Greg Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Thinkific an SaaS eCommerce business which sells a software platform for creating and selling online courses. Thinkific was founded just over 4 years ago, now they have around 20,000 websites using the system, and are achieving 40% month on month growth.
Click to Tweet: Greg Smith is on the @eComMasterPlan #podcast telling us all about his Software as a Service business Thinkific
About the business
- eCommerce Business Structure – SaaS
- Product Range Scale – niche
- On a bespoke mobile platform
- 22 people in the team – currently recruiting for 8 more – everything is undertaken in-house
- Based in Canada – selling globally
- Key widgets in the website:
Listen to hear how Greg Smith got started in eCommerce
Most Awesome Thing Right Now
Greg thinks the most awesome thing about the businesses about helping other people – everything Thinkific do is about helping other people succeed. That’s what gets Greg up every morning and gets him excited.
Listen to hear more about how….
Key Thinkific Marketing Methods
Thinkific have always been experimental with their marketing, thoroughly testing a marketing channel before rolling it out. At the moment Greg is finding that Instagram has been great for the business and although Facebook has more eCommerce lead purchase the average order value from Instagram is higher.
Greg’s top tips for getting started on Instagram would be to take a look at Later a great tool for scheduling and managing your posts. They also have a great blog that gives feedback on how best to use both Later and Instagram. Greg learned through this blog that Instagram posts need to have a consistent feel – whether that be a filter, white background or colour scheme if there’s a consistency throughout your posts people are more likely to subscribe to your account.
On the Radar For the Coming Months
At the top of Greg’s to do list is expanding his team trying to maintain the team culture whilst adding more people. Then continuing to listen to what the customers want and thinking of ways they can incorporate this moving forward. Also more experimentation ensure that Thinkific stay on top of new developments in eCommerce.
eCommerce Book Top Tip
- The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho
- The Lean Start-Up by Eric Ries
- Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
eCommerce Traffic Top Tip
Greg and the Thinkific team use YouTube a lot to put out visual content, helping people with problems and driving people straight to their website. They also use Quora helping people by answering their questions and making sure they end their answer with a link directly back to the Thinkific website.
You can hear about all this on the podcast, for free – right now…
Tool Top Tip
The Thinkific use a lot of tools Greg believes if there is a tool out there that will make the team more efficient then they should just get it and test it. One of his favourites is Trello the project management tool.
Start Up Top Tip
Greg would suggest think marketing and market first, figure out where you’re going to get the market. The second thing is if you are thinking of launching a business this weekend just go out and do it – it is possible. Don’t hold back for the perfect launch just get out there and get started.
Interview Links
Subscribe right now for free: itunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud or using any Podcast app
Like to be a guest? Fill in our contact form
Leave a Reply