Dribbble's Success: Building a Cohort-Based Course on Disco

What Academies and Bootcamps can learn from Dribbble's marketing, sales, and community building strategy

Offer 'Try before your buy' opportunities

Learners want to know whether a premium learning experience will be valuable for them before committing. As part of their marketing and community building strategy, Dribbble created opportunities for engagement and activation by providing potential learners with practical tips and valuable learning experiences, with industry experts teaching skills and mentors sharing their career journey, before selling their premium offering.

Create with, not for your community

To ensure potential learners were receiving the utmost value from the course, Dribbble's Program Manager, Madeleine Sava engaged in hundreds of one-on-one zoom calls with potentials learners to understand their needs, challenges, and goals (which helped tremendously with designing the course itself), and to share more about the upcoming Product Design Course and address questions or concerns potentials learners might have.

Experiment with pricing and discount models

Dibbble's pricing strategy was to 1) be competitive, and 2) test their market. Most product design courses on the market are around $10K, Dribbble priced theirs at $2999. While the regular course price is highly competitive, Dribbble remained open and experimented with pricing by offering 20-50% discounts to their community. In addition they offered numerous steep scholarships to meet their diversity, inclusion, and accessibility goals.

Offer valuable incentives for referrals

Dribbble plans to build out more live learning experiences in the future in addition to the Product Design Course that will be offered on a quarterly basis. When it comes to referrals, Dribbble is considering a three-pronged approach: 1) incentivise alumni by going beyond monetary rewards and offering discounts on upcoming courses and one-on-one sessions with mentors, 2) convert mentors into course advocates by offering monetary incentives for referrals, and 3) provide scholarships to folks who opt into becoming brand ambassadors.

"What we really liked when we first saw Disco's platform was the fact that it felt so user centric. Disco feels like it's a fun experience, it's not intimidating and offers accessible learning.”