Episode with Wes Kao (Co-Founder of Maven)

Hello everybody. I'm KP, and welcome to yet another episode of Building Public Podcast. Today, I'm joined by an amazing founder, someone whose work I've been tracking and following for a while. I wanna introduce our guest today. It's Wes Keough. Welcome to the show, Wes.

Hey everyone.

Sweet. So thanks for being here, Wes. The first question that I have is around Maven, right, where you work and you're a co-founder. Take us back to your connection, your early days with Maven. What made you take the leap?

We're still in the early days with Maven. So this is kind of telling the story as we're still living it. But yes, I started Maven about a year ago. And the way that, that the inspiration for Maven really came from the past 5 to 6 years building cohort-based courses, building the Alt MBA with Seth Godin that really kicked off this cohort-based course category, and then working with Professor Scott Galloway from Section 4 to build his strategy sprints, working with the co-founders of Morning Brew, Alex and Austin, working with David Perell, Tiago Forte, a bunch of these early adopters with course-based courses to help them design, build, and launch their schools. And the one pattern that I found throughout all of this was that the process for managing your course was so convoluted, it was ridiculous. It was cobbling together a bunch of tools and using anything from basically Zoom, Slack, Circle, Teachable, Kajabi, Podia, Mighty Networks, Heartbeat Chat, and then using email to stitch it all together. And I've personally spent many a night staying up trying to fix a Zap that for some reason stopped working, or trying to make a landing page look the way I wanted because I wanted, you know, the column width to be this, but the software didn't do that, or this didn't integrate with that, which means that we needed to redo this whole other thing. So the technology side was really frustrating, and I was shocked that there wasn't a single place where you could manage everything that you needed about a cohort-based course, given how fast this category was growing. So last year, Gagan, Biani, and I got back in touch. We're friends from high school.

Wow.

We grew up in the same hometown. Yes, in the Bay Area in California. And Gagan had reached out because he had started feeling the same problem. He was building a cohort-based course and was realizing just how confusing and frustrating the process was. And he said that he talked to other people about cohort-based courses and they all mentioned that he should talk to me. And so he was like, I already know Wes, I'm just going to send her a text, don't need an intro. And so, so he reached out, we started hopping on some calls to brainstorm this topic. And at the time I was consulting, I was working with these individual course creators directly and really loving the lifestyle that I had. He had just gotten back from 2 years of traveling abroad after he had shut down his last company. And we started chatting. And after a few calls, we were like, okay, there's something here. And our skill sets are such a good match. Do we want to start something together? And the answer was yes. So that's how Maven started.

I love that. And it feels like we were, as someone who follows both of you on Twitter, we were kind of brought on to this journey early on. I know Maven didn't have a name until, you know, you even did your pilot without a name, which is pretty interesting and fascinating, right? Yeah. And now it's also one of those things where you You can't imagine Maven today without the word Maven. And for a while you ran it without the title. So it was interesting. Do you recall what was— I mean, I'm trying to remember, but what was the placeholder title?

Yeah, it was called Wes and Goggins Startup.

Yeah, that was hilarious.

Very literal. Very literal.

That was hilarious. But so the first time Maven piqued my interest was when I was feeling that edtech was going to blow up in the next decade, especially after COVID. We saw how everybody were longing for communities online. And building this learning through cohorts, right? Which is a pretty significant step function change for the last decade where learning was all self-paced, like Udemy, Teachable, all that. For you, when did you start noticing this dramatic shift? You know, was it dramatic as I'm making out to be, or was it a subtle, you know, like pulling the rug under your feet kind of a change?

When Seth Godin and I started the Alt MBA in 2015, it was really the only course of its kind that was mainstream in the way that the Alt MBA was. So kind of rewinding a bit, I moved from SF to New York in 2014 to work with Seth, and my initial role was a 6-month special projects lead. And at the time, I had grown up in the Bay Area, I had turned over every stone I wanted to turn, and was ready to move to New York. And so I was like, all right, I'm going to toss my hat in the ring for this kooky author that posted that he's hiring someone to help him figure out what he wants to do next, what he wants to build next. It's a 6-month role. And, you know, if I— after the 6 months, I'll find a full-time role in New York. So I packed up my bags, moved to New York. One of my first projects working with Seth was building a Udemy course for him. So I started researching MOOCs, evergreen self-paced courses, video-driven courses. And I realized as I was building our MOOC, putting Seth's content together, that the completion rate was super low. It was anywhere between 3% to 10%. So a bunch of people get really excited to take courses and get really optimistic about the chance to transform themselves, to learn a new skill, to improve themselves, and a tiny percentage of people actually stay long enough to finish. I've personally signed up for a couple Skillshare Udemy courses. I think there's one on hand lettering calligraphy and classical music appreciation that I was very excited about, where I took probably 2 videos, watched 2 videos before I thought, okay, I'm gonna come back to this. And it's been like 6 years since I touched it, so it's been gathering digital dust since then. So as I was researching this, I was like, okay, this is a problem. You know, we're putting so much love and work and effort into this amazing Udemy course, and the fact that a tiny percentage of people are actually even gonna watch all of it just felt very upsetting. And so Seth and I started kicking around some ideas. You know, on the one hand, the completion rates for MOOCs are really low, but on the other hand, Seth is noticing that people don't read books as much anymore. There's some stat about how the average American reads, you know, only X number of books per year, and X is a very low number. I forget what it is now, but we were kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, and we were thinking, you know, this is— there's got to be a better way, that this could not be the pinnacle of online education that was supposed to democratize access and improve learning outcomes. So we thought, okay, what if we did literally the opposite of everything that MOOCs are? So let's start there and see what we come up with. So what if instead of asynchronous learning where you're watching a bunch of videos, it's all synchronous, it's live learning? And what if instead of doing it as a solo activity, you know, one person watching, learning by themselves, you do it with a community of other learners that are curated, like-minded, and want to be there? What if instead of it being free or really affordable, between $10 to $20 for most Udemy courses, the courses were expensive enough that students felt like they had skin in the game and felt like they needed to show up? Kind of like if you pay for a personal trainer, right? It's like, oh, I already paid, I should show up. Right. And what if instead of it being passive content consumption, as the dominant mode of learning. The dominant mode of learning were active, active, interactive, debating, discussing, critiquing, working in groups, actively thinking. So we started with this premise that, okay, we're going to do the opposite. And it started off as a giant experiment. So we said, okay, let's do this as a 1-month course. We're going to aim for about 100 people. We ended up getting about 75. We're going to charge $3,000 for this. The price has since increased in the last few years to $4,500, but we said, okay, let's, let's do it at $3,000. And when we first announced that we were doing this, there was basically rioting in the digital streets, at least of the Seth fandom, right? Because people were like, oh my God, I cannot believe you're charging $3,000 for this online course.

Meanwhile, his book Purple Cow was $10.

Right, exactly. $10. You know, at that time we had the Udemy course, which was, I think it was like $50. But discounted. And so people were like, okay, you know, I get it if Seth is speaking somewhere, like he's speaking in New York or London or wherever, I'm paying to see him in person, fine, the higher price tag makes sense. But the fact that this is online and Seth wasn't even going to be here, that it was built entirely around his content, his ideas, but the main point of the course was to learn by doing, not by thinking, you know, hey, I get to ask Seth Godin a question, he's going to give me a silver bullet answer to solve all my problems. We didn't want to encourage that. Mentality. We wanted it to be entirely hands-on so that people would work together in groups and learn by doing. So for all these reasons, people were flabbergasted that we were doing this. So we proceeded anyway with this initial group of early adopters. And within the first 2 days of the Alt MBA, I was shocked and blown away by how well it was working. I was skeptical too, to be honest, that we could bring a bunch of strangers together. Also, no one knew how to use Zoom or Slack. So I was creating this documentation on how to use these tools. And you know what was all of this? But the minute that people got together live and introduced each other and worked in pods and met their group for the first week, it was like this light bulb happened. It was like the skies parted and people started meeting offline without us. They met in their own, their own, you know, self-created Slack channels. They were DMing each other. They were meeting in Zoom even outside of the scheduled projects that we were asking them to do. They were opening up. They were crying because they felt so vulnerable. I remember there was a 50-year-old software engineer, and he said that he had never felt like he could truly be himself before with a group of people, and he could with the Alt MBA, with his students, the fellow students in the Alt MBA. And that was just so touching. It was just so— like, it's just hard to even put words to it that these students were so transformed by this experience. So that was the first session of the Alt MBA, and I ended up staying for 3 years.

Wow.

to run and build up, scale the Alt MBA to over 45 countries, 500 cities, 60, 70-some coaches coaching our students, thousands of alumni from around the world. And over that 3-year period, I learned so much about how to create engaging experiences online, how to bring people together, how to scale course businesses. And, you know, at the end of that, that 3 years, I thought, okay, I'm ready for a new adventure. I wonder if there was something in the water about the Alt MBA that allowed it to work, or was there something about this course format, about this learning modality, the structure that could be replicated and applied to different verticals, different creators, different industries, different topics? So that became this driving question for me. And so one of my first clients was Professor Galloway at Section 4. Oh. And I worked with him and his founding team to design their course. And I worked with a bunch of those other course creators that I'd mentioned. And what I saw was that, yes, you can apply this cohort-based model to other topics, to other creators, that this was something that, you know, even if you're not Seth Godin, you can get in on this, that this was a way for you to teach a topic that you were an expert in, in a way that was value-add for your community and didn't force you to chase volume. I think that was a really interesting part that emerged from creating this category of cohort-based courses was, you know, a lot of things on the internet, you have to sell a lot of those units to make a living. So if you're selling $10 ebooks, you have to sell a lot of $10 ebooks to make, you know, whatever your yearly salary was to be able to quit your job. If you're doing cohort-based courses and you're charging between $500 to $5,000 per student though, all of a sudden that's a different calculus. You can work with a smaller group of committed students, of committed fellow practitioners, of, of clients, of, you know, of students who want to learn from you, and you can run your course between a couple of times a year to several times a year. So David Perell and Tiago Forte, for example, run their course twice a year. Alt MBA runs 4 times a year only. We have some maven creators like Anthony Pompliano, Pomp, with his crypto course, and he's run 9 cohorts so far this year. So he's on the higher end. Section 4, Prof G, also runs, you know, a dozen cohorts or more per year.

Right.

So the fact that you have this much control over when you want to teach, who you want to teach, what you want to price. That felt very creator-friendly to me. And I think that the world is moving in a direction where creators now have more options than ever. I really think it's the best time in the history to be a creator. I would say even 5 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, being a creator was not that cool. It was kind of like, oh, you must be in between jobs. Right. Right? Like, oh, you couldn't get a full-time job, so you're doing this thing on the side. To tide you over, you know, or like you weren't good enough to go the corporate track or, you know, to work in a high-growth startup. Like, you have to do your own thing. And it was kind of like creators were eking by, you know, and there weren't that many tools or platforms. There wasn't as much community for creators to find each other and share, hey, what's working? You know, hey, let's hang out because it can be lonely as a creator. Whereas now there's so many different tools, so many different communities. And I think course-based courses are a whole other category that just Blows revenue streams open for creators.

One thing that is super fascinating about CBCs is the fact that they are almost location agnostic, right? You can live on the internet, you can do this experiment on the internet, which opens up a whole new pool of talent that were not located in Silicon Valley or New York to come now, you know, sell for virtually anybody on the internet, right? So I'm sometimes blown away when I have someone from Nigeria take one of my ODNC cohorts and I usually ask them like, hey, what made you apply? Where did you hear about us? And he goes, oh, I watched that YouTube video you made 2 years ago. I'm like, what? There were 17 views on that, right? And I think that's another aspect that I love about it is that the stuff that you create on the internet, the content you create on the internet, first of all, lives, you know, it has a very long shelf time, which means it's selling even when you're not present. So it decouples you being present and selling every day, what you have to do in real life. I have to go drive to SF, do a live workshop, and then, you know, sell every day. Plus it also helps you be location agnostic. You can sell to anybody, you can live anywhere. So how are you thinking about this, the rise of, I guess, living on the internet and then creating and teaching on the internet?

I think the internet is the best place to live. Maven is a remote company. I love that we're remote. Sometimes I still have to pinch myself to think, is it possible that I can work from wherever I want to and collaborate with a bunch of smart people from all over the US? Right now we're mainly US-based. And yeah, so the fact that with, with our cohort-based course creators and instructors, everyone is everywhere. Their students are everywhere. So it gives you so much flexibility to be able to expand your reach and not have geography be a limiting factor. I think that's one thing that really inspires me is that, you know, before, if you wanted to learn from someone like Li Jin, who's a former VC at Andreessen Horowitz, she now writes a Substack, she's a creator, she's a VC, she coined the term passion economy. Or if you want to learn from Lenny Rachitsky, an Airbnb, early Airbnb product manager who writes a newsletter, makes a living that way now, if you want to learn from Sean Puri, from Pomp, from Greg Eisenberg, all of these people you might not have had access to, you probably didn't have access to. Right. And they have all this amazing practical knowledge. You know, they're such sharp people locked in their own minds. So if you were in their inner circle, if you were their friends, if you were in, you know, the WhatsApp group, the right WhatsApp groups and the right communities, you would get to talk to them and share ideas. But for 99% of people, you know, you were not in those groups. You were not in those rooms. But now, because courses are a new channel for creators, each one of these people has a course. So all of this knowledge is now way more widely spread, more accessible for students in all corners of the world. And so there are Maven students and Core Base Course students off Maven too, in Singapore, in Brazil, in Kenya, in the UK, just everywhere, you know. And I love hearing our instructors say that, you know, they had people staying up at 3 AM taking their course, you know, and just like they were just so excited to be there that, you know, it was in some random hour of the night and they wanted to be there. And, you know, we a lot of times will make maps of where students are calling in from because it's fun, like knowing, like, hey, like, I'm in Toronto, but you're in wherever. And it's really inspiring for people to meet people from all over the world, the students too, right? Not just the instructors meeting their community members in a more intimate way, but the community getting to meet each other. Right. is something that is really magical about court-based courses that you don't get in other media that's one direction, right? You're a subscriber. If I'm a newsletter subscriber of, you know, the KP newsletter, I don't necessarily meet other KP subscribers. But if I join your course, then I can meet all these other people who have this shared knowledge, right? We have these shared values, this baseline shorthand that we can talk in. And that's really fun.

I sincerely hope that if there are KP's students that they meet on the theme of building in public, because that's the shared belief that they would all have. And That's a great segue for me to ask you a question that I've been dying to ask for a long time. I love when you said this. I don't know when you said it, but on Twitter you said something on the lines of instructors should not think about marketing way late in the game, which is often the thing that I notice, you know, among so many friends that I have and like, you know, people who are creators, but especially relevant in courses, you know, whether within On Deck or outside of On Deck and Maven or whatever, is that they're always thinking about marketing as an afterthought. And of course, you know that, you know, I'm a firm believer that on day one you should talk about marketing even if you don't have a course. And of course, when you don't have enough material to talk about the course, talk about the problem, talk about the transformation, talk about the aspirations, et cetera, et cetera. I want you to ask like, this is a great building public topic. Like what made you say so? What made you believe that? And what were some things you noticed that made you observe, make this observation? And how can people actually practice this?

I think Silicon Valley has a very product-first mentality. There's this idea that the zeitgeist is that If you have a great product, then it'll sell itself. You don't need to market it. Marketing is not that important. It's something we can kind of do because every company, you know, kind of needs marketing departments. So we'll kind of tack it off at the end. But the main bet and the investment and the effort goes into making the product great, thinking that that's all that it takes. And I always thought that this was pretty ass backwards, especially being a marketer where, you know, sometimes the product team would, would hand over a product and it's like, okay, we really should have thought a little bit more about this before spending a year and a half building this thing that now no one wants. And now it's too late to go back and change a couple things that, hey, if we had just talked about this as a cross-functional team from the beginning, that we would know that our customers are actually not so eager to do this. Like, you're building this whole suite of features around this thing, but, but people are actually wanting, you know, this over here. And so I think with courses, it's very salient because a lot of experts and creators are so excited about their topic that they want to teach that topic. They want to build a course, they want to build the content, they want to build the curriculum. And that's the natural place that they go. That's the place that they feel comfortable. And the marketing sometimes is less comfortable for them. It's newer and they're not as sure what to do. And so they avoid it until the very end. And the problem with that is that you could end up building a course that your audience doesn't actually want. And it's not that your audience doesn't want to learn from you or that they don't want to buy a course from you. They do. They probably do, right? It's that this specific course on this specific topic For this specific subsegment of your audience, there was something there that's off. So in the Maven Course Accelerator, which is a 3-week free course that I teach for all—

Which is a brilliant idea, by the way. I loved it when you announced it. I was like, that's so dope because I think the creators who want to launch their courses first need to understand the mechanics, the dynamics, and then they can go do their launch. Yeah, sorry, go on.

Yes. No, no worries. So it's a 3-week course where we teach you everything you need to know end to end about how to build a course-based course. And the first topic that we start with is course market fit. That's what we cover on day 1, is positioning, course market fit, defining your target student, understanding here's the pie chart of my community, what slice is interested in a premium course that's hands-on and interactive? It might not be the same slice that's interested in your evergreen self-paced courses. It might not be the same group that's interested in your one-on-one coaching. It might not be, you know, the people who are reading your book. It might be, and there might be an overlap, but you want to really build your course for the actual audience that wants it. So one of my favorite examples of this is Pomp. So Pomp was our first creator on Maven, and he spent a couple weeks putting together his curriculum. We all felt really good about it. And then one day we were like, okay, maybe we should test to see if people want this, just a gut check. Like, we're pretty sure people want this, and he has a pretty big audience. Yeah. So we were like, okay, the chance of it working is probably decent, but you know, he put out a survey to his audience on Twitter, and going in, Pom thought that his prospective students were crypto beginners. Yeah. So this course was geared around, around people who are new to crypto. When the survey results came back though, we were surprised that 60 to 70% of respondents who were interested in the course actually self-diagnosed as intermediate to advanced in their knowledge of crypto. And so we were kind of like, whoa, okay, like Pause. This is great. Now let's adjust the curriculum. And he scrapped half of the curriculum that he already had and reoriented his course around this really specific student of intermediate to advanced, you know, that persona. But what we learned from that was even if you are an experienced creator like Pomp, even if, you know, because he has a podcast, he has his newsletter, he tweets all the time, he's a very experienced content creator. He knows his audience. Even if you know your audience, you should still gut check. Mm-hmm. Who wants your course? What juicy problems do they want to solve? What are painful, hairy problems that if they were able to solve, this course would be a no-brainer, be totally worth it? And get a sense of who are these prospective students that you're imagining. You might have an idea of them, but you really want to go check that. So that's actually step 0 in the Maven Course Accelerator. It's part of the application. So it's actually so important now that we have everyone who even is interested in joining the Maven Course Accelerator Do the survey and make sure that you are— you're validating that demand. Right.

Which is amazing because you do that with such low effort and investment too, which is another, you know, way of like— it's kind of like a no-code MVP, right? It's just a Typeform or a Google Form, if I'm not wrong. Again, you're losing nothing by doing that as a creator or instructor. You're just testing demand. And I think sometimes, if I'm not wrong, there's even like a pricing range you check for, like how much people are willing to pay. So it gives you a lot data points before you go out and build out your full curriculum and the full landing page for, for Maven. So I think it's a really scrappy way of doing it. It's very smart.

Yeah. And you can even accept waitlists, right? So as people fill out the survey, they can check off a box that says if you're interested in joining the waitlist to be notified when this course comes out, right? And then now you're building your waitlist of interested students as you're building your content in Logseq.

I love that. Another aspect here This is still part of that thread that you wrote, which, you know, which is one of my favorite threads on this, you know, space. The one that I'm referring to for the audience is this thread that I'll include in the show notes called Spiky Point of View, and we'll unpack that in a minute. But another aspect that you touched on in that thread, which I fully agree and I love it, and it's one of those underrated aspects, is around the job of an instructor being 50% teaching and the other 50% being entertaining. It is such a— it's on the face value, it sounds like a silly thing, right? Like, why would I need to entertain, right? Can you imagine Professor G or Seth Godin being an entertainer? But if you think about it, actually, that is uniquely what differentiates them from a traditional marketer because they're right in the first meeting. They're not talking about funnels. They're not talking about, you know, shit that would bore you to death. They have a bit of an unconventional approach to teaching the traditional aspects of marketing. And this can be applied to all kinds of, you know, verticals and topics. So I fully agree. And oftentimes I have to remind myself when I do my own thing at On Deck or with an ODNC that my job is not to just like drill down the curriculum and like you make sure that they're learning, you know, step by step, but it's more about teaching them to have fun with the aspect of being a no-coder. So yeah, I want to ask you, where did you get that thought from? What drove that observation and why do you believe so?

I think we've all had teachers who were pretty boring. I remember a professor in college who I was in a lecture hall with 800 people. freshman year, Calc 1, and the professor never even turned around from staring at the chalkboard. And I got a C in the class. Not proud of it, but it was just, it was really hard to pay attention. And especially on Zoom, it's even harder for people to pay attention. I mean, even being in a meeting, like a 1-hour Zoom meeting where you, it's like part of work and you have to be there and like, you know, it's a topic that you are chiming in on, it's still hard to even pay attention for something like that, right? So especially if you are learning something as a student and your instructor is talking at you, It's just game over. And so I think the thing to really think about is learning is not just about knowledge transfer and facts. If it were just facts, then we would all read textbooks and be better people, right? And like, that's no one. Learning is a social experience. It's an emotional experience, right? It's, it's the, the social, the emotional, plus the facts coming together. that help students remember and implement changes and lead to actual behavior change that lasts, mindset shifts that last once the course ends. So, you know, when you mentioned Professor Galloway, Seth Godin, you know, they wouldn't start off talking about funnels or something boring. I think part of that's true. So they might not start off with, with the, the most technical, you know, jargony stuff. But even if they do start off talking about something deep, right, funnels, whatever, they're doing it in a way that's keeping you awake. So when I say entertainer, I don't mean you're a clown, like doing wonky stuff. Like, I mean that you are keeping your, your audience awake. You're talking in a way that cuts through the noise, that connects with them, that is entertaining, that's fun, that's relevant to their lives, right? And I think that's why Prof G is Prof G. Why do we not know of some other random business professor? There's a lot of them. There's thousands of them. But we talk about Prof G because he entertains us. If you follow him on LinkedIn, if you follow him on Twitter, you will see that he talks about relevant news and happenings and frameworks and business concepts in ways that make you perk up. So he's a pretty polarizing character. Some people love him, some people hate him. Doesn't matter. People pay attention, right? And because people pay attention, he's able to get his message across. So if you're teaching a course, you want to think about how can I cut through the noise and make my audience care, make my students care. And you can do that in a way that's that's unique to you and your personality. And this kind of segues into spiky point of view. You don't have to stir the pot or be intentionally controversial or be provocative just to get a reaction. It's really about thinking about, you know, what's relevant for my audience? How do I communicate this in a way that isn't just me talking at them the entire time?

I, I love that. And I, and I think it's the authenticity there that's really key, you know, staying true to your personality, your beliefs, and yet using them, the gifts that you have to entertain others and engage with them. So I love that. I want us to kind of go to the topic you mentioned earlier around spiky point of view. We touched a couple aspects of it, but I want to expand that. And so for the listeners who may have never heard about spiky point of view that you, you know, wrote a thread on, how would you define it? Why is it important in startups?

A spiky point of view is a belief that is rooted in your experience, your expertise on a topic that, that you're an expert in, that other people could disagree with, other experts could disagree with. So it's not a hot take. It's not something controversial just to get a reaction. It's something where, based on your track record and your actual lived experiences, that, that you feel very strongly about. So one example of this is that one of my spiky points of view, that people spend too much effort on product launches and not enough effort on everything that comes after the confetti settles and the launch is technically over. And this is from my own experience. Working the last 15 years as a marketer, being on a bunch of teams launching new products where there was so much emphasis on launch day or launch week and making sure everything was perfect, everything went well, that everything was coordinated, a bunch of different groups and parties. And then it's like, okay, great. So launch week is over and now it's the next week. And it's like, okay, cool. So what's the plan for continuing the momentum? And we kicked off with a bang, but how do we continue that? And it's like, oh, don't know. No one thought about that. Like, let's put something together now. Right. And, and just seeing how that doesn't set a team or product up for success. And someone else— so, so that's, that's my spiky point of view. Another marketing expert could disagree and they could say, actually, Wes, I think that launches are the most important part of a product's lifecycle that, you know, starting off with a bang is super important because it anchors the consumer's mind in what this is. And then everything thereafter, there's, there's more leeway, right? Like you can kind of putz around a little bit and have more leeway to get, get your act together. But the launch is when all eyes are on you. And so that should be disproportionately important. That's the opposite spiky point of view. And that is totally legitimate too. So the thing with spiky points of view is that different experts, you can get 10 different experts in a room and they could have 10 different spiky points of view. And the great thing about a spiky point of view is that it helps you stand out. Whatever you do, whoever you are, there are thousands of people who very likely have a similar background to you. They might have a similar skillset. similar years in the workforce, similar background, but every one of us has a different spiky point of view about the world around us that is a culmination of our lived experiences, our track record, our personality instincts, right? It's not just about the work that you've done. It's also your personality. Right. Like some people naturally gravitate towards, you know, I'm going to ship really quickly, right? They gravitate towards speed and other people naturally gravitate towards quality. And they want to be more thoughtful. They want to make sure that things are done right, right? And so it's a mix of all these factors coming together so that you have a spiky point of view about your field, about your function, about your craft. And it's one of the best ways to stand out and show that you have thought deeply about your work and that you're not just regurgitating, you know, top 10 lists and, you know, the first search results that come up in Google. I find they're usually SEO-stuffed, keyword-stuffed articles that spew some generic advice, right? And your audience is not looking for that from you. They want an actual spiky point of view that's rooted in experience and that's defensible, not necessarily a universal truth, but something that's defensible, rooted in rationale so that they can learn from you.

It's combining the spiky point of view and the Lesson about engaging and entertaining your audience springs up a specific thing you shared a few months ago, which is something that I embraced and I try to do more of, which is including— I think there was a tweet which went something like, you know, make sure that your course materials are super, as much as possible, super raw and includes real examples of DMs and cold emails or, you know, like things that early prototypes and like basically the shit that's like locked up in your mind, you know, make sure that you expose that to And I thought that was very interesting because by the time you take something that— the way you, let's say you reached out to an investor and you raised your first round, the early attempts that you made, I think, have the most valuable lessons as opposed to when you reflect on it 3 years later and you just write a nice Medium post. It may contain a well-packaged pearl of a lesson, which is like very polished, but I think you learn more. I mean, people learn more from watching the earlier attempts, right? Again, I want to ask what prompted that tweet. Was it part of the accelerator discussion? What happened? And I want to know why you believe in it.

Yeah. What prompted that was thinking about how most content on the internet is BS. If you look at Twitter, podcasts, blog posts, let's just use Twitter as an example. So I love Twitter, but also it's 280 characters. Anyone can do a mic drop. Saying something that sounds bold and wise and not have to back it up with anything.

Receipts, right?

Exactly. Yes. So I came up with this cheeky concept called the content hierarchy of BS, where at the bottom it's Twitter. And then as you work your way upwards, the amount of BS that you can get by, that you can drop, is less and less. So books are kind of in the middle because to write a book, you need a lot of research content to back up back up your thesis. And then courses, so pre-recorded courses. And then at the very top is court-based courses. And the reason why court-based courses have so little room for BS is because it's a bidirectional format. So if you're up on stage giving a keynote, that's full of BS also, right? You're up there, the spotlight on you, all the audience staring at you like that. There's so many— there's so much halo effect from you being the expert and like no one being able to question you and you just spewing, you know, your inspiration. Whereas in a court-based course, You're all logging in live on Zoom, right? I might be teaching, there's 200 people here, the chat is alive and well. If there's something that people are skeptical of, people are talking about it in chat.

They'll call you out. Yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah. They will pause and raise their hand and ask, like, this doesn't really make sense, or like, I just thought of a great counterexample to the thing that you just said, how does this fit in, right? So, so that bidirectional format is part of what makes court-based courses fantastic for learning because you are actually actively thinking and you are talking about the material with other people and you're actively participating in the course. What it also means though is that for the creator and the instructor, that you want to make sure that your content is defensible, that your ideas are defensible. And so the antidote to the content hierarchy of BS is the super specific how, SSH. That's what I call it for short. So the super specific how is is the idea that you want to have concrete, tactical, practical, actionable ideas in your course. And so that could look like screenshots, it could look like sharing actual scripts, it can be email copy, it could be sharing the actual Google Doc where, you know, things are laid out, it could be sharing your Notion setup and walking people through what this actually looks like. It's really the difference between saying, you know, communication is important, If you teach something like that, that's very generic. That's full of BS. Everyone already knows communication is important. Like, duh. Right. Captain Obvious, right? Like, you want to know, how do I communicate well? How do I persuade people? How do I get buy-in? How do I, you know, share hard news or whatever, right? Like, you want, you want to know the how, not just, just the what. So in Courby's courses, you know, usually a decent course will do 80% what and why, 20% how. An excellent course, a fantastic course will flip the script. So 80% is the how, only 20% is the what and the why. So the one why, you, you get it out there, right? And then the majority of time is spent on the how. Is how do you do this? How do you do that? And bringing these concrete examples so that your students can replicate the results that you have. If you only say the one, the why, it's pretty hard for people to be able to replicate. It's kind of like saying, you know, we successfully fundraised, right? And like staying very high level, it's like someone who reads that can't replicate it.

Right.

But if you say, here's the timeline of here's when we started, here's when we ended, here are all the different milestones that happened along the way, here are unexpected things that happened, here's the initial pitch that we used, here's what the initial deal memo looked like, here's what the initial slide deck looked like, here's how we built that and why we put the things we put into it. And then A month later, here's why we scrapped all of it and then created something entirely new. And here are the major changes. Here are the different reactions that we got, screenshots of people passing or screenshots of people saying, hey, question on this. That's so much more concrete because then your audience can take that and say, okay, great. I can picture myself actually here now. I've actually done the initial— maybe I've done a couple revamps of my deck and now I'm actually here. And so seeing what came next, for you, the instructor, helps me orient myself and figure out, okay, here are actually some big lessons that I can apply given where I am. And then your students can actually take action out in the real world. I think that's really what makes students of court-based courses feel like their course was worth the money, you know, compared to, you know, why didn't I just take a $10 Udemy course on fundraising, right? Right. The fact that I get to see behind the scenes and also get your feedback, either the instructor's feedback or the coach's feedback, fellow peer feedback, that I have a group that helps me stay accountable, that I get to see behind the scenes, that, you know, the instructor is doing a live critique of someone's pitch deck, that the students are pitching each other and then giving each other feedback, incorporating the feedback, and then pitching again. They're doing demo days, right? It's all of that really active, very specific how piece that makes a learning experience feel really juicy.

I love it. If I have to say, if I have to like point at one thing that I intentionally did in the last maybe 2 years that I would attribute a lot of my Twitter growth to, it is I went from someone who was trying to look like I was an impressive creator or I was an impressive no-code builder to, hey, here's the journey. I have no fucking clue where this will go. Here's the receipts, right? The number of times those kind of tweets went viral was insanely high, even if it's the actionable takeaway was so minimal. Like there's no grand lesson. Like it's some threads that go viral that I write, I look back and I'm like, there's no real grand lesson here, but it's a moment in time. It shows you that here's how an MVP looks like in day 1 or day 7, day 9, you know, and it's not pretty, but the concrete example is here if you want to take away from it. And the number of DMs I get from people when they see something like that, they're like, oh my God, I can't believe you used Adalo. You should have used Bubble. or Webflow. I'm like, then it becomes an engagement, it becomes conversation. Because when people see things, they have something to comment about, right? And especially the more concrete and the more raw it is, the more human you appear and the less godlike course creator you appear. And they feel like, oh wow, it's KP just 3 steps ahead of me, right? Otherwise, you can think of people like, I mean, anybody, you could think of anybody in any course, you're like, oh my God, they're far removed from my reality. You don't have to have my problems. Like, so I love that. And I'm so glad that you're intentionally incorporating it in the accelerator and just being intentional about reminding course creators to, you know, include raw, actionable, concrete examples in both failures and successes, right? And that's very key. I think they should see the failure side of it too, because not every cold DM will result in a yes.

Absolutely. In our Maven Course Accelerator, I will save failure examples to share with the rest of the instructors, and it'll be something like A project prompt that we wrote. It's kind of meta because it's a course where we teach creators how to build courses and how to create project prompts that are interactive for their students and stuff. So we'll have prompts for our instructors, and sometimes it'll bomb. People will go into breakout groups, they'll be confused, they won't really have enough to go on to have a good discussion, or it's mistimed and the scope is too big, and they barely finished one piece of the prompt in the breakout before we call everyone back. So we share these with everyone to say, like, hey, like, we gave you this prompt and it didn't work for these reasons. And so we're revising it based on your feedback, based on the learnings. So we changed the timing to this, we gave more direction on how long each person should speak, we are, you know, changing this or that. And we've gotten such great feedback from instructors who say that, oh, it's great seeing that you all— first, that you all made these mistakes too, it makes everyone feel much more motivated that like, oh yeah, like even this amazing course that they're experiencing used to be a lot more raw, right, than the polished state that they're seeing it today. But also, a lot of times you learn more from seeing what not to do than just hearing what to do. So seeing those mistakes of what not to do, you know, we'll share examples of project prompts gone wrong, we'll share examples of email copy that didn't really work, or, you know, ways of organizing the content that was very confusing for everyone. So we'll save all these. I love finding when, when something doesn't work, I'm like, oh yeah, well, let's save it and share it with everyone. Because we're constantly improving too. Right. Between every session, we've run 4 cohorts so far. Between every session and during every session, we are improving the course. So we don't want people to think that, oh, it's just magically everything just works beautifully. We want them to see, here's, here's what this looked like before. You know, and I love befores and afters. I think befores and afters are fantastic. I love track changes in Google Docs. Oh my God, amazing. Suggested edits, so good, right? Because you can see the original copy and then you can see the changes that were made to it, and then you see the final version. If you just saw the final version and not the track changes and not the suggested edits, you just, you look at it and it looks effortless. Right. You're just like, oh yeah, like it was just great. It just flowed. It just made sense, right? But then you see the changes that people made. And you're like, okay, I can see why the initial draft looked like this. And I can see why after a round or 2 of edits, these things got moved around and shifted around and the final version is so much better. And then you can see yourself in that editing process and be able to point it out in your own work and improve your own work.

I just want to— I know we're probably going over time, so I want to be cautious, but I just want to share this sort of watching an expert move is so mind-blowing. But also so makes it so relatable and so humbling, right? I'm sure you've had a version of this where I'll give an example. So we invented a session type at ODNC called Just Ship It Session. And the intention was we bring an expert and we ask them to take an idea and then turn that into a no-code app, right? No-code using Glide or Bubble or Webflow, whatever. And when you see them, when you watch them in 60-minute span, this is something they've done thousands of times. So they know how to do it, right? But the, the number of iterations it takes for them to like adjust that header, the CSS, the, and then make that small logic of a button click go to an email or something is insane. And after the end of the session, it looks like when you fast forward this thing to the end, the last 7 minutes, it's like, whoa, flawless. Wow. How did they end up here? Right. But if you watch the last 43 minutes, they went through so much pain. And to me, that is the essence that I, you know, I think we're, we're, we're on the same alignment here. That's the essence we're trying to communicate to the students is that the instructors are not some god people. They're not like godlike. They're just advanced beginners. They're really no experts. You know, there's only 2 kinds of people. There's a beginner who's just true beginner, and then there's a beginner who's given 10,000 iterations and they become an advanced beginner. You know, so yeah, the behind the scenes watching how someone executes certain things is so gratifying in my view to know that, okay, I'm not the only one who doesn't know how to do it so well on the first attempt. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think a lot of times beginners might think that when they watch an expert or an advanced beginner, that eventually if I get good enough, I'll just skip through all the iterations and the first 3 clicks will be, you know, will lead me to what my final product is. But what I love about the story that you just shared is that even no matter how much of an expert you are, you are still going through those iterations. Right. That is part of the process of your craft. And that's not something that you just grow out of. I thought that I would just grow out of needing to edit my work and just end up with the exact right decision or the exact right copy within a few clicks or within a few keystrokes. But there's always the iteration. That's part of the building process. It is. I think once I accepted that that's part of the building process and stopped trying to remove it or think that it should be faster, That's actually when things did start speeding up because I removed the, you know, the emotional expectation that, oh, I shouldn't have to iterate so much. I wish I could just get to where I want to faster. When I remove that, then I could just be in flow, right? And then really lean into—

Yeah. I mean, it's— I love the concept of flow and I think I wish more people in tech really embraced it and fully understood it because you see that in sports. You see that in basketball. You see Steph Curry. My favorite example is This world-class talent, right? Probably the best shooter alive, Steph Curry, dribbles, takes that 3-point shot, and then he turns around and he has no freaking clue. Sometimes it goes in, sometimes it doesn't, right? But if you notice like his adjustment to the next moment, the next moment, the next moment, that's what iterations is about, right? It's not, I think especially in course creation on skill building and learning something new, even like something like a podcast, like my, I love the process. And the flow, and in the fact that whatever you do, if you remove your expectation, like to your point, and your attachment towards looking flawless, it naturally you become flawless over time. You know, and even if you don't, you don't care because you're like, I'm enjoying this. I'm having fun.

Yeah.

And people want to see that. I think that's the thing. I think people want to see how the sausage is made. People want to see how like my other favorite thing about like you know when you share content, Wes is. There are millions of people who want to see how you run Maven, how you think about decision-making, how you think about managing up, managing down, how you think about raising rounds, right? And most people wait 10 years until they can write an autobiography or until they can give a TED Talk. My thesis is like, your Twitter is your autobiography, one tweet at a time. You have to sit with the fact that it will not be perfect. but the upside is huge. All right. I know we're over time, so I'm going to ask you one last question, which is what kind of course creators are a great fit for Maven where it is today?

I would say the course creators that are a great fit are experts with credibility who have an idea of what you want to teach. That's one. The second is the people that want to be part of Maven are experts and creators who have something to teach, who have a community that they want to engage with, and who want to build a course business. I think that last one is huge. We definitely have people who are doing courses as side hustles, who are doing it on top of full-time jobs or other work. But the ones that we see who are really successful want to invest in their course. They want to turn it into a revenue stream for themselves. They want to engage with their prospective students and with their students and with their alumni. They're very holistic and thoughtful about the process. I think creating a course is like creating any other business. It's not like once you launch, your business is done, right? You would never say that about any other product or business. But sometimes people will have that assumption with courses because their mental model is of an evergreen self-paced course where, you know, once you hit publish, it's out there. I would say even for those though, even for Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, you know, Skillshare course, you're still having to market it though, right? Like, there's— it's not truly passive income. You are having to market, you are having to get your course in front of people who'd be glad to know that it exists. So with cohort-based courses, it's the same. It's, you know, if you want to invest in growing and building your course, we've seen people with really small audiences, no audiences, double their cohorts every couple of months because they wanted to, because they invested in it, they put effort in And so, yeah, I would say that whether you have an audience or you don't, if you are an expert and you're credible and you want to grow a course business, I think that motivation piece is super important, and that makes you a really good candidate for being a court-based course creator.

Awesome. Sweet. Thank you. So where can people find you on the internet?

Maven.com is our website. We're also @MavenHQ, and then I'm @Wes_Kaoss.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Wes. This was a pleasure. As you can see, I had a ton of fun. I was in the flow. I appreciate you joining me and thanks for being here.

Yes. Thank you so much, KP.