How Kenny Rueter conceived valuable e-commerce platform

Kajabi LLC was conceived as Kenny Rueter, co-founder and chief executive, sought his own career change from a software developer to “something entrepreneurial that gave me control of my own destiny,” he said.

One weekend he built a sprinkler toy for his kids, and soon after, other parents started asking him where they could buy one.

He started exploring the entrepreneurial opportunity and realized “the process of manufacturing, storing inventory, assembling, and shipping the product would take too much time and money for the project to be worth it,” he said.

Another idea sparked: “Rather than manufacturing the toy, what if I created a series of videos and instructions for how to build the toy, and sold it online instead? Teaching people how to do it themselves seemed like a less costly, more feasible way to bring the product to life.”

Rueter looked into building a website, setting up a payment processor, and actually selling his digital product and “realized there wasn’t an existing solution that met my needs without requiring tremendous effort,” he said.

“I was spending all my time trying to figure out how to sell the videos that I was distracted from the actual content of the videos. This opened my eyes to the opportunity for people to transform their ideas, skills, and knowledge into valuable digital products that they could sell online.”

“And so I decided to create Kajabi, the first knowledge commerce platform which would enable fledgling entrepreneurs like myself to build a business around their knowledge.”