Thinkific | How one of the Top 10 Creators on Thinkific, Mina Irfan, Simplifies Her Business Using TCommerce

Mina Irfan founded Universe Guru and has been teaching courses on spiritual and life advice through Thinkific ever since. She was one of the top 10 Thinkific Creators in 2021, even with a small team and only using a couple of platforms to manage her business. With the success she has achieved, Mina wants to share her advice on how to create a profitable and sustainable business.

Find out more about Mina’s tips on creating a scalable business and take away actionable strategies that you can implement for yourself.

Related: TCommerce: Less Time on Admin and Selling—More Time Teaching

Mina’s 4 tips to build and grow a successful business

Mina started building her brand by launching a Youtube channel 11 years ago where she focused on giving spiritual and life advice, and then later pivoted into her current journey as a life coach. Not long after, Mina launched her first course on Thinkific under the name Universe Guru. As someone who personally experienced childhood trauma, she aims to help others heal through her work.

Being a Course Creator and business owner for over 3 years, Mina has narrowed down 4 tips she has learned over the years that will help you scale your business.

1. Simplify your tools and integrations

One of the main lessons Mina has learned over the past 3 years is the importance of having a simple, but powerful toolset.

Mina, unfortunately, learned this the hard way. At the beginning of her journey as a Course Creator, Mina experimented with different systems to help her business grow. A mentor strongly suggested using a third-party tool to create her sales page. She purchased the platform and invested many hours and dollars to get it up and running—even hiring extra staff to get the sales page professionally designed.

Unfortunately, this tool wasn’t useful and her sales did not improve as expected. On top of that, her students complained that the sales page was difficult to navigate, and they were left confused about where the purchase button was. Mina also continuously ran into technical problems with the integration which took a lot of time and energy to fix.

Mina recommends Creators keep business operations simple and lean by focusing on using a couple of core integrations. That way there are less complications, confusing funnels, or tons of moving parts where things can go wrong.

Wondering what Mina’s core tools are to run her business? Here’s her top 3:

Mina uses Youtube to drive organic leads. She hosts YouTube live sessions and posts valuable video content with them all directing to the Thinkific sales page where students can purchase her courses.
She also uses Zoom to conduct live coaching sessions with her students.
All her course content is hosted on Thinkific and Mina uses TCommerce, Thinkific’s suite of integrated sales and business management tools, to process payments and optimize her marketing. The benefit of TCommerce is that you get more tools that are free and integrated into the platform.

2. Boost sales with discounts and incentives

Sales vary and fluctuate depending on different external factors that Mina is not in control of. However, she can always boost sales even during slower periods or busy times in her personal life when she doesn’t have time to create content.

Mina recommends offering discounts and incentives on your products for your students. Discounts can attract students that are price conscious or don’t have the ability to pay off a huge sum of money at once.

Here are several effective ways that Mina offers discounts and incentives:

Create time-based flash sales. This creates urgency and students will often buy more than one course. This works the best when the discount is associated with a holiday or a significant day to you, like New Year, Black Friday or during your course anniversary etc.
Offer a discounted product as Order Bump: Order Bumps are upsell offers embedded into the checkout that your student can add to their order with one click. You can offer the second course at a discounted rate—your student will see the strikethrough price and understand that if they buy the second product now, they will save money. The Order Bump feature is only available to users on TCommerce.
Create course bundles at a discount. The reduced price allows students to purchase more courses at once and will help increase the average order value. Mina offers many bundles targeting different needs, like the University Bundle.

3. Offer an exclusive tier on your products

On the contrary side of discounts, Mina recommends that offering more exclusive and higher-tiered access to your products is a great way to scale your business. There are students who don’t mind paying the extra money for the full VIP experience. They want more time and energy from you, and you should take advantage of that.

Mina offers VIP options for some of her courses, like the Rich Babe Mastermind in Hawaii. The course was originally 2 days but Mina added a third day for exclusive dinner with her for an extra cost. Mina explained that those who choose the VIP experience usually tend to stay, which gave her a push in terms of revenue.

4. Build a sustainable business model with TCommerce

The best advice Mina has for Creators is to build a business that is sustainable. One-time sales are great but they don’t last long, and there is a constant effort required to keep attracting them. The most sustainable business model is to build recurring revenue by selling products with monthly payments or subscriptions.

The first step is to attract customers that will pay for a subscription-based product and build a loyal relationship with them. Mina does this by being authentic, listening and genuinely caring for her students.
The second step is to make sure you have the tools needed to support a membership business. Mina uses TCommerce so she can create product offerings that are priced as payment plans or recurring payments. She can also easily pause and resume subscriptions with just one click.

Some common subscription-based products offered by Thinkific Creator are membership access to a community, monthly subscription course content, and on-going coaching sessions.

4 Reasons why Mina loves TCommerce

TCommerce is a suite of integrated sales and business management tools available through Thinkific. Products include: integrated bookeeping, checkout enhancements, integrated payment processing.

TCommerce forms the basis of Mina’s business and contributes to her success. Here are the main reasons why Mina enjoys using TCommerce:

1) A simpler business: By using TCommerce, Mina is able to streamline her business operations. Thinkific hosts her education platform, payment processor and sales page, meaning Thinkific is the only platform she needs, simplifying her entire business.

2) More focus on teaching and creating: Mina saves time by not needing to manage a third-party tools, and she doesn’t need to hire extra staff or train them to use multiple platforms.

Mina also saves money by not needing to pay for third-party tools.

With the extra money and time, Mina can focus all her energy on creating courses, supporting her students, and refining or thinking of new course content with as little interference as possible.

3) Best-in-class support team: Thinkfic’s support team is very responsive and easy to reach. Whenever Mina has problems with payments, the team is always ready to help her resolve them. Additionally, she loves how one support team can solve all of her problems.

Mina loves how all the revenue made from TCommerce is reinvested into developing and improving the product. She feels confident that the product is shaped to fill her needs as a Creator.

4) Exclusive access to selling tools: If you didn’t know, being on TCommerce allows you to access selling tools! This includes Order Bumps, wallet payment options (Apple Pay and Google Pay), and the ability to collect student location during checkout.

Mina specifically loves the Order Bumps. They allow Mina to upsell products to her students right at the checkout. With a large number of course offerings, it’s impossible for her to create every combination of bundles; instead, Mina can easily add a relevant course as an Order Bump, which brings more value and learnings to her students, all the while increasing her average order value.

Mina recommends that any businesses strapped for time should undoubtedly migrate to TCommerce. TCommerce helped her reduce time spent on managing payments and sales and gave her more time to focus on what mattered most: creating course content and supporting her students.

Take just 5 minutes to set up TCommerce!

Get set up in minutes with TCommerce, then you can access our suite of integrated payment processor, bookkeeping tools, and powerful selling tools for free, like Order Bumps and check-out features.

Need some help with setting up? Follow our step-by-step guide here.