Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation, JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, with great shows like the MarTech Podcast. Today, we'll be focusing on becoming a knowledge entrepreneur, your next great revenue generator. To drop these value bombs, I brought Greg Smith into EO Fire Studios. Greg is the CEO and co-founder of Thinkific, the most trusted platform that makes it easy to create, deliver, and sell online courses.
Today, Fire Nation, we're talking about knowledge entrepreneurship, how to monetize your expertise in this new economy. We'll also talk about becoming a knowledge entrepreneur and so much more when we get back from thinking our sponsors. With visibility and control of your financials, inventory, HR, e-commerce, and more, NetSuite is everything you need to grow all in one place, and right now, special financing is back. NetSuite is offering a one-of-a-kind financing program today.
Head to NetSuite.com slash Fire to learn more. That's special financing at NetSuite.com slash Fire. Fire Nation, it's time to stop trading time for money and start reaching more clients and making a bigger impact, and you can do just that with online courses. Try Thinkific for free today at Thinkific.com slash E-O-F.
That's T-H-I-N-K-I-F-I-C dot com slash E-O-F. Greg, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? So happy to be here.
Something that I think differently about success is that it's not about winning. It's often about failure. And I think that way because the winning is the, it comes and goes kind of easily, but it's the failure where you learn. And if you look back on the big moments in your life, I think it's the, if you don't want to get to a place where you're looking back on the wins and saying like, oh, that was the best it's ever going to be.
It's the failures where you learn. And also when I look around, you know, in my own, call them successes, it's the places where I still see failure and things going wrong, where I look at it and I go, that's opportunity. That's opportunity to be better. Because if you look around at everything's perfect, you're like, well, this is as good as it gets.
And I don't ever want it to be as good as it gets because then it's all downhill from here. I like that quote. I think it was Earl Nightingale who said, success and happiness is the gradual realization of a worthy ideal. So if you think about that, it's not the realization of that worthy ideal.
It's not like IPO-ing with your company or it's not, you know, winning that lottery ticket or it's not, you know, getting to certain milestones. It's the journey, the gradual realization of that, in very key words here, worthy ideal, worthy goal. So think about that, Fire Nation, and revel in that. So I keep hearing this raised, Greg.
Knowledge, entrepreneurship. What the heck is knowledge, entrepreneurship? I guess it's one of those things like the creator, the influencer, that's slowly evolving as people are, like the industry is kind of creating it. But I think it's someone who's got, or an entrepreneur, who's either pursuing their passion, and they're trying to make an impact in the world, but they're doing it not necessarily with any business model, but with the idea of sharing what they're great at, sharing some area that they have knowledge or passion and trying to help others with that.
And, you know, I think it's partly it's about finding your niche. I mean, a wise person once said, when you try to resonate with everyone, you'll resonate with no one. I think that might have been you, John, from your book. But part of it, I think, is finding your niche because if you're educating, it's even more important to fit with the niche of people or community.
Part of it more and more now, there's an evolution in the space of moving towards community in that a long time ago, it used to be okay to have like a PayPal button and some downloadable zip files. And now we're, you know, then we went to more like gamified and engaged. And now I see people are almost starting with the community and often even starting with a social account before they go to a website. And then another really big thing about the knowledge entrepreneurship, I think, is the best knowledge entrepreneurs are really focused on delivering results.
They want to. It's not just about build a business, create revenue. They care about delivering an impact of results. And they realize that that's part of the flywheel that brings people back to work with you again, to work with you more and to tell all their friends to work with you.
So it's often about finding the niche, building the community, delivering results, and then all around that, sharing what you're good at, your knowledge, your passion to have an impact. And I do love just that whole concept, Fire Nation, that it's not about selling stuff per se, but it's about selling skills. And when you really think about that, now it's about you developing the knowledge, developing the skills. You can then turn around and, of course, provide solutions to people who have real problems.
So let's talk about monetizing this expertise, these skills that we can acquire in this new world that we live in. I mean, let's be honest, it's post-pandemic. We don't really know what's coming in the future, but, you know, let's talk about what it can look like for us to monetize our expertise now. Learned a lot over the years about talking to investors, and it's a good way.
What I found is the more I think about talking to an investor or pitching the company, the more the company becomes better or our business or our own ideas. So I would encourage, you know, Fire Nation out there, whether you're day one of a new venture or pitch it for someone to buy the company. One of the big things I care about is, you know, what's the size of the market you're going after? And the interesting thing in this new economy, this knowledge entrepreneurship, where you're monetizing expertise is the opportunity is so massive and that it hasn't really been easily quantified, and it's growing so rapidly.
And there's so many interesting trends that are pushing it in that direction. One of the big ones is this just-in-time learning versus just-in-case. Like, I went to university. To me, that's just-in-case learning.
I go get a business degree. I learn about how to do a financial statement just in case one day I need to do a financial statement. Just-in-time is I'm working or I'm working out, and I need a skill today, tomorrow, this weekend, and I'm going to go online, and I'm going to find someone who's going to teach it to me. And that's your opportunity as an entrepreneur.
That's your opportunity in monetizing expertise is to go. There are millions of people now going online every day saying, I need to learn something now. I've got to get better at this now. And you can go and find them and serve them, and that creates a huge opportunity to monetize because you're adding value, and you're adding value at the time and the place that they need it to deliver a result.
So that opportunity is huge right now to be monetizing in this space. So I want to talk about Thinkific specifically now, because in 2020 alone, you helped over 50,000 creators craft and launched their courses. And what's mind-blowing, too, is that there's over 21 million students that benefited from that. So right now, what are you seeing?
Because your finger is on the pulse. What are the trends? What types of businesses are creating courses today? The thing that's really wild is the breath.
I am constantly shocked by the breath. We really cut across every horizontal. So the thing I encourage people to think about is you can get out there and find your niche or your specialty or your avatar. I'm literally, I think, quoting from your book.
Keep doing it. Keep doing it. Fire Nation, that's the common path to uncommon success. Keep going.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, yeah. There's the plug there. John's not paying me to do that, but I love it.
It's great. It's an awesome way to look at building this out. And there are opportunities everywhere. I see people teaching courses on pest control or, you know, preparing for a nursing exam.
Those might seem a little more intuitive, but there's also people teaching stuff on sewing, like Sew Kenji, a whole business around teaching people sewing, or online math courses for curious minds from Po Shen Lo, or building a fitness business for physical trainers and fitness professionals. So you've got someone who's good at something and good at teaching, and now they're saying, I'm going to go train the trainer. And then the ones I love to talk about, like hula hooping, or even, you know, more conventional stuff like corporate finance or painting miniatures. And it's just, I think if there's an area, the mistake, I think, would be to ask, where's the opportunity and I can make money?
And yes, you need to consider that. But the first question is, like, where's my passion, right? Where do I actually have some skill, knowledge, expertise, I've gone through a challenge, and you don't have to be the best in the world at it. By no means at all do you have to be the best in the world at it.
You just have to have your own passion in that area and create a way to find people that you can help. And I do love that, Fire Nation, the quote, you don't have to be the best at it. Because listen, you just need to be more of an expert than the people that are going to be consuming the content, the people that you will be teaching, the people whose problems you will be solving. Like when I launched Podcasts Paradise, I was not the most knowledgeable podcaster in the world.
I was pretty darn knowledgeable, but I wasn't the top, for sure. I probably wasn't the top 10% back then. But the way that I taught things, the way that I connected, the way that I promoted it and with live webinars and all these different things, I've now brought in over 7,000 people into Podcasts Paradise. For the past four years, of course, we've been using the best course platform in the world, Thinkific, obviously.
So you can see where you don't need to be the best, especially when you start. Hopefully, you grow towards being the best because you're picking a niche that you can grow and expand in and really dominate. But that's not to start that place. You just have to start, take action, learn along the way.
And we have so much coming up as soon as we get back, Fire Nation, from thinking our sponsors. One of the number one challenges entrepreneur's face is figuring out how to scale. You don't want to trade your time for money because eventually you run out of time. And when you max out your time working one-to-one with clients, what do you do?
Here at Entrepreneurs on Fire, we've been using Thinkific since 2017 to solve this challenge by delivering knowledge to thousands of entrepreneurs around the world with online courses. As a result, we've seen a huge lift in revenue without needing to trade time for money. But don't just take our word for it. Sarah Kordiner, CEO of Maine Training, was also maxed out delivering work for her clients.
Her options were that she could hire more people, raise prices, or introduce online courses to her business. With Thinkific, she's educated over 9,000 students in 131 countries and has increased her profit margin 100% from previous years, all that without trading her precious time. It's time to take your business to the next level by creating an online course on Thinkific. Visit Thinkific.com slash E-O-F.
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Head to NetSuite.com slash FIRE right now. That's special financing at NetSuite.com slash FIRE. NetSuite.com slash FIRE. So, Greg, Thinkific is now a publicly traded company.
Congratulations on the Toronto Stock Exchange. What does this mean for the future of Thinkific? And I would love you also to kind of move into a pre-interview kind of conversation that you and I had when we were catching up about your happiness hangover. First, what it means for the future of Thinkific and for others is it is massive investment by us now in the success of our course creators.
So, everything we did around the IPO is about raising money and raising brand awareness and Thinkific so that we can go out and help more course creators and help you as a potential course creator, knowledge entrepreneur, somebody who's building a business to, you know, generate more revenue in your business, build up your community, build more customizable products to deliver to your audience. But most importantly, we want to make this as easy as possible. So, all of that goes back into research and development, building out the product to make everything easier and easier for you to go and build your business. So, that's where we're kind of investing and growing.
And then, yeah, this happiness hangover, it was a weird thing. It was my wife who actually finally put her finger on it for me. And I went, it was a month and a half or so after the IPO, a month or so after, and I had a week or two of just the closest thing I could describe it as depression. And I've never experienced anything like that in my life.
I've been really lucky to be pretty well-equipped to deal with stress and things. And I was, I had this almost like two minds where I would, I had a couple of days, I walked to the end of my driveway, I stood on the threshold of my driveway on the road, I looked up the road and down the road, and I couldn't come up with a reason to just go for a walk. I'm like, there's nothing out there worth walking to. And then the other voice in my head was saying, what is wrong with this guy?
Because that's not me. But it was this weird phenomenon. And my wife sent me this article from a psychology magazine that after highs, there are often these lows. And it was just, I experienced this high of going through an IPO and having this billion-dollar company.
And for me, it was just, it was a milestone and continue the journey. We're just getting started. But something about that triggered something even biologically in me that was like, okay, now you need to come down and take your beats and almost experience this low afterwards. It was a weird thing to experience.
Talked a little bit with you as well about things that I've experienced similar. And the example that I actually gave you on our interview chat isn't even as good as one that just came up for me when you were sharing that. But for me, wow, this was a doozy, I will say. So I was an officer in the U.S.
Army for eight years, and I came back and went to law school. And I can remember being so listless during my first semester of law school, so apathetic. And what really was the moment for me, Greg, like your moment of being at the threshold of that driveway and not even thinking there's a place to walk to, worthy of walking to? I was watching my favorite team in the world of any sports, the New England Patriots.
I grew up in New England, and I used to live and die with this team. Like every first down was a touchdown. You know, every loss was devastating, and the highs and the lows were amazing. And I loved it.
And I was watching the game, and I could just care less. I couldn't care if we won or lost. I didn't even understand what people saw in sports anymore. And it was just like, what is even happening?
Why did I even need to care about this stuff? Who cares? This is so stupid. And I was like, whoa, whoa, something's up with you.
And I was like 27 years old at the time. And it took time, but over time, I identified it as PTSD. Like I was identified with PTSD. I was going through depression because of that, because of my time in Iraq, you know, war for a 13-month tour of duty.
And so I resonate, man, with that feeling of, you know, being apathetic and listless and just like not even understanding, like, why you're feeling of it, because I didn't understand it at the time. And so this is real, Fire Nation. Some people have experienced this. You know, we kind of mentioned briefly, you know, women experiencing postpartum depression and not understanding why, because they were so excited to have a baby.
And there's, like, there's things out there. So, you know, emotions are real. So if you're dealing with something right now or you have in the past or you do in the future, just realize that likely almost everybody who you've looked up to and admired who has achieved success has gone through this because it is just the rollercoaster of emotions that we have as human beings. So, Greg, let's move on because we have some things I do want to talk about today.
But you recently launched the Thinkific App Store. What the heck is that? And why should Fire Nation care? So the App Store is the next step in a long journey of what we've been working on at Thinkific, of being two things, a couple of things for you, for anyone who's looking to create courses or build a business.
And one of those is we want everything to be super easy. And we want to give you everything in one place that you need to create and grow a business around your knowledge or expertise or passion. But also recognizing that as we see the successful course creators, the ones who care about this, the ones who start to grow their business, the next step for them when they got that easy mode up and running is they want to start connecting to other tools. They want to start customizing as they scale.
They have a vision for their product. And we don't want to in any way constrain that. And so we've always been about having a very open platform, open APIs, which allow you to connect to other tools. And now the App Store, which makes it sort of one click to connect to other tools.
And that's just getting started. We're going to add a lot more to it. But really, it's about saying you get everything you need here to get up and running and get going and build a business. And then anything you want to connect to, any niche functionality that you need, you can connect to that through the App Store and add in new functionality.
We even see some clients building their own functionality and then selling it through the App Store. So it really allows you to do some really niche things like special ways of gamifying things or special ways of engaging with your community or special ways, unique ways of marketing. And it's kind of thing that maybe not all of our customers want it, but if you want it and it's specific and unique to you, then the App Store is a place where you can often go and find that special unique element that you want to add to your business or connect to your business. So let's end with a bang, Greg, because I want to talk about how Fire Nation specifically can start becoming a knowledge entrepreneur.
What would you just recommend in general for our listeners to take that first step? The first thing really is to dive in and start. And this goes back to the point even where we started around success and failure and that gradual journey is you got to get on the journey to see that. So if you are, even if you're, you know, most of you probably have some kind of a business or something going, but if you're looking to add that knowledge of entrepreneurship, if you're looking to take something you're good at or you have a skill at or you're passionate about or your skills and start selling them or building that around your business, then dive in and get out there and start delivering it.
The best entrepreneurs I've seen in the space, the one that are most long-term successful and really build something, they delving quickly at the beginning and they started offering something and it was a little bit scary and it was a little bit uncertain and there were some failures along the way, as opposed to the ones who said, you know, I'm going to go and work on this privately for a year before I launch something. I think the big thing is... Just dive in, get something out, start showing it to even five people and then you can build it from there. Greg's quoted me a couple times, Fire Nation, which of course I appreciate.
So I'm gonna end this with a MLK quote, Martin Luther King Jr. You don't have to see the whole staircase to take the first step. In fact, if you think you see the whole staircase, you're just kidding yourself because life will always adjust and pivot to know you to figure new things out. So just take that first step.
And Greg, what's the one takeaway that you wanna make sure Fire Nation really gets from everything that we talked about here today? And then we're gonna give a call to Action Fire Nation, which is thinkific.com slash EOF. I'll tell you more about that in a second and then we'll say goodbye. One takeaway I think is that if you're listening to this, if you've been listening to EO Fire for a while, there is something in you.
You wouldn't be listening to this if there wasn't something in you that you wanna share with the world. And so I would just encourage you to recognize that it's there and to go and get it out there and share it with the world. Oh, it's there, Fire Nation. And one thing you know that I love is number one, I've known Greg for years and years and years now.
He's been to my place in San Diego. I've been to his place in Vancouver. I mean, we built a friendship up over the years and then that friendship turned into a partnership when Thinkific said we wanna come in and sponsor Entrepreneurs on Fire because we know Fire Nation is the perfect audience for what we're doing. And so we just finished our first one year together as sponsors and now as partners.
And now we just entered into a second year, a full year of this. So you'll be hearing a lot more from Thinkific in the upcoming years of Fire Nation because it's a fantastic partnership. We are proud not only to use Thinkific for our courses, but to recommend that you do as well because they're simply the best and they're going to continue to be the best. Kate has so much fun using all the Thinkific tools that have recently come out and now that they're a public-related company, there's gonna be no shortage of funds for them making their products better and better and better for you, Fire Nation, for your customers, clients, and students.
So make sure you visit It's free for you to sign up and look around for a little while. You'll be blown away by their awesomeness. And Greg, thank you for sharing your truth, brother, with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.
Thanks so much. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Greg. And Fire Nation, what can 3,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you?
How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle that you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs and you can get it all in place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side.
With visibility and control of your financials, inventory, HR, e-commerce, and more, NetSuite is everything you need to grow all in place. And right now, special financing is back. NetSuite is offering a one-of-a-kind financing program today. Head to NetSuite.com slash Fire to learn more.
That's special financing at NetSuite.com slash Fire. Fire Nation, it's time to stop trading time for money and start reaching more clients and making a bigger impact. And you can do just that with online courses. Try Thinkific for free today at Thinkific.com slash E-O-F.
That's T-H-I-N-K-I-F-I-C dot com slash E-O-F.