Learn business and career skills online
Business
3 topics under this pillar
Business on a course platform built for engineers and designers means something specific: the courses you take when the code is no longer the bottleneck — running a small SaaS, navigating a promotion, preparing for the interview that opens the next role, learning to write an email that gets answered. This pillar pulls together the SaaS and indie-hacking track, the career and soft-skills track, and the interview-prep track that most working engineers eventually need.
The 2026 backdrop matters. The path from "engineer with a salary" to "engineer who runs a small product" has never been more accessible — Stripe, Vercel, Cursor, and the modern LLM stack have flattened the cost and time-to-launch curve enough that solo and two-person products doing $5–50k MRR are routine. The flip side is that the soft-skill ceiling for in-house roles has risen at the same time: senior engineers are expected to write, present, mentor, and influence cross-team decisions at a level that didn't show up in 2018 job descriptions. The pillar covers both ends — building independently, and growing inside a company.
What you'll find under this pillar
- SaaS and indie hacking — pricing, launch tactics, distribution, the founder-facing parts of running a product on the side or full-time
- Career and soft skills — promotion, scope, written communication, technical writing, working across teams, managing up
- Interview prep — system design, behavioural rounds, take-home strategy, negotiation, the modern FAANG-style and startup pipelines
- Pricing and growth — what to charge, how to talk about it, the analytics layer behind a real B2B funnel
- Founder communication — pitching, fundraising decks, customer interviews, the writing skills that don't show up in CS curricula
The pillar is intentionally narrower than the other four — three core topics rather than five or eleven — because the bar for a useful business course on this platform is higher than for a Python tutorial. The courses that earned a place here are the ones working founders, hiring managers, and senior engineers consistently recommend after the fact. The featured rail surfaces the highest-rated picks across all three topics, so you can sample the voice and depth before committing.
If you're earlier in your career, the Interview Prep and Career topics will pay back faster — the difference between a strong and weak job search compounds across multiple offers. If you've shipped a product or two and you're considering going independent, SaaS and Indie Hacking is where the playbook lives. Most working engineers cycle through all three over the course of a decade. The pillar is laid out to make that easy.
Browse by topic (3)
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Frequently asked questions
- Can a solo developer realistically build a profitable SaaS in 2026?
- Yes, and the bar has actually dropped — modern tooling, cheap cloud infrastructure, and the LLM stack mean a single engineer can ship and run a product that would have needed a small team five years ago. The realistic outcomes cluster around $1–10k MRR within 12 months for the first product, with a long tail of products that grow further. The honest constraints are distribution (building is the easy part, marketing is the hard part) and durability (most niches now have AI-generated competitors). The SaaS and Indie Hacking topic on this pillar covers both sides.
- Are interview-prep courses worth it, or should I just grind LeetCode?
- Both, with a heavy weight on structured courses if you're more than two years into a career. Pure LeetCode-style practice is enough for new-grad pipelines where the algorithm bar is the main filter. For mid-level and senior roles, system design, behavioural, and the specific company's interview pattern all matter as much as the coding round, and structured courses cover those much faster than self-study. A reasonable split is one course on system design, one on behavioural, and ongoing LeetCode practice on the side.
- How do I move from senior engineer to staff engineer?
- Largely by changing the kind of work you take on, not the volume. Staff-level promotion lives on technical leadership, cross-team influence, and scope — the technical decision a quarter of the org ends up living with, the documentation that becomes the team's shared model, the mentorship that grows the people around you. The Career and Soft Skills topic on this pillar covers the communication side of that work, which is where most senior engineers under-invest. Tactical guidance: pick one cross-team project per half, write more than feels natural, and ask your manager for the explicit scope criteria your company uses.
- Is now a good time to leave a corporate job and go indie?
- It depends entirely on your runway and your tolerance for income variance, not on the macro environment. The modal indie-developer story in 2026 is keeping the day job, shipping on evenings and weekends, and hitting $5k MRR before going full-time — rather than quitting cold and building. The courses in the SaaS and Indie Hacking topic on this pillar are honest about that. The cleanest signal you're ready is one product earning at least one month of your living expenses while you still have a day job — anything earlier is mostly a vibe.
- Which soft skills matter most for senior engineers?
- Writing comes first — clear technical writing, design docs that don't require a meeting, PR descriptions that explain the why. Second, the ability to disagree without escalating, which sounds soft and is the single most useful skill in cross-team work. Third, mentorship and onboarding — being the person on the team who makes new hires productive faster. None of these show up on a CV directly, all of them show up in promotion packets. The Career and Soft Skills topic on this pillar has dedicated courses on each.
- How important is salary negotiation, really?
- Worth several years of compounding income, and almost universally under-practised. The standard pattern — accept the first offer, mention you have other interviews, ask for a small bump — leaves $10k to $80k on the table per offer at most US tech companies, and roughly proportional amounts elsewhere. A single half-day negotiation course is one of the highest hourly-ROI things you can do as an engineer. The Interview Prep topic on this pillar covers negotiation alongside the technical rounds.