How Kumospace scaled events with Daily

• Yang Mou, co-founder and CEO of Kumospace, designed Kumospace to give people a space to host online events and build meaningful connections. It had to feel "very immersive and human."
• There are two user-experience tracks in Kumospace: hosts and attendees. Hosts can customize the event space, starting with a template. Guests are able to navigate the space and chat with people around them.
• Since spaces are persistent, Kumospace works really well as a virtual office, or for building online clubhouses to host weekly events, as well as a platform for one-off events.
• Spatial audio has been a feature since day one: this makes interacting on Kumospace immersive and lively. People can move around in a virtual space and choose who they talk to and interact with. Because you can only hear the people around you, there can be multiple conversations in a space without the need for breakout rooms.

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Daily gives a nice level of abstraction. What took several hundred lines of code with one of your competitors took four lines of code with Daily.

Michael Nguyen, Senior Engineer, Kumospace

• Previously, Kumospace used Twilio for video calling. As users began hosting larger events, they often hit Twilio's video room limit: Twilio video rooms are limited to 50 callers. "We would often get feature requests to go over that limit," Mou says.
• The Kumospace team evaluated several video API platforms and compared them in four different categories: pricing, scalability, reliability, and ease of development. Pricing and scalability were their top considerations.
• Daily was better suited to meet Kumospace's needs as a growth-stage company. "Twilio is designed for enterprise, and so it's hard to realize savings unless you're a super big company," Mou says. With Daily, Kumospace was able to secure flexible pricing and high-quality support"
• Switching from Twilio to Daily was "fast. It took a few days."
• Kumospace also integrated Agora to support calls with more than 1,000 people.

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Daily gave us better pricing without restricting our options.

Yang Mou, CEO and co-founder, Kumospace

Kumospace get more personalized support and faster responses from Daily, compared to Twilio. "The quality of answers we got and how much time Twilio spent per issue was not as good," Mou says. "We usually get answers very quickly, in the same day and often the same hour. I think the record was within the same minute," adds Michael Nguyen, Senior Engineer at Kumospace.

Kumospace sees fewer firewall issues with Daily compared to Agora, which it still uses for certain features. As Nguyen describes, "we rarely have firewall issues with Daily, whereas it is a very common issue with other WebRTC providers. For hosts of large events, trying to ensure that every single guest has the correct firewall configuration is an enormous challenge. Guests often are not familiar with their company's firewall settings, nor could they make changes even if they wanted! With Daily, we don't have to worry about that. It just works."

Kumospace are able to add call features with significantly less code, making it easier to debug and maintain over time. It's also more convenient: “Daily gives a nice level of abstraction. What took several hundred lines of code in one of your competitors took four lines of code with Daily. I really appreciate that, because that makes my life a whole lot easier.”

Having to type fewer lines of code means spending less time on video. As Mou explains, "we generally don't have to touch video unless there's a bug. So almost all of our engineering effort is focused on building in new Kumospace features."

With Twilio, Kumospace could only access volume discounts by prepaying for usage. "That's very hard to do as a startup. If you're growing double digits every month, it's really hard to project usage accurately," Mou says.

Compared to Twilio, Kumospace can support 6x more camera-on callers per room, allowing the team to scale events.

Getting real-time call insights and usage data in the Daily dashboard has been particularly helpful for optimizing user experience. This was particularly at the beginning. "Having that live dashboard was really nice, and just all the information on it was very useful for tracking usage and debugging issues," Mou says.