While I encourage you to read our official announcement over at our company's blog, I wanted to share my personal thoughts on the announcement.
But first, some big announcements that I won't really be touching on in this article:
- We've changed our name from Coach to Podia
- We've raised $3m from amazing investors
- We have over 7,500 customers who have sold over 100,000 products
- We're a 6-person team and growing quickly
Now that the TLDR is out of the way, I wanted to talk you a little bit about how we got here.
As I've written before, when founding Podia in 2014, I set out to start a company that would help people make money online. I didn't exactly know what I was going to build or how I would get there, but at least I had a direction.
It was very early days, and as all entrepreneurs know, you're going to go through a ton of iterations before landing on not only what works, but also what you enjoy working on.
For the first six months, it was just me, a lot of brainstorming and a handful of Sketch files, but I never lost sight of where we were heading and what we wanted to bring into the world.
In June 2015 (six months into founding Podia), the product was starting to come to life and it was a simple way for people to sell online courses from their own storefront — shoutout to Jamie Lawrence for being the first person to join the journey.
More importantly than what we were building, we were true to our simple founding principle: put the creators and their successes first over everything else.
This principle is still reflected in everything we do today, from never charging transaction fees to treating customers as members of our team.
Two and a half years later, thousands of customers, tens of thousands of sales, and millions earned, our mission of helping creators make money online and putting them first has come to life. We can proudly say that we've delivered and will continue to deliver on this principle.
We want to be a shiny beacon of hope for creators who are constantly being bombarded to sign up for the latest marketing tool or sales platform.
When you stumble upon Podia for the first time, we want you to exhale with a big smile on your face and think to yourself that there's still some hope on the Internet. That not every person is out to take money out of your pocket. That there's a platform on your side.
That's reflected in our friendly, approachable, no-BS design and marketing language. We don't want to look or sound like everyone else, because we want people to know that we’re different.
That feeling of hope is what I want to see expressed in our NPS scores and when people tell their friends about us. That's the Internet I want to do business with.
We still have a long way to go before everyone in the world is selling something digitally online, but that's the future we believe we'll live in someday.
It wasn't an easy process to get to this point, which is why I always tell entrepreneurs that persistence is the most important trait.
It's harder than ever to build a product that people love, but it can still be done if you stay true to your views and listen to your customers.
Thanks to $3m in financing, a new brand name, a new website, and most importantly, to our thousands of customers. The future is bright and we promise that we'll never shy away from putting the creators and their successes above everything else.