Thinkific (www.thinkific.com) offers a powerful, all-in-one platform that enables entrepreneurs and educators to create, market, sell and deliver their own online courses. According to Thinkific’s website its mission is no less than “to revolutionize the way people learn and earn online by giving them the tools they need to turn their expertise into a sustainable business that impacts both them and their audience.” Thinkific is a Vancouver based company that started in 2012. Greg Smith’s idea for Thinkific came from an online course he was teaching for passing the LSAT. By the time he left practicing law, the LSAT course was producing more revenue than his legal practice and it just kept going from there. He went from having 10-15 people in a classroom to suddenly having thousands of students worldwide.
Greg’s idea further evolved into a course creation platform when he recognized gaps in the existing Learning Management Systems. Most of the LMSes were not easy to use, bloated with unnecessary features, and lacked a contemporary look. He wanted to market courses online but he knew he needed to recruit experts outside his company. He saw an opportunity to create an LMS for experts and businesses where they could control and own their own content.
Here is rather lengthy interview with Greg Smith on Entrepreneurs Journey podcast. I suggest you jump ahead to the 6:00 min mark to avoid the ads.
Great founder, company, and story from my home town Vancouver, BC!
Greg’s entrepreneurial story is so simple and unassuming – he needed to earn an income while at Law School and like so many people (me too!) taught or tutored to pay their tuition and living costs. But teaching test prep was competitive, and time-consuming and it was, at this juncture, where he experienced the pain. Do you quit and do something easier or do you solve the problem and move forward? Greg chose to solve the problem in a manner that worked for him. Notably, he chose to continue teaching LSAT despite the competition, but it was this competition that identified the market for test prep and what he was able to tap into.
Greg, the child of a doctor and nurse, and who earned a degree in Law, is obviously an intelligent person. But there are many intelligent, brilliant people who do not – could not – launch and build a 22M+ company. His story, though, isn’t one of passion. I noted in the youtube interview his natural curiousity, energy, and an ability to think up almost limitless ideas and schemes. But his success was his willingness to leave a comfortable and probably lucrative career in Law to make something he was already building better.
I consider Greg to be both an innovator and entrepreneur who created an original idea that disrupted the test prep space and led his company to success. But what I learned from Greg is that, once again, a venture does not have to be the most cutting edge, sexy thing out there; it might be just as good to look in our own backyard rather than over a rainbow. They key is to find a problem we find important enough to solve and persevere until we bring about the result we envision.
These guys are great and smart marketers. They let my buddy Steve Dotto use their offices for his monthly Vancouver YouTube Meet Up Group. They always have a couple of Thinkific team members at the meeting, open up their kitchen to all of us for beverages (including local beer on tap), and order us all pizza. Smart, smart, smart – as guess where it means these YouTubers look when they begin to set up their own courses – at Thinkific. Been most impressed at how they’ve been growing, and it is always good to see local Vancouver tech start up do well!