Learning AI Will Be Lead by Creators | How to Get Ahead with ThriveCart CEO Ismael Wrixen

0:00Ian Shepherd:In the latest episode of The Business of Creators, I speak with Thrivecart CEO Ismael Wrixen about their new 2025 Creator Economy report. We're expecting it to reach about$600 billion by 2030, up from the$250 billion or so in 2023. Ismael shares some huge numbers about the transactions on the platform. We do about$2 billion a year in terms of payments. We sell well over 10 million products a year on behalf of our customers. along with what it takes for creators to be successful. I would say the specialization is mandatory at this stage for those kind of seeking to carve out a piece of the new order for themselves.

0:39We definitely see some things that people do to stand out. And the big one is always offering something for free, be that documents, courses, webinars, but really kind of demonstrating value first and foremost.

0:53Ian Shepherd:If you're wondering where the creator economy is heading in the next few years, you definitely don't want to miss some of the ideas in this discussion.

1:05Ian Shepherd:So Thrivecart just released the 2025 creator economy industry report. Can you tell us some of the big trends that you saw in there? One of the big trends that we're seeing, obviously, is the sector is growing. I mean, we're expecting it to reach about$600 billion by 2030, up from the$250 billion or so in 2023. You know, AI adoption is definitely kind of shaping part of that. You know, we're seeing, well, we're expecting 30, you know, 39, 40 % of workplace skills are going to be obsolete or retooled one or the other. Different companies calling it different things. Accenture recently have gone through a retooling exercise with 11 ,000 of their staff.

1:45So really, you know, there's a huge opportunity for both kind of companies and individuals to, you know, be a part of that growth. So companies, you know, we have seen up to 2023 training budgets, you know, were falling. That may have come out of the back of, you know, the pandemic and lots of other things and, you know, in office, out of office and kind of really starting to lay the new groundwork, you know, pre-AI, I would say. Certainly the growth we've seen in AI over the past kind of couple of years. But we are kind of seeing that trend reverse now. And, you know, one of the interesting pieces within that is the external, you know, learning and training is going up.

2:22I mean, that's up about 23 % at the moment. So we're definitely seeing, you know, some very strong and positive indicators in terms of the kind of the sector in general. And then as part of that, niche creators, you know, they're the ones that really stand to benefit the most. I mean, they see, you know, quite a lot more engagement, the kind of the more generic creators out there. And these are the ones that, you know, certainly will potentially stand to benefit from, you know, a lot of this kind of retooling and general growth that we expect across the next four to five years.

2:54Ian Shepherd:Excellent. Well, I'm really excited to get into some of the detail of this. Now, I know as a business, you process over$2 billion for creators. What patterns stand out for you from that data? Yeah, that's right. So we do about$2 billion a year in terms of payments. I mean, niche creators, they're definitely the ones that outperform. I mean, there is a lot of noise out there. So I would say that the more niche you can get, the better. but just because of that noise we definitely see some things that people do to to stand out and the the big one is always you know offering you know something for free you know be that you know documents courses webinars but you know really kind of demonstrating you know value first and foremost before getting people into kind of you know cycles so you know then you can certainly go into courses upsells subscription memberships you know owning the audience things to increase kind of the lifetime value of a customer over time.

3:47And then obviously you can use a platform like ours to really kind of dive into automation, check out optimization to kind of get those higher conversion rates and boost average order values. Things that, you know, the creators that are most successful are the ones that kind of go super niche, but also kind of really try and demonstrate value, you know, ahead of potentially selling something to people with a view of long-term subscription and memberships being kind of the ultimate goal.

4:13Ian Shepherd:Makes absolute sense, yeah. And what do you see as Thrivecart's biggest differentiator in the ecosystem of like Kajabi, Teachable, Gumroad and the other platforms out there? Yeah, so, you know, the thing with Thrivecart, and there are lots of, you know, fantastic platforms out there. But, you know, first and foremost, we are a payment and checkout platforms. You know, as you mentioned, we do about$2 billion in annual sales. And what we get from that is really kind of absolutely no weak links. The last thing you want to do is put all of this time and effort into, you know, getting somebody in front of your, you know, creating the product, getting somebody in front of the product, be that through organic or paid channels or, you know, the, you know, the chat GBTs of the world now, which I'm sure we'll touch on.

4:53But, you know, the last thing you then want is, you know, you're not to have a kind of optimized payment experience and also not to be able to offer certain other things along the line, like upsells, downsells, pro rating, multiple bumps, all the kind of things that could, you know, increase average order value. So that is kind of how the business started. And we've certainly kind of added, you know, over time, we have all the everything else that the others have that you mentioned there as well, in terms of, you know, LMS platforms and affiliate platforms and no code drag and drop website builders and all of that kind of stuff.

5:26But really, the core is the payments. And because of that and because of the volume that we do, we've been able to, you know, go to our partners, you know, kind of unique to the kind of ThriveCard experience, which means the higher conversion rates, better tooling, and some of the newest tooling as well that isn't available off the shelf. But it also means better security, cybersecurity, obviously, as we push further and further into AI is going to become even more prevalent to platforms like ours. So kind of those controls, the AI controls, the fraud preventions, these are things that our platform absolutely excels at.

6:06And also for our customers, I would say that we have scale. So we sell well over 10 million products a year on behalf of our customers. That could be digital products or physical products. So a lot of platforms don't do the physical product side. They kind of leave that to the Shopify's of the world, but we certainly do. And because of that, it means that you can trust that our platform during a heavy period of volume or a Black Friday or whatever else it might be, we can certainly handle it because you know as i said it is the kind of core of what we do um and you know because of that and because of our volume we don't feel the need to do things like take a revenue cut you know of uh you know of kind of sales or kind of i think people put it in as kind of additional payment processing fees i've seen them anywhere between five and fifteen percent of sales which for a creator especially just getting started that's a huge sum to pay, we kind of see that is a is better to leave that in the hands of the creator and really kind of leave them to kind of reinvest that into their own growth over time.

7:08And yeah, I'm really a big fan of a rising tide lifts all boats. So kind of that's the ethos that we like to go for. So certainly we are the all in one we have the LMS thing about over 12 million students enrolled, tons of integrations and things. But I would say like the big thing for us is we're here to help people make their first dollar, make their first seven figures, eight figures and beyond. And because you can either use our own platform or embed us wherever you want to go, Thrivecart can always be part of your stack, irrespective of how big you get over time. Again, really kind of focusing on the fact that we bring the best payment solutions to those seeking it.

7:48Ian Shepherd:That's great to hear. And I mean, there's so many transaction types and emerging product formats. And for the creators listening, Is there anything you think is underrated right now? I think overall, one thing I would say is like people are willing to spend more than you might necessarily think. The first sale is definitely the hardest, but then kind of getting people into that kind of membership cycle, you know, high ticket events as well. I mean, we see people go from free products to low tier membership to mid tier membership to four or five, you know, figure ticketed events for masterminds and those type of things.

8:19So really kind of, you know, those that format is tried and tested, but not enough people, I would say, kind of go the full way with it, because sometimes there's a perception of, you know, things might be things might get, you know, too expensive over time. But there are always people who are kind of hyper focused in their own development and their own learning. And if you provide a solution, you know, that that is kind of positioned well and really does provide value, then, you know, there's certainly, you know, a lot of people willing to jump on those. really kind of the idea for anyone is kind of get to the point where you're kind of you know running a community that's good for kind of increasing the engagement of your you know of your products in front of your own audience obviously but then on top of that you know it keeps that audience captive and then it makes it a lot easier for you to you know potentially sell future things to them you know over time so instead of starting every new product with zero or just an email list you know of past you know customers for example you have an active community there to jump straight into and that community will give you really really good feedback you know as you go as well so everybody's in it together you know the community all benefits when the product solutions the engagements interactions you know are very very high quality so they also become you know very very good advocates you know of products as well really kind of you know you know i would say that you know taking that community focus for the longer term engagement is the piece that really differentiates really successful creators from those that are not quite so successful.

9:45Ian Shepherd:That's really fascinating to hear. And where's your business focus for the next three years? Are there particular tools or integrations that you're most excited about? I think, you know, the face of the internet is changing now. So I mean, at the OpenAI demo day, this just happened, you know, they've announced their new version of the app store, which I think had a couple of iterations now but for the payment space you know in general yeah it's definitely going that route that there are you know stripe has recently announced that they've been working with open ai to bring payments directly onto the platform we're going to be working with stripe on that to kind of bring that through our platform you know very soon as well i think you know the kind of learning management side of it's kind of the student kind of content management will be in the very near future, very easy to digest through things like this app store that has been announced and lots of others that will come as well.

10:38Agent payments on the protocols around that have recently been defined, released, and we're starting to see utilization of that too. So I think agent to agent payments is going to be very, very important going into the future as well. And then for us as a business, I mean, integrations, yes, I think we have over 50 of them now. often to have direct integrations plus zapier and we will add more over time but for us as we are seeing you know the possibilities of you know what can be done with ai now we're we actually bring kind of ai design tools ads platforms auto webinar autoresponders and a new lms to market ourselves so probably relying a little bit less on you know integrations but we have plenty of them as it is and i think for us in the business in general we are certainly going to lean very heavily into kind of the marketplace idea so not just helping people kind of facilitate highly secure and successful payments and utilize our platform and all our kind of martech and other tools to do that but also starting to provide a captive audience through kind of places like you know chat gbt open ai but through our own means as well just because we've sold you know i think it's close to 70 million uh you know products at this stage we have a huge amount of people in our own ecosystem so taking our own advice we are really going to be kind of doubling down and focusing on the people that we have within that ecosystem and doing more with them.

11:59Ian Shepherd:Wow, that's great to hear. Lots in the pipeline then. So let's talk about it from a creative perspective. And you sort of touched on this earlier, but why do you think specialization has become almost mandatory for creators in 2025? And how can new creators sort of find their niche without boxing themselves in too tightly? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, AI is definitely driving a huge amount of generic content. And it's only, you know, natural until we get to you know kind of super ai everybody's going for i mean that is going to be you know a lot of what you get there so i think it does give people the opportunity to you know specialize and it gives people the opportunity to talk from like actual experience and if you don't have experience go get the experience you know it was i think mark hubert at some point in time said something along the lines of you don't need a college degree anymore everything you have is on the internet and that is you know as true today as it's ever been so i think certainly you know specialization it is now kind of like i said mandatory as we kind of touched on at the top of the conversation you know corporate training individual kind of you know bestment learning it is going down that route as well so i think people need to kind of you know certainly lean into it and it will become more and more important as more and more generic content is put out into the universe so yeah people are definitely paying all kind of interested in paying for that of quality depth solving a real problem um you know so i would say that the more niche and like the micro niches like you know adhd for entrepreneurs or burnout recovery or those type of topics are things that kind of in a real giving a real solution to a real problem and you know for people you know who that is you know useful and applicable to they're you know the type of people that you can you know certainly offer something to get into a community and provide you know long-term value to so yeah i would say the specialization is mandatory at this stage for those kind of seeking to carve out a piece of the new order you know for themselves really interesting and the report also highlights creators like miss excel who built empires around sort of one specific skill cat's actually been on this podcast why do you think micro niches sort of command sort of three to five times higher rate yeah that's a great example actually i think in the first 24 hours of that launch, it was$50 ,000 or more.

14:11And now it's kind of consistently seeing, you know, six figure months. So I mean, that's a fantastic, you know, story. And the good thing that I like about that is kind of touched on the previous point, it's solving a real problem when people need, you know, an answer the most, but it's also a very big topic that can be subdivided into many, many sub niches, sub niches, too. So it touches on kind of a very unique case where you can get very specific, but in a very broad range of, you know, subcategories there as well, which just gives that brand the ability to kind of keep growing and keep engaging over time.

14:43But yeah, I think it comes down to people need a real solution to a real problem. And if you are providing to them at the time when they need it the most, that's when you're going to see those kind of, you know, higher rates of three to five times, you know, that you mentioned this, That is a winning formula and one that certainly Miss Excel has absolutely perfected.

15:04Ian Shepherd:From a creative perspective, is there a way to sort of test and validate whether their niche is scalable before they go all in? Yeah, I mean, there's a few kind of schools of thoughts on this. I mean, starting, you know, small digital product free, it could even be as simple as a template or a mini course or something like that. then you can go really really deep and use like you know analytics tools like ours to kind of measure conversion rates retention upsell rates downsells all of the good stuff that goes into that but really i would say kind of iterating quickly before scaling up finding that market fit um and speaking to customers that's the thing i mean the data will show you you know certainly a wealth of information but also just having those conversations with people and you tend to find that you know if people end up becoming a customer they don't end up becoming a customer or student or whatever it might be, they might still and often still have the time of day to have a conversation about, you know, what they did like and what they didn't like.

15:57So often just asking is a very kind of simple, direct way to do it, but an underrated way of doing it as well. We've certainly seen people on our platform, you know, who are now running six, seven figures, put out a multitude of, you know, these kind of mini courses, templates, etc. Once they start to see traction then they actually build around that so we would also always say kind of don't feel like you have to create everything from start to finish um you know before actually kind of getting ready to launch something because you might just end up getting in your own way and ultimately not not get anywhere so the feedback you're going to get from customers you know is the best validation possible so the more of that you can do and the faster you can do that the better and now obviously you have all the ai tools and everything else to to help build out these offers uh you know once you figure that out.

16:43So if anything, more time can now be spent on the validation stage, and doing as many of those, you know, iterations as you can, before then kind of diving into, you know, a full build out of a six months, 12 months, two year course or program, because that bit has certainly been shortened in terms of the tools now available to do that.

17:02Ian Shepherd:Excellent, really good advice there. So it's 2025. Let's talk about AI and the future of work. I know the report, you mentioned earlier, actually, 39 % of workplace skills are set to be obsolete by 2030. Do you think creators are the ones that are best positioned to retrain the workforce? Yeah, I definitely say that. And actually, the way I mean, this is my personal opinion is that, you know, the workforce is now going to be judged on skills, not necessarily experience. And I think those those can be kind of two very, very different things. There are certainly situations where somebody is in a position because they've been in that position for in that company for 5, 10, 20 years, and it's the natural progression, you know, of a hierarchy, whereas, you know, with all of the, you know, AI tools and other things that we have now.

17:46Now it's a case of what skill do you actually bring to the firm? And can that skill be done better by somebody else with different tooling? Or can it just be done by tooling? I think now kind of really getting back to meritocracy. And yeah, creators, you know, are definitely faster, more agile. As we touched on, there is a lot of noise, you know, standing out. And companies will start to invest, you know, very, very heavily, in identifying the top ones there. But businesses really just want practical ROI-driven skills. Currently, creators can deliver that, and there are enough creators out there that it can match the kind of scale that is needed.

18:23Going forward, it will be a case of what happens to that 39 % number and what happens after 2030, but certainly for the next four to five years, creators are definitely the ones that are the best place to fill that space.

18:35Ian Shepherd:One of the other stats that jumped out to me was that the report highlights that universities meet only 0.2 % of AI learning demand. Do you think this is like a once in a lifetime opportunity for creators to become educators around AI? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, even OpenAI themselves have now launched their kind of education and certification plans. And I think that it's because the numbers are so big. I mean, 57 million Americans want AI skills. This is just America, want AI skills, but fewer than 9 million are getting it. So certainly there has been a push in multiple countries through kind of formal education systems to do more.

19:12But for those universities and beyond, it might be a little bit too little, too late as they kind of start to get into the workforce. So that kind of creates a huge opportunity for that kind of personal development and kind of corporate development that we've been speaking about. But yeah, I mean, the generations behind that who are going earlier in the education system, that may differ greatly. and you would imagine it would as well as kind of you know that more and more investment is going into these kind of you know ai skills but certainly kind of where we are today you know those joining the workforce they are being you know underserved in certain situations and that's really where kind of you know that kind of huge opportunity comes uh you know for the creators out there willing to

19:54Ian Shepherd:fill the gap great well isma it's been fantastic to learn about thrive car and the rapport before we wrap up i just wondered a couple of questions if you had to bet on one creator economy sector to grow the fastest over the next five years. It could be something like wellness or education or personal growth. Which would it be and why would you choose that? Yeah, I mean, today it's definitely like images and videos. I think everybody's having a lot of fun with those, but that will eventually kind of become very commoditized. And obviously, you know, I'm sure there's going to be tons around that, but, you know, we're already seeing, you know, that happen a little bit.

20:26I think that, yeah, I mean, the topic we've been touching on, kind of the education AI skills, That's kind of the next phase of kind of big demand, certainly kind of as I see it, and that huge gap, you know, being left by, you know, institutions that creators can fill. Then I think if we start to look kind of a little bit more, a little bit further out and we start to consider, well, a GBT app store, I think it's going to follow a similar pattern. I mean, ultimately, the technology is new, but that doesn't mean human behavior is necessarily new. So if you kind of take lessons from, you know, the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store and those kind of things, it is productivity apps.

21:01It is wellness apps. You know, I think wellness is going to hit$9 trillion by 2020 from like$6.3 trillion a couple of years ago. It's going to follow very, very similar patterns that what we're seeing with AI now is the kind of infrastructure layer is being built. That's probably going to be another, I mean, it will continue into perpetuity, I'm sure. But really, that will be kind of the main focus, you know, kind of agentic coding and those kind of things for, you know, in context, engineering, those kind of things for the next maybe, you know, 12 to 18 months. But after that, and you're already starting to see it, you then are going to have the application layer that is kind of the entrepreneurs out there creating products and tools and productivity and wellness have always been kind of very, very solid performers.

21:43and that kind of marries very well with the creator economy because both of those things are huge areas where tooling plus learning go hand in hand. So yeah, I would say that that would be my expectation for kind of the mid to longer term.

21:58Ian Shepherd:So many wise words in there. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to learn about the business and I'm really excited to follow the journey and see the creators really take advantage of your great platform. Thank you. I really appreciate having me on.