Interview with Kajabi’s CPO (Li Jin)

Li Jin interviews Jeremy Saenz, Kajabi’s chief product officer, on the bootstrapped ‘secret giant’ of the passion economy — a $1B GMV run rate.

Why it was kept

Kajabi calls its customers knowledge entrepreneurs, not creators — people packaging what they know into courses, coaching, communities and newsletters. The passages Kyle kept: the three jobs to be done (build, manage and grow a business), ‘why pay more for 10 separate tools’, a horizontal platform with no single checklist for success, ‘knowledge products’ as an expression of your knowledge, and the bet that people will increasingly trust other people rather than impersonal brands.

As Kyle captured it

• Read Interview with Kajabi’s CPO: The secret giant in the passion economy that has bootstrapped to $1B GMV run rate by Li Jin Digital Creators
  • Jeremy Saenz, Chief Product Officer at Kajabi
  • When discussing the biggest passion economy platforms, a few names are frequently mentioned: Shopify ($SHOP), Patreon, Teachable, and Cameo, among others.
  • Kajabi is one of the most established companies in the passion economy, aiding people that are looking to package and sell their knowledge. It calls its customers “knowledge entrepreneurs”—individuals who have an area of expertise that can be offered scalably and monetized online through knowledge products.
  • We split the platform into 3 core Jobs To Be Done. We want all of our customers to be able to 1) build a business, 2) manage a business, and 3) grow their business.
  • “Why pay more for 10 separate tools when you can do the job better with one?”
  • Most successful entrepreneurs on the platform:
    • Brendon Burchard - Life Coach
    • Chalene Johnson - Health + Business Coach
    • Alex Becker - Marketing Coach
    • John Maxwell - Life Coach
    • Eric Worre - Marketing Coach
  • And a lot of the qualitative feedback we get from customers is along the lines of: “This was something I’d been wanting to do for a while, and COVID helped solidify my decision to jump in and get started.’” This period of time has catalyzed a lot of entrepreneurship.
  • So we wanted to focus on knowledge because that was fundamentally what our customers were doing: they’re taking what they know and turning it into a business, whether that’s through video training, podcasts, blogs, online courses, or digital downloads.
  • Then we have the “entrepreneur” part. We have issues with the term “creators,” because we’re not just necessarily looking for people who just want to create something. There’s a lot of platforms going after content creation. We specifically choose to play in the space of entrepreneurship. One of my favorite quotes is from Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist who first coined the word “entrepreneur” in 1800:** “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.” **Capital Allocation
  • We are a horizontal platform by design: entrepreneurs are coming in and serving all sorts of different niches. We’re not prescriptive on one magic formula of how to succeed. It’s all dependent on what the customer is charging and what value they’re offering.
  • There’s not a single Checklists for how customers can be successful. We need to give them a set of flexible tools and make resources available for them to understand where the opportunity is in the market and how they can capitalize on it.
  • A knowledge entrepreneur also wants to evolve over time as their audience matures and their needs change. Maybe somebody who’s offering a newsletter today chooses to offer an online course or community tomorrow. That’s what we see happening among our customer base.
  • There’s another term we use internally: knowledge product. For us, knowledge products are an expression of your knowledge, and it’s packaged in a certain way. It’s online courses, digital downloads, Cameo video messages, podcasts, or newsletters.
  • Some of these products are free; they’re front doors to your business. Other products are very high-priced, like 1:1 coaching sessions. Formats change all the time. We’re dedicated to discovering what those new formats are and how to introduce them to our customers’ ecosystem.
  • People are doing revenue share models inside of Kajabi, where perhaps they’re creating a marketplace for a very specific vertical, and they’re bringing in experts and teaching them how to create content.
  • I always ask people to start with: what does success look like for you? And then, start formulating who your audience is even before building your product. Don’t just create a course and hope that people will pay for it. Instead, understand the customer and their problems and needs. This goes not just for knowledge entrepreneurs, it goes for all entrepreneurs.
  • Firstly, people will increasingly identify with and trust other people rather than starting with a specific type of product or impersonal brand. We’re putting the individual’s brand and their company’s brand forward. We compare Shopify ($SHOP) and Etsy—there’s a difference in how overwhelming it is to go to somebody’s Shopify store that you trust, vs. going to Etsy and seeing a million things and not being sure which ones are actually trustworthy. Naked Brands