Building the Growth Engine
When you work in an early stage startup, it’s easy to spend so much time focusing on your next move that you forget to stop and celebrate the wins.
With that in mind, this post is a good reminder for me to take a step back and properly acknowledge the incredible work this team has done, from building world-class products to empowering aspiring analysts around the world.
It's a privilege to work with such a passionate and mission-driven team, and I'm deeply grateful for the opportunity to build a business that changes lives on a daily basis. You all rock.
Now as we head into the last few weeks of the year, let’s take a moment to reflect, recap the highlights, and set the stage for one of the most exciting – and important – chapters in the Maven Analytics story. But we'll get to that later...
We spent 2020-2021 bringing our vision for a better online learning experience to life, launching a world-class platform and pioneering our unique Guided Learning model. With a proven product-market fit and a growing user base, this gave us enough momentum to start shifting into growth mode in 2022.
That meant hiring for key roles across product, engineering, sales and support teams, doubling down on content and community building, investing in new technology, and building the foundation to support scale in 2023 and beyond.
👇 Let's review some highlights 👇
THE TEAM
Every great company is built on the shoulders of a great team, so it only seems fitting to start there.
In 2022 we more than doubled our full-time crew for the second year in a row, adding critical roles to support growth throughout the organization.
We hired developers to evolve our learning platform, sales and marketing experts to expand our footprint, content writers to help tell our story, and learning guides to support and empower our students and teams.
This allowed us to improve product and content velocity, explore and scale new lines of business, and support a rapidly growing user base and global community, without compromising on our values.
Did I mention that we’re hiring? Reach out to learn more about open roles and opportunities at Maven.
THE COMMUNITY
Even with the most talented team in the world, we wouldn’t be where we are today without our community. As a business, this is arguably our largest and most important asset.
In 2022 we doubled down on LinkedIn, expanding our content strategy while continuing to support our popular free, public data challenges.
So far this year we’ve launched 8 new challenges, featuring Super Bowl commercials, unicorn companies, airline satisfaction ratings, space missions, pizza restaurants, and more. Collectively, these challenges have generated an astounding 2,000+ entries in 2022 alone (as a point of reference, our first challenge in 2020 drove 10 submissions).
Over the same time period we grew from 39,000 to 85,000+ LinkedIn followers, and are pacing towards 100k by the end of the year.
But LinkedIn wasn't the only social platform where we spent our time in 2022; in April we ventured into uncharted territory and added TikTok to the content playbook. I was skeptical, and made it clear that I would not be singing, dancing, or otherwise compromising our brand reputation in exchange for validation from bored pre-teens.
Luckily, I was wrong.
With a commitment to producing high-quality, practical demos featuring tools like Excel, SQL, Power BI, Tableau and Python, we built a following of 175,000 users in under 6 months. Needless to say, this is a channel we’ll continue to nurture in 2023.
Most importantly, we’ve seen healthy growth in course enrollments and subscriptions across our native and partner platforms. In 2022 we ticked past 3,000,000 total enrollments across the board (which absolutely blows my mind), while nearly doubling paid subscribers on the Maven Analytics platform.
Last but not least, we launched two part-time bootcamp cohorts in 2022 after piloting the model in late 2021, and served 6X the number of students year-over-year. This is the most immersive experience we offer, featuring a combination of self-paced learning, live instructor-led sessions, guest speakers, career workshops and capstone projects. With a dedicated bootcamp lead in place, we plan to run at least 4 new cohorts in 2023.
THE PRODUCT
Our mission is to build the world’s best learning platform for aspiring data professionals, and in 2022 we took some major steps towards achieving that goal.
We added fresh new content to the course library, including Tableau Server, Statistics for Data Analysis, and a brand new, highly anticipated Python Specialist path, which includes courses on Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, and more.
We also released Launching Your Data Career, a unique, hands-on playbook designed to help aspiring analysts break into the field. Taught by several of our top instructors, this course is one of the most comprehensive of its kind, covering everything from resume writing to personal branding, portfolio building, networking, and interview prep.
For any finance or accounting professionals reading this, you’ll be excited to hear that we added ~50 hours of CPE-accredited courses to the library in 2022, bringing the total to nearly 200 credit hours. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, click here to learn about CPE).On the platform side, we released brand new Skills Assessment tools in Q2, allowing users to benchmark their skills, identify strengths and weaknesses, discover relevant courses, and track progress over time.
We also took major strides to optimize and evolve our Team Training platform, offering new tools to help companies empower their staff with job-ready data skills.
For leaders, that means assessing and indexing your team’s skills, creating personalized paths so that individuals can learn at their own pace, and tracking progress and performance with real-time reporting tools.For team members, it means having a clear path to mastering tools like Excel, SQL, Power BI, Tableau and Python, and building the skills to work smarter and deliver real business impact.
As a result, our enterprise roster grew to 50+ teams in 2022, including global brands like Crocs, KPMG, Constant Contact, Pfizer, Equifax, Siemens, CAT, Quest Diagnostics, and more.
We continue to receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from a wide range of corporate customers, including analytics teams onboarding new hires, L&D leaders implementing company-wide training programs, consulting shops upskilling their talent, and academic institutions using Maven Analytics courses to enhance the classroom experience.
We're excited to expand our B2B reach in 2023, and plan to invest heavily in this part of the business moving forward.
LOOKING AHEAD
While we’ve come a long way over the past few years, one thing remains clear – we are JUST getting started.
Our 2023 roadmap features some exciting stuff: new courses (including topics like data science & engineering, financial modeling and industry-specific deep dives), bigger and better challenges, new partnerships and content channels, and brand new platform and community features to make the learning experience even better.
But that’s not what I’m most excited about.
What I'm excited about is that we’re gearing up to release the biggest update to our platform, ever.
Imagine a place where you can learn job-ready skills, showcase your work, and collaborate with peers, all in one place.
Where top companies come to upskill their teams, onboard new hires, and recruit proven, world-class analytics talent.
And where success isn't measured by certificates and badges, but by real, meaningful outcomes like landing a job, earning a promotion, or launching a new career.
We're talking about a new way for data professionals to learn and get hired; a "Career Launchpad" for the modern-day analyst.
This is the future we're building at Maven Analytics, and it’s coming soon.
Want to be one of the first to experience it?
Click here to request beta access before the public launch.
Happy learning, and cheers to an amazing 2022! 🤟
