For the last 18 months, I've been chipping away at a digital products arm of Strategy Breakdowns.

It's called StrategyHub, and it teaches the exact research-and-hypothesis system I built over 6 years of working in strategy - the same tools, tactics, and templates that power this newsletter.

Today’s breakdown isn’t about StrategyHub. But it is about the product that powers it: Kajabi

Kajabi has always been a leader in the creator economy. They found their market wedge as an all-in-one course platform back in 2010, and quickly became the de facto default option for online educators looking to productise and monetise their knowledge.

In 2026, both sides of the creator economy look very different to 2010:

→ Creators rely on AI tools to plan, build, and launch their products

→ Consumers expect AI tools and personalisation to implement what they learn

In the last 2 weeks, Kajabi have launched 5 (!) new products that embody this shift:

Today’s riff is a collab with the Kajabi team on why the original creator economy premise is dying, what's replacing it, and how Kajabi is quietly rebuilding itself to own the next chapter.

One reason I’m particularly excited about this breakdown: it’s less playbook, more stream-of-consciousness. Something a bit different. The legends over at Kajabi wanted the sauce. Front-line observations on an industry I’m genuinely obsessed with, and living in every day.

So today’s Kajabi breakdown is ultimately a collection of scribbles and thought bubbles from the last few years of building this thing. V fun to pull together.

I hope you enjoy it too.

(Plus, Strategy Breakdowns readers get 50% off all Kajabi 6 month plans, this week only)

Enjoy.

— Tom

Lean teams now operate like ones twice their size.

This week one Slack thread closed a DTC founder's books, audited Klaviyo and rewrote 3 flows, summarised 2 vendor contracts before standup, and opened a pull request engineering had pushed off for a month.

Same employee. Four functions. 20,000+ teams in Slack and Microsoft Teams already operate this way.

"Like adding another employee. Or two."

- Krysta, landscaping owner who built 63 workflows in two weeks.

Most mid-market companies have not started with AI.

RSM’s 2025 mid-market research found that the majority of mid-market companies have not adopted AI, and a still-larger majority describe themselves as only “somewhat prepared” to implement it.

BetterBrain runs an AI Readiness Assessment built for that gap. It surfaces where AI is actually already in use across your organisation (almost always more than the leadership team knows), names the highest-leverage starting point, and produces a defensible plan you can take to a board.

You will get a clearer answer in twenty minutes than most companies get in a six-month strategy engagement.

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The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Back in 2010, the creator economy was a maximise-distribution game played on borrowed attention.

You probably know how the story goes:

But as the industry matured, it’s created space for a middle-class of creators.

A new model for indie media / education, built on 4 pillars:

The “expert economy”.

The most interesting 'creators' I follow generally aren’t the biggest ones.

But they do share those same traits.

They walk the walk.

For a decade, the metagame was "build an audience" and reach was the proxy for value.

More viewers/subs/impressions was the north star.

But that proxy is breaking because AI is commoditising top-of-funnel content, and audiences worth building have stopped rewarding volume.

They reward judgement, taste, experience, and the kind of credibility that only shows up when your own business reflects the worldview you're pitching.

That's the bet Kajabi is making.

Once a course platform → today the operating system for expert-economy businesses.

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

Think about it.

The creators you keep coming back to aren’t the ones with the biggest audiences. They’re the ones who you trust.

The marketer who teaches positioning → runs a business that is tightly positioned.

The early-stage investor teaching founder selection → has actually invested in generational founders you've heard of.

The health coach who you resonate with most → less juicy meathead, more nutrition + lifestyle + workouts that align with your aspirational self.

I think about this paradigm a lot.

Mass market + rides thumbnail/format/hook trends + 1,000,000 followers = 0 followers who consider that creator their #1 favourite creator

Niche market + always brings something unique to the table + 10,000 followers = 100s or even 1000s of followers who consider that creator their #1 favourite creator

Same goes with musicians, authors, etc

Audiences worth building may be smaller and more self-selecting, but are often far more valuable and sustainable in the long run, because those people actually share your work, buy your products, and enjoy your content for life.

In 2026, the strategy for 99% of people playing the great online game:

→ Stop optimising for the follower count

→ Start optimising for delivering maximum unique value

Many people see strategy as archaic, academic, and theoretical. It’s five-year plans gathering dust in a GDrive. It’s Harvard Business Review case studies that put you to sleep.

But after writing 150+ issues of this newsletter - I can tell you that’s simply not true.

Strategy, done properly, is research + data + hypothesis generation.

It’s taking a complex question, rapidly generating thoughtful hypotheses, and backing the best one using evidence from real data.

StrategyHub is the curriculum of that method.

A course that teaches the underlying skill so you can apply it to your own company, your own decisions, your own career.

Kajabi was the only platform I tested where the productisation work didn't fight me.

I had years of tactics, frameworks, tools, and methodology written down already.

What I needed was something that could ingest all of it, multimedia formats, package and price it in a way that delivers the underlying promise, and then keep helping me extend it as the catalogue grew.

Now, with the addition of Kajabi Cofounder, I can keep extending the catalogue.

Cofounder reads my existing content, products, audience, and pricing history, then drafts new assets that align with the curriculum. Layer in a baseline understanding of what's converting for the thousands of other experts on the platform, and it's less "AI tool" and more "strategist who already knows the business."

Some use cases I’m thinking through atm:

Launch the next product → I describe the idea, Cofounder drafts the offer, the landing page, the email sequence, and a launch plan calibrated to my list size and past conversion rates.

Add to the library → it surfaces the natural next module, workshop, or follow-on bonus based on what's already there and what readers keep asking about.

Spin up lead magnets → it takes assets I've already written (lessons, templates, etc) and repackages them as standalone freebies, with opt-in copy that pulls them into the funnel.

Sharpen what's already live → it reads existing pages, flags the under-performers, and rewrites the copy in my voice.

Build-out stops being the bottleneck.

Let’s zoom out of StrategyHub for a second.

AI is making content abundant, meaning trust is the thing that’s still scarce.

Kajabi’s bet: "infrastructure for productised trust" becomes one of the most strategically valuable products they can own in their category.

Here's the thing most creators miss though: trust is a curve, not a number.

Every interaction someone has with you is a trust transfer. The whole game is traversing the curve:

→ Social impression: "I’m aware you exist"

→ Signup: "I'll let you into my inbox"

→ Welcome sequence completion: "I'll keep reading"

→ Landing page click: "I'm interested enough to evaluate"

→ Purchase: "I trust you enough to pay"

→ Product engagement: "My trust was justified"

→ Ascension to a high-ticket offer (if you've got one): "I trust you enough to go deeper"

→ Testimonial or referral: "I trust you enough to vouch for you to strangers"

For 18 months, I've been guessing where trust was leaking on mine. Google Analytics over here, Stripe over there, Zapier somewhere else, a Notion doc trying to stitch it all together.

The new Kajabi products are aimed squarely at improving this trust journey. 2 interesting examples:

Backstage. The most trust-rich products on the internet are still 1:1 coaching relationships, and they typically live in the chaos of Zoom + Notion + Calendly links. Backstage gives them a single home, assigned curriculum, direct chat, live or recorded sessions, that feels polished, brand-native, and high-value.

(No plans to launch a high-ticket offer myself, just an interesting move for Kajabi. These programs are getting much more popular in the post-AI market.)

And then there's the Kajabi MCP, which is the one I'm most excited about.

Full disclosure, I'm a certified MCP addict so plugging Claude or ChatGPT directly into my Kajabi account to query data or build workflows is kind of massive.

First thing I’m building: A custom dashboard that finally visualises my end-to-end trust curve in one view.

TOFU social impressions → email signups → welcome sequence completion → clicks to the StrategyHub landing page → purchases → product engagement → testimonials and referrals.

My particular dashboard isn't really the unlock. The unlock is that you get to architect it however you want.

Kajabi has its own dashboards and its own UIs, and they're great defaults.

But every business is different. Different funnels, different offers, different tech stacks, different tiers. With the MCP, Kajabi becomes the underlying infrastructure for your version of productised trust. You operationalise and visualise it however your business actually works with the MCP.

That’s about it from me on this. Shout out to the Kajabi team for jamming with me. Got Strategy Breakdowns readers 50% off all Kajabi 6 month plans if you want to start building today:

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

If "manage your business through a conversation" still sounds vague, the launch demo makes it concrete.

→ A Claude or ChatGPT prompt that drafts a landing page, an email sequence, and an offer inside Kajabi in under a minute

→ The 6 surfaces the Kajabi MCP covers at launch: Pages, Emails, Offers, Contacts, Orders, Blog posts

→ The Kajabi MCP builds it, you launch it

The 2008 essay that called the expert economy 18 years early. Kevin Kelly's thesis: you don't need millions of fans, you need 1,000 true ones willing to pay you directly.

→ Why the maths works even at small scale

→ What "true fan" actually means as a definition

→ The infrastructure gap that took 18 years to close

If you only read one piece on why audience size is the wrong number to chase, this is the one.

Li Jin's 2019 macro framing from Andreessen Horowitz. Reads as oddly prophetic in 2026.

Good read if you want the macro tailwind underneath everything in this breakdown.

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