seed, so hired my first engineer full-time to come on and help me to keep up with the demand. We get into YC, it was, it was May 7th that we got into YC. We start the cohort in June and we're just sprinting. We're trying to build this platform as quickly as possible. Fortunately, 3 days before demo day, we actually end up closing a seed round from Tiger Global. Tiger Global comes in. Yeah, completely unexpectedly fills our round. We raised about just about $2 million. And then since then, it's been a sprint and things have started to work in a way we just didn't expect. In the past year, we've, you know, 15x'd our revenue. We get to work with some of the most amazing CBCs out there. So

I think you have, you know, some of my friends who've both been students in the CBCs and also teachers in CBCs like David Perell's Rite of Passage, I think one of our customers.

Exactly. Ali Abdaal's Part-Time YouTuber. Yeah. Yeah. Also an investor in the company now. We have We have, let's see, all the big names. August Bradley, we just had August Bradley's team come on. And these are kind of the big names, big creator names, but we're also powering dozens and dozens of coding bootcamps and online schools and different types of live online learning experiences that I don't think they get enough exposure. But we're very proud of supporting these education businesses. Mm-hmm. One of them I might have mentioned is this coding bootcamp in the Philippines that, you know, is on track to train more engineers next year than all the colleges in the Philippines combined. Just think what that does for a local economy. You know, it is just absolutely just heartwarming that we get to be a part of their journey and help them out.

I love that. One thing that I loved in the previous answer was the fact that you're not just fully zoning in or locking in on CBCs. It seems like you're still sort of spreading your optionality around even boot camps and other smaller education businesses, which is very smart, by the way, because I love that because you're kind of diversifying your audience base. But then tell me about like how the software changes. How does it adapt

Yeah, 100%. I think you make a really interesting distinction there, KP. It's, it's, we're not just building a platform for CBCs. I know a lot of people are doing that now. We're building infrastructure for online education. We are like, there is kind of, people are starting to realize now that, you know, I think we explicitly focused on adult education because we looked at, hey, like post-COVID, what's the trend here? What's the fad and what's the like permanent trend? And the fad was, I think, you know, child, children education going online. Not, not to say that that's completely going away. I think, you know, some of, some of the work that we've done is, you know, that Synthesis is doing is fantastic.

Primer, I think one of them is called.

Exactly, exactly. And what we really saw was like, hey, where is online education 10 times better? It's with these adult learning programs. And so we specifically hammered in there. And right now, kind of where we kind of— one of the big trends we noticed over the past year was a lot of— we had this kind of all-in-one platform. We kind of dubbed it as the Shopify for online schools. But what was really interesting was when you have these programs at scale that care so much about the student experience, they actually really wanted, you know, we had our own internal LMS and we had kind of our, some lightweight community tools. But the thing is they wanted to use Circle or Slack for community and for their LMS, they might have already had one. They might've had Teachable or they might be just hacking together Notion or Google Drive. Right. And so what we realized was we had built this all-in-one, yet really why most people were coming for us, to us was really for one reason, which was making it easier to manage their live events. Now, this was a huge— Hmm. insight when you kind of realize like how difficult this process really is. Turns out that Google Calendar, which has been around forever, really, really amazing for one-on-one, these small group meetings. But as you know, when you're organizing a full-on virtual school, knowing all the logistics that happen around the live programming, making sure you're generating the Zoom link, that everybody has the right permissions, that you're notifying the students, that students have calendar invites, That students then get reminded before session's about to get started. Now—

Attendance tracking, right?

Oh yeah. And then afterwards tracking attendance and then having and synthesizing all this data. I think one of the most exciting things that's happening with us moving to virtual education, so the first time we can track every interaction that a student goes through. And with that, if we can properly track everything, we can have access to data that no teacher has ever had in history. And just imagine how much powerful of a student experience you can craft with all this data. And

so, so It enriches curriculum too, right? If I have data around like, okay, which sessions are the most attended as opposed to like the ones that are less attended? And I'm like, okay, maybe people like this part more than what I imagined, right? And so there's a lot of like feedback loops you can close just by having data, just by having a virtual tool.

Yeah, no, that's, that's exactly right. And so what we realized is like, hey, everybody loves us for kind of how we empower their programs. and specifically the live programming, why are we trying to do it all? And so this is where I start having conversations with— I start diving into the world of no-code, and then I really start understanding what no-code really is. And it's this idea of like SMBs right now, these small-medium businesses, what they love to do is— everybody says they want an all-in-one. I don't actually believe that because when you look at it, they're— what people want is they want to be using the best tools, and companies that try to do it all usually do nothing well.

Right.

Right. So it's just this idea of like, what is the one thing you do really well? And you look at it and you're like, okay, wow, like ConvertKit, really good for email automation, was some of the— one of the best tools out there for that. You look at Circle, it's an amazing community platform. Same with Slack and Discord, great, great, you know, communication platforms. We could never be it all. And so we realized it's like, hey, people want to pick and choose all their parts for building their online school. So why don't we let them do that? And so this is where I understand the power of no-code and allows you to do exactly that. It allows you to basically use these, all these powerful tools, the best for every category, and then you can bring them together in a way that's really seamless and very customized the way that you want it. And so that's where we decided, okay, we're gonna focus on events. So we still have this all-in-one platform, and a lot of great schools are using it. But some of these really high-growth schools, they love us for our event manager, which we just launched on Product Hunt yesterday, thanks to your help, actually. Right. And it is basically meant to be the most powerful tool that you can use for event management, specifically Zoom events for your online school or community. And we've built in a ton, a ton of no-code integrations. So it plays well with the tools that you already know and love. So Zoom, Google Calendar, Slack, Circle, Zapier, Airtable, integrations with all of that.

I think there's a lot of potential in what you just described. The one thing that first caught my attention when I was playing with your product and when we were doing the first demo, one of my thesis is that Google Calendly, people are overdoing it. I mean, Google Calendar. And I think it's being used for everything and anything under the sun. And there is the great unbundling of Google Calendar that's happening as we see and as we speak. And one of them— so I invested in a company called Hera a few months ago, which is another YC startup last year, but they're basically unbundling the meeting prep aspect of Google Calendar, which it doesn't allow you to do that contextual notes, like historical notes. If you and I have a recurring meeting 8 times a year, there's literally every meeting feels like a new meeting. I have no context even with the rise of Otter and all these. So the current options are you have to use otter.ai and Google Calendar and Notion and then take notes and et cetera. They're combining all of these into their platform, which is Hera. So I've realized after spending some time with them that, man, this is a trend. This is going to be inevitable that people are going to pluck out compelling use cases and jobs to be done from the mega behemoth that Google Calendar today is. And one of those things to me seems, to your point, the live events. management and logistics, which is a nightmare if you just rely on Google Calendar and Zoom. And so I think there's definitely some potential, like super high potential there. And it was almost counterintuitive and a very brave move on your part, in my view, to go lean away from all-in-one because it's always tempting, right? Who doesn't want all-in-one? So to go back and say, no, we're just going to build one killer use case and we're going to dominate that job to be done.

And you're totally right. It is very controversial, right? People— but you look at this and unless you've spent so many times I mean, hundreds of hours talking to our customers, you wouldn't see it. It's just this, when you actually really look at it, it's Zoom is the, like really COVID has shown us Zoom is the future of how we meet. It's how we're going to socialize. It's how we're going to learn. Yet gathering in a virtual environment is still so hard. Like it's not easy to organize. Again, you know, maybe the audience isn't as familiar with this, but you know, as you're somebody who you're the program director for On Deck No Code and running a cohort Organizing community, make live events is kind of— it's the heartbeat of any community.

It is.

And you need them, but it's not the

Slack. Everybody thinks it's a Slack. So that's the thing. All of my friends before joining On Deck were like, KP, like, you know, what's your stack and everything? I'm like, yeah, Slack, Discord, you know, it's okay, Telegram. Let's just— after joining On Deck and running this for a year now, I'm like, no, no, no, those are so irrelevant to the NPS and the great experience. And people are trying to reinvent Slack. People are trying to reinvent Circle. I'm like, no, no, no, So that's, that's the distracting aspect here. As the program director, I know my entire NPS depends on how many great events I have per cohort, how many transformational breakout rooms I have where people found a connection, had a great conversation with a friend up here, and how many awesome live moments we had. So live is the heartbeat, as to your point. Async is great. We have a lot of pre-sessions and post-session async Notion docs and stuff. But again, nothing takes the cake as much as live events. And so if we suck at live events, it's over. And that includes orientation. Kickoff and wrap-up and demo days and everything.

Yeah, you cannot have a successful online learning experience until you are able to allow your students to make a genuine connection with somebody else, no matter who that is. But again, people need to talk, they need to meet, they need to be able to make a connection. And really, that is the fundamental problem we're trying to solve, is making it— people who live nowhere close to each other be able to meet And learn from each other virtually.

I love that. So that's where you are today, right? So walk me through the next few months. You know, what are some exciting things you're tackling right now product-wise and even as you go to market-wise?

Happy to. I know you did say you had a hard stop at 3 o'clock. Yeah. So, so now looking ahead in terms of what's next for us, I think it's this, we're starting with live events, but we really, what it is, is we want to support kind of the backend for online educators, right? So we call I call them education entrepreneurs, right? So too many people focus on cohort-based courses. Like I was alluding to before in the conversation, the bigger trend here is who are the people who are teaching these programs? They're educators first, they're creators second. And so how do we empower these people? So live events is just one. I think it's just the first problem we're going to solve. We want to solve the entire backend. You know, I think that's one thing we're moving away from is trying to become this backend and frontend tool. I think I think most programs really should be using Slack or Circle for their front end. Really, you know, that doesn't matter too much, right? The problems that I think are more unsolved that I think we're really well equipped to solve is like everything that's happening in the backend. And some of those, yeah, so live events is one of them. The other big ones that are coming to mind is student management, having like a single source of truth for your student data. Like I said, like—

A student CRM?

Like a decent CRM. Yeah. And it's funny you mentioned that the event manager that we launched yesterday, our internal code name for that product is called the SSM. The student relationship manager. Yeah. Which is the long-term vision here. And that long-term vision consists of calendar, communication, and student records. Those are the 3 things. Those are the really things, because again, if you're in this virtual environment, we can track everything and we do wanna track everything and we wanna empower you with these insights. And we'll do that by first, obviously attendance, but over time we will have payment history, we'll have notes. This record of your entire, you know, how the student has progressed. We'll have qualitative data, we'll have quantitative data. Now we have support for surveys. We've automated the way for you to be able to collect qualitative feedback from your students. That's just as powerful. So I think that's what our focus is going to be for the next 3 to 5 months is obviously starting with live events, but there's a whole host of parallel problems for anybody building an online education experience.

Awesome. Love that. I can't wait to see all of that unfold in the next few months. And I'm rooting pretty hard for you and the team. Over the months that we've gotten closer, I've really enjoyed the clarity of thinking you've had and this willingness to listen to customers and iterate. And a big part of why I officially became part of your advisory team, which is, you know, full disclosure, I love Virtually and I'm part of the team as an advisor, is because I think there is a high potential here and you're very uniquely positioned to go after solving this for that customer segment. So, so Very happy and very stoked. Where can people find more about Virtually and where can people follow you on the internet?

Absolutely. So you can learn more about Virtually just going to tryvirtually.com. As for me, I'm very active on Twitter just like yourself, KP, and you can just catch me at Ish Baid.

Sounds good. Awesome. Thank you for being here, Ish, and we'll hope to chat again soon.

Sounds great, KP. Thanks so much for having me.