How a lawyer's $29 LSAT course became a public ‘learning commerce’ company powering 35,000 course businesses.
In 2005, a Canadian law student named Greg Smith needed cash, so he did what a lot of students do: he taught. His subject was the LSAT, the entrance exam for law school, and his classroom was a rented room. It worked well enough that he moved it online and charged $29. That course eventually pulled in around $10,000 a month. Smith is a lawyer by training, not an engineer, so when he decided the interesting business was not the course but the plumbing behind it, he called his brother Matt, who could actually write code.
That is the origin of Thinkific, a Vancouver company founded in 2012 that today sits on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker THNC. Its software lets anyone - a fitness coach, a spreadsheet obsessive, a Fortune 500 company - build, market and sell online courses under their own brand. More than 35,000 customers across 100-plus countries now run on it, and the creators using it have collectively sold roughly $3.7 billion worth of courses, memberships and digital products.
The detail worth sitting with is the sequence. Smith sold the product before he built the platform. He knew exactly where the pain was because he had felt it himself: the checkout, the refunds, the students who go quiet, the tax paperwork nobody mentions. Most software founders start with a demo. He started with a customer, and the customer was him.
The early years were not a straight line. For roughly the first three, Thinkific pivoted, stalled and re-tried, hunting for a product and a set of customers that would stick. Greg and Matt were later joined by co-founders Miranda Lievers, who runs operations, and Matt Payne on the technical side. The company took its first small outside cheque around 2016 - an early backer was Hootsuite founder Ryan Holmes - followed by a $22 million Series A from Rhino Ventures in 2019. Compared with most software companies that eventually go public, that is a modest amount of venture money. Thinkific largely funded its own growth by charging customers, which is a harder way to build and a sturdier one.
Recording a video is the easy part. Anyone can do it on a phone. The hard part of selling what you know is everything that surrounds the video: a place to host it, a way to take payment, a checkout that does not leak customers, drip schedules, quizzes, certificates, a community where students actually show up, and a brand that looks like yours rather than someone else's marketplace. Thinkific is a no-code toolkit for that entire back end.
A creator signs up, uploads their material, points a domain at it, switches on payments, and starts selling - without hiring a developer. The platform handles the mechanics so the person with the knowledge can stay focused on the knowledge. It is closer in spirit to Shopify than to a video site: infrastructure for a business, not a place to park a file.
Thinkific's customer base splits into two crowds that rarely share a conference. On one side are independent creators - consultants, coaches, YouTubers, niche experts - who want a course business they own outright. On the other are established companies that use the enterprise tier, Thinkific Plus, to train customers and partners at scale. Nasdaq, GoDaddy, ActiveCampaign, Datadog and the data-science firm Anaconda all sit in that second group.
That mix matters. A single creator might churn when their launch fizzles. A company running mandatory customer training tends to stick around for years and pay more. The enterprise accounts give Thinkific ballast; the creators give it volume and word of mouth.
The clearest way to understand Thinkific is to compare it with Udemy. Udemy is a marketplace: creators upload courses into a giant catalog, Udemy sets much of the pricing and discounting, and the platform owns the relationship with the student. It is convenient, and it comes with built-in traffic. But the creator does not own the customer, cannot fully control the price, and is one algorithm change away from trouble.
Thinkific took the opposite bet. You bring your own audience, you keep your customer list, you set your prices, you run it under your brand. Less built-in traffic, far more control. That single fork - marketplace versus your-own-brand - has defined the course-software category for a decade, and it puts Thinkific alongside Teachable, Kajabi and Podia rather than Udemy or Coursera.
| Thinkific | Marketplace (e.g. Udemy) | |
|---|---|---|
| Owns the student list | Creator | Platform |
| Sets the price | Creator | Often the platform |
| Branding | Your brand | Their catalog |
| Built-in traffic | You bring it | Included |
For years Thinkific was, plainly, a course tool. Over time it widened. Communities added branded discussion spaces - threads, private cohorts, mentions, profiles - so creators could sell belonging, not just lessons. Thinkific Payments put checkout and processing in-house. There are branded mobile apps, an app store of integrations, and, since 2024, a growing shelf of AI tools: a course-outline generator, a one-prompt landing-page builder, a copywriting co-pilot, and AI-assisted email marketing.
The logic behind that spread is retention. A course, once finished, is finished; a community is a reason to come back. By adding discussion, cohorts and memberships, Thinkific gave its customers a way to sell something recurring rather than a one-off download - and gave itself a way to keep those customers longer. The AI tools point at the same problem from the other end: the biggest barrier to starting a course business is the blank page, so the platform now offers to draft the outline, the sales page and the emails, then let the human edit.
Thinkific makes money two ways. The first is familiar SaaS: tiered monthly subscriptions, from entry plans up to enterprise. The second is newer and more telling - commerce revenue, a share of the payments flowing through Thinkific Payments. In 2024 the company reported $66.9 million in total revenue, up about 13 percent. Subscriptions were the bulk at $56.7 million, but they grew only 6 percent. Commerce revenue was smaller, $10.2 million, and grew 77 percent.
The direction is clear even if the numbers are still lopsided. The more Thinkific ties its income to what its creators sell, rather than to a flat monthly fee, the more its fortunes rise and fall with theirs. It is the Shopify playbook applied to knowledge: charge a subscription, then take a cut of the register. The bet is that a creator who is making real money through Thinkific's checkout is a creator who does not leave - and one whose success shows up directly on Thinkific's own income statement.
Thinkific went public in April 2021, near the peak of enthusiasm for anything software and subscription, at a valuation of roughly $741 million. By 2026 its market capitalization had fallen to around $60 million. That swing says more about how the market repriced growth software after 2021 than about the business itself, which kept adding revenue and customers through the drop. It is a clean case study in the gap between a hot IPO print and a company's day-to-day reality.
In early 2025, in a move rare for a public-company chief executive, Greg Smith took direct control of product and R&D to move faster on AI. Later that year the company refreshed its brand and started describing what it does with a new phrase: not e-learning, but learning commerce. Same product, a sharper story - the kind of positioning shift that costs nothing and changes every conversation with a finance team. On the roadmap: agentic AI meant to re-engage dormant learners on its own, nudging quiet students back without a human hitting send.
The through-line, thirteen years on, is consistent. Thinkific keeps building the unglamorous machinery that turns expertise into a business someone can actually own - the checkout, the community, the retention, the parts nobody puts in the sizzle reel. It started with one lawyer who figured out that the software was worth more than the class. Plenty of people have since agreed.