Kajabi saves six figures and unlocks advanced use cases with RudderStack’s Warehouse Native CDP

Highlights

• Simplified first-party data collection from a complex set of data sources with RudderStack Event Stream
• Established a comprehensive customer 360 in Snowflake with RudderStack Profiles, enabling the data team to deliver complete customer profiles to power use cases for every team
• Used RudderStack Transformations to boost data team productivity and reduce reliance on front-end engineering
• Streamlined data quality and compliance with RudderStack’s integrated data governance tools

Overview

Kajabi is a leading creator commerce platform that empowers creators to turn their knowledge and passions into sustainable online businesses. The company offers a suite of tools to help entrepreneurs build, market, and sell digital products including courses, communities, memberships, podcasts as well as website-building tools, email marketing automation, and payment processing via Kajabi Payments.. Kajabi's platform is known for its user-friendly interface, robust feature set, and seamless integrations. With Kajabi’s all-in-one creator commerce platform, the company has helped tens of thousands of creators build and grow their online businesses and collectively earn over $8 billion in GMV.

Challenge: Limited by Segment’s rigid walled garden

Amidst rapid growth, Kajabi’s existing CDP, Segment, struggled to keep up with its evolving needs. "We were looking for more functionality from our event tracking infrastructure," explained Aaron, Kajabi's data platform leader. "Segment didn't have the built-in transformation capabilities we needed, and their pricing based on monthly tracked users just didn't make sense for our business."

Kajabi was tracking a high volume of one-time website visitors in addition to their core app users, making Segment's MTU-based pricing model cost-prohibitive. The company also required more advanced identity resolution and the ability to easily push data into their data warehouse and downstream tools. They sought to build a customer 360 with all the relevant data in their warehouse, which proved to be nearly impossible with Segment. They needed a warehouse-native solution, not a closed SaaS system.

Moreover, Kajabi's data team was looking for ways to streamline their data infrastructure and reduce the number of tools they needed to manage. With Segment, they found themselves having to rely on additional third-party services for data transformations and other essential functions, which added complexity and cost to their data stack.

Kajabi recognized that to turn their customer data into a competitive advantage, they needed a Warehouse Native Customer Data Platform that could scale with their business needs. They sought a solution that would enable them to build a solid data foundation to handle their current data challenges and enable future data initiatives.

Solution: Migrating to the Warehouse Native CDP

After evaluating several options, Kajabi decided to migrate to RudderStack, the Warehouse-Native CDP. RudderStack's pricing, warehouse-native approach, and additional functionality made it a clear winner.

"Considering where we wanted our data platform to go and where I saw some of our needs for data transformations and event movement, RudderStack seemed like a better place to do that," explained Aaron.

Migrating to RudderStack was smooth and efficient. Kajabi's engineering team completed the switch within three weeks. The RudderStack team provided exceptional support throughout the process, quickly resolving any technical challenges that arose. Aaron shared that the RudderStack team was very responsive whenever they had questions, and they even built a custom integration to ensure seamless data flow from one of Kajabi's key data sources.

The cost savings were significant, as Aaron noted, "We're saving $100,000 a year with our current contract." What’s more, Kajabi didn’t have to sacrifice functionality to achieve these savings. RudderStack’s Warehouse Native approach enables significant savings while increasing functionality. Today Kajabi is able to tackle more advanced use cases with better quality thanks to RudderStack.

RudderStack’s Event Stream enabled them to easily collect customer data from their website and all of their applications and send it downstream to every destination, including Snowflake. Event Stream feeds Profiles, RudderStack’s solution for unifying customer data directly in Snowflake's Data Cloud.

With Profiles, Kajabi can easily unify customer data from every source (RudderStack and others) to build a customer 360 with every relevant data point in Snowflake – something that was effectively impossible with Segment. Now Kajabi has an understanding of the entire customer journey and can build advanced analytics and predictive models. By powering the business with reliable, complete customer profiles, they’re unlocking new opportunities to enhance the customer experience and explore new revenue streams.

Aaron also explained that RudderStack has drastically increased the data teams' productivity, enabling them to tackle projects that were previously out of reach. "RudderStack has freed up a ton of time for our small data team. We're now able to tackle projects we could never have prioritized before, like building real-time payment risk models and delivering sophisticated analytics to our customers."

Results: Improved data governance and transformations

RudderStack's Transformations feature – which allows you to transform event data in real time with custom JavaScript and Python functions – also played a key role in Kajabi's migration. Aaron noted that the flexibility of RudderStack Transformations makes it a more powerful, superior solution to Segment Functions. The team used Transformations to create custom logic to determine which data points are sent to each downstream destination, ensuring compliance and controlling costs as the business grows.

Transformations also help Kajabi's marketing team move faster while freeing up engineering time because the ability to transform data in flight means they can effectively update instrumentation without requiring front-end code modifications.

Aaron shared that Transformations have been a real productivity booster for Kajabi, allowing them to make changes and updates without constantly relying on their engineering team, freeing them up to focus on other high-impact projects.

In addition to Transformations, Kajabi has also benefited from all of RudderStack's tools for data governance. With RudderStack's Warehouse Native approach, all of Kajabi's customer data is stored securely in their Snowflake Data Cloud, giving them complete control over their data. On top of this fundamental difference from Segment, Kajabi uses RudderStack’s thoughtfully integrated Data Compliance Toolkit, making it easier to comply with privacy regulations.

Looking ahead

Aaron plans to further leverage RudderStack to help every team at Kajabi deliver powerful customer experiences. By connecting customer data sources and leveraging advanced analytics, the company sees an opportunity to deliver sophisticated insights to help creators on Kajabi grow their businesses.

Kajabi is also exploring more ways to eliminate expensive data wrangling with RudderStack. Aaron is particularly excited about leveraging RudderStack's Transformations to continue optimizing their data flows and governance.

With RudderStack, Kajabi is building a solid data foundation on Snowflake to enable every customer data use case, including AI and machine learning. With reliable, complete customer profiles at their fingertips, Kajabi is well-positioned to develop advanced predictive models and deliver personalized experiences to their users.

As Kajabi continues to grow and evolve, the company sees RudderStack as a key data infrastructure partner. With RudderStack's flexible, Warehouse Native approach, Kajabi now has a customer data platform to support its long-term growth and innovation. They’ve solved the data problems, and now they’re unlocking new opportunities to turn customer data into a competitive advantage.

Kajabi Data Stack

Destinations: Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, Amplitude, Braze, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Snowflake, Snowflake, Webhook
Sources: Android, Auth0, Braze, iOS, Javascript, Node, Ruby, Snowflake, Webhook Source
Data Cloud: Snowflake