"Why should I trust Taro? Aren't they selling shovels during a gold rush?"

Regardless of the subject in question, there's always someone selling some metaphorical shovel for some gold rush. But if we take a more high-level interpretation of the phrase, we can see it as: for every job, there's always someone selling tools to achieve that job. I think all parties involved have that understanding in some shape or form.

So the question they really have is likely moreso around if the quality of membership is greater than the yearly subscription cost. So the doubts that need to cleared up can be narrowed down to:

1. What value can Taro tangibly provide?
2. Is this value worth the $400/year?

For the first, it'd likely help the most if you provide your own experiences growing through Taro (a faster promo to SDEII might be a good artifact).

For the second, that's up to them to define their definition of value. But we can start this definition with a more standard financial sense: assuming Taro can get me promoted faster, is a faster promo worth $400/year? Given most software companies have pay increases each band for a couple thousand dollars, getting a promo + raise a cycle early can put that couple thousand in your pocket a bit earlier.

• We make many Taro resources (and all the discussions) entirely free. My job is to earn people's trust by delivering a lot of value over a long period of time. If people don't have that trust yet, don't pay for Taro! We'll get to you soon with more testimonials and high-value content 😇
• How much is it worth to accelerate your promotion, find a new job, or feel more confident in your job? We deliberately focused Taro on career growth since it's such a huge part of our lives, and there's too much bad info. For me, I'd easily put the value in the 10s of thousands of dollars. So spending a bit feels like a no-brainer.
  • It helps to think probabilistically: even if there's only a 10% chance that Taro helps you find a new job, but the new job pays $10K more, it's worth $1,000.

I'd encourage your friends to go through How has Taro helped you in your career? and also read the testimonials you can see on every course. (e.g. this one about acing tech interviews)

I have been a Taro premium user for quite some time now, and I have purchased other paid courses and mentorship programs. I do that because I totally agree that if a $100-1000 course can help me land a promotion, or negotiate my salary, or make me more productive, I can not only get this value back but also earning it 2X-3X-4X, etc, more throughout my career.

I can understand why someone would argue against paying for a course since a lot of information is provided for free on the web. But you'd have to do the whole work of pre-selecting, organizing and making a plan for yourself on how to absorve this kind of content. By doing a paid course, this work has already been done by someone else and is being presented in an organized way, so you can save a lot of time and potentially achieve your goals faster.

Also, there's some information that I don't think that is widely available, because not every Staff Engineer, VP or founder (assuming these are your goal) has a free Substack or YT channel. Could you still find it somehow for free? Probably, but again the course would save you some time and probably in a much nicer format.

At last, a bunch of these paid courses offer the opportunity to connect with other people with similar goals. You definitely can find communities out there, but the course will oftentimes connect people that are on the same step as you right now, and it's a great source for asking questions and seeing others' questions being answered too.

With that said, I think both paid courses and free online content are valuable information sources. But if I'm interested in a topic, have already done research on it and I see a course that I can afford and that will help me reach my goals faster, why not invest on it?

Thank you so much for sharing Taro! I think the best way to understand a product's value is simply to get some upfront value from the product. This is why we purposefully engineered Taro to expose as much value for free as possible, far more than competitors.

For example, we were very deliberate with courses. Most course websites expose effectively nothing for free, with others sharing 1 video lesson out of 25-50. With every course on Taro, we make 10-20% of it for free. Given the high-quality and immense depth of our courses (most are 2+ hours), this is usually 2-3 free videos with 15+ minutes of content which took us several hours to craft.

If your friends are skeptical, just point them towards a course you think would be helpful for them, and they can make a call for themselves after going through the free lessons. We don't make the free lessons lower or higher quality than the rest in the course - A big part of quality is consistency.

If they like the content, they can use your referral code to join Taro: https://www.jointaro.com/rewards/

If they're also at Amazon like you, they can ask their manager to see if they can expense it. Amazon is very frugal, but a surprising amount of Amazonians have gotten Taro expensed.