At time of publication: Series A | Total Funds raised 25mn USD
******
If you are reading this newsletter, chances are you may have seen this chart, dubbed by some as the economists’ chart of the century
In the United States, Healthcare and Education (and generally across the world) have seen massive price increases without corresponding improvements in positive outcomes to show for. In Education, graduation rates are at a dismal 44% (graduation rate defined as the share of students in a bachelor’s degree graduating within 6 years).
This is weird! Though there is abundant content and curriculum freely available online and the marginal cost of distribution of content online is essentially zero, the cost of ‘education’ keeps going up with poor/stagnant learning outcomes.
MOOCs earlier were seen as a big leap for education/learning. Coursera and edX featuring free content and fairly affordable certifications from the world’s top universities were thought as democratizing education for the masses. That is partially true - Coursera has reached 70mn ‘learners’ just in 2020.
But if you look at completion rates as a success metric, things aren’t so rosy anymore. Data suggests dismal completion rates between 3% to 6%.
Disrupting Education and Learning isn’t as easy as just putting classroom content online. There needs to be sufficient business model innovation.
Students should not just have affordable access to quality content online but also must be sufficiently motivated to complete a course while getting help and feedback along the way. Designing a social experience in online learning can increase learning outcomes - it solves for motivation, feedback and probably help too.
And while a few decades ago, learning/education used to be ‘one degree and done’, in a predominantly knowledge economy, learning doesn’t stop with college and has to be continuous.
To summarize, we know that online learning can make learning affordable and accessible but learning (and life) outcomes can increase if:
Learning is social which provides motivation, help and feedback
Learning is continuous
Maven is an interesting learning/edtech startup that enables a social learning experience through what is called ‘cohort based courses’.
Popular and recognized (at the very least on twitter) experts can create and sell courses on Maven that are:
Live
For a limited cohort of students who learn together
Time-bound (usually 3-5 weeks)
Rich in ‘hidden knowledge’ - knowledge uniquely absorbed and distilled by the course creator over many years and is not widely available
For example, Chris Fralic, a recognized expert on networking and business relationships, sells a cohort-based course on Maven called ‘Building Relationships, Brand and Reputation’ (his hidden knowledge). The course is 3 weeks long. Participants actively learn live (over a video call) with Q&A in every session. There are also some exercises, project activities that the learners will engage in with the cohort of peers. The experience is social and hence there is motivation and accountability to aim for high outcomes.
Course instructors/creators can set the price they want. Since they usually have a committed follower base and are recognized as experts and due to the built-in scarcity in the model, they are able to charge a lucrative fee. Course fees often start at $500 per learner and course duration is often for 3-5 weeks. As Li Jin predicts in ‘100 True Fans’, a few committed fans will have no qualms buying your product at a seemingly steep price if they recognize the value.
From a creator perspective, cohort-based courses provide a far better monetization opportunity than passive video courses created via (say) Teachable since the value provided here is higher and the scarcity is more. And the best thing is it is not mutually exclusive - creators can sell passive video courses to a larger group at a lower price point and active courses to a smaller cohort at (far) higher price points. TechCrunch reports that as of May’21 four courses on Maven have earned more than $100,000.
From a learner perspective, Maven doesn’t compete (yet) with a university curriculum. As noted earlier, it will be useful for continuous learning post-university and to access hidden knowledge from experts (who you also trust as experts). And it provides opportunities to form connections with like-minded cohort learners and maybe even with the course instructor.
Maven starts with a large market opportunity in continuous learning which is a must in the knowledge economy. There are tens of thousands of niche knowledge elements that are worth learning and paying for. Attracting the best creators/experts in many niches will mean attracting learners with high willingness to pay for.
Tens of thousands of niche/hidden knowledge x only available on Maven x high willingness to pay = a very large market!
Of course many creators having a good enough twitter following also pulls in learner traffic to the platform when they promote their individual courses and can be discovery points for other hidden knowledge ‘needs’ that the learners may have and leads to high annual revenue per learner.
There are some key friction points of course, a non-trivial problem being - how do experts in something also create good curriculum, activities and projects for learners? That needs some education and onboarding. Currently, Maven does this via ‘Course Accelerators’ - intensive bootcamps for instructors. I feel this is a great way to filter for quality and get on board committed creators. But we need to see how this works at scale.
Having tens of thousands of creators and courses opens up interesting future opportunities for Maven. A big opportunity is the ‘corporate distribution channel’. There is less price sensitivity for learners when the company pays. Forbes estimates Corporate Training programs as a 87bn USD market just in the United States. Maven has a lot of potential to be the destination for learning/training and can be a better spend (and a better perk) from a company perspective than workshops and training programs especially if they can access top quality instructors.
Once there are lots of courses covering a wide range of necessary skills and knowledge, Maven can also curate ‘recommended playlists’ for learners (depending on learner goals) that they can use as a broader learning curriculum (and if possible) expense to their companies. Community creation on the platform around certain goals/outcomes may further increase value to learners.
While Maven presently caters (mostly) to post-university learning, it can potentially be an important piece of the puzzle in transforming regular ‘college’ education too. In the near future, I am convinced that for better outcomes, college education has to become ‘unbundled’.
Bundling in Education distorts and obscures true costs. Unbundling the pieces of university will ensure tech interventions in each of the pieces drive down costs. Maven can potentially play a big role in the learning part of education. Imagine curated free passive videos plus necessary community/live social interaction when necessary.
Maven is founded by a stellar team with deep experience in Education - Gagan Biyani (Udemy), Wes Kao (altMBA) who has created multiple cohort based courses and Shreyans Bhansali (Socratic).
Maven, founded by a stellar and experienced team, caters to a very large market, is pioneering a fundamentally different and better approach to online education, has the potential to aggregate the best creators and hidden knowledge and become a destination for continuous learning. Maven is a High Potential Startup to watch out for.