Pollenizer’s Coachy.com put on ice amid technical issues

Pollenizer co-founder Mick Liubinskas has revealed star in-house start-up Coachy.com, which helps users learn new skills, has been put on hold due to technical problems.

Coachy, founded by Luke Grana, enables people to learn skills via one-on-one video sessions with coaches. It is aimed at people who don’t always have time to attend physical classes.

Grana developed the Coachy platform alongside Pollenizer, after approaching the Sydney-based start-up incubator with his idea. They began working on it in December 2011.

In January last year, Liubinskas told StartupSmart Coachy has the potential to go global. The story attracted a comment from a StartupSmart reader, who wrote: “And now look at Coachy. Stuffed. Dead. Inert.”

Liubinskas says while Coachy is “certainly not dead”, it has been put on hold “for the time being” to address technical issues.

“Up to 200 coaches were using the platform and we got great feedback from them. The market position was strong,” he says.

“But in terms of the browser face of the video technology, it was too unreliable.

“One of the fundamentals of Coachy is obviously streaming and, until the NBN arrives in Australia, we’re going to be struggling to produce high quality video.”

But Liubinskas insists Coachy is still in the game, saying it will probably be back up and running by March or April.

“It’s absolutely still in play and we’re really excited about the customers we’re working with,” he says.

As for Grana, Liubinskas says he has “taken a sabbatical at the moment”, but remains a director and advisor to Coachy.

“Luke is the original co-founder and a shareholder in the business, and we definitely want to keep him active… Luke has really, really worked his butt off to take the business as far as he has,” Liubinskas says.