Thinkific: Leading the Educational Renaissance
By: New Business Review
Tags: Innovation In Education, Vancouver Startups, E Learning Solutions, Online Learning, Edtech

From left to right: Thinkific co-founders Miranda Lievers (COO) and Greg Smith (CEO). Image courtesy of Alana Paterson.

An entrepreneur’s most valuable assets are the knowledge and skills they have acquired through building their ventures. Thought leadership is a popular buzzword these days; a promising area to build a successful business is to take it a step further by sharing and selling skills or knowledge online. However, managing the operational side of sharing one’s expertise online can be cumbersome. Greg Smith, CEO and Co-founder of Thinkific, knows this all too well.

Greg graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from UBC Sauder in 2000 and then studied at UBC’s Allard School of Law. After being exposed to many CEOs while working as a junior securities lawyer, Greg was encouraged to start a business of his own. He had already been running LSAT courses on the side, and decided to take his classes online so he could reach more students. Although his brother, fellow UBC Alumnus Matt Smith, offered to build it for him, they found a lack of digital infrastructure to easily create online courses. That was when the idea for Thinkific was born. Eventually, the two brothers and a few other co-founders launched Thinkific to empower any person with any expertise to create, market, and sell their own online course easily.

The SaaS company is unique from other online learning platforms like MasterClass or Skillshare because they allow educators full autonomy in this way. It provides tools for educators to independently create and sell courses, enabling them to own their brand, customer relationships, and build a sustainable business. These educators are often entrepreneurs or established thought leaders in their respective industries.

Thinkific also has an enterprise arm, Thinkific Plus. Intel, Samsung, Shopify and many others have used it to successfully enter the online learning market. Thinkific has gained noteworthy support from fellow Vancouver based startups: Hootsuite’s famous Academy is hosted on Thinkific’s learning platform, enabling more than 450,000 people to achieve social media certifications. Further, Corporate Finance Institute has trained over 300,000 people predominantly outside of North America to become financial analysts, powered by Thinkific.

It is clear that Thinkfic has not only transformed educators’ lives but also the lives of students globally. Thinkific is contributing to the educational renaissance, leaning into the future of education by promoting Direct to Learner content, unbundling of education (you increasingly do not have to enroll in a traditional institution to learn or teach a skill), and lifelong learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these trends, especially the last: with heightened job insecurity and a higher pace of innovation, upskilling more frequently is beneficial. It is likely that in the future, ever-changing technical skills required of jobs will be taught throughout life instead of just in college. Similarly, COVID-19 also pushed people to realize the feasibility of making a living by running a course online.

True to their mission to help entrepreneurs, Thinkific put forward a $1 million Entrepreneur Growth Fund in the midst of the pandemic. The initiative supported 2,000 entrepreneurs with the mentorship and funding needed to quickly create online courses. Many shifted their existing business — which previously had either no digital or online learning aspect — online. By being a low barrier to entry solution, Thinkific has enabled a class of knowledge entrepreneurs to emerge. Thinkific saw a 221% surge in users creating courses at the start of the pandemic. To date, Thinkific course creators have earned more than $650 million in revenue. The online course market was forecasted in 2019 to be worth $300 billion by 2025, but with Thinkific’s hyper growth that timeline may not be as long.

Thinkific will continue to fuel its growth with its Series A raise of $22 million in September, the third largest deal in Vancouver in Q3 this year. The raise was led by early investor Rhino Ventures, which NBR profiled on Pitch Deck earlier. Fraser Hall, Managing Partner at Rhino, was quoted in a TechCrunch article discussing Thinkific:

“Working with Thinkific over the past four years has been nothing short of exceptional. It’s no secret that its business model, user numbers, and ~ 150% year-over-year revenue growth is tracking, by stage, very closely to Shopify, which is now Canada’s most valuable public company. It’s a model that is undoubtedly shaping a new world of knowledge entrepreneurship and one that’s accessible to any individual or organization that wants to add education as a new revenue channel.”

Thinkific is emblematic of the recent uptick in momentum and mentorship within Vancouver’s startup scene. Beyond Rhino, it was supported by early stage Vancouver-based investors Ryan Holmes (Founder of Hootsuite), Jeff Booth (Founder of BuildDirect) and others — evidence that successful local entrepreneurs are keen to encourage and increase entrepreneurial ventures in the region.

Thinkific plans to use its latest funding to explore opportunities accelerated by COVID-19 and grow its team — it is currently hiring for more than 30 roles and is planning to hire 350 people over the next 18 months. NBR got to sit down with Dalena Nguyen, a Talent Branding Specialist at Thinkific. As someone involved in Thinkific’s human resources, Dalena provided insight into how Thinkific’s strong values guide every decision and form the ethos of the company’s strong culture. One of the values includes being “fanatical about customer success”. As a company focused on being accessible to anyone, Thinkific has found that having a diverse workforce has allowed them to build a better product by taking a wide range of perspectives into consideration, better reflecting its diverse customers. Notably, 51% of Thinkific’s leadership team is composed of women, which is uncommon in tech.

It’s clear that Thinkific’s rigorous hiring process, which uses the topgrading approach, has been successful in finding individuals who add a new perspective while still adhering to Thinkific’s core values and contributing to the company’s growth. Thinkific was named one of the Best Workplaces in British Columbia, made the Growth List of Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies by Canadian Business (ranking 17th out of 415 companies), and was named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 all in this year alone. It is leading the way in not only building more resilient digital infrastructure for entrepreneurship but growing Vancouver’s startup ecosystem. We look forward to seeing Thinkific continue to revolutionize the way people earn and learn online.