In this week’s episode of Earned, Conor sits down with Ahad Khan, the CEO of Kajabi—a company that allows creators to support thriving online course businesses.
In Ep. 155 of Earned, Conor sits down with Ahad Khan, the CEO of Kajabi—the creator commerce platform that allows creators to support thriving online businesses. To start, we dive into how Kajabi empowers creators to build and control their businesses beyond social media. Ahad shares how he sees the diverse landscape of the creator economy, likening today's creators to the new wave of small and medium enterprises. He introduces us to some of Kajabi's strategies, including product integrations like Viably that boost community engagement and revenue potential. We then discuss the dual nature of content creation—authoritative and entertaining—and how creators can strategically leverage social media for relationship building rather than just monetization. Switching gears, we unpack Kajabi's commitment to aligning its success with that of its creators, offering tools that facilitate value creation and income generation. To close the show, Ahad sheds light on what community he would build if given the opportunity, and why.
Check out highlights from the episode below, or or tune into the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen!
The following interview has been lightly edited for concision.
Ahad Khan on Keeping Kajabi’s Core Strong: “If you're focused on everything, you're not focused on something, and we want to be more meaningful in our core.”
Conor Begley: As you think about what the platform build part looks like, what are the areas of the world that would be really interesting for us to either partner in, to acquire, to invest in? What do you think about, outside of what you do today, that you think would be an interesting combination?
Ahad Khan: We made an acquisition of a company called Viably for a community's product about a year and a half ago. We know this is a surface area that we want to have native to Kajabi. We can either build it or we can buy a great entrepreneur and a great team to help us build that within Kajabi. So we took that path and that has been a great success for us. We've powered three, maybe $400 million dollars on Kajabi via our community's product this year. So it's been a great boom for our customers because, at the end of the day, our main KPI is that our customers make money. We're happy and it seems to be doing pretty well.
When we think about the future, you know what inevitably ends up happening on a platform that has so much diversity of business, like Kajabi does, is that you end up not being able to solve every bespoke problem at scale the way one or two or three customers might want. There's a big opportunity for us to build an ecosystem around Kajabi. So our R&D team can't go after everything and we don't want to, because what ends up happening is that if you're not focused on something. If you're focused on everything, you're not focused on something. We want to be more meaningful in our core. But we need to enable the ecosystem to build in service of the Kajabi creators too. Right, we have tens of thousands of customers on this platform. We've had 100,000 people on here. That is a big opportunity for us to open up the aperture and enable other third-party software developer companies, which we have already.
So think about APIs. Think about that piece of it. Those things don't happen year zero when you launch it. In three, four years we're going to have a lot of people building really cool products around Kajabi, as long as our core capabilities continue to be best of class. That's how we're thinking about building. We think about building independently in perpetuity because I think that's the right way to approach company building. But partnerships and stuff we love. We did a partnership with Adobe earlier this year around Adobe Express, enabling that kind of content creation to happen natively in Kajabi. It's been fantastic and Adobe's been a great partner. We'll have a couple of those launched this year as well, so we are trying to be thoughtful about partnerships. When we think about building the business—we're going to do this for the next 20 years. What are the right decisions we're making now to help us fulfill that goal?
Keep up with new episodes of Earned by following the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts, or if you prefer to watch these interviews, by subscribing to our YouTube channel.