Gaining hundreds of thousands of followers on one of the major social-media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), or LinkedIn often isn’t enough to sustain a career as a creator these days.
Instead, many content creators are looking to third-party platforms to turn their most loyal followers into paying subscribers.
Kajabi, an online course platform, is one of a handful of startups helping creators crack this space. The startup, which told TechCrunch in March that it was valued at over $2 billion, shared that creators using the platform have now earned more than $6 billion in revenue.
That means Kajabi creators have earned an additional $1 billion since March, when the company announced creators had earned $5 billion.
One of those creators is Rob Lennon, a self-described “AI whisperer” and entrepreneur, who uses Kajabi to host his courses and manage his paywalled membership called “Lennon Labs.” Lennon’s membership, which costs about $30 per month, unlocks classes, AI bots, office hours, and an online community Lennon manages on Discord.
“I chose that because it felt like the cost of me and you going out to lunch once a month,” Lennon told Insider about landing on the price point for his subscription.
While Lennon has 117,000 followers on X and 23,000 on LinkedIn, he has converted about 3,000 into paying customers, he said.
“I’ll do promotions and specials and things to create urgency and scarcity and try and bring them into a paid product,” Lennon said.
Riding the wave of AI buzz, Lennon reaped the benefits of being an early adopter of ChatGPT by promoting his course on his social-media platforms.
Within the first 11 months of launching his Kajabi offerings, Lennon has earned about $500,000, according to Kajabi and Lennon. He earned about $200,000 in the first two months of selling his courses, per Kajabi.
But Lennon said the rapid success he initially saw was “lightning in a bottle,” adding that he hadn’t been able to reproduce the virality and influx of new sign-ups since ChatGPT was in its “heyday.”
This is why Lennon is now turning to a subscription model that offers followers more tools at a lower rate — as well as a sense of community.
Subscriptions have been hailed as a relatively stable income model for creators since they are generally recurring payments. It’s why platforms like Instagram and Facebook have pushed out their own subscription tools for creators, and why other third-party platforms like Teachable and Discord have opted for these models.
Lennon wants to see if his membership model will drive more people to his paywalled content and community instead of running a more “bespoke course business.”
Building a course and membership business
Running courses and a subscription service accounts for about 95% of Lennon’s income, he said. On top of his business on Kajabi, he also takes on consulting projects.
Lennon said that recurring costs to maintain his business add up to about $300 a month. This includes the cost of his Kajabi “Growth Plan” subscription, which costs creators $159.
“In terms of labor, it’s kind of the amount of effort that you want to put into it, provided that you can pay your rent and support yourself while you’re building stuff,” Lennon said. “You have periods of building and creating, and you have periods of more making money and marketing.”
Kajabi isn’t Lennon’s first rodeo, either. He’s used course and community platforms like Maven and Mighty Networks, but said that Kajabi offered a more “straightforward” experience.
“I use a combination of Kajabi and Discord,” Lennon explained. “I like Kajabi, especially for the courses. It’s very simple. It gives a great experience and there’s not too much going on. So when someone’s in a learning mode, you want them to be able to really focus on the material and not get distracted. And then for things that are more conversational, or updates that are too small to create a whole course out of, we now have the Discord, which has lots of channels for different things, some forum-style areas for organizing information in a different way.”
When looking at the plethora of subscription platforms for creators — from Patreon to Substack to Kajabi — Lennon said that what creators really need are tools that allow them “to create a world.”
“The ones that are doing this best allow you to create not just a single product, but an ecosystem,” Lennon said.
