Creating a software as a service (SaaS) product has never been easier. However, with the increasing challenges of transforming a SaaS product into a thriving business, you may find yourself actively seeking a SaaS course to enhance your business success.
On the one hand, modern technologies and frameworks make it possible to build new apps faster than ever. You can ship prototypes (or even entire products) with a combination of no-code tools like Airtable, Softr, and Webflow.
On the other hand, as a founder or product leader, you must navigate tons of complex challenges in today’s overcrowded SaaS product landscape, like:
- Learn product-led growth (PLG) to create the right product strategy.
- Constantly building and refining features.
- Attracting the right type of customers for the product.
- Making sure those customers stick around long-term, and much more.
Luckily, you don’t have to face these challenges on your own. There is a wealth of knowledge on each topic available in both free and paid courses.
Choosing the Best SaaS Course to Suit Your Needs
I’ve pulled together 10 of the best SaaS courses tailored for founders and product leaders. To help you in pinpointing the ideal course that suits your specific needs, I've organized them into these distinct categories:
- Product Strategy and Management: These courses can help you lay the foundation for a successful SaaS business. Setting the right product strategy is the most critical task for founders and product leaders because it affects everything else down the line — including pricing, target audience, and growth.
- Marketing and Customer Acquisition: The courses in this category can help you get your product in front of the right audience and grow your business. They cover various marketing strategies and channels, including search engine optimization (SEO), social media, paid ads, and more.
- Customer Journey Optimization: These final three courses can teach you how to create a great experience for your customers through their entire journey, starting with onboarding.
Below, you'll find the specific SaaS courses corresponding to each of these three categories. I’ll also discuss the format of each course (live or pre-recorded), its price, and exactly what you can learn from it.
Note: If you're a developer or technical founder, there are other key skills for building cloud-based SaaS applications that I won’t cover here. You can check out Udemy’s Web Development SaaS courses on specific technologies like Python and Docker or Microsoft Azure’s certifications for a broader look at important cloud computing concepts like SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.
SaaS Product Strategy and Management Courses
The courses below help with the three fundamental parts of starting and growing a successful SaaS business:
- PLG essentials for the right product strategy
- Executing that strategy by building the product
- Learning how to delegate and find time to do high-impact work
I’ll start with product-led growth (PLG) education and product strategy since that’s the foundation for the entire SaaS business.
1. ProductLed: Become a Certified Growth Leader
- Format: Five on-demand modules with expert instruction, strategic worksheets and templates, examples, and Growth Certificate upon successful completion.
- Price: Only $250
Designed as the self-paced version of our ProductLed Academy, our Growth Certification Program aims to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of PLG and empower you with the necessary insights for success.
It is specifically tailored to help you overcome challenging product-led dilemmas, including decisions regarding offering a free or freemium plan and determining which features should be hidden behind a paywall.
Here's a glance at what's covered during each of the modules of the certification course:
- Module 1: Clarify user success
- Module 2: Identify your product-led model
- Module 3: Build your onboarding sequence
- Module 4: Develop and optimize your monetization strategy
- Module 5: Create a product-led organization
Upon successful completion, earn your ProductLed Growth Leader certification and have the growth skills, knowledge, processes, and frameworks to confidently plan out a successful product-led approach.
Enroll today to start earning your product-led growth certification, and gain access to all the course material for 1 year.
2. Product Faculty: Level-Up Your Senior Product Management Skills
- Format: 6-week, live online course delivered on Saturdays from 9:30 AM to 3:30 PM EST
- Price: $2,995
Product Faculty is an advanced program for Product Leaders.
The program is built around eight areas in which Product Managers and Directors of Product can level up their skills to:
- Strategize for analyzing product and retention strategies.
- Devise for building a strategic roadmap.
- Schematize for implementing a system for taking features from discovery to design.
- Actualize for taking features from definition to delivery.
- Optimize for measuring key product metrics.
- Magnetize for building a product experimentation engine.
- Technologize for improving your tech stack.
- Harmonize for growing your leadership influence.
Each of these areas is instructed and explored in-depth by product executives from companies like Meta, YouTube, and Shopify. Also included in this training course are one-on-one coaching and cohort-based learning.
3. The 20 Hour CEO: Learn Frameworks That Will Help You Scale Your Business
- Format: Five live sessions with 1:1 coaching
- Price: $5,000
As a SaaS founder, you have so much to do, yet so little time, which makes it easy to focus on the wrong tasks. This is a massive obstacle to growing your business, which The 20 Hour CEO program can help you navigate.
This program is focused on helping founders and CEOs with some of the most common, but difficult aspects of running a business — time management and task prioritization.
The training is spread across five live sessions, during which you learn how to:
- Make fast, high-quality decisions.
- Find where the biggest value and use of your time is for your business.
- Use delegation and automation frameworks to free up your time and mental capacity, and much more.
The program also includes 1:1 coaching, walkthroughs, and real-world examples.
Courses on SaaS Marketing and Customer Acquisition
Even with a great product and effective leadership, you’ll struggle to grow your business without the right marketing approach and customer acquisition strategy. The courses below can help you avoid that and grow your user base through a mix of organic and paid acquisition channels.
4. HubSpot Academy: Understand the Inbound Marketing and Growth Flywheels
- Format: 15 pre-recorded videos spread across six lessons
- Price: Free
HubSpot is one of the most successful SaaS businesses ever. A big reason for their continued growth is their focus on inbound marketing — attracting customers by creating valuable content and experiences (instead of interrupting them with ads).
In this free course, HubSpot’s team provides an intro to the inbound marketing methodology. The course has a very low barrier to entry since it’s free and covers mostly beginner-level marketing ideas and tactics.
This makes it a great choice for founders and product leaders who want to quickly go over the basics of SaaS inbound marketing. However, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of how to execute marketing tactics, I highly recommend the next two courses.
5. ProductLed Acquisition Course: Get 10%+ More Signups Per Month
- Format: Five on-demand modules for self-paced learning and access to course materials for one year.
- Price: $250
Whether you are a PLG founder, marketer, or designer, this specialized 4-module course gives you the know-how to create a high-converting SaaS homepage and the skills to transfer this success to other pages on your website.
Instructor Pedro Cortés guides you through four modules. Each lesson teaches you how to create one important section of your homepage and address every detail.
- Module 1: Learn homepage positioning and how to define your irresistible offer.
- Module 2: Design the perfect structure for your homepage.
- Module 3: Write high-converting headlines for your homepage.
- Module 4: Create the right visuals without a designer to polish your SaaS homepage.
The exact process taught in this course module can get 20%, 40%, or even 100% uplifts in conversion. Get more signups now.
6. Grow & Convert Marketing Strategy: Create High-Ranking Content That Gets Conversions
- Format: Pre-recorded video lessons [five modules] and monthly live coaching calls via Zoom
- Price: One-time fee of $699 or six monthly payments of $135
Grow and Convert is a content-focused SEO agency that has helped SaaS companies like Smartlook, Buddy Punch, and Leadfeeder grow their businesses.
This course teaches you how to use Grow and Convert’s strategy to:
- Find SEO keywords that will drive qualified traffic to your site.
- Write content that outranks the competition.
- Use different tactics to drive traffic to your articles.
- Scale your content marketing.
- Measure product conversions — like account creations, free trials, or demo bookings — from your content.
The course has pre-recorded videos that demonstrate how to put the concepts you learn into action. Plus, there are live monthly coaching calls with the founders — Benji Hyam and Devesh Khanal — where you can ask questions, get feedback on your content strategy, and brainstorm new ideas.
7. Demand Curve Growth Program: Develop and Optimize Your Growth Strategy
- Format: Pre-recorded content, with tailored paths depending on your business stage and product
- Price: One-time fee of $1,200 or $250/month for six months
Demand Curve’s Growth Program helps startup founders and marketers build a growth engine for their businesses.
Like Grow and Convert’s course, this program is very hands-on, with a heavy focus on the “how” of marketing — how to select the right acquisition channels, how to experiment with them, how to evaluate the results, etc.
The Growth Program covers six broad topics:
- Growth fundamentals
- Growth foundation
- Acquisition strategy
- Funnel
- Channels
- Learnings and iterations
Lastly, the program also provides access to a Slack community of SaaS founders and marketers.
Courses on Customer Journey Optimization
If you want your users to stick around and become paying customers, you need to understand and optimize each part of their journey.
This is especially important in today’s product-led world, where customers expect a frictionless product experience. The courses below can help you deliver that to them, starting with one of the most critical parts of their journey — their onboarding.
8. Appcues Product Adoption Academy: Learn Different Onboarding Tactics
- Format: Pre-recorded videos and articles
- Price: Free
Appcues’ Product Adoption Academy is a collection of free, on-demand resources, based on real-life examples and interviews with product experts.
It’s similar to HubSpot’s Academy in that it has a low barrier to entry and focuses on the basic principles of onboarding and product adoption.
Currently, there are five online training courses in Appcues’ academy:
- User Onboarding 101
- Mobile App Onboarding 101
- Product Launches 101
- Free-to-Paid Conversion
- Value-First Onboarding
Again, all courses are completely free and come with a certification upon completion.
9. Udemy Customer Success Course: Reduce Churn and Increase Retention
- Format: 37 pre-recorded lessons spread across four sections
- Price: From around $20
While there are many SaaS metrics that product teams can track, retention and churn are a must for pretty much all organizations. Uncover 20 readily applicable techniques within this course to reduce your churn rate in under three months while enhancing customer retention.
This course starts by guiding you through everything you need to know about these two metrics. Then, it dives into strategies and best practices for reducing churn and improving customer retention, like:
- Minimizing time-to-value (TTV).
- Profiling and attracting your ideal customers.
- Creating content that helps them use your SaaS product.
- Identifying which customers are at risk of churning, and much more.
Like all Udemy courses, this one also comes with quizzes, assignments, and a certificate upon completion.
10. Pulse+ Gainsight Customer Success: Help Customers Achieve Their Objectives
- Format: Pre-recorded, interactive videos, and lessons spread across three levels
- Price: $900/year for individuals and custom pricing plans for teams
Pulse+ is a comprehensive customer success training and certification program by Gainsight — a customer success and product experience SaaS company.
This training program goes over the two metrics from the previous course (i.e., retention and churn). However, Pulse+ also covers other advanced topics and use cases, like:
- Empowering the Sales teams through customer success.
- Using surveys and in-product feedback widgets.
- Creating customer journey maps, and more.
There are three different levels of Pulse+ certification (all of which you can share on LinkedIn). To get each one, you need to complete a different curriculum and pass exams consisting of multiple-choice and scenario-based questions.
Why Learning SaaS is Important
SaaS is a rapidly growing industry that has revolutionized the way businesses operate. As more and more companies shift towards cloud-based solutions, it has become essential to learn about SaaS to stay competitive in the market.
Learning SaaS can help you understand the benefits of PLG strategy, which focuses on building a product that sells itself. By implementing PLG, you can generate high-value product-qualified leads (PQL) and achieve sustainable growth for your business.
As a SaaS founder, it's important to continuously develop your skills to stay ahead in the industry. The best skills for SaaS include understanding SaaS metrics and finance, product management, UX design, and marketing. Investing your time in developing these skills will help you run your business successfully and stay competitive in the ever-evolving SaaS industry.
Want More SaaS Course Recommendations? Join the World’s Largest Product-Led Growth Community
The ProductLed Slack Community is a free community space where beginners and product-led veterans discuss industry best practices, ask questions, and share recommendations for tools, training programs, and other resources.
If you’re looking to connect with other product-led enthusiasts around the world, join our community.
