Kajabi, an industry-leading, all-in-one platform helping individuals and SMBs to create and monetize online courses, training materials, and other content, recently announced two company milestones. The popular platform received a minority growth investment from Spectrum Equity, a leading growth equity firm investing in the information economy; and they’ve launched a fully redesigned Pages landing page building tool, a major feature of the service.
These two developments suggest that online information product entrepreneurs have unprecedented levels of opportunity as 2020 unfolds.
Online learning has become a $220 billion global market, with many people turning to digital channels to meet both their professional and casual learning needs. At the same time, there are an estimated 40 million “solopreneurs” in the U.S. workforce. Many of these are knowledge merchants, capitalizing on the demand for online learning by making their expertise available online. Kajabi is laser-focused on providing a platform on which they can do this successfully, and without any knowledge of web design or coding.
Since its launch in 2010, the Kajabi platform has helped more than 25,000 business owners generate over $1 billion in sales, reaching upwards of 41 million customers who have purchased educational content from businesses powered by Kajabi.
With the online educational market continuing to heat up, the time was right to launch the fully redesigned Pages functionality, which was retooled based on user input.
“We sat down and talked with our customers,” explained Jeremy Saenz, Kajabi’s Chief Product Officer. “We learned about their businesses, and what they needed to take their success to the next level. And that’s what we built for them.”
From website creation, email marketing, course authoring, business analytics and payment processing, Kajabi combines everything entrepreneurs and SMBs need into one single platform to run their digital businesses.
Unlike many of the dominant platforms on the market, Kajabi is entirely creator-focused, giving its subscribers complete autonomy to drive their businesses forward and highlight their own brands, allowing budding influencers to create, promote and sell content that often augments their offline business strategies.
While the relaunch of Pages was well underway before the ink was dry on the Spectrum Equity investment, Kenny Rueter, the CEO and a co-founder of Kajabi, pictured above, sees the timing as indicative of positive market conditions and the investors’ belief in the product.
“Our mission is to make the best possible DIY platform for digital business owners selling informational products; this investment [by Spectrum] is a vote of confidence in our ability to innovate and support that goal,” Rueter notes.
With demand for digital educational materials continuing to grow, Kajabi’s user base helped influence the design of the new Pages functionality, Saenz explains. Ultimately, they wanted more choices, the ability to optimize their content for both desktop and mobile, and full customization so their site accurately represents their brand.
The Pages feature was recently rolled out to all current users, and will be marketed as a key component to Kajabi’s all-in-one site builder, which bypasses many of the limitations of other platforms used to publish educational content, like YouTube and Udemy.
The company allows subscribers to customize their own storefronts, create and manage content and sell and market in one integrated platform, with valuable resources to help them grow sustainable businesses and build their brands.
The minority growth investment, meanwhile, continues Spectrum Equity’s successful track record of supporting product and customer-driven businesses as well as their ongoing interest in SaaS companies that enable SMBs and entrepreneurs to succeed (for minority growth investment), and their investments in education efforts including DataCamp, DMI, Lynda.com and Offensive Security.