How the best course creators get started

By Claire Chen

Instructor Partnerships

Summary

Use Maven's course interest survey to help you grow your course waitlist and validate your course idea. Customize your survey and send it to your network and audience. Read on to learn how Maven's top instructors use the course interest survey to start building their waitlist before they even started building their landing pages.

Benefits of a course interest survey

We are often asked “How do I build an email list?" "How do I generate interest in my course?" and "How can I make sure I've got course-market fit?"

A survey is the best way to:

Find out if there’s demand for your course idea.
Get your first leads in your waitlist

Almost every successful instructor on Maven has done this step. Check out what Maven's CEO, Gagan Biyani, has to say about why you should survey your audience.

Customizing your survey

Maven has created a survey for with questions that have been optimized for conversion. This survey is available to you as soon as you create your account.

To view or customize your survey:

Navigate to the Surveys tab
Click "Edit" to customize the questions
Hit "Publish" to save changes
Click "Share" to copy the URL

All survey questions are customizable except the first question (email capture). Here are the default questions:

What’s your first name? [Short answer]
If this course could help you accomplish one thing, what would it be? [Short answer]

Sharing your survey

To share the link with your network, just click "Share" to copy the URL.

Here are ways to amplify your course interest survey:

Email your personal network. Pro tip: export a list of your personal contacts from your email
Post it on every channel—social media, communities, email, newsletters
Ask your friends to comment and like your post on social media
Ask your personal connections to forward your blurb + survey to people who might be interested

📌 Use this template to share your survey with friends or on social media:

I'm thinking about building a live, [X-length] cohort-based course for [target student] on how to [course outcome]. You’ll learn [outcome 1, outcome 2, outcome 3]. I’ve taught/consulted on this topic for X years working at Y company [insert your credibility as a leader, operator, coach, consultant, and/or teacher]. Now I’d love to teach you. Fill out this survey to get on the waitlist & be the first to hear when enrollments open: [Maven form link]

Examples

Check out some announcements from other Maven instructors:

These announcements were made before we built the course interest survey tool for you. There's no need to use Google Forms or Typeform anymore. The course interest survey is integrated with your waitlist, so every lead is captured during in Maven.