Top 10 CX/UX Reasons to Not Put a Course on Maven

I fell for it! I followed! I saw others putting courses on Maven and figured it was the place to be. And I can tell this is the case, given how many people have asked about my experience with it.?

I also know that some people who are between jobs wonder about creating courses, and where would they put those courses. Hence why this is in my Life After Tech publication.

I’m now in the middle of the only course I’ll run on Maven, and I won’t run another course there. Let’s look at my top 10 reasons why not, more important reasons first.

I will keep putting my courses on https://DeltaCX.Academy , which (in Oct 2024) uses the Teachable platform. (#NotSponsored) My November to-do list includes getting everything from my Courses page off Maven and onto Teachable (where I’ve been for around 10 years).

#1: BYOC

Maven is designed for you to bring your community to them. They expect you to have lots of followers, and you just need a platform to run a course or cohort. In that case, Maven has plenty of competitors.

I thought that if I set up a course there, it would show up in their search results and possibly be promoted in their frequent emails. I learned that they don’t do either unless you have a certain number of paid sign-ups.?

My course won’t even show up in search results until I find enough paying people. Interested in what I’m teaching? Sorry, you won’t see it listed on Maven until later, or maybe never.?

I need help finding new audiences for my courses, so this doesn’t work for me. You’d also think it doesn’t work for Maven. They get 10% of every sign-up I get. Wouldn’t they want to promote every course, hope to get people a new audience, and make that money?

#2: Setting up a course is?tough

I needed to write to Customer Support a lot, which is not a good sign for the user experience of the system. I’m smart, and I’ve set up courses on multiple platforms before. This seemed quite complicated and not well-organized. Even after getting it done the first time, it didn’t seem to get much easier the next time.

And it took me many hours over two days to get all of the settings in there.

The left side nav includes many unrelated areas:

• Get Started. To get your course ready, there is a Get Started screen, which seems to track your progress and act like you’ve done less than you have.?
• Lightning Lessons, which are (optiona) free short lessons that help you promote your longer Maven course. Good luck getting those broadcasted to the Maven community! I thought if I created one, Maven would at least share that out. Nope.
• Lead magnets. Lots of drip campaign emails in Maven… because we all know that people who didn’t sign up for a course want to be reminded about it literally seven times. #UXSarcasm
• Landing page. A highly templated place with some modules that you can’t change, which was strange. But plenty of places for lead magnets!
• Emails. Drip campaigns. I wanted to remove nearly all of the drips and cart abandonment emails. One reminder is fine. And I rewrote it to be friendlier and sound like me. If you want to add something to the drip campaign, you kinda can’t. That’s a “Broadcast,” and it’s somewhere else in all these settings.
• Students. That’s not really a setting. That’s who has enrolled and (if they captured the email address) who dropped off and didn’t finish enrolling.
• Syllabus. This is an OK area where you set up the plan for your course. Lessons, projects, due dates, and the content itself (like if you have pre-recorded videos).?
• Projects. If someone has submitted a project, which is an exercise or any homework, it will be here. But it’s not a very clear page. You have to click on each project to see how many submitted and how many didn’t. Projects also show up in the “Community” for your course, but you’ll hear more about “Community” later.
• Surveys. Maven surveys your students in the middle of the course and at the end. I don’t think you can turn these off. You can add questions to them. Ah, NPS, and I can’t remove it.
• Earnings. $262 made on my first and only Maven course! I had expected more, but without showing up in Maven searches or emails, it was up to me to find people with open wallets. That’s fewer and fewer people (lately).
• Analytics. What you’d expect from a learning management system, but mostly in data table form.
• Student View. It makes sense to preview things how the student will see them. Looks like it takes me to the course Community. I guess if that's turned off, the student sees… nothing? Not sure.
• Help center. Also not a setting or related to my course.
• Settings. Completely related to the course. And probably the first page you should fill out when building a course. Also the page I came back to the most. So why is it at the bottom?

#3: Confusing information architecture

With everything in the left column, it’s not totally obvious which things you need to do before launching a course, and which areas you’ll need while running your course. Which areas aren’t course-related, like Help?

While running the course, if I have “Community” turned on (I’ll talk about that in a moment), that’s the main and possibly only place I need to be. Notice it’s not an easy link from the left side. I have to go to Settings (bottom of the left column) and scroll down to the setting where I turned the Community on. That takes me to the Community.

Help should be placed somewhere else in the interface. Settings was what I used the most, but it was at the bottom (and might require scrolling to get to it for smaller screens). Get Started mostly reminded me to do things I had to do anyway, so that seems like a First-Time Experience that wouldn’t persist in a navigation bar, especially once you’ve “gotten started.”

The left side feels like “settings” related to one course, but some are settings, and some aren’t. I think they need to rethink their information architecture and navigation. #UXArchitects

#4: Maven’s Community is?ouch.

I have it turned on for my course, and it’s basically a pseudo-Slack interface on the web. I see lots of public and private channels, Slack-style.?

But what is most interesting is that I have NO idea when a student posts something. I don’t get an email that someone posted. I don’t get a browser notification. I have to keep going to the page and refreshing just to see that nobody posted or commented lately.

Ah, someone just turned in some homework… half an hour ago… I had no idea. No email. No browser notification. I went and reloaded the page, and had to notice that “projects” was now in a bold font, meaning that something new is there.

I think I get a daily digest, but that doesn’t match my teaching style of trying to help people more in the moment. Does someone have a question right now? I don’t want to get an email notification about that tomorrow. Maven seems to think we’re all mostly hands-off, which is not how I would run a cohort or any course.

In general, I think online communities make more sense when you create them where people might be anyway. That’ll mostly be Slack and Discord. People are in a bunch of those for work or fun, so they are logical choices. They cost nothing or very little.?

Compare this to a Maven community or Mighty Networks, Circle, or another paid system. You might see less action there because people have to specially log into something they only use for you.

#5: Hard to give out course?coupons.

People love coupons, and I love giving them out! Teachable and Webconnex (my live event system, #NotSponsored) make this easy.

• Teachable lets me create as many coupon codes as I want. I also have interesting payment plans, like charging people one-time or monthly. The student can pick. Teachable can even create a bulk spreadsheet of codes.
• Webconnex lets me create global codes (e.g., a code that gets the same discount on ALL of my events; I like that), as well as codes that are good for only one event.?

Unlike Maven, Teachable and Webconnex don’t care if two of my courses or events have the same code, even with different discounts. Maybe COMMUNITY gets 10% off this course and 15% off this other course.

Maven cares. One code works for one course, and that’s it. That means if I wanted to promote a bunch of courses to my online community, I couldn’t just say, “Use COMMUNITY to get 10% off any course.” I had to create COMMUNITY1, COMMUNITY2, COMMUNITY3, COMMUNITY4, COMMUNITY5. That was tough for me to keep track of, and it added plenty of manual tasks and cognitive load for potential students.

I would have to say, “If you want to take Course X, use code COMMUNITY2.” “If you want Course Y, use code COMMUNITY 4.” This made it really hard to give out codes for multiple courses to large groups of people. For example, “Hey, LinkedIn, take 30% off any of my courses with code LINKEDIN.”

#6: You can’t duplicate a?course.

Let’s say you’ve spent two days setting up a course in Maven. What a sense of accomplishment! And now, you want to create another course and utilize all the customizations you made for the other course. Now that you have all of your settings in place, you’ve adjusted the emails you do or don’t want the system to send, etc., you just want to press “duplicate,” right?

It doesn’t exist, at least not when I wrote this in October 2024. Want to easily copy a course so you don’t have to do so much setup? You can’t. #UXFail

#7: Maven seems to be mostly cookie-cutter courses on AI or Product Management.

Based on the emails I used to get from Maven (I opted out), which are the courses they decided to promote, it seemed like everything was about AI or Product Management.?

Perhaps this isn’t the right venue for the topics around which I’m creating courses.

But Maven looks like a good place to spend a lot of money on courses that might help you be the Last AI-Loving Product Manager Still Employed.?

#8: Why did my Customer Support Rep sign up for my?course?

When I saw my Support Rep sign up for my course, I figured he might be interested in the topic! Cool, sure, come and learn!?

And then I heard a rumor. Warning: this is a rumor. I can’t prove it, and it might not be true. It came from someone I trust, and they heard it directly from someone they trust. So this is second-hand at best, and I can’t prove this. But I can say that believing that this might be true adds to me taking my courses off Maven.

My trusted contact said that the person they know reported that someone who works at Maven attended their course… and then ripped it off. That’s all the info I got. I already struggle with copycats and thieves, so this is a dealbreaker, even if only partially true.

It reminded me of the stories from Amazon sellers who told me that Amazon watches which of their products sell well and then has a cheaper factory make an identical, competing product. That’s then sold under the Amazon brand and is magically the recommended product.

All of my stuff is copyrighted, and some of it has trademarks and registered trademarks. Please don’t mess with me on this stuff. Check your company values, religion, morals, or anything that will convince you that maybe you shouldn’t steal somebody else’s content… and then don’t do it. Thank you.

#9: They take 10% for?this!

Maven takes $0 upfront and 10% of each sale. Their setup page seems to suggest that most people are selling courses for around $300–400 each, though I noticed that many of the top courses were over $800. If you had 20 people sign up for a $350 course, Maven gets $700. Get 100 people over two or three cohorts to take your $800 course, and wow, Maven is really doing well on you.

Teachable isn’t the only game in town. You can look at Thinkific and others. I used to be on Teachable’s mid-level paid tier, which was around $1000 per year and 0% of each sale, but I used to sell a lot more courses. Now, I’m on their bottom tier, around $480 per year, and they take 5% per sale.?

If you had 20 people sign up for a $350 course on Teachable, Teachable gets $350. Plus the $480 in annual fees they get anyway. So that’s around your break-even point for comparing these types of LMS systems.

Thinkific seems to cost around $480 per year plus a % of the sale, depending on your tier and whether or not you use their payment gateway. Hmmmmm.

But let’s say you had some really popular courses. Let’s look at Maven’s #1 course, which is a Product guy, ex-Every Famous Company, running what looks like a two-week course on your “product sense” for $1800. He might as well get it while he can! He might decide that losing $180 to Maven on each sign-up is worth it, but I wonder…?

If the course is that hot, who needs who more: Maven or him? Wouldn’t he have enough happy customers and word-of-mouth that he can move off Maven (or run some cohorts outside of Maven) and keep more of that money? I Googled, and couldn’t find him offering that course outside of Maven. Lost opportunity!

I don’t see projects or exercises in his course, so this is probably about watching videos, being in the community, joining office hour calls, etc… all things he could do on any other platform.

#10: Maven has some nice cohort features but is ultimately easily replaced.

A cohort is a group of people taking the same course simultaneously. They are then put into a “community” together and follow a common schedule, such as lessons, projects/homework, or AMA/office hours calls at a certain time.

If Teachable or Thinkific replaces this, great. But I can replace it myself. Take everybody who signs up for my “cohort,” and:

• Give them a schedule associating certain dates with lessons, homework, and live calls. There might also be live lectures.
• Invite them to a Google Calendar series of AMAs/office hours sessions. Invite them to calendar events for anything else that’s live.
• Create reminders in that Calendar for when homework is due. Or have Zapier send something on a schedule to the “Community.”
• That Community can be anywhere. I already have Slack and Discord communities. Perhaps each cohort gets its own channel. Put everything in a single channel for that group. It's easy and organized.

Conclusion

I like the idea of Maven, but not the execution of its ideas. It’s great if you’re already the popular kid with the hot course and you don’t mind giving up 10% for features you can probably get somewhere else for less.

Maven seems like the place to put a course about AI or Product if you are already popular and known. Maven will promote you, and you’ll have a platform for your course. Yet at the same time, if you are that popular, you kinda don’t need Maven. So it’s an interesting “who needs who” question.

For those of us who aren’t the coolest kids in the school, Maven doesn’t help us. I’ve spoken with other (let’s call them) popular people on LinkedIn. One revealed privately that eight people signed up for one of their Maven courses. I had six for my Maven course, and they all came from my community. I could have directed them anywhere.

Might as well direct them to my LMS system, which is better designed with better features and more maturity… which also costs less.

?? dcx.to for courses, community, coaching, articles, & videos. I’m available for strategic and tactical product, service, and experience projects, leadership, and training.

???? https://lat.link Life After Tech is a book, exercises, coaching, community, and more. You are the phoenix. It’s never too early to plan what you’ll do when you’re done with tech… or tech is done with you. Or you want to add non-tech work outside of a tech career.