Challenge

Kajabi has established itself as the leader in the creator economy by prioritizing direct-to-creator monetization, enabling creators to sell digital content through the platform—particularly online courses, coaching, and memberships. Its most important role is to enable creators on the platform to own their audiences, brands, and pricing structures in a way that creates sustainable income. To do this, Kajabi needed a payments partner that offered three things:

1. An all-in-one solution for creators to manage their businesses’ payments and revenue.
   
2. Global scalability to keep pace with a growing community of more than 60,000 entrepreneurs and more than 80 million people around the world who consume content on Kajabi.
   
3. Customizable monetization options for its creators, who offer everything from gardening courses for dozens of students to financial planning communities for thousands. “Some of our creators have one offering, but some have dozens of subscription types in one business. These services need to be heavily optimized and low-friction, and we need to give creators the flexibility to create an experience that makes sense for them,” said Stephanie Visessung, head of commerce at Kajabi.
   

Kajabi identified Stripe as the partner that best met its criteria for solution breadth, scalability, and customizability. “We want creators to know who we are, but we want their brand to shine to their customers and students first and foremost. Stripe really aligns with us on how it presents itself as a company,” said Ahad Khan, Kajabi’s CEO. “We never thought much about going with another solution, because we want to stay associated with Stripe’s velocity.”

Solution

Kajabi uses a combination of Stripe solutions to offer creators the control they need to build their own brands. The company recently launched Kajabi Payments, a payment processing solution built directly in Kajabi, powered by Stripe. “We received an incredible response from our creators when we introduced Kajabi Payments. Within the first month of opening up our beta testing, we had record-breaking 7,000 creators join the waitlist. Since then we've processed over $2.6 million in revenue. There's been a ton of positive feedback from our creators knowing that Stripe, a brand they already trust, is under the hood,” said Visessung.

Kajabi wanted to give creators full control over their checkout pages, and to get this exactly right, the company adopted Stripe Elements. Now, creators can decide how payment methods are displayed as they build their unique offers. “We learned that it was going to be a significant engineering lift every time we wanted to introduce a new payment method, and we weren’t going to start releasing those payment methods quickly enough for our creators. With Elements, we can release payment methods much faster, and it's the core of our new pop-up Checkout experience, which our creators are ecstatic about,” said Visessung.

Kajabi also uses Stripe Billing to give these creators even more flexibility. Creators who offer their services on a recurring subscription basis can build out checkout pages for any of the plans and packages they offer. This means they’re able to design any number of new subscriptions whenever they want, and more easily scale their revenue.

Results

Hundreds of checkout pages managed on one platform

The way Kajabi works is that each class or offering from a given creator has its own checkout flow. Managing a multitude of different checkout pages could have become a pain for Kajabi’s content creators, and for Kajabi. With Stripe, it’s been able to unify the checkout-page-building process and behind-the-scenes management of payments for its creators. “Whether a creator has a couple of checkout pages or hundreds, setting up and managing them needs to be smooth and consistent. With Kajabi Payments, ongoing management of different payments and memberships is all in one place, so creators can manage their entire business together,” said Visessung.

50% faster deployment time of new payment methods

Partnering with Stripe not only gave Kajabi the tools it needed to support its creators, but it also helped deploy them quickly. Before Elements, the company considered building its own custom checkout solution, but with Stripe, Kajabi was able to deploy new payment methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay in less than half the time, allowing its engineers to focus on new features.

$5 billion in creator revenue processed, with more growth in sight

To date, Kajabi has processed more than $5 billion of creator revenue with Stripe, and that number is growing as Kajabi continues to invest in the growth of its international presence. “With Custom Connect, we have support as we expand to creators outside of the US,” said Visessung. “But, more importantly, it continues to be the platform powering us to create new revenue opportunities for our creators.”

Kajabi plans to continue expanding with Stripe to support creators in new ways. “We’re looking at what it means to build business banking services for creators who are otherwise getting turned away from more traditional financial institutions,” Visessung shared. With more features in development and new opportunities for creators on the horizon, Kajabi is ready to further empower creators to turn their knowledge and passions into successful, sustainable businesses.