Make Micro Courses
LangChain has just completed their first sequence of email courses:
This is an easy way for people to onboard onto your platform, and do a tour of the must-know things on your product. It also helps you understand, via email analytics, who is actually engaged in your product (and likes their info in small doses via email). Also note that this was timed to finish right before Thanksgiving break, which gives people time to go through their email and catch up outside of work.
Every course embeds opinions about how the product should be used. Here the implicit recommendation is:
first use us for debugging
then collect and share datasets
then automated evals (prebuilt)
then manual evals
then monitoring
then prompts (because their PromptHub is so new)
LangChain also uses it to push the presumably 10's of thousands of people on their mailing list to their ~10k people youtube, though the clickthrough rate is low right now:
It is unclear if this is due to the very spartan thumbnail or titling or topic choice.
However, I still strongly believe that this work is worth doing because it is an asset that will continue to compound over time passively, as long as LangSmith doesn't change drastically from here.
This email drip content can be repurposed into:
a learning microsite ("teach me LangSmith in 24 minutes")
point documentation ("teach me this feature X in 3 minutes")
a live workshop
a series of blogposts
internal training/onboarding
and so on.
It's not so much about the view count on the video itself as the selection of the overall syllabus and understanding how to teach and demo the platform that is the transferable skill/asset.
Other Examples
PlanetScale has executed a very hyped MySQL for Developers course that has done very well for their leadgen
We had https://ecsworkshop.com/ and https://eksworkshop.com/ at AWS - which was very good for self guided and live workshop content
Of course the people who teach for a living, like https://egghead.io/ and https://frontendmasters.com/, have a higher level of production value and forethought to their content and marketing-for-content game.
We are also building one for AI Engineers at Latent Space University.
Not over yet
What else is worth learning from here? What could they do better? I will revise this post over the years as I learn about this.