About six months ago, I saw a tweet inviting me to a ‘cohort-based course’ on Product Management from someone I’ve been following for quite a while now. I’d never heard the term cohort-based course. So intrigued, I wanted to check out what it was about.
After I read through the initial proposition, Lenny described how it works.
“A 4-week-long intimate workshop-style course. Lenny won’t just talk to you, he’ll engage the class, facilitate breakout discussions, and leave plenty of time for Q&A. Learn with a cohort of peers. You can figure things out when you want to, but it’s important to have feedback and accountability to drive your likelihood of success. Not just theory and principles but applying what we learned into our day-to-day work.”
The idea of being able to learn from someone I trust as knowing his stuff was delightful. And being able to do it with a group of ambitious PMs was even more exciting.
Then I had my next call, and I closed the tab.
But I kept coming back to the idea and wanted to know more about this. So back on Twitter, I found out that this was a 4th in a series of courses. And the people behind it I’d been following indirectly for some time. One was the co-founder of Udemy, a platform I took my first PM course on, and the other co-founder of altMBA, a business I’d been looking at for inspiration when we were designing our programs for startups.
And there was already quite some talk about this new startup, which was then still called “Wes and Gagan’s new startup.” It’d by then already raised $5M, and recently in May raised $20M from prominent investors like A16Z. It’s currently already generated more than $2M in revenues for its creators. The founders are consistently posting impressive stories about their traction.
But honestly, I’m not that interested in the surface. I’m interested in what’s under the hood — the product, and where it can go.
So let’s have a look at that.
In this article, I will look under the hood in four steps.
In having worked with over 200 startups so far, you see patterns emerge. Education, fintech, consumer, deep tech — to understand them you can look at them the same way.
They are products — or solutions if you will — and those need to be adopted by a large enough market. And that market will only do so if:
- their need is big enough and they’re willing to pay,
- current alternatives aren’t satisfying, and
If those things are checked, the startup’s got something cooking. Those will be the first two parts.
Then I want to zoom in on the frustrations and obstacles in the current experience and suggest a few ideas about how this could be tackled. This will be discussed in parts three and four.
For this, I’ve spoken to both creators and customers about their work with Maven so far. I’ll try to include their quotes to explain some points.
Let’s zoom in.
The Need
As a consumer
When breaking down new products, it’s easy to look at what’s new. But things that work often don’t work because of what’s new. They work because of what’s been true for a long time. Jeff Bezos once summarized this with one of his favorite questions:
“What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?”
What’s not going to change in an industry in the next 10 years is things that have remained the same for the last tens if not hundreds of years.
- We want to learn and become better. Better entrepreneurs. Better leaders. Better employees. Better partners. Better friends. Better.
- We want to learn from people we trust, and we trust those who’ve been there.
- We want to connect and learn with great peers.
- We want to feel supported in the challenging things we undertake.
Imagine a world 10 years from now where we want to learn less and become worse. Where we wish we could trust our educators less. Where the people who teach us have no idea what they’re talking about. Where we demand more isolation and less support.
That’s a good science fiction book for you there.
Think of it as the next illustration.
What hasn’t changed over time is that we’re Mario looking for these flowers to become this fireball shooting Mario. We want to learn and become better versions of ourselves.
And that’s why Maven’s new form of learning is working. It builds on top of the things that haven’t changed and that aren’t going to change, in a new way.
Let’s double click on that.
The oldest existing, continually operating university is the University of Al Quaraouiyine in Fez, Morocco. It was established in 859. That’s more than 1100 years ago. And that’s not odd. It’s been a successful way of learning specific skills with clear outcomes and clear rules.
But even though the university as an institution is already 1100 years old, the product is not producing the results that we should expect from it in certain contexts. We take part in a course because it’s part of the curriculum, not because we’re motivated to learn about it. The creators are often professors without industry expertise, who have a teaching duty but are primarily occupied with research. Teaching methods, though repeatedly proven ineffective, often don’t go beyond three hour-long lectures, individual preparation, and some group work. The professors and other instructors are often too busy to support you beyond the obvious coursework.
It’s not the best we can do, and builders are recognizing this more and more.
More importantly, learning isn’t over after you finish your university degree. Especially in technologically intense industries, new forms of work come and go rapidly. Mastering new skills is what it means to live in growing and rapidly changing industries. And that doesn’t require a finished degree. It requires autonomy, continued learning, and a supportive network.
Online education broke down the age-old successful concept of university and improved on it by allowing you to:
- Take only the courses that are deeply important to you and your progress. Before, you would have to follow a multi-year university degree. Now you just learn what you want.
- Learn from industry experts with deep experience in what they’re teaching, who are motivated to teach. Before, you would have to trust that the (associate) professor knows how to turn their research into practical learning. Now you just learn from who you trust — the industry expert.
- Learn from wherever you are in the world, as long as you have internet. Before you would have to move to the city of your university. Now you just log in online and you’re there.
But now, we’re learning that this is interesting but not enough. We’re learning that there’s a difference between learning and education.
Sure, Udemy, Coursera, and edX tried to solve the problems in education before with MOOCs. And even though financially these are quite successful, in creating an actual learning experience they’re lagging. One research found that completion rates are 4%. That’s 1 in 25 people who start with the ambition to break into software development, to make a career leap in marketing, to grow in their passion for drawing, to pick up their camera again on the weekends.
And the 4% makes sense. Because access to content is no longer what makes education hard. Rather, the hardest thing about learning is pushing through when it gets tough. It’s showing up and doing the hard work. It’s continuing even though your terminal has been saying ‘Error’ for the past day. It’s creating another ad even though your conversion on your previous one was 0%. It’s taking out another piece of paper even though your previous drawing ended up in the waste bin. It’s going out with your camera even though all your previous shots were blurry.
So we’re left with our unmet need: we have an idea of where we want to be in the future, but can’t get there. Having spoken with a couple of Maven students, this is the context that most of them are in.
- We’re an entrepreneur with a big idea that has a hard time distilling the first step.
- We’re a mid-career product manager that wants to work on bigger, more important products.
- We’re a freelancer that wants to land higher-paying clients.
- We’re passionate about crypto and want to get a job in the industry.
- We’ve read everything about the Creator Economy and want to start contributing to it, but don’t know how to apply it as a builder.
Do you start to see the pattern here? There’s a gap that’s left unfilled which we feel is keeping us back from becoming our better selves. Selves that are better humans. Selves that can do better work. Selves that can give back. Selves that work on what they’re passionate about. Take a look back at the Mario illustration above. We’ve hired universities and MOOCs to become a bigger version of ourselves, but we find ourselves still not being able to shoot fireballs.
We’ve learned that university is too theoretical and doesn’t teach the skills we currently need. We’ve learned that MOOCs don’t keep us accountable and don’t inspire us to make a change. We’ve learned that what was missing was not the content.
But then what do we need?
Social accountability. University is inherently social. We work on projects with other students. We get asked in a workgroup to solve a problem that we were asked to prepare. Others ask questions to the lecturer and we start to think about the questions ourselves. A lecturer poses a question and the entire group discusses it. School is social.
Bringing that all together we can start to realize the problem Maven is solving for its customers:
Finding accessible, high-quality, and social ways to learn that keep me motivated.
And that’s where Maven’s type of learning excels. It combines the best of online with the best of instruction. It brings together an online cohort of passionate learners with an industry expert, who workshop-style takes them through a multi-week program to share what they know.
They’re called cohort-based courses, CBCs in short.
Applying the Mario framework to this, you can start to see how it makes sense:
And students are loving it. “People with different views and voices help each other out for a common purpose: to learn together.” said one student. “You get to learn with peers and experts, you get to build your community and network and you feel part of a winning team,” said another.
So how does it work?
Every week you have 1 or more workshops. In between the workshops you work on group projects with your team that are related to real-world problems relevant to their context. Every day when you’re stuck you can reach out for help from the community. And so it taps into our age-old needs for learning from people we trust, for connecting with and learning with great peers, and for feeling supported in the things we undertake. As one student summarized it:
“It connected with what I was seeking, and this person is the best in the world for that.”
The combination of all of this is important. Research on teaching strategies found that the top three most effective teaching strategies are ones where 1) the teacher personalizes learning by relating it to the students’ context, previous experiences or knowledge, 2) students collaborate on various activities in small groups, 3) the teacher drives discussion with the entire group. We learn if things are relatable, if we can collaborate on the learning, and if we can discuss the topic with others. And that’s exactly what you do during a CBC.
So how do you follow a course? You find a course you like, you apply for the cohort you like or subscribe to a waitlist. Then you go through an onboarding flow where you share your interest in the course, and the creator accepts or rejects you based on your fit to the course. From there you’re invited to the student portal and the community, from where you’re matched with a smaller group of students to collaborate with, as well as a coach.
And from there, Maven is solving the problem for their customers by breaking down the walls between industry experts and ambitious learners, and between ambitious learners among themselves.
As a creator
But what’s in it for the industry experts? Running a cohort-based course today requires a lot of jumbling. You need different tools for managing enrollments, collecting payments, different surveys, communication, having the community, scheduling the classes, hosting the class, uploading your video, sharing course materials, tracking progress of students, collecting feedback. And then we haven’t even touched on creating the content or distributing the course.
In a similar way that Shopify allowed entrepreneurs from all around the world to start their online shop, Maven is empowering creators to create cohort-based courses and so directly connect with their customers and change education.
Of course, cohort-based courses aren’t the only way to connect with your audience and earn a living with your passion. I tried to summarise what’s approximately out there for creators in this 2x2 (simplified):
There are virtually two strategies of earning a living as a creator:
- ‘Create once sell twice’ approach. This is the approach in the top left. This is considered the scalable approach because for every extra consumption of your product you don’t have to put in more work. You write that tweet, post that video, upload your MOOC and publish your book once. Then consumption can just happen. It’s no longer dependent on your hours. The downside of this approach for most consumers is that the willingness to pay is rather low. You wouldn’t pay $50 to watch a Youtube movie, let alone pay anything for a Tweet. Books are considered expensive above $15.
- Paid per hour approach. This is the approach in the bottom right. This is the approach where any impact you have on your audience depends on your hours. It’s not scalable because, as an example, you can’t run 2 1:1s at the same time by definition.
So what ends up is that creators stitch together a whole bunch of different things. Offline events, blogs, online video sessions, forums, brand partnerships. The major downside of these two approaches is that the ROI on these activities is still not as high as you’d expect. Because of this, creators are stuck in the ‘production wheel’. And that’s where you can start to ask questions, like ‘Why is there nothing for creators that’s scalable with a high price point?’
In summary, the problem Maven is solving for creators is this:
Finding ways to earn a living with my passion that touches many people and has a good ROI.
And that’s what’s so attractive about Maven for creators: they’ve created a more scalable way of making an impact on their audience with a higher price point. They’ve provided more leverage for the time of these experts, which frees up time from other activities, which in turn helps to increase the quality and comprehensiveness of content over time. And by doing it in a way that makes it seamless, they’ve got a huge opportunity.
The Alternatives
Maven isn’t the first cohort-based platform, and especially not the first to offer online courses with experts as mentors. So how does it compare to others in the market?
There are currently two main approaches: the SaaS approach and the platform approach. Let me explain.
SaaS approach
As I described above, running a course is a mess. It requires creators to manage multiple tools to keep everything running smoothly. This is often a great starting point for product development, by making the experience smooth and seamless. Think of it as the way Shopify has helped entrepreneurs in all sorts of categories to build online stores.
And so that’s what you’re seeing multiple companies do. Disco, Teachfloor, Graphy, Virtually, and Teachable all provide tooling for creators to create courses seamlessly. The easiest way to explain their business model is this way:
The creator wants to teach. But it’s a hassle. So they go to a business that provides an easier way for them to do it. They pay a certain amount per month, host it on their website. The customer doesn’t notice anything from the tooling. The creator’s problem is solved. That’s it.
Except that it isn’t. Remember that I wrote above that the customer problem is not ‘to teach cohort-based courses.’ It’s finding ways to earn a living with my passion that touches many people and has a good ROI. And that’s why I believe the SaaS approach won’t be the one to win the market. Sure, there will be some high-profile creators who will prefer this approach, because they’ve already got a large following themselves and their only problem is that they’re looking for a more seamless way.
But this market isn’t the largest and is definitely smaller than the total market of people who could teach. The majority of potential creators will need a kick in the butt to create a course. Providing support in demand creation is a large part of that. And that’s where the second business model is superior. Let me explain.
Platform approach
The way Maven is currently positioning itself is a platform approach. This means that they’re bundling all their creators and courses on one general website. Think of the way Airbnb bundles all its homes on one platform and so connects homeowners to renters, and how Uber bundles all its drivers in its app and so connects taxi drivers to people looking to go from a to b.
The benefits of this approach are best summarized by this napkin sketch from Uber:
For Uber, getting more drivers starts a value loop of creating more coverage, faster pickups, less driver downtime, and lower prices. These are key values as someone looking for a taxi, so this all leads to more demand again, which is the key value for taxi drivers, so leading to more drivers again.
This concept is called ‘network effects’. Simply put, the value of something becomes greater if more people join. Uber becomes more valuable for drivers if more customers join, and the other way round. Airbnb becomes more valuable for travelers if more people list their homes, and the other way round.
The key here is the value you’re delivering. As I wrote above, customers and creators both have their own needs. For customers, it’s the network and the real learning. For creators, it’s seamlessly monetizing their audience.
The network loop potential for Maven looks as follows:
The more creators and courses they onboard, the more applications they get, the more they can filter those back to high-quality applications, leading to a high-quality community — which is one of the values customers are looking for, thus creating satisfaction and so creating more customers. Similarly, more creators means a wider coverage of subjects, which means after you’ve takes one course you’ll likely be interested in something else, which means there’ll be continued learning. This again is what customers are looking for, increasing satisfaction and thus creating more customers. This will again attract more creators.
If you as a creator can choose between a platform where you have to hustle all of your marketing, versus another one that will get you at least one customer (meaning $200-$1000), which one do you go for? Right, and that’s what’s so powerful about this approach.
There is currently one other company in the world taking this approach, which is called NasAcademy. Having been started by Neseir Yassin, one of the most popular creators out there with his Nas Daily, it offers courses to learn specific skills. Right now it’s primarily focused on empowering people who want to learn how to create videos. But the main difference is its speed in creating new courses. As of today, NasAcademy has 14 courses. Maven currently has 45. In a market of network effects, speed to scale wins. That also explains Maven’s large initial funding round of $25M: they’re all in and need to move fast if they want to capitalize on this opportunity.
Based on the conversations I’ve had with their customers, I can say there is definitely a need for this kind of a platform, and it works like very few other learning platforms out there.
If they can work out the product from this initial version to a version where it is indeed seamless for creators to offer courses, and succeed in keeping customers around, Maven will become a very important company in the education space very rapidly.
Frustrations and Obstacles
Out of Udemy and altMBA, Maven was born. It’s the best between an education platform and education that works. It’s the accessibility of online with the interaction of offline. You take part in a class and learn from experts and peers, and get to expand your network. In this way, it nails the interactive part like altMBA. But because it’s a platform approach, it expands the total market size. Being able to not just take part in Lenny’s course about Product Management fundamentals, but potentially participate in someone else’s advanced course smoothens the learning path.
In marketplace jargon this is called liquidity: the number of transactions filled out of the total potential transactions in a marketplace. Now, this is still pretty vague, because how do you determine the total potential transactions?
Imagine it like this. In an ideal world, you’d be able to learn anything you want to learn at any moment you like. You’d be able to immediately join a group of amazing peers, who are working on exactly the problem you’re working on. Any moment you run into something you can get help from peers. You connect, work together, and have meaningful conversations. You create work, get thoughtful feedback and feel yourself grow. You get the outcomes you’re looking for through your hard work and others’ support. In the short term, you use the tactical and practical insights provided by the experts. In the long term, you build a more theoretical understanding you can apply on a broader scale. And ideally, this doesn’t stop.
This, I believe, is the vision that Maven is aiming for, and it consists of two types of liquidity: learning liquidity and community liquidity. Learning liquidity means the number of learning transactions filled out of the total learning demand. Community liquidity means the number of community transactions filled out of the total community demand.
Evidently, this is easier said than done. Liquidity will never be perfect, scarcity is a first principle in economics. But moving closer towards it constitutes real-world change, and it’s thus valuable to look at what obstacles Maven can remove to move towards the vision.
From the conversations I’ve had with customers and creators, there are a couple of improvements from both the creator and the customer side. I’ve summarized them in these two pictures, adding them to the AARRR framework of product adoption and growth:
I’ll elaborate on the biggest issue for customers and creators, and recommend ways to remove these. I’ll also add some additional ideas for the other issues next.
Ideas
The biggest issue as a customer: Communities end when courses end
“When the course ends, I don’t want my conversations to end. There’s so much more ongoing learning or mistakes I’m learning from. I want to share those with others, keep learning from them, and just stay connected to people that are like me.”
Almost every customer wanted to stay connected to others from the course and mentioned that there currently isn’t a smooth way to do so. These customers had been looking to become part of a great community for a longer time, but they don’t know where to go.
Currently, some creators provide their Slack community. This is pretty good because there you can stay connected.
But what happens to these is that activity slowly decreases over time. And this is a shame.
This issue has two possible solutions: the community and the activities.
First off: the community. Finding a community where you can have great correspondence with great coaches and peers is hard. Finding people who can push you, are willing to look at your stuff, and have interesting discussions about stuff you care about isn’t straightforward. Customers approach others on Twitter. They join random Slack channels. They ask people to mentor them. They join cohort-based courses. But there aren’t many communities that truly work. Many of them aren’t rapid dialogue that’s context-based as during the course. It seems like a great opportunity for Maven to look into.
But…
It’s a sensitive topic, I imagine. Community is audience, and if Maven suddenly starts to own the audience of its creators, the creators might opt-out. This could be solved by creating a main community, where the creator communities are added underneath as a sub-community. This can become a paid community after the course, where creators get a percentage of the ongoing revenue whilst Maven provides moderators/tooling to keep the conversation and meetings ongoing. For the sake of the length of this article I won’t go too much into this, for this would probably require another whole article. There’s a lot of potential with a real need to be solved for the customer, but it needs to be executed in a way where creators win as well.
The second option to solve this is through ongoing activities. Currently, Maven sells cohort-based courses which run for 2–6 weeks and cost multiple $100s. All of the customers I’ve spoken to mentioned that they’re quickly losing touch with the community after the course, mainly because there’s very little left to come back to. I think it’s worth it to solve this issue by creating more post-course events and activities that will help people stay connected to each other and meet even more like-minded peers. These can be both paid and free, which will create an even bigger monetization opportunity for creators.
Comparing what it currently looks like and what it might look like will give you an idea of why this makes sense:
As Sequoia wrote: “Retaining existing users is key to growth and is accomplished primarily through engaging them — by providing value in the product.” In Maven’s case, the main value for customers is lessons learned with experts and peers, and meeting like-minded peers. By creating more activities to retain users, I believe Maven will create huge value for both the customers and the creators. For the customers, it means continued learning and socializing. For creators, it means Maven can drive customers to their courses, while at the same time providing another revenue stream through workshops.
The great thing is that this won’t only provide value for existing customers. Any product should get its customers to experience the ‘wow’ moment as fast as possible. From the customer conversations, I’ve learned the ‘wow’ moment for Maven is two-fold: interacting with the expert and interacting with peers. By decreasing the price and time investment for people, Maven will decrease the obstacle to experience this ‘wow’ moment. Joining a workshop — free or paid — customers will be more likely to experience the power of this format. With the courses starting at high price points, giving them a shot is a big deal, and I believe Maven loses quite some potential (high-quality) applications at this step in the process. By making the barrier to entry lower and giving customers a way to experience the magic of Maven earlier on, Maven will make it way more attractive to learn via their platform.
The biggest issue as a creator: Candidate and application control
“We need to be sure we’re moving the pipeline, but there’s so little control and it’s still quite a hassle. We don’t know what our drop-off points are in the application flow, we don’t know who contacted applicants last, we don’t know who the main contact point is. We have to email them to reformat Typeform, and it’s a lot of work.”
Creators have a hard time managing their onboarding flow. There’s a Typeform for applicants to fill in. Those end up in an overview per cohort of applicants with their information. Then the creator can email them to learn more, and eventually accept them. Once students are accepted, they can register to officially enroll.
This influences them negatively because 1) they’re afraid of losing applicants in the process, and 2) it’s a lot of work with checking and rechecking whether you’ve got it right.
Seeing as this is an important part for the creator to make it effortless, and the student to not be accidentally missed, this is worth fixing.
I believe this consists of three parts.
First, Maven can improve the product for creators and decrease the internal work pressure by allowing creators to create and manage their survey. They can start with a general template for application surveys to help creators on their way, and allow creators to add or remove questions in it.
Second, Maven can make it more seamless for creators to manage applications by redesigning the management of customers. This consists of three parts. First, allowing creators to add notes and insights to specific customers allows them to make informed decisions. All of the info should be in one place. Second, by changing the layout to a more Kanban-style drag and drop they can visually see where they stand. Third, by informing creators which customers haven’t been contacted in a while and should maybe be followed up, they won’t have to manually manage this.
Third, by creating a dashboard that shows creators what their funnel looks like, Maven empowers them to optimize the flow. They could include how many visitors they’ve had to their page, what the drop-off looks like in their survey, and how many eventually finish enrolling. Maven’s business model works best when students can book courses when they want, meaning they depend highly on their creators’ availability. By visualizing the impact of their decisions in the process, such as the impact of their price and their availability, they can influence the experience to align creators’ and customers’ goals.
Other recommendations
These are just two ideas to improve learning and community liquidity for Maven. But there are many more changes they could make to improve the experience. Here are a couple of other recommendations:
As a customer:
- Meeting other peers is one of the biggest reasons why customers book a course with Maven. What if the platform automatically schedules weekly sessions between new people? There already is an app that does this for Slack communities, called Donut. If Maven would offer something like this in a centralized community, it could continue to facilitate meaningful networking even after courses finish
- People take these courses because they’re on a certain path. And learning is not over once they finish the course. The path from entry to expert is hard. Maven can be of huge value by making it more transparent what’s needed to progress from entry to expert in different roles. This can be done by creating career-based category pages. Imagine a page for product managers, designers, marketers, writers, and tech entrepreneurs. What if Maven could share the entry-level skills you need, and then suggest courses and workshops to learn those. And then continue your learning with intermediate, advanced, and expert-level skills. If Maven could clearly articulate these, and articulate courses and workshops to help people learn these skills from people in the field, it will differentiate itself hugely, while at the same time creating huge value for creators as they’ll be able to drive significant demand to them.
- Enrolling in a course is currently mainly interesting because you know the expert. But what if you don’t have a feeling for the creator or the topics discussed? At the previous company I worked with, Withlocals, the biggest ‘wow’ moment in our experience was when travelers saw videos of the hosts introducing themselves and the tour they were offering. From that moment they were sold. I believe the same will hold for these courses. Adding more supporting visuals that showcase the value of the course will be a huge thing. This can be done with videos of the creator explaining the course, or videos from previous students explaining what they got out of it.
- One of the ways Airbnb creates hype around their product is through ‘Castles’. This doesn’t only hold for their accommodations business, but also for their experiences platform. The way they do it is they create exclusive, high-end offerings. This created huge buzz around the it for them. The most popular creator on Maven currently is Anthony ‘Pomp’ Pompliano with 1M followers. I’m quite sure he’s the one who brings in the most demand for Maven. And I believe Maven can drive huge demand by replicating this with exclusive, scarce courses — maybe even one-offs — with experts with lower availability. Think of names such as Tim Ferriss, Sam Harriss, Brené Brown, Kevin Rose, Naval, Jamie Foxx. Even though their availability will obviously be lower than the average creator’s, they can provide huge value to the rest of the community by creating awareness. For them, it can be valuable because they can create a unique course that will allow them to touch the lives of their audience in a meaningful and differentiated way from what they’re doing now.
As a creator:
- I was recently listening to a podcast from Tim Ferriss where I learned about how Shopify crossed the chasm from working primarily for a Ruby on Rails audience to working with a wider audience of promising entrepreneurs. They called it the Build a Business Competition. It was a competition where they challenged entrepreneurs to build a business in 6 months. The business that earned the most would win $100,000. What it did for them is that it switched their focus to giving people who felt entrepreneurship was intimidating a kick in the butt. I believe Maven is in a similar situation where they need to get people to try their hand at CBCs, and a competition would be an awesome way to get it off the ground. Let’s call it the Create a Course Competition.
- “I thought I was ready but I had a lot of work and thinking to do. Creating the content is a lot of work. Figuring out the right ordering, creating examples and activities is hard.” Any moment in the journey where customers get stuck, they will drop off. Content creation is surely one of the big hurdles creators need to get through. I believe Maven is in a unique position of streamlining this process by creating a product that supports creators in this. Think of a flow where Maven shares what customers are looking for and how creators think they can provide this. Think of forcing functions to describe the target audience for the course. Think of landing page generators where creators describe their course and it automatically shows them what it looks like. Think of an end-to-end product that helps to define learning outcomes, collect resources, structure modules and plans, design teaching methods that are engaging and effective. Think of examples and templates to support them in creating all of it. Maven currently has its own course to help creators launch a course. This is great and can be a great tool to help those stuck in the process. But Maven needs a seamless way to get started, and applying for a course can be quite a high barrier to entry. Eventually, this will help even more people design their course and thus create more creators.
In summary, this is what those initiatives would look like in the funnel:
For customers:
For creators:
Of course, it’s not that hard to come up with a list of ideas to improve an experience. The hard thing will be executing these initiatives in a way that makes the product easier, and not ballooning the product with too many features.
Up next
The goal of this was to understand the underlying mechanics of Maven’s success so far, understand the target user’s needs, how it compares to alternatives, and how the team can make the experience even better. I’m quite sure the team has most of these things on their radar, but I hope these recommendations and insights can help them to continue improving the experience.
Maven has a huge opportunity to create a meaningful new platform in the education space. And the way it’s grown so far, I believe it can deliver on that opportunity. From the customers, I’ve heard they’re super fast in building new services and products to smoothen the process. I bet Maven can keep up its growth rate for a long time if they succeed in retaining their customers. The core value proposition works like crazy, the customers are excited about the initial experience, and Maven can make those work for a long time.
I’m extremely excited about what the team is doing and think it can go a long way in improving the world’s learning and community liquidity. I wanted to see if I could help outsiders understand what’s going on with Maven, and see what could be done to make learning even more fun and intuitive for both the creator and the students, while also impacting Maven’s bottom line. The team seems to be focused on the customer’s goals and wants to create something magical, so I bet they can make this happen.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas about this piece.
