Sounds like you should be the platform and let content creators in. Pay them commission on sales and you can QC anything coming in until you can afford to pay someone else.
It's definitely something we considered! We actually were really focused on that for a long time, but didn't get a lot of traction with it, because creating content in our format requires illustration and animation, which is not easy to do. A lot of people said they wanted to do it, but very few followed through. We did some partnerships with media companies but we didn't solve a critical problem for them (the original inspiration was the end reader experience) so there was not very much urgency or willingness to pay. So we pivoted to a "full stack" model where we create the content and build the platform. It was working decently well (it's not easy to get 1,200 people to pay for access to content), but just not well enough.
Have you tried creating a 'creator's' software that's lightweight, easy to use and has lots of pre-loaded illustration packs (with a wide variety of themes) & drag-and-drop style animation presets?
Check out Linear Algebra: Foundations to Frontiers (https://www.edx.org/course/linear-algebra-foundations-fronti...), it's being offered self paced by edx, and you can download the lecture notes for free at http://www.ulaff.net. When I took the course two years ago I liked how the lecturer will discuss basic concepts in the lectures but also gives additional material related to state of the art research being done in the field.
There also used to be a course called Coding the Matrix, I'm not sure if it is still being offered online. The lecture notes form a book of the same title, which is available for less than 10$ (Kindle).
Yeah, part of my motivation for doing a lot of maths study is exactly that I took that Andrew Ng class. You can get through the class without knowing multi-variable calculus and linear algebra and what-not, but that class made it clear to me that learning that stuff would be hugely beneficial.