By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
Sean Kim is the President and Chief Product Officer of Kajabi, which is the gold standard for entrepreneurs and course creators in terms of monetising what they do. He joined me from Los Angeles in the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur to talk about Kajabi and how it can transform a business for an entrepreneur.
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An All-in-One Platform
Kajabi is the leading all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs to publish, market, and sell their products such as online courses, coaching materials, newsletters, and podcasts. They have creators across diverse categories — from education, fitness, finance, and cooking to parenting. There’s a diverse range of creators who are successful on their platform.
You can think of it as a build-your-own personalised masterclass for your audience. You build a website, host all your valuable content behind a paywall, and decide how much you want to charge for it — it's that easy. Sean shared that their platform will only charge you the monthly fee to host the content and tools. Creators like you will keep 100% of the earnings. To date, they’ve already helped creators generate over $3.5 billion in sales from their customers.
Screengrab from Kajabi
Kajabi has been around for close to 10 years. On the platform, they have over 53,000 customers, and on average, creators make roughly $30,000 a year. If you're looking at Kajabi and other platforms in terms of how much an average creator makes, this figure is already pretty good.
The platform’s mission is to become the most creator-focused company in the world. They want to help creators, at any stage, build a meaningful business. Essentially, they want to make business as simple as possible for creators through their all-in-one solution. Through their best-in-class services that match customer service, they want creators to be able to focus on what they love: creating content.
Building a Business under One Roof
A course creator or an entrepreneur might want to have a WordPress website or an email marketing tool like ConvertKit. They might want to have a podcast- and a video-hosting platform, and something like Thinkific for their courses. How does Kajabi solve what's really an integration issue, let alone a marketing issue for people trying to be online?
Sean said that the great thing about Kajabi (based on what he’s heard time and time again talking to their customers) is that they offer everything.
When you come to Kajabi, it's essentially an all-in-one solution. The platform provides everything you need to get started from zero to one. They give you the playbook on how to set up the best site, courses, and emails. They offer you all the tools that you need in order to build an entire business under one roof.
They acknowledge that the customer's time is valuable. This is why they want to make it as simple and easy as possible to get everything done — and under one roof.
With their platform, you don't have to jump around and try to bulldog different types of services to make your business run. And if you actually look at all those different, separate services that you would typically use to run a business, it would cost more than just using Kajabi.
The people behind Kajabi want to automate the entire email marketing funnel on your site as well. They offer that kind of service. They offer prebuilt funnels and you can customise them how you want them. You can capture leads and convert them into paying customers. They know how marketing is an incredibly important component of any website.
Kajabi also gives you access to a community of 53,000 customers that are in it to win it. Some of the most successful creators are there on the platform explaining exactly what you need to do to become successful. There are also creators there who are just getting started. In sum, it’s an active community that’s there to help you out.
Screengrab from Kajabi
One of their popular creators is Brendon Burchard, who has tons of amazing content on marketing. There's Amy Porterfield, who is another well-known creator as well. There are a ton of other smaller creators. There are also the larger traders out there.
Sean shared that just recently, he was talking to a creator who isn’t your traditional creator. They were a Product Manager at Google for a few years and then decided, “I want to help people get into Google.” They know how to interview for Google and what kind of questions the tech giant is going to ask. According to that creator, you don’t have to have tons of followers on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. But you should have something really amazing in terms of valuable content for people who want to get into Google.
What that creator did is put a course together and it just took off. While Sean can't share the exact numbers in terms of how much money that person makes, it's more than what he made while working for Google. This is just an example of how valuable their platform can be for major types of creators.
Competition among Creators isn’t an Issue
Competition is one of the issues for entrepreneurs who build a course for either a new business or as a way to monetise their existing knowledge. You may wonder how Kajabi helps a business owner and course or content creator have their own brand within the platform so that it's not about fighting against 53,000 other creators.
Sean clarified that their platform doesn't have a marketplace wherein you're competing against other creators. If you’re on Kajabi, you are your own brand. You have your own personalised website. And when you build a website, it's going to require some trial and error on the customer's part. You aren’t going to make a million dollars during your first year.
Image from Unsplash
As an entrepreneur, you have to find that niche problem that you want to solve for your audience (In terms of types of content that have been performing really well, Sean cited personal development fitness as the top-ranking industry on Kajabi. Its earnings have increased 101%, year on year). Then, you got to do the research and understand what type of content will resonate with your audience. You also test on social, for instance. And when you do that, you'd be amazed at the feedback that you’ll get.
Once you've proven that you’re solving real problems for people, then Kajabi will be there to take care of the rest. They’re there to make building your business easy with education, services, and tools.
Kajabi will provide you with an all-in-one solution — from email and photo hosting, and website design to payment. They will also host your content (e.g. videos, newsletters, and live streams). They will give you the playbook that worked for their top customers. They will also offer you coaching. They will provide you with 24/7 customer service. And they will also give you that community comprising top experts and successful creators. You can ask them any questions because everyone there is actively engaged.
Sean reiterated that when you come to Kajabi, you're building your own brand. It's not branded as Kajabi. You have your own personalised website, you have your own domain, and they give you all the tools to help make that successful.
A Community to Help You Get Your Content Noticed
People use different ways to drive awareness. The most successful, for Sean, is to have the email addresses of people who are really interested in the content that you’re producing and in the value that you’re offering.
While there's a lot of testing being done on social (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok), building that audience from people who are really interested in your type of content is something that people are constantly testing on these different social platforms. According to him, this shows how audience building is a really crucial strategy.
Their Kajabi University has around 600 videos and a lot of them are dedicated to how to build an audience, how to nurture those leads, and how to ensure that they become customers. They have a lot of training materials on this matter and they have experts who are there to help you as well.
As soon as you join them, they already have coaching that's available. You won’t be alone. There are a lot of people in the community who are literally going through the exact same thing that you are experiencing — and they're providing you with the best practices: Here’s the playbook. Here's what's worked for them in your industry. All this critical knowledge is available to share with entrepreneurs to ensure that they become successful with their businesses.
Image from Unsplash
Kajabi, the platform itself, is hosted in English but they have creators all over the world — in 140 different countries, in particular. Altogether, they have a hundred thousand businesses created by these 53,000 customers. They have over 300,000 products created on the platform and as stated, average creators make around $30,000 a year. There are also those on the far side of the spectrum. For instance, one person made a hundred million dollars on Kajabi.
Sean attributed that kind of success to the testing of the tool. The tool itself is great because you have everything you need packaged under one roof. But it's also about the knowledge that they’re providing you — the playbook in terms of how you get there, how to build your audience, and how to set up and design your website properly. There’s also their community. The community is a really important part because it’s where you have people who are in the exact same situation as you are. You have successful people who are willing to help out.
Kajabi is essentially a hero platform. The content creation itself is done on other platforms (whether it’s a video or podcast); then you host all that content within Kajabi. The great thing is that they don't charge extra for the hosting, which is something that other platforms may do. On Kajabi, you can upload as many videos or podcasts as you want.
On Content Migration
Some people are going to start their whole business on Kajabi, but some already got a business that's distributed across different platforms. When asked about content migration, Sean said that it’s something that they can help you with 100%.
Many customers come to them and ask about migration. They have very specific needs in terms of how they want to migrate and what they want to migrate; will it affect them in terms of email delivery and SEO. Kajabi has a deck full of staff and a lot of them are engineers who have gone through that same situation as well.
Sean pointed out that whatever the use case may be, they’re here to help out and ensure that you're successful.
For example, there was a customer in Australia who built their site off Kajabi. They were having this coaching service, and to her surprise, she got 10,000 sign-ups for her coaching webinar. While she acknowledged how successful it was, she was a little concerned about how well the webinar is going to go. That customer reached out to Sean on LinkedIn and said, "Hey, I don't know if you're going to see this. But I built my business on Kajabi from somewhere else. And I got 10,000 signups for my webinar and it’s coming up in three days. Could you provide some type of support?”
Sean immediately jumped on there and said that they will help. He got his entire staff to help her, review her content, and provide the support that she needed during those times when she was having a webinar. She was more than thrilled and gave Kajabi amazing reviews. She also emailed Sean personally and thanked him that the webinar went so well.
This is the kind of customer service and support that they want to provide. Sean wanted to let people know that they can reach out to them. He knows how hard it is to be a creator — there are ups and downs that they go through, and there are unknowns and challenges that they have to face. It’s their mission to make that as simple as possible and ensure that you have the best chance for success.
Kajabi’s Pricing
The basic price is $119 a month if you're billing annually. And then they have the growth plan, which is $159 a month if you're billing annually as well. They also have a pro plan.
Screengrab from Kajabi
If you are to get different types of services to make a similar experience like Kajabi, Sean assured that all those different point solutions bolted together would cost more than what they offer in their platform’s all-in-one solution.
And when you decide to leave Kajabi, you will still have access to all your content. You’ll have access to all the email addresses of your customers and to your data. After all, it is your business. They make it as simple as possible to run the business; to make it successful with all the data that you can get to help improve that business over time. But if you choose to go to another platform, that's something that you can do quite easily as well.
If you want to reach out to Sean, you can email him at sean.kim@kajabi.com or contact him on LinkedIn. You can also check out their website at www.kajabi.com.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by Subham Dhage on Unsplash
