Webinar attendance and reporting for recurring online courses

The moment this becomes a real problem: an instructor finishes running the same course they taught last term, opens their video conferencing tool to export attendance, and discovers the download is a raw CSV with inconsistent timestamps, no session-to-session comparison, and no way to match attendees across multiple class meetings. They spend an hour in a spreadsheet doing what should take two clicks.

This gap persists because video conferencing vendors sell to IT buyers and meeting schedulers — not to instructors or training coordinators. The people who feel the attendance pain most acutely are rarely the ones who signed the contract, so their complaints go into a feedback forum and die there. Adding robust LMS-style attendance tracking would also cannibalize the vendors' integrations with actual LMSes, so there's a structural reason they leave it thin.

What the current situation forces people to do: manually export per-session CSVs, reconcile them in Excel or Google Sheets, and then hand-build a per-student attendance record across a term. For a professor running four sections of the same course, this is a multi-hour recurring task every semester. For a corporate trainer tracking compliance attendance, missing or messy records carry real liability risk.

This is a business and not a feature because the need recurs on a fixed schedule — every course cohort, every quarter, every compliance cycle. The buyer is a training manager or academic department head who already pays for tools that almost solve this, which means they have budget and motivation. They don't need another conferencing tool; they need the reporting layer that sits on top of the one they already use.

What to build

Build a web app that connects to Adobe Connect, Chime, and similar conferencing APIs, pulls raw attendance events per session, and produces per-student attendance summaries across a defined course or event series — with CSV and PDF export formatted for direct submission to an LMS gradebook or HR compliance record.

Where to start

Start with Adobe Connect specifically, which has a documented API and a disproportionate share of university and government training users who already feel this pain acutely and have procurement processes that reward solving compliance-adjacent problems.

The hard part

API access to attendee-level join/leave events varies wildly across conferencing vendors — some expose it cleanly, others require polling or webhook gymnastics — so the first painful trade-off is deciding how many integrations you build before you have a paying customer, versus launching with one vendor and being too narrow to sell.

How it makes money

Annual subscription per organization, tiered by number of active hosts — roughly $200–600/year for small academic departments, more for enterprise training teams with compliance requirements.