Customer Education Without an LMS: Patreon’s Product-Led Approach
By Blair Mishleau, Senior Community Education Manager at Patreon
If we believe in our product, we should be excited to teach inside it.
That led our creator education team at Patreon to a deliberate choice. Instead of investing in a traditional learning management system, we chose to educate creators about best practices directly on our own platform.
Hosting education inside the product has reshaped how we think about expertise, collaboration, and measurement.
For teams weighing an LMS or rethinking where learning belongs, our experience highlights the distinct opportunities and real design considerations that come with building an education program without one.
The Strategic Upside of Teaching on Your Own Platform
You Become a True Product Expert
When learning lives inside your product, you can’t rely on simulated workflows or abstract examples. You have to understand how the product actually behaves in real-world conditions.
For example: using Patreon’s post editor has helped us find advanced uses, like embedding feedback forms and Arcade tutorials.
Over time, that’s helped the education team transform from content producers to product experts.
Education and Product Become a Feedback Loop
Teaching inside the platform has strengthened our partnership with our product team.
As we create resources, we can experience the pain points creators share. This gives us first-hand experience we can share with the product team, and lets us pressure test new features.
One simple yet impactful example: adding more post formatting to our written post editor. Things like different heading size and horizontal line dividers have rolled out, in part, because of feedback we’ve share
Education stops being downstream support. It becomes an input into product improvement.
Creative Freedom Without Constraints
Traditional LMS platforms often encourage standardized course formats and linear modules, but teaching inside our own environment gives us more flexibility.
We can:
Embed tutorials directly where creators are already working.
Host slide decks alongside relevant workflows.
Build downloadable job aids creators can reference outside the platform.
Design resources that feel native rather than external.
Share quick posts, called Quips, which appear right in creators’ home feeds in Patreon.
Instead of asking creators to step away from their work to complete training, we support learning in context. That shift has made engagement feel more natural and actionable.
The Design Considerations That Come When You Don’t Have An LMS
Forgoing an LMS requires intention. It's not simply replacing one system with another.
Insights Data Looks Different
We’re fortunate that Patreon’s Insights feature provides robust behavioral data. We can see engagement patterns, usage trends, and interaction depth that often mirror LMS reporting.
To supplement this, we’ve also worked with our internal data warehouse to define success intentionally and build our own reporting views.
Rather than focusing solely on completion rates, we look at whether creators take meaningful actions after engaging with a resource.
For instance, we’ve been able to measure product adoption for those who engaged with our education vs. those who haven’t. Spoiler: it’s looking good!
Not every organization has analytics or tooling this strong. For teams considering this path, an honest assessment of your product’s data capabilities is essential. Without meaningful instrumentation, it becomes difficult to measure impact confidently.
Being Flexible with Course Authoring Tools
We don’t use legacy authoring tools, and we’ve gotten creative with how we build engaging materials. It’s been fun to experiment and see what’s possible with our own product.
Embedded media, contextual tutorials, and lightweight resources often achieve instructional goals more effectively than overly structured, academic courses for our more creative audience.
This model requires a team comfortable with experimentation. Creativity and iteration become core competencies.
Measuring Learner Sentiment
An LMS typically includes built-in surveys tied to course completion. Inside a product environment, sentiment measurement is more distributed and less based on a specific moment of course completion.
To solve for this, we’re embedding Typeforms directly in our posts, along with a simple 👍/👎 one-click sentiment tracking we built internally.
Another huge plus: Patreon natively supports commenting, likes, and lightweight audience surveys. These native tools often provide richer and more contextual information than a single end-of-course survey. Plus, folks don’t have to leave our platform to share it.
When This Model Makes Sense and When It May Not
Choosing not to use a traditional LMS is not the right decision for every organization.
If your product lacks meaningful analytics, or if your program depends on structured certification pathways with strict compliance requirements, a traditional LMS may be the better fit. The tool should match the problem you’re solving.
But if your goal is to drive adoption, deepen feature usage, and align education closely with product behavior, hosting learning inside the product can create disproportionate leverage.
For customer education leaders, the more strategic question may not be “Do we need an LMS?” It may be “Where does learning create the most impact for our users?”
In our case, the answer was clear. The most powerful place to teach was inside the product itself.
About Blair: Blair runs the creator education program at Patreon, focused on building scaled education that helps creatives earn more money doing the work they love. He’s passionate about smart systems and processes to make sure programs are efficient and sustainable. He’s won multiple awards recognizing his contributions and innovation in the industry. Blair lives in Chicago with his fiancé, Trevor, and cat, Sergio.
