Generative AI
Content creation
Pivoting
Kajabi was looking to evolve into a multi-product company
Historically, Kajabi only had 1 product - a monthly or annual SaaS subscription.
Creator Studio became one of many 0-1 big bets Kajabi launched around this time. The goal was to create new add-ons to help grow revenue even if subscriber count continued to grow at the same pace. We as a team KNEW many of these big bets may not result in a boon but we had the runway to R&D a new SKU for the company.
I was the Lead Product Designer (IC) on the Marketing Tools team with 2 junior direct reports. As a team our charter was to help make marketing easier for creators so they could in turn make more money and continue to stay on platform.
We knew there was a strong link between building an audience and finding success as a creator.
In Kajabi, users with at least 8 contacts were over 50% more likely to reach their first dollar of GMV.
Those who don’t hit GMV are significantly more likely to churn.
My team was researching how early stage creators can grow their audiences
Earlier stage creators make up the largest and most precarious segments of the creator economy.
After talking to many creators, we discovered that while they had tons of video content (avg. of 10 hours or more), they struggled with social media. I fell in love with this problem after speaking directly with so many of our customers on this.
Our hypothesis was by helping creators repurpose their existing long-form content into shorter clips they would more easily be able to build hype around their products.
Around this time, ChatGPT hits and content creation apps explode
We explored partnerships and signed contracts with potential collaborators. I prototyped an AI video editor that could take existing Kajabi content and generate shorter, social-media-ready videos.
This was early in the LLM hype and the output was a mess—garbled videos that didn’t resonate with our alpha users. One participant summed it up: “Haha. This is unusable.” Not what any designer wants to hear, but the technical limitations were undeniable.
We then switched to a big name in content creation with more advanced editing features like text, simple animations, and stickers. This tested better but felt like as much effort as doing it manually. Plus, users who weren’t already in the habit of creating social content weren’t suddenly inspired just because the tool was available.
From AI video editing to copywriting time saver
We rounded out this journey to create a new time-saving marketing tool for creators.
Around this time, I stepped into the manager role and assigned an ambitious designer to the project.
Ultimately, Kajabi product strategy pivoted away from straight content creation
Kajabi began charging a monthly fee for credits to projects, and while there are paying customers, it still didn't generate the response the business hoped for.
Our PMM worked hard to spread the word, but the real takeaway was a strategic shift: Kajabi isn’t about creating content, but empowering users to turn their content into a business.
This project, though some might see it as a failure, helped steer our product strategy in the right direction.
How We Kept Experiments and MVPs Lean:
Testing with Existing Tools: We gave customers access to existing tools to see how they'd use them with Kajabi content—no need to build anything new just yet.
Super Lightweight MVPs: We released bare-bones MVPs with minimal features and UX, rolling them out to a small group of alpha users for guided feedback.
Reusing Built Assets: We leveraged existing LLM text-based integrations, making it easy to pivot and adapt features as needed.While the feature made sense and performed better, it still didn’t generate the response we hoped for.
