Jan 29, 2023

Introducing an even easier way to start teaching

By Wes Kao

Co-founder of Maven

Summary

After two years of being in private beta and invite-only, anyone can now use Maven’s course builder tool and join the accelerator for free. Now, you can start creating your course within a few minutes and it’s free to get started. Maven is an all-in-one platform to build, market, and grow your cohort-based course. It includes: email marketing, landing page, Zoom integrations, lead generation, content, community, and more.

We have big news to share with you...

Up until now, you had to get a personal invite to use Maven. We’ve had 21,000 instructors apply to join, and only a 10% acceptance rate.

But that changes today: Anyone can now use Maven’s course builder tool & join the Maven Course Accelerator for free. No gating, no application.

Here’s why this matters:

The old way of building a live course was about stitching together multiple third-party tools. This got complicated and unwieldy pretty quickly. With Maven, you can spin up a new course with one tool that includes: email marketing, landing page, Zoom integrations, lead generation, content, and community.

With less time messing with tech/logistics/admin, this opens up access for a larger number and wider range of deserving experts to teach online–even if you’re not technical and don’t have a big team.

Check it out—it's free to get started

Why now and why Maven?

1. Step-by-step guidance

Instructors often say, “Just tell me what to do!” and that’s what we’re here for. Maven’s product is designed to take the guesswork out of course creation by providing pre-filled templates, thoughtful defaults, and more. Plus, once you create your account, you’ll get access to our top-rated, free live training—the Maven Course Accelerator.

“I joined because I wanted to learn how to construct a really good, scalable course. I wanted to focus on the good stuff which is building the content and community, not the admin stuff. Maven showed me how I could do all that.” - Marily Nika, AI Product Lead at Meta

2. Get discovered on Maven’s curated marketplace

The Maven Marketplace is the #1 destination for live learning for professionals. Over 15,000 students have taken Maven courses and come back for more. When a course starts to get traction, our algorithm features your course on maven.com where thousands of students are browsing each day. Roughly 30% of all enrollments can be attributed to the Maven marketplace.

3. Less admin, more teaching

Maven makes it easy to spin up your course and focus on teaching. We handle a lot of the admin and keep everything you need in one place: marketing, email automations, student management, content, community, events, and billing.

Introducing an even easier way to start teaching

Before Maven, you needed to stitch together multiple tools to get a course off the ground.

With Maven, you can spin up a new course w/our all-in-one tool that covers: email marketing, landing page, Zoom integrations, lead gen, content, community, and more.

Here are a few ways Maven helps simplify your ops:

Intuitive landing page that is optimized for conversion
Record and upload Zoom sessions for you
Automatically send calendar invites to your students
Automate email campaigns with pre-written copy
Get lead gen & feedback with ready-made surveys
Easily spin up a community
Student CRM to view your leads, applications, and enrollments in one place

With admin and logistics off your plate, you can focus on teaching.

Landing page

🚫 Old way: Build a website from scratch. Go down a rabbit hole of deciding fonts, link colors, button shapes, figuring out payments, etc.

✅ New way: Build a landing page in <1 hour with a beautiful template that's optimized for conversion. With Maven, you can easily launch a course page using an intuitive landing page template with copywriting suggestions. When your course starts to gain traction, our algorithm will surface your course to potential students on the Maven Marketplace—the #1 destination for live learning for professionals.

Getting leads

🚫 Old way: Spend months building content and worry if anyone will buy your course.

✅ New way: Launch a course validation survey in 1 minute. Most successful Maven instructors started with a survey to assess market demand and identify the juiciest topics. Maven offers a pre-built course interest survey so you can start getting student leads before you build. This survey is integrated with your Maven student CRM and emails so you can easily communicate with your interested students. No more hacking together Google Forms, Sheets, and email.

Email marketing

🚫 Old way: Spend weeks writing copy & automating an email funnel. Spend hours each week maintaining it and tracking data.

✅ New way: Maven emails your students for you with pre-filled templates that are optimized for conversion. No more creating campaigns from scratch—Maven pre-built automated campaigns and tracks the conversion for you.

Syllabus

🚫 Old way: Your life is answering “where is the Zoom link?” and “where’s the recording?” every 10 minutes.

✅ New way: One location to access the course schedule, recordings, and content. Students love being able to find everything they need in one place.

Community

🚫 Old way: Manually set up Slack from scratch and try to make it work for your course. Before you know it, you're in 19 (mostly dead) workspaces that your students rarely check.

✅ New way: Lively Maven community with default channels, intro templates, and content in one place & designed for course communities. The community is integrated with project submissions so students can easily turn in their assignments and give/receive peer feedback.

Calendar invites

🚫 Old way: Cobble together Google Calendar, Google Groups, Google Sheets, and Zapier. Spend hours recreating and sending invites for each cohort.

✅ New way: Create events only once, using one tool. Your students get calendar invites automatically with a link to join live sessions.

Zoom recordings & uploads

🚫 Old way: Make Zoom meeting links manually. Stress out when you inevitably forget to record.

✅ New way: Maven records workshops automatically & posts recordings in your student portal for you.

"Maven's Zoom integration to automate class recordings is my new best friend. Feels like having a free EA." - Joel Hansen, LinkedIn Masterclass

Earnings dashboard

🚫 Old way: Ongoing attempt to clean and track data on course revenue from multiple sources.

✅ New way: A central spot to see your earnings grow. On average, Maven instructors earn $20K in their first cohort.

Student certificates

🚫 Old way: Attempt to design your own certificate, get frustrated trying to use Figma, and manually issue certificates to each student.

✅ New way: Maven automatically sends a beautiful and easily shareable certificate to your students. Certificates help you grow your course through positive word-of-mouth.

Maven Course Accelerator

The Maven Course Accelerator is a free cohort-based course on how to build a successful cohort-based course. Previously it was by application only with a ~10% acceptance rate.

Starting today, the accelerator is now open to anyone who joins Maven.

It’s free & rated 9.2/10 with hundreds of instructor success stories. You'll learn everything you need to know to build, market, and grow your own course effectively.

Join the next cohort for free

What are the terms?

We’ve designed our terms to be simple and instructor-friendly. You earn 90% of your course’s revenue minus Stripe transaction fees. Plus, you own all of your IP/content. This means we won’t run your course without you, and our partnership is non-exclusive.

Building and growing a high quality course takes effort, but so does everything worth doing. If you’ve been thinking about creating a course… Now is the time to take the leap.