Thinkific

Thinkific is an online course platform for building, marketing, and selling learning products from one place. Courses are assembled in a drag-and-drop editor, with communities and memberships alongside them and payments handled natively. The company reports more than 20,000 teams using it for learning programs, and the platform has moved well past its origins as a place for solo creators to host video.

For a CMO the interesting use is not the obvious one. Customer education is one of the few marketing assets that compounds: an academy reduces support load, raises activation, and gives sales a credible artifact, while a certification program creates a population of people professionally invested in your product. Thinkific is a reasonable place to run that without a full LMS procurement cycle. For brands where expertise is the product, it also turns an audience into direct revenue you own outright rather than renting from a platform.

The honest limitation is that a course platform is not a growth strategy. Thinkific will host and sell what you build, but it will not tell you what to teach, and it will not fill the funnel. Teams that succeed here already have an audience or a clear educational wedge. Teams that treat launching a course as the strategy tend to produce a well-hosted product nobody enrolls in. Judge the spend against a specific outcome, activation, support deflection, or direct revenue, and not against the pleasant idea of having an academy.