142: Greg Smith Grew Thinkific to a $65M ARR Public Company, Here’s How – 8FE

Want to learn the strategies behind scaling a company to $65M ARR?

In this episode of Beyond a Million, Brad sits down with Greg Smith, founder and CEO of Thinkific, a platform used by over 77,000 entrepreneurs to build and sell courses online. 

Greg shares his journey from lawyer to entrepreneur, revealing how he grew Thinkific from a small course platform to a major player in the digital product space. They dive into the challenges of scaling, the pressures of being a public company, and the importance of staying focused on what truly drives success.

If you’re looking for ways to scale your company like a pro, this episode is for you!

Tune in.

Inspiring Quotes

• “A product is way better off being known as really amazing at one thing than mediocre at fifty things.” – Greg Smith
• “It’s a lot easier to figure out what’s going to stay the same than to forecast what’s going to change.” – Greg Smith 
• “Do less, better.” – Brad Weimert 
• “We always knew what to build next, because customers were just screaming for it.” – Greg Smith 
• “It’s tempting to try fun, new marketing tactics and product editions, but sometimes, it’s more beneficial to improve the core product.” – Brad Weimert 
• “One of the core competitive advantages you can have is the data pool.” – Greg Smith

• 00:00:00 Intro 
• 00:03:08 Transitioning from law to entrepreneurship 
• 00:06:15 Thinkific’s journey 
• 00:10:21 Shiny object syndrome and creating new features
• 00:13:30 Marketing channels 
• 00:18:50 How Greg’s role changed as the company grew 
• 00:23:01 Going public 
• 00:27:10 Business partnerships 
• 00:30:11 The future of course creation 
• 00:40:51 What’s (not) going to change for content creators 
• 00:47:55 AI and content creation 
• 00:52:25 Employee training and Thinkific 
• 00:57:18 Greg’s advice for entrepreneurs and content creators
• 01:03:19 Outro

00:00
Brad Weimert
You have 77,000 plus people creating on your platform. They’ve sold billions of dollars of products. What is something that the million dollar and up creators are doing that the sub million dollar creators have not figured out?

00:16
Greg Smith
The people who cross a million? There’s almost always a personal connection. Brand is very creator focused, personality based. They’ve niched down often a recurring revenue component. There’s another thing that I think if I’ve got ad revenue on YouTube, I’d be making about three to $8 rpm, but with digital products, $2,000 rpm. So it means with 6700 followers, I’ve made well over a million dollars.

00:44
Brad Weimert
How do you think AI is going to impact content creators in the next five years? Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even ten figures. I’m Brad Weimert and as the founder of Ezpaydirect, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and ten figure businesses. Life can get exciting beyond a million.

01:29
Brad Weimert
Greg Smith, I haven’t seen you in years. Thank you so much for carving out time.

01:34
Greg Smith
Thanks. Appreciate it. Brad, great to be here.

01:36
Brad Weimert
So you founded Thinkific, which now has the stats I pulled. Correct me if I’m wrong, but 77,000 entrepreneurs are using it in almost 200 countries. Almost 190 million people have accessed the content on the platform and it has generated close to $2 billion for the people using the platform.

01:56
Greg Smith
Yeah, I mean, I think we’re actually through. That’s probably a little bit old. Like, the nice thing about being part of a high growth company is you keep moving through those barriers. So we’re well past the 2 billion now in terms of what people have generated on the platform and the others have probably grown as well. There’s only so many countries, but other than that, we keep growing.

02:16
Brad Weimert
Yep, there are probably a lot of countries that your goal is not to get thinkificant to them.

02:23
Greg Smith
Yeah, generally the more the better. And the penetration in some of them is quite light. So there’s still lots of opportunity to be more international than we are today.

02:30
Brad Weimert
And in terms of headcount annual recurring revenue, et cetera. Where are you guys at right now?

02:37
Greg Smith
Yeah, we’re about 280 people. We are at about 65 million us annual run rate in terms of revenue. And that was as of our last published quarter numbers at close of Q two this year, 2024, and still growing and profitable. So it’s been good.

02:57
Brad Weimert
So like 300 million Canadian?

03:00
Greg Smith
Yeah, exactly, yes. 65 million US, 300 million canadian.

03:04
Brad Weimert
That’s the conversion? Something like that, yeah. So I want to talk about the current platform because we have easy pay, direct serves, the content creator, coach, consultant market really heavily. And so we’re entrenched in Ithoodae. And I think about it all the time and I’ve got a bunch of specifics. But the origin story for you is also interesting because you started as an attorney. Can you give me some backdrop on what it was like to be an attorney and how the transition happened?

03:33
Greg Smith
Yeah, I loved it. So I went to business school, then I worked for a while, then I came back and went to law school, got into one of the biggest firms in Canada, worked for a couple of them, actually, and mostly did securities and capital markets law. So that’s m and a ipos, all largely working with public companies, some private. And I loved the work, loved the people I was working with, loved the firms I was at and just, but had this entrepreneurial bug. And when I was in law school, I created an online course. I was teaching and tutoring in person and then took it into an online course and that continued to grow. But the big thing was even was I, while I was practicing law, people were reaching out to me saying, we want to do what you’ve done.

04:13
Greg Smith
We want to build our own courses or digital products. We want to put them on our own website, we want to put it under our brand, we want to sell them. So conversion rates, payments are important parts of that. And so that was the impetus where I eventually jumped ship and went full time entrepreneur and went and started building thinkific.

04:32
Brad Weimert
What was that transition like? It’s one thing to have your own course. What was the catalyst that made you think, oh, I should build a unique platform for this? Because certainly at the time there were ways to do it. The market for info products has existed for 50 years or well beyond.

04:51
Greg Smith
Yeah. So when I got started with my own course, it was 2005.

04:55
Brad Weimert
Oh, okay. So, no, things didn’t exist.

04:57
Greg Smith
Yeah, well, yeah, so, I mean, that’s not 50 years ago, but so we did go looking for something off the shelf that would do what we do today, which is sort of your site, your brand, your content, your customers, your data, etcetera. We couldn’t find anything. We looked at LMS learning management systems, but they were more like for universities in house, like basically educating students in a school or employees in a company. We did look at marketplaces, Udemy, Coursera, Masterclass. They weren’t around at the time, but there were other marketplaces. But the challenges then were kind of more of a royalty model, where we give away our content, someone else sells it, controls it, takes most of the revenue from it, and has that direct relationship with customers.

05:35
Greg Smith
We really wanted to build our own thing under our own brand and kind of own and control our destiny. And so we initially just hacked together some payment stuff and website and a bunch of custom code to get it working. And then it wasn’t until, say, 2012, when we had a lot of people reaching out to us saying, we want to do exactly what you’re doing with your own course. Can you leverage that? Whatever you’ve built for us? And what we built was a one off solution for one website. It wouldn’t scale to the tens of thousands of websites we support today. That was really where we started building. Thinkific was all, these people are asking us for this solution, let’s build it for them.

06:15
Brad Weimert
What was the value prop then? Because I know the value prop is different now, and I want to talk about the differences over time. I mean, similar, but I want to talk about the specific differences. But what was the pitch to people then?

06:26
Greg Smith
The original idea was create and sell beautiful online courses. And that was sort of the original banner head. But then we did have a few sort of false positives and other starts. We tried doing kind of a marketplace model. We tried almost a masterclass model where we produced content and sell it for people. We did a lot of bespoke websites where went into bigger organizations and helped build it out for them.

06:49
Greg Smith
Then we kind of came back full circle once our tech had evolved and our team had grown a bit and were able to do it to kind of like a shopify for digital products, where it was really about, you get your site, you sign up on your own, you put your card in, we give you a website, you create the, give you the tools to build your digital products or course at the time, and then go and sell it. So really the original one is quite simple, is create your online course and then go sell it. And then there was some evolution that came from there.

07:17
Brad Weimert
So how far did that get you before you adjusted the model at all? Like in terms of revenue and how long did that take?

07:24
Greg Smith
Yeah, that got us. I mean, it did get us past the million mark. That very simple, very focused kind of one product from there is where we started to open up to other opportunities, really. It was in a similar way that the original idea came where people started coming to us and saying, there’s more we want here.

07:42
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I think that there’s a question that I like to ask people, and I’m laying the foundation for this because it’s different for everybody and people tend to have opinions on it. But at what point do you chase new features for a product versus doubling down on what’s working? And at what point do you add marketing channels for an existing product line or add new product features? So what was the first sort of plateau at growth, if you had one? And how did you think about that transition?

08:13
Greg Smith
So the first few years were kind of struggling, right, trying to figure everything out. And then we hit this magic moment about three years in where all the graphs start going up into the right, revenue is pouring in, growth is awesome. The cool thing there was, we’d really hit this product market fit. We always knew what to build next because customers were just screaming for it. It was so obvious that we had some core unmet need of the customers, a job they were trying to get done. That was fundamental to running the business. They were running on thinkific. And so it was pretty obvious what to build. And then, yeah, you’re very right. We transition into this point.

08:46
Greg Smith
I’ve heard it called this good book called the Build Trap, that sort of, you get into this bit of a trap, I think, of just constantly adding new features because for a while you’re adding new features all the time because your audience desperately needs it just to meet their basic needs. And then you get into kind of this thing of just, well, let’s just keep adding more. What’s the next exciting thing you can do? And that was probably tied not directly, but closely to some of, like some slowdowns in growth there. And so we had to kind of reset and think, okay, it’s not just new features. It’s actually potentially going back and solving existing problems way better with new technology.

09:21
Greg Smith
It’s cleaning things up, it’s improving the user experience and investing in other ways to solve the problems we solve in better ways, rather than just putting on the next new feature. But you’ll never have a shortage of asks of new features from your customers. The problem is it goes from like 80% of your customers desperately need this thing to 10% think it’s nice to have, and 1% are screaming about it, and then you listen to them, and I think that’s a bit of a mistake. We certainly made that mistake.

09:45
Brad Weimert
Our internal mantra for the year is do less better.

09:51
Greg Smith
That’s a great one.

09:53
Brad Weimert
Well, that’s sort of. The product is stable. We know what we’re offering, and it’s tempting all the time to do fun new marketing things and product additions. And to your point, if you can improve on the core product, that may be more beneficial.

10:11
Greg Smith
Yeah. I think even outside of software, a product is way better off being known as really amazing at one thing than mediocre at 50 things or even three things.

10:21
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I think that’s a really good reminder, and it’s a really hard thing for the typical entrepreneurial archetype. Right. The person that wants variety, that wants to create, that has a short attention span. And I don’t self identify as. I’m not like the totally spazzy add entrepreneur that needs to run around doing new things all the time. And I’m a pretty focused operational executor, but I still like variety, and I’m still tempted by the shiny object.

10:49
Greg Smith
We actually, early days, we had a shiny object. We called it the shiny object drawer, and it was where we put all the shiny objects so that we could kind of ignore them. It was actually a Google Drive, doc, and we would just write up the idea and then it’d be like, okay, cool idea. We’ll come back to this when we have time for shiny objects. Which, of course, was never, but I’m pretty sure we wrote up an idea for Tinder back then, before there was Tinder. Not that we would have been able to execute on that one. It wasn’t our skill set. But, yeah, it’s funny, you kind of have to have that outlet to let these things go so that you can really focus on what to important.

11:22
Brad Weimert
Do you have it? I mean, this is a random question, but do you? I find myself in situations like that. We have parking lots. We call them parking lots internally, which is, you know, it’s not quite shiny. Same kind of concept, just all the garbage that like, yeah, let’s. Let’s park that for a little while. We’ll come back to it. Which, like you said, you never come back to it. Do you have specific space set aside for the creativity and the new feature set and the evolution to plan that stuff or think through it?

11:56
Greg Smith
We do, yeah. So we do this thing called Blue sky week every quarter we take a week. And initially it was just all of our engineering team, but lots of other teams now participate and there’s really no rules. It’s sort of build, create whatever you want. And some really cool ideas come out of it. It does tend to be well informed by user needs, though, so it’s not, you know, when we first launched it, I was a little worried people would be like inventing a new vacuum cleaner. And I’m like, what are we going to do with this? But it stayed pretty focused. It was really surprising to see that everyone on the team had a really good understanding of our user needs. And often some of the best ideas came out of this. I do think, though, the ideation can be dangerous.

12:36
Greg Smith
I think it becomes really tempting the shiny object stuff when you’re in your early stages and you haven’t achieved product market fit and success and growth when things aren’t going as well. But then also at a later stage if growth starts to decline, that’s when as a whole company, you can get really distracted, not necessarily by one little idea, but by potentially really big distractions. And you see this, I think Jim Collins book of like the one where he talks about decline, he talks about this point, he doesn’t use this language, but it’s basically grasping at straws and you’re kind of on your way down and you start just firing off uncalibrated cannonballs at things and having them go wrong.

13:11
Greg Smith
And it’s that temptation when things aren’t going your way to go, grasp at new things as opposed to go back to your base, remind yourself on what you’re really good at and focus on that. So I’m always conscious, despite the fact that we have this innovation, that innovation has to tie back to what are we really good at and how are we meeting the needs of our customers rather than just random new ideas.

13:30
Brad Weimert
So I think about that in terms of product innovation and offerings quite often. But I also think about it in terms of marketing channels. What was the original marketing channel that you used? And let’s start there. What was the original marketing channel for you? How’d you get the first to the first million and the first 10 million?

13:51
Greg Smith
Yeah, I would love to say it was SEO and content because I love that. And I think if I could go back it would be more of that. We took longer, but when we hit it, the SEO and content was great. It kept our cost of acquisition down scaled for a long period of time, but it was actually partnerships. So like essentially affiliate partnerships, finding people who are in the space, have an audience that is similar to who we’re trying to reach. And they were willing to help us get in front of them, often for an affiliate fee. I remember one webinar in particular, I think it was with Marshawn Evans Daniels, and she invited 60. She had a much bigger audience, but she invited 60 people to the webinar with us. 55 showed up, and 20 purchased a one year plan with thinkific.

14:38
Greg Smith
And so that was just a breakthrough moment of us realizing that me on a webinar for an hour can drive that kind of result. And it really kicked off a whole bunch of growth for us, 20, 30% revenue share at the time. So partners was a big one, and then we introduced more, the SEO and organic, and those were big focus areas that got us well through a million. And then sort of crossing the 10 million is where we did much more paid spend. And. But it’s interesting because all the channels kind of, they fluctuate a bit. And it is, you know, we do our best to get the, you know, first touch, last touch, multi touch attribution, figuring out where someone came from. But it’s always quite complicated and never perfect, and one channel affects others.

15:20
Greg Smith
And so we’re certainly nowhere near perfection on even understanding exactly where every lead came. Right. Even, like, if I’m on this show now with you and someone listening says, oh, I want to go check out thinkific, it’s pretty hard for me to know for sure. Even if I were to offer a coupon code or something to sort of track back to, like, this is where they came from.

15:38
Brad Weimert
Yeah, no question about it. I think for people like me that are highly analytical and want to be very organized, that’s infuriating.

15:50
Greg Smith
Yeah. I heard one company where they were doing so well on podcasts, but to validate it, they would shut off advertising in a particular. They’re doing podcasts, they’re doing television, they’re doing radio. And the only way to really figure out some of this stuff was to stop doing it in, like, so they’d stop all their ads in a state for a while and then see what happened. And the differential was like, okay, when we turn it back on, we know what the differential is because there’s no way to positively track it, so we can negatively track it.

16:17
Brad Weimert
God, that’s awful. I mean, my approach is just like, do more things, and if you see everything raised, that’s good, but I. It’s not analytical approach.

16:28
Greg Smith
Yeah, yeah. And I think that works when everything’s really efficient. Or, like, went through a long phase where, you know, our metrics were so healthy and so off the charts beyond, you know, what good looks like in terms of things like CAC to LT or LTV to CAC, where you get, you know, you’re spending a dollar to acquire a customer and you’re getting a $20 in return. And so really healthy things. And that allowed a lot more flexibility and spend and do all the things. But as things tighten up and you scale bigger, you do get to this point where I found we have had to be more efficient and more ruthless about each channel and each, even the campaigns within the channels being more profitable.

17:12
Brad Weimert
Is that because of margin compression, because you’re making less per customer, or is it because of saturation or what is that about?

17:20
Greg Smith
It’s not margin compression. So it’s partly just more scale, partly some changes in that went through when your early days, I think growing from that, like zero to five or 10 million, there is opportunity to grow at metrics that don’t make sense. Like they can be so good, but that rarely continues into the 2030 60 plus million dollar range. And so you do have to get more measured and efficient with things as you get through that. But honestly, I don’t know exactly all the reasons why. I mean, you can look at macro factors. Obviously, Covid was a big boon for us. And then post Covid was slower but still growing. So part of it was just in 2020, were at one point, we’re doing 150% year over year growth at a pretty good scale, and then the year after it was half that.

18:07
Greg Smith
And so figuring out if it’s come down so much, suddenly your marketing channels naturally are less efficient because you’re acquiring less for the same spend, or sometimes more.

18:16
Brad Weimert
Did you think about the systemic approach to adding channels, or were you just kind of throwing shit at the wall the whole time and seeing what was going to work?

18:23
Greg Smith
Definitely tried sort of to think about the systemic approach, but a lot of it was just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck. You know, we do a partner webinar and say, oh, that worked, let’s do more of that. And then we’d write some blog posts and do some YouTube videos and say, oh, that worked, let’s try more of that. So we’d go to an event, speak at an event, and we’d get a bunch of leads from that. And I say, let’s do more of that. But it wasn’t as precise as I’d love to say it was. It was trying a lot of things and just going with what worked.

18:50
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I guess, you know, for me, I’m always kind of thinking about where those things happen in the growth of a company. Because when you’re first figuring out how to get product market fit, you’re doing everything right. You’ve got a million hats that you’re wearing, you’re trying whatever you can, you’re seeing what fits, you’re trying to figure out the product that’s going to make sense, whether it’s software or something else. And as things start to stabilize, the approach changes for people. How did your specific role change? What are your responsibilities as a CEO today?

19:26
Greg Smith
Yeah, I mean, it’s radically different. It changes, I think every six months. I’m almost applying for a new job, so I’ve got to really level up in terms of a lot of reading and studying and even courses to continue to grow and figure out what my new role is today. It’s largely how do I ensure my executive leadership team is supported and have everything they need to excel and make sure I have the right executive leadership team? It’s some component of investor relations, being a public company, managing all the things that go with the stock market and a board of directors.

20:03
Greg Smith
And I love that because there’s a huge element there of just going out and meeting with very smart analytical investors and having them provide feedback gives a lot of good ideas and maybe points out weak points or strengths that you hadn’t considered or even acquisitions we could make. There’s an element of partnership building and exploring things like buying other companies. That is part of my role now. And then there’s a huge element that I just. Two big elements that I refuse to give up, which is talking to customers a ton and talking to our team and working on culture.

20:33
Brad Weimert
Culture, customers, money, investor relations and exact team. Also mentioned was partnerships.

20:43
Greg Smith
Yeah. And there’s some elements of product in there as well. So still fairly, it’s changing a bit now because I’ve got an amazing executive who’s taking a lot more of it on, but up until very recently have been very closely tied to product and still involved in that to some extent.

20:58
Brad Weimert
Is that because you like the partnership and the product side of things? Because if you have a great executive doing the product, partly because I love.

21:04
Greg Smith
It, partly because I can add value there in terms of understanding our customers and bringing some of that to it. But again, I think this is an area that’s currently evolving because I know I have an executive who’s kind of owning this, but a lot of it is an area of passion and some expertise I would like to thank there in terms of being good at it. But we kind of call it giving away your legos here, even though you enjoy playing with them. There comes a point where you got to give away your legos and have someone who’s better at playing with them than you take those on. So I’ve had to do a lot of that over the years.

21:33
Brad Weimert
I’m going to clip that one for sure. That’s great. Are these your responsibilities? Because as you grew, you have a board that is telling you these are the things you should be focused on, or did you figure this out on your own or how does that work for you?

21:49
Greg Smith
Yeah, not so much on what are my responsibilities? They certainly have been great at maybe pointing out a weak point in company or market or idea that I hadn’t seen. I’ve certainly brought things and then said, you realize this can put the company at risk. And I’m like, right. They’re like, you’re doing great. You don’t need to put the company at risk. I’m like, yeah, okay, good idea. This is like a shiny object that could really submarine us. So let’s not do that and just exploring strategically opportunities. Board’s actually been helpful even on recruiting, have done great stuff there. But in terms of the development of where I spend my time, it is much more evolving naturally with the needs of the company and constantly trying to find the most exceptional people.

22:31
Greg Smith
Like, probably the most important thing I can do is make sure that we have the most exceptional people, the right people in the right seats on the bus, a players in super important seats. And as long as I’m doing that, then that almost requires me to give up legos for them to take those things on. And that redefines my role constantly because you bring in someone who can now take over all of R and D and I don’t have to be as involved in there, and I can’t be as involved in there because otherwise I’m, you know, now it’s mom and dad managing and people get mixed direction from two different leaders.

23:01
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well, I clearly have no linear approach to this conversation at all, which I’m totally okay with. Yeah, yeah. Why did you choose to go public?

23:11
Greg Smith
Great. Yeah, no, it’s a good question. One of the big reasons initially was we can get more exposure and certainly our press releases go farther, our brand goes farther, there is more recognition, there’s articles written about us far more frequently. You can look us up on Yahoo. Finance, and Apple stocks and all that kind of stuff. It brings a level of trust with customers. Obviously, we raised $180 million with it, so that was a nice benefit as well. And we did that at a pretty ridiculous billion dollar valuation. And so that was a good time to go public. The window was open. And I was lucky in that my CFO had a background in public companies. I have a background with public companies and that I was a securities lawyer. So I advised, I took companies public prior as a lawyer.

23:55
Greg Smith
So when the opportunity came up, it seemed like the right thing to do. And I think it has been quite beneficial for us in terms of creating a lot of opportunity.

24:03
Brad Weimert
What’s the worst thing about being a public company?

24:07
Greg Smith
Yeah, well, so one of the other reasons, and a good thing that can be a bad thing too, is you’ve got liquid shares, right? So we, all of our, every single person who’s ever worked for thinkific has had equity in thinkific. And so that’s great. And going public means that it’s actually liquid. You know, they could use it to sell some stock, get a mortgage, that kind of thing, or put a down payment down or buy a house. But the downside is your stock moves with the stock market. And so a lot of times our stock will be up or down. And I’m like, we haven’t done anything, we haven’t announced anything. It’s just down because interest rates are up, right? Or it’s up because interest rates are down or because tech is booming or because tech is not doing as well.

24:47
Greg Smith
So that is one thing that does create some distraction. And certainly there’s a cost, financial and time wise, to having, you know, spending a lot on insurance, which you need as a public company, having a board cost aboard, time of managing the board, and there are benefits to all these things. But, you know, there’s costs here for sure in terms of managing all of this. So it does add a whole nother almost department to your company to have to deal with all of this.

25:14
Brad Weimert
Did you have a board before you went public?

25:16
Greg Smith
We did, but it was me, my brother, Fraser and Jay. So, you know, Fraser and Jay being our early VC investors, and then my brother, who was co founder with me. So it was four friends getting together once a week to kind of chat through challenges in the business. It’s much more kind of formal now. We have independent directors who I don’t have a prior relationship with, and they’ve, you know, they haven’t grown up with the company, so it’s quite different now.

25:45
Brad Weimert
What’s the best thing about being public.

25:48
Greg Smith
I mean, a lot of the reasons went public materialize. So we do get more exposure, we do build more trust. Being a public company, I’ve certainly learned a lot. We raised, like I said, 180 million. It opens the door if we needed. Let’s say we wanted to buy a company for $50 million tomorrow. There is a market we could go raise money from very quickly, existing investors and the liquidity there for the stock for all existing investors. And I also kind of like the fact that now all of our numbers are public. Right. Like you asked me about revenue. That’s something I might have been a bit cagey to answer five years ago, but now I can say, oh, yeah, we’re at 65 million as our last recorded quarter. It’s different today, obviously, and we’ll report again at the end of Q three.

26:28
Greg Smith
But just having that stuff out there is even some transparency, brand building that comes with it, of people being aware of, you know, how well you’re doing and things like that could be.

26:37
Brad Weimert
A scary level of accountability.

26:39
Greg Smith
Yeah, sometimes it certainly is. And I’d say there’s a downside that, and this is typical of public companies, it can occasionally create short term focus because you kind of have to hit the quarter. The results you deliver each quarter are really important and lots of people are scrutinizing and analyzing them. And there can be an impact on share price if you have a bad quarter. But I’ve really tried to kind of, while managing that, really focus on the long term growth and not focus on short term at the expense of long term, but focus on the long term while trying to manage the short term.

27:10
Brad Weimert
Preston, so you mentioned partnerships, and originally partnerships when you started were sort of influencer relationships, affiliates, jvs. How did that change over time? So that was zero to a million. Now at 50 or 60 million, what do partnerships look like for you?

27:32
Greg Smith
Yeah, we still do lots of that, but definitely that’s a Lego. I’m not as involved in, much more involved in the bigger partnerships. So in particular, one I’ve been working on is with Spotify. So now you can build your course with thinkific and publish it into Spotify and sell it on Spotify specifically in the UK today. But the hope is it’ll roll out broader beyond that. But that was a year in the making. Lots of flights and dinners and conversations with the awesome team at Spotify. But I felt like I was kind of uniquely positioned to be a part of those conversations and help make that happen. It wasn’t just me lots on the team kind of helped with that.

28:08
Greg Smith
But it’s those kind of partnerships I’m more interested in looking at and then that and occasionally talking to integration partners where there’s an acquisition opportunity for us, maybe some product gap that we have that could be of real value to our customers. We can see someone is doing well with it in the space. Maybe we’re integrated and partnered with them first and then there’s an acquisition opportunity there.

28:28
Brad Weimert
So tell me about the dynamics of the Spotify partnership and where the value is for both sides.

28:33
Greg Smith
Yeah, so the simple is people create the course with thinkific publish to Spotify through our integration. Spotify takes care of selling it and bringing in the students to it. And then there’s a revenue share wherever I potentially, if it’s sold through an Apple device, Apple gets some. Spotify gets some, think of it gets some creator getting the biggest chunk. Obviously, the nice thing about working with them is they’re very aligned with our values of sort of creator first and really focus on the creator and rewarding them. So we’ve done everything we can to kind of push as much of the value to the creator as possible. And the cool thing is they get exposure right now in the UK to, I don’t know, 40 million users there and potentially to 600 million Spotify users. The future.

29:12
Brad Weimert
Got it. Okay, so Spotify is functionally serving some sort of ad to their users about a course from thinkific that might be relevant based on whatever things they can track internally. And then the payment is actually happening through Apple’s payment mechanisms.

29:31
Greg Smith
Most of it is still happening on the desktop app as opposed to in the Apple, in the device, because that’s where you buy, I think, most of your, say, Spotify subscriptions, and we’re still running experiments with them on how exactly is this something that’s going to be included, like in a subscription, but essentially it’s on par with, you’ve got music, audiobooks, podcasts, and now courses. And so in the UK, at least, when you go into the app, you’ll see courses at the top and then audiobooks, podcasts, and then courses. And so you can click into that and see what courses are available. And I think we’re even experimenting with including, with different ways of pricing it and including it and things like that.

30:11
Brad Weimert
How do you think about course creation in the future and these giant companies facilitating stuff like that? Do you think that’s going to erode the market for course creation platforms?

30:25
Greg Smith
Well, I mean, there’s lots of ways we’ve evolved, I think even over time. You mentioned the sort of starting and evolution. One was we’re not just courses, we do all sorts of digital products. Another was getting into actually working with bigger companies, even as clients. But specifically on the larger companies like Spotify, I see it more as a distribution network. So I think what it does is it expands the reach of the individual creator. Where before this partnership and things like this that we’re doing, you’ve got to create your own content or your own digital products. You’ve got to go build your audience on a social network. Then you’ve got to figure out how to capture those leads and sell to them. What this allows you to do is you can do all of that which lets you own your brand.

31:07
Greg Smith
And I think it’s still really important to do that business model. And we can talk about why financially that’s typically really beneficial to creators, even with low follower counts. But this also gives you this channel where someone can promote your products for you to an existing audience that they have typically at a lower cost because they already own the audience and they can put it in front of them. So I think what it really does is it expands the reach. So if anything, I think it increases the opportunity for creators to reach more people.

31:34
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I see that as the short term for sure. The way you just described it seems very clear that from a distribution perspective, that makes tons of sense. I’m thinking more we’re starting to see the major content platforms allow monetization of content for creators. And in some ways it’s a little disturbing, but it makes sense too. It’s one place to go where the audience is already. And so the creator gets the opportunity to monetize where the audience already is. Certainly part of the playbook for Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Google, Facebook is to integrate new products once they’re doing well, and just create themselves. Do you look at them as potential competition down the road or a potential acquirer down the road?

32:30
Greg Smith
Yeah, certainly there’s some of all three, right, competition acquirer, but also just partner in that. When you look at, say, YouTube, for example, which is where a lot of this is happening, the monetization, a lot of the audience and a lot of the creators, especially when they’re more long form or education focused or they’re sharing something of knowledge base, which is where we really focus. It’s a much tighter distribution in that you’ve got the top one or 2% of creators on YouTube making 90% of the wealth.

32:59
Greg Smith
And that’s because the natural whenever, any, whenever you have one platform of not like thinkific platform but a platform like YouTube where it’s content distribution, social network, call it by its very nature, they haven’t, they have to have an algorithm where they route their end users to the highest quality, best content, best performing content which naturally sways all of the follower count and revenue to the top end. And so you get, the rich get richer and there’s just a few of them and it’s really hard, say, through ads or other means to make a decent living with say 10,000 fans or followers on a YouTube, for example. And so I think there’s always room for us because we give people an opportunity.

33:40
Greg Smith
I’ve seen people make my YouTube channel, for example, I’ve got 6000, 700,000 followers and I make on that one about $2,000 per thousand views. So if you do add just as a so my revenue per thousand views which is a key metric for creators, right? 2000 revolutions per minute revenue per thousand views. If I’ve got ad revenue on YouTube, I’d be making about three to $8 rpm. If I’ve got brand sponsorships, maybe $50 rpm but with digital products, courses specifically for me, $2,000 rpm. So it means with 6700 followers I’ve made well over a million dollars from that channel. So it’s a fundamentally different arrangement with a much broader distribution of wealth.

34:30
Greg Smith
And essentially you can have a middle class of creators because they own their own product that they’re selling as opposed to doing, and they own their own brand and their own site so they can bring people in and then potentially cross sell other products, have upsells, have a community that people are part of. And I know some of these things you can do on the network but you’re still tied to that algorithm, right? So I think that’s where the opportunity for us to continue to live is super exciting.

34:57
Brad Weimert
So I think what I heard was the core monetization strategy through something like YouTube, at least as a platform, is monetizing through ads. And then you’re getting paid a nominal amount per view for the ads that run which, by the way, might conflict with your product that you’re selling or who you are because you don’t get to pick that versus. Or you go to getting a sponsor for the channel where you’re pushing somebody else’s product and you’re getting paid more to do that. And those typically are little bursts and maybe you have something with a short contract but the way to make money right now is monetizing through courses and so using YouTube as a traffic source and then selling courses on the backend is how you get to $2,000 per thousand views with your YouTube channel, is that right?

35:48
Greg Smith
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

35:51
Brad Weimert
Do you think that YouTube or others will integrate a full course platform at some point to allow them to facilitate the experience?

36:01
Greg Smith
Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, they do have paid content. They do are experimenting more and more with things like paid communities. I think the trade off, though, is as long as it your business lives on someone else’s owned property, they have different motivations. So with a tool like thinkific, at our core, everything is, it’s your site, your brand, your business, your customers, youre a everything, your data, right? And so you own the customer relationship. You’ve built that. You can cross sell other products, you can reach out to them, you know, in any way that you want. And, you know, we’re not in there messing with that. We don’t have a direct relationship with that end user. Whereas with a social network like YouTube, they, their end customer, you know, fundamentally is not the creator. Right. It’s the viewer.

36:49
Greg Smith
So they focus more on the viewer. And so that skews a lot of the dynamics. And so it means if you build around that, you are always at risk of them deprecating the entire courses or communities thing and saying, oh, it’s not making enough money for us from our core customer, who’s not you, it’s the viewer. You’re at risk of the algorithm and them just deciding to point all of your traffic at someone else. You’re at risk of advertisements from competitors. There’s a whole bunch of things that affect you there that I find. I’m not saying don’t use it. I encourage everyone we work with definitely use the platforms because it’s a massive source of exposure. Just don’t be entirely tied to it. Right. Own your brand.

37:28
Greg Smith
Have a place where you can pull people to for maybe your flagship products, maybe your flagship experience, and you can really own that experience because then no matter what happens on the platforms, on the social networks, you’ve got your own platform where you can build that. And that’s kind of where we meet our niche need there.

37:46
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I look at Amazon very similarly for e commerce brands. You probably want to play there. You probably need to play there. But, man, if you don’t have an ecommerce store set up separately in addition to your Amazon store, you are waiting for that to explode.

38:01
Greg Smith
Well, I mean, how many Amazon products has Amazon just decided? Oh, hey, paper plates do really well. We’ll make our own, you know, branded paper plate brand and or 50 of them. Right. They’re like, I think they’re auto generated names, these brands that you see on there, but they’ve wiped out anyone who was previously doing well with that. And the same thing can happen on the social. And I don’t want to get negative here. I think these platforms are amazing. They’ve helped build the whole creator economy. It’s awesome. And I’d love to partner with them more, but I think it’s both. I think it’s having both is necessary. A place to build the audience and then separately a place where you get to really own and control and interact with more directly.

38:38
Brad Weimert
Don’t get me wrong, almost like 90% of my goods are purchased from Amazon. As a consumer, I fucking love the platform. Also there’s a pretty significant delineation here because Amazon’s pretty gangster with this. Like they will take your product, make their own white labeled version and then they will just outrank you. They will just put their product as the top spot. YouTube doesn’t have the same motivations. And so when you look at incentives and why they do things, you pointed this out with YouTube. It’s to the end consumer and it’s really based around entertainment. They’re not trying to show people the best information. They’re trying to show people the information that other people clicked on and viewed the longest. And that is not necessarily the best information as I think we should all know and agree on.

39:28
Greg Smith
Right. A thumbs down counts just as much as a thumbs up on YouTube in terms of engagement. Right. But that’s, I think part of that is a factor of where their business model sits today because they’re primarily ad driven. Today it’s entertainment and volume of viewership. Right. Their bhag, big Harry audacious goal at one point was, you know, the billion hours watched in a day or whatever, that’s because of a certain, that’s, you know, follow the money, right. That’s where their current motivation lies. But if their motivation starts to shift that selling these digital products, the memberships, the courses they’re starting to allow people to offer on their side is the primary revenue model. You will see that shift to more of an Amazon approach of, hey look, Brad’s course on whatever you’re teaching is the best in this category.

40:12
Greg Smith
We’re going to bump them to the very top. And all your competitors potentially aren’t as focused or potentially worse. Let’s hire someone to go teach this corporate finance topic, whatever you’re teaching, and we’ll bump our own to the top. Right now we have our own product because we don’t have to do the revenue share at that point. I’m forecasting too much into the future there. But I think that’s the potential risk where it’s always important. Really the reality is you don’t know what the motivations will be in the future. And so there’s always a benefit of owning your own storefront and having a place where you can kind of have that direct interaction. But again, it’s and not an or. I think you need both.

40:51
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well, you know, forecasting into the future too far is what’s so much fun is making the guesses with no information. Yeah, I think that I look at pretty much everything in business and life from the perspective of whats the absolute best, whats the absolute worst case scenario recognize neither are actually likely to happen and then plan about a step in and say whats the likely best, whats the likely worst? And I think its not a stretch at all to say the likely worst is that the algorithm is going to change and you’re going to be impacted negatively if you have one traffic source, which for a lot of people is one social channel. So I love that.

41:36
Brad Weimert
Well let’s talk about, I mean I have a million questions for you because software development is a horrible pain in the ass and I have lots of questions around that.

41:44
Greg Smith
Yeah, yeah, I love it. But on the forecasting, just one thing I heard that I thought was really brilliant. This is nothing from me, but it was, it’s really hard to forecast what’s going to change. It’s a lot easier to figure out what’s going to stay the same and you can build a strategy around what you know will stay the same. And so when you look at status quo today and you figure out look, these things are, these are not going to change about your business, about your customers needs and wants and the industry, that can be a great thing to build a strategy around because you can rely on it, whereas things that like, oh, it might change this way, certainly a lot riskier.

42:16
Brad Weimert
What’s not going to change with content creators in the next ten years?

42:20
Greg Smith
I think one of the things is they are going to continue to be looking to monetize in some form or another. I think knowledge sharing and content sharing, the people doing it and what’s created this entire creator economy, it’s the second half of the two word name is the economy. It’s the monetization, that desire to monetize content is what drives a lot of people to do it. Yes, we all are driven, and many of us are driven by having a positive impact and sharing our message with others. And there will be a few would continue to do it just for that. But the whole industry I think is driven by this desire to monetize. So that’s one of many needs that I think we can rely on not changing.

43:03
Brad Weimert
You have 77,000 plus people creating on your platform. You’ve sold, they’ve sold billions of dollars of products. So you have lots of data on this. What is something that the million dollar and up creators are doing that the sub million dollar creators or a newbie have not figured out or are not doing?

43:27
Greg Smith
Yeah, there’s a few things and it can vary obviously. Creator, I’m always surprised. People often ask what’s the topic that I should teach that’ll do the best? And I’ve seen success in everything from hula hooping to corporate finance or mining to sex education. So it’s not so much the topic. I think that when you see people who’ve really scaled up, there’s an element of they’ve niche down often and then potentially they can expand or branch out from there. At certain levels, like when I see people cross 10 million, usually at that point they’re actually starting to branch back out. But early on they kind of stay really narrow and focused in what they’re good at.

44:05
Greg Smith
There is often a recurring revenue component and so as opposed to just the one off launches one time, even at a $1000 fee or something like that, usually having a recurring revenue component allows people to scale a lot bigger. Because you’re not always searching for your month doesn’t start with $0, right? Your month starts with everyone who’s already subscribed. There’s another thing that I think it does vary is like what the brand is and that personal connection I see the people who cross a million, there’s almost always a personal connection. You know, the brand is very creator focused, individual, personality based. And then there is a point where I start to see them try and branch out. And I don’t know if it’s like a survival mechanism of like I can’t do this all myself anymore. But.

44:52
Greg Smith
But I think part of it is recognizing you can scale more when you have potentially other faces. You know you can and do more with it. When I started my online course, it was actually under the brand. I didn’t do anything like Greg Zelsat. It was under Alpha score. And my whole intent was I want to be on par with Kaplan and some of these other creators that are big brands with big teams. And even though it’s just me and my brother, this is going to be a bigger brand. And I don’t know if that helped or hurt, but most of the people I see, they start building under an individual brand, a personality people associate with them. And I think that really does help with the growth.

45:28
Greg Smith
And then there comes a point where they do, you know, again past the million dollar mark as a creator where they start to expand a bit. Maybe they have other creators come in or they hire a team that is doing more of it and it becomes less about their individual brand. Although I have seen some scale it all the way with just the individual brand. But I think that the breaking it apart or having a bigger brand that’s bigger than just you also it allows things like taking investment or potentially exiting or selling or things like that beyond you.

45:58
Brad Weimert
I mean, we’re talking about the face of the brand I think is what I heard. I kind of heard two things initially when you were talking, I was thinking authenticity in the brand, meaning that whatever the creator is talking about is actually close to them and personal to them. That was initially what I heard. And then went into kind of having a face on the brand and that being the brand versus having an institutional construct. Right. Having some like beyond a million versus the podcast of Brad Weimer for example.

46:33
Greg Smith
Right, yeah, exactly. And I think the, it’s a bit of both. Right. Part of the reason the face of the brand works is because you get that authenticity, but you can scale that. If I, if it was you and me doing a show to get our business together, you could have Brad being authentic and Greg being authentic. And under a bigger brand.

46:49
Brad Weimert
Right off the top I can think of Diary of a CEO and Alex Hormozi and it’s Alex’s name that has been his brand and now he has a company that he’s pulled to that. And then Steven Bartlett is diary of a CEO and that’s what he’s been pushing in both work. But I would think, and you might have the data behind this, but I would think that it would be much more difficult to scale the brand side of it on the first part as opposed to the personal brand.

47:20
Greg Smith
Yeah, I think it’s easier to start scaling the personal brand, but there’s a point where it flips and it’s probably easier to scale the brand. You know, nobody’s gonna be, I don’t think you’re gonna see the same level of success of like Brad’s sugary drink or versus Coca Cola, right. You know, and you get the generational thing, but even taking investment, right, at some point, if people are looking for an exit liquidity investment, these things can be easier if you can go beyond just the individual brand. But it’s a great place to start and scale up, and I think it’s one of those transitions that can happen at scale.

47:56
Brad Weimert
How do you think AI is going to impact content creators in the next five years?

48:01
Greg Smith
So many ways, but good ways, really good ways. I’m not as worried about the replacement element. Think that it’s so exciting what it is doing already and can continue to do. I mean, one of the things that AI is just so built for and so good at is consuming content and then producing more content with it. And so if you’ve got someone on your team, your AI, who can consume what you’re producing and then augment, improve, potentially distribute, but syndicate in that you put this podcast into it, and it pumps out things like blog posts and additional videos or snippets, or really trains a model that can then talk to your customers with your voice and potentially my voice, because I’m on your show. I think this is ridiculously powerful, and we’re just getting started.

48:54
Greg Smith
I do see in the space so far, largely the use case is sort of repurposed GPT, right? Like people are kind of injecting GPT into products where it’s largely what it’s doing is it’s saving you the trip over to GPT to do the work for you, and instead it’s embedded in the product. And so we’re really looking at how do we go a step beyond and kind of leverage that as the base layer, but do a lot more with it. But the crazy thing is, the models are evolving so fast, you almost don’t want to get too far ahead of them.

49:23
Greg Smith
One of the first ideas we had when GPT kind of hit the thing in January, whatever, a year and a half ago, Washington, or two and a half years, I don’t know, when they first came out or was really starting to get going, was, let’s do this, to ingest all of a creator’s content and then create a personality out of AI that they can use to talk to customers. Well, fast forward six months from that point, GPT is releasing the ability to build your own GPT. So part of it is just making sure what we’re trying to do is making sure we are able to constantly leverage the latest updates and then, you know, staying in the head of the curve in terms of the only competitive advantage I see here, which is the data pool.

50:06
Brad Weimert
Which is the data pool.

50:08
Greg Smith
Yeah, I think it’s because it’s moving so quickly and it’s pretty easy to work with. In terms of a developer perspective, I think one of the core competitive advantages you can have is the data pool. And so as a creator, you kind of own your own data pool of even just your viewpoints and content and all of that stuff. But as a company like Thinkific, while we don’t own it because our customers do, we can tap into and leverage in really helpful ways for individual creators the greater pool that we have. So one thing we definitely will not do is take one creator’s content and then help produce, say, a course for someone else using their knowledge.

50:41
Greg Smith
We won’t cross that line, but what we can do is look at the billions of pieces of information we have across that and use it to help an I individual creator without swapping knowledge across that line. But then when they input what they’re good at, we can really level them up.

50:57
Brad Weimert
What are the AI features that you’ve integrated into thinkific so far and what’s on the roadmap?

51:02
Greg Smith
Yeah, a bunch of different ways. One is we’re working with, so we actually, about a year ago we said what would it take to disrupt thinkific from a garage? And we focused on social, mobile and AI and we built a company and a product called the Leap Co. And it’s scaled really rapidly, got a pretty amazing kind of visitor count, well over a million in terms of people coming on a recurring basis. But also we built an AI based product there that’s focused on social and mobile. So it’s almost like a really streamlined version of Thinkific where you can build products, all sorts of digital products, not course focused at all, but all sorts of very simple digital products. Leveraging AI to get a storefront up and running and get things selling there.

51:50
Greg Smith
So that’s been spectacular success and just came out of beta and is starting to go. So that whole thing kind of operates on AI in terms of ingesting your content brand and then helping you produce storefront and products to sell within it. Then we’re doing a bunch of other stuff on the thinkific side as well.

52:10
Brad Weimert
Okay, I have a bunch of questions I want to ask you, but I think some of them are more personal, so I’m going to save them.

52:18
Greg Smith
I don’t mind the personal ones, but you can always edit if it’s too personal, but I’m generally pretty open person.

52:24
Brad Weimert
It’s more about things that I need internally as a company. Well, I’ll ask you, and this is a totally random one, but we’re adding a whole bunch of people to the team right now. And part of that is we’re heavy on training, obviously, and our training is extensive inside the walls of easy pay direct. The people that work here understand payments so much better than the industry at large, like just wildly different level of education inside the company. But to do that, the training has to be killer. The platforms that we use, you mentioned this earlier. You mentioned LMS, which is learning management system. I noticed that thinkific rolled out an LMS. It has an element, and maybe you don’t look at it that way, but it has an element that’s designed to create trainings for enterprise or for businesses.

53:19
Brad Weimert
I’ll ask you two questions on that. The first I alluded to earlier, but how far down the path, like in terms of revenue, et cetera, did you go before you decided, hey, you know what, we’re going to serve enterprise businesses to have courses for their employees, for training. That’s number one. And number two is how does the layout of that differ from the product that already existed inside of thinkific?

53:44
Greg Smith
That was one of the ways that we evolved, certainly. So when we first got started, it was like creators like me producing courses. And then we evolved in one way was going to all digital products and another way was this what we call plus, which was a higher price point for a higher service offering to serve some of these larger companies. I wouldn’t say we’re really targeting true enterprise like, we’re more like SMB up to say, you know, 20 to 1000 employees. And the primary use case usually isn’t the educate employees. People definitely use us for that. But primary use cases is more customer education where they’re either monetizing it so they’re taking their knowledge as a company and selling it to customers, or they’re training their customers for free alongside a existing product and service. Those are the two biggest use cases.

54:29
Greg Smith
Often they’ll use us for that and more, including internal, because once you’re building with one system, it’s easy to do it. And yeah, I don’t, you know, the lms thing, that was when were first getting started because the conventional lms, especially back then, was very focused on something, was not at all what we wanted to do and they couldn’t meet our needs. But we are a learning management system. Right. So technically, anything where you put learning content, manage it, and then deliver it to people is an LMS. I just find that as a creator, most of them don’t even know the word, let alone really what it all means. And so it’s more like, hey, we’re a course platformer. We’re at more of a digital product platform, storefront and e commerce business for you, a way for you to monetize your content followers.

55:08
Greg Smith
And so, yeah, that was definitely one evolution. We were probably 15, 20 million in revenue when we launched. That grew it really rapidly to 10 million. And now it’s, I think it’s about 25% of our business. So at 65 million us in revenue, it’s about 25% of that and growing at, I think about 30% year over year. So really solid growth rate there. So that’s definitely been a big win. And it plays nicely because it just means like our larger customers have a place to land and that has much higher level of service. And then to your question from the software front, when we first started, we kind of followed the playbook of Shopify plus very similarly. Like it was the same product at a higher price point with a higher level of service.

55:54
Greg Smith
And then since then we’ve added more feature set that is available just there. That is really about serving the needs of those larger customers that our smaller customers just don’t need. And so we put the stuff that the bigger customers definitely need and the smaller ones don’t up on that higher price point and that helps create that plus business. It’s also got a different go to market because we have a sales team there, whereas we don’t have a sales team on the bottom end.

56:17
Brad Weimert
That’s awesome. So that was going to be one of the questions is if you had separate sales mechanisms, and I would imagine that the LTV for the small business product is higher than the course creator LTV.

56:31
Greg Smith
Yeah, yeah. The average price point for someone on our sort of what we call self serve core business is about $99 a month. You can get in lower, higher. And the average price point on the plus side is sort of $2,000 a month and up depending on what you’re using and levels of service and things. So it is pretty significantly different, which allows us to have a sales team there and different levels of account management, things like that.

56:57
Brad Weimert
Because you are charging per seat in the business side of things, it’s not.

57:01
Greg Smith
Really per seat, it’s more like volume of usage sites, things like that, you know, like the volume of usage that you’ve got overall and a few different things that we build into it there, but it, yeah, just people have bigger needs and we meet those needs and so there’s a higher price point that comes with it.

57:18
Brad Weimert
Helpful. You did a bunch of things from an educational perspective in college that I think are some of the best things you can do to learn business. So obviously studying business, but then also an attorney. Those two things going through those two paths in school help you get a grip on, I don’t think, early stages of business, but they help you get a grip on later stages of business, which is the m and a, the financial side of things, larger transactions, et cetera. School, college, I think, is going out of style, if it hasn’t gone out of style entirely already.

58:00
Greg Smith
Fair enough.

58:01
Brad Weimert
What advice would you give a 25 year old entrepreneur? Or what advice would you give a 20 year old entrepreneur today?

58:08
Greg Smith
Yeah. I mean, oh, man, I loved going to school. I loved university, partly because I had a lot of fun. Right. And so not just, they have cameras now, they have cameras there now. Yeah, yeah. No, I had a great time, made tons of friends, people I’m still close friends with to this day. And so there is an element of learning that happened there that was very much outside the classroom but also learned a lot in the classroom. I don’t think you need to. Right. I don’t think it’s necessary to be an entrepreneur. Like, most of this stuff can be learned in online courses. Right. Or from, you know, there’s, there are better instructors at corporate finance online teaching on thinkific today than I got when I was going through school. Right.

58:54
Greg Smith
So I had some instructors who were amazing and others who definitely weren’t. And so I think you can get a lot of the stuff outside, but there is a discipline element of some of this self taught. But there’s also, I love the learning online in particular, because it’s just in time versus just in case. Right. When you go through school, everything is, you’re going to spend four years doing this just in case. It’s useful at some point in the future, and some of it will be out of date at that point where it’s like today I’m studying this product development framework that is just in time. We need this now. We’re going to start implementing it. I’m getting caught up on it. There is that element that I think can be so much better, but the trade off is the motivation piece.

59:36
Greg Smith
When you’ve paid tuition, you live on campus and you have class, you’re much more likely to go and study and get these things done. You have to be self motivated to make that trade off. There’s nothing wrong with the self taught, but there’s that trade off. There’s also the social piece too, which I think you have to. There’s lots of other avenues you can find there. But I love school. Don’t think it’s necessary, but it has some benefits for sure.

59:58
Brad Weimert
What advice do you have for people that have a SaaS company that are a million in ARR?

01:00:05
Greg Smith
Stay really focused, really stay close to your customer. Live and breathe and spend time with them, even the ones that are frustrating or frustrated. And stay very close to the products and really focus on meeting needs of customers. Right. Getting down to what are they trying to achieve. And I think setting, the more you set success for you in alignment with success with customer, the better you do, right. I think when you start to deviate of like, we need to make money versus how do we help our customers, that’s where things can go sideways, especially as you get up into the millions in revenue. And then the other one is just as at every stage of company, it’s the right people in the right seats is the most important thing.

01:00:49
Brad Weimert
What advice do you have for a new content creator or coach?

01:00:53
Greg Smith
Don’t worry about the perfectionism and the procrastination. Like, just get something shipped. This month, right? When I started building my first online course, I was going to take probably a year to build an 80 hours course because that’s what one of our competitors had. And my brother what gave me the best advice, he’s like, we’re going to launch in 30 days. I’ve got the launch button here and so whatever you’ve built by then is going live, so do what you can. And I built this kind of mini course that went out and we had this bet whether anyone would buy it. They did, they liked it. And then we kept building more and I eventually got up to much bigger products. You don’t need to go 80 hours. That’s crazy. It was just the industry was In.

01:01:28
Greg Smith
But I think it’s just, you know, get over your. Yourself and your fear of getting stuff out there. Get something out there that has problems with it and needs feedback, and get feedback from real people as fast as you can.

01:01:39
Brad Weimert
I love that. Earlier today, I was talking to a very good friend of mine. He goes by J. Hobbs, he’s a musician. And we had the normal bullshit preamble in our conversation. Hey, how’s it going? What are you doing? And I was like, I’m fucking busy. I’m overwhelmed. I’m busy. And he was like, yeah, I’m really busy too. And I was like, are you though? And he said, yeah, today is one of my he said, it’s my favorite day. I just make a music all day. And I was like, so does that feel busy to you? And he’s like, yeah. And I was like, how? Like you’re just by yourself creating music. There’s no real deadlines to anything. And he said, yeah, there are. I have deadlines on everything. And I said it’s self imposed.

01:02:21
Brad Weimert
And he said, yeah, I have goals that I’m setting and deadlines that I’m going to get them out by. And I thought that is a beautiful lesson because if you don’t create the deadline yourself and commit to getting it out, you do this perfectionism thing where you just drag it out for fucking ever and never launch.

01:02:38
Greg Smith
Yeah, yeah. And that’s. I love to hear that, especially from artists because there’s a great book on some of this stuff called the war of art. Not the art of war, but the war of art. So not Sun Tzu, but the war of art, the press field. Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. But I mean, summary as I understand it is like, it’s not about waiting for inspiration to strike you and being artistic when you feel like it. And I think this goes especially for creators. It’s about having that dedicated work time every day and putting it in. And eventually genius comes out of that through like dedication and repetition and consistency, not from just waiting around to get an epiphany in the shower.

01:03:19
Brad Weimert
Greg Smith, it has been awesome. I’m going to pick your brain on software as well, but I think it’s too nerdy for the rest of the audience.

01:03:27
Greg Smith
Now you’re going to get comments saying wait, we want to hear.

01:03:30
Brad Weimert
I hope so. Then I’ll harass you for around two.

01:03:33
Greg Smith
Happy to. Yeah.

01:03:34
Brad Weimert
Is there anywhere you want to point people to learn more about yourself or about thinkific, et cetera?

01:03:40
Greg Smith
Thinkific.com is sort of like all my channels sort of point back to there. The leap co is the other sort of AI product that’s totally worth checking out, especially if you want to get up and running today and, you know, super fast and I’m on LinkedIn is probably the best place to get me to just. Yeah. Personally, I love it.

01:03:57
Brad Weimert
Thanks so much, man. It’s great to see you.

01:03:59
Greg Smith
Thanks, Brad. You too.

01:04:01
Brad Weimert
I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it. I need your help. There are three places you can find beyond a million the podcast itself beyond a million.com, which has some cool free resources, including a free course. And we finally launched the beyond a million YouTube channel. I would love it if you would go there and subscribe. And if you don’t want to, you still will probably enjoy seeing the visual content. Check it out. YouTube.com eondamillion.