Greg Smith - CEO and Cofounder of Thinkific

Today we get to talk to Greg Smith, CEO and founder of thinkific. We're going to talk to him about all the different business models that he had to iterate on and then the false positives that he had to navigate his way through to ultimately land on a business model that's allowed him to empower other entrepreneurs to build their own little empires around teaching and learning and also seeing enterprises like Lululemon coming on board and leveraging thinkific for their own businesses.

Three, two, one.

Hey, welcome everybody. Back to another episode of Founder Journey. Today you've got Greg Smith. Greg is one of the OGs of Launch Academy. He was actually our second company accepted in 2012 and I've had the privilege of watching his company grow and he as an entrepreneur grow. They just announced their series a raise over 22 million, $25 million just this past October, November. And they're growing extremely, extremely rapidly. As we all know, Covid has slapped us all upside the head and turned our world upside down. One thing that has thrived is online education, remote education, and the entrepreneurs that have come out of this Covid ecosystem with new endeavors. Education has been a big part, people being able to share their knowledge and experience. And that's what Greg started with Thinkific back in 2012. Greg, welcome to Founder Journey. Please introduce yourself to our audience and just give us a little background about founder thinkific and we'll really dive into the journey that got you to where you are today in a bit. But just some high level review about the industry.

Sure, yeah. Let's see. First, Ray, thanks for having me. Stoked to be here. Excited and little background on thinkific. I mean, I got my start in entrepreneurship at maybe, well, background on me at like maybe 8 years old. So we could. There's like little entrepreneurial adventures and misadventures all the way along. You know, trying to sell candy to the, to the local kids and things like that in creative ways. But then Thinkific, I got started maybe in 2000, not Thinkific, but 2006, started creating my own online course for the LSAT that did really well. And then eventually it led to other people reaching out, asking how to create their own online courses where they could have their own brand and build their own business around it and deliver courses and build a business around their own branded memberships or courses. And so we set out to build thinkific for them and to solve the problem that really I had when I was creating my first course. And that was we started thinkific in about 2012 when we walked in the doors to launch Academy and had our first home there and for quite a while. And yeah, fast forward today. Grown quite a bit. Lots of pitfalls and successes and failures along the way. We're about 250 people today. Should be 500 by the end of next year. And growing and scaling and having a lot of fun with it.

That's awesome. 250 people and you're going to double that to 500 by the end of 2021? Yes.

Yeah.

And so that's insane growth. Are you looking to do that all in Vancouver? You're based in Vancouver, headquartered in Vancouver. But is this gonna be a remote workforce? How has Covid changed your insights into how to structure your office? Is there anything that you want to talk about there?

Yeah, I mean, we started the year at 100. We're gonna close, like I said, just maybe just under 250. So did 150 people people added to the team this year, which was pretty intense in terms of hiring and systems and process and little things breaking along the way. We started the year all in one office with, you know, adding square feet to be able to put everybody in the same office here in Vancouver with the odd remote person. But, you know, less than 2% of the company was remote. And which was kind of a problem. It's a bit unfair for the remote people when they're the only one remote in a meeting. And so when Covid hit, we went full remote. And so now we've extended our hiring. We're hiring all over the place. Still pretty heavy. Vancouver, because that's where our base was. But now we're hiring all over the place. And I think it's been a huge boon for us in terms of just the ability to get really serious about remote, do a lot better job of it. And some of the just general benefits of being remote. Like, I love the fact that I don't have to commute right now. So silver lining to everything. And then also just from a hiring perspective, we've been able to access talent from around the world, which is great. And even some people on our team deciding they want to go live somewhere else. So, you know, a bunch of people gone short distance, like up to Whistler or the Okanagan or even Ukulele on Vancouver Island. But some, I think one team member is in Turkey or Istanbul.

So and I guess that. How does that. Does it have any impact on the talent that is using Thinkific? Like, because you have people around the world, does it make it more accessible to people? Does it have no bearing whatsoever on our customer base.

Yeah, yeah, we're customer base wise. We're about 60% in the US about 10% in Canada and the other 30% around the world. And we've been fairly global like that. I mean, that's not fully diversified globally, but we've been fairly global from the early days. Just the benefit of building SaaS that can be used by anyone around the world. So I don't think Covid's changed our geographic makeup very much. We've always kind of been been around the world and that it continues to grow and it's something we're looking to do more and more of as we go forward though, which I think actually when you think about it, the addition of it hasn't impacted us yet, but the addition of being able to build a remote workforce and now we're starting to like, when this settles down, we'll be opening offices in some key centers, including in Europe. And so that's allowing us to go into new time zones from customer support and sales and connection with customers. So that's where it will start to change that customer make up a little bit and extend our reach that way.

And that's something that a lot of companies have had to deal with. As they grow and they become global businesses, they need to understand how to service customers in diverse geographic locations. What is the most common use case of thinkific? What's a breakdown of the type of people that use thinkific and what type of courses are they teaching and how are they monetizing it?

So it's, I mean, we do span the gamut of kind of all industries and even customer sizes. But the majority of our customers are really the solopreneur individual or micro SMB. So five employees or less, or maybe one to 10 employees, they're starting out or have been, you know, they have a business going of some kind or some kind of audience, or they're just getting started and they're looking to create courses as a business or add courses to their business. So what this looks like is it could be someone who's a corporate finance professional who starts teaching finance courses on the side. It could be a software developer who starts teaching coding courses on the side. Or it could be someone who's teaching how to bake sourdough or hula hooping. I've seen people build a small empire on teaching hula hoop for dance and fitness and fun. So it really like cuts across everything.

That's not a joke. That's not a joke. It's not hey, she build a small empire? No, no, she's making a killing.

Yeah, she's done really well. Yeah. Dan Love from, from Hooplovers TV if you want to check her out. Really cool courses on, on hula hooping. Love what she is doing there. So it could be anything from health and fitness to entrepreneurship to marketing to business to arts, crafts, all sorts of different areas. We are seeing now more and more even bigger companies. So mid market companies, people like Lululemon or Target or Shopify, using us for educating partners or customers or even employees in some cases. But our sweet spot really is with the really small business or the entrepreneur looking to create courses as part of their business or to create a business really right off the ground.

And definitely kudos to you and your team for building a great product. Like again, you were the first, one of the first companies that came into Launch Academy and I saw what you started with and we eat our own dog food. We were using the platform at a very early stage to sell our online entrepreneurship courses. Fast forward to today. We definitely still use Thinkific. It's like a backbone of our international program that we use for our startup Visa program. I've got three courses on there about fundraising, about entrepreneurship, trying to start to launch this into foreign markets and I couldn't do it without Thinkific. So you built an amazing product. But how did you get there? What is it that kind of led you to believe that I can actually make a platform here, that I used it myself and other people are going to want to use it?

Yeah, I mean, early days it was kind of a funny evolution because we had my course that was doing well. I was getting students into it. And then we started getting other people reaching out, saying, I want to do what you're doing. And initially we tried a bunch of different business models. I tried more of a licensing model, almost like what Masterclass is doing, where we said we'll produce the course for you, high quality, we'll sell it and we'll give you a licensing fee because you're the instructor. And that didn't work so well for us. We tried a bit of a marketplace model, kind of like what Udemy does, where it's like it'd be one site. You come to thinkific.com, all the courses would be there and we would, you know, people would produce it and upload it themselves, but then it would sell through our course and we would kind of own the overall business. And that didn't work as well for us. So we tried almost like an More of an enterprise model, working with a lot of organizations where we'd go in and help them build their course for them and white label it for them. Got some false positives on a lot of these areas where things looked good, but it wasn't quite total product market fit. And also I don't think a lot of it hit our kind of passion buttons and the economics weren't working great for us. So.

I remember the days, are you sitting up, sitting at Launch Academy, you're working away at this and then you look at your clock, it's like, oh shit. And you realize you're supposed to be across town at your studio filming something. So you grab your camera and you're bolted up the door. But you guys had like a separate studio where you did a bunch of filming. And so I want to go back to those false positives, like you were hustling and you were getting people in your studio. Was that one of those false positives? Just because people were showing up and videotaping, like, did that mean you actually had a business going?

Yeah, and you know, I wouldn't. It's an interesting one because if I could go back and do it all over again, you know, obviously with perfect hindsight, I'd just jump right to what we're doing today. But I don't even know that the market was quite ready or there for what we do today, which is more like kind of the Shopify for online courses. And it was almost the idea we started with in the first place. But then, yeah, we kept getting the danger there at the beginning is we kept getting people saying, I'm willing to pay you to do things this way. So we'd say, okay, we'll try that. You know, we've got a customer, they're paying us, let's go and do it. And we were also brainstorming ideas. And so one of those early ideas was what if we go find great instructors out there who are already really good at their craft. They're known, they're already drawing an audience, sort of selling in person trainings and we'll just film them and produce these well known instructors and put them online. Now we didn't shoot quite as high as like masterclass of going after true celebrities, but it was more like, you know, the local best instructor in something. And so we'd produce and that the false positive was they said yes. We hopped in the studio, we filmed it, we produced the course, we started selling the course and it was generating revenue, but it really wasn't doing it. In a way that was going to work for us to really scale the business or at least we didn't figure it out. You know, other obviously other people have in different models, but it wasn't really something that was going to work for us. And then we had the other one, I'd say false positive. The big one for us was in working with sort of not profit professional associations. So like you know, the association of say HR Managers or the association of Forestry Professionals and stuff and they're actually still clients to this day. So it worked out in a different model of how we work with them. But originally we were working with a way where we would charge them a lot more and do a lot more work for them. And that, you know, the revenue seemed nice initially, but it was just so much work to get the deal, so much work to close the deal, you know, such a long time frame, so much work to actually make it happen that when we actually started looking at doing more of a self serve model where they'd kind of sign up on their own, get things built on their own, you know, just put their credit card online, much more true SaaS model, that's when things really started to take off. But it is funny how you can get pulled down all these paths of, you know, there's revenue here, there's a customer saying they want it here, there's some success and feedback here. When we've had so many failures that you can get led down a lot of different paths that way.

Saying no is really hard when people are throwing money at you and you see a potential opportunity, but it's off focus or it's not scalable. But when you're trying to put food on the table, it's hard to say no to that type of contract. And they could quickly smile into something that could take your business in a very different direction that won't ultimately be successful and non fundable.

Yeah, and I'm glad we did it because it kept us alive at the time and it kept us going, but it dragged out our success like it was two, three years in before we started, three years in before we started to see any real success with our real business model. And so those false positives really I think slowed things down. They kept some revenue in the tank. I think the key that one thing we did was we did keep exploring other options. So we were open to continually kind of pivoting and trying other things. If we'd gotten stuck in one of those ruts, we probably would have just fizzled out. If I could have avoided it altogether. I would have. I don't know the exact advice I would use to kind of avoid it other than to take a step back from small wins and say, I don't need to scale it now, right? Like it's totally okay to do the non scalable. Like, like I was shooting the videos myself, I was editing them myself, I was picking up the phone to sell the courses myself. Totally okay to do those non scalable stuff. Even when we transitioned to our existing business model, we were calling people up while zooming people up and, and then they would Dropbox us their files. We would build the course for them because we didn't have an interface for them to do it. We'd ship it back to them and we call them up and ask for their credit card over the phone kind. So totally okay to do the non scalable, but I think it's important to also zoom out and say, I can do the non scalable thing now, but does it scale? Is there a way for it to scale and at least have that view? And I think in some of those early things, we didn't have a really good view of how they would scale, at least not in a way that worked out economically.

So in the last few minutes you've talked about the pivots and changes and the lessons learned, all in a very positive manner. And I know you're a very positive guy. You're very thoughtful and methodical of how you approach things and how you learn from it. But walk us through what actually went through your head, because it was not, it was not all rainbows and roses here like you, you struggled, you had a lot of challenges and your co founder, who's your brother, you guys both had to deal with this head on and individually at the same time.

Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, so many hardships in those early days. I mean we were, if we had six weeks of cash in the bank, like before bankruptcy, I felt like we were had all the money in the world. That was like, nice margin of safety, right? It was like, okay, this paycheck and the next one and the one after that, I don't have to like draw from my credit card or like borrow money to pay to make payroll or something. So we definitely had a lot of, you know, you go through a fair amount of stress when, and I think when, you know, it's kind of cliche, but I never did any of this for the money or the revenue. It was really, you know, wanting to deliver on the vision and help people build courses and build businesses. But in those, especially in those early days, the or, and even now, revenue is like the lifeblood of a company. And the blood isn't, you say, run a marathon. It's just. But it's necessary to run the marathon. Right. So we're still running the marathon. But the revenue is a big part of what keeps you alive doing that. And so in those early days, when you're struggling on the revenue side, I think it makes everything more stressful. It made my relationship with my brother, co founder Matt, way more stressful. It made strategic decisions way more stressful because we'd say, well, we want it made hiring more stressful. You know, everything you're doing, every relationship with a customer, it's all a little more stressful because you're still very much in survival mode. And so we'd say, well, I want to go this way for the next few weeks. And my brother would say, well, I want to go that way. And we're kind of ending in the same place. But it was how we were spending over time over those few weeks, well, that was a stressful decision because, you know, when you're looking at, say, six weeks of Runway or sometimes three weeks of Runway, how you invest the next two weeks is a huge deal. And so we had a fair number of disagreements about those early days on, like, how are we going to survive? And then the other thing, you know, you make a decision and you don't see immediate feedback that it's working. That really makes you question if you're making the right choices here, if this is all worth doing or if it's going to work in the end. So definitely a lot of struggle and stress in those early days.

Yeah, the sleepless nights. As an entrepreneur, it's no joke. Like, you could wake up one morning and just not want to face reality and not want to go into work and have to deal with all the tons of problems that are on your table. But you get up and you go, and then after lunch, you have this serendipitous meeting or email that comes in that just totally turns your day around.

Yep, yep. But I think going through that your mindset is that the mindset is the most important thing for an entrepreneur. If you can survive criticism, if you can survive setbacks, if you can survive failure and thrive and push through it and be persistent, that's, to me, the key thing of being successful as an entrepreneur.

Well, that's sage advice, and it's easy to hear it, but when you really need to hear it in those challenging times, it's not easy to let it sink in. And that's just I think the mentality of a lot of entrepreneurs, they're self starters. You focus on the bigger picture, but the smaller picture of what's happening internally gets lost on a lot of people. How much do you see in what entrepreneurs struggle with and go through with the clients that are coming through? Because they're all entrepreneurs in their own right.

Yeah, yeah, that's the really cool thing is I get to work with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs now all building their own businesses, building their own courses, or building a business around a course or they have a business and they're adding the course and they're scaling the business. And you know, it's funny, there's the things we talk about most I think are like the technical problems, like how do I get some software set up or the operational problems, how do I hire someone? And those are definitely big deals. But it often comes back to mindset. And if you have that mindset where criticism, failure, setbacks can be seen as a positive, like not just survive it, but really like turn a positive light on it, that fundamentally I think can make the difference. Because there is no way you're going to know everything you need to know right now to go and set out to build a new business. You're going to have to learn it along the way. And a lot of that learning is going to come painfully through trial and error. And it's that ability to take a hit and say, oh, awesome. This is like feedback for me to get better. I mean, when I look at the business now and I look around and someone says we're terrible at X or we're horrible at this, to me that's exciting because it's like, okay, well we're doing this well now, whatever that is, whether it's, you know, zero or you know, plus 10, we're doing this well. Now if we go fix that problem and get better at it, we can do this plus whatever that improvement is. So I love hearing about the problems and I've really tried to like kind of wire my brain to look at problems and challenges and criticism and failures as a huge opportunity to improve both personally and then for the company. And you asked about our clients and I think with our clients, one thing I see a lot of, and this is especially in our clients, is that almost perfectionism of like, I really want to get this right. And so in the context of creating courses, you know, I want to want to do everything right. I'm going to shoot the perfect video, Spend a lot of time editing, script it perfectly. And I give the advice, actually, my brother gave me when we were starting out, creating a course. It's like you got 30 days. What can you get done in 30 days? Just get something launched, get it out there, get feedback from real customers. Because even if you spend a year in your office or apartment building, the perfect thing, when you launch it and it hits the road, customers will give you feedback about how it's not perfect. So you may as well just get it out there sooner and get more feedback sooner.

Yeah, you probably remember the saying going around the office is, fuck it, ship it, you gotta get it out there.

I think I might have had it on a shirt or something. Right. But that was get shit done.

Get shit done is our other motto. That's LaunchCami's actual motto, but it's about just getting it out there. Like, you will never get the feedback that you need and the validation that you need until it's in the hands of the customer. Because you can iterate all you want internally in your mind, or even in house with your dev team, but unless it's in the hands of the customers, you're never going to get that feedback and data that you need that's critical for the evolution and growth of the product. And speaking about evolution and growth, you were trying to raise money at an early stage in your business. And I saw a lot of the no's that you got and walk us through that, like hearing those no's and how you got up the next day to get right back at it. And when you realized, okay, maybe I'm doing something wrong here, what do I need to change? To change the nos to yeses.

Yeah, well, probably one of the first things is that I was, we were looking at it wrong and that we were thinking about pitching and raising probably a month or two into the company. I mean, we didn't have a product, we weren't really clear on what we were doing. And in one way it was good because those nos were more an opportunity to just like, it was one of the benefits of Launch Academy of like, we got in front of investors and so we pitched something and then they ripped it apart and said, yeah, it doesn't seem like that works to me or something. And so to me, I looked at a lot of those as real learning opportunities. And in fact, I remember early days, I would go to Boris Wirtz often and pitch him. And you too, Ray, and you both. The approach I took wasn't, how do I sell them. How do I tell them all the good bits? I would go in there and just tell them all the bad bits, like, this is what's not working, this is what sucks, this is what's hard. This is where I think it might fail. And often the response from you, Boris and others was like, yeah. And then they'd walk us through what could be better, or give feedback on it, or say, no, that's not a problem, or say, look at this other thing. And so in the early pitch days, I think one thing I made the mistake of is thinking that I was raising money instead of, I'm just using this as an opportunity to get some feedback. And so I said the right things by putting the negatives out there and getting feedback on it. But I think when you're really early, putting it out there as just an opportunity to get feedback is great. Or just don't go out and raise money right out of the gate. I think waiting till the money's kind of ready for you, by the time we. And that other thing too is we never really took it seriously. I don't think we ever went out and said, we're going to raise by this date, this amount. And here's our plan. We were just sort of in pitch competitions, which, again, great opportunity for feedback. Once we were going to raise, it just kind of came to us and it became a lot easier. Like, we did have to put the work in for sure, but it became a lot easier. And it's continued to get easier and easier to the point where now, you know, VCs reach out to me on a. On a multiple per day basis, looking to invest in the company because, you know, we're now something attractive where they want to invest some of their money and see a return on it. And so I think not stressing too much about it, early days, looking at conversations with investors is a really a way to learn rather than to sell them everything perfectly. Just put the dirty out there, the broken, and get that feedback early on and that'll help you much more to fix things and to be ready for the real conversations when you commit yourself to raising.

Yeah, that definitely is something that I recall that stood apart for you and your team doing that back in those days, just two of you. You guys are never afraid to get up on stage and pitch and talk about your company. That's what I find with a lot of entrepreneurs. They're afraid to talk about their company because somebody's gonna steal my idea or somebody's gonna.

I remember that.

And you guys, like, again, a lot of props to our getting out there. Say, this is what we're doing. This is what's not working. How do I fix this? Or what are your thoughts on this? And you guys are very open to feedback and criticism. And Boris Wirtz, he's the founder of Version One Capital, Version One Ventures. Amazing guy, but he's also one of those guys that gives you blunt feedback. He's German, so German Canadian, So very, very blunt feedback.

And an entrepreneur who's exited and now investing. And so he had the perfect mindset to just, you know, jump in and help you with everything that was wrong.

Yeah. We've got Boris on founder journey. I can't remember if this episode has aired yet or not, but check it out. Boris Wirth's version one episode. But that's what you need at that stage. You need that blunt criticism, and you got to have a little bit of a thick skin. You got to get used to the no's and the negatives, because that's how you grow and evolve. But what was that aha moment for you when you realize, okay, this is something that's gonna now stick, and this is something that I can really start to scale?

Yeah, it's kind of like a series. There was a moment, but there was a series of paper cuts along the way, or, like, you know, benefits things along the way. But we. So there's a few moments. One of them was I remember sitting actually in Launch Academy, and we'd had a bunch of those false positives, and we were talking about different ways of doing it, and Matt, actually, I remember his words. He looked at me, he said, so I think we're pretty much like Shopify for online courses. And then he described what he meant, which is exactly what we do now. So, you know, self serve, build your site, build your course market, sell it, generate revenue, but self serve and just pay us a monthly fee. And he said, I think that's pretty much what we should do. And I said, well, I don't know, let's talk about it. There's lots of options. And he said, well, that's what I've been telling everybody we do starting yesterday. I was like, you can't do that. You can't just pivot the business without talking to me. But he won, and that's what we were doing. And he was right. I don't think I gave in right there, but that was it. So that was kind of one moment of how that. Which is interesting because that was the idea. We set out within the beginning, but we just couldn't do it. Early days from technical and team limitations and abilities, and it's just a lot of work to get to that point. And it was actually what I needed for my own course. But we had to try all these other things to almost come full circle back to that. And it was much more fleshed out when we finally came back to it. So we started there, then we started working on it, and the traction started happening. Customers started coming in. People were liking it. But there was this moment when we turned on in a pretty rapid succession, the ability for people to pay us, just, like, put their credit card on the site and pay us monthly. And then we turned on annual plans so they could pay us annually. And there was a couple other features we sort of unlocked. And then we did one big webinar with a partner, Marshawn Evans, and she was promoting us to her audience. And, like, in all of those things coming together in about a week, our revenue curve just, like, took a huge jump up. And, like, it wasn't just a. It wasn't just a vertical jump. It was an inflection point of, like, the whole curve of the revenue curve went up. And for someone who'd spent at that point probably three and a half years, you know, putting things on my credit card and student debt and, like, you know, just not paying myself a salary and trying to make it go, I literally fell down on the floor in the middle of the office. And I mean, it was an office. It wasn't launch academy. It was just like, it at the time. I fell down on the floor and started doing, like, snow angels. You know, we like, kind of make a snow. I'm like, there was no snow. I don't know why I was doing this, but it was just like this release of stress of like, okay, finally something's really working here. Like, And I could see in that moment, like, the path to the future of, like, we hit it. Like, there is real product market fit here and the revenue is coming in, but also the things customers are saying, the features they're asking for, it's all coming together. And there was that moment of like, okay, we got here where people in.

The office looking at you and probably thinking the offices like, okay, Greg's broken. Oh, yeah, he's on the ground doing snow angels. It's done.

They were all looking at the same graph too, so they were kind of celebrating too. But, yeah, I think they thought I was a little funny.

One thing I want to quickly touch on so you're the Shopify for online courses now. Shopify today is a household name. Everybody knows it doesn't matter where you are in the world. Shopify really revolutionized the online e commerce industry. But when Matt made that comparison, Shopify was not a household name. So was it good for you to have this comparable or did it make things a little harder to explain for you?

Yeah, I mean, I think it was more that him and I had looked at so many models that it was a good comparable between us, but it wasn't necessarily the message we were going to take to everyone. So even when he said it to me, I'm telling people we're Shopify for online courses. I think he was using that for people who got it and then for others, he was just describing what it actually meant to us. But it was helpful, I think, to look outside our direct competitors and our direct industry and say, what other models are working out there? What could we learn from other companies that are being successful to apply in our industry? And I think that's a bit of what Matt was doing there, is saying, you know, here's a company doesn't compete with us, but they have a pretty similar customer base, a pretty similar kind of mission to help create and grow entrepreneurs to us, what are they doing so well? What is, what could we learn from them? And we haven't then gone and said, okay, we're exactly that. But it was a close comparable at the time to say it's a better business model than we were trying to do, which was really we wanted, you know, the model switch shift at that point was we're going to do, you know, monthly billing where people can just pay us online, they can sign up, they can self serve and we'll build software that's so easy to use that anyone can go in and build their own online course and launch a business around it.

And so now Fast forward to 2021. You've got successful business, you've got money in the bank, you've raised capital. What are the challenges on the horizon for you? What's keeping you up at night now? Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs falsely think as soon as I raise money, that's gonna solve all my problems. We know that that's not the case. It's getting real now. What is getting real now for you?

I mean, one of the things I think is the, that we've been seeing, it certainly hasn't just started, but it's been happening at different stages along the way is the scale of the team and the Operations and process and systems to kind of support team at scale. You know, when you're seven or even 14 people, you can kind of touch everybody by reaching out. You know, pre Covid days, like or like one conversation in the of like collection of desks becomes one conversation and everybody's looped in. So you don't really have disconnect within the team. And then as you grow, you create more disconnect. And then an interesting thing that started happening is things that worked really well. We're starting to break largely just because there was too many people in the room. So you'd have a meeting that always worked really well or a kind of a ritual that worked really well. Even the idea of like bringing birthday cake to everybody at their desk and singing happy birthday on their birthday, or at our monthly town hall for the whole company, you know, celebrating the anniversaries of people who've been there for a year, these little things started to break and so we had to look at how do we kind of sell, divide and take those processes and like split them out and still do the things that are working, but just move them to a different level within the company in a smaller group or a smaller meeting. And so it's the continued evolution of that to me that is one of the interesting things. I'm lucky. I've got an amazing COO and co founder now, Miranda and CTO and co founder Matt Payne, who look at a lot of these things. Matt looking more at the engineering and product side and Miranda handling a lot of this system and process side. And then for myself, what keeps me up at night in a really exciting way, I've got a whiteboard here in my home office and spend lots of time on that is trying to pull myself out of the quarter and even pull myself out of and into the five year plan. And so thinking much further out than I ever have before, like launch academy days, I was thinking, you know, three weeks out or six weeks out and then that slowly progresses and your eye kind of comes up towards the horizon. And now I'm really, I'm actively trying to get out of the quarter and the year and into, you know, things, everything beyond that. So if it's something that's going on this quarter or this year, something I've already made my contribution to and the team's handling it and I'm looking at like what's really coming far down the road.

And some entrepreneurs, if not all entrepreneurs, really enjoy that part of the business. It's the big vision, it's the long term goals and anybody that goes out thinking, oh, one, in five years I'm going to sell the company and I'm out of the case of the business. While you're not really the entrepreneur of the business, but to hear you saying that you're now thinking about what's going to happen the next five year horizon, that's really, I wouldn't say refreshing. It's really, I'm proud to hear you say that because that shows that you're really dedicated to what you're building and you're building something amazing. Thanks Greg. You've been really generous with your time and it's been really awesome insight. So we're going to kind of wrap this up with two questions and then we'll get to your call to action. So the first question is give us a tool or an app that has been instrumental in your journey as an entrepreneur. It could be something that you use for work, it could be something that you use personally, but something that's digital that you think our audience should be aware of. Okay.

Themselves I got a digital one and then a couple sort of non digital, more like mental models one, but the digital one is audible or the combination of Kindle and audible and the sort of whisper sync and that kind of thing is just for me, I was always a paper person. But ability to like listen and listen to books and stuff. I mean as an entrepreneur you need to be constantly learning and leveling up. So whether it's your reading paper, you're listening to business books or you're taking online courses, just find a tool for you. For me lately it's been audible. But find a tool for you that really allows you to continually level up and learn and pick the problems, the areas you're struggling the most with and then go deep on those until you find solutions. And then the 2 non digital sort of mental models I love is there's the flywheel concept, great little like 50 page book called Turning the Flywheel by Jim Collins that gives a really cool sort of tool mental model for developing your kind of business strategy and how it all works. And then a simple one I think I used a lot in the early days is just ROI analysis and just get comfortable with understanding roi. And I use it in or at least have in virtually every decision at some point in like should we do this thing or that thing or how do we do this or you know, is just analyzing what's the return on this investment. And investment could be person hours put into it and then return could be you know what kind of value it brings our customers or something like that, but just getting really comfortable with applying that in a lot of decisions. There's so many other mental models you can use, but that's one I rely on pretty heavily.

Yeah, the ROI one is definitely one that I use. I'm also an accountant, so roi. But the key is that return on that investment. The R of the ROI doesn't necessarily have to be money. Yeah, there could be personal self validation or benefit. But really understand, well, what is that return and is it something that how much does it mean to us compared to the investment that's going in? As long as it's a net positive, you're always going to come out ahead. That's an awesome, awesome way to kind of end discussion. But I do want to give you one last chance to or one chance to ask our audience for a call to action. What is it that they can do for you? You've been really generous with your time and your feedback. What can our audience do for you?

I'll sneak into one's kind of advice, but it's also something that I'd like to see more of. It's like I just asked you as entrepreneurs to really care about your people. I think it's probably the most important thing we do as entrepreneurs is we get to build teams. And so leading from a place, investing a lot in yourself and then in the future in your leaders who report into you as a way to be a more empathetic, open, inclusive leader, to build a better culture that really cares about the people. I mean, if you want to look at it financially, they're by far your most important assets, but it's just the right thing to do. So I think really looking at all the ways you can be better for your people is a great thing. And then if you're not doing the entrepreneurial thing or you want to do the intrapreneurial thing, check out Thinkific. We're always hiring. And if you're looking for courses or if you want to build your own business and you're thinking it relates to education or teaching something somehow, or there's a component, check out thinkific.

Yeah, like one of the other mantras at Launchcam. Everybody's got something to teach, everybody has something to learn. And that definitely shines through with thinkific. And not just the people that are creating courses, but the management that's leading that company as well. So real good props to you and your team. Miranda and Matt, both the mats, your co founder, cto. But also your brother Matt. Thinkific is an amazing company and I'm really excited to have been part of the journey and I'm excited to see what happens next.

Thanks Ray. I really appreciate your help in the early days. It meant a lot to us and it made a huge difference in our success. Thank you.

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