Creating your first course

After you sign up and verify your email, the first thing you'll do is build a course. The wizard takes about three to five minutes. There's nothing to read in advance — answer honestly and the AI will do the work.

The four steps

Step 1 — Goal. Tell us, in a sentence or two, what you want to learn. The more specific the better. "I want to learn how to deploy production Postgres on AWS for a small SaaS" gets you a sharper course than "databases".

Step 2 — Why and what for. Strive asks why you want to learn this and what you'd like to be able to do at the end. Are you preparing for an exam? Building something? Learning for fun? Each answer shifts the course in a different direction.

Step 3 — Where you're starting. A short personalized questionnaire — generated specifically for your goal — asks about adjacent knowledge you already have. The point isn't to grade you; it's to know which fundamentals to skip and which to ground.

Step 4 — Depth and format. Choose the depth tier. A Quick tier produces a 4–6 module course you can finish in a weekend. Standard is the default, calibrated for serious self-study. Deep generates a long course and is appropriate when the topic is the kind of thing you'd take a semester on.

The agent chat

After you submit, an AI agent shows you a draft structure — module titles, lesson titles, and a one-line rationale for each. You can chat with the agent before accepting:

• "Add a module on monitoring" → adds it.
• "Combine modules 3 and 4" → reshapes the structure.
• "This is too theoretical — I want more hands-on labs" → re-skews difficulty and adds practice lessons.

The agent only changes structure. Lesson content is generated later, on demand, when you click into a lesson.

When to commit

When the structure looks right, click Generate. A small fraction of your allowance is debited for the structure (structure generation is cheap — the bulk of cost happens later, when you open individual lessons), and the course will appear in your library. From there, you start studying — one lesson at a time.

You don't have to know exactly what you want before you start. The wizard plus the agent chat are designed to help you find the right shape. If the first draft is wrong, iterate or scrap it and try again.