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Course interest survey

Identify your market position, build a waitlist, and gather crucial feedback to shape your course

Chelsea Wilson avatar
Written by Chelsea Wilson
Updated over 2 months ago

Why you should start with a survey

The most successful Maven instructors take one specific action in their first week of course building: they launch a course interest survey. This 30-minute investment has proven to be the foundation of our most successful courses - including those now generating 7 figures.

Why This Works:

  1. You'll identify your exact market position (turning your expertise into a "painkiller, not a vitamin").

  2. You'll build a waitlist of potential students (many survey respondents become your first enrollments).

  3. You'll validate your course concept before investing significant building time.

Think of launching your course like launching a startup: the earlier you validate your concept, the better your chances of success.

Here's what Maven's CEO, Gagan Biyani, has to say about why you should survey potential students:

👉 Check out this list for examples of course interest survey launches from Maven instructors.

How to get started with your survey

Launching your course interest survey will take ~30 minutes and save you hours of time trying to guess (perhaps incorrectly) what your target students want from your course. Get started today in the Surveys tab of your course.

1. Customize your survey.

For the best insights from your potential students, add custom questions (ideas below) to the available templated ones. Keep the survey short: 6 questions at most.

Questions to shape content:

  • What level do you consider yourself on [insert topic]?

  • What are the key challenges you face in [insert profession or job role]?

  • From this [list of topics], which ones would be most useful to your professional success?

  • What's the immediate impact you're looking for from a course on this topic?

To inform pricing:

  • What company do you work for?

  • Do you expect your employer to reimburse the cost of your course?

2. Share your survey (+ examples from Maven instructors).

Click "Share" to copy the URL.

To get feedback from potential students, you need to make some noise. Share your survey with your network publicly (i.e., on LinkedIn) and via personalized outreach.

Remember, you are not trying to sell your course in this post. You are gathering feedback to help you build a course people actually want to take.

To amplify your course interest survey:

  • Email your personal network. Pro tip: export a list of your personal contacts from your email.

  • Share on social media, in your communities, to your email list, and in your newsletter.

  • To boost engagement, invite your friends to comment and like your post on social media.

  • Ask your personal connections to forward your survey to people who might be interested.

Announcement post inspiration from Maven instructors:

As you craft your announcement posts, check out our best practices for social media posting here: 🎥 LinkedIn Growth Playbook: Hooks & Profiles.

Your next steps

The critical first step is getting topic and positioning feedback via the survey. Next, you must leverage the responses, iterate on your initial topic, and narrow your course content.

1. Understand your target students by doing ~5 prospect interviews.

Just like with any new product, you have to understand your customers (your students) to build the right thing for them. Offer 1:1 calls with everyone who responds to your survey (share your Calendly link and expect to book ~5 calls). Your goals: get deeper feedback and build relationships.

👉 Read our guide on how and why to book 1:1 calls.

2. Form a clear idea of what you'll teach and who the exact target audience is for your course.

Use the survey and 1:1 call results to inform key decisions about your course, like the scope of your content, which outcomes you will prioritize teaching, and exactly who is right for your course.

Remember, cohort-based courses are short (~1-5 weeks long), so you won't be able to cover everything. In fact, broader "overview" type courses don't resonate well with the types of students who take courses on Maven. Maven students are busy professionals who need implementable insights and solutions to their problems now.

Instead, pick one problem a narrow group of students really need to solve. Courses that solve a big professional problem are bestsellers. Many problems are not that big, not very important, or easily solved by reading a book: don’t pick those!

3. Turn your vision into a published course.

It all starts with the survey and 1:1 calls. With insights from your target students under your belt, you can now begin bringing your ideas to focus with a clear roadmap. You know who your target students are, what challenges they want to solve, and how your course will help them solve those challenges.

Using the survey and call insights:

  1. Draft and refine a course landing page that clearly articulates student outcomes.

  2. Design your course syllabus to deliver your student outcomes.

  3. Set your price.

FAQs

  1. Do I need a published landing page to launch my interest survey?

    1. No, you don’t need to have a published landing page. In fact, you'll use the responses on your survey and the information you gather during 1:1 interviews with respondents to draft and refine your landing page copy, course outcomes, and course positioning.

  2. How do I reach potential survey respondents?

    1. Share your survey in multiple places wherever your potential students hang out: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, communities, or direct email. Besides your channels, ask your network and community to share the survey with anyone they think would be a good fit for your course. People often underestimate how far-reaching their personal network is.

  3. Should I ask students what price they're willing to pay?

    1. The goal is to capture interest, validate your early ideas, and get course-shaping feedback. The goal of the survey is not to validate price. How you price your course depends on what outcomes you promise, what content you share, and how many opportunities for hands-on application of learning you offer. Read our full pricing guidance here.

If you have any further questions about using the course interest survey, please email [email protected].

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