Greg welcome to the show thank you appreciate it pleasure to be here do you have a favorite quote something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us for the longest time it has been Calvin kage's quote around persistence and uh it's a longer one but this the simple element of it is that nothing takes the place of persistence not Talent OR education or genius you know all of these things um are thing Are they things you can have but not succeed but persistence alone is omnipotent and and really pushes forward the the
march of humankind yeah that's very powerful um so tell us about think EIC what does the product do who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve yeah I mean at its core myself and think GIC is about trying to make people's dreams come true uh and that's a little maybe esoteric so the the more specific is uh we help people In businesses that have knowledge or passion or expertise H we help them monetize it and the the way we do that is they get their own website they get to create digital
products be it we started with courses but now it includes memberships and communities downloads coaching things like that uh and they get to share that with others to impact other people's lives positively uh but also build a business by charging for that expertise and we serve uh a lot of Creators uh but also actually now bigger businesses that are taking their knowledge and and monetizing it and sharing it with their customers and give us a sense of the size of the business where you in terms of Revenue customers size of Team yeah so we went
public a couple of years ago we're doing about uh a little over 60 million Us in Revenue recurring right now uh Team of about 280 people growing profitable and uh looking for the next big opportunities awesome And you've raised I think what over 200 million now yeah so we were largely bootstrapped up to IPO and then in the IPO raised about 180 and and so uh that's been uh a big big step up in terms of what it unlocks for us as a business for sure okay great so let's talk about uh the idea where
did the idea for this business confirm you founded it in 2012 um what were you doing at the time and and and and how did you come up with This idea yeah so I mean the founding we'd probably have to go back a little further so 2005 2006 I was actually so think ific we started in 2012 but we go back about five six years before before that I was going to law school at University of British Columbia I was teaching and tutoring the elsat the law school admissions test was doing it in person and
realized I'm answering a lot of the same questions for you know every time a student comes on or I teach a Class how can I take this online and just help reach more people and maybe turn it into a real business that helps pay off my significant and growing student debt uh so we set out initially to put it online used a whole bunch of mixed software tools from WordPress and PayPal to a bunch of custom code that my brother wrote uh to put up uh first actually a Blog and then start building an audience
and then we put up the course and uh started selling the course And you know even just initially we were selling it at 29 bucks a month and made a few hundred in the first month and that grew over a period of years I went on to practice law and do other things but come to 2012 the course was growing it was successful it was doing maybe $10,000 a month at that point so it was a really nice side hustle for us and uh we saw this opportunity to build this exactly what we needed but
for other people and That came about because other people were reaching out saying we love what you've done with your elet course we want to do the same with our hula hooping course or our finance course or our uh some other programs and also we'd been it would just been painful dealing with all of these moving parts of software right like the the having an audience and being able to make money selling them our knowledge and expertise was awesome but keeping all these moving Parts of software together was quite painful and so we realized there
was a real paino we could solve for others by building one system where they get to drop in their knowledge and expertise make it look beautiful sell it to others build a community around it build a real business around it and so that's where we set out to build thinkific so it took 2005 is when you said you you launched your own course and then 7 years later was the start of Thinkific what was the the process that got you there so you starting to get people asking you you know how they can do something
similar and I I'm sure there were tools out there at the time I mean you you kind of used a I guess a homegrown Solution on on WordPress to do this but what was it that that convinced you that there was an opportunity here that it was worth you know the time and money to to go and Build something yeah I think it was a combination of factors so in the interim there from 2005 to 2012 I finished law school I practiced as a lawyer uh eventually actually started another company and then came full full
circle back to this idea because we had been looking for another solution we just we didn't want to build it to begin with for ourselves we were looking for something that was really easy to use uh that could get us up and running and Where our brand was important we wanted it to live on our own website under our own brand we wanted to own the data and the intellectual property we were teaching we wanted to own that relationship with the customers and not have that live in someone else's system and uh and so we
looked at everything that was out there and what we found was there was LMS Where Learning Management systems and they're typically designed for like corporate learning or University learning teaching students or employees and they were really expensive hard to use and uh and really you know they didn't have things like Commerce built in and and e-commerce and the ability to sell and build a business then we looked at marketplaces there wasn't say udem me masterclass corsera at the time but there were similar products out there and the issue with them and many of them approached
us uh was we didn't like the idea that it was Going under someone else's brand we had lost control of the data the direct relationship with the consumer and you know it kind of put us at odds with the marketplace because they would probably have competing products to us in there uh and also they were spending a lot of their revenue trying to acquire the student the and user and that meant we would only get like a small portion of the revenue at the end of the day so because of that we set out to
build our Own system uh you know it was the combination of it was becoming unwieldy and actually quite expensive to manage all the moving parts of software to do it ourselves and others were asking us to do it for them so we said let's just build a really easy SAS solution that does this for other people and I think at some point along the way my brother came and said hey I think we're building Shopify but for digital products instead of physical ones and that was really Where it kind of uh moment happened and we
decided to dive in and do that so just just help me understand you mentioned that you wanted to be able to build this on your own site just in in terms of just high level sort of technical setup how does that work with with thinkific are people actually building this on their own site or is this some kind of you know there's a subdomain and and kind of a you know they can they can customize the look and Feel of of a thinkific site like how does it work yeah I mean it can be either
or so you come to think giic you set up a free account you can start building out your course or membership or other products and with it you get a site that site could live at you know yoursite.com or yourdomain.com whatever that is it could also live at a subdomain so for some people they already have an existing website it's already all set up and then they just Add what think ific provides as a subdomain so you know courses. yoursite.com or learn. yoursite.com and so that's that's yeah it it really could be any of those
things we also give you your own domain of like your site. think.com but a lot of people will go in and then customize that uh URL so that it's their own domain name okay so initially it was you and your brother Matt who started the company and then uh you brought on a couple of other Co-founders a bit later on but do did either of you have any experience with building software uh not so much for me my brother yes he had some uh he was still I think in the process of starting think GIC
we originally built a lot of it in PHP as coding language and then he says you know Ruby and rails is cool I'm going to go learn that and I think in the course of a weekend this tell you how he's the smarter brother for sure he Went and learned Ruby on Rails and then rebuilt the whole system in Ruby on Rails now since then obviously we have a lot of other products and and and code in the mix but uh I had no no SAS experience he had some but pretty Limited at that point
and so uh we were we were kind of figuring it out as we went for sure okay so you've got you know Matt's tech tech expertise to to help in terms of executing and and building the product what about finding Customers how did uh how did you get the first 10 you know the mythical first 10 customers like um lots of trial and error lots of non-scalable activities a lot of um there was definitely a fair number of maybe call them pivots in the early days and even false positives and it's funny cuz you know
we talk about pivoting and making changes when things fail our problem early days was actually everything we tried worked to a little Bit so we initially went after we had this idea of building what we have now that was the original idea but that was going to be really hard technologically so to have many many like now we have tens of thousands of websites managed by tens of thousands of active customers didn't have the tech to do that initially so we said okay we'll build actually more of a Marketplace and we'll just go and shoot
we'll film people edit their courses put it into a Marketplace And and we'll handle selling it and that kind of worked so we had some Revenue but then we realized we didn't have the expertise to scale that the way like a master class would or cor sah would so we tried another thing where we were kind of building custom learning sites for larger organizations and that worked we got revenue from it but it didn't feel scalable and it wasn't what we were as passionate about at the time and So eventually kind of came full circle
to The original idea of making it easy as a self-served s system where anyone can kind of sign up do it themselves and get going and that's really where so we had 10 customers by that point but they weren't necessarily the right customers for us and then where we started getting customers uh was a lot of non-scalable stuff so that meant you know finding places where these people hung out and figuring out their email address reaching out to them hopping on a phone Call and in a lot of cases early days getting them to like
Dropbox us their videos and then we would custom build the course for them send it back to them say what do you think should we set up another call so you can give us your credit card number I mean just ridiculous when you think of what SAS can do now with stripe and all these other you know easy to set up things uh but we were literally I I remember one time we found this what we thought was The perfect customer hopped on a call had a great call he sends us over all of his
video we spend a month building out a whole website and a whole bunch of courses for them we send it back to them it's beautiful we're like okay let's set up the next call to get that credit card number and start charging you you're a customer now and uh that was it he just ghosted us no yeah so so lots of non-scalable things that um but you know you we just like that's where I love That persistence idea is like we did not give up we just you know okay he ghosted us we'll keep emailing
them but we'll move on to the next one and keep setting people up until we're until we're really growing so it many ways it sounds like you were operating like an agency or a Services business like we'll we'll build a custom you know course for you drop the stuff over in many ways was was that just because the product functionality wasn't There yet so you were forced to do that or was it because you couldn't convince people to try the product so you were trying to make it as easy as possible or or was it
a bit of both it was very much that the product wasn't there so it was like okay we don't yet have the product that other people can just you know your your beautiful SAS products today someone signs up on your website they put in their email they put in their credit card and they get to work doing Stuff with your product we didn't have that yet so we're like okay well we while we're building that because we were building towards that we'll just call people and we'll do it for them and we'll do it manually
so we can start to generate Revenue while we're building the product as opposed to like waiting to ship a product and then hoping people use it the cool thing that happened because of it is by doing it manually we learned a a lot like we really got to Know our customer base as to what they were looking for and then we would feed that back in in that information back into the product we were building to make it better now you know someone listening to your story and saying you know Greg's business you know 60
million in ARR you know maybe he's a smart guy maybe he's had luck maybe it's combination of those things and and maybe you know people can look at it now and think it's been an Easy Journey for you but you know as you and I were talking it's it's it's it's been far from that can you give us an idea of like even just getting to the first million in AR how long did that take you guys oh yeah okay uh I don't have my old my old charts in front of me but I'd say
the first three years so 2012 to 2015 that was that sort of false positives pivoting trying new different things and then around 2015 so about 3 years in We turned on that's like this is a long time but you know now that I think about it in retrospect but we turned on the ability for people to sign up on their own and pay us on their own and build the product on their own like go build their own course and we turned that on and and I remember about a month later we had a webinar
with a partner of ours was MarShon Evans a wonderful woman who promoted us to her audience and she Invited 60 people 60 of her sort of best customers to the webinar because they she thought they might be interested in our product 55 of them showed up and 20 of them bought a $1,000 like signed up automatically on our system and bought $1,000 kind of annual plan and started getting to work and I remember so that happened and then over the course of that week because we'd launched this sort of pay yourself and we had some
other people promoting the Product every day we'd come in and look at the charts and they just tick up dramatically so we're you know growing at really significant rates at that point I remember I had a moment where after 3 years of work and getting really spotty Revenue like a few thousand here and then nothing the next month to see that we had recurring revenue on credit cards automatically signing up on our system and the most exciting piece is some of these people we'd never talked To them they just found our website and signed up
I remember falling down on the floor and lying there on the floor in the middle of our office and it was almost like I was doing um snow angels you know like I was just the whole team thought I was crazy but I'm just like yes I can stop putting payroll on my credit card so there was this real moment there of like we've achieved product Market fit and and and was it because of just enabling the selfs serve And making it easier for people just to do things on their own it was a combination
that was a big piece of it but it was also spending 3 years talking to customers tweaking the product figuring out the right offer ing figuring out what the pitch was you know what what was it that these people wanted and really figuring out okay this is like they want something they can selfs serve where they get their own site their own brand they get to have Their Vision come to life by creating their own course or or membership and and we can give that to them and then we've sort of figured out some of
the marketing channels of how we actually get this out to people and all of that kind of came together over 3 years but it all landed in a period of a few months and that's where we started to see that SAS Vue just ticking up on a recurring Revenue basis and it so it it felt like this instantaneous moment Overnight but it was 3 years in the making one thing I'm trying to figure out is like 2015 there's more and more sort of players that that are around to you know help you build and launch
online courses so you know whether it's an entrepreneur or a business they they have a reasonable amount of choices that they can choose from in terms of what to to go and use what was your differentiator at the time what were you first of all were you Finding that you had to spend a lot of time persuading people why they should choose you over something else and um yeah how did you figure out like where you could fit you know how how you could position yourself in the market that made sense yeah I'll be honest
you know positioning is something we think a lot more about now and do more time thinking about us versus you know what other options are there at the time it you know I I realized there were some other Companies who were getting started then but it it was we were all so tiny that the chance we would bump into each other was fairly small uh and so we did have differentiators uh but it also felt like when you're really small it kind of feels like people are attracted to your culture and your brand and your
personality as a company more almost more than anything so there's uh do you solve the problem am I excited about it and do I kind of identify and want to be Part of this exciting mission that you're on so a lot of it was just the way we talked to customers the fact that we were excited about their Vision they were excited about ours we knew we could help them and we were building this reputation of having good relationships with customers that was a big differentiator at the time I think the other thing that set
us apart certainly in the early days and it's still part of our DNA is where we were really focused On the learning component of it and creating an amazing learning experience the way I see that is for our customers there's a segment of this overall Creator Market that's just make money on the internet and we never really loved just that we wanted it to be about they've got a passion for an expertise they want to share how do we unlock that and create an amazing end product because that creates a sustainable business it's not just
have a funnel Make a sale and then you know who cares what happens after you sell something it was about ensuring that when you sold a student something that that learning experience after the fact was going to be amazing and so we invested a ton of effort in making that exciting so things like interactive components like quizzes and some gameification stuff like that made a big difference I think where people saw we were different in that way at the time okay so 2015 things Eventually you know will finally start to take off uh you're able
to do the snow angels in the office and and uh you know it's it it feels like you know the whatever you've you know the effort you've been putting in over the last few years is is finally starting to pay off you know what did you have to do next I mean we we I want to try and think about like the next probably big milestone for you guys was like getting to the 10 million first 10 million in ARR was it just a matter of like continuing to do more of of the same did
you get to a point where you know growth eventually flatlined and you you kind of figuring out where to go next like how how easy or hard was it to get to that next Milestone yeah certainly the next one is in some ways it's easier in other ways it's harder it's easier because you have Revenue you're not putting everything on a credit card or debt or Worrying about whether you'll even exist in six weeks um in every other way it's harder right because you now have you've gone from like let's just figure out something that
works we can try anything and there's no failure because everything's a failure until something clicks then you get into a place of we have something working and you know let's not screw it up but let's grow it and try a whole bunch of things and I'd say like I'd put things into maybe four Buckets at that point you've got customers product marketing and team and so over the 1 to 10 million range you've really got to spend a lot of time in and figure those things out and so the customers is for us was just
a lot of relationships and amazing customer support and you know everybody on our team talks to customers and especially at that time would do a lot of customer support coming in and talking to customers even our CTO would come in and You spend the first hour in the morning talking to customers and going over customer support tickets to understand what's working and what not working you translate that into product and the nice thing when you hit that product Market fit is I've seen it defined in many ways for me it feels like gravity product Market
fit is like being sucked into gravity while where instead of trying to figure out what to do next your customers are screaming it at you They're saying build this for me next and so rather than trying to sell it to them it's becomes trying to keep up with their demands as fast as you possibly can by producing what you think is the best fit for your customers that they're also looking for and doesn't always mean building what they want that's just one input to it um but in a big way it's trying to keep up
with those demands and then the marketing figuring out how we actually you know go to market and scale And and find more people from that million to that 10 million and for us a lot of it was referral based so having really good relationships really good customer support we became known for that it meant that our customers referred more people uh we build in mechanisms where you know the students can learn about that you know think giic is an option and then maybe they our customers refer their students to us uh we developed a bit
of a partner network Of Affiliates and people who would send people our way uh we built out a lot of a Content engine as well uh less so on the paid side at that point but but heavier on content and referrals which was a huge way of building that up and then figuring out how to build a team I did a ton of reading just trying to understand how to hire how to fire how to coach how to lead how to build a team I'd never really built a team before and so figuring that all
out so those were Really the four buckets we focused on for that period let's talk a little bit about content so I think that's been one of the the growth drivers for your business what exactly were you doing what was the content strategy if there was one that that you were pursuing at the time yeah I think I mean this is something that I've seen other companies do better uh and do earlier and it's something if you know if I could go back and do things Again or if I was starting something tomorrow I would
probably start with content and developing ourselves as a subject matter expert because the the genius thing about content is you can produce blog posts and YouTube videos and you know podcasts and all of these things in a topic and space and you've kind of chosen your Tam your total addressable market and that should be big right especially if you want to build like a venture-backed or scalable Company uh you've chosen this audience you want to go after and if you start speaking to the topic that interests them that is also passionate for you and you're
going to build a product or an offering around it that can transcend pivots and so you get to build this audience and whether you end up delivering the product you envisioned which you probably won't you'll probably make changes significant ones along the way you've still got this audience and That's often the hardest thing so building that audience through content I think is is exceptional to do early on and so I wish we did it sooner but what we did was uh certainly a lot of blog posts a lot of YouTube a lot of podcast style
interviews like this one although we didn't actually produce a podcast we just put the YouTube the videos on YouTube those kind of things in terms of the content space the the other thing I think that's helped Drive growth Has been Partnerships but I think you also had a lot of false false thoughts there as well or in terms of not being able to figure out how to make these works so tell me tell me a little bit about like what did you set up to do with Partnerships and what were some of the the failures
or the setbacks that you had to go through before you could figure out how to get Partnerships to work yeah I think yeah we made a lot of Mistakes so early days I think we were thinking okay here's someone who's got an audience that's bigger than ours that fits our unique customer profile or or ideal customer profile uh let's just go ask them to promote us and we'll pay them some money or give them affiliate fees and that you know one most of the people never even responded uh or it was really difficult to get
in touch with them because they were bigger than us they didn't they'd Never heard of us we were batting way above our weight class and or we were attempting to and then there was so there was a learning of like how are we going to get these people to even talk to us and do what we want them to do and then there was a realization that no it's not about doing getting them to do what we want them to do it first it's about doing what they want so it's about figuring out what do
they want fitting into their Vision their plan their Business plan understanding that and developing a relationship on that base this because otherwise you're coming as just like everyone does sort of a selfish ask instead it's coming and saying how can I help you what's important to you let's do things for you so one great breakthrough we found was um actually booking interviews and saying we'd love to interview you for our audience and then you just talk to them you showcase What they're great at you promote their products and services and at the end of the
interview I'd have a conversation about hey is there more ways we could partner and that would kind of Blossom another way I found that worked was you know I remember one sort of influencer that we sent them emails we um and we had some light responses like they were really kind uh at one point someone on our team sent them a 3D printer you know like we were just really trying to to Get in their good graces like a gift because we'd heard they like this stuff and I eventually I found that the way to
do it was to just get on a plane and figure out where they were going to be go to conferences where lots of these people were going to be at and just show up and build relationships and and even there was a learning of you know again showing up as how can we help you uh and then sometimes those Partnerships ended like or or you just lasted with us Helping them and nothing else and that was fine uh other times we made something more formal where they would promote Us in turn other times we'd help
them and they'd end up just promoting us in their own way on their own time and you know uh but really it all started with both getting on a plane and going to them especially if they were bigger ones and then booking interviews where we could showcase what they're good at and then ask more about how we can work And help with them and fit into their plans yeah I mean everyone sees those you know influencers out there and it sounds like a pretty straightforward thing right you just send an email write a check and
get customers but it doesn't quite work like that yeah I mean I think today it is a little more transactional unfortunately where it can be send an email they make a video you get customers you can do that today you couldn't when we were getting started I Still don't think it's the healthiest way even though you could email a top influencer cut them a check and have them promote you it's not the same as building a relationship and doing something much more meaningful together you can generate better results for you and for them I think
if you if you look to build a a deeper relationship than just a transaction yeah I agree who is who is your ICP at the time I know today you're you think about helping Entrepreneurs and you you mentioned that you have businesses Now using thinkific as well but back in those early days when you're still you know seven figure multiple seven figure business were you targeting mainly entrepreneurs was there a particular segment or or an ICP that you'd identify that was your sweet spot or was it just basically you know anybody who wanted to create
a course Yeah it it and it's it's stayed the same but shifted or expanded over time and in some ways gotten more specific I know that's sort of a paradox there but um back then it was kind of coaches authors trainers experts the Creator thing was just kind of getting started it wasn't really a thing yet and so coaches authors trainers experts people who ideally if you want to go ideal they already have some sort of content doesn't have to be Online content but if I ask them to get up and in front of a
room for a few hours and teach an audience they'd be able to do it those were our sweet spot because they already knew what they were teaching um they were already saw themselves as an expert and then we could get them up and running building a course uh where the challenge hit was often figuring out how to show them how to build an audience now I would say that's kind of expanded into you know The Creator educator which is anyone in the Creator economy who's knowledge passion really anyone with knowledge passion and expertise who's building
an audience building a business business and has some knowledge they want to share with the world uh combined with some of these bigger businesses as well especially yeah I mean that that landscape is is starting to to change quite a lot and I want to talk about this probably will leave this for a Little bit later in terms of you know the opportunity with the Creator economy and how big you know this thing actually is or or or could be if we go back to you know let's say 201 17 2016 2017 that time how
big did you expect or hope for the business to be able to get like what was your expectation at the time yeah I'm C at that time I was looking six months out so on the rare occasion like if we were raising capital I would put together a plan that had us going a year Out and you know project revenue and stuff a year out uh but it was r looking much further than 6 months out now that's probably a big flaw in my leadership uh but I was really just like okay how do we
get through the next six months what are we going to do in the next six months and re rarely sort of brought my head up from the desk to think what could this be I certainly never imagined we'd IPO or you know and I I had taken companies public prior to This as a lawyer so I used to be a Securities lawyer so I knew the concept of the IPO quite well had been involved in many uh or in some but yeah never occurred to us that we would get to this point um become public
grow it this big and and now you know now I much more look to the Future and I think there's a lot more Runway left for us we're really just getting started at this point but it's funny early days more just head to the grindstone and just what's the next Six-month bring so what was the when was the first time you raised money uh it was it was in 2015 uh we were part of a kind of startup incubator um not where they take Equity or anything think it was more just like a place to
have a desk or a few desks and uh we talked to our our one actually one founder of another company here in Vancouver um Jeff Booth that uh uh and he had started had been quite successful with his own company And were sort of pitching him as like mock pitches we weren't even pitching for dollars uh and he got he saw one pitch and then came back a month later and saw the next one he's like wow you actually listened to all of my feedback this is amazing if you ever want an investment I'm in
I don't care the valuation like I'll cut you a check and I'll help you find other investors and so that leveraged into uh us also meeting Rhino Ventures who invested in Us but it was our first round was about 600,000 Canadian other numbers I've shared have been us but 600,000 Canadian and it was funny because we shook hands on the deal to do 600,000 some of it was Rhino and then a few other uh more founder type people and it took six months to get the check now they are way faster don't hear they're not
slow to cut checks it was me mostly dragging my feet as a lawyer and working all the details and everything But it took six months to get the check and by the time we got the check we didn't need it so we were already growing re that was when I'd had that you know lying on the flare floor moment our revenues growing we're putting cash in the bank and we were hiring people and we just threw the money in the bank on top of everything else and kept growing but it well I think what it
did do is it gave us the confidence to lean in a little bit more because I knew I Could make some Investments and if it didn't work out it wasn't going to be um just personal debt for me so so the the confidence was the biggest thing I think we gained from that first check okay got it so the first three years the business was bootstrapped you raised the the seed round 2015 but didn't really use it so I guess we could say you're still bootstrapping the business you just have that money in the bank
if you need it h How long did you continue down that path before you went out and raised more money it was so from 2015 raise of 600,000 we did between then and when we ipoed in what 2021 so the next six years uh spread probably evenly so every couple of years we raised first a million then 2 million and then 22 million 22 million was mostly secondary so even that was still pretty much bootstrapping we did put some into the company um but in each Case we didn't need the money so it was a
weird thing I'm not in retrospect I'm not really sure why we were raising but it seemed like the right thing to do one of them was about cleaning up a messy term sheet and some messy Equity structure so it made sense to do around and raise and then clean up some messy legal things um which i' would strongly advise people if you're raising money keep your terms keep keep your ter your legal terms like very standard and Simple don't get f see uh but yeah so about every two years we raised along the path and
then eventually that led to the the IPO 2021 what drove that decision like why why did you decide to to IPO yeah it was a variety of factors uh so we we we made the decision and five months later we were listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange normally it's about a 2-year Journey but we were a little bit ahead in that we just had a Really strong Finance team and finance leader in my CFO Karen had a strong team in my co-founder Miranda and and so we were able to move really quickly on that but
the reasons for it was one we thought it'd be good for overall customers like it would give us the capital to build out more of what our customers needed and wanted so that was probably the biggest thing is how do we we're always looking how do we help our customers succeed in their business and Having a significant influx of capital plus a bigger brand plat form to stand on uh just gave us the ability to help more people and build more for the people that we were helping um the brand piece was another piece as
well you know being a public company your press releases go farther your marketing goes farther you know we get picked up in the newspaper constantly I know that's not what everybody reads these days but blogs pick us up a lot more too uh so That gives us some more marketing reach uh raising uh significant amount of cash was was a reason as well uh plus it gave liquidity for our team so you know at this point point we are 2021 we're you know almost 10 years into the journey we've got op everybody in the company
has Equity uh every person we've ever hired always gets Equity uh but there's no market for it you know there's there's no way for them to turn that into cash and some of these people Would love to buy a home or and so part of it was just a way to create some liquidity for the team as well so a lot of benefits uh to doing it and then we got lucky with the timing in that we were going public at a time when our business is growing like never before uh well not like we'd
had faster growth periods but it was growing exceptionally fast and the window for IPOs was very wide open SAS valuations were at an all-time high and so we were able to Raise money at an exceptional valuation which I'm quite GL glad we did because now it's just a war chest for us to use growing going forward what what was the valuation that you uh just over a billion okay so the the business is growing you you have the high growth rate you get to the IPO in total by that time you've raised over 200 million
and then a couple of years later you had to lay off a lot of people Yes how many people are we talking about uh first round was about 100 second round was about 100 so over a one year you know on the two tail ends of a year we we let go about 100 people at each point so um pretty significant obviously we were one of the first tech companies in fact I was looking the other day at Google you know think ofic layoffs and uh this one of the second links that came up was
a a news article saying like is this the sign of things to come and Obviously it was so we were we saw the writing on the wall we we had raised in part all of that money at IPO because I'm a firm believer that well you can't predict when Black Swan events will happen or what they will be they will happen and so having a war chest is a good thing so we built the war chest the Black Swan event happened you know Tech markets turning down uh slowdown in Tech gen Tech growth generally and
unfortunately we saw the writing on the Wall and we we decided to just take very decisive action I'm quite grateful my board was pretty influential and in you know opening my eyes to the need to do that and then we have a team that was able to just act quickly and make this happen quickly and uh that put us in a much stronger position today because we took those actions and then you know in True Form to our culture uh empathy is a big part of it and kindness and so we were really as kind
and empathetic with The team as possible and I think in a way we set a standard I've seen other companies mirror the way we did layoffs in terms of how they communicate it when they do it how much they pay out and so we did everything we could to be as kind as possible through that process and I think people did appreciate it as much as it's a thing to have to go through for everyone I I mean it's crazy that you know a few years earlier you said you were reading books about you know
How to manage people and coach people and because you hadn't done that before and then suddenly you're thrown into this situation where you don't have to lay off you know 10 people or 50 people but you know several hundred people right that's that's that's not you know Pleasant for anyone involved right when you and I were talking earlier about this yeah there's this Black Swan event and and we can we can point to that and Say you know externally that was kind of a big big reason why this happened but you also said something to
me which was really around you felt like you were growing or maybe going down a direction which you weren't necessarily comfortable with or maybe you were taking too much advice from people can you talk a bit about that yeah and just to be clear I take full response responsibility for the mistakes I made To get us there um I think as a leader you you have to do that that's my responsibility to make those calls uh and so you know on the one hand when things are growing as fast as they were if you don't
invest in growth you do risk being left behind and so we were heavily investing in growth and heavily hiring and if the market had continued and you know the industry had continued and growth and continued on track uh and you know drawn a straight line up and to The right we it would have looked like the right move but with it turning around it certainly looked like the wrong move and you can see that in almost every tech company today that it looks like the wrong move but if it gone the other way the ones
that didn't hire it might have looked like the wrong move as they fell behind so on the one hand you kind of feel like you have to because it's growing uh and then to be more specific about what you mentioned Uh for most of the early life of the company I was told I was very coachable I listen to a lot of advice from other you know from investors from other entrepreneurs but one thing I stuck to was you know I just stuck to my guns and that I would take in lots of advice and
Nod and say yes and consider it and ask questions and then I would make the best possible decision I could based on my own um information and not always just do what other people suggested there was A point there as we scaled where I really started to have a lot of inbound advice of you got to spend this money you have to have a plan to spend it you've got to grow as fast as you can you have to be the market you know the the winner take most in the market and the only way
to do that is to outspend everybody and that was never the way we had operated and it was a mistake for me to kind of lean into that and do it that way and uh You know unfortunately we would have been bet you know with 2020 hindsight I would have been much better not making that mistake and instead staying more true to our operating procedures up to that point which was to stay relatively bootstrapped and profitable and keep the cash as uh you know not see the cash as a way to outspend everyone but actually
keep it as dry powder to take on opportunities when they arose and I think you know there's a good lesson for Founders there of don't be obstinate like take advice listen to everyone but then amalgamate all of that advice and make your own decision on what you think is best and and don't and and be cautious of the you know fast moving urgent Trends you know even we we we saw lots of Trends come across our desk with virtual reality augmented reality crypto Bitcoin you know and um uh blockchain and and took a hard look
gathered a lot of and intelligence and in most cases It's decided there isn't true customer value here for us to create so we're not going to do this AI is different you know there's this fast moving Trend in AI we've taken a hard look at it and we've said we can deliver real customer value here so we're jumping all over it but most of the big trends in the past we haven't because I just didn't see real customer value so I think there's a good lesson to you know taking your own advice after you listen
to everyone else And then taking a pause compressing you know uh considering and then and then making a move that you're you're confident and the other piece I think is being a student of history and recognizing these are all patterns that repeat themselves and if I had if I'd been you know 75 years old at this game and had seen many many of these Market patterns before I probably wouldn't have made the same mistakes but you don't have to be 75 to have gone through Market Cycles you can just read books yeah let's let's talk
a bit about the Creator economy I I think I saw a something that youd posted on on LinkedIn recently but tell tell me like from your perspective first of all maybe just describe what the Creator economy means for people who don't really understand that and then what what is the opportunity that you see and what does that mean for your business in the coming years okay yeah So Creator economy to me is people who are creating largely content but it can be other things largely creating content usually on social platforms or platforms that distribute to
large volumes of people and you know it is hundreds of billions in in Revenue that exists in that economy I mean an interesting fact I think is that kids are more likely to want to be a YouTuber when they grow up these days than a doctor or an astronaut Or or anything else so that's that's the Creator economy in terms of what it what it comprises in of Revenue a lot of it is actually brand sponsorships and advertising so typically you know someone gets big on YouTube they're looking to Brand sponsorships or ads as a
way to make runy it's sort of the most obvious one especially because you know YouTube and other platforms have really made that easy where you just flip on ad revenue and you've got revenue you don't Have to do anything else I think where it's really exciting for us I mean there are other Revenue channels in it like digital Goods which is where we live but that's probably less than 5% of that overall economy but what's exciting for us is if you do brand sponsorships or if you do ads you your RPM or Revenue per thousand
views is about5 to eight dollar made per thousand views if you do brand sponsorships and you're really good at It you might get to $50 RPM we see our customers doing a th000 to $2,000 RPM and that's because they're selling their own product it's a digital good uh and they're able to generate significantly higher Revenue per view uh and the other cool thing that so it's a much more lucrative business another really exciting thing about it is as we move more we see more creators moving into offering digital Goods is that you can make a
really substantial business on a Much smaller follower count or view if you want to make money on ads you need millions millions of views millions of followers uh and that's why you know the top 1% of creators they get pushed to the top by the algorithms and they make all the revenue right whereas if you've got a few thousand fans or followers on any platform it's really hard to make a meaningful Revenue but we see people with a few fans and followers making meaningful revenue on thinkific because They're selling their own digital products and that
means they can make more Revenue per view like by an order of magnitude or two uh plus they um it's a much higher margin right so even as opposed to say selling physical Goods which is something that creators do as well uh with physical Goods you've got the cost of the goods you got shipping supply chain Logistics and so you might end up with 20% every dollar you sell you've got about 20 cents on the dollar That's profit in your pocket whereas with digital Goods you can end up with 80 cents on the dollar in
your pocket and that makes a huge difference when you're talking about selling $100,000 worth of product and having 80,000 instead of 20,000 to take home uh so the all these are all reasons why we're actually seeing a shift in the Creator economy towards digital Goods towards sharing knowledge passion and expertise as opposed to just entertainment with Ads uh and that's really where we live is in this shift towards knowledge passion and digital goods and the you know the increased revenue and the increased margins for creators and as they get more and more Savvy we're seeing
more and more people shift to at least include that in their business model yeah yeah I think it's a super you know I mean obviously this is a space which is very relevant uh for for me and I've I've gone down that path without Even thinking so much about it where initially you're spending a lot of time you know maybe this you're doing this creating content as a part-time thing and then maybe you're doing some Consulting and doing some content then you're starting to get SP sponsors then you're starting to do you know coaching or
or stuff like that but ultimately you know it's kind of open my eyes in terms of as you as your audience grows as well it's like wait a minute why why am I not Doing any kind of digital product why am I not doing courses the one thing uh you know I think maybe if this was you know few years ago maybe it would be I a little bit more clearcut today I wonder about like AI like do do you think AI is a a threat to creators or it's an opportunity we are seeing it
I mean depends on how you view it but generally I'm seeing it as a huge opportunity in that um it's what we're Seeing is it it's accelerating the speed to Market accelerating what creators can do with their business because they're using it as a tool in so many ways from I mean creating content is the simplest application but there's so many ways you can do it so many ways you can use Ai and so it's saving them time it's getting them to Market faster it's letting them launch more products and reach more people and we're
seeing it actually drive up their revenue directly Like we see it in because we see the revenue numbers of the creators and we're seeing it move Revenue up which I think is really exciting then of course we're building a lot of AI into our product that'll allow our creators to reach more people build products faster and charge more for those products because they have ai offerings built into them so that's that's pretty exciting for us to see this I think where it is more of a threat is less to Creators and more where there isn't
a personality so if you look at say a business of summarizing textbooks well AI can replace that right whereas what you can't replace with the Creator at this point is their true personality and maybe you will have aiid driven personalities that build an audience but our creators aren't successful necessarily because they're really good at a particular topic that's part of it but they're really successful when they Have a personality and they build an audience that identifies with them and connects with them and it's such a beautiful thing because you know in the old world of
Education you have the the person in the Ivory Tower as they call it you know teaching Finance at University and there's so-called expert PhD and they know it really well but there's only can be a few of those whereas now what we're seeing with creators is you've got the woman of Color who used to work at a daycare who teaches finance and reaches millions of people in you know her community who connect with her and her story and um and she teaches it her way that kind of connects in a way that's relatable to the
people who are connecting with her and it's such a beautiful way of saying there's more than one way and more than one type of person and personality to teach a subject and Reach people and help them um so I think in that sense AI Is something that's going to empower them in fact we have a a core value that we deal with like not a core value of the company but a we we have a set of values ethics around the way we use Ai and one of them that is fundamental is to respect the
unique Genius of our customers and that we're not looking to replace them we have no interest in using their expertise to go and build products for others or make it so that you don't have to be good at a subject To go and share it with others we want to just empower the unique Genius of the creators rather than replace it yeah that's super interesting and the what you said about personality I think is is is so important that I feel like that's going to become more and more important and relevant in this space as
it becomes easier just to churn out information with with AI and going back to what you said earlier about why People chose you and thinkific in the early days it was less about the product right because theu wasn't doing that much in in the early days and you weren't able people can sign up or PVE or anything but they were connecting with you and they were they were buying into you know what you guys were building there was some confidence or belief in in where you were going and some kind of connection and I think
in many Ways a lot of uh Founders building SAS businesses are in similar situations where they're they're they've got a product and they're looking at competitors or potent those competitors don't even they're not even you know on on their radar right but that you know if you're the small guy you're looking at these big players and you're saying how how how am I going to compete with these guys I mean I don't have like even 5% of The features and the functionality and all that they have but if you can find the right people and
and and get build that connection I mean when we say personality it doesn't mean you have to be a you know incredibly Charming person or charismatic or whatever it just means you need to be able to connect with people right yeah or just be you I mean I've seen people who are who are building on a personality and building Relationships where they're not great at connecting with people but they're maybe they're really good at marketing you know and uh and they just attract other marketers who want to learn from them or are really good at
marketing too and they want to be part of that community it's a great way to do it so it's just mostly being you and being as unique as you are and that that helps you kind of build that and we it's interesting even at scale we find that the relationships Matter like when we launch a new product line we we you know not too long ago created our Commerce solution which helps gives a whole bunch of features to help people sell more it collects and remits taxes for them does a whole bunch of stuff you
know does things like buy now pay later or gifting where you can like buy gift certificates for courses and give it to someone else and when we were initially coming out with this a couple of years ago we were going to Creators and saying or customers of ours and saying look it's not done yet we got a few features but there's a lot more coming and the ones we had good relationships with were like cool I trust you guys all take it sounds good uh and they you know they're they're moving over in some cases
millions of dollars in Revenue into our payment processing platform and uh you know we didn't let them down so we continued to build trust uh but it was that trust Built over years of of you know serving them that that allowed us to launch these new products more easily that's that's cool uh talking about payment processing do you do you handle it yourself using stripe on the back end what are you doing because I was looking at your pricing and the typical business model in this type of business is that there is you know some
kind of monthly recurring price and then there's usually Some kind of transaction fee I couldn't find those transaction fees within kic so is is it is it really zero or or is it something that people are still paying yeah so we don't yeah it's good it's a good question it's a it's a bit of a mix we don't charge a transaction fee per se just as part of our pricing it is just a flat month I mean there's a free plan and then a flat monthly plan most people go to 99 bucks a month to
get all their needs met which is Probably still pretty inexpensive for everything that we offer um I mean I know as customers really scale and grow sometimes we actually lose money on them because they're you know all the bandwidth and servers and hosting we pay for so so really it is just the the monthly fee when people get onto the paid plans in terms of the payment processing um you can connect any payment processor like stripe you can connect other things through our API so We have a an application programming interface that lets you connect
other things up but we also now have our own payment processor and beyond that it's we call it think ofic it was think ofic payments now it's really think ofit Commerce which is our payment processing plus all of these Commerce features that allow you to make basically make more money um and and it does things like pay your taxes for you and and transfer funds and stuff like that and within That we that is actually built on top of Stripes API so they have an amazing platform for building this stuff it's allowed us to build
really our own Payment Processing but using their entire infrastructure uh so it's been a really exciting partnership for us with them and and so through that we do have uh the ability to earn some Revenue there but the beautiful thing is it's not extra fees for our customers it's something that they would pay anyway Anywhere they process a credit card you're going to pay that 3% it just means some little piece of that goes to so that's where we get a little bit of extra Revenue there um but we provide a lot of services and
usually the people who are using it they're selling they're selling more so they're actually earning more because they're using our solution there all right um we should uh wrap up get onto the lightning round you know this is one of those Conversations that I feel like we've just skim the surface there was so many things that we could go into and uh you and I are already scheming on a on a followup um episode maybe we'll even do that in person in your studio right that would be great yeah come to Vancouver but let's get
on to the lightning round for now and um and you'll be free to to to go so I've got seven quick fire questions for you so whenever you're ready uh what's one of The best pieces of business advice you've received people first I think it was meant in terms of hiring but I see it as everywhere customers relationships Partners board members uh investors but especially customers uh put the People First and the relationships first what book would you recommend to our audience and why can I pick a few I read so much I love this
uh turning the flywheel by Jim Collins anything by Jim Collins and what Is strategy by Joan mcgr that is a 50-page picture book my son took it to daycare because he was so excited about the pictures in it so it's a super quick read um same with turning the flywheel they're both exceptional I could name tons of others but those are great great uh what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder persistence um willful blindness at times uh and uh I think you just have to Be passionate about the space that
you're in what's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit I love Spotify I know it's not really productivity but I use it for everything from some mindfulness meditation stuff to just listening to music to listening to podcasts and audiobooks I learn from it so it's a huge one for me uh what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time um Hydroponics for uh like just it's an Like everything I want to do you know dream-wise that I know nothing about is really about saving the environment and you know
one day if I have a big payout that's where I'll put my donate my money um but Hydroponics I think is a really exciting scalable way to grow food for the planet that has a much smaller environmental impact I've actually got just next to me here in my bathroom I've got a whole Hydroponics rig where I'm experimenting growing lettuce and other Things wow maybe that's the answer to the next question about an interesting or fun fact that people don't know about you uh well yeah hydroponics in my bathroom um I don't use it as a
bathroom anymore uh I love to kite board I love to flight board I like uh play a ton of board games and uh what else uh yeah those are a few and uh finally what's one of your most important passions out side of your work my kids I got an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old and just live for spending time with them and playing soccer with them and all the other fun things we do together it's awesome yeah I I I miss those days my kids are now teenagers and they don't want to hang out with
me anymore so there's a good book on that actually um for the family side is the the family board meeting but it's it's a short read but might might even help you get those teenagers to hang out with you the family board meeting yeah I've got To look that up good tip thank you all right cool so great thank you so much for joining me it's as I said I think given the time we had available I think we've we've tried to tell the story and and extract some lessons here but I just feel like
there's so much more that we need to talk about and go deeper into and so I'm hoping we're going to we're going to do a follow up and and and do that soon if people want to learn more about think ific they can Go to think ific and if folks want to get in touch with you what's the best way for them to do that uh I'm just uh Greg at thinkific or greg. Smith at thinkific or on LinkedIn as well I don't respond to LinkedIn messages as regularly as I should so probably email is
the better way um but yeah if you connect with me Greg Smith on uh I think I'm Greg Smith lawyer or something like that on uh or just if you search Greg Smith think ific on LinkedIn Yeah we'll we'll include a link to your uh LinkedIn profile in the show notes well thank you thank you for joining me thank you for uh uh racking your brain and sharing what's some of the lessons and and and experiences over the last 12 13 years actually longer than that because we went back to 2005 and uh you know
I appreciate you you you taking the time and uh I wish you and the team the the best of success thanks it's been a Pleasure cheers
