Maven

Maven is a marketplace for cohort-based courses: live, time-boxed classes taught by practitioners to a group that starts and finishes together, rather than a pre-recorded library you work through alone. The problem it attacks is completion. Self-paced video courses are cheap to produce and cheap to abandon, and single-digit completion rates are normal across the category. A cohort adds the two things that make people finish - a fixed schedule and other humans who notice you are not there. Courses typically run two to six weeks with live sessions, assignments, a private cohort channel, and direct instructor access, which is why they command prices in the hundreds or low thousands rather than the $19 of an evergreen course. Maven supplies the infrastructure for that model: a landing page and checkout, applications and waitlists, scheduling and reminders, live-session hosting, cohort community, and post-course certificates. Instructors keep control of pricing and curriculum. The company was founded in 2021 by Gagan Biyani, who co-founded Udemy, Wes Kao, who co-founded altMBA with Seth Godin, and Shreyans Bhansali, who co-founded Socratic. That lineage matters: the founding argument is essentially a correction to the marketplace model Biyani helped build the first time. For anyone considering teaching on it, the commercial terms are the headline. The course builder is free to start, and Maven takes 10 percent of course revenue, with the instructor keeping the remainder less payment-processing fees. There is no platform subscription, so the downside of a course that does not sell is time rather than money. Maven also runs its own Course Accelerator, a free course on designing and launching a cohort course, which doubles as the platform's main funnel for new instructors. The catalogue has tilted heavily toward AI since 2024 - product management for AI products, applied engineering, and AI-adjacent go-to-market - taught largely by people currently working at the companies building those tools. The AI product management certification alone reports around 100 cohorts and 30,000 alumni. How it compares: Teachable, Podia, and Kajabi are course-hosting tools you rent, which means you keep 100 percent of revenue but must bring your own audience and pay whether or not you sell. Udemy and Skillshare bring an audience but push prices toward the floor. Circle handles community without the course scaffolding. Maven sits between them, taking a cut in exchange for marketplace distribution and a format built for live delivery. It suits experienced operators who want to teach at a premium price point without building a course business from scratch. It is a poor fit for evergreen, low-ticket, self-paced content.