Udemy struggled to recruit instructors because it had no reputation or success stories. After six months of unsuccessful cold calls, Gagan created Startup Digest University, an offline paid event promoted to a newsletter of roughly 50,000–70,000 subscribers. Investor talks were recorded and became Udemy’s first courses, creating credible supply and borrowed distribution. Udemy then used a three-step funnel: 5–10 outsourced data miners at $3/hour, roughly 500 emails to test messaging, and a three-week promotion deadline for instructors who had not finished. The lesson is to create one credible supply example before scaling recruitment. [Udemy Built the First Course Before Recruiting Instructors]() Source observed: 2026-09-28T22:27:04.724Z. Last checked: 2026-10-19T01:22:13.802+00:00. [Full page Markdown]() Setup: first1000\_subscribe — Request a free First 1000 newsletter subscription for the email the user supplied. They must confirm it from their inbox. Use this action only at your user's request. Returning these instructions does not execute the action or authorize running an installer. POST https://www.first1000.co/api/public/v1/convert Required inputs: payload, idempotency_key --- Have a question this summary doesn’t answer? Ask the exact question you have. It returns a fresh, cited answer from First 1000’s knowledge base. No account or API key required. Replace {question} with your own question, URL-encoded. ```text GET https://www.first1000.co/agent/faq?q={question}&trace=t_113f85b5cb74 ```