Interview with Teachably creator Vince Angeloni
Check out the interview below with Vince Angeloni (@vince_angeloni) about his new edtech startup Teachably. You’ll be able to see a live demo + Q&A of Teachably at DemoCampHamilton17 on June 17th inside The Art Gallery of Hamilton!
Tell me about yourself.
My name is Vince Angeloni, I’m from Hamilton, Ontario and I am a User Interface Designer, Web Developer and entrepreneur. I have been in the industry for almost 10 years collaborating and building products for startups in Southern Ontario. During this time I have helped design applications for KFC, PizzaHut and FlightNetwork.
What is Teachably all about?
Teachably is a cloud based all-in-one management suite for teachers that allow them to manage everything from their students, class timetables, and create lesson plans. It’s main goal is to provide simplicity and organization into teachers’ lives.
Why did you decide to create Teachably?
Teachers are some of the hardest workers I have ever met. Their passion and drive is inspiring. They have an incredible amount of work load when not in the classroom, not to mention being an inspiration and role model for students on a daily basis. In the education technology industry there seems to be a lack of focus on how humans use software. With my years of experience creating products around how human beings use them I decided to create a product focused primarily around using modern development technologies along with modern approach to interaction design to create a much simpler product to not only save teachers time but reduce the amount of tasks and workload they have.
Why should teachers use Teachably?
Every teacher works differently, not one does the same thing in terms of organizing their lessons and keeping track of their students. With that said, we are dedicated to building a product that everyone can use. You don’t need to be a computer expert to use Teachably or be part of a long introductory keynote on how to use it. It’s simple user interface allows teachers to get started using it quickly and easily. We have a growing set of features that teachers are actively involved in developing. In the next month we plan on releasing more features like interactive whiteboards that can be used right from the web browser that can plug into any SmartBoard reducing the need of any extra software.
What is your monetization plan for Teachably?
As of current we haven’t finalized a monetization plan but it will be a monthly fee for accessing all of the features of the product. Special discounts will be available for group membership purchases (for faculties) and of course we will always have a demo membership that will allow you to preview all of the great features for a limited time.
Where do you see Teachably going in the future?
Teachably is just getting started. With my heavy background in mobile design and development, there is no doubt we will want to get the product not only on desktops and tablets but allow teachers to seamlessly manage everything on their account through their mobile phone.
We also are using the latest web technologies to build in some features that will make it more interactive not only to teachers but to parents, students and faculty.
What tools did you use to build Teachably?
Teachably is built primarily on Ruby on Rails with front-end being managed by jQuery, HTML5 and SCSS. It is running on a Heroku server and a PostgreSQL database. In the coming months we hope to continue to ramp up on using all the latest, modern web development technology.
Do you see any particular trends happening in edtech? How does Teachably fit into these?
Education Tech is right now heavily focused on building products that allow interaction with students to help them learn. While Teachably’s main focus is the teachers and helping them stay organized we can’t ignore the fact that the students are a big part of the workload. That’s why we will be building in features in the future that will allow teachers to use Teachably to interact with students and help them learn while also staying organized.
How can the community help you make Teachably a success?
Teachably is focused and built around the teachers. Without them it would not be possible to continue, so the more input we get from them we can build out the product to their liking. We listen to our members as a sort of crowdsourcing tool. We are not fans of companies that build products for themselves and not their users, we want to break that tradition with Teachably.
