Positive mentions of Thinkific

Yes. If your goal is “I have little/no audience, I want to put a course somewhere and see whether strangers actually enroll”, you want a marketplace, not just a course-hosting platform.

Platforms worth testing

Udemy is probably the most straightforward experiment. There is no fee to create/host courses, and Udemy itself provides marketplace discovery plus a Marketplace Insights tool showing search demand, competition, trends and enrollment channels. Udemy Support Teach Udemy

The important catch: if Udemy generates the sale, your revenue share is much lower than when you bring the student yourself. Udemy currently says instructors receive 37% of net revenue on sales not attributable to an instructor promotion, versus 97% when a student purchases through the instructor's coupon/referral link. Udemy Support

For rapid validation, I'd structure the experiment differently

Don't spend 6 weeks building a polished 8-hour course.

Instead:

1. Pick one very specific outcome.

• Bad: "Learn Marketing"
• Better: "Build Your First $1,000/mo Newsletter"
• Even better: "Get Your First 100 Newsletter Subscribers Without Paid Ads"
• Make a 60–120 minute MVP course.
• Put it on Udemy at a low introductory price.
• Watch:

• impressions
• landing-page visits
• conversion rate
• enrollments
• completion
• reviews/questions
• which traffic sources produce students
• If strangers repeatedly enroll without you personally sending them there, you've obtained a much stronger demand signal than simply getting friends to say the idea sounds good.

One particularly interesting alternative: Maven

If you're selling expertise rather than generic educational content, Maven is worth investigating. It explicitly offers free "Lightning Lessons" designed to build an email list and validate demand, alongside workshops and cohort courses. It says it has a marketplace of 500K+ learners and currently takes 10% of course revenue. Maven Maven Help Center

So I'd think of it this way:

• Udemy → "Will strangers buy/consume this topic?"
• Maven → "Will professionals care enough about this problem to attend/pay for a more premium solution?"
• Your own course site → "Can I build a sustainable business around this audience?"

The key distinction is that Udemy/Maven can provide some distribution, whereas platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, etc. primarily give you infrastructure—you still have to bring the audience yourself. Webflow

If you tell me what the course topic is + roughly what you'd charge ($0, $10, $50, $200, etc.), I can suggest the fastest 7-day validation experiment and where I'd put it.

If by “marketplace software” you mean a platform that hosts cohort-based courses and has its own audience that can discover/promote new cohorts, Maven is the clearest fit I found.

Best fit: Maven

Maven is specifically built around live, cohort-based courses rather than primarily self-paced courses. Its marketplace gives instructors access to an existing learner audience, with several discovery mechanisms:

• Marketplace discovery: students can browse courses by category and keywords.
• Personalized/recommendation emails: Maven says courses can be surfaced to relevant students through its emails.
• Trending placements: courses with recent enrollment momentum can receive additional marketplace visibility.
• Homepage discovery: listed courses can appear to students browsing Maven.
• New-cohort promotion: Maven has built-in cohort launch emails and marketing tools for converting interested/waitlisted students. Maven Help Center Maven Help Center
• Maven currently says its platform has 500K+ serious learners and describes the marketplace as a way to reach people beyond your own network. Maven

One important caveat: Maven isn't a pure “post your course and we'll fill the cohort” marketplace. You generally need to generate some initial traction yourself. Currently, Maven says a course becomes eligible for marketplace listing after 100 waitlist leads or 2 paid enrollments, followed by its review process. Maven Help Center Maven Help Center

How I'd think about the options

So if your key requirement is:

“I want to run recurring live cohorts and have the platform itself expose each new cohort to people who already use the marketplace.”

I'd put Maven at the top of the shortlist. Its entire product/distribution model is unusually aligned with that requirement. Maven itself says its marketplace and recommendation emails only surface courses with open cohorts, and its discovery system is explicitly designed to amplify courses after instructors establish initial traction. Maven Help Center Maven Help Center

If you tell me what kind of course you're selling (B2B/professional, consumer, technical, hobby, etc.) and approximate price ($100 / $500 / $2,000+), I can compare Maven vs. 5–10 alternatives specifically on marketplace-driven enrollment, including how much of the student acquisition each platform actually provides.