Why We Cap Every Cohort at Sixteen

Published 8 November 2022 by Ilene Castorena

We opened Beesy Academy earlier this year with a rule that our own spreadsheet disagreed with: no cohort goes above sixteen people. Two months in, our first course filled in nine days and we had eleven more people asking for a seat. The obvious move was to add a few. We did not, and I want to explain why, because it is the decision that shapes everything else about how we teach.

What sixteen buys

At sixteen, every person speaks in every session. Not in a breakout room, not in the chat, but in the main room where the instructor and the rest of the cohort can hear them. That matters because the useful moment in this kind of teaching is almost never the explanation. It is when somebody describes their actual situation, gets it examined out loud, and everybody else recognizes a version of their own problem in it.

At sixteen, the instructor reads everyone's work every week. Not a sample, not the ones who asked. When somebody hands in a scope statement with a boundary that will not survive first contact with their sponsor, they hear about it that week, while they can still do something about it.

At sixteen, people learn each other's situations well enough to be useful to one another. By week three, students are answering each other's questions with specific advice, because they know that this person runs a team of five in a regulated business and that one is the only designer at a company of forty.

What twenty four costs

We ran the arithmetic on going to twenty four, because we would have been careless not to. A ninety minute session divided by twenty four people is under four minutes each, and that is before the instructor says anything. In practice you do not get four minutes each. You get five confident people talking and nineteen people watching, which is a webinar with extra steps.

The instructor's reading load roughly doubles too, and the honest outcome there is not that they work twice as hard. It is that feedback gets shorter and more generic, and the specific sentence that would have changed how somebody ran their next one to one turns into a line of encouragement.

What we do instead

When a cohort fills, we open a waiting list for the next quarter and we tell people plainly how long the wait is. Cohorts open quarterly, so the wait is never longer than three months. Some people take the wait and some go elsewhere, and that is a real cost we absorb every quarter.

It is worth it. The thing we sell is not access to material. Recorded material is abundant and mostly free. What is scarce is somebody experienced looking at your specific situation and telling you something true about it, in a room with fifteen other people who will hold you to what you said you would try. That does not scale, and we have stopped pretending it might.