Getting started

Mastria is the academy platform for developer-tool and data startups: courses, hands-on browser labs, and proof of business impact in one product. This guide covers how your academy goes live and what your learners see.

Your academy

Every academy is a branded, standalone site:

• Its own address — you start on yourname.mastria.dev and can move to your own domain (learn.yourcompany.com) whenever you're ready. See Custom domains.
• Your brand — your logos, one brand color, your fonts and corners, set on Admin → Brand, or copied from your docs site in one paste (Match my docs reads Mintlify, Docusaurus, Starlight and Fern). From that one color the academy derives its whole palette, in light and dark mode: buttons and progress in your exact color, links shaded until they read as text, button labels in white or dark ink (whichever reads better), and greys with a hint of your hue. A yellow or neon brand stays readable without you picking a single extra shade. The same colors carry through to the sign-in email's button, link previews, and certificate share images. Learners get light or dark mode from their system setting, and can switch from the header unless you lock one. There is no CSS to write, and nothing breaks when the platform's design improves. See Brand & appearance.
• Public by default — anyone can browse and read your courses without an account. Signing in is only needed to track progress. Zero-friction reading is deliberate: your academy is also top-of-funnel. When a course shouldn't be public, its settings can unlist it (link-only) or restrict it to selected customer accounts — see Course settings.

How learners sign in

Passwordless, via magic links: a learner enters their email, clicks the link we send, presses Continue on the page it opens, and they're in. (That one extra click is deliberate: mailbox link scanners open every link in an email before the reader does, and it keeps them from using the sign-in link first.) No passwords to forget, nothing for your support team to reset.

The email a learner signs up with matters more than it looks — business emails automatically connect learners to their company, which is what powers per-account reporting later. And because work inboxes don't last forever, learners can add a confirmed recovery email on their profile — either address signs into the same account, so leaving the company never orphans progress or certificates. See Accounts & learners.

Getting set up

During the design-partner phase, setup is hands-on and fast:

1. We create your academy and subdomain. You set your brand on Admin → Brand (paste your docs address to start from their look), or we do it with you.
2. You hand us your existing content in any form — markdown is ideal, but we'll convert what you have. See Courses & content authoring.
3. Point your custom domain when ready (one DNS record).

Staff accounts get an Admin area right on your academy domain — courses, lessons, publishing, and version history are self-serve. For anything else, "tell us and it's done same-day" still applies.

Where's the dashboard?

On your domain. Some platforms send staff to a separate central dashboard site to manage their academies; Mastria's admin lives at /admin on the academy itself — learn.yourcompany.com/admin — so management travels with your domain, white-label included.

• One sign-in for everyone. Staff use the same magic-link login as learners. A staff seat is what unlocks the Admin link in the header — learners never see it.
• More domains, same admin. Extra custom domains point at the same academy and are managed in the same place.
• More academies, one source of truth. Running separate academies (say, customer training and partner certification)? With repo sync, the same course folders can feed both — your GitHub repo, not a dashboard, is the central place where content is written, reviewed, and published.

What's next on the platform

• Hands-on labs (live): Python and SQL run in the learner's browser — no VMs, no waiting — with automatic checks, authored feedback, hints, and stuck-friendly checkpoints, embedded right in the lesson. Try it on the demo academy.
• A real course player (live): every lesson keeps the course outline in view with checkmarks and lab markers; Complete & continue finishes a lesson in one click and lessons with labs complete themselves when every check passes; resume follows the learner's latest activity; course cards show progress; and finishing a course lands on a completion card with the certificate and the recommended next course.
• A learner profile that holds the records (live): every learner gets a My profile page — a display name that renders on their certificates, every certificate in one place, a learning record of started and completed courses with a printable training history, and a recovery email (with one-click promotion to the sign-in address) so the account itself survives a job change. Certificates are public verification permalinks with one-click Add to LinkedIn. See Certificates and Progress & tracking.
• Authoring tools (live): a single-screen course workspace — outline beside a markdown editor with a formatting toolbar, ⌘K navigation, live validation-gated publishing, course templates, version history with diffs and rollback, and GitHub repo sync so courses can live next to your code.
• Impact reporting (live): lesson funnels, per-account progress views, and trained-vs-untrained comparisons against your own product metrics — sent via a simple webhook or CSV, keyed by user email. Completion events flow back out through signed webhooks, and every table exports to CSV.
• A home that organizes itself (live): a featured hero, tag and with-labs filter chips, header search, an un-gameable New badge (keyed to a course's first publish — nothing an author can game), and learning paths — named, ordered course sequences with their own pages and derived progress. Past twenty courses the home grows curated topic rows on its own; every mechanic arms itself as the shelf earns it, with nothing to configure.
• Course lifecycle & credentials (live): access control from public to link-only to account-restricted; coming-soon teasers with a waitlist before launch and a graceful retirement path after (started learners keep access, links never break); and publicly verifiable completion certificates — optionally assessed, requiring every lab check to pass.

Questions at any point: marc@mastria.dev — you'll get an answer from the person who builds the product.