What stood out most was “the team’s responsiveness and willingness to collaborate,” adding that MaxLevels was “proactive in addressing issues, receptive to feedback, and adaptable as our business needs evolved.”
How MaxLevels Built and Scaled Simon Sinek's Optimism Company Learning Platform
MaxLevels has partnered with Simon Sinek's Optimism Company, the leadership and personal development brand behind the bestselling author of Start With Why and The Infinite Game, as a dedicated hire team since 2020, building and maintaining the platform that carries live online classes, keynotes, courses, and a growing membership business. In that time, subscriptions have grown 60x, gross sales are up 44%, and total orders have increased 10%.
Key takeaways
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Nearly 6 years as a dedicated hire team (2020–ongoing), not a one-off project
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Built gamification (an interactive game between course chapters), HubSpot integration for inquiries and newsletters, and paid subscription functionality
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Migrated the platform’s analytics from GA3 to GA4 ahead of Google’s deprecation deadline
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60x increase in subscriptions, 44% increase in gross sales, 10% increase in total orders
At a Glance
- Founder
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Simon Sinek
bestselling author (Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, The
Infinite Game) and one of the most-watched TED speakers of
all time
- Headquarters
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New York, New York
- Industry
- Education, Leadership & Professional Development
- Engagement
- Dedicated hire team, ongoing since 2020
- Services Provided
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- UI/UX design
- Web development
- on-demand feature updates and maintenance
- Client Contacts
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Tina Vo, Operations & HR Manager
Lisa Vo, Engineering Manager - Stack
- WordPress, WooCommerce, HubSpot, Google Analytics 4
-
60x
INCREASE IN SUBSCRIPTIONS
-
44%
INCREASE IN GROSS SALES
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10%
INCREASE IN TOTAL ORDERS
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~6 Years
ONGOING DEDICATED PARTNERSHIP
Why This Had to Be Built
A personality-led education brand carries a specific kind of pressure most websites don’t: the site isn’t just a product, it’s the primary way hundreds of thousands of people experience Simon Sinek’s ideas directly, whether that’s a course, a live class, or simply staying current with new content. That meant the platform had to do three things well at once, teach effectively, convert visitors into subscribers and customers, and stay engaging enough that people didn’t just buy once and disappear. Getting any one of those wrong risks the other two.
The Challenge
-
01
Staying current without losing consistency
The website needed to keep pace with industry trends and evolving business needs while remaining stable and user-friendly for a large existing audience
-
02
Personalized guidance at scale
Delivering tailored guidance and support to users with genuinely different needs, not a one-size-fits-all course catalog, was a complex product problem, not just a content one
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03
Low engagement between purchases
Users would complete a course and drop off, rather than staying engaged with the platform between learning milestones
What We Built
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On-demand pages and functionality
Added new web pages and features as the business evolved, keeping the site aligned with both audience needs and new offerings, rather than requiring a full redesign cycle for every change.
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Discount coupons and promotional offers
Integrated flexible discount and coupon functionality, with specific validity windows, to support customer loyalty and conversion campaigns.
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HubSpot integration
Connected HubSpot to streamline course, event, and business inquiries, and to automate newsletter sending, reducing manual work on the marketing and operations side.
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Gamification
Built an interactive game, called Jeopardy, between course chapters specifically to address low user engagement, turning a known drop-off point into a moment that pulled learners back in.
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Paid subscription functionality
Built subscription management so the team could handle course access and user permissions directly, supporting a shift toward recurring membership revenue.
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GA3 to GA4 migration
Migrated the platform’s analytics ahead of Google’s sunset of Universal Analytics, delivering better privacy controls, data structuring, and reporting going forward.
The Results
Metric
What It Means
60x
increase in subscriptions
A step-change in recurring engagement, not incremental growth
44%
increase in gross sales
Direct revenue impact tied to the platform’s conversion and subscription work
10%
increase in total orders
Broader commercial traction across the site, not just subscriptions
Nearly 6 years
ongoing
A sustained dedicated-team relationship, the strongest signal of trust a long-term client can give
In Their Words
“They have extensive knowledge and experience with numerous frameworks and backends. I can always rely on them to fix a critical bug and find the diagnosis for it.” She noted the team improved site speed, helped launch new product and landing pages that brought in revenue, and fixed critical bugs quickly to minimize downtime.
What’s Next
Frequently Asked Questions
MaxLevels has served as a dedicated hire team since 2020, building and maintaining the Optimism Company learning platform: on-demand feature development, gamification to improve course engagement, HubSpot integration for inquiries and newsletters, paid subscription functionality, and a GA3-to-GA4 analytics migration.
Subscriptions have grown 60x, gross sales are up 44%, and total orders have increased 10% over the course of the engagement. The platform now carries live online classes, keynotes, on-demand courses, and a membership business that has become a meaningful revenue line rather than an add-on to book sales.
The two models pull in different directions. A one-off course purchase is a transaction; a membership is a relationship that has to keep justifying itself every month. That means recurring billing, access tiers that don't confuse someone who bought a single course, and a content library that gives members a reason to log in again. Running both on one platform, without either one degrading the other, is most of the engineering work.
It helps, but only when it's tied to progress rather than points for their own sake. On the Optimism Company platform, gamification was added to improve engagement across courses — the useful version is showing learners where they are, what's left, and what they've earned, which addresses the real problem with online courses: people buy them and never finish. Badges alone don't fix that.
Because inquiries, newsletter signups, and course purchases are the same person at different stages, and they shouldn't live in three disconnected systems. Connecting the platform to HubSpot means someone who downloads a resource, joins the newsletter, and later buys a membership is one record with one history — which is what makes marketing to an existing audience work rather than guess.
More than flipping a switch. GA4 changed the underlying data model from sessions to events, so existing goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking have to be rebuilt rather than ported. For a platform where revenue depends on knowing which content converts, getting that migration right mattered more than getting it done fast.
Since 2020 — one of MaxLevels's longest continuously active client relationships. The team has worked as an embedded dedicated hire throughout, shipping features on an ongoing basis rather than delivering a fixed-scope project and handing it over.
It means engineers working as part of the client's team rather than against a fixed statement of work. Priorities get set together and can change month to month, which suits a platform that's continuously evolving — new course formats, new membership features, new campaigns. For a product that's never finished, it works better than scoping each change as a separate project.
The leadership and personal development brand founded by Simon Sinek, bestselling author of Start With Why and The Infinite Game. It offers keynotes, workshops, live online classes, and on-demand courses in leadership, communication, and purpose, alongside a membership business.
Yes. We work as a product engineering partner on education and creator platforms — course delivery, subscriptions and recurring billing, member portals, engagement mechanics, and the analytics behind them. The Optimism Company engagement has run since 2020, covering both new feature development and long-term platform maintenance, so we take on new builds and existing platforms either way.
