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TL;DR (Quick Summary)
- Thinkific is two products stacked together, a learning management system and a website builder, which is why the menu feels like more than you signed up for.
- There are eleven sections in the left hand navigation. You'll use about five of them regularly.
- What Thinkific calls Landing Pages are its AI pages. What it calls Websites is the classic builder, and that's where the better converting pages come from.
- Leads, funnels and email automation are worth running outside Thinkific, because you get more control over them elsewhere.
- Build in order. Settings, course, curriculum, sales page, homepage last. Out of order is how people end up redoing a live site.
You logged in and had no idea where to start
You signed up for Thinkific to get your course online. You logged in, and there's a menu down the left hand side with eleven things in it, and you don't know what most of them do.
There's nothing wrong with you.
Thinkific is two products in one. It's a learning management system, which is the course delivery part, and it's a website builder.
Most people arrive wanting the first one and get handed both. Nobody sits you down and explains which half you're looking at.
Then you go looking for help, and every tutorial you find opens on a screen you've never seen, three steps into a task you haven't started.
Start with the map, not the build
In this video I walk you through the entire Thinkific admin interface. It's the first episode of a free 13 part series where we build a Thinkific site from scratch, in the order you actually need to build it.
This first video is the tour. Where each section lives, what it's for, and which episode covers it properly. If you already have a site, it's still worth the fifteen minutes, because knowing what you skipped is how you find the thing that's quietly set up wrong.
Products is where everything you sell lives
Courses, communities, digital downloads, coaching and webinars, memberships, categories. If you sell it, it's created here.
Memberships and bundles confuse people, and the difference is simpler than it looks. A bundle is a group of courses sold as one product. A membership is usually that same group, often with a community attached, paid for on a subscription. Subscription makes it a membership.
Two more things sit in here. Teaching Assistant is Thinker, Thinkific's AI chatbot, which lives in your site and answers student questions. And your video library is being renamed to Asset Library. It's rolling out gradually, so you may still see the old name.
Channels is your website, and one naming trap
Under Channels you'll see Websites and Landing Pages, and they look like two different things. They aren't. A landing page is just a page with a call to action on it. Your homepage is a landing page. Your about page is a landing page. Your sales pages are landing pages.
What Thinkific labels Landing Pages are its AI powered pages. What it labels Websites is the classic builder, where you design the page yourself. I use the classic builder. You'll get better design and higher conversion out of it, and we go into that later in the series.
Theme Library is where you pick your theme before you stack your branding on top. Preview drops you onto your live homepage. The mobile app and the widgets are both options I'd leave alone, the widgets in particular, because there are much better looking ways to send people from another site into your Thinkific site.
Marketing, and the parts I run elsewhere
Leads, funnels, affiliates and email automation. Of those four, affiliates is the one worth using, and episode 13 covers setting one up and managing it once people start selling for you.
The other three I run outside Thinkific.
Not because they don't work, but because you don't get enough control over them inside the platform. Your email list in particular is too important to run somewhere you can't fully steer it.
Sales is where the money shows up
Bundles, order bumps, coupons, transactions, subscriptions, group orders, invoices, payouts, revenue partners, disputes.
Order bumps are the one almost nobody turns on. An order bump adds a discounted product at checkout to lift your average order value, and it takes minutes to set up. Episode 6 is entirely about it.
Payouts is worth understanding early. Thinkific takes the payment, charges and remits the tax on your behalf, takes its fees, and what's left comes to you as a payout. That's the number you'll be reconciling, not your gross sales.
Users, Team, and the rest
Users holds everyone who ever created an account, enrolled, or bought from you. Underneath it sit groups, seat management, certificates, notification emails, student progress, discussions, assignments, quizzes and reviews.
Team is newer and it solves a problem I still see constantly. If you need to give a VA or a designer access to your site, add them as a team member and set their permission level under Roles. Don't hand over your username and password.
Analytics gives you a snapshot, including your cart to visitor ratio and course engagement. Set up Google Analytics as well and connect it. Learner Hub is your student dashboard and it's customisable.
Account is your own profile and plan. Integrations is the app store where your pixel, your analytics, your Zoom and your CRM all hook in.
And Settings is where 90% of the people who come to me have got something wrong. That's episode 2, and it's the one nobody wants to watch.
The order matters more than the settings
Here's what the tour is really for. Thinkific will happily let you build in any order you like, and the order you'd naturally choose is the wrong one. Most people start with the homepage, because it feels like the beginning.
It's the end. The homepage links to things that have to exist first.
Build your settings, then your course, then your curriculum, then your sales page, and the homepage last. Doing it in that order means you set each thing once. Doing it out of order means changing your currency after you've already taken payments, which is a very different job.
That's the whole reason the series runs in the sequence it does.
Episode 2 is the backend setup. Site details, domain, theme, payments, cart, tax codes, team roles. It's the least exciting episode and the most expensive one to skip.
Every checklist and resource from this series lives in the community, along with the settings I don't have time to say out loud on camera. Come and grab them.