Does it work or does it deliver
A self note on building products
tl;dr; Make sure your core-product offering and it’s user experience is not reliant on a third party services for a long time.
Let’s take it from the beginning.
For quite some time, my life has revolved around CBCs. A business that has existed for decades in offline and (quite recently) online forms with different names, prices and what not. But what exactly is this?
CBC: Cohort based courses, A modern word for tuition. But what’s a tuition exactly? Here’s what google has to say.
Since 2020 many Ed-tech companies took the CBC route to make a viable business out of it. For the most part they consisted recorded content and live classes. Doubt sessions and community and all of that were a make or break add-on. Whether a tech backed platform for CBCs is profitable or not, is still quite early to have a say. Some of these platforms are Unacademy, PhysicsWallah, Neog camp and so on.
Let’s say that you would like to start a tech first CBC of your own, do you build the platform which works or which delivers?
Tech that works
Here’s a way you can put together a platform where that works and ship it ASAP
Use MS Teams, Zoom or YouTube for live video.
Store recorded live videos on Vimeo / YouTube.
Use Discord / Avalon scenes to host your community.
Manage your website on a low-code tool like webflow, softr and so on.
Use convert-kit and airtable for everything else.
You find a product-market fit, you start getting traction and maybe a couple of funds to expand. What next?
In this particular case, the core product offering is reliant on many parts. Teams, vimeo, YouTube and third party vendors’ servers and core products. These are standalone products that are solely not reliant on delivering / bending to your needs.
Now obviously there will always be third party services that we need, it’s practically impossible to do something from scratch. My main theory here is that if a core product offering and it’s experience is supported by a third party service / vendor and you have limited control on it, it’s probably best to build it in-house.
Something that’s core to the product and how the user interacts with it is a major deciding factor on your business. Your product can be great, but if you are lacking behind the experience of it then you have made room for a competitor. Ex: Android and iOS.
In the case of CBCs, if you are running your live sessions on maybe Zoom, Gmeet, MS Teams or YouTube, do you really have any room to experiment with? This does sound obvious, but it’s surprising on how many have been relying on zoom and other platforms for far too long. There are still many caveats to this, and it isn’t wrong to use these either. But if you are going to be tech first, then what chances of survival do you have if you get a competitor with a big cheque.
A whole means of delivering the product / service is fixed in a particular way and does not make it easy to improve on. Your Product designer is cuffed and forced to come up with something else to add-on to the business value of the product. Had this been somewhat under control, maybe, let’s say, during live sessions you add something like assist the mentor with AI. This opens up a whole door to new possibilities:
Doubts can be cleared / expanded on.
Assist the mentor on the topic, if something they convey during a live session does not seem to be on point, then it can re-phrase it for them.
Make live notes for the peers, auto ban spammers, fix audio and video quality on the peers / client side if the host has some issues… and so much more.
This is just off the top, not exactly proven-to-work points. This might also go extremely wrong, but it can be improved on. After all you control it.
There are many things that opened up for your designers and developers to explore and build on. Had the live session been locked behind Zoom, just maybe the above listed things could be made to work on this. But what’s the likelihood of it to deliver? A seemless experience of using it is a make or break part.
Now do not come at me with pitch forks on the feasibility of the above example, it’s just for an explanation. Also, do not be surprised if somebody implements it within the next 6 months, OpenAI’s GPT3 is one insane tool. Not me, but somebody.
It’s easier said than done
All of this is contextual. Founders, designers, developers and teams have many things to manage, it’s easy to suggest. But taking the right call at the right time is a gamble, and some say gambling is a skill. Time, tide and markets wait for none.
Conclusion: Make sure that any part of your core product offering and it’s user experience is not a sitting duck.