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Gagan Biyani

Hi there 👋 I’m Gagan, co-founder at Maven. AMA 👇

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Maven
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I'm Gagan Biyani, co-founder and CEO at Maven, a platform for cohort-based courses (CBCs). Backed by a16z and First Round, Maven empowers creators to monetize their expertise by teaching their audience via live and asynchronous video. In just one year, Maven has dozens of creators making over $10k and many who have made over $100k. Previously, I co-founded Udemy, a platform for video-based courses or MOOCs. With over 500 million course enrollments, Udemy was the first major MOOC platform online and is the most extensive video courses library on the Internet. I was also co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery company that raised $60M and eventually shut down. Currently, I'm working on a 3-day virtual lecture series called The Ideation Bootcamp where you can learn how to reverse engineer $100 million startup ideas. I also write about my experiences as a founder here and here. Let's talk startup ideas, Maven, online learning, the transition to CBC's and more. AMA 👇
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Ruth Freeman
Hello Gagan - I am the scrappy (I love this new designation that I will continue to live up to) founder of a digital parenting education company called Peace At Home Parenting Solutions. We serve MIT, CVS Health, IPG, Omnicom, Big Brothers Big Sisters and others with a 99% overall satisfaction rate among class participants. It seems that Peace At Home grew in the opposite way from your amazing Maven (we love it - we both serve parents at The Hartford and greatly admire your exceptional program). I was teaching online classes for one of my corporate clients and they were so successful that my daughter, who is in analytics, suggested that we bring it to the public. All I knew was hour long webinars and that is where we started as I slowly built a team of 20+ exceptional experts on specific parenting topics - kids with autism, anxiety, birth to five, youth exploring gender identity, etc. So the team came almost first and the digital products are being created as we go along. We now deliver quick recorded "Flash Classes," individual and small group coaching, monitored, private Facebook community, etc. My two questions for you are 1. Do you have any suggestions about Learning Management Systems? I want us to be the Amazon of parenting education and I mean specifically that a parent struggling with a particular issue can easily navigate right to the expert or content that they need. 2. Is there any way I can inspire you to meet with us to pick your brain and consider ways we might partner with Maven. Thank you so much for being available in this way to us big dreamers.
Davin Chew
Hi Gagan, I've learned a bunch from your writings and musings so I'm excited for this. I've been researching the customer success space and noticed that onboarding / digital adoption is comparable to CPC. Any thoughts on that space?
Gagan Biyani
Maven
@davinchew I love Minerva! Had so many great conversations with various folks from that team. Customer success - my fiance actually runs customer success at a startup so I know the function well! I would agree that there are some good comparisons to digital learning in general, and there are lots of ways to utilize principles from courses to apply them to CS. Ultimately, the better your customers know how to use your product and what the benefits are, the more likely you are to retain and upsell them. So CS is pretty much entirely an education game on some level. Also, the way you monitor student health in a CBC is kind of related to how you monitor customer health in a CS function.
Stanley Satyukov
Hi Gagan, I shared this with my team. You do a great job!
Gagan Biyani
Maven
@westyer Thanks Stanislav!
Jacqueline Jones
Awesome 👏🏾 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Gagan Biyani
Maven
@thejackiejones Woohoo! Although these days I'm much more confined to my specific neighborhood in Oakland, CA than I used to be :). Life has changed a lot since my nomad days, but I love it nonetheless.
Malaika Rubin
Thanks for taking the time to take our questions. Mine is pretty simple, and maybe it's the marketer in me.. but why the term "cohort"? Don't you just think this will cause confusion in the industry? I know that my potential student demographics (men & women, 30-65) won't get it, at least not at first lol. Just wondering. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
Andrew Whitehouse
Hi Gagan, I'm considering joining the course and emailed a couple of questions ... appreciate you may not have seen them yet. 1. What time of day do the live sessions run? (I'm based in the UK) 2. What sort of time investment does the ideation bootcamp recommend from participants? Thanks
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