Zoee: Bringing speed to execution with 100ms

The concept of having a coach isn’t new - teachers at school, our fitness instructors, our managers/mentors at work settings, or even a close friend whom we go to for advice. With people’s attitudes towards seeking help changing, it has also brought about a shift in the role of a coach. Coaching has since become a full fledged service that helps people clarify their goals, develop effective strategies for achieving them, and stay accountable to their plans.

Nichole Lowe, CEO and Founder of Zoee, has been a certified coach for almost a decade. While she recognized the impact having a coach can have, she also saw early on how challenging it was for a coach to do their job, especially virtually, without the right tools. That’s how Zoee was born - an all-in-one virtual coaching platform uniquely designed by coaches for coaches. It helps coaches manage their inbox, client relationships, scheduling, invoicing, video communication and more using a single piece of software.

Parker Schlank, who leads the engineering team at Zoee, and Jamieson Reinhard, the senior engineer in charge of Zoee's React application, were tasked with building a seamless video communication module where coaches and clients can interact with each other. Read more to find out how 100ms enabled him to build and go-live in a week.

Background

Zoee’s use case for video was straightforward: add a video calling feature in their web app for video consultations. For building the first version of the feature, the team went ahead with Zoom’s Video SDK. A few weeks into the implementation, they began running into frequent issues.

• Separate implementation was required for different browsers
• The sample app was difficult to navigate around
• The basic APIs weren’t of the highest quality, resulting in them not working as expected

With increased development effort came many delays in their go-live date. During this time, the coaches were experiencing disconnection issues. This was affecting Zoee’s north star metric, coach happiness. They immediately decided to look for another partner, and discovered 100ms via a google search.

"Our requirements from a video stack provider were clear - quick integration, minimal call failures and low maintenance post-integration. 100ms turned out to be an excellent choice for these."

• 

• Parker Schlank

• Engineering Lead, Zoee

Implementation

Parker and team began with the 100ms Web Starter App, which was an immediate hit - the app worked out of the box, it was simple and the team could customize elements in it. The team appreciated that the apps were frequently updated, so they could rest easy that their core services would work without issues.

Zoee team was also relieved to see that 100ms’ client’-side architecture was straightforward. It didn’t require separate implementation for browsers, and rendering video on the canvas wasn’t like taking an advanced math class.

"With Zoom SDK, it took us a week’s effort to write code for each browser. Because rendering video tiles appropriately for each browser and resolution was manual. With 100ms, all of this came out-of-the-box."

• 

• Jamieson Reinhard

• Senior Engineer, Zoee

With the video consultation piece in progress, the team was scoping out building a reporting function, another critical component to their business. They wanted to fetch session data which 100ms provided with comprehensive webhook events that would be triggered for multiple events including:

• when a session started/ended
• when coach joined/left
• duration of sessions

100ms came with in-built retry logic in case the webhooks didn’t send the information the first time, a feature not available in Zoom SDK.

"Intuitive documentation is the key to discovering functionalities like webhook events. 100ms’ docs and API references are 10X better, which helped us build 10X faster."

• 

• Jamieson Reinhard

• Senior Engineer, Zoee

All of these factors led to Zoee going live with 100ms in less than a week’s time, as compared to the three months that it took with Zoom Video SDK.

Post integration, the team was delighted with the rarity of call failures. Some of the issues that were eliminated with 100ms were:

• audio issues on safari
• video rendering issues on firefox
• frequent disconnections on mobile phones

Since most of the integration logic resided on the server-side, 100ms handled audio-video exceptions without requiring any intervention from Zoee. This meant that they didn’t have to assign a developer resource just to debug video.

Team Zoee also appreciates that the 100ms’ customer success team is available throughout the clock via a shared slack channel.

"We were paying $2000 for Zoom’s live support, and there were instances where it took 2 weeks for basic queries to be resolved. 100ms’ support is phenomenally better. Our queries are usually resolved within a few hours; they even get on calls with us to debug"

• 

• Parker Schlank

• Engineering Lead, Zoee

What lies ahead

Since video consultations are at the core of Zoee’s platform, the team is working on leveling it up further with features like background noise suppression, video filters and a hands-free mode for users joining in via mobile.

"Time is the most valuable asset to any entrepreneur and if I could give that back, I could transform lives—and the coaching industry. And we at Zoee are just getting started."

• 

• Nichole Lowe

• CEO and Founder, Zoee