Before building anything, run one live test against the single assumption that could sink your business, letting that experiment validate the core bet and even reveal the right co-founder.
Maven
Maven is a platform, co-founded by Udemy veteran Gagan Biyani with altMBA's Wes Kao and Socratic's Shreyans Bhansali, that helps experts run cohort-based courses (CBCs) and takes a 10% cut of instructor revenue. Its founding lesson is a method: Biyani validated the company not by building a minimum viable product but by running a minimum viable test against the one hypothesis that could sink it. Both stories below flow from that single test, which proved the business and picked the co-founder in one move.
PMF: Validating the 10x hypothesis with one live course before building anything
The problem. Maven's entire thesis rested on one make-or-break assumption: that people would find roughly 10x more value in a live cohort-based course than in a cheap, abundant asynchronous one. If that was false, none of the marketplace, the instructor tooling, or the software mattered. The traditional MVP path would have meant first building an instructor-facing product (landing pages, payments, a syllabus designer) before knowing whether the core bet was even true.
The approach. Instead of building, Biyani ran a single real course as a minimum viable test, recruiting Sam Parr of The Hustle to co-teach an ideation bootcamp on the riskiest hypothesis directly. If students paid a premium and rated it highly, there was a business; if not, no software would save it.
How it solved it. The cohort earned a 9/10 rating from students and grossed over $150,000, proving people would pay far more for the live format. Only then did Maven build "just the basics" and go from MVT straight to company-building, reaching 50+ instructors within six months and, after its January 2021 launch, seeing four courses each clear $100,000 and over $1 million in total course sales by May 2021.
Founder-Market Fit: Letting the test reveal which co-founder to recruit
The problem. Biyani came from Udemy with distribution and marketplace experience, but the MVT surfaced that the hardest and highest-leverage part of a cohort-based course was not the software: it was building community and designing the learning experience itself, exactly the areas where his own background was thin.
The approach. Rather than guessing at a complementary co-founder, Biyani used what the test taught him to define the role precisely, then recruited Wes Kao, co-founder of Seth Godin's altMBA, specifically for her expertise in course design and community-building that the MVT had flagged as decisive.
How it solved it. The pairing gave Maven a founding team matched to the actual work: Kao's altMBA pedigree directly addressed the community and curriculum gap the course exposed, and the combined team went on to raise a $20 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with a16z's Andrew Chen joining the board. The test did not just validate the market; it told Biyani exactly whom he needed beside him to serve it.