It's So Hard To Say Goodbye...

Heads up, this post contains an important announcement so make sure you read it all the way through!

When we launched Kajabi in October of 2010, we knew we were on to something... however, even then we didn’t think we would be launching an entirely new industry.

After seven years and nearly $500 million sold by our amazing #KajabiHeroes, we’ve seen businesses and lives transformed by this idea of selling your knowledge, and the best part: it’s just getting started.

And that’s why I wanted to write you a letter about where we’ve been, and more importantly, where we’re going.

When we launched, Kajabi had a fresh look, innovative features, and almost overnight became the tool to use to sell and market content online.

People from all walks of life used Kajabi to easily sell their content online (everything from raising alpacas to proper tennis form to fitness and beyond). Kajabi gave them the ability to focus on their content instead of struggling with technology.

The growth was incredible... growth in the platform, its capabilities, and more than anything, in our users and their businesses.

We were truly fortunate to have a ringside seat to entrepreneurs braving this new industry, on our new platform, and analyze what was working and where improvements were needed.

We looked at the power users who were using Kajabi to execute multi-million dollar launches, as well as the newbies who were starting to make their first dollars online.

Which features of Kajabi did they use or not use?

How did they market their products?

Did they tend to sell more than one product over time or instead focus on one flagship product?

What was holding them back from greater success?

Was there something we could do to make it even easier?

All of this was analyzed to answer the golden question: How could we help each and every customer become even more successful?

While we were asking these questions and watching the data, the world was changing around us:

- The use of mobile phones and tablets skyrocketed.

- Buying digital products and online courses became much more mainstream.

- Visual design trends were evolving to an even cleaner, more simplistic style.

- Payment processing companies who embraced technology began to thrive.

And we had built a world-class development, design, and customer support teams to execute on our vision.

We had a choice…

After watching all of our users and the world around us, we found we could either make drastic changes to Kajabi to keep it relevant with the industry growth and trends, or we could take everything we learned from our analysis of successful customers, go back to the drawing boards and design something far superior.

Weighing our options carefully, and knowing that creating anything from scratch would be a costly and risky move, we decided to start with a blank canvas.

We knew without a doubt that the only way to ensure that Kajabi would remain the de-facto standard for online content delivery would be to take everything we had learned over the years and build something which could help even more people.

And... we had an even greater vision.

Our customers continued to share with us that the biggest problem they had while getting started was confusion around which tools to purchase and how to hook them all together. It was an overwhelm of shopping, comparing feature sets, and combing the entire internet to figure out which tools to get. This was then followed by a painful integration process to get them to talk to each other. For someone just wanting to share and sell their knowledge, this burden was stopping them before they started.

It was like in order to successfully sell content online, you needed a “sandwich,” but Kajabi could only provide the bread. To get all the other parts of the sandwich you had to go elsewhere... and figure how they all fit together.

We asked ourselves, what would it look like if we applied the same simplicity we had for content delivery to the whole “sandwich”?

New Kajabi is born

Finally, New Kajabi was born in November of 2015.  

We took everything we learned and designed a platform which was built to evolve with our customers, and make it easier for anyone to have success selling their content.

Some of the major differences from Kajabi (which we now call “Kajabi Classic”) to New Kajabi:

- Ability to sell multiple products under the same brand. This means that customer could purchase more products from you and access them with the same username and password.

- Built-in payments: No more hassle of integrating with a 3rd party payment provider

- 1-click upsells: Maximize your profit by offering another product upon purchase

- 1-click future sales - Once somebody has purchased one of your products, they can purchase more products in the future with just a single click

- Built-in email marketing: Send email broadcasts and sequences right from Kajabi

- Landing page / Site / Product templates: Pick from an extensive library of beautifully designed templates to use as starting points for your landing pages, sites, and products.

- Complete customizability: Make your site, product, and pages look beautiful and just like you want them

- Pipelines: We created a brand new methodology of selling your content. Pipelines lets you stitch your marketing pages, sales offers, and email sequences together to allow prospects to flow effortlessly into becoming customers.

- Pipeline “blueprints”: With one click, landing pages, offers, and email sequences are built and wired together for you which follow proven marketing best practices and strategies.

- Built for mobile: All of your pages and products will look great for your customers on mobile devices.

- Fast and stable: New Kajabi is rock solid and was built from the ground up for speed.

- Integrated guides and achievements: Since creating more #KajabiHeros is our #1 goal, we’ve integrated coaching and “how-to” instruction right into the platform itself.  No more wondering what to do next in order to be successful...

There are countless other advantages New Kajabi has over Kajabi… it is truly a better platform.

In addition to the platform changes, our company has changed quite a bit too.  Our team has grown and is stronger than ever.  We’re up to 42 amazing people whose primary mission is to create #KajabiHeroes.

What is a #KajabiHero, you ask?

We define it as anybody who has made $1,000 or more selling their content online, and it is our mission to help each and every customer become a #KajabiHero. In fact, that’s our team’s #1 core value: our customers are our heroes.

And it seems to be working… Our customers have made almost a half a BILLION dollars selling their content.  Yes, $500 million dollars sharing their message and knowledge with the world.

Because we care about your success - It’s time to say goodbye to Kajabi Classic.

Even writing this, it was really hard to type those words. It’s almost like I wanted to cue up Boyz 2 Men in the background “It’s so hard to say goodbye.” Kajabi Classic was truly the beginning of an industry... a movement, and it paved the way for New Kajabi and its capabilities.

It’s almost a bit like your first car. You’ll always love it, it will always represent a level of excitement, freedom, and a rite of passage that will perpetually bring a smile to your face... however that first car isn’t forever.

And as we look at our core values as a company, with our customers’ needs and success being our top priority, we had to make the difficult decision to sunset Kajabi Classic.

New Kajabi is the full embodiment of our best in every category. The best technology and future development capabilities, the best support and customer success resources, the best platform for continued innovation, the best security, the best customization options, and the absolute best for our customers.

To read our Kajabi Core Values, download them here.

What does this mean for you?

We’ve got your back and, trust us, it will be worth it.  Our promise is that we will do everything we can to make this as painless as possible, with an outcome even better than what you have now.

1) If you do not already have a New Kajabi account, sign up for one today. We’ll change your Classic account to completely free during your transition - just reach out to us at support@kajabi.com and we'll get you taken care of.

2) We’ll help you import your content. Lots of you have loads of content in your Classic accounts and have been dreading moving it all to a new system by hand, and we’re here to make it effortless for you. We’ll import all of your content into your New Kajabi account for you! (See our help article for how to start this.)

3) If you have any questions, or need help strategizing the move, we’re at the ready. Just email support@kajabi.com and we’ll make sure to help you with any questions.

When will this happen?

Kajabi Classic will be shutting down 2 months from now, on October 1st, 2017.

This means that after that day, your customers should already be accessing your content on your fresh and beautiful New Kajabi product, as your Classic projects will not be available to them.

We recommend that you begin having us migrate your content into New Kajabi as soon as possible. We’ll continue to send reminders in the coming weeks to account owners of active Kajabi Classic projects.

The future is very bright

We know change is never easy, and this decision wasn’t taken lightly. We want to make sure that this transition offers you more of what you want in a technology platform for your digital business, and we’re confident when you see the capabilities of the new Kajabi, this will be tremendously exciting! Seeing your older programs in the new interface, mobile responsive, and design forward... it's going to be awesome!

We appreciate all of you more than you can imagine, and thanks to our Kajabi Classic family, together we were able to launch an industry changing and industry creating platform, and it continues to be an honor and pleasure to support your businesses.

Sincerely,

The Kajabi Team