The toy had a name before the company did. Crazy Spray: an arch of PVC pipe, attached to a garden hose, that Kenny Rueter’s sons could ride their bikes through. It misted water. It attracted neighborhood children. It prompted the sort of question that can ruin a perfectly agreeable hobby: where can I buy one?
In 2009, Rueter discussed selling it with his friend Travis Rosser over tacos. Then came the inventory, assembly and shipping. A large plastic arch is an awkward thing to put in the post. Teaching parents to make their own sounded easier. They could sell the instructions and videos, and leave the plumbing to the customer.
That small adjustment exposed a larger nuisance. Getting paid for knowledge online involved more technical assembly than the toy. The business opportunity was sitting beside the proposed business, wearing overalls. Rueter, a software developer, began working on the machinery that would let other people sell what they knew.
A programmer finds a problem worth keeping
Rueter had earned a computer science degree and written early web applications for other companies in the late 1990s. He understood the keyboard side of the equation. What he wanted was more say over the business decisions being made on the other side of it. His route into entrepreneurship included experiments before Kajabi gave that ambition a durable home.
Rosser supplied design experience; Rueter supplied programming. Their earlier Twitter scavenger hunt, Find That Tweet, had failed to become a money maker. Rueter later made a useful admission: he did not particularly need a Twitter scavenger hunt himself. Cleverness had supplied an idea without supplying the personal urgency to keep pursuing it.
Kajabi had that urgency. The distinction matters in a career so often reduced to a charming toy story. Rueter could recognize an unnecessary obstacle because he had just tripped over it. He was designing for someone whose frustration he understood without a questionnaire. The first customer was conveniently available whenever he sat down to work.
“I think of myself as the first customer.”
Kenny Rueter
The customers came before the checkbook
Kajabi launched in 2010. Its early commercial approach depended on reaching people already selling knowledge, rather than persuading the whole internet to develop a new hobby. Experienced online marketers could test the software in a business that already had an audience. A working product in those hands could explain itself more persuasively than a founder’s promise.
By the time Rueter and Rosser appeared together for an interview in 2011, they reported roughly $1 million billed to customers in five months. Their own sales were already being discussed alongside the larger sales their customers were making. Those are different ledgers, and Kajabi’s story keeps requiring the reader to remember which one is open.
There was a practical elegance to the arrangement. A teacher could concentrate on the lesson while the platform handled delivery and payment. The founders sold software to people selling expertise. Each additional business became another test of whether the system worked outside its inventors’ heads.
His preferred title for a customer: Hero
By April 2019, Kajabi was describing a team of 93, users in 120 countries and 28 million students reached. Rueter’s Impact Summit keynote traced the journey from making toys to helping other people teach. The numbers gave that journey a scale the garden hose could never have supplied.
The language around it was revealing. Kajabi called its customers Heroes. In a software business, that choice rearranges the cast: the subscriber gets the adventure, while the company provides equipment. It also makes a demanding promise. A tool that frustrates the customer has wandered into the wrong role.
Rueter’s public enthusiasm has consistently gathered around people building businesses from practical experience. That makes his audience broader than the familiar internet celebrity with a camera and a following. A person who can teach an obscure craft may have something valuable to offer long before anyone thinks to call them a creator.
Nine years before outside capital
In November 2019, Kajabi announced its first institutional financing, a minority investment from Spectrum Equity. The company had grown for years before adding that partner. The sequence is an essential part of Rueter’s career: customers had already given the business a reason to exist before institutional investors joined it.
Spectrum’s investment thesis described a familiar mismatch. People could know a subject deeply while struggling with marketing, web design and analytics. Kajabi combined those jobs in one place. Its commercial argument rested on the hours and coordination a small operator might otherwise spend managing separate systems.
For Rueter, bringing in investors also meant building the organization around the product. Finance and leadership hiring became part of the work. Growing a company eventually requires attention to jobs that offer fewer satisfying demonstrations than a new feature. The programmer who once wanted better management decisions now had a larger management problem of his own.
Capital raised and company valuation describe Kajabi. Neither is Kenny Rueter’s personal net worth.
The May 2021 financing brought $550 million at a valuation above $2 billion. Tiger Global led the round, with investors including TPG and Tidemark. The backyard project had acquired the kind of financial vocabulary that rarely fits comfortably on a toy’s packaging.
A birthday measured in shipping dates
One of Rueter’s more telling announcements arrived for Kajabi’s tenth birthday in October 2020. He used the occasion to bring back six-week development cycles. The first was called Cambria, after the California town. Celebrating meant putting new work on the calendar and making the product more useful to the people paying for it.
The town reference was affectionate and specific. Cambria’s smaller size, he explained, did not diminish its community or its businesses. He saw a parallel with Kajabi’s entrepreneurs. A business could matter enormously to its owner and customers without becoming a household name.
That is a useful corrective to the valuation story. A large platform can be built from many ambitions that remain deliberately small. The customer might want a living, a family business or more control over a working week. Rueter’s task was to make room for those different definitions of enough.
The founder returns with a partner
In 2021, Rueter moved from CEO to executive chairman, while Ahad Khan took over as chief executive. By 2025, Rueter had returned to daily leadership as co-CEO alongside Jonathan “JCron” Cronstedt. He continued to hold the executive chairman role. The return brought an old working relationship back to the center of the company.
In their January 2026 manifesto, Rueter described Cronstedt’s ability to articulate his ideas and connect with customers. Their strengths differed, and the partnership relied on that difference. Sharing the top job was a bet that two familiar collaborators could make decisions together without losing the urgency Rueter wanted.
His public product commitments made that urgency concrete: six-week cycles, announced scope and a roadmap customers could see. Publishing a promise creates a particularly attentive audience. People who depend on the software have good reasons to notice whether it arrives.
The number beneath the billions
Rueter’s August 2026 writing introduced a less comfortable figure than the usual cumulative sales milestone. Among Kajabi experts who had made at least one sale, median lifetime earnings were $3,653. The average was $122,047. A small group of very large earners pulled the average far above the middle.
Those figures describe platform earnings, without establishing an individual business’s profit after expenses. They also exclude people who never made a sale. Both qualifications matter. A company selling business tools has an incentive to tell attractive success stories; a reader deserves to understand the distribution underneath them.
The figures make Rueter more interesting than an uncomplicated evangelist for online courses. His own published argument acknowledges that outcomes vary considerably. Software can remove administrative obstacles. Finding buyers, building an offer and staying useful remain work for the person whose name is on the business.
The middle and the average
Lifetime earnings among experts with at least one sale. Bars share a linear scale. Earnings are not profit; these figures are not forecasts.
What the garden hose cannot teach
His newer argument follows the customer beyond access to information. Coaching, he writes, can command payment because another person pays attention to whether the work gets done. Consulting involves accepting responsibility for an outcome. A paid newsletter can offer judgment about what deserves the reader’s limited attention.
Those are related businesses, but the work differs. A course can explain a process. A coach can notice that someone has stopped following it. A consultant can help decide whether it was the right process to begin with. Rueter’s interests now extend across those relationships, beyond the downloadable instructions that started everything.
He and Cronstedt have also argued publicly that AI should help with routine work while leaving room for human experience and trust. It is a commercial position as well as a conviction: Kajabi sells the infrastructure for people who want customers to value their expertise.
On EveryExpert, Rueter offers founder strategy sessions about financing, product and teams. There is a pleasing circularity to it. After years spent building tools for selling experience, he has put his own experience on the counter. The original question survives, with rather more history behind the answer: what do you know that somebody else could use?