#275 – Love, Cohort-Based Courses, and Monetization Frameworks with Wes Kao of Maven
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What's up, dude? What's going on, man? You know what I've been reading about lately is love. I've been trying to learn more about the concept of love and the science behind love and the psychological perspective on love. Trying to unweave the rainbow, as some would say. That's very you. I got literally yelled at by one of Natalie's friends this weekend because he thought I was too analytical about stuff.

Yeah. Like this. Like, what is love made out of? Yeah. You know, people say that phrase, like, hey, you're overanalyzing things. Right. Like, I don't even think that makes any sense to me. I'm like, what is overanalyzing? That's an analysis. Can you overanalyze something? Does that make any sense? Have you ever heard of the triangular theory of love? No. Let's get into it. So, and, you know, popular society... It doesn't have anything to do with the love triangle. That's my first pitch. What's the love triangle?

You know what a love triangle is? A love triangle is like... Oh, you mean like when it's like one person loves another person who loves a totally different person. Yeah, that's like a big concept. Whoever came up with the triangular theory of love had to know that they were like taking that namespace. It has literally nothing to do with that. But the triangular theory of love is... I think it's just an attempt to understand love from like a psychological perspective. Like what actually is going on here? It's, I think, popular among psychologists and...

practicing therapists. And the idea is that like in normal society, we have this word love that we use to describe a bunch of different things, right? I could say, I love you. You're my brother. I could say, I love my girlfriend. I could say, I love my kids. If I had kids, I could say, I love this candy bar. I could say, I'm falling in love to somebody just like two weeks ago. We have the term platonic love and romantic love. Right. So you start getting into more specifics, but like generally people just say love and it's very vague.

So the triangular theory of love, imagine a triangle. So there's kind of three different incarnations of love. There's intimacy, there's passion, and there is commitment. So intimacy is like this feeling of warmth, wanting to be like next to somebody, enjoying their presence, just being really close and open and the comfort that comes from knowing that you and this other person want the same thing. Then there's passion, right? That's associated with creativity.

extreme emotions, highs and lows. It's like puppy love, like your first high school romance. It's like limerence or infatuation or obsession or like a crush. What's that word you just used? Limerence? You've never heard of limerence? I've never heard you use a term I didn't know. What? Wow, you've been reading, huh? Bro, I taught you to code. You didn't know what a relational database was until I told you. You taught me technical code words. Exactly. Words that actually connect to the real world. The technicalities of love right now, man. So take a seat.

Yeah, it's all the same thing. You know, falling in love. Like you watch a Disney movie and the two characters are obsessed with each other and there's like a heart thumping out of their chest and their eyes are popping out of their head and they're obsessed. That's like limerence. That's passion. So that's one corner. And the last one is commitment, which is like sort of the third incarnation of love, which is unlike the other two. It's more of like a

You sit down and you express a desire to like be with somebody for some period of time, you know, often forever because you really like how things are going. So that all that makes sense. Kind of interesting. But I'm obsessed with cognitive science. And so those are three different things. And like one of them does not fit. Right. You've got like the desire to be close, like passion. I'm like, OK, that's like the reptile brain. Like that's like that's love with a capital L. Right. Yeah. And then you have this other thing, this commitment thing, which is like,

This is us taming those other parts. Like, it's completely irrational. And when you look and see some other girl, you're with, you know, a girlfriend, and you see some other girl that you want to run off with, it's the commitment thing that, like, tamps down the desire to go, like, be intimate and passionate about somebody else. Like, it almost feels like that part, like, reigns in love that's, like, completely unconstrained, if that makes sense. It's a little bit different. So, like, you would say, like, romantic love is love that's high in passion and passionate

intimacy, right? It doesn't necessarily need commitment. So it's like, yeah, I think it's a little bit different than the others. It tends to grow over time, but it's not necessarily the most rational thing. Can you imagine chat GPT making some commitment to spend the rest of its life with you? Like, where's the rational basis behind that? So there's like love behind that kind of desire. But it's really interesting to just figure it out. I don't know about you, like, how easily do you fall in love? How many times have you fallen in love before?

three times you know three and it was always put it this way more than 10 years ago like totally passion like obsessed with somebody maybe three times and like each and every single time i made an absolute fool of myself and i had nothing like it didn't go well it's dangerous it's the roller coaster yeah it's the roller coaster right it's the ups and the downs but it's like the best feeling in the world when it's when it's requisite and it's maybe the worst feeling in the world when it's unrequited

But different people have different levels of emotional availability. And like the best theory that I've heard is that there's sort of like in the same way that other systems in your body work with like hunger and I don't know, like sleepiness and thirst. You have the same sort of desire for like human connection, right? Interpersonal needs being desired are things that can only be fulfilled by another person. And like the desire for love is one of those things. And so somebody who is, for example, like,

feeling unloved or sort of alone is going to be much more on the lookout. Their antenna is sort of internally going to be raised for somebody else they might come across who might be able to provide those feelings of love, which is why somebody who's been alone is more likely to fall in love with somebody than somebody who already has a partner or somebody who feels really fulfilled in their relationships. But it's kind of this thing where the socially acceptable thing is you just don't question where love comes from. You don't try to understand it. You don't try to like

you write like a poem about it, you know, you just like read like a, uh, some song lyrics about love. I'm like, that's as, that's as far as you go. And on that note,

Hello, Wes. Hey, Wes. How are you doing? We're talking about love. Yeah, we are. All right. You entered as we were waxing. I want to say like waxing romantic, but Cortland was actually unweaving the rainbow of love and telling us like the ingredients that go into it. So he's completely analyzing it and taking the L, taking the love out of love. Taking the poetry out of it.

Let me ask you a personal question. I just asked Channing. Okay. How many times in your life would you say that you've fallen in love? Channing said three. I said ten. Maybe two or three.

Two or three. Okay. That's what I'm talking about. Both of you are sane. I'm an insane person, apparently. But I have to do one quote that I came across. Courtland was saying, like, in his analysis, he read a book, and it's like there are three corners of love. There's intimacy and passion, right? You want to be close to people. You have this really powerful emotional rush. And then the other corner, there's commitment. Wes, you're married, right? Yeah. So, like, that's, like, a commitment. Presumably, you want to be married forever, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I think because it's a choice, it might feel secondary. But I actually think that that one is just as powerful, if not more so. Same. I feel like it's powerful. I don't want to say it's not powerful. There's a really good quote from David Brooks in this book that I strongly recommend called The Second Mountain. It's about like, if you are ambitious and you succeed, and then you're like, oh, is this all there is? And you're like, okay, well, now what's the next thing, right? And that's The Second Mountain. And his quote on commitment is...

that commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters. And in a way, like I strongly agree with that. But I also feel like the love faltering thing, that's like, that's just like sort of a feeble animal emotion, right? Sometimes you get angry and you're like, I don't love you anymore, right? And you want to just walk away, but you're like...

pause. I had this commitment. Corlin, you and I have had, have had these run-ins more than, than a little bit. We grew up twins, like fighting all the time. And like, we, we definitely have, um, very open license to like speak off the cuff about our feelings about each other now. And like, sometimes we get pissed, but we're like, Hey, we've got this, you know, this commitment to this business. I love you as my brother. And it's like, it's, it's, it's not emotion that keeps me hanging around sometimes. Sometimes it's like, you know, something higher order than that.

I think that most people are in relationships where they're not actually that compatible. And due to what we see on TV and the movies where, you know, we know that stories are about conflict, right?

Right? So all great dramas are about conflict. And so that's all that we're surrounded by when we're growing up, when we're kids and we're teenagers. You start to think that that is what love is. People fighting a lot and then getting over it and then like, and overcoming these things together. It's the rollercoaster. Right. It's this rollercoaster and there's so many emotions and...

And if you try to model your life after that, I think that just it's a terrible idea. Yeah. So I think that there's a lot of people who, you know, think that they're in relationships where, you know, this is how love is supposed to be. But it should feel easy. Like my husband and I, Zach, my relationship with Zach has always felt easy.

And that's amazing. It's huge. We're both building companies. We're both founders. There's a lot of ups and downs in life. You don't need to make it harder on yourself. Like there's plenty of struggle. There's going to be plenty of challenges that you're going to have to face. Like why make your life harder and take up all of your emotional energy on a daily or weekly basis? Because like you don't communicate well with the other person or like I co-sign this so hard, like the things that they say, like anything that

they say, like, you might misunderstand or vice versa. And for every one sentence that they say, it takes 30,

three sentences of explaining what they actually meant right it's like two steps forward three steps back like there's so many relationships that are like that and yeah yeah so that's that's my spiky point of view on you find somebody you're compatible with i think you you let your love grow you want to be committed to them you want to what'd you say channing you want to make sure that even on the days where things falter you stick with them because that's love so i think that's a big part of love to you and also wes i didn't know zach was a founder what does he what does he do

He has a Series A startup also in cleantech. It's called ChargeLab, and they make software for electric vehicle charging stations. Very cool. To offer billing, charger management. We should also introduce you while we're at it. I know you. This is your first time meeting Channing, but you are- Yeah, great to meet you. Hi, well, good to meet you. Co-founder of Maven.

Maven is an online education company. You basically provide courses for, I think your niche is kind of the tech industry, for people to come on and essentially take these cohort-based courses and learn together with a bunch of other people almost any topic imaginable. So you have hundreds of courses that you partner with instructors to provide, and you've been doing this for, I think, three years now? Is this your third year? Two and a half, yep. Two and a half, going on three. And what is a cohort-based course?

A cohort-based course is an online course that has both asynchronous and live components. So in the past, if you think of online course, you might think of a course like the kind that you find on Udemy, Skillshare, LinkedIn Learning, Masterclass, where it's basically a bunch of videos and you watch them at your own pace. You know, it's solo. It's, you know, there's no community, no interaction. A cohort-based course is the opposite of that. It

It's a course where you are doing it with other like-minded people over a set period of time. So that might be two days, a week, two weeks, a month. And it's interactive. It's hands-on. You might be doing projects. You're having group discussions. The instructor might, you know, teach you a concept on, let's say it's a writing course and you're writing headlines. So they'll teach you a framework about writing headlines and then pause, set a timer for two minutes, and then everyone drafts five headlines.

and then puts it, you know, shares it with everyone else. And then, you know, they'll do a teardown and, you know, kind of give live feedback. So it's a lot more interactive and it's really bringing the best parts of online learning with accessibility, scale, with the best parts of in-person learning

The community, the deep transformation that can happen when you're, you know, breathing the same air with the same people in the same room and just vibing with each other, building off each other. So it's really bringing those two pieces together. Yeah, it's like a little like Y Combinator where everybody, you know, joins the same batch at the same time. And then your sort of compatriots are motivating you just as much as the material that you're learning. Exactly. The talks and whatever. Or just going to normal school where you have like a class of people all taking it at the same time as you.

And then your website is basically a two-sided marketplace because it's not just the people who are doing the learning, but you don't really employ the instructors. They're not Maven employees. Like theoretically, anybody out there could go to your website, sign up to become an instructor, and then essentially, I guess you have to approve them and figure out what they want to teach, make sure they're actually good at it. And you say that they can earn up to $30,000 when they launch their first cohort, which is a lot of money.

Yeah, I think, you know, especially if you look at what adjunct professors or lecturers are making in teaching at a university, it's light years ahead in terms of flexibility, in terms of, you know, the monetization opportunity. We see instructors, you know, teaching a couple times a year and are making anywhere between $20,000 per year to $500,000 per year.

And it's really up to them. You know, how many students you want to have? How many times per year do you want to run your cohort? What do you want to price your course? The average course on Maven is $800, but we have instructors pricing at, you know, $400 to $500 or, you know, $1,000, $500 to $2,000. So it's really giving that freedom back to experts. So I'm literally sitting here with a notepad.

taking notes because now we are trying to make money. We have this platform where we teach people about entrepreneurship and we have a lot of entrepreneurs you can teach. And so this is something that we, I mean, I'll speak for myself. This is something that I'm really interested in. I'm just interested in how, from a high level, how indie hackers can solve the problem of education.

And online courses are a really interesting approach. But I'm curious, how did you narrow that down to a cohort model? A couple different ways. First, my co-founder co-founded Udemy back in 2010, 2011, and was really part of that first wave of video-based courses.

And those are called MOOCs, right? MOOCs, exactly. Massive open online courses. Right. Exactly. And when I created the Alt MBA with Seth Godin, which really kicked off this category of cohort-based courses, I had initially started working on a MOOC for him, a Udemy course that went on to be one of the best-selling Udemy courses of that year. Cool. And as I was putting together this course in 2014 for Seth Godin,

I started researching about MOOCs and found out that the completion rates were super low. So 7% to 10% completion with a recent MIT study saying it's anywhere between 4% to 6%. So single digits completion. And I was thinking, we're putting so much work into creating this amazing course and a tiny percentage of people are actually even going to watch the whole thing. And so it just felt like there's got to be a better way.

And so that's when Seth and I started kicking around this idea of, well, what if we flip the script on what online learning could look like? So instead of it being, you know, free or affordable, we made it expensive enough that you felt like you had to game. Instead of being solo, made it multiplayer. Instead of it being, you know, any time, full flexibility, we made it super constrained, mandatory, sets our end dates. So we just kind of started kicking around these different ideas. And so we launched the first cohort of Alt MBA in May, June 2015. Wow.

And I was a little skeptical at that point too, because, you know, at that time, Slack, Zoom, you know, they weren't as popular, nearly as popular as they are today. And, you know, the first core of students were brave enough to take the leap with this huge experiment and

would message me and say, like, you know, Wes, is it safe to turn on my webcam with these strangers? Like, you know, and what is Slack? What are channels? How do you use this? And so I was, I remember writing documentation because Slack didn't even have documentation yet for what to do in the use case we were using it for. And, you know, what was shocking to me was that from that very first cohort of Alt-MBA, the students were,

They were about 75, just took the course and ran with it.

They connected with each other outside of the channels that we set. They were meeting each other outside the groups that we had pre-coordinated with them. We had said like, hey, spend three hours per project. They were spending six, seven hours working together, not wanting to stop. They were co-founding companies together, hiring each other, hitting each other up if they were flying over London, flying over Ohio, and staying at each other's places. So it was just wild to see the level of connection.

That people were able to build. This reminds me of the PayPal mafia where you have like all these people working together at PayPal. And because they're working together, when they eventually left to like go do other things in life, they continued working together. And they started all these amazing companies where they're like all the co-founders and they work together and they invest in each other's companies. It's like, you know, a partner at Sequoia is from PayPal. YouTube is started by PayPal grads.

You know, obviously like Elon Musk was at PayPal. Yishan Wang was the CEO of Reddit. There's like 50 other companies. And so it's kind of cool when you have a cohort-based course. You have kind of the same effect of like everybody learning at the same time. They're like, well, who am I going to go out and do this stuff with? Who am I going to use my business skills with, et cetera? And it's like, oh, the people I just learned with. It's the same sort of effect. So you create your own like little mafia from your students. Totally. It's kind of like putting out the bat signal.

Yeah. You know, Commissioner Gordon turning on the bat signal and a bunch of people just coming together because they're excited about the same thing. Yeah. You know, like you could theoretically recreate this environment on your own. It would just take a lot of effort and corralling and herding cats, you know, and constant maintenance. Whereas with the course, you know, the instructor might be the reason that people initially join the course.

Right. The reason you tell yourself from a rational perspective is like, oh, I want to learn this or I want to learn that. But the reason that you stay and keep going and hold yourself and each other accountable is because of these other students that are in the course. And I think that's just such a magical, beautiful thing. Let's talk about accountability and motivation, because I think the sort of like three to six percent completion rate is true for almost all content, not just courses.

You look, go around my house. I've got books everywhere. Chang's got a huge bookshelf. The vast majority of books I think people buy and don't read. They just kind of sit there. You feel good having bought it, right? The same phenomenon exists on like social networks and forums. The vast majority of posts on indie hackers or tweets on Twitter, nobody reads, right? The vast majority of it is just like scrolls by and you don't see. Or even with like motivation to get work done, like you look at the world and you have literally billions of people going to work

Seven, eight hours a day, getting stuff done, coming home Monday to Friday, they're consistent. And then with indie hackers, you see people like quit their jobs to go start a company, and they suddenly find it really hard to work. And they're not getting stuff done. And they find it hard to do the hard parts of their company, whereas when they are at a job, like they did the hard parts, and it wasn't that big of an issue. And I think my theory is a lot of it comes down to exactly what you just said, Wes, which is accountability.

I don't think humans are wired to work alone. We're not wired to just sit down and push through hard mental things without having our family and our buddies and our coworkers and colleagues, like our tribe, like next to us doing the same thing. Cause that's kind of how we evolved.

And I think people like my brother, Channing, I think will probably disagree, who's like the lone wolf. He wants to do everything alone. I think people like that have to rig up like a million different systems and crazy psychological tricks to try to get themselves to be efficient. You know, like half of like Seth Godin's writing is about like, how do you be like efficient and whatever? Because it's like, it's hard to do it on your own. But when you're with a bunch of other people, suddenly it just automatically comes out of us.

He says this on the heels of three weeks ago, I just signed up for a commitment contract where I have to finish a novel by December 31st or I'm paying $10,000 to like, I don't know. Some terrible charity. Some terrible charity that does the opposite of what I want. To work on your own, like you have to be crazy. It's very effective.

I think procrastination is one of the most normal, natural things that we all deal with. I actually think that it's nearly impossible to get anything done unless there is a threat looming of some kind. Like not like,

like a physical threat per se, but like a psychological, some threat to who you are or like how people think of you, right? So there's gotta be something of that nature in order for people to meet deadlines, right? Like this is literally why people do things right at the deadline. It's so funny because like we've all experienced this, working on the paper two days before, the night before, starting to cram for exams in college,

With every court-based course that I've worked on, there are spikes in applications and in signups right before the deadline. Right at the end. Yep. Right? And it's like, oh, come on. Like this was open two weeks ago. Here you are like the last day signing up. Right? And I think Seth Godin, Steven Pressfield talk about this a lot. It's this fear, I think, of, you know, when you take action and you do something in the outside world, suddenly that thing becomes real.

Before it was all in your head. And so it's changeable and you can kind of back out if you want to. But when you ship something, when you hit publish, when you, you know, send the note or show it to someone else, it becomes real all of a sudden. And the fear of rejection grows.

And the fear of failing or the fear of being ashamed that something's not good enough. Like, I think that all catches up to us really quickly. And so we kind of try to delay that as much as possible. And I feel like that the MailChimp quivering finger. Have you seen that? When you hit publish? Oh, my God. It's an amazing. Oh, like it's like shaking like it's scared to hit publish. MailChimp. There's like this quivering finger hitting a red button that says publish. Like, that's how I feel publishing anything. Like for the past 15 years. Like, that's how I felt.

This is why I don't like to launch things. I like to quietly launch. I just build stuff and I put it live on any hackers and I don't tell anybody. And then I let people discover it because I have that quick ring finger. I don't want to tweet about it and just tell everybody I did this thing and then have people hate on it. I want to slowly introduce it to the world. And when I feel super comfortable, then click that red button. Also, have either of you made that mistake of...

say having a newsletter that you're still editing and then you actually accidentally hit submit like i did that i did that six months ago to a like an issue that i literally spent like three weeks writing and it had all this research and at the end it was like halfway really great so like people are going to be invested and then they're going to get to like and then i'm going to like hit them with this and then i'm going to you know give them this left turn and i hit submit

On that, like, I think that red button is not like theoretical. It's real. Yeah. They need to add the red button to every email client. So you can't accidentally do that. If there's an essay or an article that I'm excited about and working really hard on, the quivering finger becomes even more real.

It's not a throwaway idea. You know, it's like, I care about this. I want to do it justice. I want to make sure that I'm explaining it in a way that maximizes the likelihood that people understand what I'm saying are going to be, you know, on board. And this idea of doing this idea justice has prevented me from shipping a lot of stuff that, you know, probably was good enough to ship. Perfect as the enemy have done, basically. And it's hard because it's like it's,

It's like potential energy, right? Like the higher something is, the harder it can fall. The more excited you are about an idea, like the worse it's going to hurt if it doesn't do as well as you want it to do. And I think every founder deals with this when you launch. There's another thing that's interesting about Maven that I want to talk about, which is the fact that you have fundraised.

Channing and I do not talk to a lot of people who fundraise on the podcast, but we do every now and then. And now, like as of last week, ND Hackers is technically a funded company. We don't have any grand ambitions to raise tens of millions of dollars, but at Maven, you all have raised, I think like $25 million or something, something huge. So does that mean you have ambitions to be like a world changing billion dollar unicorn company? Like what does that mean for you?

Yes, that's definitely the goal. I think that a lot of companies have this goal. So it's really a matter of staying focused and continuing to execute. But yeah, I think that we are really seeing Maven as a 10, 15, 20 year project, you know, to change what education looks like in the future. And there's going to be different milestones along the way, and we're not going to be able to topple any institutions. Right.

right off the bat. But I do think that higher education, especially continuing education, is at a point where people are itching for something new and dissatisfied with the options that are currently available and are more open to, hey, what does a different system look like? So different than the higher education system. You're not toppling anybody yet, but

You want to topple existing industries. I think for a very long time, we're going to be complementary to existing educational institutions. And there's a lot of room there to play around with already. So, you know, if you think about college, four years, structured learning, you know, some people go on to do a master's, they get their MBA, they do grad school, but most people don't.

And so basically from the age of, I don't know, what age are people when they graduate? Like 22? Yeah, 22. So like from 22 to like 55, like those are like really peak working years, you know, or 60 or 65. You know, I plan on working for a long time, like 65. Like those are multiple decades where there's not an opportunity right now to learn in a structured environment.

There's been many points in my career where I've switched roles, where I've taken on a new function, and I learned it by being fortunate enough to be connected to interesting people and to be able to reach out and talk to people to get their advice, or by Googling and reading up on an issue or reading books on an issue. So it's kind of cobbling together these different resources and kind of shaping my own model of, okay, how do I do this? How does this apply to me?

But there weren't communities or there weren't courses available to teach a higher level, more nuanced topics that, um, that

that more intermediate or advanced professionals need. It's so fascinating to me to think about it because on the one hand, I've never taken a single online course. Actually, I took one for learning how to code when I got my first coding job for like, I took like five quick courses. But I've never taken any of these courses and yet I love learning. I feel like in college, I learned almost nothing, right? I was like an English major. I did the reading that I already wanted to do, right? Like,

however many thousands, tens of thousands of dollars that I paid in college, I'm like... You do the assignment just to get the grade. Yeah, I mostly regret that. You don't care about the learning. But then I graduated and I don't just have the books behind me for show. I love learning. And I think that there's a there there when it comes to your ability to disrupt...

the future of college. And also, I just know that college enrollment is kind of plummeting. College is a scam to me. I think college is kind of a scam. I mean, it's like you get a degree, which is like somewhat useful in that it like proves to people that you're able to do a hard thing. And so like maybe it's smarter for them to take a bet on hiring a college grad than a non-college grad. But beyond that, it's like why are you paying like – I mean, I went to MIT. It was like $40,000 a year. And I looked at tuition last year. I think it was like $700.

$70,000 a year. So it's like, I mean, I don't know, Wes, like imagine people paying 70 grand for the courses on Maven. That would be amazing, right? And imagine those courses also like don't teach people anything and they're there for four years, right? Like that's college. But let me frame this a different way then. Would you like officially say, I regret going to college. I wish I had not gone to college and I should have done something else. No, no, no, no. I don't regret it because number one, I had badass financial aid.

I just got a lot of scholarships and whatever. So I didn't pay nearly that much. I graduated. I had like 11K in debt. Number two, it was just really fun. It's like a socially acceptable way to like be an adult and not have a job and just have fun for four years. So like I don't regret that. And also like met a lot of people because, of course, it's cohort based. And so, you know, I'm not just there by myself. I'm there with a bunch of other intelligent people.

energetic, excited, ambitious people who have like worked with a lot and hired them. They've hired me and things like that. So like I got a lot out of it. I also got like a sense of discipline out of it, but I didn't need like that model is not the only way to give people those benefits. You know, like I could go on Maven and like learn probably more practical skills than I learned in college. In fact, most things I learned in college, like I taught myself, um,

And it will be way cheaper and way less time-consuming. So I know this is not part of your next-year plan, Wes, but I hope that Maven and other companies like yours do kill college and replace it with something better and more efficient and more affordable. So you're like, there's a baby in the bathwater of college. But there's a lot of bathwater. It's mostly bathwater. You can throw it all out and keep the baby. And I feel like the online stuff is more like, it's what you want. Yeah, I think...

with college, there's a part of me that thinks that college doesn't have to be and shouldn't only be preparation for joining the working world. Like career prep, if you will. Because there's a lot of people who think that college should be, you know, learning personal branding, learning about writing, you know, writing in public, about personal finance, et cetera, et cetera. Like STEM, all that stuff. Yeah, exactly. And

I think that is useful, but I also really value that in college I learned stuff that was completely impractical that actually did end up shaping me as an individual, as a human and as a marketer. So like Greek mythology, like would I take that as a course now in my late thirties? Like, no, I don't have time to take a course in Greek mythology, you know, but am I glad that I read Euripides? Like

Like, yes, there's so much that you can learn from studying stuff that's kind of outside of what you eventually end up pursuing as your career. So I actually kind of like that college, you know, you can kind of explore and take stuff that's not really that practical. But I also think that is it worth going into debt for? Yeah, why does it got to cost tens of thousands of dollars? And being the only option for a lot of people? Like, no, I don't think that that's practical.

Right. So I do think that there should be other options for people to learn the super practical stuff that will help you, you know, in your career and for people to be able to take it in a more modular, targeted way. Right. Like you might not need to go back to school for two years to get a graduate degree on, you know, X thing. Like you might need a two week course as a product manager on how to write PRDs.

or you might need, if you were getting promoted, you're going to be a general manager, GM of a business unit. There's not a course right now that teaches you how to be a great GM. You can kind of piece together like, okay, there's the people management part, there's goal setting, there's forecasting, and then kind of learn these different things and try to piece it together. But if there are courses where in certain phases of your working life,

where you need to learn something and do it pretty quickly and pretty efficiently, I'm excited about there being that flexibility for people to do that. I think there's kind of a bait and switch aspect to education sometimes where I often advise like any hackers who are getting started to go into education because it's one of the more lucrative places to start a business. People will pay a lot of money to learn because they directly envision how learning new skills will help them make more money in the future. So they're willing to invest in their own education because they think it'll make, it's like an investment in themselves.

But I think that there is to some degree with college like a little bit of a bait and switch where it's like, OK, I'm just going to prepare you for your career. It's worth all this tuition. So come on. You're going to make more money later. And people are like, yeah, let's do it. And you get in and then you actually learn a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with career prep, which you're saying is good, Wes. But I wonder if there's a way to do that without the bait and switch. Is there a way to first have a world where it's like, OK, here, take these courses, learn these things. They will make you money. And also learn these other things.

that have nothing to do with what's going to make you money directly. It's not obvious, but like they will enrich your life and make you a more fulfilled person. And maybe you'll use them in some way and be more, you know, open-minded or educated. But I don't, I don't know where like, where there's a good place for that in society right now that isn't like this bait and switch, pay for one thing and then suddenly you're getting this other thing. Because I learned like, I learned a ton of computer science in college, which has almost nothing to do with like the real job of being like a web developer.

at least for me. I've got strong opinions on this. And the TLDR is that I genuinely don't think that there really is like a place in the market for types of learning that are useful that help you grow as a person and help you kind of like explore and play. I think that that's very useful, but

if it doesn't have like a clear connection to some functional economic benefit, then capital just isn't going to like efficiently be allocated in that direction. But Coral, let me just give you an example, right? Like one of the things that I, so towing the valley is a concept that I have where I do a lot of reading and sometimes I'll read books to you. I'll read books. I'll tell you about it. And you'll be like, wait, what's the point of that book? Right? Like, what are you trying to learn? Like, are you trying to like impress me? And I'm like,

dude no like it's just interesting it's fun right like maybe i'll find something and you're like oh like i got you know like you when you model out like do i want to like spend my time learn you're like no but if i don't know like this kind of whatever and so like i'm like a society of one in this case like an experiment of one where i'm like i had that conversation and people look at me like i'm like i'm insane but i've discovered so many fun awesome like well i mean like aspects of myself social media is kind of like that like youtube is humongous there's

a ton of educational stuff on YouTube that people just watch because they're interested in it. And maybe they're never going to make a single dollar off of it, you know, and maybe it's not as educational as reading or taking a course, but people are still learning. Yeah, I think, Channing, you have a good point that if there's not going to be a clear benefit for the person from a economic standpoint, it's hard to justify paying

For a course, depending on how much like and we see that on Maven where the most popular courses tend to be courses that are reimbursable by employers because it's directly applicable for your job.

So how to become a stronger product manager, content marketing 101, FP&A, right? AI storytelling and writing. Like there's these different topics that have a clear connection to helping people do better in their jobs. And those courses tend to do better. They're trying to, you know, attract more students where, you know, there are other topics that are equally interesting that, you know, might not have as clear of a career benefit that, you know, it's just, it's harder to,

block off the time for as professional or spend the money on. But, you know, I think it depends on the medium too, because to Cortland's point, there are a lot of people watching educational videos on YouTube. Like there's a lot of successful channels that teach kind of interesting things about random things that like are just fun to know facts, right? So I think as a creator, I

If you want to make a living teaching, then it is better to pick a topic where there's market demand for that topic. So I think that's kind of the lesson on the subject matter expert creator side. Yeah. It's kind of a lesson for anyone starting any company, really. Pick an idea where there's demand in the market and your company will help people succeed so they pay you. Let's talk about the financials of creating courses because I like what you're doing. In a way, you're almost creating jobs for people.

As well as helping people on the other side of your marketplace, like get better at their jobs. Like you're essentially this like crazy economic machine that's just like increasing value for everybody. How does somebody make money selling cohort based courses online? A lot of people I know are indie hackers. They try to do courses over newsletters or on YouTube or even on podcasts. What do you know about basically making money as a teacher that I think a beginner might not know as they go to become an online educator?

I think one of the first things to think about is course market fit. So are you the right instructor teaching the right topic to the right target student at the right price point? You know, I think a lot of people, when they first start out thinking what they want to teach, what they want to teach to, they think the world is their oyster. Like I have all these things I could teach. This is going to be awesome. But really, the world is not your oyster.

there's actually only a very limited set of things that you should probably teach. And they should be extremely obvious to people who are not you. Like if someone from the outside looked at your LinkedIn or looked at your website or your background, they should be able to say, oh, you should teach this thing. So there should be a clear enough track record. This is not a place to teach or explore something that you are kind of still figuring out yourself. Like this is very much like

You have figured it out and now you are teaching your system or your framework or your spiky points of view, your approach to people who used to be you a couple years ago. Is this because if you don't do that, people won't trust you enough to learn from you or is this because your content just won't be good?

Both. I mean, mainly the former, because whatever topic that you want to teach, there are lots of other people who also teach that topic, right? It's very unlikely that you're going to be the one and only. And so why would I learn about X from someone who just started experimenting themselves versus the person who's been, you know, who's worked with dozens of clients, who's been doing this for years, right? Who's, you know, has a lot of experience under the belt. Right.

So it's really about credibility. But of course, the quality of your insights is partially based on the number of reps that you've taken and the primary data that you've interacted with and gotten takeaways from. So yeah, the quality of your course will be better too if it is something that you can talk about without preparation for hours on end. So it should be like that obvious.

Not to mention the other hidden benefit of just your own sustainability from being incentivized to keep doing it. If you're teaching something that is out of your comfort zone or out of your expertise, number one, you're probably not going to have as much stamina to keep doing it. Number two, you're probably not going to get the feedback loop of like people engaging in and liking it. That also keeps you sustained to do it for a long term. So there's like so many different, it's like a big, giant, multifaceted feedback loop.

Yeah. I like thinking about it in terms of two circles of a Venn diagram. And I call this inside out, outside it. So outside in is thinking about market demand, the questions that people ask you all the time. Right. What's, you know, super obvious that you should teach.

Inside out is the other circle where if you look inside of your in your heart of hearts, what is something that continues to fascinate you that you get excited by that you constantly see with fresh eyes yourself? Because if you pick a topic where there is a lot of market demand and people think you're the right instructor to teach this, but you get annoyed talking about it or you don't really want to go there like, yeah, you're not going to be able to stick with it long enough to see progress. Yeah.

So you really want to be in that Venn diagram overlap of inside out and outside in. With the outside in circle being bigger, by the way. That circle is like this big. The inside out one is like this. But still that Venn diagram overlap. It's like love. But the inside out is the passion. The corner of the triangle. And the outside in is the commitment. It's the external framework that keeps you doing it. And you got to have the passion. I mean, Channing, you and I talk about this all the time. You used to say, Cortland, you're just lucky that

The thing that you're passionate about, which at the time was computer programming and creating stuff online, just so happens to also be very lucrative and useful in the world. I have a really good outside-in, inside-out overlap. But the inside-out is just passion. It's what you would do even if nobody was paying you, what you can't stop thinking about, what you can't stop telling your friends about. To put that in context, that's...

That's because we would have conversations of what like I would want to do how I want to spend my time and yeah You would talk about how you wanted to spend your time and for you you had the inside out That was such a hard constraint you're like oh if I if I have to like set an alarm or if I have to like do any kind of like constraining or like, you know strategizing over how I'm gonna get my if I have to donate to a crappy charity or

that if I don't hit a deadline, then I'm not doing the work that I love to do. No, to be clear, that's what I have to do to race through this thing. But I love doing it. Yeah, yeah. I think one thing that's interesting about this whole level of competence that you need to be an instructor is that I've met a lot of indie hackers who've decided to be teachers and have gone on to make a lot of money educating. But even the most experienced ones have this feeling or like,

Like they don't feel like they can teach anyone because they haven't been teachers. They may have been an industry for years. They may be a Twitter guru about something. But the second they sit down to like write a course, teach a class. You mean that's not a teacher? I mean, it is. It's like the highest form of teacher. But the second they're like, OK, this is my course. It costs a thousand dollars a person.

A lot of people get, you know, imposter syndrome or whatever you want to call it where they're just like, am I qualified to teach this? And so I often end up telling people the exact opposite, which I may be completely wrong, which is like, oh, no, don't worry about that. Like, you got this because it's so emotionally scary for a lot of people to think that they can teach and that anybody's going to pay that amount of money for what they have to say. I think in many ways that that bit of imposter syndrome is a good thing.

Because $1,000 is a lot of money for a lot of people. So I take that with weight that people are paying real money to be here learning from me. And so how can I deliver 10x more value than what it is that they're paying, right? And like having a really high bar for your course, I think is a good thing.

Um, I have a, a framework that I call the content hierarchy of BS. So if you imagine a triangle, I already love it with, with more BS at the bottom of the triangle and less BS at the top. So at the base of the triangle, you have stuff like tweets, tweet threads, uh,

LinkedIn posts that are kind of mic drop moments where you kind of say this thing, you throw it out there and like you don't really need to stand by it or defend it or answer people who challenge your thinking. Speaking at conferences, being a keynote speaker, also quite low on the triangle because you're up on stage, right? You have all the trappings of being a credible expert. You're on stage, everyone will blow you. Exactly. So these are all situations that are very one directional.

Where you kind of say your piece and then kind of bounce. And so the bar for the quality and insight and rigor is just not as high. And the further up you go in the triangle, the less room there is for BS. So writing a long form article.

a long-form essay, right? Or a book. Less room for BS there. There's more that you need to fill and make your argument. And at the very top of the triangle, I would put courses. Whether it's a video course or a core-based course, I put the core-based course at the top because a video-based course is still one-directional. A core-based course, you are in front of 50, 75, 100 students who are all professionals in your field. Right.

Many of them can be quite senior and you're saying your stuff. And if someone disagrees, they're going to speak up. Yeah. Right. And there's going to be sidebar conversations happening in the Zoom chat or people are going to be confused. Right. So there's a higher bar for the rigor there because it is bidirectional.

And I think that's a really good thing. It's great because it ensures and incentivizes instructors to think more about what they want to teach students and make sure that it is actually something that they stand behind, that they're coming up with examples, that they're sharing edge cases and nuances and counterexamples.

and really sharing the guardrails of an idea, not just like saying the most Captain Obvious basic version of the idea and then moving on to the next thing. Because your students are not going to go for that. You can't just give people like the chat GPT answer or it's like, here's a listicle of all the things because then people are going to follow up with questions. And if you don't have answers to those, you're screwed. I love that there's like a theme that you're sort of exuding, which is a lot of people are very incentivized by carrots. And then a lot of people are like, well, you got to have like a little stick too.

You're very heavy on the stick. I'm a stick person too. Well, I don't know, man. Literally, the commitment contract that I signed is called Stick with 2K. Oh my God, I love it. And Cortland, you haven't stopped shitting on me for it. So I don't really know how much of a stick guy you really are. There's studies on how people are either incentivized by, they're driven by fear of loss or the prospect of gain.

And the majority of people are driven by fear of loss. Totally. Yeah, loss aversion is huge. What bad things might happen if I don't do this, right? Versus what good things will happen if I do. It is important definitely to think about both. So I will say that I'll add that if you're the kind of person who overthinks about things and you are a high quality person,

person, you have high quality ideas, then moving a little bit left on that spectrum. It depends on where you're on the spectrum. There are a lot of people who are more on the thread boy side of the spectrum. If you're that kind of person, absolutely, you should take that imposter syndrome seriously and make your course mergerious. But if you are someone who tends to be self-conscious talking about yourself, but deep down, you know you are very credible, then you can probably move a

There's one of the most popular podcasts these days is Andrew Huberman. I don't know if you ever watched anything from him, but he specifically has one episode, the entirety of which is devoted to the neuroscience of motivation. And he

He kind of like just dives into the research and lays this old age old debate about the carrot versus the stick to rest. And he's like, no, it's the stick for almost everybody. And he names the two things that people, especially like in our field, like entrepreneurs, people who are really ambitious. The two things that we tend to do on the one hand is like you have a lot of people who are like visualizers, right?

I'm going to visualize success and I'm going to see what that feels like. I'm going to manifest it. I'm going to give myself affirmations and make myself feel all the good feelings. And he's like, well, what you do then is it often helps you get going, especially if you're really afraid to get going. You're like, I don't want to start. It might get you started. But then as soon as you're started, now every time you're manifesting that great end of the finish line, you're just giving yourself that rewarding dopamine hit and you're kind of done. Whereas

The people that are the most persistent and don't procrastinate to the very end are people who do their manifesting and they do their visualization, but it's like they're visualizing what will happen if I fall on my face? What will happen if I don't get there in time? But they're doing that not at the end. They're doing that when they have plenty of time. Which brings me back to love. Commitment versus passion. Which one is the carrot? Which one is the stick? Commitment is the stick, right? It's...

loss avoidance. You get married, you're at the altar, you tell the other person, I do, you read your vows. It's saying, I don't want these bad things to happen. I don't want to lose what's good. And I want you to also make that same commitment. How do we make sure we prevent loss? Dude, I'm going to psychoanalyze you right now live on the show. I think you're being pressured to marry somebody that you don't really want to marry. And now you've read some book and you're convincing yourself like, no, no, no, marriage is really good.

I don't know where this is coming from, but that's my best theory.

You know me well enough to know that that's true. But I think it's really true. And I think passion is the other side, right? So you meet somebody, you're starry-eyed, you think about the possibilities and what can be and you're motivated by this promise of really great feelings. And so it's both the carrot and the stick. And I think it's wiser to be a little bit more thoughtful about the stick because humans experience loss aversion. Losing $100 is way more painful than making $100 as positive. It's just how we're wired because loss can kill you and gains usually aren't.

aren't quite that permanent. This is something that we teach instructors when they join Maven. We teach them about how they should think about marketing from day one. Because most course graders will think about marketing after building their curriculum, after building out all their content, building out their pricing and everything. And at that point, it hurts a lot if you launch your course and it's crickets and tumbleweed and radio silence.

And like no one is signing up, right? Like it's a pretty hard blow. Whereas if you think about how am I going to market this? Who is going to pay $500 to take this course? Why would they be excited to do this? And how am I going to deliver way more value than whatever this course costs? And if you start thinking about those upfront and also distribution, how are you going to get in front of the right people?

All these things are questions you eventually have to answer. And if you answer them up front, that's kind of like, Channing, what you said with envisioning what things could go wrong and how you preemptively address those. If you think about that up front, it actually makes what we've seen, instructors much more confident in building out their curriculum, in doing all these other steps with more lightness and more joy and more pep in their step because they've kind of answered these harder things up front.

How do you market a course? I mean, I assume like part of it is like putting it on Maven is good marketing because you all probably do your own promotion. Obviously, anybody can go to your website and look at things. You have your own email list. What else can somebody do to get the word out about their course when they're just now becoming an instructor?

There's a bunch of different things. So one is getting in front of the right people who might want to take your course. So one way of doing that is building an audience. So emailing your email list, building an audience on LinkedIn, on Twitter, getting in front of prospective students, essentially. The other thing is tapping into existing places where people are already hanging out.

So communities and Slack rooms and different groups, right? So, you know, not necessarily assuming that you need to build your own audience for everything, but, you know, are there different groups you can partner with? There's one director, Shivani Barry, who has a leadership course for women in tech.

And she started off with no audience. She was a product manager at Intercom and PayPal. And her first cohort had 15 students. And she basically doubled every couple of months from there, 30 and 50 to 60. And her course is around $2,000. Wow. She was able to do this. Yeah, it's amazing. She was able to do this with no audience because she would host webinars regularly.

with different women ERG groups within Amazon, Instacart, PayPal, Deloitte. So she would go to these companies and say, I'm going to host a free 45-minute session on dealing with dominant personalities or how to advocate for yourself as a woman in leadership, balancing warmth versus competence. Right?

Talk about these really useful topics, show her value, and then inevitably some people who attended would be like, oh, this is amazing. I can do seven more weeks of this? Yes, signing up. It sounds like she's going directly to the places where these people are dealing with these problems. Exactly. She's going to the people, passing out the free samples, and people want the whole chicken. Yeah.

The other cool thing about it is that it's a very high price point, right? Like $2,000 per person. Education in general, people pay a lot of money for it, which means you don't need...

10,000 customers to make a living as an educator, right? You can have like a few hundred customers. Like my ex-girlfriend teaches people to be basically sex and relationship coaches. And I think it's like $13,000 a year. And she teaches like five weekends a year. She makes, you know, millions of dollars from like a handful of students. And there's not that many other things you can do as a founder or entrepreneur that make you that much money with that small number of customers. Also to that point, the, I mean, like,

What is I forget what his name Kevin Kelly thousand true fans. Yep. I always do the math on that and I'm like, okay, but the things that people are like the kinds of content that people are usually putting out doesn't have a price point. Like I think a thousand times a hundred to be making a hundred thousand dollars like you have to sell whatever your content is for a hundred dollars to all those people.

But like with courses, that's the kind of content where like you can actually hit that kind of a price point. Some courses. Some courses are like $8. Wes, what do you think goes into the difference between selling a course, you know, for $8 and selling a course for $2,000? Like why can some people sell for so much more? Well, the average course on Udemy, I believe, is $10 to $20 on average for business courses. So I think the prerecorded aspect is a big reason why certain courses are cheaper. Yeah.

You know, there's no scarcity with it. There's no marginal cost to add an additional student. And people know that. And compared to a cohort-based experience where it is going to be higher touch, there's going to be more direct interaction with the instructor. It only happens a couple times a year. So there's a lot more trappings of scarcity with this.

core-based courses. Right. You're just going higher up the pyramid to use your analogy. Exactly, yeah. It's like higher stakes and harder but like you get the price point to match. It sounds more fun too though. I'd rather teach people live and kind of update my lesson plan and get to interact than to like have this huge thing where I spend months putting together hundreds of videos and then have this big launch and it might just be a dud and I'm, you know,

Yeah, the feedback loop with live courses is great. So, you know, I've seen creators start with a pre-recorded course and then create a more premium live version of that. I've also seen the opposite. And I think that the benefit with starting with a live course is that you get real-time feedback from your students on what's resonating, what's not, what's confusing for people, what you should...

trim entirely because it was boring and didn't really add any value for people. And so you get a lot of rich data in real time that you can use to hone your materials. So Saul Hill Lavingia, founder, CEO of Gumroad, has a Maven course. And he taught his course when he was writing his book. And he was able to essentially...

test a lot of his material on his most diehard fans and be able to see like, what do people find actually useful? What are examples that I haven't thought of that, you know, that his students are sharing, right. And kind of pushing and prodding on his, his content. Um,

that he was able to shape his book and tighten it and sharpen it even more because of that. Yeah, yeah. I like that idea of basically working with a small group of people to create content that will then go mass market and reach tons of people. Okay, so let's do a quick lightning round of questions since we're running out of time. First question, how does Maven make money? What's your business model?

We are a marketplace. So we have a fee for using our product and being on our marketplace. So instructors keep 90% of their course earnings and Maven keeps 10%. Cool. How does a course creator scale their course? It's cohort based. So it's all at the same time. Like how big of a course can you teach? Can you teach 500 people?

Yeah. So we've seen cohorts that have 300 to 500 people. Before Maven, I worked with a bunch of early adopter course creators like Tiago Forte with Build a Second Brain. And Tiago has about 1,000 students per cohort. I also helped build Professor Scott Galloway, Prof G's courses, and he has about 1,000 students per cohort also. So there are a bunch of different ways that you can create more intimacy even with big cohorts, basically creating subgroups

for students to be able to interact with each other in more intimate ways. It's near unlimited scale. Most people will not get there. A couple hundred is a really nice sweet spot for most instructors. And with that, there's plenty of room for, you know, discussion, interaction, et cetera, still. What about the short head? Who are the, who are like the 800 pound gorillas? Like who's brought in the, like, you know, what's the highest earning course creator? Yeah.

We have course graders that are close to a million per year.

Yeah, we have several that are in the 500,000 range per year. My high school English teachers aren't going to want to hear that. It's pretty nuts. I mean, it's an exciting time to be alive. Yeah. To be a creator with skills that are where there's market value. Last question and we'll let you get out of here. We want to do something like this for IndieHackers. Like I want to help IndieHackers learn from course creators. What should we do? Do you have an affiliate program? Can we partner with you? Like,

How do we help the people that we know are knowledgeable teach a course that we can then offer to our audience? Yeah. We don't have a formal affiliate program, but we do have a free course for anyone who's interested in building their own course. It's called the Maven Course Accelerator. It's three weeks. I teach it. It's completely free. And basically, we teach you everything you need to know to download all your ideas onto paper, to organize them into a curriculum, figure out...

your course landing page, what positioning and marketing you should have on it, how to nurture your leads to become students.

everything from the course creation to marketing. So everything you need to know. Westcow, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to at Maven and also plug the link for that excellent course you just talked about? Maven.com is the best place to go or Maven.com slash teach and also at Maven HQ on Twitter. All right. Thanks so much for coming on.