How a group of volunteers built an upskilling platform for product managers

Started in 2019 as a small mixer event in Bangalore, The Product Folks (TPF) is today a community of over 130,000 members which runs multiple upskilling courses like Insurjo, Product analytics 101 and No Code for Product Folks, among others. 

These courses aim to meet the needs of product managers and enthusiasts at different levels of their product careers and are taught by various product leaders from the industry.

Except for a few courses which target senior product managers, all the upskilling courses are free. 

TPF’s flagship course, Insurjo, is said to have received over 23,000 registrations and 500 of these participants have been connected with jobs. On the other hand, the Product Analytics 101 course has seen about 8000-1000 registrations. 

“For free courses, we do not pay the coaches but we do send them an honorarium. For paid courses, we have a revenue share model with the program director. But these courses are capped at a maximum of 30 people,” Suhas Motwani, co-founder of TPF told BusinessLine.

An example of paid course is TPF’s 201 series which is priced at $399 and targets people who are already working as product managers and Senior PMs.

Motwani said the reason for monetising the courses is to ensure senior folks are invested in the course. He added that in the case of entry-level professionals, people already have skin in the game because they want to make the transition to product management roles. Hence, those courses are free.

While most courses are free, TPF does make some revenue from brand partnerships.

The team looks at it more like a treasury instead of a start-up or organisation.

TPF was founded by Motwani, Abhay Jani, Aditya Mohanty and Parth Batra in 2019 and currently has a team of over 70 volunteers.

All co-founders too have other full-time jobs and do not draw any salaries from TPF. Whatever revenue they make is used to incentivise volunteers, and produce TPF merchandise, among other things. 

“We haven’t really focused on revenue as we wanted to build the most engaging product community. We will be figuring out revenue channels in the coming year so that we can sustain and scale,” said Motwani. 

Further, TPF plans to continue doing community-led education and doesn’t want to start offering certification courses like other upskilling platforms.

Talking about the differentiation of TPF from existing upskilling alternatives in the industry, Motwani said, “Being a community of 130K members, we have access to best product leaders, and these leaders do not usually go to traditional bootcamps or other courses. I think that’s why we have an edge and that’s why senior PMs are interested in our courses.”

Some of the industry professionals teaching at TPF include Anuj Rathi, SVP Products at Swiggy; Khilan Haria, VP Product, Razorpay; Shivangi Srivastava, New Initiatives Swiggy, among others.

After completion of the courses, people will have an opportunity to give a 45 minutes assessment test. Post which, TPF does a bit of matching to help the candidates connect with companies for job interviews. 

In addition to upskilling courses, TPF also has initiatives such as product conferences, product teardowns, exclusive job board, product slack community and others.

In addition to building a community for product managers, TPF has also started a sister community called The Product House.

The mission of Product House is to get 100,000 Web2 folks to learn about the decentralised Web3 world and possibly transition into the space.

To achieve this, it has started new initiatives in the pipeline with the aim to give access to live classes and resources. One such initiative is a course called Web3.0 Fundamental Series, which has got over 20,000 registrations.

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