IDALS

Structured dance learning from India's best creators!

Education

I taught dance in person for fifteen years and moved it online five years ago. In August 2025 I took the platform down. It was making money, but I had built it in a way I could not keep running. I was paying creators before knowing if their work would sell, producing videos faster than I could think about them, and maintaining a system that had grown past one person. I kept teaching through live diploma programmes while I worked out what it should be. A year later, to the day, I put it back up. I rebuilt the whole thing myself over two months. Not because I am a developer, but because I knew exactly what was wrong and did not want to explain it to anyone. There is no shortage of dance content online. There is very little dance education. Most of what exists is choreography to copy. Watch, repeat, move on. It does not teach you to hear music, build movement of your own, or teach someone else. The practical problem is smaller and more annoying. Learning a routine from a normal video player means dragging the bar back to the same spot twenty times, and flipping left and right in your head because the teacher faces you. So IDALS breaks every move down at four speeds, and the player has a mirror button and chapter markers. You can send a video of your own practice and get a voice note back from a mentor. I wrote the requirements before writing any code. A product spec, a technical spec, and a sketch of every screen. It felt slow. It saved weeks, because I never had to guess what to build next. The bigger change was learning to cut. Semantic search, AI-generated descriptions and learning paths were all planned. None shipped. They were good ideas that were not the reason anyone would sign up, and the launch date was not moving. And I stopped guessing at problems I could measure. In the first month, 955 people visited and one subscribed. Session recordings showed people reaching the price, reading it, and leaving. They had no idea what they would be buying, because the tutorials were locked. So now anyone can watch the first ten minutes of anything, no account needed.