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This mission drives everything we do – the products we build, the people we hire, the content we produce, and the way we support our students and teams. It's our heart and soul, and the north star that guides how we make decisions and measure our impact and success as a business.
2023 was a year of growth, investment, and lessons learned, but I’m proud to say that through it all we’ve remained as mission-driven as ever.
Having doubled the size of our team in 2021 and again in 2022, we spent much of the past year investing in infrastructure and scalability to support not just the company we are today, but the company we want to be in the next 5+ years.
That meant bolstering our product and engineering teams, adding HR, growth, and DevOps support, bringing on new instructors to expand our course library, and investing in new tools and technology for everything from content production and web development to project management and design.
But of course, 2023 wasn't ALL about frameworks and infrastructure...
The year kicked off with an amazing team summit in Miami, bringing together team members from Germany, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, and across the US – many meeting for the first time. We worked hard, played harder, ate comical amounts of food, and parted ways feeling inspired and energized to get back to work.
Speaking of work, this year we piloted a brand new Cohort Learning experience, hosted our first-ever Open Campus, and added Guided Projects to the Maven platform, introducing a unique and powerful new way for students to hone and showcase their skills.
We also hit some fun milestones along the way!
Fastest growing US companies
100K+
Maven Analytics users
1M+
Udemy students
100M+
Total Teaching minutes
2023 was a big year in terms of product evolution, with major enhancements to our popular Maven Showcase (new integrations, rich text support, custom project sorting, likes & comments, etc.), a brand-new cohort learning experience, and a streamlined user checkout and onboarding flow.
Perhaps the most notable highlight was the introduction of Guided Projects, a new Data Playground feature designed to simulate real-world business problems using tools like Excel, Google Sheets, Power BI, Tableau, SQL, and Python.
We saw 500+ project completions in the first two months, and expect significant growth as we expand our library and integrate projects into learning paths and assignments in early 2024.
As always we have an extremely full roadmap taking shape in 2024, including new courses, articles and projects, unique enhancements to the learning experience, and some exciting evolutions to challenges and live events.
Some of our most unique and insightful product concepts have been inspired by our community, and we look forward to learning from – and collaborating with – the students and teams who use our platform every day.
We've launched dynamic NPS scoring to measure what you love most about our platform and learn about the things we can do better. We've recruited beta testers, curated a Maven insiders community, and introduced a new platform for you to request features, upvote topics, and launched a public roadmap and changelog so everyone can impact the platform.
We continued to refine our enterprise and classroom offerings, adding 60+ teams to the platform, launching pilots with several local universities, and exploring new partnerships and integrations to help us expand our footprint. This is a key focus area for the business in 2024, and major product developments are already underway in Q1.
Last but certainly not least, we continue to make student support a top priority and key differentiator. That's why we expanded our customer success team, rolled out new tools and processes to help us better serve students, and introduced AI-powered chat support to help our team stay focused on the highest-value conversations.
We've grown a lot since day 1 – new authors, new course topics, new content types, and new channels – but our commitment to quality has never wavered. Students can expect the same consistent and extremely high-quality bar across all of our learning materials (courses, paths, projects, articles, assessments, etc.), which helps create an amazing user experience and differentiates us from platforms that focus on quantity over quality.
The content machine continued to grow and fire on all cylinders in 2023, allowing us to produce some amazing new material to add both depth and breadth to the library.
We launched 9 self-paced courses, including some brand new topics (ChatGPT, Alteryx, Sheets, and Financial Modeling), a complete rebuild of our best-selling Power BI Desktop course, and the first three parts of our 5-part Python Data Science path.
In May 2023 we debuted our first Medium publication (Learning Data), publishing more than 100 articles with the support of 40+ guest authors.
Finally, we continue to run our popular global data challenges, driving 1,200+ submissions across 7 new challenges released in 2023.
As proud as we are of our product and content, nothing quite compares to the community we've built – both on and off the Maven platform.
Talking to REAL users, making REAL connections, and hearing REAL success stories are one of the most fun and rewarding parts of our job, and we're humbled by the sheer number of lives we've been lucky enough to touch.
To that end, in Spring 2023 we introduced a new initiative called Analysts You Can Hire, which featured the profiles and portfolios of aspiring data professionals in the Maven community. We featured more than 70 job seekers in 2023, and based on overwhelming feedback plan to continue scaling this initiative in 2024.
From a social standpoint, we saw moderate audience growth across the board, ticking past 225,000 followers on TikTok, 150,000 on LinkedIn, and 20,000 on YouTube. Admittedly, we did not dedicate as much time or energy towards organic content as we probably should have, and plan to double down our efforts here in 2024 (Hint: expect to see much more of us on YouTube!)
Inside the platform, we continue to see steady gains, including a 50% lift in Pro subscribers, 15,000 course completions, and 10,000 projects hosted on Maven Showcase. Ongoing UX improvements and a steady stream of new content should help us eclipse these numbers in 2024.
2,315,785
92.4%
2023 lessons completed
33,285
102%
10,330
44%
Final assessments completed
Maven Analytics students showed amazing dedication by earning impressive learning streaks.
Last but not least, one of the biggest (and most successful) experiments in 2023 was our first-ever Open Campus event in October. Following on the heels of a successful "January Jumpstart" promotion earlier in the year, we decided to make our entire course library free to the public for the entire week. On top of that, we hosted 12 live, expert-led sessions throughout the week on topics like data visualization and storytelling, portfolio building, interview prep, skills workshops, and more.
We had an absolute blast hosting live webinars and guest speakers for Open Campus, and plan to run several similar events in 2024.
Data Skills
Data Careers
Data Journeys
One of the most exciting things about running a startup is seeing how much can change over a year.
There are a few things that we can say about 2024 with near-absolute certainty: we'll continue to produce great content, including courses, projects, and paths, we'll expand our footprint in areas like Machine Learning, AI, and Data Literacy, we'll host more live events (public and private), and we'll continue to evolve the platform to give individuals an exceptional learning experience.
Then some things are very likely, but tougher to guarantee, including:
Launching new modes of learning content like practice questions or code sandboxes
Integrating AI into the student UX via chat, portfolio reviews, personalized recommendations, etc.
Exploring new partnership opportunities with companies and universities
And of course, there will be opportunities that present themselves in 2024 which we simply can't predict or understand in this moment – and in many ways, that's the most exciting thing of all.
When you have a versatile, passionate, and talented team, combined with a leadership group that supports bold innovation and celebrates experimentation, you open the door to pursue exciting, often game-changing opportunities as they arise. Time will tell what those opportunities will be, but you can be confident that we'll be well-prepared to jump at them.
As we prepare for our upcoming team summit next month – this time in Austin, TX – we couldn't be more excited about the team we have in place, the mission we're living, and the opportunities that lie ahead.
So cheers to an amazing year, and to going even bigger in 2024!
