Platform for Creators to Share Knowledge

The leverage of internet has led to the rise of the passion economy. More and more people are becoming creators and earning revenue and are self-employed. Hence, there is a need for tools and platforms to help creators. One of the tools that creators need are platform to share their knowledge in the form of courses.

If we are building a platform to host their courses we must address the following jobs to be done: (Reference: Ryan Gum's tweet)

• Help grow their business: grow their audience, monetize the audience.

• Help run thier business: handle payments, payouts, refunds, taxes

• Help save time: delegate work to team members, automate repetitive tasks.

For a creator, a platform to host courses means - creating an education SaaS product for them. Right from creating landing pages for learners to showing course previews and handling course payments - the platform must take care of everything. Some of the existing platforms enabling creators to monetize their courses are Teachable, Podia and Thinkific. (Of these three, I like Podia personally.) No platform is perfect and it is always a tradeoff between power and ease of setup.

A few questions about the platform design for creators:

• Will it be a 2 side marketplace? - Here, the supply consists of creators, and the demand is the audiences. Will the platform help creators acquire audiences also with discoverability, or will it be a pure hosting platform with the creators having to drive the audience on their own?

• If the platform aids discovery, will we allow multiple creators of the same course to be shown? If we show, how will we display the ordering? How can we assure creators that the platform does not favour one over the other?

• Quality vs Quantity - Do we want multiple creators with small audiences in our platform or few creators with very big audiences on our platform? Our pricing or percentage cut will depend on this. For small audience creators, we need quantity. For large audience creators, quality takes precedence. Do we want more quality on the platform or we want to champion small/medium creators with more courses?

• Who owns the audience - The creator or the platform? Medium does not expose the mail ids to the creator, so they own the audience. Substack on the other hand shows the mail ids to the creator. This decision also affects the switching cost of a platform.

The core values of the platform we are aiming to build guide these decisions. We need to understand that we cannot please everyone. We understand our creator audience and then build the platform for them.

Another important factor in these platforms is the UX of plugging content in. The content must be easy to put and a provision to update regularly. Again a few more choices to make:

• Do we reflect the latest version of the content to everyone taking the course? Or reflect the latest version of the content only to people yet to take the course. This is an important decision since it would affect the course completion percentage. (The new content would be shown as unsuccessful, so the course completion percentage would reduce.)

• Do we enable assignment submission on the platform, and how are we evaluating them (or are we evaluating them)?

• Are we a specialized platform hosting only a particular type of course (tech-focused, career-focused) or a generic platform hosting any kind of course?

There are many more choices to make here, but sharing a few to give a flavour of how it is not so easy to design a platform. We often think it is a technical decision, but many choices are based on business calls. At least for early-stage products for the creator, the right engineering teams are the one with a good business understanding of how the creator economy works.

These are initial thoughts on a creator-focused product. I will write more as I think more on this problem.