What this product actually sells

Connecting engineering decisions to revenue requires knowing where the revenue comes from, and for this application the answer isn't the one most learning platforms would give.

There is no subscription

There's no payment gem in the Gemfile, no subscription model, no plan, no price and no billing.

Learners don't pay. The catalogue of more than 350 courses is free to whoever signs up.

What is there instead

A Partners:: domain: Partner, CourseSponsorship, Inquiry and Role.

Partners have tiers: founding, supporter, hiring and track. They sponsor courses, they post roles, and they arrive through an inquiry form.

So the paying customer is a company, and what it's buying is access to the learners.

flowchart TB
  L["learners: use it free"] --> E["engagement: enrollments, completions, submissions"]
  E --> V["a population of people learning Rails seriously"]
  V --> P["partners pay for access to that population"]
  P --> R["revenue"]
  R --> C["which funds the catalogue the learners use"]

Why this changes everything downstream

In a subscription product, a user who signs up and never returns has still paid. Revenue and engagement are related, but you can separate them.

Here they're the same thing. A learner who signs up and never returns is worth nothing to a partner, because the hiring tier is buying the attention of people who are learning.

So in this product engagement is more than a proxy for revenue. It's the inventory being sold.

The consequence for engineering

Anything that makes a learner more likely to finish a course is revenue work.

Anything that makes the site marginally faster for a learner who's already committed probably isn't, and the courses in this series have been careful to say so. The roadmap optimization improved the experience and saved no money.

That distinction is the subject of this course, and you can't draw it without knowing which of the two models you're in. Most writing about connecting engineering to revenue assumes subscriptions, and applying it here unmodified would point at the wrong work.

Key takeaways

• There's no payment gem, no subscription and no price; learners use the catalogue for free.
• The Partners:: domain has tiers, sponsorships, roles and inquiries, so the customer is a company.
• What partners buy is access to a population of people who are learning.
• Engagement is more than a proxy for revenue here; it's the inventory being sold.
• Advice written for subscription products points at the wrong work in this model.