Soft launching a course makes it available to all DataCamp students. During this period, DataCamp will not advertise or promote the course. The soft launch phase is an opportunity to collect and implement feedback from students who discover and take the course on their own. It is when any remaining bugs in the course can be ironed out before we make a big announcement to our students. 

After your course soft launches, you will be given access to a dashboard which tracks how your course is performing. You should use this dashboard to improve your course after launch. 

Once we have enough data to confirm that the course is performing well, we will notify our marketing team that your course is ready for hard launch, which is when we begin promoting it to all of our users!