Kajabi

Kajabi wants to be the "operating system for human expertise," which is corporate speak for "we'll help you commodify every fragment of knowledge rattling around in your skull." The promise feels deeply existential and deeply hollow—turn what you know into what you're known for, as if identity itself is just another product waiting to be packaged and sold. This isn't about genuine expertise or meaningful contribution; it's about extracting maximum value from the increasingly desperate belief that everyone has something worth monetizing. The tagline "You already know more than you think" reads like a motivational poster designed by venture capitalists who've never struggled to pay rent through creative work.

The all-in-one platform rhetoric masks what feels like a digital sharecropping operation. Sure, they promise "lower fees and faster payouts," but every creator economy platform makes these claims while quietly skimming their percentage off every transaction. Kajabi's integration of "pricing, checkout, and delivery in one place" sounds convenient until you realize you're completely dependent on their ecosystem—your audience, your content, your revenue stream all trapped within their walls. When platforms control distribution, they control creators, and no amount of "unified system" marketing speak changes that fundamental power imbalance. The philosophical question isn't whether the tools work together; it's whether creators maintain any meaningful autonomy.

What disturbs me most is how Kajabi frames expertise itself as inherently monetizable, as if knowledge only has value when transformed into revenue streams. Their weekly breakdown of "how real experts turn experience into sustainable revenue" reduces human wisdom to case studies in extraction. This isn't empowering creators; it's training them to view every skill, every passion, every hard-won insight through the lens of market potential. The platform doesn't ask whether your expertise should be commodified, only how efficiently it can be processed into profit. There's something profoundly sad about a system that can't conceive of knowledge existing for its own sake.

The user experience feels designed to manufacture urgency around monetization rather than support genuine creative development. Before you can even explore the platform properly, they're collecting email addresses with promises of "practical ideas you can actually use"—the kind of hustler language that reduces creativity to productivity hacks. Their emphasis on "nurture trust, and turn interest into revenue" reveals the transactional nature of every relationship they're helping you build. Your audience becomes a funnel, your expertise becomes content, your creativity becomes a business—and Kajabi takes its cut from every transformation. The automation tools aren't serving art; they're serving conversion rates.

Most creator economy platforms at least pretend to care about the creative process, but Kajabi strips away even that pretense in favor of pure business optimization. They're selling the dream of turning knowledge into recognition, but what they're actually offering is a sophisticated system for turning creators into small business owners—with all the administrative burden and market anxiety that entails. The philosophical problem isn't that the platform doesn't work; it's that it works exactly as intended, transforming human expertise into standardized digital products. For creators looking to build something meaningful rather than something profitable, Kajabi offers all the wrong solutions to questions you probably shouldn't be asking.