WordPress Post by Gagan Biyani three components of product market fit

Unedited by Larry Chiang 

Maven is having a killer quarter after a strong last 12 months. People rarely share this publicly, but here’s an inside look into how we’ve navigated product/market fit:

Maven’s initial launch was wildly successful. We started a movement. The phrase we coined, “cohort-based course,” showed up in countless startup pitch decks. We were on a $4M GMV run rate in 3 months. It was intoxicating to be onto something.

After the launch energy faded, we faced reality. We had no product: started with a Notion doc and were hand-holding instructors behind the scenes. This resulted in  a 73% instructor revenue retention rate, and many instructors were telling us we weren’t critical to their business.

Today: It took almost 2 years, but we’re now at 120-140% instructor revenue retention. Our business is growing despite a tough ed tech market, and professionals are actually using (and loving) our product to speed up their careers.

We made a few critical strategic decisions that led to 3 big breakthroughs:

Breakthrough #1: We started by looking at follower counts; now we focus on real professional expertise.

Our first persona was creators with 100ks of followers, but Maven was often their 3rd or 4th priority. Simply put, they didn’t NEED us, but they were bringing in a ton of revenue.

We shifted away from creators to experts, eventually losing 95% of our first $4M in course sales. This shift took 2 years, but it worked – Maven now has hundreds of “subject matter expert” instructors who have spent 10-15 years in their field.

Today, Maven has its killer value proposition: we offer ambitious professionals access to the experienced operators to take their career to the next level.

Lesson: Persona is key. Focusing on who really needs your product is more important than short-term traction. Sometimes the early signals are the wrong ones, and you need to course correct.

Breakthrough #2: We started as a platform; now Maven is a marketplace.

When starting Maven, I envied the Substack business and modeled Maven off of it. Maven would provide software while the creator would bring the users. This was a failure of “business by analogy.”

In the course world, instructors didn’t value software the way creators did in the newsletter world. They demanded we create a marketplace, and students were increasingly asking us why they couldn’t easily find great courses on Maven. I knew from my time at Udemy and Lyft how hard it is to build a two-sided marketplace, so I resisted this for 1.5 years of heavy internal debate.

Eventually, we launched the Maven marketplace. Now, hundreds of thousands of students browse Maven’s courses to find something that can help them in their careers. 25%+ of all course sales come from Maven’s marketing, which has been critical to our instructors and students.

Lesson: Find your own path. You can be inspired by other companies, but ultimately every market and situation is different. Be willing to change even the big things when your customer demands it.

Breakthrough #3: We started as a services business; now we’ve productized.

Creators with big followings required white glove treatment. We built an “instructor services” team: course managers, curriculum developers, and marketers to help our famous instructors succeed. This is normal in EdTech: Masterclass, LinkedIn Learning, and Coursera all have big internal content and services teams.

We decided this wasn’t scalable, so we let go of the instructor services team (half the company!) and went all-in on software. It took us 2+ years to fully replace that team with software, and many instructors did not think this was the right move. However, today, we regularly have instructors switch to Maven because of the power and professionalization the platform offers.

Lesson: Scalability matters. You can’t just “do things that don’t scale” forever. There has to be at least a path to how it can scale; otherwise you’ll build the wrong business.

Conclusion: it sounds easy only in retrospect.

2 years is a long time. During that phase, our top 3 competitors all pivoted away from the expert-led cohort-based course market. We stuck with it, and for years we weren’t sure if the bet would pay off.

We still have a lot more work to do and I think we’ll need another 5+ breakthroughs to reach our destination. That said, I thought I’d share the evolution of Maven to-date as a real-time case study in how companies navigate product/market fit!