Thoughts on "7 day free trial" for taro?

would other means of providing a free trial on just the courses work?

My pain point with purchasing productivity stuff/lessons to help you save time/grow faster is that there's tons and tons of paid resources but

1. just because its paid doesnt mean its valuable. Especially with job search products most paid products are garbage preying on peoples desperation for a silver bullet
2. theres no way to know if the purchase is going to be worth it before hand so I dont buy even if theres 1-3 lessons in the start that helps out. The big issue is I don't know if what you have is already out there I can get for free anyways. With Taro its clear you cant find a lot of this info out there for free. But the common counter argument is that you pay to save time, but as I mentioned above most paid products are not worth it.

Adding in different layers of auth for courses/networking might also help with b2b? a lot of companies already spend money on udemy access for their employees

Yea, we could consider decoupling courses with the community stuff. You make valid points about most paid content being low quality.

That's not a bad idea, but it does require some additional implementation effort to effectively create "tiers" of the membership.

All good points OP! Here's my thoughts on a free trial:

1. It's not great ROI - There are a ton of technical assumptions that Taro is buffet style (which is better for most users as it's just simpler), so creating premium access for courses specifically would be a huge pain. This is a big reason why we didn't do another thing of being able to buy a specific course. So it takes a lot of time, and I've talked with many, many founders whose companies do offer free trials and the take rate of converting a free trial -> paid is insanely low, sometimes as low as 0.2%. For consumer products in particular, many people who do free trials are frankly very cheap and never had any intention of buying your product.
2. Courses are modular - The courses don't function in a way where in order to get any meaningful value, you need to consume the entire course. Every lesson minus the intro should have some actionable takeaway or mindset shift, and this includes the free lessons. The free lessons in every course (between 10% to 15% of the course) are the free trial. If those lessons don't resonate enough with them, then they probably won't resonate with the rest of the course. We did a lot of research when making courses, and we purposefully made our free tier as generous as possible. Nobody else exposes >5% of the course for free, and many platforms just paywall the entire course.

That totally makes sense and thank you so much for your insights. It's very interesting to know the "behind the scenes".

Genuine question out of curiosity: Do you foresee any opportunities for B2B for Taro? Or partnering with any YC startups who are in the training/teaching area (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/arist) or some form of "cal.com" style monetization where its cheaper for consumers but paid for enterprise?

The selling point of being able improve onboarding speed for hundreds of engineers for enterprise/startups/businesses sounds to me (a random consumer) promising? But of course I don't know much about monetization so I'm curious about your thoughts

We've definitely thought about B2B - We just haven't made any real progress (not for lack of trying through, haha, Rahul's had a lot of tough conversations).

In general, education just isn't something companies pay for, despite it being important. It's sad, but true. Most companies have the mentality of just ingesting engineers, not supporting them, and hoping they grow into the role and are awesome. If the engineer leaves, then hire someone else to replace them.

This is why the overwhelming amount of $$$ spent by tech companies in particular is on hiring. And this is why Taro is currently exploring how we can connect good engineers like you and other folks in the community with fitting jobs.