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Ask HN: How do you use copilot?
As developers, I know we need to keep up with best industry practices.
For me, I really want to learn how to harness the full power of copilot. How do you use it? Where is it helpful? Where is it not?
For me, I really want to learn how to harness the full power of copilot. How do you use it? Where is it helpful? Where is it not?
Here’s how we did it:
Last summer (after having conversations with a few dozen college students), we stumbled across a very interesting insight:
*80% of college students aren’t on Facebook anymore*.
Sure, tools like Snapchat and Instagram exist that represent someone’s social graph, but there isn’t a central place for students to go get guidance from other peers. For students to even do simple transactions like exchanging textbooks, finding roommates, or buying sports tickets is messy.
This gave us the idea that just maybe students were hungry for a new social network to fill the void Facebook left behind.
Our goal was to create a digital community where students could discuss campus life, discover housing options, and buy/sell from other students.
### Step 1: Build the Platform
To make this happen, we started by setting up a (Circle)[https://circle.so/] community specifically for our first college, the University of Michigan (Go Blue!). We then customized the community's branding and design to fit with UofM’s colors and overall aesthetic.
Next, we created different spaces within the community for different topics, such as "Ask UMich," "Class Reviews," “Buy/Sell,” and "Events."
Lastly, we then threw together a marketing page using Webflow and used Zapier to sync all user content into an Airtable to run analytics.
*Tech Stack:*
Marketing website: Webflow (https://www.peervine.io/)
Community: Circle
Database: Airtable
Syncing: Zapier
Operations: Retool
### Step 2: Launch
Getting students into the platform was easy enough. We just showed up on campus and bribed them with free cookies and pizza. This got us to our first 500 students on the platform.
We made sure to promote the community heavily on campus through flyers, social media posts, and announcements at student events.
*Step 2.5 (optional): Build a mobile app*
We didn’t have an app when we launched and quickly realized that was going to be a problem.
Our hack was simply to create a React Native app that rendered a web view wrapped around our Circle community. It wasn’t ideal, but it got the job done).
### Step 3: Growth
After launch, most of our effort was focused on growing our community. We used a variety of different tactics, from referral contests to even a match-making service that 3x-ed our growth.
Within 12 weeks, had more than 10% of Michigan's undergrad population on the platform (roughly 3,000+ students).
## WHY did we do this?
We get asked this a lot. Since we have our engineering team, why not build this in-house? It came down to this:
It was cheaper and faster.
We’ve learned that most of the components of a social network (feed, profiles, messaging, events, etc…) are all a commodity. What matters much more is who is on the platform and whether or not they are deriving value from the network.
So we decided to focus energy on building the community instead of reinventing the wheel.
Plus, we really didn’t know what our audience would resonate with from a product perspective. Circle allowed us to spin up experiments in just hours rather than weeks. When you’re a small startup, these savings make a *monumental* difference.
### What’s Next?
We’re fundraising! We’ve proven that the model can work on one campus. Now, we want to launch at new campuses.
## Reflections
Through this process, we learned the power of the No Code ecosystem.
Too many founders (including myself) feel the need to build products for the sake of building instead of finding scrappy ways to prove (or disprove) their hypothesis.
But users don’t care if you built your own platform. They only care whether or not you solve their problem.
In the end, that’s what really matters.
The journey to starting Virtually began last year while I was trapped in a winter storm. I was playing around with some video conferencing software and was very impressed by how far it had come in recent years. With not much else to do, I started brainstorming about what could one day be possible with better conferencing technology.
An obvious use case seemed be education. I thought perhaps the best teacher for any niche topic might not actually be someone in the same city or state as you, but, instead, could be someone across the globe. Better video conferencing could lead to more accessible as well as more affordable education.
The thought was powerful enough that I decided to quit my job at Facebook to start working on Virtually the next month. My main mission was to enable infrastructure for live online education. The very first iteration of the product allowed for content creators to monetize their time by selling 1-on-1 appointments. I don't know if it was the product or the execution, but it didn't gain much traction. I was lucky to be invited to interview at YCombinator for the summer 2019 batch but didn't make it further in the process.
I started to explore other applications of the same technology. One place where it seemed a live component could have added more value was in the world of online courses. In 2019, almost all online courses were pre-recorded. There were a select few experimenting with the live format (Building a Second Brain for example) and it seemed like these courses were receiving significantly higher levels of engagement than traditional online courses. When I dug a bit deeper, I discovered that building live online courses was inherently difficult. Either you were a venture-backed startup and could afford to hire engineers to build out custom technology or you had to "duct-tape" Zoom, PayPal, Calendly, and a dozen different tools together. I pivoted the product to help make this easier.
Fast-forward to today- my team and I are working to build Virtually, a React web app (powered by Next.js) that allows individual to build live online courses with built-in support for conferencing, payment processing, and student management.
Current course hosting platforms (Teachable, Kajabi, Thinktific, etc.) primarily focus on pre-recorded content. We decided to focus on live online classes as our research showed that live classes generally have higher completion rates. In addition, we hypothesized that live learning would help drive higher content retention through virtual meet-ups, office hours, mastermind groups, etc.
We primarily use http://daily.co/ for video conferencing but allow users to substitute Zoom or any other conferencing link. We also integrate with Google Calendar to make it easier to schedule live sessions.
One notable feature is our "Live Room" which is an always-on conferencing room that is embedded within your Virtually classroom. With the tool, you're able to manage multiple concurrent live classes at the same the same time each with its own "Live Room."
If you or someone you know is trying to build a live online training program, we'd love to talk to you. Feel free to reach me at ish@tryvirtually.com.
I'd absolutely love to hear any feedback that you might have and will be around all day to answer questions!
The idea of Income Share Agreements has been around since 1955, but they haven't seen mass adoption until recently.
This post covers the recent history of ISA's and how they helped kickstart the coding bootcamp revolution.
Kush Patel, Founder & CEO of App Academy, and I recently had an in-depth recorded conversation exploring this topic: https://bit.ly/2S0jiXR.
From what we could tell... the spark for the coding bootcamp revolution came from a single hacker news post. This one to be specific: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133
Back in 2011, Kush and his brother saw this post and decided to enroll.
After the program, Kush saw how quickly other students were able to land jobs and start their software engineering careers.
Seeing this firsthand is what lead him to start App Academy which became the first coding bootcamp to incorporate Income Share Agreements as a financing option.
Others would fast-follow.
Make School in 2014. Lambda School in 2017. Flockjay in 2018. And now, in 2020, hundreds of programs.
ISA's have had a few false starts, but for the first time, it looks as if they're off the races.
Software engineering education became the first killer use case for ISA's. And now, it's quickly seeing mass adoption.
It's so important that we start to see this idea spread now more than ever.
Over 10M Americans filed for the unemployment benefits in the month of March alone.
These individuals need job training and they need it now. Traditional higher education isn't going to cut it.
We need a new method of job training.
One that is accessible from anywhere, provides trade-specific knowledge, and is generally risk-free.
If there was ever a time for ISA's and career accelerators to thrive, it's now.
And it's all thanks to an innocent Hacker News post from 2011
For me - I spend M - W with absolutely no meetings.
And then I spend Thu/Fri chatting with fellow founders, customers, investors, etc..
I wanted to a create a place where people could share their struggles without feeling like they were the only ones feeling that way.
Sometimes knowing that you're not alone can make all the difference.
Open When a platform for communities to come together and pass on advice for whatever they're going through. Often it can be a place to heal. To find comfort.
Going through a breakup? Dealing with discrimination? Frustrated by sexual harassment? Someone's done it before. Someone's doing it now.
Read about the experiences of people who have already gone through what you're going through now. Feel empowerment from other people's stories and experiences. Hear about how they survived the obstacles that you're going through now. And when you've made it through to the other side, share your own story for the next person.
About 1 in 13 children have some sort of food allergy. And about 30% of those people have multiple food allergies.
So what if you're with one of those people and you're trying to go eat out? Forget it. Too hard.
At least that's how it's been for the past few decades. Today, we're excited to launch Edible Search: An aggregation of health, diet, and allergy information across all the top chains in America.
With a simple search, Edible Search will show anyone a food allergy or dietary restriction EXACTLY what they can eat. No more playing 20 questions with the cashier. No more interrogating the chef. Not more looking at PDFs.
Simply, Edible Search (http://www.edible-search.com/).
Would love to hear what you all think. Do you know someone with food allergies? Would this help them out?