Generative AI
Content creation
Pivoting
Kajabi was making a big bet on AI
Kajabi is a $2B creator commerce platform that helps entrepreneurs sell courses, coaching, podcasts, and more. Historically a single-product company, Kajabi was evolving into a multi-product business and launching a series of 0-1 bets to grow revenue beyond its core subscription. Creator Studio was one of them.
I was the Lead Product Designer on the Marketing Tools team, with two junior direct reports. Our charter: make marketing easier for creators so they could grow their audiences and stay on platform.
The insight that started it all
We knew there was a strong link between audience size and creator success. Kajabi users with at least 8 contacts were over 50% more likely to reach their first dollar of GMV. Those who didn't hit GMV churned at significantly higher rates.
After talking to dozens of early-stage creators, a pattern emerged: they had hours of existing video content but struggled to repurpose it for social media. Our hypothesis was that helping them transform long-form content into short, social-ready clips would help them build audiences faster and stay on platform longer.
Early AI, honest results
This was early in the LLM era. I prototyped an AI video editor that could take existing Kajabi content and generate shorter, social-media-ready clips. The output was rough. Garbled videos that didn't land with alpha users. One participant summed it up: "Haha. This is unusable."
That kind of feedback stings, but it was exactly what we needed. Rather than doubling down on broken technology, we pivoted to a partnership with a more mature content creation platform, adding text overlays, animations, and stickers. It tested better. But users who weren't already in the habit of creating social content still weren't inspired to start.
The real pivot: from video to copywriting
The biggest learning wasn't about video at all. It was that creators didn't need another editing tool. They needed to save time on the parts of marketing they found tedious. We shifted focus to AI-powered copywriting, leveraging existing LLM integrations already in the platform.
This tested significantly better. Ultimately Creator Studio generated 50,000 pieces of content and shaped a key strategic insight: Kajabi isn't about creating content. It's about empowering creators to turn their content into a business.
How we kept it lean
We ran this entire process without over-investing in any single direction. We tested with existing tools before building anything new. We shipped bare-bones MVPs to small alpha cohorts. We reused existing LLM integrations to pivot quickly when the data pointed elsewhere. Fast, cheap, and honest. The way early AI product work should go.
I loved working with Heather. She helped me bring the concepts, customer research, and business cases in my head and visualize into an incredible Figma mockup. Her ability to imagine what a product could be is profound.
Andy
Director of Product @ Kajabi
Let's doooooo it
I'm looking for teams with AI-fluent workflows and products
where AI is core to the experience, not a checkbox.