From Marketplace to a Membership That Builds With You

Summary

TL;DR

For two decades TrueFire ran like an online course store: a deep catalog, à la carte purchases, and "On Sale" ribbons. It did have a subscription — All Access — already the biggest single revenue driver. But it ran as a bolt-on: content stayed gated outside it and one-off course sales ran right alongside it, close to an even split. We were hedging between two models.

I led the work to flip that and put the subscription at the center: one membership that includes everything and builds with you as you improve. The marketing site was the first place that change had to show up, and we built the whole story around the comparison people are actually making in their head, paying for something structured versus just using free YouTube.

The Problem

The diagnosis

I spent real time on the live site as a new visitor would, and the same thing kept jumping out: the product was hedging. It sold one-off courses and a subscription right next to each other and never fully committed to either. You'd land on a page and get two competing asks — buy this course, or start a free trial.

1. The subscription was a bolt-on

All Access was already the biggest single revenue driver, but it ran alongside the à la carte catalog rather than replacing it. The bigger problem: our best content — the structured, hand-guided learning paths — was gated outside it. And exit surveys were blunt that the #1 reason people churned was a lack of structure and not knowing what to do next. We were selling the fix to our biggest retention problem à la carte, outside the subscription people had already paid for.

2. We merchandised like a discount store

The hero pushed individual courses and led with a feature list ("Master Guitar Faster: Interactive Courses, Tools, and World-Class Instructors"). "On Sale" ribbons and discount urgency ran throughout — ecom tactics that trained people to wait for a deal and quietly undercut the subscription. And there was no argument for why a membership beats the free wall of YouTube.

3. The site was confusing to navigate

Three overlapping mega-menus — Learn / Play / Explore — with 40+ links. UXR calls were consistent: most people couldn't figure out how to get around or find what they came for. That's what drove simplifying the nav and pulling every content type into one Browse and one Search.

4. The workhorse page was a product page

Course detail pages pull a big share of our organic search traffic — one of the highest-traffic templates on the site. They were built like product pages: walls of small text, a giant table of contents above the fold, forum-style comment threads in place of reviews. Built to close a single sale, with nothing that pointed you to what comes next.

5. A legacy stack holding back SEO

The site ran on a legacy stack spread across several languages. URLs were opaque IDs like /c1762 instead of readable slugs. Any rebuild had to set up redirects carefully so we didn't tank our best organic pages, then actually enhance them — and that work set up the bigger prize: programmatic SEO across the catalog.

The roadmap

We mapped the whole journey

Making good on "builds with you" is bigger than a marketing site, so before we built anything I mapped our whole product against a User Journey Cycle — the loop every learner runs through. You set a goal, make a plan, make progress, celebrate the win, and go again, with content, tools, and incentives feeding it the whole way.

Here's what that exposed. We're deep on one piece: content. 80,000+ lessons. But almost everything else was thin or missing. No real onboarding or goal-setting. No custom learning paths or practice schedules. Barely any of the tools that tell you how you're doing — check-ins, assessments, progress tracking, a dashboard, streaks. And weak incentives, the milestones and badges that give you a sense of momentum.

That's the same gap our churn surveys kept pointing at: people leave because they don't know what to do next. The map turned a vague "lack of structure" complaint into a concrete list of things to build.

So the marketing site is step one — it tells the new story. The gaps on this map are the feature roadmap we're building alongside it, the pieces that actually make the membership build with you.

Leadership

How I led the work

We wanted to completely redevelop the entire product, the app and the website. But the goal was to get an acquisition lift, ASAP. With that mandate, we decided to update the marketing site first, for a few reasons:

1. It was the thing we could do quickest to start impacting the funnel.
2. Our current site left a lot to be desired, so there was a ton of low-hanging fruit to start improving.
3. A lift in acquisition would give us more time to then rebuild the logged-in experience, which is where we make the biggest impact on retention.

With that decided, here's how we built it:

• Got the positioning nailed before any design started. We agreed on the "vs free" angle and the proof points first, so there was a clear spine to build on.
• Worked the highest-traffic pages first. Homepage, then course detail (every course uses that same template), then the long tail. We went after the pages that touch the most people, not the easy wins.
• Invested in a design system with our Head of Product Design, so the new look could roll out across thousands of catalog pages, not just a few hero pages.
• Protected organic search, our biggest growth lever. We had to launch new versions of these pages and brand-new ones, set up the redirects properly so we didn't hurt existing traffic, and actually push organic higher on top of that, including building toward programmatic SEO. Getting it right took real care.

The Work

The before & after

Scroll inside each pane to scrub the full page. The first three carry the whole story.