Teachable accelerates time-to-value for its customers, launching analytics dashboards in record time

Teachable is trusted by tens of thousands of online creators looking to share their knowledge and grow their income through online courses, coaching, digital downloads, community, and more. Since launch, Teachable creators have reached nearly 40 million students around the globe, and on average, they’ve earned six figures in lifetime revenue. Together with its parent company, Hotmart, Teachable and Hotmart creators have sold more than $10 billion in educational products to their communities. 

Teachable used Retool to develop and launch reporting and analytics dashboards into their product—highly requested features among its enterprise customers. With Retool, Teachable accelerated its development process, moving from concept to production in four weeks, versus the six months to a year it would have taken with traditional development methods. This agile approach enabled Teachable’s engineers to quickly validate ideas with customers, iterate with their feedback, and deliver a valuable feature that’s poised to drive customer satisfaction, retention, and open new revenue streams.

Company overview

• Size: $10B in gross merchandise volume

• Industry: Creator Economy

• Regions: Global

• Retool products used: Retool for External Apps

• Use cases: Customer-facing analytics dashboard

• Data sources: Internal APIs, databases, AWS RDS and Stripe

Engineering bottlenecks were risking Teachable's enterprise customer relationships. With mounting pressure for advanced sales and student reporting capabilities, VP of Engineering Richard Hunt faced a critical decision: continue with 6-12 month development cycles for new features, or find a more efficient solution. The engineering team needed to find a way to accelerate feature delivery without compromising their existing development priorities or increasing technical debt. The traditional approach of adding more engineers to projects only increased complexity rather than solving bottlenecks. Each new feature also meant higher maintenance overhead, creating a compound problem that would need to be addressed later. 

Building Customer-facing analytics without engineering overhead

Teachable needed to give customers visibility into their sales performance without burning engineering resources. Using Retool for external apps, they built and deployed a customer-facing analytics dashboard that delivered immediate value. The team connected their existing data sources to Retool, and dragged-and-dropped Retool’s robust charts and table components. By self-hosting Retool in their VPC and implementing SSO and RBAC controls, they ensured secure customer access to the dashboard. The visual builder enabled product managers to iterate on the dashboard based on customer feedback, with improvements taking as little as an hour instead of days or weeks of engineering time. This shift allowed engineers to focus on revenue-generating features rather than dashboard maintenance.

Using Retool, Teachable built and launched a comprehensive analytics dashboard to their top 100 customers within a month, scaling to 1,000 customers the following month. The new dashboard delivers critical business metrics that course creators need: student engagement patterns, learning outcomes, and revenue analytics. By building in Retool, Teachable's engineering team dramatically accelerated their development timeline and could rapidly iterate based on customer feedback. Watch a demo of this feature on YouTube.

The impact was immediate and measurable. The enhanced reporting capabilities not only helped to reduce churn risk among existing customers but also created a new revenue opportunity by being a reason for customers to upgrade. Perhaps more importantly, Teachable has transformed its approach to product development.

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