LMScast with Chris Badgett

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Get WP Fusion NowIn this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett and Craig Shoemaker discuss how course designers and education entrepreneurs can boost revenue without continually pursuing new clients. The conversation is on developing more compelling offerings, enhancing the customer experience, forging deep connections, and adjusting to an AI-driven future while maintaining the human aspect.

According to Craig, one of the most common errors made by course designers is to concentrate only on making a course rather than establishing a comprehensive product. By providing only one pricing choice and neglecting to incorporate upsells, order spikes, premium tiers, or surprise bonuses that thrill clients, many firms lose money. Chris concurs that the offer is the cornerstone of any successful education company as flaws in the offer have an impact on all other aspects of marketing and sales.

The significance of looking beyond the original transaction is another important subject. Craig advises business owners to inquire, “What happens next?” following each client activity. There should always be a clear next step that strengthens the relationship, whether someone downloads a lead magnet, buys a course, or completes a program. Chris elaborates on this by offering useful tactics, such as utilizing thank-you sites to present supplementary materials during periods of strong consumer engagement rather than only instructing people to check their mailbox.

Craig also considers his own career, in which he made over $2.5 million in royalties from Pluralsight-published web development courses. Changes to the company’s royalty arrangement significantly decreased his revenue, despite the platform’s great popularity. He learned from that experience how risky it is to rely solely on third-party platforms and how crucial it is to own your audience thru email lists, lead magnets, and direct customer interactions rather than relying on the business of others.

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Episode Transcript:Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Craig Shoemaker. You can find him at craigshoemaker.net. Craig works one-on-one with education entrepreneurs to help them spot problems and opportunities they’re often too close to see their own course or membership businesses.

Craig also has a fascinating story from his own career as a course creator. He earned more than 2.5 million in royalties from web development courses and generated hundreds of thousands of watch hours. But when the company he published his courses with changed its author agreement, his royalties were cut by 68%.

That experience changed the way Craig thinks about audience ownership, platform dependence, and the idea that not all money is good money. Craig now helps other education entrepreneurs make more intentional decisions, get more value from the audience they already have, and work out where human judgment and leadership still matter as AI changes the education market.

Craig, welcome to the show.

Craig Shoemaker: Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. I’m stoked to get into it, especially with another podcaster. Craig’s podcast is The Growth Question, and you’re gonna make it easy ’cause you’re a pro podcaster- … and you’ve been creating media and courses for a long time.

But the first thing I wanted to ask you is, what do you see when you look at an education business that the owner is often too close to see?

Craig Shoemaker: That is like the question, isn’t it? Because there’s so many d- th- usually what happens with an education business is it’s usually one person. Maybe there’s a small team, but they’re having to be responsible for being a domain expert in what they’re doing marketing, doing outreach, handling the financials.

And so there’s so much surface area for blind spots that there’s a lot of opportunity there. But I’d say one of the things that I find most often comes up is the way that the, the offer is constructed. And so a lot of times what course creators will do is they’ll create a course, and they’ll put it out there and they say, “Hey, it’s available for, whatever price point.”

What I’ve found is that if you don’t have multiple options available, so maybe like different tiers, or maybe you skip doing order bumps, or you don’t have an upsell available in your funnel. Or one of my favorite things, if you don’t have a surprise, if you don’t give people something that they never saw coming to create that goodwill, that these are things that people have often either never thought about or haven’t thought about it deeply enough to be able to integrate it in with what they’re doing.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, the offer is core, and if you mess that up-

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah …

Chris Badgett: or if you have challenges with it, everything else is downstream from that. What are some more detailed offer mistakes-

…

Chris Badgett: Or gaps-

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: that you see in the patterns of the people you work with or in the market in general?

Craig Shoemaker: I think a lot of times people will– they’ll create their checkout process or their order process, and then they won’t pay attention to the question of what happens next. And you get the chance to answer that question or pose that question all through the process. So when someone opts in to maybe a lead magnet, what are you showing on the thank you page, that confirmation page?

That, that’s one of the biggest buyer intent signals that people will have is the fact that they’re like raising their hand, saying, “I want you to contact me.” And often, and I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself, is that you’ll throw up a, a standard or, kind of template thank you page and go from there and hope your email sequence kicks in.

So that’s one place where you can say what happens next?” When you get people into the buyer flow and they’re, they’ve got that momentum going, and then they’re purchasing your main course or program, whatever they came to, on the other side of that, are you pitching something different or bigger to them in terms of an upsell?

So what happens next there? But then the one that kind of hides in the shadows a little bit is that once they’ve made a purchase, and maybe once they’ve begin going through your program what happens next after that? We don’t wanna be satisfied that they just started the program. We want to create a relationship with the people that we’re working with and figure out what does that entire customer journey look like?

Chris Badgett: I love that. I think that’s like thinking through time is the biggest unlock you can do. The customer journey before they buy from you, after they buy from you. It’s not just, “I have a product, here it is.”

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: What types of course and membership business owners come to you for coaching?

What do you notice that’s in common with them?

Craig Shoemaker: So I’ve had people everywhere from medical doctors to people who help independent authors sell ads, to YouTube scriptwriters, to guitar teachers. And so the commonality isn’t in what they teach. The commonality usually is the … a question that sits behind the next decision that I have to make, especially ’cause I’m usually doing everything alone what is that decision going to cost me?”

Maybe I’ve put together this program, I’ve r- built this community, and I’ve been successful doing it, but I’m not … I think I know how I did it. Maybe I could do it again. And it’s just living within that uncertainty of saying “Okay I’ve built something and I’ve established resonance with my audience, but now I need to figure out where that next step lies and make sure that I’m heading in the right direction.”

Chris Badgett: I think that’s a backbone of good coaching programs where people hit some kind of growth ceiling. Whatever that is in terms of operations or sales or just figuring out how to move forward and scale, basically. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s awesome. I’ve seen so many coaching programs across different industries that it’s really

It’s not the beginners. Beginners need coaching, but the people that are hitting growth ceilings raise their hand. They have budget-

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah …

Chris Badgett: typically, and they’re ready to invest in themselves, and they’re humble enough to realize, “I don’t have all the answers and I need help,” and raise their hand.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

And that’s what makes working with people at that stage really fun and interesting because they have all the levers to pull. When we’re starting out and we’re beginning we’re trying to find ourselves and trying to figure out who, what sort of audience we resonate and that’s hard work.

But I found the, the way that I can help people most is when you have the, the mechanisms available to be able to say, “Okay we can at least test this idea because there’s an audience there,” or, “We can adjust pricing here because we know people are buying at this point.” And that’s what makes it fun because you can see the results a little bit faster.

Chris Badgett: Tell us the story of the 2.5 million in royalties from web development courses, and what happened there. What did the business look like at its peak? Yeah. And I know they, they changed their royalty agreement. I’m guessing this might be Udemy, but it could have been something else. What-

Craig Shoemaker: N-

Chris Badgett: What’s the

Craig Shoemaker: story?

Not Udemy. So I try to, I describe it as it was basically Netflix for developers, right? And the I was very entrenched in the tech community and knew a lot of people who… i’ve published books, I’ve written for magazines, done conference talks and when I lived in Southern California, I would build a, a, a technology talk and then go on tour to all the different user groups in the area and did all that.

So I n- I was around the people who were about the business of teaching technology to our market. And there’s a, a, a group of developers in that community that started this this company called Pluralsight, and the idea was that basically they would get the best developers they could find to build courses for the the developer community.

And what’s so cool about it is that what they did is they didn’t overlap content. So if you had the course on beginning web development, anybody who used that service all around the world was going into that course. And I just so happened to be in the fortunate position to be able to do some of the very basics of web development.

So as their audience and as their reach grew, more and more people were watching my content. And it was… I learned so much about how to build good courses, how to communicate with people, and yeah just loved doing it. But a- as most companies do they grow, and they were bought and sold a few different times, and then they decided, okay what we need to do is basically change how we’re handling the the author agreements.

And so with that change, so did my royalties. And so- What

Chris Badgett: year are we talking about? What time period is this?

Craig Shoemaker: ’22, ’21, somewhere around there. And so th- what I wanted to do was, like, okay i- instead of continuing to push through a, a system that’s changed a lot, I realized I’ve had all this experience as an author, as a speaker, as a course creator, as someone who’s built courses that resonate well with people.

I want to take my experience and help other people build their businesses in a way that can, just be worthwhile. And part of that story, part of that scene was, like, I I wasn’t in the sort of- I didn’t understand at the time how valuable it would be for me to basically just put up a lead magnet within my courses and begin to build my own audience in parallel with everything that I was doing there so I could make my own offers.

And so this whole idea of not seeing your blind spots and paying the price for it is something that I’ve lived out

Chris Badgett: So you felt that pain personally with the- Oh, yeah.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And then describe the pivot to coaching. Do you mostly do coaching? Do you still make courses? How do you… what did you pivot to?

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. So I’m doing coaching with my clients one-on-one now. I still do the… I actually got contacted recently about making a- another course there in terms of the technology stuff, and then I, building some courses and digital products within my within my business right now.

But my main focus is working one-on-one with people because when you have a longer engagement with someone, you get to know their business, you get to know their habits, and you get to know how they think. And when I’m in that position, I’m able to help orient people’s business and growth in a way that you can’t do if you just meet once and then you go on from there.

And so it’s in building those relationships that I really get to have, have an impact in what people are doing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I’m a big fan of courses, coaching, and community, and you don’t always- Yeah … have to do all three or do all three equally, but, a c- coaching is very different from courses.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

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Chris Badgett: But it… But like you said, it’s more personalized, and you can drive impact, and you have a lot more unique context to help people. Did you go the kind of individual coaching route, or do you do group coaching or a combination?

Craig Shoemaker: Right now it’s individuals. It’s all one-on-one, yeah. I’d like to do group co- coaching in the future.

It’s… I’m just gonna see how that evolves a little bit. But yeah it’s getting down into the weeds with the individual right now is the w- where I can pull those levers the hardest.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us more about the patterns and when you get into the coaching, and we talked about working on the core offer and thinking through time and customer journey.

What else are big areas where you unlock growth or get people unstuck or remove bottlenecks?

Craig Shoemaker: This is gonna sound so cliche, okay?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Craig Shoemaker: But it’s true and that is around mindset.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Craig Shoemaker: Almost every one of my clients has been, at one point or another, essentially afraid to raise their prices, change their pricing, d- or go into a different area of expert- N- not totally wildly different, but y- just mindset stuff holding them back from either creating a new part of their program.

But particularly it comes down to pricing. And- There’s I think there’s just something in that situation to where you’re the single person, you feel like everything’s on your shoulders. You don’t want to make a mistake that will adversely affect, the wellbeing of you and your family, and so there’s fear there.

And so a lot of times I’ve been able to say, “Okay we can w- we can test in certain areas we can set up different kind of boundaries, make you feel comfortable.” But for the most part, it’s usually just by facing that area of saying I’ve never charged this much before,” or, “I’ve n- I’ve never…”

Maybe, I’ve, I had one person who essentially trained his audience to expect really low prices from him, and he was sweating bullets the first time I said, “We’re gonna, we’re gonna build a high-ticket, $5,000 a person mentorship program, and you’re gonna sell it to your audience.” And I don’t think he slept well the night before he launched it, but then when he sold out, he was sleeping actually quite well.

And so we all have it. We all have those, those areas that, that require some extra push.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Super valuable. And the mindset like imposter syndrome, fear of failure, fear of success- Yeah … financial insecurity. Yeah it’s such… Nobody can escape it.

Craig Shoemaker: No.

Chris Badgett: Anybody I’ve ever talked to, no matter whether they’re in software or digital products, physical products, when you bring up pricing, it’s always, there’s all this fear and what if it breaks or whatever.

What about like funnels as an example? What kind of gaps do you see people making in terms of the funnel? More on the before the conversion, what are people just not doing or doing poorly-

…

Chris Badgett: In their funnels?

Craig Shoemaker: It’s the basics. The, the funny thing is that there’s so much information, like, being thrown at us all the time.

I think the thing that stops us from doing it is the fact that, one, one podcast will say one thing, one blog will say another, one email list will say this, and you just get… unless you really focus, that’s the, the thing that stops you. And so I would say that the, the gap is the ability to focus.

To be able to say, “Okay, I’m gonna take this one technique,” so maybe it’s confirmation or thank you pages. Okay, make sure when someone opts in for your thing, that the response that they get back, independent of the email that’s sent to their inbox, is congruent with whatever offer you want to pitch them in the future.

Maybe that’s an opportunity for you to give something generously to them at that point, and just do something different than what everyone else is doing other than, “Hey, you’re on the list. Congratulations. You might hear from me again.” So that’s one of the things. One of the other things is just being able to truly understand the progression between, okay, I have this thing that I wanna offer people.

Low ticket, high ticket, doesn’t matter. But again, that whole idea of congruence. Okay if I have a lead magnet or if I’m post- posting social content, h- how much does it make sense for them go from point A to point B to where I want them to go? Or am I just creating things because it’s fun or it’s exciting or it’s the trend or whatever?

And so it’s about being really intentional about saying, “This is the first problem I need to solve for people, and that will unlock the second problem, which is the thing that I can really provide for them.”

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I just wanna share a pro tip. Something I do that I learned is if, and this doesn’t apply to everybody, but on a lead magnet thank you page, one of the things I do is put in a little pause of five minutes before they get the lead magnet, and on the thank you page, I think the email might still send relatively quickly, but even email deliverability takes time sometimes.

But- … the basic idea is, “Thanks, your resource is on the way. While you wait, check out this thing.” And it might be, like, something further down the funnel, like a prerecorded webinar or something else. And you’re not gonna catch everybody, but it’s like the, the idea of a one-time offer, but just with- Yeah

information. And it works, and they still get the lead magnet or whatever, and they- Yeah … and it, the… I think of fast lane, slow lane, sidewalk buyers or whatever that framework is.

Craig Shoemaker: Okay.

Chris Badgett: If somebody’s on the fast lane they may be like, “Oh forget about a lead magnet. This thing further down I’m super interested in,” they just move faster through.

It’s just a fun little trick I learned that works.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But it’s stuff like that, thinking through time,

if you could have a moment, instead of saying, “Thanks, check your inbox,” or whatever “Hey, while you wait, check out this cool thing real quick.” I don’t know. It’s just fun stuff like that.

Yeah. Once you start thinking in time and shaping experience there’s just so much you can do, and it’s all about adding value, not upselling and a million one-time offers or whatever. Yeah. Although that’s good, too, but not necess- but you have to do it in alignment with what’s right for them at that stage.

Craig Shoemaker: Yes. So I love the phrasing that you’re using, thinking in time, because I think that takes out the sense of urgency in terms of I have to pitch them with all of this stuff, as soon as possible. A

Chris Badgett: one shot. Yeah. One opportunity, Eminem style.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. No multiple shots. And the way I like to phrase it for myself in my own coaching, but also with the clients I work with, is just how can we serve people the most powerfully, right? And when you use that mindset, then it’s less transactional and becomes more relational. And you can do that at scale.

You can care about people and their and their transformation even when you’re talking to a, a large number of people. But it’s the fact that the word I like to come back to is just being intentional about it and knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing for the benefit of the people you’re serving.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned relational. I’m a framework guy, so I’m dropping another one, which is, like, when it comes to marketing and sales, I see three buckets: inbound, which is content marketing; outbound, which is prospecting. Like you, you prospected to get on the show, and now you’re on the show.

Craig Shoemaker: did. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then there’s relationships, and what I find is that entrepreneurs tend to have one of those be their superpower.

Like for the work I do I’m primarily an inbound guy first, relationships second, outbound third. I do all of them.

But I think the relationship-based marketing, sales, and business is is misunderstood, and people don’t quite realize that.

So you mentioned a lot, like maybe in your own business and with your client business, if somebody wants to leverage relationships, not just s- so I get more whatever, but in a win-win format.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

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Chris Badgett: How can entrepreneurs do better-based, relationship-based growth and scaling to either optimize what they already have or bust through that growth ceiling?

Craig Shoemaker: I think that’s getting easier now than ever. Okay, so you talked about how I prospected to get on the show. Yeah. And so we were talking a little bit before we hit record about the fact that I’ve built a booking agent that runs in the background, and what it does is basically scours the web to try and look for podcasts where I might be a good fit to come on as a guest.

That’s using systems automation in order to shortcut the part of the process that would be the most painful for me, which would be doing all the searches, trying to find the fit, and all that kind of stuff. So I can just hand that over to a machine. I don’t care, right? But then when it came time for me to send you an email, I made sure that I went through and I got to– tried to get to know you from a distance a little bit.

I watched some of- … some of your interviews, got a sense of what you did, and then wrote you a personal email in order to say, “Hey, if you’re interested, I’d love to come and have a chat with you.” And so I think more and more as the world is moving towards automation, is moving towards really sterile, soulless ways of communicating, that adding in those areas that kind of show, number one I cared enough to take the time to, to value you as a person, to be able to reach out in this way.

And we can talk about that at scale in a second. But n-number two, that I literally was the person on the keyboard doing it. I think there’s a texture to that, that, that comes across hopefully at least enough for people to be able to feel it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Craig Shoemaker: And so I was just gonna say that for at the scale situation, it’s just it’s basically, being transparent enough to say “Here’s the areas of my business that are automated, that I have AI take care of,” and trust me, I do a lot of that.

Having a technology background I try to leverage as, as much as possible. But then to be able to tell people like, I’m… Customer interviews is something that I, I- is a big thing that I harp on a lot with my clients. Because when you’re teaching and you’re selling programs at scale, sure, you talk to your customers, you answer questions, you do support, all that kind of stuff.

But that’s a very distinct difference than getting on a call like this and asking very pointed questions about what’s important to them, how they found you, what they thought of the program and things of that nature. And so you can build those areas of relationship- … even when you’re working at scale, as long as try hard to make it happen.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and in a AI world, I think relationships just become even more valuable. And I think sometimes people don’t realize … Do you know Dunbar’s number or whatever?

Craig Shoemaker: No.

Chris Badgett: So Dunbar’s number is that the human animal is designed to have relationships with 150 people. It’s like the size- Okay. Yeah, I

Craig Shoemaker: have- … of a

Chris Badgett: tribe.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. Okay.

Chris Badgett: So we have, in our genetics or whatever, that kind of capacity. Yet we find ourselves in a world with social media, email lists, and all that stuff. So we’re still like our biology isn’t ca- has not caught up to our current reality. And I think the like even just shallow connections, like actually engaging in a conversation on social media with somebody you don’t know, like these shallow, the shallow network of relationships have a, hold a lot of power.

And as more automation and everything comes in, it doesn’t mean automate everything. It’s, you’re still pe- what I’m saying is the human connection is becoming even more valuable-

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah …

Chris Badgett: in an automated world.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And, and- What do you- I was just saying- Go … and we, we’ll get to a point, and we are now, but you can generate video.

And so being able to give the tells, the, like the very human tells to be able to say, like even if I’m gonna cold pitch you, to be on the podcast or to be a client or something like that, and I send you a video or whatever, it’s like just being able to connect, look into the camera and I don’t even know what the distinction is anymore but to be able to find those ways to be able to show that humanness is there is is a huge deal.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I asked somebody once, what’s the difference between a high-ticket program and a low-ticket program, and he answered with one word, and he said fidelity. And I had to look it up and see what he meant. But it’s really access. Like-

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah …

Chris Badgett: you could have $100 course, but if somebody has access to you on a monthly or weekly or whatever- Yeah

coaching call or some kind of coaching format, that’s a different product altogether.

Craig Shoemaker: Oh, 100%. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: What’s your advice for somebody, for a coach to transition from courses? In the sense that from where I sit, like, looking at AI and information, and, we have a course tool that has some community and coaching features in it and stuff, but I’m finding that courses are, just on the macro level, are becoming a little less valuable.

And that human connection, like the coaching and the community, becoming more valuable.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Not that courses are dying or dead or anything like that. They serve a place. They’re not going anywhere, just like books are still here.

But and there’s only one you if you’re a coach.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So that’s the, that’s one of the mindset things is like, yeah, I help businesspeople or whatever, but there’s already this famous business guru who said it all. But that’s not … I would be intimidated going to Tony Robbins for- … a private coaching call on personal development. I’d rather go to somebody who’s 60 that had a very similar life journey as me, even if they’re not well-known, but they’ve got what I want, and they’re, like, a kind, helpful person.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Okay. So I think there’s a couple different questions in there. So the first one would be, like, how would you move into to coaching if you’re selling courses? And I’d say it’s a really natural progression. And on my website, the the, the hero text at the moment says, “Knowledge is now free or paid for your judgment.”

The whole idea of the fact that the procedural information that we have to sell, yes, is valuable because it’s organized, and it’s tested, and it’s vetted, and all that kind of stuff. And y- I even have a thing to where you can… I’ll show you how to put an AI model in the place of you as the teacher, and you get to see how well it can teach what your, what your program is.

But the fact of the matter is that the, the facts and the procedure are just one part of it, and that is enough for some people. They can just buy your course, they can learn the thing and go on. But other people want to know what that looks like in context and like you said, against the reality of someone who’s lived it.

And so a model will be incredibly confidently wrong sometimes, and if you don’t know where those dividing lines are, then you can be set off in the wrong direction pretty fast. And so as an education entrepreneur, being able to say y- and I like getting really practical here right now, right? So let’s say you, you have a course, maybe you have a community, and you want to start doing some sort of coaching or something one-on-one.

I would say look for building the high-ticket thing first. Create something where you can serve people really powerful. Charge an amount for it that scares you a little bit but also gets you to the point to where you know that if someone goes through this time with you, the transformation that they have at the end of it will be well worth it.

I always say anything we do should ultimately be free, right? Because people should be able to take what they’re in the, the business education con- context of it, right? But you work on building something that excites you to work on with your clients. It excites them to be able to get th- the transformation they’re looking for, and then you can prove out what that relationship looks like and what’s valuable to people.

And record every call transcript, use that in your research, and then from there you can go on and build maybe other group coaching type of programs and things of that nature. But the, the bottom line is what you have to sell is your judgment, not just your knowledge.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, it’s like a different kind of asset.

Yeah. We think of the expert has the, the knowled- there’s a knowledge gap, and we help fill it. But the judgment- … and the discernment- Yeah … is also just as valuable.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: You say that running a, a lot of people are running a business based on instinct instead of intention. Unpack that for us.

And then by the way, guilty as charged. I’ve done a lot of stuff based on- We

Craig Shoemaker: all

Chris Badgett: have.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah we’re all in this group when you think about all the hats you have to wear as an entrepreneur, usually as a solopreneur. So I couch it in this area because most of the people who are in this arena are either doing it themselves or doing it with a, some virtual assistants for a very small team or whatever.

Even in those contexts, the thing that you’re doing is usually trying to run to an understanding of this, what is it that I’m selling? That’s the first thing that people want to figure out. Okay, what do I have to provide the market that’s going to, people are gonna buy and hopefully be profitable from, right?

Okay, so you get some traction there. People wanna buy your course or your program, cool. Then after that it’s okay how do I increase my profit margin? How do I make this thing kind of work for me? A lot of education companies start off with a really high profit margin because generally what you’re doing is selling, one to many and you’re able to work in a, a situation to where it’s not exactly passive, but it’s more passive than in other places, right?

But then you’re have– You’re faced with this question of okay was it my positioning that, that nailed it, or was it timing that nailed it, or was it a bit, little bit of luck that nailed it? What caused me to be able to have that, that success that I’ve had so far? And so that’s where it comes into okay maybe you’re not entirely clear of how to repeat the process.

And so that’s where the intentionality comes in, is to be able to say, okay, there’s different systems and frameworks that we can put into place in order to make sure that maybe we’re gonna focus on profitability for this section, or maybe we’re working on retention for this section, or maybe we’re working on what our relationships work, work look like.

And all of that comes from basically being strategic and intentional about working on that thing specifically in isolation rather than, “I’m just gonna try a bunch of stuff and kinda hope it works,” which is how we all kinda start off.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s super easy to get busy and lose your way.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: There’s a lot of we- weeds you can get into, whether that’s some kind of technology rabbit hole, or you start learning about funnels and then you’re building, like, all this stuff.

Or you get really obsessed with the video production or-

Craig Shoemaker: Yep …

Chris Badgett: I don’t know. There’s just so many- my- … places to get stuck.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. My my weakness is the fact that I just, I enjoy creating things, right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Craig Shoemaker: So I play drums and guitar. I’ve written code for a living. I’ve, books and magazines, podcasts.

It’s I just love the creative process, and so sometimes what I’ll do is oh I wanna make this new lead magnet, or start building this new program, or do this other thing. It’s like no, gotta get back to, okay, what builds the business? So we all fall prey to it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Shiny object syndrome is a real- Yeah

real thing. Let’s dig in a little bit more on AI. For education entrepreneurs specifically, what are some examples of ways they use AI, or might be using AI poorly versus things that- … tips and tricks you have on c- ways to use it in ways that unlock value?

Craig Shoemaker: I think the poor ways to use it I th– I, I think the most obvious poor way to use it is also the most enticing.

So spinning up Claude and saying, “Hey, I need you to write my newsletter for me this week because I’m busy.” I’ve done that. I’m not super proud of it, but I’ve totally done it, right? And it’s this seduction of being able to say, “Okay, I know that the system knows about my positioning. I’ve given it, dossiers on all of my key clients.

Here’s my case studies. All of the, you know, here’s stuff that I’ve written before. Here’s all the rules that you’re gonna use to write like me,” right? And you spin something up, and you get… And it’s just it’s 80%. It’s not horrible, but it’s not you, right? And so I think it’s when you build systems and you have a lot of a lot of input that’s gone into it, and then you look for these places to where it’s like the key insight, the thing that really requires the thing that is most of who you are and what you most provide value to your your audiences, and you delegate that off to AI, whether it’s building stuff for your website, writing emails.

Building content that it shouldn’t be doing is, I think, the, the biggest misstep. And so what I like to do is, again, the customer research interviews, or in my case it’s on my coaching calls, is I like to use it more as a research arm for me to where it’s like I don’t try to invent who my ICP is.

I know who my ICP is because I have hundreds of hours of coaching call transcripts that I’ve then gone and asked Claude, say let’s do the pattern matching. Let’s figure it out. What are the things that they face most often? What are the words that they use to be able to describe the the obstacles that they face?”

And so that becomes much more powerful while still keeping me in the driver’s seat of actually running the business.

Chris Badgett: You have a saying that not all money is good money. Unpack that one, ’cause I totally get that, but I’d love to hear your perspective on it

Craig Shoemaker: So th- there’s a saying that says passive income doesn’t exist, right?

And that’s totally true. With my courses that I built, though, since I worked with a very strong and very capable publisher in the industry, I would be able to kill myself building a course, record it, publish it, and then be able to collect royalties on it for a long time without really having to y- you know…

I made a quality product, so it didn’t need a lot of updates and do all this kind of stuff. But the thing that got me in the end was the fact that it made me lazy.

For many years I got the royalty checks and it was great, and I loved it. But what I should have been doing is figuring out, okay, in light of all of the success that I’m having, how do I build something in parallel, like I was saying before, that gives me, th- number one, gives me platform independence, and number two, gives me something long-term?

Because I always knew in the back of my head, I’d tell my wife, I’m like, “This money’s awesome. It’s not gonna last forever. We need to plan. We need to enjoy it while it is,” whatever. And so it was just the fact that, sure, you can make a lot of money doing something very specific, but make sure, one of my favorite words coming back to, is you’re intentional about it.

What are you doing with it? How are you making it into something that will last you long-term?

Chris Badgett: I think that dovetails into what you were just saying about AI. And by the way, it’s human nature to be lazy or whatever. The brain is… wants you to not work as hard. Oh, yeah. That’s just a thing.

It’s part of the human condition. But if you’re lazy with AI, that’s different from using it as the ultimate research assistant that actually probably makes you work harder, ’cause now you have new insights, and you create more value and stuff like that-

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah …

Chris Badgett: in some ways. Let’s talk about lifestyle.

You have five kids. I think you work from home.

And that’s often… There’s often particularly in the early days of an online business, there’s this friction between family and work. But what have you figured out with five kids, like, how to strike that balance and move forward and be a present father while also, doing, having time for your entrepreneurship and doing what you need to do there?

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. Oh, man. It’s not easy. I have a la- I have a lam- I don’t have an on air light, but I have a laminated sign that says, “Recording. Don’t open this door unless there’s an emergency.” It’s on

Chris Badgett: right now?

Craig Shoemaker: It is on my door right over here, right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Craig Shoemaker: And everybody’s old enough that they can read. So- Yeah.

I’ve been working from home for the last 15 years, even longer. So my, my kids have basically grown up with me working at home, and so a lot of it is just been the culture and the nature of what it means to live in this area. But for right now, I literally have a puppy tethered to my chair because I- no one else can watch him right now and I don’t want him to eat all the cords in the house.

So I think it just comes down to having a, an- an understanding of when you need to focus, how can you build boundaries and expectations ahead of time to make sure that happens? And then it’s s- so then once you have all the people around you giving you what you need, then it becomes, okay, how do I focus my mind well enough that I don’t get distracted on social media or, answer emails that I don’t need to at the time or, you know, whatever.

And so it really comes down I think the… Now that I’m articulating it, the, the bottom line is really just self-discipline. What does it look like to be able to say, “I need to have these things in my environment and in my mindset to be able to do what I need to do”?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and that goes back to your favorite word, intention.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Like, when you intentionally hold the space or- … intentionally be present at dinner time and stuff like that.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. That

Chris Badgett: intention is everything, and it’s actually, in my experience, a relief ’cause when you’re trying to do all the things at the same time-

…

Chris Badgett: It’s just hard.

It is.

As I’m talking to you, I saw a voicemail come in from, on my phone from my daughter who’s in the other… i’ve… I like to have a separate workspace, so I’m, like, in a detached garage office, but they’re only three feet away.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But it’s… she knows that I work, that I’m usually working at this time, and I’ll get to her- Yeah

when I get to her, and if there’s an emergency, the door behind me will open just like your dog will- It

Craig Shoemaker: has hinge-

Chris Badgett: hinges. That’s right … do. So life, sometimes you gotta do it.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about how people can work with you. Who’s the perfect fit person- … for your coaching, and what can they do to reach out to you?

And just to add another question on top of that, I know on your website you have something called the Offer Map. If s- … if somebody s- wants to check that out, tell us about those things.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. So that, that was exactly what I was thinking of. So the, the person that I work best with is a education entrepreneur who has a program or a course that they’re selling and wants to figure out how they’re gonna scale and grow from there.

And like I said, that gives… There’s so many different opportunities to go into a business like that and find areas where you can create growth and extra profits that’s i- is worthwhile. Also, going back to one of the first things that we talked about was just having an understanding of what your offer is.

And so if you go over to my website, there’s a link at the top for the Offer Map, and it’s a free tutorial series where I take you through my framework of how I think about building offers. At the end of it, you can get access to a calculator that takes all of the different elements of the Offer Map, and you can plug all that in there, and it gives you an idea of what your revenue might look based off of your audience size, your conversion rates, and each of the different elements of the Offer Map of what that might look like for you.

You just have to provide your email to get to the calculator, but everything, you know, everything’s available for free. On the AI side of things I have some- something that you can get access to, which is basically an assessment that you can take that gives you a sense of where your– I call it your AI gap.

And so as a teacher, as someone who, is– your business is built around education, h- how much can AI do, and where is that, that lane of judgment and le- and of leadership s- remaining for you? And I’ve… That’s an exercise that you can go through. It’s… I’ve seen some wild stuff, right? In, in one, one guy’s situation, we went through and we’re like, “Okay we’re telling Claude teach this this thing about ads.”

And it got it really close, but it wasn’t basically the nuance of the niche that he sells to, right? So it’s not just general ads. He does it specifically for authors who are inde- independent authors trying to sell their books through ads. So some of the procedural stuff it got right, and then it’s another part of the, the system that I take you through is like, okay here’s this really gnarly specific question that someone had that came in as a support email, and it answered that incredibly well, which is not what I had anticipated, right?

I thought that the more relational specific type stuff it was gonna fall down on, and the other stuff it would do better. So it’s just a very revealing exercise to be able to put any AI model I like to use Claude a lot, in your spot and be able to see, okay if someone was just gonna spin up a new chat session, what might they get if they were trying to learn the thing that you do?

And then by seeing those gaps and seeing those edges, that gives you a place to adjust your positioning.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check it out. That’s at craigshoemaker.net. And if you like podcasts, you’re listening to one now. Craig has a podcast called The Growth Question. Can you tell us what that’s all about?

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. So The Growth Question is a place where I co-host with my friend John Brosio. And we do similar fashion like this, where we’ll have people come in, but we’ll do live breakdowns. And so they’ll come in and say, “Okay this is an element within my business that’s not working, or I wanna fix, or I wanna grow in.”

And so the two of us together dig into the nitty-gritty of the situation and basically do a, a live coaching session right there on the channel. And so it’s, i- it’s a great way to be able to see us working in real time, and also learn from, some very real similarities that you might have with the guests’ questions that they have.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So subscribe to The Growth Question podcast, and definitely get- take a visit to craigshoemaker.net. And thank you for being a shining example of a education entrepreneur. As a course creator, somebody who has made courses, made money with courses, maybe put courses on a platform, and whether it was Udemy, Pluralsight, or wherever, and had issues with not owning the platform-

And wants to get into coaching, Craig’s walked a mile or two in those shoes. So check him out. That’s craigshoemaker.net. Craig, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Craig Shoemaker: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get WP Fusion NowAccording to Chris Badgett, effective LMS and eLearning companies gain valuable clients by serving as strategic business partners rather than just creating websites. Agencies should charge for a systematic discovery process that produces a clear blueprint before any work starts, rather than diving right into development or offering planning for free. He likens it to building a custom home, where no expert begins work without first drafting architectural blueprints. Before investing in a major project, this strategy guarantees that the agency and client are in agreement, minimizes misconceptions, and establishes expectations.

Creating a professional sales process, or what Chris refers to as a sales motion, is one of the episode’s main themes. Agencies should initially qualify new clients using a brief application form before scheduling sales calls or submitting offers. The form should indicate whether the possibility is a good fit for the agency’s specialty, has a reasonable schedule, and has the funds to support the project. Chris proposes that agencies could infer budget by understanding the client’s audience, business size, and present operations rather than directly asking about it. Similarly, the ideal clients are those that have a clear strategy and enough time to carry it out well rather than those who expect a project right now. Chris suggests a two-step dialogue procedure after a lead is qualified.

The first is a quick 15-minute qualifying call that is intended only to verify the details from the application and assess the compatibility of both parties. There ought to be no pressure to close a deal. If the match is good, the customer is asked to a lengthier strategy call where the objective is to sell the paid exploration phase rather than the website project as a whole. The agency emphasizes that careful preparation has genuine value and should be compensated by making this paid discovery its initial offering.

One of the most significant services offered by the agency is the discovery process itself. Chris suggests distributing the process of discovery over three organized sessions. Understanding the client’s long-term vision, pain spots, and company goals is the main purpose of the first session. In the second, potential solutions are mapped out, necessary technologies like CRM connectors, AI, automations, hosting, and LMS features are identified, and any knowledge gaps are filled.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. In this episode, I’m gonna help show you how to do sales professionally as an agency building e-learning or online education websites for clients. So if you don’t know who I am, I’m Chris Badgett, CEO and co-founder of LifterLMS, the leading lent- learning management system for WordPress.

And in this episode, we’re gonna dive deep into the agencies and the freelancers that build LMS websites for clients. I actually started as an agency owner, as a freelancer. I’ve been on all sides of this game. You may see me as a software person with LifterLMS, but I’ve built tons of sites for clients and done tons of client sales, and w- I wanna share with you If you build LMS websites for clients, how to do better sales, how to build better projects, and how to get paid what you’re worth.

Now, if you’re listening to this or watching this and you’re not an agency, if you are an e-learning DIY person yourself, it’s really good for you to listen to this so you can see how a professional agency builds a learning management system website, and more than that, an online learning company business.

You’ll get some things out of this, even if you’re not an agency or a freelancer. If you’re thinking about hiring an agency, this will show you how to find a really good agency who actually goes through the process that I’m describing here for things like seeing if you’re a fit for each other, doing a discovery process, and so on.

So the thing I wanna start with you is that what you wanna do as an agency is do not skip over the architect part of the job. This is where you build the plan in the beginning. And what a lot of freelancers and agencies do is they just do that part for free, or they skip it altogether, and then they wonder why the LMS website project goes off the rails.

The client’s not happy, the agency’s not happy, and there’s a bunch of conflict. If you are building a custom home, it’s really important to actually go through the architect or architecture part on the front end. You wouldn’t just say, “Sounds good. Let’s do this. I’ll pay the first invoice,” and then a bunch of people show up on your land with tools and materials to work with no plan at all.

So I’m gonna go into the actual phases and process of sales, which is actually not just sales. It’s not about making money or getting a website project kicked off. It’s about correctly planning and architecting the plan for a successful education company that’s looking to create, launch, and scale online learning on the internet.

So if you’re an agency and you’re doing the blueprint for free or the planning process, that’s not the way to go. You should charge for the plan, not just the build. That’s called a discovery process. We’ll get into that in a little bit. But the plan is a product. It’s actually the first step, so sell it like one.

So- That’s how this works. And I’m gonna give you the operating system to do this. And this isn’t gonna be about marketing, this is gonna be about sales. A lot of people think sales and marketing are the same thing. They’re actually completely different. There is a period when a lead comes in where marketing and sales kind of overlap, but this is gonna be about the sales process, also known as the sales motion

So Back when I was a freelancer, I just wanna say I feel your pain. I think the first website I sold was for about two hundred dollars, and within three to four years the largest website I sold, which included ongoing work, not just the launch of the website, was one hundred thousand dollars per year. And I did that in three to four years, and that was because I discovered

Excuse me, the discovery process I’m gonna teach you today. So this is for projects that are, not the discovery process, but the project is five thousand dollars and up. This is not for freelancers and agencies that do the small builds. So if you wanna get into that kinda middle tier of website projects, this is for you.

There’s eight steps. So we’re gonna talk about the qualification form on your website, the review, the setting call, the strategy call, the discovery process, the proposal, the follow-up on the proposal, getting paid, and the kickoff. So each of these steps costs time, and each of these steps must earn the next move.

This is called sales motion. If you’ve never heard that word, what I’m teaching you is a sales motion for an agency building LMS or e-learning websites for clients. If you’re not in that niche, you’ll still get a lot of value from this, but this is particularly for people that are building in the e-learning industry.

The f- doing it, doing a proposal for free is what most freelancers and agencies do, or they don’t do at all. They’re just like, “Pay me and I’ll get started.” That’s the less experienced way of doing it. So we’re gonna go into how to properly go through the sales motion of doing an e-learning website.

So again, this is not about marketing, this is about sales. So let’s assume we already have some traffic, we already have some people, looking at the services page on our website. Maybe you’re in the LifterLMS Experts program, which is free to join. It’s a free service ’cause people ask us all the time, “Hey, do you know any freelancers or agencies that can help build my LMS website and my online business with me?”

So we refer ’em to the LifterLMS Experts. That’s a free service we provide just to connect people with qualified agencies and freelancers. Let’s talk about where the sales motion really starts. So you have a page on your website, it’s four- Your services. And at the bottom or at the top or both, you’re gonna have a call to action.

So what is the call to action? What a l– the mistake that a lot of people do is they just go straight to book a call through a button in a scheduling link or something, or they send you to a contact form to get started or directly to some kind of priced product that somebody can buy without ever talking to you as a freelancer or agency.

That is the wrong way to do it. So what we wanna do on our first call to action to begin the sales motion is the first part of sales is known as qualification. So what we wanna do on our qualification is start with a form. So a form allows you to automate the qualification first step and get into that.

The step one of the form you don’t wanna ask a million questions in the form. I actually recommend only asking a few things like obviously what’s your name, email, phone number, things like that. But then only ask three qualifying questions, and you’ll have to figure out what these are for you.

But it could be the first one would be, like, relevance or niche or market. If you exclusively build LMS websites, you don’t want a restaurant, wasting your time to build an online website or online ordering system for a restaurant if that’s not what you do. Now, I will say in the early days of freelancing and agency work, I would take any kind of client that came in just ’cause I needed to make money and move forward, and that’s fine if you’re in that phase, you’re in the beginning phases and you’re learning.

But I definitely recommend niching your agency to a p-particular niche. If you’re in this community and you’re listening to this podcast, I definitely recommend just making sure they’re somehow related to education doing courses, memberships. Maybe it’s a company that needs internal training for their team members and so on.

That is what you’re trying to get in question one. In question two, we wanna find their budget. And just a pro tip here, you can’t ask people, “Hey, how much are you looking to spend?” or “How much are you able or willing to pay?” That is the wrong question. It’s too direct. You have to earn trust before you get there.

But you can ask in a sideways way to figure out- like what kind of budget they have. So certain questions you can ask are things like, “What’s your team size?” So if you know somebody has three, four, five, 10, 100 team members, you know that’s a company that has some kind of budget. Who are their learners?

Or who are they serving? So if they’re cerni- serving a market that has a lot of money, like CEOs or governments or whatever, it doesn’t mean it has to be high-ticket courses or anything like that, but you can figure out their budget based on what they’re doing. I like to try to figure out if they’re already getting paid for what they do.

Maybe they’re doing the education in person and they’re looking to automate, and so on. But there’s different ways to ask about the budget without asking them directly about the money itself. The third thing I like to ask is their desired timeline. What I’m trying to find is the urgency for the project and to see how important it is to them.

Now, there’s a lot of different things they could answer here, and the first answer is counterintuitive, not what you want. If somebody’s already in an emergency and they’re like, “I need this tomorrow,” or, “I need this, next week,” they’re already behind the eight ball and they’re not– they’re in too much of an emergency situation that it’s gonna break your process, and those aren’t the best clients.

So if they’re in a big hurry, if they’re an urgent lead, those are usually the weaker leads. And whenever you get somebody like that’s not qualified, I would recommend just building other people or other agencies you could refer them to. I call it throwing a bone. So even if you can’t help them, you can still direct them to somebody who might be able to help them.

And then maybe that partner that you refer business to also refers business to you when they have somebody who’s a better fit for you instead of them. So always try to help people even if they don’t make it through the initial qualification the other timeline thing, the, the sweet spot is somebody where what they’re doing is a priority to them, but they’re not in an emergency situation.

So there’s a saying we have from the agency world, which is, “Your lack of planning is not my emergency.” I know that sounds rough. I wouldn’t say that to a client per se, but what you want is somebody who’s proactive, they’ve got a plan, they’re looking at the next quarter. You potentially have one, two, three, four months to actually work together and develop an awesome project together.

Those are the ones you want. And on the other side we have what we call people that are just dreaming. They’re like, “I’m not sure. It’s just an idea I have. I’m just exploring options,” which is fine if that’s in- the state they’re in, but those aren’t the best clients ’cause they don’t really have a plan.

You can create smart popups for things like LifterLMS or WooCommerce, cart abandonment recovery, upsells, course engagement, activation, targeted offers based on exactly what your students are doing inside LifterLMS. I personally use Popup Maker on all of our websites at LifterLMS for lead magnet opt-ins, cart abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to the right next step.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

In sales, we call those tire kickers which comes from car sales. They’re not really interested in buying. And it’s fine. This is why that form is there. So if you see somebody who’s like– If you ask in your form “What’s your priority and timeline?” And they’re like, “I don’t really have one. I have…

It’s kind of low priority. It’s just an idea I was exploring,” then I might refer that person to some other marketing resources I have or other things without moving right into the sales process So the best client has at least a month of runway and a real plan. They’ve already prioritized. They’re in motion on a plan that they have.

So in terms of the form, you can use any kind of form tool in WordPress, like Gravity Forms, WS Form, Ninja Forms, WP Form, Formidable Forms, and so on. That’s what I would use on your website to build that kind of qualification form on your website. And just a pro tip for you, when you get these emails, you can actually integrate AI to help with what’s known as lead scoring, which is just a fancy way of saying okay, based on how they answered this form, this is a hot lead, this is a warm lead, this is a lead that’s not relevant to us or, h- has a lower score.

We might refer them out to another agency or other resources and so on. So the next stage after we get through the form, let’s say they’re qualified, everything looks good, they’re in the right niche, their timeline is good, and they have … It appears as though they have budget. You could also do it yourself or use AI to look at the client’s company and business and learn a bunch of things about them through their online presence.

So if they’re qualified, the next step in sales is to move to a two-step process. The f- next step is what I call the 15-minute setting call So in sales, there’s setting and closing. So we’re setting up the lead, and then we’re qu- qualifying them now, not through a form, but through a conversation, and then we’ll move into a closing call in the next step.

But while we’re on the setting call, it’s w- it’s one job to do, which is for a human to, to do, which is to confirm in person what the form claimed. You’re basically moving past the form and continuing to qualify to make sure that the niche is good, the timeline’s good, the budget’s good, and that it looks like not just that the client’s a good fit for you, but that you are a good fit for the client.

So I’m a big fan of non-pushy sales, so every step in this process, it’s a win-win for everybody. It’s not high-pressure sales. At this stage, we’re just trying to make sure we’re a good fit for each other. So the setting call is a 15-minute call. It’s relationship building. It’s getting to know each other a little bit.

It’s confirming their answers on the form are accurate, maybe probing for some more information, giving the client opportunity to ask you questions to make sure that you’re a fit for them. And then what you do here in setting is we’re still qualifying, so to remove the high-pressure sales aspect if they’re qualified is to not try to close them on that call.

So you can open the call by saying something like, “We’re not gonna … I have nothing to sell you today. I’m just trying to make sure we’re a good fit for each other, learn a little bit more about your business and your goals with your e-learning website.” After that call, if they’re a fit, what I would do is say, “After I get on- off this call with you, I’m gonna send you a link to schedule a strategy call,” which is actually a closing call.

We’re not doing a magic trick or any kind of sleight of hand here. We’re just removing the pressure of “Hey, there’s nothing to buy right now. Sounds like we’re a good fit for each other. I’m gonna send you an email right after we get off the phone with the next step.” If they’re not qualified, what we’re gonna do here on the call or after the call is say “Hey, it sounds like we’re not quite the right fit.

I don’t really work in that niche,” or, “My agency doesn’t really work with the timeline that you need,” or whatever the, the reason is. But then we can throw them a bone here and either do it on the call or after the call in a follow-up email, refer them to some other agency or other resources. But if they are a fit, as soon as you get off the call, we’re gonna send them a booking link to book the 30-minute strategy call.

So that’s moving on to the next step, which is step three, which is the closing call, which is also known in public speak as the strategy call. ‘Cause most people don’t like to show up. Nobody wants to be closed. Everybody loves to buy, but nobody loves to be sold to. And we, I like to call this a strategy call because it’s not it’s not just a sales call.

It’s we’re gonna do some strategy together and draw some insight and ideas. They’re gonna get benefit from it, even if they don’t close or become an agency client for you So now that we’re on the sales call, this is the real sales call, and you’re not just selling a website, you’re selling the solution to what they want for their business.

It’s outcome-focused. So basically, the frame to hold here is that, we’re qualified for each other, we’re a good fit for each other, here’s the next step. So this is where we move from selling the paid discovery. Now, in sales, there’s this idea of holding the frame, and what I mean by that is you should be process-driven.

And I’m literally giving you the process here to hold and to execute on. ‘Cause if you just show up to these calls and you don’t really have a process or guide the client sometimes they’re just gonna take over the call and start, going in tangents, which is fine, but that’s not what you want.

If you have a solid sales motion, you have a process and a choreography that you follow when you do your sales. So the next step is to sell the paid discovery. We’re not even selling the big project yet. We’re just selling the … as an architect, the idea and the plan that we’re gonna do the architecture work and build the plan for the work that we’re gonna do together.

So the build is not for sale yet. We’re selling the plan, and the benefit is that every detail is hashed out so that the client can move forward with more speed, certainty, and insight. In terms of the paid discovery this is where, this is the holding the frame part where you explain what that is, and you can use that metaphor of building a custom home and how it’s very important that there’s a plan in place before all the workers and materials show up to get started.

That’s part of the product, that’s part of the service that you offer in terms of being a web or online business or e-learning business architect. So if some people push back on this idea of putting a plan together, there’s several objection handling that you can do here. One of them is that just explaining matter-of-factly that this is how professionals work.

It’s not posture, it’s not an argument, it’s just holding the frame on your process, being like, “Look, we can’t move forward without a plan together. We need to know what the plan is before we can price the plan.” And then the main thing that closes the sale of the discovery process is letting them know that, “Hey, no matter what…

Hey, this plan is yours. You paid for it. It’s a work product, it’s a deliverable. You can decide to work with me to implement the plan after that, or you can find… You can take this plan, this document, which is yours, that you own, and you can move forward with that with whoever you like.” And this is really what closes the sale.

Most clients that really understand the value of a plan and having a blueprint before actually moving into construction will totally get it, they’ll totally value it. So if they agree to move forward from there, now we’re moving into paid discovery. What we do here is we need to send them an invoice for the paid discovery.

Now, you might be asking, “How much should I charge for a paid discovery for this kind of online business and website build?” There’s a lot of options here, but this isn’t gonna work for low-value clients, in the hundreds of dollars or the lower thousands price points. But as a minimum, what I would recommend is $1,000 minimum for a minimum $5,000 website project.

Again, you could be getting into a 20,000, a 30,000, a 50,000 or even more website project, but it really needs to match the, it needs to, line up and be like a small piece of the bigger project, but you should not be giving it away for free. So it’s a separate deliverable, it’s not a deposit.

And one pro tip here you can do is you can let them know if they decide to move forward with your discovery, that you will deduct that as a discount on the actual project. You can do that. I’ve done that in the past, and it works well. It removes the risk. And again, they can always take that and, do the actual implementation once they have the plan with somebody else if for whatever reason they want to.

In my experience, I’ve never had somebody not move forward after the paid discovery with us, but it puts the client at ease, and it’s always there. If it’s not a fit, if you or them didn’t enjoy working with each other during the architecture and discovery process, you can always pass that to somebody else, and they can move forward.

Once we get through the discovery process what we’re doing here in actually jumping into the discovery process is I recommend doing like three calls on a weekly cadence. So I’m a big fan with working with clients, with getting things in the calendar and having them on the same time, same day, and then you can develop a rhythm and a cadence together.

So there’s three parts o- of a discovery process. So let’s say you’re gonna work with a client through a discovery process for three weeks, every Tuesday at 1:00 PM. You set that up, you send them the calendar invite after they paid the invoice, whether it was a $1,000 discovery, a $5,000 dis- discovery, or even a $10,000 discovery for a large project.

So the first call is about going deeper from the strategy call, which is where you’re getting into a deeper dive into, to their pains and their goals. Remember, in the qualification call and the closing call, there’s only so much time we have to get into the nitty-gritty details. But call number one, I like to do hour-long discovery calls, three of them.

We’re really digging into their pains and goals, and we’re also digging into your capabilities as a freelancer or agency. Remember, this is always like a two-way process, but you’re holding the frame on the cadence and the process so the client can relax and feel comfortable that you’ve done this before and you- you’re asking the right questions, they’re free to ask questions to you, and so on.

So you’re getting the information you need to basically get to the point where you can construct a detailed proposal. But you don’t have to do it all in call one. Call one is more of a mind meld to really sync up as an agency and a client together about your capabilities and their pain points, goals, and the opportunities that they’re chasing Call two, we’re starting to work towards the proposal more.

We’re filling in gaps. Maybe there’s more information gathering after we’ve got out the call, after we’ve discussed, and more ideas have emerged. We start mapping towards solutions, and we’re setting expectations on how the process works. We’re giving the client ideas about what we see as priorities.

They’re telling us what they see as priorities. ‘Cause remember, clients don’t necessarily know exactly what they want, so we’re trying to flesh all that out, and you don’t necessarily know exactly what the client needs. So we’re mapping all that out, but ultimately with the eye of getting to a specific proposal with- which is in your capabilities.

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So in terms of solution mapping, what I’m talking about is, all right, we need a website. Are we working on an existing website? Are we doing CRM integration? Are we bringing in other tools? Are we bringing in artificial intelligence for something? Are we building in automations? Are we gonna be doing the web hosting?

Is somebody else gonna be doing the web hosting? And so on. So we’re getting everything we need on call two, so that we can put together an effective proposal with all the information that we need So after call two, you take everything you’ve done so far and you actually put together the proposal. And a proposal includes things like timelines, phases, costs, and whether you’re doing project-based pricing, I’ve got some pro tips for you on that in a little bit, versus hourly and so on.

And remember, here’s where you can throw in on this third call you’re presenting your proposal. So you’re actually coming back together for a third time in the discovery process now that you’ve, discovered everything and you have your proposal. It goes through phases. One thing I like to do here is if a project sounds really big, maybe this first proposal is just for phase one, like just the website.

And if they want– if you have like marketing and sales capabilities that you can offer as well, maybe that comes in phase two, and we’re just gonna table that and not even look at that. ‘Cause sometimes clients wanna pack, especially entrepreneur clients, which I can relate to, they wanna pack in this grand vision over years and everything.

But maybe you’re driving towards a proposal for phase one, which is just getting the website launched, courses set up, and all of that. And maybe you do instructional design and help with course development and all of that. It just depends on your capabilities So in call three, we basically are presenting the proposal.

We’re screen sharing, we’re looking at the proposal document. Again, we’re not doing high-pressure sales, so at the end of the call, we’re gonna send them the proposal after we get off the phone and encourage them to m- make the purchase and move forward with whatever phase one is. Maybe it’s the entire project, or maybe it’s like a, a phase one, and move forward from there.

But we’re not gonna do the high-pressure sales and ask them to pull out their credit card or whatever on the call. We’re just presenting the solution. We’re letting them know cost and timelines, phases, milestones, deliverables that you’re gonna deliver, deliverables they need to deliver, like course content or logins to certain things so that you can do your work, and so on.

And so that completes the discovery process. You’ve given them the proposal. They can take that, they could shop it to another company, but if you’re at this point and you’ve done a good job, it’s 90% guaranteed that they’re gonna move forward with you now that you, as an architect, have given them the blueprint, the cost, and the timeline and all of that.

But they keep the plan no matter what. And most are gonna stay with you. So just to dive into some pro tips on the actual proposal itself, you’ve got timelines, you’ve got milestones. Maybe you’re doing things in phases. Maybe you’re putting all the phases in the proposal. Maybe you’re just focusing on phase one.

It just depends on you and what the client needs. You’ve got all of the deliverables and the costs there and it basically confirms what the discovery has already shown and agreed to. If there’s surprises, it means the discovery failed. You didn’t find the information or explain enough what you do and how you do it, how much it costs and how long it takes.

So- one pro tip here is to phase the money. I’m a big fan of… And remember, we’re not doing high-pressure sales. We’re removing risk and pressure constantly. So the simple way to phase the money is 50% upfront, 100, and the rest, the other 50% on completion. But for bigger projects, you might chop it up into three milestone payments or maybe four and so on if we’re working over many months.

And it’s a lot easier for a client to get started, let’s say, on a $50,000 project for 10 grand, and ultimately they pay as you deliver milestones, every couple weeks or month and so on. So that way they’re comfortable. You’ve reversed the risk, so if they’re not happy with the first milestone, they could choose to back out, and you’re also still getting paid for that first part you did.

So I’m a big fan of phasing the money, and if you really believe in the quality of your work, there’s no reason not to do that to make your client’s life easier and earn their respect and trust. And let’s say you work with that client again later on another project or on the same project. Once you’ve worked together, you may be able to switch to a different model where you do half upfront and half up at the end or whatever.

So that’s how you do that. I’m gonna give you a pro tip here on how to price it. So- I wouldn’t just present one number for the whole thing. Show the total, but show the different deliverables that add up to that total. So a simple example would be first step, we’re gonna build a website.

That’s $10,000. Then we’re gonna do all the learning management system stuff, and that includes this many courses, this many quizzes, this many memberships, e-commerce integration, and all the things you do. That’s the second step. Then the third step is marketing automation, CRM integration, and so on, and each of those deliverables has a different cost.

So that’s the way to do it. In terms of pricing, I learned a pro tip when you’re looking at a deliverable, and you can look at the actual individual deliverables that roll up into a milestone, and the milestone has a number on it, and it’s up to you whether you wanna put money beside each deliverable or just the milestone.

But it’s important not just to give them one number for the end. But this is a trip- trick I learned from Chris Lima for pricing. I’m a big fan of project-based pricing instead of hourly work, so you’re pricing based on value versus time, which I’m a big fan of. And the way I decide, if I find a client I really wanna work with, and we just can’t quite really discover with a lot of clarity, and we really need to just get into it, the client has pr- plenty of budget, I trust that they’re gonna be around and be respectful of my time, I’m gonna be respectful of their time, I may go hourly and present an hourly rate with hours estimates.

But I’m a bigger fan of doing milestone-based, fixed price, project-based pricing. So the trick I learned from Chris Lema, you can do this in a spreadsheet as you’re looking at the deliverables that roll up into the milestone, is when you look at something specific, let’s say install and configure all the LifterLMS components based on what the client needs, there would be three columns in the spreadsheet for that each deliverable.

So column one is the least amount of money I would take for this work. Column two is the average price that, I feel comfortable with for this work. And then the, the third column is the amount that is super valuable to the client. Client has good budget, this is what this deliverable is worth.

If they’re really paying, not top dollar, like you’re ripping them off or something like that, but like, when you’re like, “Yeah, this is really worth this in a perfect scenario.” And so you have these three different numbers. The low number, the average number, and the high number. And then what you do is you do a scoring across those, where the low number is worth one point, the average number is worth three points, and then the big number is worth one point, and you average that out.

And what that does is, let’s say it takes you a s- much longer than you thought it would take, and that’s on you for not knowing how long something would take you. You may end up at the low number. Let’s say it does exactly what we think it’s gonna do, and we’re happy with it. You’re gonna end up at the average number.

Let’s say it actually goes quicker and everything turned out amazing. You’re gonna end up at the high number. So across all the deliverables, when you’re coming up with your pricing for a value-based price project, I find that super helpful. Now, that way of pricing, value-based pricing, is in for internal purposes only.

That’s for you. It’s not for the client to see. It’s just you as a business owner figuring out your deliverable and ultimately milestone pricing, and that all kind of rolls up into the total project price the next thing we wanna get into, you’ve finished the discovery process, you’ve gone over your proposal, they’ve seen the timelines and the pricing and everything.

And again, we’re gonna remove high-pressure sales and just present the proposal, give them the PDF, and then let them know we’d like to move forward, and they have basically a yes/no answer to decide to work with you or not. And they need to know that once they say yes, then you can put them on the production schedule.

But, like, when this project start is dependent on their confirmation that they’re ready to move forward with you or not. And again, I don’t like to pressure them on the call. After I get off that third discovery call, they’ve got the proposal, I’ll send an immediate follow-up email. There’s a saying, “The fortune is in the follow-up in sales.”

So it’s all about following up. Remember, we’re going through a choreography, a sales motion, and a process here. So in the follow-up, I’d be like, “Hey, it’s great to work for you,” or, “Great to work with you. I hope you enjoyed the discovery process. I had a lot of fun. It’s awesome getting to know your business.

I’m confident I can help you, and I feel really confident about our proposal. Let me know if you’d like to move forward so I can get you on the calendar. I’ll send the invoice, and once that’s paid, we’ll get started and get rolling.” So that’s the main follow-up, and most of them, if they’re gonna close, should close pretty fast, like even the same day or within a week.

If they don’t respond, I would do a couple more follow-ups. So follow-up two would just be like, “Hey, just checking in. I really enjoyed the discovery process.” And just reinforce what you said about getting on the production schedule and moving forward with the kickoff call, which we’ll talk about in a second.

And then the third, I might follow up a week later and be like, “Hey, it’s been a week.” Maybe they have to consult with other stakeholders or a business partner or spouse or something like that. But just check in and be like, reinforce the value again, let them know you’d love to work with them, remind them about the getting on the production schedule and let them know if they’re ready, if they’re ready to roll that you can send the invoice and get on the calendar and move forward.

And through those three follow-ups, you’re highly likely to close that sale. If it– If they’re like, “No, thanks,” you could always throw them the bone again, maybe refer another agency or send them more resources and information so that’s the last part of the sales motion in terms of the discovery process.

And now, just like we were talking about sales, we’re not really talking about marketing, and we’re not really talking about implementation, but there’s these gray areas right between sales and marketing and then sales and customer success. So customer success, I mean moving forward with the project.

They paid invoice number one, and they’re ready to roll. So one of the reasons they hired you is because you’re being a good communicator. You’re getting on the phone or the Zoom or w- meeting, online meeting with them. You’re adding value. So what I like to do is actually, especially for, mid-market projects, these are like 10, 20, $30,000 builds I like to do a weekly call with the client.

Now, this works with solopreneurs and agencies. If you’re a solopreneur, it’s just you. You’re doing all these steps. If you have an agency, there’s a project manager perhaps. They’ve paid, they’re moving forward with phase one, and everything is moving forward. So the kickoff call, they pay the invoice.

What the client wants to see is fast action, and you have to be honest about your capacity. Maybe you’re really booked out and you can’t do that kickoff call until a month later or even two months later, and that’s fine. But if you’re not busy and you’re ready to roll… And remember, you’re incentivized to roll and build this project so that you can get the future payments or the la- all the way to the last payment and so on.

You’ve already built a rhythm, let’s say meeting at, on Tuesdays at 1:00 PM or whatever. So you do a kickoff call, and on this call, the salesperson and the project manager, if they’re different people, and maybe there’s developers and designers and other people will come to that call, that is the kickoff.

That is the handoff from sales to implementation. And if it’s just you as a solopreneur, you can still do all this. And then you get on a weekly rhythm where you’re providing updates, you’re removing bottlenecks, or if you need things from the client, if you have questions for the client. You always have this weekly touch point to accelerate ’cause everybody gets really busy with emails and business and life and all the rest.

So this is a partnership, and you’re valuing that partnership. You’re holding space for each other and moving forward. So- That is the sales motion and how to do paid discovery. If you have any questions about that process or any questions about how much should I charge for this?” or, “What do you recommend if the client says that?”

Just reach out to us, let us know. It’s … Again, it’s about building a partnership. It’s not about closing sales or pressuring clients or trying to get the most money you can for the least amount of effort. That’s the wrong mindset. The correct mindset is, how can I add more value than anybody else to this type of client through my agency work?

Where I feel like I’m earning a respectful income, I’m getting paid the work that I’m doing as a freelancer in an agency, and I’m super happy with it. I enjoy working with this client, and the client feels like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe how much value I’m getting.” Ideally you want to end up in the 10X value range.

So what I mean by that is, let’s say you charge $30,000 to help an a in-person training company move online, and in their first year w- after you’ve launched, they’ve made $300,000 with their online training business that they paid you 30,000 for. That’s 10X value. And let’s say you’re really happy with the $30,000 and the amount of time that required you to work on, and th- there’s good profit there and stuff for you.

That’s where we’re going. That’s how this process works. Make each step flow into the next and get paid for your thinking. Never try to build a house without a plan. Hold the frame. Lay out your process. One of my favorite things to do, whether it’s the setting call, the closing call, discovery call one, two, three, I always open the call with something like

First I just break the ice and make the human connection, but then I’m like, as I’m rolling into the work, I’m holding the frame by saying, “Awesome. Let’s jump r- right into it. I’ll set the time expectation. We have an hour for this call. The way this call works is XYZ. The purpose of this call is to, XYZ.”

I- it could … If you’re on call one, it’s to, “For me to get all the information I need to build the proposal that you’re gonna get in call three. It’s also an opportunity for you to explore deeper into our capabilities and everything.” So that’s how you hold the frame and just deliver value. It’s not about being in control or dominating the client, it’s about the choreography so that the client can relax, so that you can relax, and that you guys can create the most value for each other.

Now, if you’re hiring an agency and you want high-quality work, there’s many different ways to do this kind of sales motion, but you should experience something similar to what I’m talking about here. And the best thing about a great agency-client relationship is it’s a relationship. It builds over time.

And in sales, I call it land and expand, where, all right we did a 2,000 or $3,000 discovery process, and then that expands into a $20,000 website build, then that expands into a maintenance package, hosting, future projects, a completely different other project. The client refers you to their friends. So it’s all about landing and expanding and really developing a high-quality business relationship and a brand and a reputation in your industry as a high-value agency in the e-learning niche.

And also, just last thing for you is, remember, clients aren’t hiring you to just build a website. They may think that’s what they want, and that’s kind of a commodity in a sense. It’s like a website, it does X, Y, and Z. But what you’ll find as a high-quality agency or freelancer is that you’re actually delivering business consulting.

Maybe you do other things besides the website, like marketing services, instructional design, AI implementation, and you’re really becoming an integrated part of this client’s business. And even friendships and things can emerge from these kinds of things when they’re done well. So that’s it for the, this episode.

That is the agency sales process between five and even six-figure website clients in the e-learning niche for courses, memberships, training-based membership sites for any reason. I’m Chris from LifterLMS. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and we will catch you in the next one. Take care.

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Get WP Fusion NowChris Badgett and Steve Woody from WP Fusion have an uplifting discussion about entrepreneurship, the strength of the WordPress community, artificial intelligence, personal growth, and creating a meaningful online company in this episode of LMScast.

Steve talks about his amazing path from web developer and agency owner to bestselling book, business adviser, and first WP Fusion contributor. He considers how moving outside of his comfort zone and actively participating in the WordPress community profoundly changed his personal and professional life.

Chris and Steve talk about how networking at WordPress events like WordCamp and PressConf, building genuine relationships, and surrounding oneself with growth-minded individuals may open doors to possibilities that technology alone can’t.

The quick development of artificial intelligence and its implications for online company owners, entrepreneurs, and course designers are also discussed. Steve emphasizes that critical thinking, creativity, purpose, and human connection are still vital while outlining how AI may be utilized to automate tedious activities, increase productivity, and improve consumer experiences rather than seeing it as a threat. Chris and Steve delve further into the significance of sustaining a growth mindset, conquering a fear of change, and consistently picking up new skills in a constantly changing digital environment.

They also provide helpful tips for breaking out from the “downward spiral” by emphasizing physical well-being, developing a positive outlook, creating communities of support, accepting discomfort, and concentrating on providing value before anticipating outcomes. This episode provides insightful advice on developing resilience, discovering purpose, and achieving long-term success in both business and life, whether you’re a WordPress expert, online instructor, entrepreneur, or someone seeking inspiration to advance both personally and professionally.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode Transcript:Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Steve Woody. I’m gonna start with a story about how I met Steve, and then what transpired over the next week, but first, welcome to the show, Steve

Steve Woody: Hey, Chris. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate you being here.

Chris Badgett: It’s awesome to reconnect with you. And just to tell the story how I met Steve is I went to a membership site owner conference in the UK called Retain that’s put on by Mike Morrison over at the Membership Geeks. And I was at the hotel bar with Jack Arturo from WP Fusion, and he was like, “My friend Steve’s coming,” and he told me a little bit about Steve, and it’s like really late at night at this point, I think it might be 11:00 PM.

And Jack and I t- tech folks are, like, sitting there, and here comes Steve. He was the nicest dressed guy in the whole hotel. And we just hit it off. We started talking, and then multiple nights, we’d be down there in the hotel bar talking until it closed down, nobody’s around.

Staff is walking around, giving us the eye to go to bed or whatever. But we just hit it up. We had a great conference together. We did a s- seven mile, I think, run together, and visited, like- 20.

Steve Woody: Felt, definitely felt like 20.

Chris Badgett: We did, like, all the bridges on the river there. It was awesome.

But the first night I met Steve he just randomly bought me a train ticket ’cause I needed to get to London from Newcastle, and I’ve been in Europe, I’ve been on trains before, but it had been like 20 years, and Steve just greased the whole thing. I had a personal guide. I got a black car in London with Steve, which is iconic.

Some good fish- Fish

Steve Woody: and chips. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And, Good day … and then we there was another conference I went to, another after party, meals and whatnot, but it’s really fun. This, this episode is gonna be about community, which is really interesting in this modern world with tech, AI, remote work, location-independent businesses.

Community is really important, but one of the coolest things about community, and I would say community changed my life, and it’s because it’s real human beings that you meet. I call it finding the others. ‘Cause you may have, your unique quirks, but then you end up in some random country with finding a good friend that you’ve never met before, and you’re into a lot of the same stuff, but what, tell, what did I miss, Steve? It was a fun week.

Steve Woody: It-

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Steve Woody: what else happened? It was an incredible week. It was so interesting. Okay I’ll give a little bit of a backstory before Retain because it’s quite interesting my journey and how I got into this space. And thank you by the way for that introduction.

That was very humbling. I’m blessed to know you and you’re a great guy and I just- I you’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head. It’s the connection. Everything to me is about the connection. Yeah, okay, we can sell products. Yeah, okay, we can look at the business and the strategy, but at the end of the day, why are we doing what we’re doing?

Why are we here? We’re here ’cause we wanna make a difference, we wanna make an impact, we wanna have value, but we really wanna connect with people. And I believe in that tribal mentality, and so WordPress is a very interesting tribe for me. And when I started on websites, we’re talking a couple of decades ago now I started in HTML.

HTML sort of progressed into PHP, bit of CSS on the side, and then I saw this guy who I knew who was making a lot… He’s making seven figures. He was doing really well as a web- as a website builder, and he was just churning out websites. And I’m sitting there, one pixel to the left, one pixel to the right, doing these sites and really meticulously taking care over the code to make sure it was commented out, it was written well.

So my biggest fear was another developer. It wasn’t the client, it wasn’t the customer. It was another developer looking at my code. And so what happened was I realized that this guy was using this template builder or this CMS called WordPress, and I’m humble, I’m man enough to admit when I make a mistake, but I hated WordPress.

Like I told everyone, “If you use WordPress, you’re cheating. If you use WordPress, you’re not a proper developer. If you…” All of the stuff that we hear o- over and over with whatever industry, that was me. And I’m sitting there in my pants eating cold pizza, looking at this guy making seven figures, and I said, “Look, I may not agree with him, but he’s doing something I’m not.”

And so I had to make some radical changes, and I got into WordPress, and I started to use it. But I never engaged with the community physically. And so for a decade, I used WordPress. And I wanted to contribute, I wanted to get involved, but I never felt like I was good enough. I never felt like I was of a level or a caliber where I could give back.

And so for me, I used the product, which is what everyone normally does. They start by using. But I did an agency, had designers, developers that were working, building websites for clients, and I went more down the funnel route as, as opposed to the website route itself, and I was more interested in sales funnel, internet marketing.

Around the time a good friend of mine, Russell Brunson, was launching a product called ClickFunnels, and so around that time when that was launching, I pushed into that whole market. And it was around the same time that freelancing was becoming more popular. And what I found is that I live in…

lived in London at the time, in the UK. I had an office in Central London, and I started to see these freelancers that were building on WordPress in India and in the Philippines, and they were just churning out sites, and they were doing it cheap. And I couldn’t… I had rent to pay. I couldn’t afford to be that cheap.

So I had to make a pivot, and this was around 2014, that I decided I was gonna stop building websites, and I decided to write a book. And so I actually wrote a book called Plan Your Website, and it did really well. Became an international bestseller sold the rights to Saudi Arabia. It was used for over a decade in universities.

I ended up building websites for Harvard, and so I really got to expand my my circle and move more from a a website developer and agency owner into more of a a consultant, into a consulting role for business owners. And then I just stopped building ’cause I was just consulting, and so I was giving people a plan, and then they were going to the developers to get the job built.

So fast-forward to today, and the re- and the reason that we met was because of, as you mentioned, Jackultoro. So about- 12, 13 years ago now, I hired Jack from a, from one of these outsourcing websites, and I know enough code to be dangerous. I can get myself into trouble, but I don’t know how to get myself back out.

I’m… That’s my level. And so I stopped coding. I stopped learning code. I never learned script- I never learned to Python or JavaScript or anything. I never bothered. And I needed because I was using a CRM at the time, and to me, it was In- Infusionsoft was the only real product on the marketplace. You had Salesforce, but that was enterprise.

So for the, for a typical business owner, for a small startup or a one-man band, Infusionsoft was the product that pe- that people were using. And I needed a way to connect Infusionsoft into WordPress. And so I think at the start we piggybacked it onto S2Member. I think it was… We used another plugin and Jack, I hired him to come on board, and he made this connection to connect the the CRM to the website, so that if people updated their details in a form, it would update the CRM.

If I updated the CRM, it would update their account area. And then what happened after that is Jack was like, this is cool.” I’d hired him. He’d given me the code. But he said I think I could turn this into a product. I think I can make this something.” And so as a result, he he said “Do you mind if I take this code?”

And I was like, “Sure. Just look after me, and let’s keep me involved, and we’ll… Let’s see what we can do.” And he we… we created WP Fusion. And I say we. At the time, it was us, but I have to give full and absolute credit to Jack because at that time, I had some personal stuff going on in my life, so I had to step back.

And as a result, Jack spent the next decade building this incredible plugin, and initially, it was just for Infusionsoft, and then I would phone Jack up and be like, “Hey, Jack, some of my clients have just moved over to ActiveCampaign. Can you hook it up?” And, “Hey, Jack, some of my clients have just moved over to Zoho.”

And that’s why now it’s like Jack was like, “Okay, I’m just gonna… I’m just gonna preempt that Steve’s gonna need all these CRMs,” and so he just connected them all up. But yeah it’s evolved, and he has spent 10 years building nothing but sanity metrics within that company. He’s done no vanity. He’s done no marketing.

And the 15,000 users are a testament to Jack. They are Jack. I can’t take credit for that. I wasn’t involved in that part of it. And so fast forward to about a year ago, and I was going through a, a relationship breakup and considering what my life was gonna look like mo- moving forward.

And Jack said, “Come over to Berlin. Let’s just get you out of your environment and sort your head out.” And we, we’d stayed friends the whole time. So I went over to Berlin and it was interesting because me and Jack both work nights, as many developers and many people do. And when I flew out there, for s- for whatever reason, my body clock had adjusted to daytime, but Jack was still on nights.

And I didn’t have Jack’s Wi-Fi password, and he’d gone to bed, and I was literally sitting in his front room for about seven hours, and I had nothing to do. I had no phone. I had no laptop. And it forced me to just uncomfortably sit on his balcony and in his front room and just process my life, which at that time I really needed to do.

And I I come away from that weekend, and Jack said, “Why don’t you come back into WP Fusion?” He’s like, “Why don’t you come back and if you’re looking for something to do, I’d” Long story short I pivoted out of websites during COVID. I moved into crypto. I went through crypto made e- enough money that I didn’t need to work at the time, but I lost my self-worth.

I lost my I, I lost my my passion, and I love building. I love building things. And so Jack kinda guided me and helped me get back into that space, and he said, “Hey, we’re going to an event in Newcastle. It’s called Retain. Why don’t you come with us?” And yeah, that brings us up to where… And that was the, that was tail end of the year before I met you, and then, yeah we met and that’s just the start of the story.

There’s so much more that’s happened it’s insane. This year’s been just unreal, unbelievable. But yeah, that, that kinda- Let’s- … brings us up, so yeah …

Chris Badgett: let’s talk about the power of community. Like in WordPress as an example I would say a very small percentage, single digits actually get involved in the community, and that’s not just WordCamps.

That’s other niche events like PressConf or other marketing conferences or the thing that we went to in Retain. And for me it’s literally changed my life. My current business partner I met at a small conference. My lead developer I met at a, a small conference. A lot of the people that are, have been most impactful in my entrepreneurship gener- journey, there has been an in-person element.

And you don’t know what you’re missing unt- I think until you see the value. I was just like you, an, a freelancer, agency guy building sites. Yes, I used WordPress and all the, and Infusionsoft and all these other tools, I went to like the Infusionsoft conference and then started going to these WordPress events, and quickly e- everything just changes when you kinda have that people side view of what’s going on.

So I’m really curious to ask you, Steve, recently you went to PressConf, a great event and- Yeah … but I really wanna get your perspective of you’re, you had all these chapters in your life. You’re a book author, agency owner. You didn’t even mention it, but you worked with Tony Robbins for a while and- Anyways, you kinda plugged back in to this entrepreneur digital course, coaching, information product industry, and started going to some events like the one we met at called Retain.

But I’d be curious to get your read as somebody kinda reentering the WordPress community, if you will what you noticed at PressConf, and what are some things that you noticed there?

Steve Woody: Yeah, that’s a brilliant question because just before I went out to Berlin with Jack, I was actually teaching at a university in London, and so I was…

I’d gone from being quite isolated ’cause I went through a period where I wasn’t working. I was… I just didn’t, I just didn’t need to. And the thing is I’ve spent my whole life struggling financially, so I’ve always had that that chasing the carrot, that next paycheck, that making sure I can survive.

And so when that was no longer a thing, it re- everyone thinks you wanna sit on a beach and retire until you actually don’t have anything to do, and then you realize actually it’s quite boring. And what drives us is the need to solve problems, to build things, to do things. And I find that being around people it creates that energy that allows you to find these opportunities more so than if you’re just sat in front of a computer doom scrolling, so to speak.

And yeah, we did Retain. Retain was an incredible experience. Some of the speakers there were absolutely phenomenal. It invoked a passion in me, and we talked about this on the train on the way back down to London, that it made me realize that I’d spent, We get stuck in our stories sometime, and I was stuck in mine, and so having moved elements of my life to allow me to be able to enjoy being back in that environment and I’d never been to a WordCamp.

I’d been to some local WordPress meetups, but I was, again, very much outside of the WordPress ecosystem. And so after we got back from Retain, Jack was like, “We’re going to another event.” And I was like, “Cool. Where’s this one?” And he was like, “Arizona.” And I was like, “Okay. That’s a long flight.” And he was like, “Don’t worry.

We’re flying business.” I was like, “Course we are, Jack.” So we went out… ‘Cause… A- and by the way, that’s not just ’cause Jack’s flushed. That’s because Jack knows how to work air miles and credit cards effectively, and that is a game, if you’re not aware of it I implore you to look into because that man is a genius at getting discounts and deals and business flights for a few hundred dollars.

It’s it’s an art to watch him do it. And so we fly out to Arizona, and we we spent some time at this event and so Arizona PressConf is a very special event for me for multiple reasons. And so one of those reasons is because during the event, I got to witness something that, for me, was incredible.

And it was on day two. It was where, as I was walking into the conference room, there was a group of guys outside the conference room in a circle, and they were sharing, and they were openly talking about some of the challenges that men go through, and it was a… It was an incredibly cathartic mental health I’m not gonna say exercise, but just just an opportunity for just some incredible nurturing, let’s just say that.

I think that’s a good choice of words, for, for men in that environment to really open up emotionally and intellectually and mentally and share some of the challenges that guys go through that they don’t often talk about. And that to me was like, “Wow, this is not just a WordPress event, and this is not just a, a business event.

This is bl-” And you mentioned Tony Robbins, and so I’m very much attuned to that kind of world. And so this was personal development and business development, and the way that it was fused together in a way that people didn’t even realize what was happening, these incredible moments were just popping like fireworks everywhere.

And I got to witness this and I also got to witness Raquel, who as the owner of the, the event is someone who… The first t- the first night I met her, she turned around to me and she said, “I’m gonna change the world.” And I thought to myself, “Okay, people say that. Sure.” And then on, on the first day of the event, ’cause the first night was obviously the mixer and everything, the first day of the event, I saw her on stage and I was like, “Wow, actually, I believe you.”

She had that presence, that energy, that power to be able to really command, and then obviously just watching and seeing what she’d built and coming from the event space. PressConf… And I know it used to be Pressnomics, and it was reborn. It- It’s so much more than an event. To call it an event almost does it a disservice.

It is it’s… I would call it a lifestyle. The people that go to those events choose to be at those events ’cause they want to be in proximity to the people at those events. You have people on stage that have just sold companies for 300 million. You’ve got people that are flying in that, that Raquel is incredible at leveraging these, these people to be able to deliver.

Just like Katie Keefe did a talk and it was such a… And it almost set the tone for the weekend, she was talking about the struggles with her child, she was talking about the challenges with business, and it was relatable. It was so relatable that it allowed people to look at the problems that they maybe weren’t feeling comfortable to share, but then it give them that safe space to do that.

So that to me was phenomenal. So after press conf, went back to the UK for two weeks with Jack, and then pretty much just got on a plane and went straight back out to Arizona and spent a month out there. Come back from there to Poland to WordCamp. And so that was my first WordCamp experience to go to an actual WordCamp event.

That was my first time seeing a WordCamp. And yeah it’s it’s really opened my eyes. And so I got to experience WordCamp from two perspectives as a person who’s been using WordPress for a long time, as somebody who is giving back to WordPress through the plugin ecosystem and through w- products that we offer and also as Raquel’s partner now, ’cause there’s a lot that happened in Arizona

I also got to see behind the scenes of how the event was run and what was happening, and the volunteers and the passion and the love and the people who have made it their life’s mission to create this community. I thought for a long time that WordPress was software. To me, that was my…

WordPress is software, it’s a tool, you use it to make money. I no longer believe that. And I’ve had many a debate with people online about WordPress is dying and the ecosystem’s dying and, WordPress is being replaced by AI and we… all of these conversations. But WordPress, in my opinion, can’t die.

Even if the boss presses the red button, it doesn’t matter. It’s never gonna switch off because WordPress isn’t a company, WordPress isn’t a product, and WordPress definitely isn’t software, in my eyes, in my opinion. To me, WordPress is community. And so yeah, getting to experience the community physically, like in a sense of being together with people.

And I’m not talking about the main events, I’m talking about the side parties, I’m talking about the side tracks and the conversations that happen outside the main room, just absolutely phenomenal. Just blows my mind that… i’m a little bit annoyed at myself for it taking so long to get into this space knowing it’s been there all that time.

So yeah it’s been a absolute whirlwind this year, but one that I’ve I’ve loved every minute of it

Chris Badgett: You know, it’s, the community is around WordPress and digital software and entrepreneurship and information and products. We’re going through a period of rapid flux and transition. I think it’s a mistake to say, “Oh X is gonna die,” or, “Y is gonna die.”

But the community is a huge part of what makes WordPress and all the people involved special. However, many of the companies are struggling with some challenges with growth and, other tools and competition. Education is changing. Like for example, in my world, why take an online course when you can just ask an AI chat and get your answer there?

So there’s all this stuff happening, but like you said, when you had the financial freedom barrier removed, you got a little lost. So my biggest concern with AI is really that it is awesome to be financially free, and that should be, that’s a great goal. But there’s a part of humans that need to struggle.

We’re literally struggle machines. And and then we also need to connect with other humans.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

Steve Woody: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: It’s so interesting. So if robots and AI take all the jobs, I’m really concerned, but I also have faith in the power of community. And, And also just being flexible. It’s not… Like you said, it’s, WordPress isn’t just software.

What we do isn’t just WordPress. There’s other community stuff. I’m sure you love to help an entrepreneur with a brick-and-mortar business, as an example. It’s still, that’s just another community that’s your entrepreneur vibe that let’s… It doesn’t even matter what tools we’re using.

We’re just helping each other. But how do you see this going forward? ‘Cause I feel like we’re a society in transition, and if you look at AI conversations, there’s the concept of the singularity and then super super intelligence. And so what, where does the human fit? And I think community is going to just become more and more valuable, like human community.

And I’m not anti-AI. I love AI. Oops. I have an AI agent powered by Automem, and it’s awesome. But I can be pro-AI and pro-human at the same time, but I do have some concerns about the future.

Steve Woody: This is the part of the conversation I really enjoy. So there’s a few books. One of them is called Tribes by Seth Godin.

It’s an incredible book. Talks about bringing people together and about finding your people, and I think that is vital. I think we need that. We’re not designed to be solo on this planet. We’re designed to be in partnerships. We’re designed to be around people. And that goes, some people choose religion, some people choose football, some people choose politics, whatever it is.

I know there’s always gonna be segregation, there’s always gonna be two sides to it. But ultimately we all want to belong and we all want to comm- connemme. I don’t know why, but we wanna… For a better choice of words, I was gonna say wanna fight and the other F word, make love. But it’s just as humans, that’s what we’re wired to do, right?

So I think ultimately, if you look at the cell on a cel- cellular level, the first thing is survival. We wanna survive. And once, once we’re comfortable surviving, then our DNA wants to reproduce. So that’s what we do. And so ultimately, if we can create a comfortable environment, then we get complacent, we d- get a little bit lazy and we need something to push us.

AI is great at, it’s an incredible disruption, and it’s a disruption that’s happening. If you look at, Look at computers and computer software, and then look at the internet, right? The internet obviously increased the the ability to be able to deliver. And then you’ve got mobile phones.

Again, increased the ability to deliver at a level. Now you’ve got AI. So what we’re doing is we’re stacking up these incredible technologies on top of each other, which is just boosting the run- or reducing the runway to time to market is so quick now. It’s phenomenal. You can have a fully functioning CRM with a CMS, with everything built overnight in a couple of prompts.

It’s phenomenal But there’s also social media, and we don’t have enough data right now with social media to be able to look at the mental impacts. We’re starting to talk about it, the negative impact it’s got on kids. Governments are now starting to put limits in place, and we’re starting to see that there’s this, this real addiction to this dopamine hit that we get through this instant gratification.

And This is what scares me right now, and I think that the two biggest businesses that we’re gonna see come out the next decade, going a little bit off topic, but I think they’re gonna be event businesses or retreats, but physical businesses and therapists, because I think everyone’s gonna need me- and we’ve started to see a, a, a slight mental health pandemic, but nothing compared to what I think is coming.

Because when you lose your sense of purpose it really throws out your north pole. And it… and if you’re not prepared… i’ve done a lot of personal development, and I really struggled during that phase. And so if I struggled through that phase, and I’m not saying I’m better than anyone else, but I had tools equipped to be able to use them.

People that don’t have those tools and can’t have access to those tools are going to really struggle, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet compared to what’s coming. On the flip side, I think people are freaking out over AI, but I think they’re also missing, and this is just an opinion I don’t have the data to back this up completely, but as an example, if we look at what happened a couple of years ago in Germany a lot of money was invested into…

And I do a lot of macro and micro market analysis, trading and things. But if we look at what happened in Germany, they invested a lot of money in wind power. And then there’s a, a saying, and I can’t remember what it is, but there is a specific saying in, in Germany for no wind, and they had 12 to 14 days with no wind, and it had the potential to cripple the economy ’cause they had to import power.

And if you’ve ever had to import something over your usage, you’ll know you get charged a premium for it. And so AI and crypto together with the, the power that they’re harnessing it does two things. One, it has the ability to cripple a country, to literally cripple the power grid of a country. So some things that people aren’t aware of at the moment is a bit like in Dubai where they had the housing boom, and then it died off.

If… I think it was around 2015 or whenever it was, but the, the… They stopped building in Dubai before they finished it. And so that’s happening with data centers right now. There are so many data centers that were being built as part of a valuation for an, an LLM or an AI company. These data centers are now just sitting empty.

They’re not even finished. Even if the data centers get built, we don’t have the physical components in the world to be able to build the transistors and all of the networks and the grids and the electricity pylons and everything that’s needed to power that infrastructure. We don’t, we, we don’t have… we’re running on a, a deficit right now.

We don’t have the physical components and materials to build at the speed that we need it. So I’m not even that worried about AI, and people don’t even consider this angle, but in order to get to where AI needs to be, where it’s not just a chatbot that you can talk… And don’t get me wrong, it’s clever, it’s smart, but it is still a set of rules.

And yes, you can automate mundane tasks, but it st- it doesn’t think for itself. Yes, you can use an orchestrator, and you can allow AI agents to talk to each other, and it can do a lot of your job for you. It can. It can automate so much. I’ll give you a quick example. Mine– One of mine has the, It’s connected into my Fitbit.

It knows how many steps I’ve done, it knows how much sleep I got last night, it knows my my what I’m doing work-wise and throughout the day through the apps that I use. And as a result, it knows what to order me and put in my shopping basket, and it’s like, “Oh, you haven’t had enough protein this week, but you’ve worked out, so I’m gonna order you some extra chicken.”

It’s got access to my credit card, and so it orders my shopping for me automatically. And so this is just an example of just how we’re starting to use systems now. And yeah, they are incredible. But we’re not gonna see this just continuously go on and on. It’s gonna hit a plateau. It’s gonna, it’s gonna dip.

We’re gonna have a correction. It– the market has to, the world has to. And so there are a lot of people, a lot of people who are scared of AI. And if you look at the people who are using AI, it’s a very small minority, and sometimes it feels like you’re in a bubble because of that. But you talk to most sixteen, seventeen, eighteen-year-olds, they will tell you that AI is destroying the planet.

They will tell you that AI is taking all of the jobs. They’ll tell you that AI is, all… they hate it. And you can argue, yes there’s an energy problem, but until you are faced with a challenge, you don’t have the opportunity. If we look at what’s happening in El Salvador at the moment, they’re starting to harness the power of volcanoes to be able to create new energy sources.

So it– You, you can’t get the ability to innovate until you first have a problem you need to overcome. So crypto and AI together are causing us to innovate energy to a much higher level. And, I’ve got Elon talking about like farming in space, and good luck to him. Crack on. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens.

But I’m not worried in the short term because a lot of business owners, yes, they might use AI. And by the way, when we say use AI, most people who use AI, they use the free version of ChatGPT. Developers will use Claude, and a few people will use everything or their own custom version. But most people will stick to either ChatGPT, or they’ll chat to Claude, and they’ll get it to do some basic tasks.

But I would say the majority of people I’ve spoken to in AI, they’ve built a great dashboard on localhost, and now they have an idea of just how screwed they are, but they don’t actually know what to do with it. And so this brings me to the final point with AI is that a bit like with sat nav, the way that before sat nav existed, we had physical maps.

You’d have to stop at a service station, you’d have to look at a map, you’d have to plot your route, you’d have to understand what the roads meant, how it worked. Now, you turn up at your destination, you don’t even know how you got there. I turn around to my daughter and I’m like, “Drive us into town,” and she wouldn’t even know what roads to take.

She’d have to rely on the sat nav. And so what I mean by this is it’s removed our ability to think critically And so AI is making people dumber because they sto- they’ve stopped thinking, and they’re just relying now on an output, and AI is being trained on previous models, and it’s like garbage in, garbage out.

And so I don’t think AI is evolving as much as the marketing is telling us it is. Yes they’re allowing us more features to connect the dots, and MCPs are phenomenal for being able to allow tooling. You already mentioned AutoMem. So AutoMem is a, a vector database that uses two different vector databases to to mimic short and long-term memory through a dream cycle with relevance to give you a context window that isn’t just gonna destroy your RAM or blow your tokens up.

So having this– having these systems, watching these things get built, they’re incredible. But there are still business owners out there who are scared and are not willing to move. And yes, can we really be able to plug in with one prompt in an evening? Of course, we can. Are people gonna do it? Some will, but there’s a lot of other people that have spent so much physical money, so much emotional bandwidth, so much mental strain to build what they’ve got.

They’re not willing to move. They’re not able to move. And so I don’t think WordPress is going anywhere either not in the short term

Chris Badgett: Let’s land the plane on the mindset thing. ‘Cause I think that’s where you and I really connect, and a lot of the people, like the vibe you were talking about at Press Conf and some of the pop-up experiences.

And mindset, I’m just gonna throw in one pro tip. One of the things that helps me is I spend a lot of time in nature. I’ve lived through the Alaskan winter in a tent with a wood stove with… When it’s 30 below. And I had- I put in a hand pump well that I had- I would have to thaw with a propane torch in the middle of winter to pump water.

But because I had that base, it just gives me perspective on everything else. So that… So getting out in nature, you don’t have to be extreme- extremo like me, but it’s very grounding in your humanity. The other piece is, goes back to community, which becomes more and more valuable in a world where all this automation and abstraction is happening.

But I wanna dig in a little bit, ’cause I’m the same as you. If I talk to a younger person, including my own children, they’re very against AI. And I get it because, if you’re graduating into an economy where all the jobs are replaced by AI and robots, that’s scary. Everything has an immune response.

I don’t know, just in my niche, for example, if you look at something like university education, which is very expensive in the United States and many other parts of the world people are doing the calculation of return on investment for spending 200 grand on college, and then there’s all the uncertainty about the jobs.

The whole American dream, go to school, get into a good college, get a good job, it’s really under question of does this model work like it used to? And it’s changed in many ways already. But

Steve Woody: the mindset- let me just say- Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Go on. I was gonna s- just one point, ’cause when I was teaching at university, there was…

i… There’s something that I said to my students. I sat down on the first day. I had about 60 students in the class, and I said to them, “Look, if you leave this university and the only thing that you have is a degree, you’ve failed If you haven’t used this opportunity to build experiences, to build relationships to try and to fail and to learn and to grow, then you’ve completely missed the point of being here.

Chris Badgett: That’s a great point. Learning is what makes us human. It’s not going away, and there’s so many types of learning in addition to tests and textbooks and lectures. But in terms of the mindset, like you and I obviously, and many of the people we connect with and resonate with, your vibe attracts your tribe.

I find myself in a bubble of growth mindset people. So I’m not scared of AI. I have concerns, but I’m I have an open mind. So but sometimes you’ll see, let’s say inside a company where a developer may actually be concerned about their job and being replaced with AI. And in my view, like the better mindset is like why don’t you try to augment yourself with AI and just make yourself 10X more valuable and figure out these things like AutoMem and agent orchestration and, solve problems with AI.

‘Cause essentially that’s what we’re doing at work, is solving problems, and you just have new tools. And while you’re at it, don’t forget that you’re a human being. We’ve seen this m- movie before. Facebook or Twitter or whatever does not replace real in-the-flash human relationships. It’s great to have a lot of shallow connections on the internet.

I love meeting people that I’ve known online forever. This is one of the benefits of community and you’re like, “Oh my God, there’s Zach Katz. He’s seven feet tall. I had no idea.” “I recognize you, but dude, I’m like, I’m usually the tall guy.” You don’t look like your avatar? Yeah. I do. It’s true. And we’re great friends, but, For anybody really, there’s the youth and their mindset, there’s entrepreneurs and their mindset, there’s employees and their mindset, there’s successful entrepreneurs and their mindset, there’s startup entrepreneurs and their mindset.

What do you recommend here or what’s your, what are your pearls of wisdom around mindset in a world that has never been changing faster with exponential technologies like crypto, AI, robotics, and other things just going at a pace that the human being is not necessarily… We don’t have 100,000 years of genetics like we have around you need to eat, figure out how to eat.

Now there’s, like, all this stuff going on.

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Steve Woody: I think that is a fantastic question, and my

Chris Badgett: I was- how do you not lose yourself? Like, how do you not lose yourself? So I start,

Steve Woody: yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then how do you set yourself up- Start with

Steve Woody: the outcome …

Chris Badgett: for success?

Steve Woody: So get comfortable being uncomfortable.

That’s the first thing. I think it’s important that when we are struggling, and a lot of people are struggling, and change invokes a lot of fear, it involves a lot of uncertainty, and when you’re in that space of being fearful, uncertain, when you’re struggling, it causes pain. And I have a saying that I believe that is hurt people.

And so often when we’re caught in that cycle, and we’re caught in that mindset of spiraling and… I don’t like to label things, and I definitely don’t like to use medical labels, so things like depression or things like, like whatever the, the word might be, but anxiety and all of these things that people suffer with, ultimately, it could be changed quite simply by physiol- Like, you could…

If you get up and move. If you see someone who’s depressed, if you were to picture someone as depressed, they’re probably gonna be slumped over. They’re gonna be sitting like this. They’re gonna be like, they’re gonna be like that. But if you see somebody who’s sitting up, they’re sitting up straight, they’ve got good posture, or they’re walking around, and they’re just more…

it creates in… So for me, the absolute first thing, if you wanna work on your mindset, the base layer has to be your health. You have to work on your physical health if you want to improve your mental health. And by the way, if your mental health is not in a good place, you’re not gonna want to work on your physical health.

So to me, Eric Thomas, he’s a fantastic lecturer, he says, “Until you want success as bad as you want to breathe, you’re not gonna be successful.” So people chase money. They think that’s what they want. Money is a byproduct of value. So if you’re adding value to the world, that’s gonna make money, and that’s gonna help you, and that’s gonna put you in a better place and around better people.

You can’t add value to the world until you’re adding value to yourself. So ultimately, it has to start with yourself. So I would say hydration, absolutely above and beyond. And you might think this is basics and it’s stupid, but it’s true. We often forget to hydrate. We often forget posture. We often forget to just go for a walk.

You mentioned nature. You mentioned the stuff you do to get outside. When you’re up against a crunch or when you’re struggling you almost feel guilty for stepping away from your, what you need to be focused on. But if you look at the productive hours you spend in a day, I can do much more in six hours productively than someone that sits at a screen for twelve hours.

Because I know that time’s gonna be hyper-focused, it’s gonna be beneficial for me, and I’m gonna be locked in. So the absolute best tool that I have in my arsenal is my diary. So my calendar is blocked out every hour of every day, what am I doing? Am I learning something? Am I talking to somebody? Am I spending some time on my own?

What am I doing? Now, it’s very easy when you’ve got a calendar to just start ignoring things. If you set an alert for the same time every day, you’ll just start snoozing it. So you have to make sure and push yourself to… and this is why automation is amazing. It is great. I love it. We build it But there is still something so powerful about doing something manually.

I still do manual bookkeeping. And you might think to yourself, “What is the point? You can just chuck your bank statements into AI, and it’ll do it all for you.” Yes, it will. But when it does that, what it won’t allow me to do is have the emotional connection to, “Oh, shit, I spent too much on McDonald’s this month.

I need to rein that in.” So you get to see the patterns, and you get to connect to the patterns which you wouldn’t otherwise get to do. So yeah, AI’s phenomenal. It can do incredible things, but what it can’t do is it can’t change you in here. That comes from you being connected to something, often through pain, struggling, suffering, or an experience.

And if you’re not gonna experience it yourself, then maybe you can experience it through someone else. If you’re very lucky, you’ll learn by someone else’s mistakes. But often, we have to make mistakes. You don’t grow when you’re comfortable. You don’t grow when you’re happy. You grow when you’re suffering, when you’re struggling.

And so I think it’s important to get comfortable being uncomfortable and to not not to see it for worse than it actually is. If it’s bad, you can see it for being bad, but don’t catastrophize things to make them so bad that… Y- I say this to my daughter, it was a saying that I have as a father is it’s not my job to stop her falling over, and it’s not even my job to pick her up if she falls over.

It’s my job to ensure that one day when I’m not around, she’s able to pick herself up. And so giving people the tools so that they can do things themselves is really important. And so what works for me may not work for you, may not work for the listeners. You gotta find what works for you, but the only way you can start that is by actually doing something.

And I’ll give you an example with this. Yesterday, very good friend of mine, he is a personal trainer coming up to 40 years old, doesn’t wanna personally train anymore. So went out and got a sales job working for a media company in the UK selling advertising space on billboards. Goes into the office on the first day, and there’s 10 sales staff, and this is a real company.

Got about half a million billboards in the UK, very reputable company. 10 sales staff, all of them have an area in the UK, and they’re all responsible for the lo- locations of these billboards, and then they have to go and find all of the companies, be it taxi companies or hair and beauty salons, whatever it might be, and they have to…

a cold ou- outreach to them to try and sell them advertising space. And I took one look at this, and I was like that’s an inefficient system.” And so I sat down with my friend, and I said, “Let me just build you a simple dashboard, a simple system.” We vibe coded it. It was very simple. And the average salesman in that company sends 100 emails a day.

They had a- an Amazon reward thing within the sales team where somebody got a gift card ’cause they did 350 emails in a day. Well done, you. On my friend’s first day in the company, within an hour, he’d done fifteen hundred emails. With auto replies set up through AI to be able to manage that, his commission on closing just one percent, which is what is the industry standard, he gets thirty percent commission on a sale.

By just closing, having a one percent conversion rate on that business, he’s making a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. There’s so many opportunities out there to take a boomer business, to redefine it, to take it to a new level, to be able to get… if you’re just worried about money, there are so many ways to earn money out there.

You don’t need to struggle. But if you want to build something meaningful, if you wanna be part of a community, then sometimes you don’t wanna be on the cutting edge of bleeding technology. You wanna be where everyone’s comfortable, where everyone’s familiar, and that’s why I don’t think WordPress is going away.

You’ve gotta be comfortable being uncomfortable. You’ve gotta be able to push yourself and go to new areas. But also, if you live there, it’s exhausting. So you have to be able to come back to comfort, and you have to be able to balance between the two. So I’d say the key word in all of this is balance.

So be comfortable being uncomfortable and find balance, and if you can do that, you’ll be okay

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Steve. I’m gonna ask you one more question. It’s actually nine questions in one, so this is a rapid- Okay … fire round.

Steve Woody: All

Chris Badgett: right. So let me give you the setup. Here’s the challenge. I look at it like the spiral, right?

So you’re either on a downward spiral, or you’re- Okay … plateaued and you’re just level and stuck, or you’re on the upward spiral. And nobody is perfect, and we all oscillate and have plateau periods or downward spiral periods, something that, bad happens in our life or whatever. But ideally, we wanna be generally trending on the upward spiral.

So the nine questions in one is this. I may have done the math wrong, by the way. Math is not my strong suit. I love

Steve Woody: this. No.

Chris Badgett: All right. So you only get one answer per question.

Steve Woody: Okay.

Chris Badgett: So-

Steve Woody: And do I have to answer as quick as I can?

Chris Badgett: It’s more- What- … like one story from your life and one pro tip- Okay

Per area.

Steve Woody: Okay.

Chris Badgett: So if you’re on the downward spiral in some way-

…

Chris Badgett: What’s something f- maybe from your life that made you continue down faster? All right.

And then on the plateau, what’s one thing from your life, and then some advice that kept you on the plateau? You could just, could not go…

Luckily, you weren’t going down, but you were flat. And then the th- the last one is the upward spiral. What’s something that pushed you to get that, escape velocity and that upward momentum? So I don’t think that’s nine questions. What’d you do to make a downward spiral worse? What’d you do to ensure that you stayed- I love this

stayed stuck on a plateau? And then what’d you do to achieve escape velocity to go higher? Oh, I think this is- So I think it’s just three questions.

Steve Woody: No, but I love it. I love it. I’ll be respectful of the the time I answer these as well, but okay. So downward spiral, I’ve done this a lot. So for context I used to be homeless when I left the army.

I lived in a car for six months. I’ve been bankrupt. I’ve literally been in the gutter, so I’ve had to… And I don’t have a trust fund. I don’t have a family wealth that’s afforded me the life I’ve got. I’ve had to build it from the ground up. And I have a saying that I’m gonna be successful because I know I’m running out of things to do wrong.

I have done so many things, and I’ve messed up so many times. And so for me, on that downward spiral, which I know that so well, the thing that keeps me going down is the- Your mindset. When you’re in that place, you can’t… The thing that got you there is not the thing that’s gonna get you out. And so if you keep doing the same thing that got you to that place, you’re gonna keep going.

And what happens, what tends to happen is when things go bad, you start to blame yourself. You start to… Y- you’re not kind to yourself, so you start to beat yourself up, you start to bully yourself, if you took the voices in my head and you personified them as two people and let them talk, you would interject.

You would not allow those two people to talk to each other in that way, yet we do it to ourselves in our head all the time. We talk shit to ourselves all the time. And I think on the downward spiral, the thing that made me spiral more than anything was my inner dialogue, the things that I said to myself and the way that I talked to myself.

And so my tip would be force yourself, make time to meditate. If you wanna get fit, if you wanna get healthy, you go to the gym, you train a physical muscle, and you see the improvement. Why would you not train your mental muscles? Why would you not take time to actively train your brain to meditate, to use mantras, to use affirmations, to talk positively, to inspire yourself?

‘Cause it has to start from within. There’s a, a fantastic book called “The Master Key System” and it talks about for something to exist, you first must think it. When you think it, you can do it. When you do it can be. And so for me, it’s the internal dialogue, getting that in check, and then even if it’s something as simple as breathing.

So the action step that I would take if you’re on a downward spiral is to stop and breathe, and a great technique for that is a guy called Wim Hof. Wim Hof, the Ice Man, he has a, a fantastic, Does a lot of ice challenges, a lot of cold water therapy, but he talks about breathing and there’s a lot of things you can do around breathing.

The, the simple one that I’ll give you right now is the four by four. So you just go in on four, you go four very short bursts of inward breath through your nose, and as you do it, you tap your fingers, and then out the same way. You repeat that for f- for 60 seconds, your state will change. You will feel different.

You cannot approach a problem when you’re in a negative mindset. So yeah, the, the thing that, that made me spiral down more than anything was my mindset, and breathing is gonna be the best way to regulate yourself, meditation to allow… And that’s why yoga is an insane thing to… If you’ve got the opportunity, go to a yoga class.

You’re around other people, it’s a different environment. It forces you to be able to do that. So absolutely recommend that you go and do that. That’s just life advice. That’s through my life I’ve learned that. Plateauing I would say the thing that causes me to plateau o- or to plateau more than anything is arrogance and ego.

Some of the… Three of the, the most dangerous words in the English language is, “I know that.” As soon as you say, “I know that,” you’re cutting off the opportunity to learn something new. And so always be the dumbest person in the room. Always surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. Always ask questions.

There is no such thing as a stupid question, it’s just the one that you didn’t ask. And so the reason I was never able to grow and I wasn’t going up or down, was because I believed I knew the answer, and I was arrogant or unwilling to try something new, and I was just stuck. And a lot of that come from just ignorance, and it come from just the unwillingness to listen.

We have… And ironically, I haven’t shut up throughout this podcast. I appreciate that, but we have one mouth and two ears for a reason, so you should use them in that order. Well-

Chris Badgett: And the

Steve Woody: upward spiral You should listen more than you talk. And the upward spiral is absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, proximity.

The people that you’re around. If you are around people… A- and you are the sum of the five people you spend most of your time with. So it really helps to be around successful people. Just today, me and my daughter, we went to we went to visit one of lo- the UK’s largest private car collections today.

Gentleman’s got a collection of 60 million pounds worth of Ferraris in his house, and this is an incredible guy who sold a company, a telecom company, for a absolute fortune. Some of his cars alone are almost worth eight figures. And so when you’re in that environment, and when you see how these people are and how they act and how they are around each other, and you realize that, you always wanna be helping people.

You always wanna be trying to offer value. It’s not about what you can take, it’s about what you can give. If you wanna make money, you have to give value. So it’s not “I wanna take something. How can I take your money?” It’s, “No, how can I give you value first, and then I will get something back as a result.”

And so by proximity, by being around good people, by always offering yourself of giving value first… And I’m not talking about working for free, because you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta respect… You’ve gotta have boundaries. You’ve gotta be able to res- respect yourself. So it’s not about I’m gonna go and work for free until I make it, but it’s about having the respect, being around good people, and having that ability to add value.

And that has every single time when I’ve been on a run, it’s been because I have been breathing. I’ve been meditating. I’ve been physically training. I’ve put myself in the best possible state. I’m hydrated. As a result, my mind is working better. I’m sleeping better, so I’m having better conversations with better people.

Every single time something has gone well in my life, it has been because in that state, I’ve given value, and as a result, I’ve got something back as a result of it. So if you can apply that or find that logic, then that, that’s my advice

Chris Badgett: That is amazing. And I just wanna highlight the compounding nature, both on the way up and the way down.

Steve Woody: Oh,

Chris Badgett: yes. These things stack, so when it’s scary living in exponential times, you are also an exponential animal. You can make things drastically better by stacking- Of course … or drastically worse, or stay flat by not stacking at all.

Steve Woody: If you’re on the way down, and if you’re on the way down right now, my best advice to you is to change your state.

And the best way to do that is just put your hands in the air and treat it like a rollercoaster. You’re going down anyway, right? So just enjoy the ride. It’s not until you start to do that you’ll be able to flip it around. So yeah, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta pull yourself out of the state that you’re currently in order to change it,

Chris Badgett: i’m gonna do a quick lightning round for myself, and then we’ll close it out. And I resonate a lot with what Steve said. But the downward spiral, I’ve been in that entrepreneur place, working nights, and just not sleeping well, high anxiety, just really going down. And I actually came across an online course called Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan, and it was like…

And this is before all this was super popular about having a morning routine and everything. So I was like, “Yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start developing my morning routine.” So I just did a half-mile walk down a dirt road every single morning after a glass of water. That was, like, the foundation. And then in terms of compounding over time, earlier this year, I ran 100 miles, which is insane.

I became an ultra runner. But it all started from just committing on the calendar, even when I didn’t feel like it, to do that morning walk, get sunlight. I’m stacking. I’m moving my body, I’m getting sunlight, I’m getting hydration first thing in the morning. I’m not going straight to my phone.

That’s, that got me off that. In terms of plateauing, I think to stay on the plateau, ignore two things. Ignore community, and ignore learning. Like Steve said, “I know that” are very dangerous words. So being a lifelong learner is really what it’s, what it means to be human. We’re supposed to keep learning and evolving all, all the way through our entire life.

And then on the upward spiral, my pro tip there is to… I got lucky, ’cause I kinda found it. There, there’s randomness, there’s luck, and there’s strategy, and they all come into play. But what I found is that when I could align my life mission with my company mission, everything wasn’t so hard anymore. So my dedication to lifting up others through learning, and like Steve said, first focusing on myself- And then my company does that through software.

It’s so aligned that it literally doesn’t feel like work. I do consider myself lucky, and I… Yes, there’s parts of my job where I have to, quote, “Sweep the floor” and do something I don’t wanna do. But when you can align your work and your life purpose together that really unlocks that upward spiral compounding.

So that’s Steve Woody. Steve, where can people find you if they wanna connect with you? And also if you enjoyed this episode, I’d love a comment below the YouTube video or send us an email. If you want me to do another one with Steve on a specific topic or go deep or do more of the same, just let us know.

I’d love to hear from you. But finding Steve is awesome. I found a new friend. And it’s a brother from another mother experience that you can have when you get outside of the building, your comfort zone. You don’t have the, all the answers. You hang out with people that are… Yeah, you may share some things, but Steve is also very different from me.

He’s an extrovert of the extreme variety. I’m an introvert of the extreme variety, but it clicks. It works.

Steve Woody: Opposites attract, yeah.

Chris Badgett: So it’s it’s fun. So where can the good people find you, Steve?

Steve Woody: On, on my socials, I’m on Steve Woody. But otherwise WP Fusion. WPfusion.com is the best place, or steve@verygoodplugins.com the purveyor of finely tuned WordPress plugins as Jack likes to call it.

But no I’m available on most of the time I only really use Facebook, and I use it for friends and family. I typically try and avoid social media as much as I can. I don’t try and use it for marketing or promotion. I love real-life connections with people, and I love to actually meet people and to talk to people, and I’m happy to connect on socials, but you’re not gonna find me posting too much on there.

You’re gonna, you’re gonna find me at the events. You’re gonna find me in the real world. And I’m always up for going for a run, Chris.

Chris Badgett: All right. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

Steve Woody: Thank you, Steve. When. We need to lock that in. Thank you, brother. Love you, brother. Thank you so much.

Appreciate you. I appreciate you. Yeah, you too, brother. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get WP Fusion NowChris Badgett discusses how AI is transforming the development, administration, and use of WordPress websites. He discusses leveraging AI technologies like Claude and ChatGPT to communicate directly with WordPress rather than manually navigating dashboards and menus with John Turner, the author of WPVibe.ai, in this LMScast episode. John Tuners also has a YouTube Channel.

One of the main topics of discussion is how AI can speed up and simplify WordPress administration. With WPVibe, users can integrate AI with their WordPress websites to carry out activities like developing courses, adding and enrolling students, upgrading plugins, doing accessibility and SEO audits, producing content, altering websites, and even designing new WordPress themes. Chris emphasizes how HR departments, agencies, freelancers, and LMS owners may find this particularly helpful.

For instance, without having to manually import people or go through several WordPress pages, an HR manager could use AI to develop a safety training course, add hundreds of employees, and enroll them in it. Chris also talks about how important it is to provide AI with additional context. AI can do much more than just respond to inquiries when it has access to a WordPress website, analytics, Google Search Console, email, and other resources.

It has the ability to evaluate data, offer suggestions, and act. He gives an example of how an AI agent can find and replace missing alt text in thousands of photos, a work that would have taken weeks for a person to do. Chris also stresses that since AI is developing quickly, individuals should begin studying and playing with it right away.

According to him, AI is a tool where users take on the role of director, directing the system toward the intended outcome. People can get an edge in their profession and learn how to use AI more quickly if they play with it more. In general, Chris believes AI will be the next development in the creation and administration of WordPress websites. AI is now enabling individuals to create, administer, optimize, and personalize websites using natural conversation, often without the need to know how to code, just as WordPress formerly made website building accessible to non-developers.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show, back from episode 2009, where we talked about SeedProd, but this is John Turner. He’s a, a very prolific WordPress creator, a super awesome guy. He has WPvibe.ai, which essentially allows you to build a WordPress website, manage it, modify it from an AI chat connection we’re gonna dive into that today.

AI is, sweeping the world. I’m so glad John is working on the opportunity in WordPress, and we’re gonna go deep into what WPVibe is, how it works, and how you can think about it for the future, and how to get started with it. But first, welcome on the show, John. Awesome. Thank you for having me, Chris.

Yeah, it has been a while. I’m super excited to be here. I’m super excited to, to talk about AI, because I know there is an education gap right now, and I think that definitely needs to be filled to help move and excel WordPress with AI, so excited to be here. I have this saying that every s- company, but we could say every software company, is a education company, whether they realize it or not.

And particularly with a new emerging technology like AI, it’s never been more important. Let’s lay the groundwork just in terms of terminology, ’cause there’s gonna be people listening and watching of different experience levels. Sure. We have, AI models, we have MCP servers, we have connectors, we have WPVibe we have WordPress abilities.

Give us the 101 on what the key terms are and what they mean. Sure. Typically what most people are familiar with is they’ll go to ChatGPT or Claude.ai and they’ll talk to a chatbot, okay? And that’s where they’re just talking and then getting a reply back, okay? Now, what has happened is they’ve started expanding that ability.

So both of them have added… they have different names for it. Some of them call it connectors, some of them call it apps, some of them call it plugins. But essentially, they’re all MCPs in the background, and MCP is just a technical term for the protocol that AI uses to ter- talk to third-party sites.

So essentially, imagine you wanna talk to your Gmail or have AI read your Gmail. You would use the Gmail connector, which is essentially an MCP under the hood, okay? So basically, that’s how you connect other side other sides. Then you have agents, and agents are typically things that will do stuff for you.

So imagine you’re like read all my email and close all the spam ones and let me know the ones I need to reply to. So AI would run a series of calls to make that happen, and that is s- essentially is agent functionality Nice. Nice. And I actually do that. I use Claude Cowork to- Yeah … read my email, get rid of the cold pitches and everything, and also Slack me the most important things with a link to open the email right away- Yeah

on a scheduled task that happens every day at 5:00 PM. So that’s an example. And it’s surprisingly really good, I bet, right? It is, and I just wanna note on that, I had to get over some fear. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know, if I give Claude access to my email, is there a risk? Is it gonna start- Yeah … doing things?”

But then I started thinking about it, and I was like, Gmail reads all my emails and serves ads based on what it’s seeing and- Yeah … Anthropic or Claude is actually pretty secure. Yeah. I’ve made mistakes where I’ve put something in Claude Code or a chat or something, and it’s like, “Oops, you shared that secret key.

You’re not supposed to do that. I’m deleting that.” “Go ahead. Here are the steps to reset that and all that.” Yeah. It’s actually s- I find it safe, but it does feel risky, but all technology feels that way, right? Yeah. A- and really, it c- this is kinda where the model conversation comes in.

So each company makes a variety of models, and then if you might have heard things of Hermes or OpenClaw. You can use open source models with them. So your risk level really depends how smart the model is. So Claude is actually known for being safe models. They put a lot of guardrails in.

But if you were to use a model, like an open source model that might not be as smart, that does tend to open up the risk a little bit because it just doesn’t have the intelligence like some of the frontier labs have that are able to recognize when a destructive action’s about to happen and prevent it from happening.

Typically I, if you’re an- someone new to AI, I tell them to use one of the US frontier lab models typically to get the best results. So that’s gonna be, like, ChatGPT or Claude? Yeah. Is there anything else on that list? Google is okay for just chatting, but the, the…

Google has struggled with tool calling, and I know they’ve delayed their recent model, but hopefully they’ll get that fixed soon. Grok actually just released a new model called Grok 4.5 which is apparently really good at doing these agenit- agentic task for you, so that’s another one to look into.

But typically right now the two I would look into are ChatGPT and Claude Nice. And I’d love to hear your explanation, and we can roll this into WP Vibe. How do you think or explain the difference between Claude.ai chat versus CoWork versus Code, and which one should you use with WP Vibe? Yeah all right, so yes, it’s a little confusing.

So they have this ecosystem, and basically each level gives AI a little bit more access. All right, so you have Claude.ai, and that’s a website you go to, and you talk to any of your connectors. So if you have WordPress connected via WP Vibe, you can talk to WordPress. You got Gmail, you can talk to it.

All right? So that’s level one, typically the safest level. Then you have CoWork. CoWork can run on your desktop, and what that does is it gives AI access to your local computer, but it sandboxes it. Okay? So it sits in a, a sandbox where it can’t really go outside that folder that you give it access to.

The next level is Claude Code, and think of that full computer access, just opening up the clot- floodgates, and it’s really for the power users. If you’re new, I recommend using Claude.ai, and if you connect, for example, WP Vibe at the Claude.ai level, it cascades to all the other clients like Claude CoWork and Claude Code as well.

So you can use them on any of them that you feel comfortable with. So again, I think they’re slowly merging everything in, but that’s how I look at it right now And just to be clear what’s the difference between Claude.ai versus the desktop app? I find myself kind of recommending people if they’ve been using the website to install the desktop app, ’cause it’s gonna give you some more capabilities like co-work and code and stuff.

Yeah Claude.ai only gives you access to the chat, the, the web chat. It… You don’t have… actually, I take that back. They do have a web version now of Claude Code, but you have to connect it to GitHub. Typically, I do recommend yeah, running it locally. So download the Claude app for Mac or Windows, and then the…

Right now, again, this… By the time this goes out, this might be changed, but the, the… They have two modes. They have one I think it just says Home. The other one says Code. And within the Home tab, you can chat or you can select Cowork. And then the Code tab obviously has a little bit more features. The Code tab will let y- show you Git diffs and open up a browser.

It’s a little bit oriented for coding essentially, whereas Cowork is more, like, knowledge work, kinda, non-nerd work. And then Chat is just chatting essentially. And one more piece of groundwork, let’s just talk about pricing. So Claude has the free version. When people get serious, they usually upgrade and get the $20 a month, and then- Yeah

there’s the 100 or 200 a month power user level. Yeah. And then WP Vibe has a free version, and then pro versions. Walk us through the pricing of, and what’s the best config and how are they different at the different levels? Yeah, so every… So we followed the AI labs pricing models. The difference is we don’t provide inference, and inference is basically talking to AI.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

So what I recommend most people do is ChatGPT and Claude both have free levels, and you can just chat with them as much as you want. And basically the way they get it is the more value you get from AI, they’ll start charging you. So they cap your usage. So say the free version, they might give you 20 chats.

I’m just picking a random number. And then when you hit that, they’ll say, “All right. You’re, you’ve reached your limit today. Tomorrow you can reset.” That’s exactly how WP Vibe works. So we give enough daily tool calls for you to get really the average user to, to do real work. But then if you’re, like, a freelancer, agency, or you’re powering through some stuff, then we prompt you basically to upgrade and get more tool calls per day.

Because, again, ours, even though we’re not pro- providing AI inference, we still do have a cost because we’re hosting the tool, the back end. And again, it’s just it adds to our cost. So essentially we wanted to make it just like the, the AI companies where you could test it and get real value out of it to see if that’s something you wanna continue on, and then if so, then you upgrade.

And I think a lot of people, once they touch AI and see the value they get from it, it’s kinda hard to go back really. It really is. So really, and a lot of people are probably already coming with their own $20 a month Claude or ChatGPT subscription. So you bring your own subscription- Yeah … and then wal- walk us through the setup of WP Vibe.

And then if we’re just looking at a plain WordPress site with nothing on it, what are some of the first things we should try just to play around with it and experiment? Yeah so the way it works is, In ChatGPT, we actually have a official connector. So they have a store, they can search for WP Vibe and hit connect, and it will walk them through the process.

So let me give you an idea of the process. In Claude, you have to add a com- a custom connector, but that is basically putting in a MCP URL, and you hit connect. From there, what happens is it sends you to our website and you basically authenticate. So we’re just trying to figure out, are you the person you say you are?

We send you a, a code, a one-time code. You enter that, and you’re authenticated with our connector, okay? So at this point, you can add any number of WordPress sites, and the way you add a WordPress site is you just say simply connect seedprod.com for example, and it will call out to that site, and it will…

Actually, let me back up real quick. We do have a plugin we offer as well on the wordpress.org site. It’s not required, but it does give you a lot more functionality. But what happens after you add the site, it calls your WordPress site, and it- and WordPress has a built-in authentic- authentication system which talks back to our MCP and then authenticates the site.

So there’s no credentials we see. We encrypt everything, and at that point you’re actually connected. I can share my screen and show you, but I don’t know if we wanna go that far. But that’s essentially the flow. Yeah, we can do if you’re listening on the podcast, go to the LMScast website and you’ll see the YouTube version of this, if you wanna give us a little quick demo of that.

Sure. So let me look at the… How do I share my screen here? It’s at the bottom. There’s a plus- Okay … I think. And then I might have to bring it up once you authorize it

All right So I’ll pull it up. Just let me know when you want me to pull it down. Okay All right. This is, for example, we’re connected to testing.seedprod.com. Okay? So the way I do that is let me remove this. Okay. Can you remove testing.seedprod.com? I’m gonna reconnect it to show everyone how we connect the website.

All right. So again, it’s … A lot of people type, and one hint I’ll give you is get a voice a voice-to-text agent, because what that will do is save you a lot of different keystrokes, and it’s so fast. Do you use that, Chris? Do you use it any- I use Whisper Flow. Okay. I use something called Super Whisper.

Again there’s tons of them out there. All right. So it’s removed it okay, let’s reconnect to testing.seedprod.com. So again, I’m… While it’s doing that, I’m gonna show you up here in my connectors, I have WP Vibe connected, and you can see it here. Okay? Now, the way you do that is you just go hit add, add custom connector, and our website has this URL you put in here.

So let’s go back here. All right, so now-

All right, so I’m just authenticating on my app. I’m actually gonna… Oh, I don’t have my

Let me open up my browser real quick because- I just stopped sharing in case you were typing in your password or whatever. No, I’ve got this is a testing site. I just- Okay … I couldn’t remember

All right. All right, so we’re back here, and then I just click… Oh are you sharing again, Chris? Yeah, we’re back. All right. We just hit approve this site. All right, and we’re connected. So now I can say, “All right, tell me about this website. What plugins are installed?” And while it’s doing that, I’m just gonna go back to the site here and pull it up

All right, so here’s a website, and it’s connecting to our site, and it’s telling us what plugins are installed. Now, what’s cool is we actually just pushed out a widget, and it has some things that you can try on your website. So it’ll detect your plugins. So right now it knows we have Lifter installed, so it’s like, “Enroll students in your course, build an online course.”

And you can just copy these prompts and paste them in and it’ll do it for you. Okay? But so Here we go. It’s showing our plugins. And again, when you’re talking to AI, it’ll do anything that you can do on a website. For example, we have four updates. We’ll just say, “Okay, can you update the four plugins that need to be updated?”

All right. So essentially, anything you need to do on your WordPress website, WPVibe can do. We can make posts, we can run audits, security audits, we can run SEO audits, we can update plugins, we can create a new theme. Just you name it, it can do it. Is there anything you’re interested in seeing, Chris, or? I’m interested in all of it.

And I just wa- I just wanna say you had a you have a saying, as AI keeps getting better, a lot of the dashboards and menu clicks fade into the background. So this is like a conversational interface with your WordPress site without clicking add new and… ‘Cause in the past, we would do a lot of copying and pasting from ChatGPT if you’re trying to write a blog post in ChatGPT, but this is actually, you can just talk directly to your website, which is- Right

really amazing. Yeah, e- exactly. And also, what you can do is, All right, so it, right here, it said one of the, the plugins had an error updating. So it’s it’s smart . It knows what is actually going on here. And then, so this is CloudCode, and it has a built-in browser here. But if you’re on the website, so we’re on the website right here, as things are updating, we actually have a live reload thing that pops up here and helps you see what’s going on in your with your website.

With deep integration into LifterLMS, WooCommerce, the popular form plug-ins, and many more top WordPress tools, WP Fusion lets you automatically create and tag contacts, unlock course and membership access, track student progress, recover abandoned carts, and trigger powerful automations based on what your users are actually doing on your LMS website.

So whenever you’re on your website, like you can tell it to navigate to a different part of your website, and this will actually update for you. So it’s just a complete unified experience. That’s awesome. And I just wanna… Maybe you could help expand on what I’m gonna say. For a Lifter example, if you do a Google search for LifterLMS, there’s a a LifterLMS MCP.

You’ll see all the abilities. So for courses, there’s things like list courses, get course, update course, get course content create lessons all the money stuff like list access plans, create access plan, list students, update student, enroll student, and all this, and there’s many more. So explain how the benefits of this compare to clicking around and trying to do it all manually on your WordPress site.

The biggest thing is it’s a lot faster here. Is there something that really takes a long time in Lifter that we could maybe test? So I have a, a, a course here, or a test course. Is there anything in particular you wanna test here? I’m… Right now I’m just having it lift out, or list out all the Lifter abilities.

Maybe just adding some- It says, “Lifter doesn’t have any roaster abilities.” Maybe- Let me see here. What version of Lifter has the abilities? We’re on 10.1 or something like that. Okay. we have a REST API

Let’s see here. Okay, are you sure? Check it again and see. Is it, is the REST API the only thing you have access to?

So I’m gonna open this up a little bit here so we can see it

I’ll put a a comment here in StreamYard that goes to the LifterLMS MCP thing on GitHub. Okay. And again, the, the Abilities API is pretty new, so- Yeah … i- i, there, there might be some il- issues with it just discovering. Here’s what we found here. So we found just these here. So I can look into this more on the Abilities and see why it’s not recognizing it.

But we do have the REST API, so we can do stuff there. Nice. And also what we do- Yeah … Chris, is another thing, is a lot of… Okay, so le- let’s explain what the Abilities API is first. So the Ability API is WordPress core’s answer to expose functionality to AI clients, okay? So as you can see here, we do have a REST API where we can modify stuff, but the Abilities API goes a step further and helps unify what an agent sees versus what it can do.

Now, since this is new and a lot of stuff coming out doesn’t have the Abilities API, we also ship a WP-CLI emulator. So we ship primitives because essentially everything on WordPress is either in the database or on the theme. So we can touch any parts of WordPress, even if a plugin doesn’t ship with a specific AP- Abilities API functionality, if that makes sense.

If not, I can explain it a little bit more. That’s very cool. Expand. So essentially i- imagine that you have an SEO plugin and it has no Abilities API. What AI will do is it will look at our database, say, “Oh, this is how it stores all its meta titles and descriptions. I’ll just update these directly.”

Okay. And it’ll update them, say, if you’re doing a SEO au- O audit on your website. And what happens here is we actually have built-in gates. So the biggest thing is people are scared of letting AI touch their site. But if we do something destructive, it will actually prompt us and tell us, “You can’t do it unless you agree to do it.”

So let’s try it here. Okay, can you create create a user, and then I wanna delete that user so I can demonstrate how our gates work, our permission gates? So Chris, if you’re working on, for example, your courses with Lifter and you’re wanting to do cleanups, basically our philosophy is if anything has a trash or is not, is non-destructive, then we let it flow.

If not, then we prompt the user to agree to take a destructive action. So if you’re… okay, so you can see it doing stuff right here and saying refresh because it’s creating the user and stuff. So essentially what happens is, i- if it’s gonna delete something, it’s gonna prompt you and tell you, “Hey, I can’t delete this unless you agree.”

We wanna make it as safe as pop- possible for people to get work done on their website, but not destroy their website in the process. That is super cool. All right, so here’s the approval gate loading right now And this is an approval gate to delete a user? Yeah. Yeah. And it tells you exactly what it’s gonna do, but this would show up for anything that is non-reversible ex- essentially, like deleting a plugin, deleting a course.

Anything like this would show up. And then we have a session thing. So if you don’t wanna keep doing this and cl- keep clicking approve and execute, you can set a session variable where it’ll just do it once and then freely continue to do stuff. Okay? So we’ll execute that, and it’ll run it, and we’ll push it here and say, “I approved it,” and it’ll just check it and say, “Oh, this, this user was removed.”

I’m thinking of a real-world use case where some people use LMSs to just train people at a company. And let’s say they just set it up and they wanna add, create these 200 users and enroll them in a certain course or membership or whatever. Yeah. They could… That HR person could do all that from Claude without, having to figure out how to import users into WordPress.

I’m imagining you could give it a CSV of email addresses and names or whatever and just- Yeah … say go. Absolutely. So let’s try it real quick. What’s an example course? I won’t have it build out the whole thing, it’ll take too long, but I’ll just for this demo, like- just safety training.

Okay. So I wanna demo building a course on LifterLMS. Just make a simple safety training course like your typical HR person would create. I wanna make this as quick as possible, just so don’t build out ribose, robust or verbose courses. Create it and then let me know what you’ve done. All right.

So we’ll let that build out here. And so first of all, typically what they would do is build the course, and then, Chris, I guess the next thing is, they would do is enroll people in that course. Is that correct? That would be the next thing. Okay. So we’ll let this build out. And the biggest thing is what they’d wanna do is obviously curate this course a little bit more or, the, the average user might even talk to Claude and say, “You know what?

I don’t e- what do, what should this course even look like?” And that’s the big thing with AI, like it is an amazing brainstorming partner. Yeah. So imagine if I was an HR person I could actually chat with the AI and say, “All right. I work in HR. W- we’re a construction company. We build commercial properties.

I’m trying to build a safety course. Can you help me plan this out?” And it would actually plan it out for you and then implement it, which is absolutely amazing. And we can do something like that as well once, once this kind of builds out if you want to, but I’ll let you decide how, h- what direction we go.

I think that’s super cool. The, the concept really is like the speed of iteration, like the brainstorming and okay, you create version one, but you’re not 100% happy. Just keep iterating. Yeah. And that’s never been faster. Yes. I don’t know about you, but with the voice to like the whisper flow and the one you use- Yeah

I’m 10 times faster. I’m already a slow typer. Yeah. And it’s that, that efficiency right there, and then AI speeding up, now I get impatient waiting the like minute or two for Claude to do its thing, but hey- Yeah … you’re still going a thousand times faster than you used to, right? Yeah. And, once you get the hang of this, you can actually just open up another session while this is running and continue to work on it.

So this one actually has a thing here that’ll let you know when it needs input. It’s a little overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of it, like you can run two or three of these chat sessions and really get a lot of work done very fast. So here’s our course right here, the worst workplace safety essentials it created.

And, again, we didn’t fill out a lot of the content of it. It’s more of a skeleton here. But, that, we did that what, in a, a matter of seconds, right? So again, let’s just… I wanna give people kind of a brainstorming session because I think it’s a thing people overlook a lot of times.

All right, so let me just… Okay, so I’m actually new in HR, and again, this is demo. How- what would this course look like, you think? All right. And it would… You can go back and forth with it, and then it will update your course for you, right? And then we’re like, w- if we had a list of s- people, we could just upload it to this chat and it would add the users and enroll them in the course for us.

How much does the, the person have to think about multi-step processes? For example, if you give a bunch of users, it’s really create a user in WordPress, step one. Step two, enroll them in this course. Yeah. Do you have to know the chain of tags? Or- N- no, not at all. So I’ll create some users here in just a second.

Especially with the smarter models, so as I was saying here the, the smarter model you use, the better it’s gonna do without giving it explicit instructions, okay? If you use kind of a smaller model like Hoo- Haiku, you might have to tell it, “All right create a user, add it to this course specifically.”

But the smarter models like the Frontier models the labs are releasing, you can just tell it to add a user and it knows what to do essentially. Yeah. Yeah, there’s that saying, and this is why I wanna just compel with some urgency, is like we’re always working with the worst version of AI. It gets better every day, every week.

So if you’re not on the train, it’s time to, do some learning. And I’ve found that you just have to experiment and just play with it for a day, a weekend, a week, a month, 60 days, and y- you’ll be shocked. And the thing is it’s going so fast that the time to start learning tools like WP Vibe and how AI interacts with WordPress is of the essence, ’cause it’s just gonna get faster and better, and as- Yeah

there’s no better time to start learning. Yeah. If you’re, if you’re- yeah. You want to get in right now because the quicker you get in, the quicker you realize the advantage you have over people that haven’t learned this skill yet. And just, whatever you’re trying to achieve, you can move a- at least 10X faster is what I’ve seen, it is quite amazing and yeah, chatting with it and just putting in those reps is the best advice. And one way I like to describe AI is that it’s kinda like an actor and you’re the director, so you can basically tell it or direct it however you want to do. But one thing is sometimes it can go off script, someki- sometimes it can ad-lib and make up stuff.

So you just need to be aware of that and be aware of, the capabilities versus the restraints as well w- this is trying to take screenshots of this, so I’m gonna stop it here and I’m just gonna say, “Okay, can you just add some test users? May- maybe add three test users.” So again, I’m not telling it specifically how to do it.

It should add it to that course. We’ll see. I actually, I just said add test user, so it might not add it to that course. It might just add the users, but again, you’re, you need to kinda watch it and, be as specific as you think you need to be essentially. One thing I love about AI recently is that it almost anticipates your next step.

So it might even prompt you here “Hey, do you want me to enroll them in the course?” Or- Yeah … it’ll give you like three o- options and then say which one it recommends and stuff like that. It’s re- it’s becoming more and more proactive, which is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, it is crazy because, yeah, they will come back and…

All right, so this one actually says, “Not enrolled anything.” So then you would just say, “Yep let’s enroll them,” add them to the course, whatever you need to do. And again, this versus just clicking around here, again, once you experience kind of this magic, it’s hard to go back and start clicking around in the dashboard.

I still do occasionally, but the more and more, I’m just talking to AI and telling it what to do. Now, the cool thing also about WPVibe is we have skills. So if anybody has heard of skills, so they’re essentially like knowledge base, like how to do stuff, okay? And we load a variety of skills built in, so we actually have a recipe book on WPVibe to AI for tons of different plugins.

Like we have over 100 something skills right now. But you can make your own skills as well. So imagine you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you can create a skill and recall it in the future. So I’ll just say, “Okay, so I wanna demonstrate our skills. What is a skill someone working on a course would typically need that is a repeat process?

Can we save that as a custom skill?” So what this will do, again, you wanna tell it what you wanna do, but this will save a custom skill, and then you can recall it in the future. So say that need to, I don’t know, add attr- attribution to videos or images or something every time you create a course, it will do that for you.

You just say, “Run skill X,” and it will do it for you. Does that make sense? That makes sense. A question on that. At LifterLMS we have a, a fancy AI agent that’s super custom with tons of skills and stuff that we just use internally at our company. But one of the, just you can come up with all these fun projects.

Similar to you, I’ve been around WordPress for a very long time, and my website is very old. Yeah. So I asked the AI, “How many images do we have that don’t have alt text?” Which is bad for SEO- Yeah … and accessibility. And then our agent found them. It built a little test area where we could review it writing the images.

We gave it some of our top SEO terms and told it not just to put it in everything, but when it made sense. And then it basically executed across 7,000 images in 10 minutes. Yeah. And fixed a problem we’ve had for a long time that would have taken a human at least a month to figure out and do. Yeah. Yeah, it’s quite amazing.

And that’s where we’re going with WPVibe. So right now we just shipped the ability… So Google has an audit tool called Lighthouse. Yeah. And it lets you run speed audits, accessibility audits, and o- other audits on your website. So we’ve built that into WPVibe, and soon we’ll be adding GA4 and Google Search Console.

So essentially everything’s together. So it can look at Google Search Console, look at articles that maybe need a little tweaking. It could tweak that article and then help bump it up in the rankings for you. Or, y- anything you can think of where you need that context, like analytics or r- query rankings in Google, it can pull all that together and take out that step of you going to Google Search Console or Google Analytics and taking that data and pasting it in here.

What’s an example, I think an SEO project, whether somebody’s using all-in-one SEO or something else- … that it’s like one of those areas where people wanna experiment and learn first. Yeah. What’s an… Maybe expand a little bit on, like, how somebody who wants to do their first SEO project with WP Vibe, what kind of project would they do?

So the, the first thing I would do is I would just say right here, I would just say, “Okay thank you for creating this skill. Let’s just do a simple SEO audit of these courses. What do you recommend for the meta title and description?” And it will look at the courses, the content, and sub- and recommend SEO titles and descriptions.

We actually have a skill called SEO Audit, and it will do a lightweight pass across your entire website and look for things like H1 tags, alt tags missing, again, your meta ti- meta title and descriptions, and it will recommend things for you. And actually this is using Lighthouse. So if you remember, I told you we had some of the Google tools built in.

It decided to use the Lighthouse tool to do the, the SEO audit here

That’s amazing. And again I know it takes a little while ’cause you gotta wait on this stuff here to run the tools here, but it should come back with recommendations on what to do, and then again, you just say, “Do it or don’t do it.” And another thing I like to do is what these agents can do is spin up sub-agents.

Yeah. So are you familiar with sub-agents, Chris? Yep. Okay. So what that essentially does is it spins up another copy of itself. So if you’re not sure about something or you think something doesn’t sound right, you can say, “Spin up an adversarial sub-agent to review these findings.” And what it will do is it will spin up another agent, pass in its findings, and basically look for gaps or blind spots That’s awesome Yeah, so it’ll almost check itself.

So here we go. This just came back with a bunch of stuff here. So pages blocking from… This is a test site, so public blog is set to zero. That’s the stuff you might have even forgot about, right? … “Oh, I turned this, this site off. I discouraged search engines from checking it.” And then a- again, it’s got title and descriptions and, we could have it update these for us.

So yeah it’s quite amazing and I think that th- this is just the way we’re gonna be interacting with WordPress in the future. It reminds me of the early days of WordPress, ’cause unlike John, I’m not a developer, but when I found WordPress, I was able to build websites and basically solve business challenges as a agency owner, and WordPress democratized website building for people like me.

And now I see this next wave of AI really doing that for WordPress again at a, in a different way with speed and going outside your skill set with code and things like that, that the AI just does for you. Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. And again, the more tools you give it, the more power it will see. So like I said, this one just ran the Lighthouse audit tool.

A few other tools we ship is we ship a, a, a image search tool. So say you want a image for your course, we can just say, “All right. Can you find a image for this course and apply it?” So we’ll try that. Okay. On the Workplace Safety Essentials course, can you find an image and apply as a featured image?

We have a code snippets tool, so it can create any code snippet you can think of to push out on your site. So just the, the possibilities are limitless, and what we focus on at WP vibe is giving it primitives. So primitives are, again, like access to basically what a developer would have. So WP Vibe can almost act like a developer for you and do that stuff that you might not know about, Chris, not being a developer, but- AI certainly does know how to do it and knows how to apply it I think one example, I’m just thinking back to my early agency days is when somebody wants to ins- they’re gonna run Facebook ads and they wanna install a tracking pixel.

AI could just do it for you instead of having to get a developer to be like, “Hey, I need to put this pixel wherever it’s supposed to go, and I don’t understand the Facebook developer pixel documentation.” Yeah, absolutely. It can do it for you, and then you can even use a Facebook connector if they have one, and you can close that gap as well.

So not only can it set up the pixel, but it can see your ads and then help you adjust and modify those. For the general education, I think the i- the key idea here is context. The more context you give your AI “Oh, I can see your Google Analytics, I can see your WordPress site, I can make changes. I can see your email or whatever else,” you’re just providing so much more context.

‘Cause just chatting with AI and the large language model is cool, but this whole thing, by giving it all this context about your website and your business and what you’re trying to do and the tools you use and the analytics you use- … it just, it’s like a whole nother level than just chatting and copying and pasting things.

It absolutely is. And, just to go back to what we were working on. So it found this image. It… do your courses have a featured image place? They do. All right. So let’s see if it applied it. If I go to here to course, it said it applied it here. Do I just click edit or where would I see that at?

View. Okay, view. Oh, yeah, there it is So yeah, it just found an image for us, added it, and, done. So pretty amazing. I got… I have two more questions for you, John, two more quick areas to explore. One is design. Yeah. We’re doing a lot with functionality and adding users and stuff. Themes have really changed in WordPress, and now there’s full site editing and Gutenberg and everything.

Yeah. How… What kind of design things, or what would be good first design related projects that you could do with WPVibe connected to your WordPress site? Yeah I’m glad you brought this up. So essentially, there’s lots of different ways to apply des- design to a WordPress site. So if you actually go to WPVibe.ai, we built this entire site with WPVibe, and we have a video on our YouTube channel.

So if you go down here to the bottom and click on YouTube you can see this video of how we built our website with AI, and we approached it a little bit different. So this entire website took me about an hour and a half to build, and it’s very robust. It has it has a recipes generator. It’s got all this stuff, and then I can edit it just by talking to WPVibe.

WordPress has full site editing built in, okay? And it uses Gutenberg. Now, what we have found is AI typically struggles with Gutenberg, and the reason is that it is so verbose. So if you look at how Gutenberg is generated for you non-technical people, it creates basically a big wall of text to create a heading or something like that, okay?

And AI has to figure out what this text means and then how to edit it. And not only that, with full site editing, you can make changes in the block. You can make changes at the site level. You can add custom CSS. So it has all these different things it’s trying to figure out how this one title is being rendered or the custom CSS behind it.

And it’s not only Gutenberg. Elementor CProd, the plugin I, I build, the page building plugins, it has to infer all this. Now, the good news is it can still work. It just won’t be as complex. So it’ll be more of a basic site. Like trying to do something like this, it would struggle with. But if you want to build like super complex sites where you take, you vibe code like HTML and have it render it that, what we have found is classic themes are the best way to do it.

And that’s the way WP Vibe works, is it will generate a classic theme, and for those who are not familiar before full site editing WordPress, you would just create a theme with code and it would display for you. AI is super good at reading the file system and editing code, and we have found that is the best way to build themes with AI.

Again, if you’re not technical, we also ship with WP Vibe something called AI custom fields. So you can tell it, “I want this to be editable,” and this will turn this into a custom field that you can change on the back end. And again, if you watch that video, it goes into a little more details on the why, but you can see exactly how we built this.

But as the models continue to get better and more robust, it is unlocking a lot of the full site editing. It’s getting better at it, and it’s making less mistakes. So I think it will get there eventually, but right now it does struggle. Again, it can create small things, but if you’re like just build out the entire website, typically it- you’ll have more errors or frustration than going with like the classic the- theme way.

And in your case, you didn’t modify an existing classic theme. You created a brand new one. Yes. Is that correct? Just by talking. Just by talking, and again- It- … I didn’t tell it to create a cla- classic theme. I just said, “Hey, I wanna build a n- a WordPress website,” and I told it what I wanted, and it chose how to do it.

We tell it how to do it on the back end because we know that this works best, but it will just do it for us and create a test site and go from there. I could demo it, but it does take a little bit longer to build out a th- a site because it’s generating a lots of code.

Last question for you, John. How should an agency owner or a freelancer think about this? What are the biggest benefits? Obviously, there’s a speed increase in the ability to implement and perhaps offer services that are they didn’t offer before, ’cause now they can do an SEO audit as an example.

Yeah, so- But, like, how, what would what’s in it for agencies and freelancers? So yeah, I think if they want to free up more of their time and offer more robust services to their clients, then they want to start leveraging AI right now. So we actually just got a review the other day, and I thought it was pretty cool because this is a agency person and he said, I tried several tools like this, but this beats them all.”

And, he maintains 50-plus sites, and I think that, with WPVibe, we can add as many sites as we wanna add. Right now I have four or five sites. Can you list all the sites I have connected? But imagine you have something you need to do on every site, like update plugins. We can say, “Can you update plugins on all of my sites?”

And it would do it for you while you’re out taking a walk or something, right? And, I think agencies are gonna wanna start offering this ability to clients as well, and that’s something we have planned for WPVibe, where you can add clients to your account so they can edit their sites as well.

And what’s cool about AI is you can actually say, “Hey, this client should only have access to the about page or the contact page,” and then it will prevent them from editing other parts of the website. So there’s a safety layer built into it as well. Ultimately, we wanna get to the point where you’re talking to AI just like emailing a developer.

But instead of emailing developer, you’re talking to AI and it’s doing the work for you. That is so cool. So in your view, I’m gonna pull the screen share down and we’ll land the plane here, is Okay … what do you see as the future of page builders? This feels like the next evolution of page building, just doing it through AI, right?

Or- Yeah … what do you think about that? You even have CProd, which I think has 800,000 installs or something, and it’s a page builder, and it comes- Yeah … in the same thing. So you’re the guy with b- on both sides of the story, so how do you see- wordPress, last I checked, was like 43% of the web, right?

Millions of sites, millions and millions of sites. Not all those sites are gonna start fresh and create a new site or a theme. So that is actually our goal. We want, at WPVIWe want to provide a first-class AI experience, no matter you have a legacy site or building a new site. All those, we want to meet you where you’re at.

So we actually just shipped Elementor V4 skills. So now when you’re working on Elementor site, we understand how V4 works. We can make changes to you, to the site for you, and it will show up in work. And again, like I said, it does work right now, but it’s not 100% like it is when you’re building like a classic theme.

The, the… It’s more error-prone, let’s just put it that way. But we try to solve that with our MCP, but whenever we get an error, we actually feed it back into the AI so it can understand from its mistakes and it won’t try it again. So that’s one thing we actually have a upper hand on because WordPress ships with the ability to connect like an API key to WordPress.

And again, it’s two different methods for talking to your WordPress site with AI. We believe people will want to use their agent of choice as opposed to an ad hoc API key, ’cause first of all, you have to pay extra for that. You don’t get to use your subscription with an API key. And then you run the risk of having a A- API key exposed, right?

So essentially, what we wanna do is we want to, whatever WordPress site you have, whether it’s old, you’re running old plugins, we want to be able to use our AI to manage and not only manage it but do a, a, a great job at managing that website and helping you save time with it. My mind is blown, John.

Thank you for this. Awesome, Chris. And I wanna encourage all you out there listening and watching to go to wpvibe.ai. Try the free version, fall in love with it, and then get on the pro version. I’m looking forward to experimenting with it more, and this pla- this, this thing is moving fast. Like- Yes

three months from now, who knows? Yes. So this is the time to learn and get started with all this stuff. Absolutely. Now is the time. And it’s actually quite fun once you get into it, it is fun. Yeah. Particularly when you unlock the talking thing. Yeah. And and as you get better, like you said, sometimes you’ll s- all right it’s doing this, it’s creating this course.

While it’s creating the course, I’m gonna do this other thing and then- Yeah … start another one, and it… I don’t know, the productivity is just insane. Absolutely. Yes, it is. Yeah. All right, John thanks for coming on the show. Go to wpvibe.ai. Also, subscribe to the WPVibe AI channel. I saw your videos come up and I see tons of tech videos, but then I saw yours and I’m like, “Yes, this is WordPress and AI.

This is like-” Yeah … “so fun.” And you’re really leading through the space, so it’s awesome to see. Keep up the amazing work. Yeah. And thank you for coming on the show. Oh, thank you for having me, Chris. It’s been awesome.

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Get WP Fusion NowChris Badgett discusses six useful and very successful methods for improving the online course and membership website checkout process in this LMScast episode.

According to him, checkout optimization is one of the most effective ways to boost income without boosting marketing expenditures because around 70% of visitors who reach the checkout page never finish their transaction. Chris starts off by emphasizing the effectiveness of cart abandonment recovery and demonstrating how automated follow-up emails may entice prospective buyers to finish their purchase. Based on LifterLMS’s personal experience, he discloses that this tactic has recovered almost $319,000 in lost revenue, illustrating how even a minor increase in checkout conversions may have a big effect on business expansion.

Chris also highlights how crucial it is to create a frictionless checkout process by eliminating extraneous form fields and requesting that clients just enter the information necessary to finish their transaction. He discusses how eliminating unnecessary steps makes it simpler for customers to complete the checkout process while still enabling companies to use customisable options to gather more data as needed. He suggests including testimonials, user reviews, trust indicators, and social proof straight on the checkout page to further boost consumer confidence and convince them that they are making the correct choice.

To further improve customer confidence and persuade them that they are making the right decision, he recommends including testimonials, user reviews, trust indicators, and social proof directly on the checkout page.He suggests putting testimonials, user reviews, trust indicators, and social proof right on the checkout page to boost client confidence and convince them they are making the correct choice.

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Episode Transcript: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and today we’re gonna go into how to optimize your checkout for courses and memberships regardless of which tool you’re using, because the surprising statistic is that nearly seven out of 10 people abandon your checkout And never return. So today, I wanna show you six ways on how to fix that.

So if seven out of ten people reach your checkout and never finish, that’s a huge missed opportunity. The things that most people don’t realize about conversion optimization is in certain places, if you can just make a little bit of improvement, it can literally double your business or have a dramatic impact.

The checkout is one of those places, so just having a slight increase could cause a lot of new revenue for you, particularly if your course or membership is a high value or a high price point course or membership. So definitely pay attention in this em- episode. I’m gonna go over six tactical specific ways to improve your checkout so that you can uncover lost revenue that’s literally just sitting there.

You just gotta pull a few levers, and I’m gonna go over six of those levers today. The first is that you wanna recover lost checkouts. A lot of people don’t think about this, but if seven out of ten people abandon your checkout, those seven people, or 70%, could come back and buy from you. You’re not gonna get all seven, but even just getting one or two of them has a dramatic impact of your business.

So the checkout page is the highest leverage page where your prospect has already raised their hand. They said, “I’m interested in their product.” They know what the price is, and they’re all the way at the checkout, and then they leave. So how do you do cart abandonment recovery? This is something that we’ve been doing for a very long time.

We’ve done cart abandonment recovery at LifterLMS for about seven years now. And just for our software sales site, we have recovered $319,000 just through implementing the same cart abandonment recovery system that I’m gonna describe to you here today. I’m not just gonna describe it to you, I’m also gonna show you exactly how you can do it and just install an add-on, click to activate, and it’s on if you’re using LifterLMS for your courses and memberships.

So basically, the way cart abandonment works is when somebody leaves your checkout Cart abandonment needs them to take an action like entering their email address to actually know who they are. So a lot of cart abandonment actually doesn’t happen when they first visit the cart. They often enter their name, enter their email, maybe the phone rings, maybe they’re having second thoughts, maybe another screen goes off with something else and they lose focus and they just abandon your cart.

But the way cart abandonment works, once you have their email. Is it gets dropped into a cart abandonment recovery system, which I’m gonna describe for you here today. But before I do, just so you know, LifterLMS recently released a new add-on into our Infinity bundle. Or I’m sorry, it’s actually in all bundles, so it’s also included in the Earth bundle. Which is our lowest price bundle that has our payment gateways and all the e-commerce stuff in it, and it is included in all plans.

So that is a new add-on, and everything I’m gonna describe to you here, all you have to do is install the add-on, activate it, turn it on, and it’s gonna start working right away. And just in case you missed it when I said it earlier, the system that we use at LifterLMS on our software sales site, we use a very similar methodology for the LifterLMS add-on.

So basically, the way it works, somebody enters their email address, and then they abandon your cart, and then they’re gone. But what does the cart abandonment recovery system do in the background? The key thing is it’s gonna send three strategic emails and each email does a different job. So basically what it does is the first email fires one hour later and says, “Hey, it looks like you abandoned your cart.

Do you wanna complete your checkout? Did something go wrong?” And there’s a big button that says, “Return to my cart. Return to my checkout.” And so when somebody clicks on that, they’re not just going back to your website, they’re actually going to the cart they had loaded up, and all they have to do is complete the form that they already started and complete their checkout The next email fires 24 hours later.

So this is really important, like the cadence. So basically, email one is one hour later, email two is one day later, and email three is three days later. So email one is “Hey, did something go wrong? Come back.” Email two follows up and is “Hey, we noticed you didn’t complete your checkout.

These are the benefits of the product. Are you sure you’re not interested in moving forward with our product?” Again, there’s a big button, Return to Checkout. Then what happens at email three is that there is a different system which basically gives you an opportunity to apply a limited time offer or expiring coupon code that’s good for seventy-two hours for somebody to not only complete their checkout, but also get a discount.

So this is your last shot, your Hail Mary last chance to close that sale. We’re not gonna follow up with this person forever. Cart abandonment is like a period in time over three days, and that final email basically with the LifterLMS cart abandonment recovery add-on, what it does is it automatically generates that unique, expiring coupon code that’s just good for that user, creates the custom email, sends it to them.

In our experience, the majority of cart abandonment recovery that happen with that first email. But the other two emails, the one day later or the seventy-two hours later also adds revenue. But even just that first email contributed… in our case, out of the three hundred and twenty thousand dollars, it contributed two hundred thousand dollars of that three hundred and twenty thousand dollars in terms of recovery.

The other cool thing about cart abandonment recovery, once you turn it on, you kinda forget about it, and you just keep track of your sales and everything. But we actually have at LifterLMS reporting that shows you your number of abandoned carts, the amount of carts recovered, the revenue, and there’s actually a weekly summary digest email, so you can keep track of that over time.

So that is in the Earth bundle, our lowest cost plan at LifterLMS, ’cause we love to help course creators and membership creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, build successful businesses, and cart abandonment recovery is a huge opportunity. So that cart abandonment recovery is my number one tip for r-recovering lost sales.

The next six or five tips I’m gonna give you on your checkout optimization Are more about creating higher conversion on the checkout you already have. It’s basically getting people to complete the cart they already have. Not necessarily recover ones that are lost. So the first thing that’s important in checkout in terms of conversion optimization is reducing the number of fields at checkout.

So what do I mean by fields? Fields are the little boxes that people type in information when they’re completing an enrollment in your course or your membership. So the cool thing about LifterLMS is we have a form fields manager for your checkout fields. So the basic thing you wanna do is, particularly if you have a digital program, is to remove the address field.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

So if you’re not shipping anything, if you don’t know- need to know where people live or what their address is, go ahead and remove that field. Basically, the way this works is on a checkout, you want people to have to do as little amount of work as possible to pay you, so there’s no point in asking for their physical address if you don’t need it.

So you can reduce those fields and increase your conversion rate on your checkout. The other cool thing too is LifterLMS has a add-on called Custom Fields, so if you need to collect some kind of custom information or custom data, like company name as an example, you can create your own custom field at checkout.

But if you wanna do the absolute minimum, what I recommend is email address, password, and that’s it. That’s the most conversion-optimized checkout field situation. However, if you need to collect more information, like company name, or you need their phone number, or you need their physical address, you can of course add those.

But best practices in conversion optimization, whether somebody’s opting in or enrolling in something for free, or if it’s a paid program, is to limit the number of fields. And if you’re doing a paid program, keep in mind You’re not just asking for their first name, last name, email address, desired password for their account, and so on.

They also have to enter their credit card, the year of expiry, the three-digit code on the back, and so on. So the amount that we can reduce those fields and the amount of work somebody has to do to buy your products and programs, the better. So keep that in mind. And one more pro tip for you, LifterLMS, as an example, has places where y- people confirm their email address they have to type it in a second time to make sure there wasn’t a spelling error, and so on.

You can remove those confirmation steps if you want to, which in general I actually recommend doing just to limit that extra step from the checkout. But if you wanna make absolutely certain that somebody entered the correct email address or type their password a second time to make sure they’re not gonna make an error later, you can turn those features on.

But I recommend turning those off so the confirmation step is not required. Which streamlines the checkout and it removes all that friction from the checkout. My third tip for you is to add social proof to your checkout. So what do I mean by that is trust is everything in checkout. If you’ve done the work, if you’ve built a great product, if you’ve built a strong company brand, personal brand, you’re gonna come with that trust in spades.

People aren’t gonna care, they’re just gonna buy your stuff. But particularly if you’re working with colder audiences who don’t know you, don’t necessarily trust you, I definitely recommend sprinkling in some social proof onto your checkout page. So on WordPress as an example the checkout from Lifter is embedded. It’s a block, it’s a short code, it’s a content area that’s its own thing, and it sticks into a page, i.e.,

your checkout page. But what some people don’t realize is they can add content above and/or below the actual checkout experience. So definitely below, and even in cases above, I recommend adding a key testimonial, maybe mention of the reviews you have “Oh, we have, 4.9 stars on Trustpilot across 300 people.”

Or most importantly, I think a targeted testimonial that speaks to the return on investment, whether that’s time or money in the program, is a great thing to add below the checkout, which means it’s right below the moment they’re gonna click the button and do their checkout. So before they’ve entered their stuff and they’re j- they’re on the last, fence to jump before becoming a customer, and they just look right below that button and you can see a very strong testimonial, ideally from someone That your buyer might know or be aware of, maybe a micro-celebrity or influencer and that sort of thing.

And that stuff really helps boost your conversion optimization by injecting social proof. So you should have social proof throughout your site. You don’t have to go overboard with it, but it’s definitely helpful to sprinkle testimonials on your homepage, on your about page, on your checkout page, on your courses and membership sales pages as well.

And by the way, with LifterLMS, there’s an easy button called Aircraft, which is our page builder for modern WordPress. It includes pre-done patterns, and we have several testimonial patterns for inserting a strong testimonial or a grid of testimonials or some trust logos like Trusted by and all that stuff.

So that’s all included in the Aircraft page builder, which works with any modern WordPress theme, not just our theme, Sky Pilot The next thing I wanna help you optimize your checkout with, and this is another very powerful way to keep the checkout and prevent the abandonment, is what’s called an exit-intent pop-up.

So I wanna give a nod to our podcast sponsor, Popup Maker, a great friend of the show from Code Atlantic. WPpopuppmaker.com, go check it out. But basically the way exit intent works is when somebody goes to your checkout page, and let’s say they enter their email, or they don’t, and they’re going to abandon, which means they move their cursor up to the top corner as if they’re gonna navigate away in the browser.

Popup Maker will detect that. That’s called an exit intent, and it gives you a trigger that you can have a pop-up pop up on the screen. So what can you do with that pop-up? Basically you’re stopping the immediate exit so that they have to take an action. And when this is done well, it’s really not annoying.

If somebody wants to leave, they can just click the X, close it, and leave. But what do you do in that message? You have a pop-up as somebody is abandoning your cart. There’s three main things you can do. The first thing you can do is just confirm the value of what you’re delivering. So you could say something like, “Are you sure you wanna leave?

You were just about to get the best course about XYZ. Close this now and complete your checkout. If not, no hard feelings, we’ll see you back another day.” So that’s number one, which is confirming the value. Number two, what you can do is you can try to use another conversion optimization technique, which I call the coupon close.

So what a coupon close is somebody went to buy your product, let’s say it’s $1,000, and they’re abandoning the checkout. They may or may not have given you the email address and you have one chance to try to save this sale. So what you can do here is you can offer a fast action coupon. And the way this works is- You can provide a coupon code, let’s say, for a 10% discount so they can save $100 if they go ahead and complete their purchase.

Of all the three, I actually recommend this one the most simply because I’ve done it and I’ve seen it work really well. So that’s using wppopupmaker.com’s powerful pop-up tool to do a coupon close when somebody tries to abandon your cart. And then the third final option is to do a downsell.

So there’s a couple different types of downsells. One is to suggest in the pop-up a cheaper product. So if, let’s say, you’re selling an expensive membership and somebody’s abandoning, what you could do on the pop-up is say, “Hey, no hard feelings. It looks like you’re ready to go, and you’re not interested in the membership right now.

Can I interest you in the most popular course inside the membership, which is only 10% of the cost of the whole membership?” That would be a downsell from the membership to the course. Another kind of downsell, or you could consider this a fourth type of pop-up that you could do, is to instead of trying to capture the sale, is to capture the lead.

So what you do here is “Oh, it looks like you’re not ready to get the membership. That’s fine. I’ve got a free resource ready for you. Just enter your email here, and we’ll send that right over your way.” So basically what you’re doing is you’re downselling from the paid product to a free product.

And remember, you may or may not have this person’s email address, so at least you are capturing the lead. So that is exit intent pop-ups. I highly recommend the most powerful pop-up solution for WordPress, which is Popup Maker for doing that. It has deep integration with LifterLMS. If you get the Pro version, there’s all kinds of fancy LifterLMS related stuff you can do.

We actually have another episode on this podcast about Popup Maker’s deep LifterLMS integration. The next checkout optimization tip I have for you is to offer multiple payment gateways. Some people miss this, and I highly recommend against missing this. So what does that mean? So in LifterLMS as an example, and again, all the strategies here apply to whatever checkout tool you’re using, but if you’re using LifterLMS, we have several payment systems.

The most popular are LifterLMS’s Stripe payment gateway and LifterLMS’s PayPal payment gateway. And what you wanna do is make sure you have both installed, activated, and connected to your Stripe and PayPal accounts. So why is this important? The truth is, if you’re serving to a global audience, not everybody has access to credit cards, which is like the bread and butter of Stripe credit card payments.

In some countries, that’s not even an option, but people would gladly buy your courses and memberships if you offered an alternative, which is PayPal checkout. So PayPal is available in way more countries and can just service more of the world. So it’s important to get outside of your particular behavior.

Maybe you always shop online with a credit card, but there’s a huge portion of the world that uses tools like PayPal to do their checkout. So essentially, the way it works in LifterLMS is you set your primary gateway. Let’s say it’s Stripe, so when somebody hits your checkout, it assumes they’re gonna pay with credit card.

Stripe’s gonna do the checkout, but there’s a little radio button where they can say, “No, I don’t wanna use credit card. I wanna use PayPal instead.” It switches over, and then they can immediately check out with PayPal. So definitely go ahead and unlock the, more buying power by offering multiple ways for people to pay you.

LifterLMS also has what’s known as the manual checkout as well. So you could add a third option, which is essentially a way to request any kind of payment. So you could be like, okay, first option Stripe, and then there’s PayPal, but then you have a third option, which is send me Venmo or send a check in the mail to my business.

And the way the manual payment gateway works is they complete the checkout, they get the instructions to send you the money, whether that’s a bank transfer, a Venmo request, could be crypto could be a check in the mail, and you basically just give them those instructions. And then their order’s gonna go through, but they’re not gonna get access right away, and you’re gonna get a notification as the site owner that somebody has done a manual checkout, which then tells you to go check the mailbox, check your bank account, check your crypto wallet, or check whatever method that you ask them to do.

And once they pay you, you can manually approve the checkout, and they’re gonna get instant access to their course or membership from that point. So definitely look at multiple payment gateways as a way to optimize the checkout. Now, the sixth and final checkout optimization tip. I have for you, a bonus one, is to make sure your checkout is optimized for mobile.

So what we often forget, particularly if you build a lot of websites or you have an online business, a lot of the time you’re working on a laptop or desktop computer, maybe with multiple monitors and all this stuff. But at LifterLMS, one of our company values is learner results first, which means that we’re always thinking about the end user, basically our customer’s customer.

What is the learner doing? And the reality is, a lot of online education and e-learning happens on mobile devices and tablets. So even if you as the course creator, the coach, the education entrepreneur, the website building professional, don’t really do a lot of website stuff on mobile, a lot of the end users do.

What that means is the checkout experience needs to be super optimized for mobile. They shouldn’t have to try to be on their phone and pinch zoom in on checkout fields and can’t see everything. It doesn’t scroll great. That’s not the case with LifterLMS, particularly if you’re using LifterLMS’ Sky Pilot theme, which is the most advanced WordPress LMS theme with exclusive focus on e-learning.

It’s literally one of a kind on the internet, and it was built from a mobile first standpoint. So fifty-nine percent of e-commerce transactions on the internet based on the stat from Sellers Commerce, is happening on mobile devices. You really need to make sure when you build your website and your checkout. That it is mobile optimized.

And also keep in mind- Particularly with mobile devices the mobile abandonment of the cart is even higher than desktop computers. So if you use a strong mobile-optimized theme with mobile-optimized checkout like Sky Pilot, and then you use the LifterLMS cart abandonment recovery add-on as an example, you’re way more likely to close more sales.

The other piece of mobile optimization is you have to have good hosting for your website. LifterLMS is the most performant, secure mobile-optimized LMS on the market, but you still need to have good web hosting. Every second in delay from a study by a company called WP Rocket equals a drop in 7% on conversions.

So every second your website takes to load on the checkout screen, you’re losing 7% of the conversions, which is huge So we have a list on the LifterLMS website of the top WordPress hosting companies that we recommend that are fast and are gonna give you speedy LifterLMS checkout. And really you want your whole site to be fast all the time for every reason, but at checkout, it’s super important to have that speed on checkout.

LifterLMS is built for it, and you need to have web hosting that is fast as well, which is one of the reasons why we recommend the LifterLMS checkout is so simple and streamlined that the checkout is just fast. If you use a tool in WordPress like WooCommerce, it has way more going on the checkout screen and can be slower and so on.

We do love WooCommerce as well, but if you want the most optimized, simple, fast checkout for courses and memberships I would recommend going with the native LifterLMS checkout and our Stripe and PayPal payment gateways. So checkout optimization is really about two things. It’s about recovering abandoned carts and also optimizing and keeping the users checking out that you already have.

So go get yourself the LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery add-on. I’m super excited about it. Again, not to toot our own horn, but we’ve recovered $319,000 using our cart abandonment system. The LifterLMS cart abandonment system is very similar to the one on the LifterLMS software checkout site. I think you’re gonna love it.

So if you’re just getting started, go get the Earth bundle. That’s our e-commerce bundle. It’s gonna have everything you need for courses, memberships, checkout, payment gateways, cart abandonment recovery, and so on. If you have any questions about any of this, please reach out to us. Conversion optimization is real.

Checkout optimization is a huge part of that. I hope you found this episode useful, and we will see you in the next one. Take care.

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Get WP Fusion NowEffective communication, according to Chris, is the cornerstone of a successful remote business and ought to be regarded as one of the most crucial principles of business. He demonstrates that effective communication enhances cooperation, leadership, customer connections, and overall business performance based on his more than 15 years of experience managing LifterLMS as a wholly remote firm.

He highlights that writing is an essential communication skill since it facilitates idea organization, improves documentation, generates more powerful marketing material, and even facilitates more efficient use of AI tools. Chris also describes LifterLMS’s methods for maintaining remote teams’ alignment without overburdening them with meetings. He talks about quarterly planning using the Shape Up framework, organized monthly all-hands meetings that highlight individual, client, and business successes, and the practice of recording ideas in shared Google Docs before they are forgotten.

In order to keep everyone on the team informed and improve teamwork, he advises using Slack for open, public discussions rather than private messaging wherever feasible. Beyond technologies and procedures, Chris emphasizes the significance of fostering a supportive remote workplace culture by honoring cultural differences and communication preferences, recording corporate expertise, and providing chances for colleagues to bond via virtual game days. Additionally, he offers productivity advice on how to communicate more quickly and effectively by using voice-to-text software and comprehensive AI suggestions. His main point is that effective communication is a lifetime talent that enhances leadership, marketing, teamwork, and all facets of managing a profitable internet business.

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What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and this is a solo podcast episode with just me, where we’re gonna talk about how to communicate effectively at a remote company. I actually had a team member suggest this topic for a podcast. I’ve been communicating in a remote company, both internally and publicly, for over 15 years, and I realized I have a lot of tips and tricks to share with you today and level up your communication ability at a remote company, whether you’re- have an education company or you’re running an agency or running any kind of online business.

So the first thing I would say is to value communication at the highest level. So what do I mean by that? One of our top company values, and we only have six or seven, is clear communication. So we value communication very highly at all levels, both internally in how we write, in how we market, in how we send emails, in how we treat each other as team members, clients, users, prospects, and all of that.

So clear communication is super important to us at LifterLMS. If you value clarity of communication, you can build a better company that’s much easier to run, manage, that you will actually enjoy. Good communication means clarity of thought. So the way I like to think about this- Is writing is the ultimate form of communication.

So writing is not just for making blog posts or building a sales page. We use it all of the time. We use it for figuring out what we’re gonna say in a video. We take notes, we send emails, we do social media content. We write all over the place, and especially now with AI tools, we are writing prompts and creating skills for agents, and so on.

This is all types of communications. So let me next go into my tip around communication around meetings. I learned this saying from one of my business mentors, Dan Martell, that basically meetings shouldn’t suck, and if they do suck, you’re doing them wrong. Now, in the remote world, sometimes companies trend towards no meetings at all, ever, just complete asynchronous communication, which is fine.

But I actually think it makes a lot of sense to have some meetings that are effective with the right people on the meetings on a regular cadence or ongoing basis. So how do we do this at LifterLMS? Internally, we have I don’t know, maybe let’s say … It depends on your role, but for me, as an example, not including podcasts recording sessions and things like that, but when I’m actually meeting with my team on Zoom, not asynchronous communication, which by the way, we’re constantly communicating asynchronously via Slack, which I’ll talk about in a little bit.

But in terms of communicating through meetings at a company we have one all-hands meeting a month, and that has a particular format flow that we do. It basically goes housekeeping, where we just catch up, we talk about people’s upcoming time off and things like that to just make sure we’re all synced up on schedule Then we do a section of the all-hands meeting called Wins.

And at companies, it’s really easy to focus on the problems and the constraints and focus your meetings where most of the content of the meeting is course correction or in general can come off with a negative vibe. So I always like to start a meeting, the all-hands meeting, with sharing wins, and I break that down into three categories.

There’s the personal win. Anything happen in your life? Did you have a baby? Did you run a marathon? Did you move or, get engaged or something like that? That’s just a personal win part which brings the humanity and the, we’re not just workers, we’re human beings doing life together.

So that’s for that. And then we do a customer win. And anybody can contribute to these. It’s not just the CEO talking. It’s anybody can contribute. So in the customer win area, we like to surface recent testimonials or five-star reviews, or maybe we saw on social media that somebody was really excited ’cause they launched and sold 5,000 courses on their first launch and so on.

So we’re always sharing the wins of our customers and celebrating them even if they don’t know about it because- In my view, in business, whoever’s closest to the customer wins, and if you’re not actually, keeping tabs on them, seeing what’s working, seeing what’s not working, but particularly celebrating their wins with them, you’re out of sync with your users.

And then the third win area is the company win. So this is something like, “Oh, we did this marketing campaign and it did really well,” or, “We shipped this new product, it was really hard,” or, “We built this new course that a bunch of people contributed to,” and so on. So that’s an example of a company win. And then when we get into it we…

From here, we go to the actual functions of a business. So the big mistake that a lot of companies make, particularly in my space, software companies an immature founder or CEO or operator will just see the business as just two things. There’s engineering and then there’s marketing. But that’s not true at all and that’s how businesses get lopsided and have big gaps and a lot of failure points.

A business is actually seven areas. Now, you can slice and dice an organization in different ways, but here’s how I like to slice and dice those areas. So as part of our all-hands meeting, I call do it doing a tour of the functions. We’re gonna go through the seven key functions with, key project updates, challenges we’re having giving props to somebody on the team who did well in this function asking for help.

And again, anybody can contribute to these areas. So those seven functions are, number one is product, number two is engineering, number three is marketing, number four is sales, number five is customer support or customer success, number six is operations and admin, and then the seventh area is just the CEO.

This is a moment, a part of the… where the CEO or the founder or the owners or partners could really just contribute some of that CEO stuff like a high-level celebration, or charting a vision, or vision casting the future, or doing a quick reminder of the company values, or spotlighting team members who exhibited the company values in the last week, and so on.

And then from there we wrap up. So that’s our all-hands meeting. Happens only once a month. I used to do it every week, but once you’re rolling and established and your asynchronous communication is really good, I find one hour a month is great for that meeting The next kind of all-hands meeting we do once a month is just called a team game day.

So there’s literally zero business agenda on that meeting. We just show up and play online games together as a team, whoever can make it, and that’s often a game like GeoGuessr has been our latest favorite that’s easy for everybody to play from all over the world. And that’s just a chance to communicate and connect as just human beings without some kind of organizational hierarchy and whatever, just to connect as humans, and that’s all that is.

And it’s super helpful just for putting the human touch in an organization, particularly when you don’t have an in-person office where natural, just personal do life conversations and having fun together can happen as easily The next set of meetings I do really depend on the organizational structure.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

typically this is known as a one-on-one with, your management team or your leadership. For example, I do a one-on-one meeting with our head of growth/marketing. I do a one-on-one with our lead developer. I do a one-on-one with my business partners, and that is really it for how… the one-on-ones that I do.

And sometimes you may have a manager who does one-on-ones who has a bigger team underneath you. It just depends on the scale of your company as to how many people do one-on-ones. So all that is to say, in a given week, I have about three hours w- of three or four hours of internal company meetings.

So that doesn’t eat my lunch. We don’t do meetings every day, and that’s great. And there are times where we’ll do a one-off meeting for something that’s pressing or urgent, or what I call co-working, where we just wanna collaborate with somebody and work on a project together. And then there’s a bigger meeting system we do four times a year, which I’m gonna tell you about here.

I’ll probably do a whole episode on Shape Up, which is the system we use for figuring out what to build, what to focus on, coming up with strategic projects and so on. In this episode, I’m just gonna go over the high level key aspects of Shape Up. So Shape Up is a system for managing a company that was developed by the folks over at 37signals.

We do a modified version. Jason Coleman, my business partner, modified it to work for companies of our size, style and scale. So basically, what Shape Up is the management team comes together in a quarterly rhythm, and these meetings don’t happen all at once, but the first meeting is called the ideas meeting, and this is where over the course of the last quarter we have…

Whenever you have an idea like, “Oh, we should build a product for this, we could c- should create a course about this, we should do this marketing campaign, we should focus on this engineering project, or we should do this on our website,” instead of just blasting that stuff to the wind or losing it in a Slack thread or something like that, we actually have a document where we collect those, and whoever puts it in there writes their name beside it so we know who had it, and it’s like a little tickler file for when you actually do the ideas meeting, which is where we meet and decide which ideas we’re gonna prioritize on in the next quarter.

But the next step is not just to work on the idea. The next step is called a pitch. So pitches between the ideas meeting and the pitch meeting is these ideas that we’ve decided to write pitches for are assigned to a particular leader or manager in the company, and then that person writes a pitch, which is like a product specification, user stories.

It talks about the opportunity of doing this project. It gets into the solution. We give it a time constraint, which we call appetite, and we get into no-gos things to not focus on in that project. It’s basically like instead of asking, let’s say, a web developer, “Oh, we wanna build groups e-commerce for LifterLMS.

Good luck. That’s your project,” we actually get into writing a detailed pitch or specification of how it’s gonna work with interface designs and so on. It makes the purposeful work that we do down the road much better and tighter. At the end of the, that pitch meeting there’s some there…

it’s called the betting table. We present our pitches- And then after those are presented, we’re voting on whether the next quarter is the time to focus th- on this or not. Some of the things that we find in the pitch meeting, we may decide to just categorize as a JDI, which just means just do it, and that just means it folds into the day job territory of whoever’s responsible for that area.

And basically in the betting table we have a whole spreadsheet that where we can put in all the pitches we voted to pursue in the next quarter and assign them to people, and if they all don’t fit, we have to make cuts, which are called notable passes. So after that’s over, the next week begins a seven-week or six-week cycle where we’re, quote, “on cycle” and we actually do the work that each person has in their pitch.

It doesn’t mean they stop doing everything they do in their regular day job, but they will prioritize that cycle project, we call it. So that is Shape Up in a nutshell, which requires an ideas meeting and then a betting table where after the pitches are written, we decide what to focus on.

So that’s eight more meetings a year since this happens on a quarterly cycle, and that’s how the Shape Up system works in our meeting cadence. So that rhythm is super important. So instead of trying to plan a whole year out, we’re basically focusing on one quarter at a time ’cause things change a lot and as you’ve noticed, we’re living in an exponential age with lots of rapid change and stuff like that, so kinda getting in that quarterly rhythm is really important.

I should also mention I also do a one-on-one with myself on Fridays where I give myself permission to step back, review the week and think strategically, think about my team, how I can set them up for success, think about the company, spend a little time more zoomed out on the ten-year vision, five-year vision, three-year vision, one-year goals and all that stuff.

So I also regularly have calendar meetings with myself to focus on something like strategic thinking time is actually what I call it. So another cool thing about the meetings is it’s hard to hold an agenda in your mind or rush to, right before a meeting, to figure out what you’re gonna talk about.

So that’s the immature way to do it. The way that we do it is we actually just use a simple system using Google Docs. So each meeting, whether it’s a one-on-one or the team all-hands, there’s a document with a template and some structure to it that we can fill in whenever inspiration strikes. And what this does, if…

Let’s say I have an idea to discuss with my lead of growth and marketing. I’m not necessarily gonna bother him on Slack, particularly if it’s a big idea, a new project, or something that’s gonna take detailed feedback where it’ll be better on a Zoom meeting. I’ll actually just add that as soon as I have the thought to the document for our next one-on-one.

Or if I have an idea about a future product LifterLMS should make, I will add that to the next quarter’s ideas list that we’ll look at later. So what this solves is it keeps your brain empty, it keeps overwhelm from happening, and it… most importantly, it prevents you from losing those good ideas you have in the shower, or on your run, or while working on something else, so that you capture all that value in a document.

So when we have meetings, particularly all the recurring meetings I’ve mentioned, there’s a recurring calendar invite in Google Calendar, there’s a Zoom link to join, and there’s also a link to the document, so that anybody at any time can empty whatever idea they have in their brain to that document, which is very efficient and captures value, ’cause we think our memory is a lot better than it really is.

So I highly recommend using Docs to… as a capture device. This is classic getting things done methodology to unload your brain. Some people call it building a second brain or whatever, but I actually find it more useful, not just my brain, but everybody’s brain in the company is using the same system and contributing to these documents.

So we’re more working as a group mind than just one mind, which is very refreshing, particularly as a leader, because there are other leaders, and good ideas, and innovation ideas on your team. So you have to empower people to communicate, speak up, and to use the, The systems and contribute.

‘Cause what ends up happening if you don’t do that is that you’re not really helping people fulfill their potential on your team. Fulfill potential is actually w- another one of our company values. So getting people engaged and contributing to meetings and unloading their brain when inspiration strikes is a good idea.

Now, there are times, of course, where something is … doesn’t need to go in a doc, it’s just a Slack post. So let’s talk about Slack for a little bit. If you’re not a Slack user, Slack is just like an instant messenger internal communication tool for a company. I personally do not like using email for commun- for communication, particularly within the company.

We do all that communication in Slack. And one of the biggest things that makes Slack effective, and where I see a lot of companies struggling ’cause they’re not doing it, is to have almost 99% of the conversations in public as opposed to DMs. And what that does is it allows multiple people to collaborate, and this whole concept of working in public, it just creates more context for everybody on the team.

So if you’re constantly just emailing or DM- DMing people individually, you’re basically operating in an unnecessary silo So when it comes to Slack it’s good to develop what’s known are channels, which are just areas where certain conversations happen. So for example, we have a private management channel in the LifterLMS Slack that the folks in the leadership positions have access to.

We have a marketing and sales Slack. We have a developer Slack. We have certain big project Slacks, like our newsletter, and just getting people to work in public is huge. And I’ve noticed when you do this in a company, it often takes some time for somebody to get comfortable, particularly if they’re shy or if they’re maybe not as confident in their role, or they don’t wanna show publicly that they’re asking for help.

Whatever it is, once you get over all that kind of insecurity, the company is much more powerful and just the public communication and working in public is 100% the way to go. Now, when do you not work in public? When do you actually use the DM? Yeah, sometimes I DM people on Slack. It could be something about somebody has a sensitive question, like HR-related question.

Okay, that’s fine to DM that kind of thing. If you’re ever sending a team member sensitive information or they’re sending you sensitive information, of course, that can be a DM. So I’m not like never DM, but literally 99.5% of the time, I’m always communicating in public with my team. So if you’re not s- using Slack, I highly recommend it, even if you have a small team And let’s talk more about the softer side of communication.

So one of the things you’ll find in a remote company, particularly if you have team members all over the world or customers or users or prospects all over the world, there’s so many different cultures out there, which is one of the beautiful and awesome things a- about humanity. And different cultures and even languages have different styles of communication and different personalities and so on.

So one example of this some folks in different parts of the world are not as comfortable being on camera, so I don’t force that on a Zoom meeting as an example. I do very much appreciate it when somebody does turn their camera on, ’cause it’s like a… it’s a show of being present. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around somebody who’s working in a corporate job and hates their job and there’s a meeting going and their camera’s off and they’re not paying attention and they’re doing something else on the side or not even working.

I find that kind sad. I don’t think that there are like not great places to work and all that kind of thing, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to, be engaged, particularly if you do like we do where you’re not in meetings all day. You’ll hear corporate people sometimes complain about, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been in meetings all day.

I’m double-booked constantly. I can’t get any work done.” You definitely don’t want to create that. So if you can do the minimum effective dose of meetings like we do, and when you do have a meeting give it everything you have, be present, be on time, contribute to the docs and so on. And then also related to international sensitivity- Particularly if you have a business like LifterLMS, where less than half our customers live in the English-speaking world.

Even though we use English at our company as our primary language, I’m always super sensitive to a team member or a customer or community member who English is not their first language, or perhaps they can’t even speak English at all. So it’s good to be sensitive to that and communicate more simply if you’re speaking to a non-native English speaker, and just have some grace and gratitude and, get creative.

Use tools like Google Translate or an AI tool if somebody’s trying to talk to you in Spanish or Swahili or a different language, ’cause the tools have never been easier to communicate cross-culturally, and it’s important to be sensitive. Related to that, in terms of brand voice, we often hear about brand voice communication as “Oh, we need to get everybody in the company to kinda communicate if they’re marketing so it sounds like it’s c- coming from the brand voice.”

For example, the company MailChimp is really famous for having like a good brand voice document, and their team and the interface and everything in that product kinda has the same vibe. That’s cool. So figure out what your brand voice is and, create a document for that and share it with your team and work with people.

We actually use LifterLMS on a private website to power an internal training resource, so it’s full of courses and standard operating procedures and policies and things like that. That’s a good place to put your brand voice. Lifter has an add-on called Private Site where you can build your own internal company playbooks I call them, or standard operating procedures that are not open at all to the public internet or Google search indexing and all of that.

So that’s LifterLMS Private Site. If you haven’t created a internal training platform for your business yet, you are behind. Every company is a education company, whether th- they realize that or not. So even if you sell education publicly, you need a place to document your standard operating procedures, and LifterLMS can do that.

The other area is project management. Project management, people use tools like Trello or Asana or Monday.com or Jira, Atlassian or whatever. That’s another good place to communicate, and that’s really communicating around projects, and you get a feel for it. The more complex your business is and the more people there are, the more necessary strong project management tools are.

But that requires communication as well. Also tagging on to brand voice, it’s really important to communicate in a very respectful way. So what I mean by that is, if you’re sensitive and inclusive across cultures some things which may be fine in one culture where people swear a lot, as an example, may be very offensive in another culture.

So I always try to make sure I’m communicating professionally and I’m being culturally sensitive, whether people have different religions, values, cultures and so on. So it’s always good to do that both publicly and internally. For example, I was at a conference in the UK for membership site owners and the, all the speakers, almost all of them were swearing in their talks from the stage, and one of them said “I think we have an all UK audience here.”

It was just me and a couple other Americans that were there, but there was a lot of swearing and that was– They were okay ’cause it was mostly a UK audience and it was private or whatever. But that’s the kind of thing, if you do that in your TED Talk, you may actually offend or turn off a lot of your audience, which can have a big impact on morale and sales and things of that nature So I wanna share a communication tool that has 10X my productivity that I recently started using.

It’s called Whisperflow, and what it does is you load it up on your computers and on your phone, and you just hold a key, and you can start dictating and it’s voice-to-text. And you might be asking how is that better than the little microphone that’s already there, like on Twitter or ChatGPT or whatever?”

It’s f- I don’t understand how it works, but it works way better. It’s way faster. It works across devices. It saves your history. I find that particularly useful for working with our AI agents and kinda doing brain dumps and so on. So if you’re a slow typer like me, go get yourself a copy of Whisperflow and just try it out.

I’m insanely more productive because of that, particularly because I am a slow typer. So one final pro tip for you, and this is just a artificial intelligence pro tip. If you’re a beginner and you’re just starting to use AI chat tools, you’re not really using memory systems, and the chats are resetting with no context every time.

So one of the things you can do is you can slow down and communicate and create documents. Dan Martell calls these master prompts that you can use to provide context to your AI tool. For example, I have a Chris Badgett, CEO, LifterLMS founder master prompt, which is five pages long, and then I have one about me as an individual personally in my personal life, which is about five pages long.

So I have that loaded up in my AI tools so I don’t need to constantly re-communicate who I am, what my goals are, how I like to roll, and so on. So communication skills with AI, because AI is so fast, you are the limiting factor as a human. So if you can communicate more effectively with AI, you’re gonna be a lot more productive as well and then the last thing I’ll say on marketing and sales, back in my day, I’m kinda old now there was no marketing degree at university.

It was just called communication. I actually don’t have that degree. I did go to college. My background’s in anthropology. But when you think about it, marketing is called communication at universities. Why do they call it that? ‘Cause basically, that is what marketing is. Marketing is just communication.

Maybe you’re doing visual communication and using tools to help you create brand consistency, like Canva templates, or you’re doing copywriting, you’re trying to be persuasive in a email or on a landing page, or you’re trying to clearly, with clarity, describe the features of your product or program or service.

This is all communication. So if you wanna get good at marketing, it’s not about the tips and tricks and the hacks and the ads and the all the tools. It’s really about how well do you communicate. How well do you understand your customer avatar, your ideal customer profile? How well do you understand your team members?

As a leader, what we do as, is influence, and influence can have a negative connotation, but there’s a lot of positive stuff with leadership and influence as well. And in order to influence in a positive way, you need to be an effective communicator. And the good news is that communication is not a skill that you just do once.

It’s a lifelong journey, and you’re only gonna get better at communication over time if you work on it. And it comes in handy everywhere, from working with your team, working with your customers, customer support, selling, in your personal life with your partner, your friends, your family, and so on. Clear communication is one of the biggest unlocks in life.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I’d love to hear from you about any communication tips that you have. I’d love to hear what you found most useful or valuable from this episode. And if you want me to follow up with you on anything communication related or you want some more ideas expanded on based on what I’ve been sharing with you here, please do.

I’m Chris from LifterLMS. Clear communication is one of our company values, and I hope you got some value out of this episode. Take care.

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Get WP Fusion NowIn this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett discusses why any serious YouTuber should create an online course rather than depend solely on YouTube revenue. He contends that the toughest part is over for creators who have already developed an audience; the next stage is to transform that following into a business they own.

By utilizing LifterLMS to offer courses from their own WordPress website, producers can make a steady income without relying on sponsorships, ad revenue, or shifting algorithms. In his discussion of the distinction between renting and owning a platform, Chris explains how marketplaces such as Udemy may restrict long-term growth, price, branding, and customer connections. On the other hand, creators have complete control over their content, student data, email list, price, and company when they own a WordPress website. Instead of relying on outside platforms, he urges YouTubers to create digital assets under their own control.

Additionally, he suggests that rather than attempting to teach all they know, designers should focus their courses on a single change. YouTubers should listen to audience inquiries, study comments, use polls, or create waitlists to evaluate their ideas before devoting time to developing a course. Rather than waiting for perfection, Chris suggests beginning with a single, basic course, launching it immediately, and making improvements over time.

Chris also emphasizes that producers who own their platforms and establish direct connections with their audiences will be the ones who shape the future of online education. He thinks people will always value learning from real people with genuine experiences and knowledge, even as AI and shifting digital trends continue to transform content creation. Creators may develop a long-term company that isn’t reliant on algorithms or third-party platforms, diversify their revenue streams, and enhance their personal brand by integrating YouTube with an online course. Creators may develop a long-term company that isn’t reliant on algorithms or third-party platforms, diversify their revenue streams, and enhance their personal brand by integrating YouTube with an online course.

In general, Chris urges YouTubers to concentrate on building long-term companies rather than just views and subscribers. He suggests utilizing YouTube as a potent lead-generation tool that directs students to online courses hosted on a website they completely own and control, producing enduring value for both artists and their audiences, rather than viewing it as the ultimate destination.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris, and in this episode, I’m gonna show you why and how every serious YouTuber should build an online course. See, the thing is, if you’re a YouTuber and you have some audience, even if it’s small, you’ve already done the hardest part.

You’ve built an audience. Most creators just never turn it into a business that they own. And also, by the way, you’ve developed the skills of being on video, being in front of a camera, getting comfortable with that. So it’s time to build the business. I’m gonna talk about what’s going on in the YouTube landscape, an event I’m getting ready to go to, so let’s just dive right in.

See, most creators on YouTube, they rent their income, and they don’t know it. So if you think about things like ad revenue, sponsorships, Patreon, these services that YouTubers use to monetize They’re actually just renting that income. It’s not coming from a platform that they own and control, and it can be very fickle.

Most YouTubers don’t make any money at all, but of the ones that earn money as a YouTuber over 50% of them make under $15,000, and it’s only 4% of the YouTube income earners that earn over $100,000. So the cool thing to think about here is that views are the top of the funnel, not the actual business. So I’m going with my daughter to VidCon, which is the big YouTuber conference in California, so I’m really focused on YouTube right now.

I’m a grown man. I’m 47 years old, and I’m still… I feel like I was kinda early here in wanting to be a YouTuber when I grow up. I’m 47. I’ve been on YouTube… Gosh, it seems like it’s been about 20 years since I launched my first video. I fell in love with the platform before it became as famous and as popular as it is today.

I’ve been doing video marketing, creating video courses leveraging video in so many different ways for a very long time. I’m super passionate about it. The thing is, most of the course creators that we work with at LifterLMS think about YouTube later as a way to do marketing or get clients for their courses and memberships and coaching programs.

But this video is not necessarily for them. It’s for the people that come from a YouTuber-first approach. I’m a YouTuber, I make videos, it’s what I do. It’s also very relevant no matter what age you are. Like I said, I’m 47, my daughter is 14 years old, and we’re both YouTubers. So this isn’t something that is only relevant to the younger generation, middle of the road, or the older generation.

Anybody can be a YouTuber. And one fact I wanna share with you, which I kinda have a funny debate with my daughter, is that she has built in over about a year about four times the subscribers that I’ve built at LifterLMS after 13 years. So she likes to rub that in my face, but I always like to remind her, I just ask her one question, “Hey, what’s your revenue per subscriber?”

So if you don’t know LifterLMS, we’re the leading learning management system in WordPress. We’ve sold millions and millions of dollars worth of online course software, LifterLMS. We also give away a ton of value for free, including in the free version of LifterLMS, but that revenue-per-subscriber thing is very real.

There’s a lot of influencers and creators on YouTube that maybe they go viral, maybe they’re on a hot topic, and they get a lot of subscribers, but they literally make no money or very little money. Now let me Differentiate a couple different types of YouTube content. YouTube is big for two things.

One is education, the other is entertainment. And I actually like to try and live in the middle in what’s known as edutainment. So predominantly what I’m into is making nonfiction YouTube content that’s educational, but I try to make it entertaining. I’m not the most entertaining person in the world, but edutainment is really what it’s all about.

So for the YouTubers out there, let’s talk about the difference of renting versus owning. Now, where I come from in the WordPress ecosystem, we know this already. Like we … When we build our website, we build it on WordPress on our hosting account. It’s a website that we have full control and ownership over.

So as an example, in the online course space, people sometimes end up on course platforms like Teachable or Kajabi or School or Thinkific, and they end up paying an exorbitant amount of money every month to rent a small piece of some other company’s website to put their online course on. That’s not what we’re about at LifterLMS.

We don’t want our users to have cookie cutter sites where they all look the same. We want people to build an asset that they own and control. So when you’re renting access on somebody else’s website for your online course, you’re subject to algorithm swings, platform cuts, policy changes. S- if your revenue is dependent on sponsors, they leave.

Sometimes you end up in this feast or famine like, “Let me go find money somehow for my YouTube channel.” But when you own your site, you own your students, you know their email addresses, as an example. Like in YouTube, you can have a lot of subscribers, but you can’t email them you’re de- totally dependent on the YouTube algorithm and people only being able to find your YouTube content if they happen to subscribe, if they happen to see it in their feed.

So owning a platform is very different than renting space. So when you own the platform, your income starts compounding because you just have so much control. One of the things that happened in the course creation space back in the day, in the early days of course creation, I’m talking about 15, 16 years ago, there was a company that got big called Udemy.

You may have heard of it. I… My very first online course before we built LifterLMS, I put on Udemy. You can go check it out. It’s called The Poet Omelet Method: Perfect Omelets Every Time, which was just a fun course. I challenged myself when I fell in love with the online course format in the early days to make a whole online course in a weekend and publish it, and I did that on Udemy.

And it wasn’t a very serious course. I just happened to love cooking But what happened is over time, I watched Udemy maximize for profit for Udemy and not take good care of their customers. So what happened is they… One of the big things they did is they created, this was a while ago at this point, a maximum of $50 that you could charge for your course.

They also made it impossible for you to ever provide a link to your own website from inside the course. So Udemy just wants to keep the people, the eyeballs, the traffic. They wanna keep everything on their platform. And then what they started doing is they started doing these course bundles where your course would get included in a course bundle with other creators that you don’t know, and they would discount your course price, the amount you would get paid and your commission by a serious amount, like 80, 90%, and then they would put coupons on top of that and stuff.

It was a real disaster if… And it made a lot of people clear about the value of owning your platform where it’s your rules, it’s your website, it’s more customizable, it’s more affordable, and it has the best support in the industry. So that’s just something that happened on Udemy. Udemy’s cool. I like it.

I’ve taken courses over there, but I would only put free courses on Udemy just as a form of lead generation. I would… In personal branding or whatever. I wouldn’t try to build my whole business on somebody else’s website when it comes to monetizing my YouTube channel. So the first thing as a YouTuber to think about when you’re ready to create a learning platform that you own and control and monetize your YouTube channel is to decide what to teach.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

And what I mean by this is that your YouTube channel probably already has a topic focus, a niche. You have a certain type of viewer or customer avatar that you make content for But sometimes YouTubers are so prolific and creative in making all this great content that you suffer…

you can suffer from what we call the expert’s curse, where you know a lot of things and you’re like what should I actually teach?” So the key thing to do when you’re making the leap to monetizing your YouTube channel with an online course on your website is to start small. Just pick a transformation of some kind of result, a specific result, even an identity shift.

Those are the best, where you create a transformation related to your subject matter expertise. So for example, I like to look at the big mega niches. So the big mega niches on YouTube, and you’re probably in a sub-niche under these if your content is somewhat educational and not pure entertainment, are health, wealth, and relationships.

So what do I mean by that? Health are things like personal fitness. It could be dealing with a medical issue that you have, and there’s many like you that have the same issue, and they’re looking for resources and things. It could be something to do with weight loss or getting your beach body ready for the summer.

It could be all kinds of different things. But if your content is broad, when you’re making your first course, I would look for a specific transformation. So if we look at the health space as an example, I’m an ultra runner, which means I run distances over the length of a marathon. This year I ran a hundred mile run across the st- entire state of New Hampshire, and so that’s like an, a health niche I really understand ’cause I’m been in this ultra running space for a while.

And if I was doing a lot on my YouTube channel, I know a lot of ultra runners, influencers, micro influencers and stuff that have a lot of great YouTube content, but they’re not creating online courses. So if you’re, like, sharing your races and then you’re doing like, “Hey, here’s what’s in my pack. Here’s h- how I fuel for a hundred miles.

Here are the challenges you face on your first hundred mile,” and so on, I would pick my first transformation and I would get specific. So I would do something like- How to go from finishing a marathon to finishing your first 50-miler. And then I would create a course content around that to help somebody kind of transition, just like I did.

Before I ran long 50-milers and 100-milers, when I was younger, I ran a marathon, so I knew what it ta- took to run a marathon. But running double that distance or even four times that distance or more is a totally different game. But anyways, notice how I said I would focus on how to run your first 50-miler, having previously finished a marathon at some point in your past.

So I would go into certain things to facilitate that transformation in my course, like getting into the gear, getting into the training, getting into the nutri- nutrition, getting into the hydration, getting into the recovery, getting into how to work with a coach or decide if you want a coach or not. So I could easily come up with eight key videos or lessons

that would make that course.

I don’t have to teach everything I know about long-distance running and all the science and all the health and all the stuff. I’m just picking a specific transformation. And if you’re a YouTuber not in the health space, just to briefly touch on other transformations. If you’re in the wealth space, so for example, I’m in the cr- make money with online courses space.

That’s the space I live in. This podcast has a ton of episodes about that. It’s something I’m really excited about and have a lot of experience in, both myself and across many, We’ve helped over 100,000 people create and sell online courses. And I actually have an online course called the Six Figure Course Plan Challenge.

It’s on the LifterLMS Academy, and it’s literally designed to help you go from zero to your first 100K course. So that’s an example of a transformation within the wealth space, so for courses. But for you, if you’re in the wealth space, it could be something else. It could be about investing or crypto or real estate or boring businesses or any kind of career path that people are, wanna learn how to do and go down.

And then on the relationship front, it could be everything from dating to parenting to other issues with relationships that happen at different phases in life, whatever it is. But I would get specific. I watched a s- a sleep coach, or an s- i’m sorry, I’m getting into health again, but let me go to the to this one example I saw was a for new parents, it was a course on how to basically figure out a newborn and sleep, both for the baby and for the parents.

Super specific. It’s time-bound. Your work- the audience is people with a newborn baby at home up to one year old who have a burning desire to figure out this whole sleep thing, and they’re a first-time parent. So that would be an example of a transformation in the relationship space of being a good parent, and also the relationship with yourself and your own needs in terms of sleep and so on The next piece that’s key, particularly if you’re a prolific content creator you just want to go and just start making the course and stuff, but it’s good to do some validation and not to build in the dark.

So you probably already have some validation. What are the questions that your audience asks you frequently? What’s the most popular question? What do you see in the comments? Which ones of your videos have the most views with the strongest education and transformation intent? You can make some videos about a course you’re thinking about making and ask people to go sign up for the interest list or the wait list.

You can even use LifterLMS as an example to set a course start date in the future, like a month away or even three months away. See how many people sign up for the interest list or pay in advance, perhaps at a discount for an early adopter discount and so on. There’s all kinds of different ways to validate, and you have something as a YouTuber that a lot of course creators or would-be course creators don’t have, which is you already have an audience.

So your audience is free market research, and you already have one. Try to validate before you really commit and do all the effort and so on. You can even make a light version of the course as a standalone video and see what the uptake or popularity of that is But if you’re just getting started, definitely start with a simple course, like one simple course.

It’s easy to start thinking about, “Okay, I’m gonna build a membership, and there’s gonna be this whole course catalog. I’ve got ideas for 50 courses.” That is all good, and I would encourage you to, explore that creatively and stuff, but take it one step at a time. Rome was not built in a day. You’ve already been building.

You already have a YouTube channel. It’s fine if you only have, 200 subscribers or if you have 200,000 or two million. I’ve seen people be very successful in small YouTube niches with a very small audience because it’s super niche. It’s a super kind of pain point, opportunity-seeking niche, and you can do a lot.

So don’t get distracted by vanity metrics like number of subscribers, number of views, and so on. If you have some traction at all on your YouTube channel, you’re doing well, so y- it’s not about keeping up with MrBeast and getting millions of views per video. So the perfect thing to do is just to start and create one course and launch it.

Done is better than perfect, and done is definitely better than fai- failure to launch or never releasing anything at all. And it’s one of those things where once you do it once, it’ll be so much easier, and you’ll be– you’ll go 10 times faster the next time you do it. And you can always expand to more courses and more y- membership and coaching programs and stuff as you go.

And we have all kinds of resources on the LifterLMS website to help you with the beginning stages as a course creator So own your platform, own the revenue, the data, the student relationship. WordPress plus LifterLMS is the owned alternative. If you’re brand new to setting up a WordPress site, just reach out to us.

We’ve got content and resources and recommendations to show you how easy it is, and you can look at our case studies. We have Y- YouTubers like Frank Kane, who’s, at the time we interviewed him, this was a while ago, he had made over $2 million with his online courses. He was in the he’s in a tech niche in terms of Amazon skills and things like that, but he has over 600,000 students.

He’s in one of those situations where he had started building on Udemy, but he got unhappy with all the restrictions and new policies and everything, so h- he’s been building up a mirror LMS or learning management system platform on his own WordPress site with LifterLMS. There’s another YouTuber named Christian Taylor who does a lot of software reviews, does some affiliate marketing with that, and some of his views have gone viral and whatnot, and he’s stepped into the course creation space with LifterLMS and WordPress.

Check out the LifterLMS reviews. There’s 389 reviews on wordpress.org. There’s more reviews on Capterra, Trustpilot, and G2 as well. LifterLMS has a really high review rate, rating ’cause it’s affordable, it’s infinitely customizable, and it has the best support in the industry. So you already have a audience, you just need to launch to the audience that you already have.

It’s not like you have to go find more people. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, you’re already ahead of the game. You’ve already done 80% of the work by building the channel, getting comfortable on video, making video, editing video, and, building that audience and getting comfortable up there.

So your own influence that you already have YouTube beats cold traffic or paying for ads. You don’t have to do all that kind of stuff when you’re launching your first course when you already have an audience. So in, in summary I wanna see more YouTubers building online courses. I’ve– I know a lot of young people or friends with kids, and a lot of these younger folks, including my own daughter, says they wanna be a YouTuber when they grow up.

It’s the– it’s like the number one skill. When I was a kid, people wanted to be an astronaut, now they wanna be a YouTuber. So there’s so many people coming online, going to YouTube with hopes and dreams, but it’s important to think about monetization. Yes, you can do sponsors, monetize your channel with ads and things like that, but that’s not the way the pros do it.

The pros do it by building their own information products so that YouTube becomes more of lead generation for the back catalog, their online courses. And if you’re gonna go to the effort to build an online course, it makes a lot of sense to do it on a platform that you own and control. So I’ve got a free resource for you Called Turn Your Subscribers into a Business You Own.

You can go get that at lifterlms.com/vidcon. So VidCon is a YouTuber conference I’m going to in California to connect with the YouTube community, hear their stories. I wanna see more young people getting involved in creating education products and figuring out monetization, becoming entrepreneurs. And by the way, if you’re not young, I c- I’m sure I’m gonna feel old at the YouTuber conference.

It’s- I am definitely way past the average age that’s gonna be there, but these are my people. We’re the creators, we’re the video makers, we’re the entrepreneurs out there that are figuring this whole thing out. And so much is going on in the business of education. There’s never been more opportunity in all these niches to create micro-learning, just-in-time education in very specific niches, very specific transformations.

There’s never been a better time. And if you’re worried at all about artificial intelligence taking over the world In my view, YouTube is going to remain an outpost for humanity. So what I mean by that is a lot of people will read blog posts and articles that may have been written with AI or heavily written with AI, but nobody really wants to watch educational content made by a non-human.

And really, as a human, there’s only one of you out there, so if you think that, oh,

it’s already been done, this famous person has already done a course on my topic, yeah, they’re not you, and you have your own take, angles, insights, and ideas as well. So I wanna encourage you to, monetize your YouTube channel and become an education entrepreneur, and YouTube is a great place for that, and having an online course to monetize your YouTube channel is the way to go.

At the end of the resource that I mentioned at lifterlms.com/vidcon there’s a link to a YouTube playlist where we go from zero to hero. We show you how to create your very first online course from scratch using LifterLMS and WordPress. We show you the essential steps. We don’t show you everything under the sh- the sun, but in about 40 minutes of content we show you how to create your first online course.

So see what I did there? That’s a transformation. It’s a… We actually have that course on our website, but for the YouTubers out there, you can go find that playlist. It’s in the resource at lifterlms.com/vidcon. If you wanna see the official quick start course from LifterLMS, just head on over to academy.lifterlms.com.

You can’t miss it. So that’s it for this episode. Keep making videos. Everybody can have a TV channel now on YouTube. If you’re already doing it and you’re a creator, no matter how young or old you are, I wanna encourage you to please make your first online course. LifterLMS is here to help you on the journey.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode

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Get WP Fusion NowChris Badgett talks about the limited-time LifterLMS Infinity Bundle Lifetime License in this LMScast episode and explains why professional course designers, education entrepreneurs, agencies, and training companies would find it to be a worthwhile purchase. The LifterLMS Lifetime Deal is available from June 23 to Thursday, June 25.

He emphasizes how the lifetime license offers lifetime support, limitless website usage, continuing upgrades, security improvements, and access to all existing and future LifterLMS add-ons, all without the need for recurrent membership costs. Chris adds that LifterLMS keeps innovating by introducing new features and add-ons, guaranteeing lifelong clients enjoy growing value over time without incurring extra expenses. He stresses that because the offer may drastically lower long-term costs, it is especially appealing to companies that want to use their LMS platform for a few of years.

Chris also explains the rationale behind providing a lifetime license, pointing out that LifterLMS decided to address recurring customer demand for a one-time purchase option even though subscription models are frequently more lucrative for software firms. He clarifies that the lifetime license is a relationship with devoted clients since the organization prioritizes providing value to users above optimizing business profitability. He also emphasizes advantages like lifetime support, help desk services, and Office Hours Mastermind calls, where consumers may speak with the LifterLMS staff directly. Chris clarifies that LifterLMS provides prorated upgrade discounts to current clients, making the switch from an annual plan to a lifetime license more simpler. In general, he conveys the idea that a lifetime license may assist online education companies secure future upgrades, save money, and reliably develop their learning platforms throughout time.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideHere’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and in this solo podcast episode, this is gonna be a little different. This is gonna be more of an announcement episode, and what I’m announcing to you today is our limited time summer LifterLMS Infinity Bundle lifetime deal. So that’s happening between Tuesday, June 23, through Thursday, June 25.

So if you’re interested in getting a LifterLMS lifetime license, pay attention to this episode, ’cause it’s only gonna be up for a short time in terms of the sale. So basically, what a lifetime license is at LifterLMS is you buy it, and if you’re existing customer, you can upgrade and get prorated, but if you’re brand new and you’re ready to go all in on LifterLMS, we are offering a 70% discount on the LifterLMS Infinity Bundle lifetime license.

So what is a lifetime license? Basically, you get everything that LifterLMS makes. So our top plan, called the Infinity Bundle, has all the software add-ons and everything we offer for now and into the future, you get forever with your Infinity Bundle lifetime license. So a lifetime license essentially is a lifetime of no renewal payments.

So I don’t know if you’re anything like me, but I’m allergic to subscriptions. I have so many subscriptions, whether they’re monthly or annual, that I just don’t really want another one. So if you’d prefer to pay once and never have to pay again, that option is available to you with the LifterLMS lifetime license.

The other cool thing about the lifetime license is it’s available for use on an unlimited number of sites. So there’s many different reasons why some people care about having unlimited sites available for use on their LifterLMS license. The first one is that if you build LMS websites with LifterLMS for your, for clients as an agency or as a freelancer, you don’t have to keep buying it again for every client.

So you can use it on unlimited sites for life, which is pretty cool. The other reason people do this is because some people are what I call serial education entrepreneurs. So what that means is they ha- they do a lot of things. I’m thinking of LifterLMS customer Ziv Raviv, who has Balloon Artist Academy, which is a niche thing where he made a ton of money teaching people how to tie animal balloons.

If you wanna learn about that, there’s… We’ve interviewed Ziv on this podcast multiple times. But Ziv has also done other courses and websites with LifterLMS in the marriage and relationships niche and other niches. He also runs an agency where he uses LifterLMS for his clients, so he’s the perfect candidate for a lifetime license.

I believe he has one, actually. The third one is access to all the software that LifterLMS makes. See, LifterLMS is not static. We continue to innovate, we continue to make new add-ons, solve new challenges- and just continually deliver new value to LifterLMS customers. So as an example, in the past year we’ve released several add-ons, including the cart abandonment add-on.

We have Excuse me. The LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on. We did LifterLMS Events. We’ve recently added more stuff to the LifterLMS Groups add-on for automated groups, e-commerce, and so on. We’re currently working on a Name Your Price add-on and there’s many more. So we continue to release new add-ons, and not only do you get all the software in its current state that LifterLMS makes, you get all the updates, and by the way, we launch new software frequently, like new add-ons, and you will get access to those for life without having to pay for them.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

so the continuous innovation of LifterLMS and all the updates and the security enhancements and so on is included, and no longer, if you get a lifetime license, do you have to pay every year on an annual license to retain that privilege to the new updates and new add-ons. And the other great thing that we do, which some people don’t do when they offer a lifetime license, is we offer support as well.

Some people do a lifetime license, but you can’t contact support or whatever. We don’t do that at LifterLMS. We see support as part of the product, and whether you’re using our ticket system, our help desk, and talking to the technical support team at LifterLMS, you get that for life, so you don’t have to maintain an annual license year over year.

So it’s if your platform is gonna be around for at least three years, like if your learning platform is here to stay, it makes sense to at least consider getting a lifetime license, ’cause you’ll actually end up paying less. So you cut your costs, and going forward, LifterLMS, you’ve paid for, you have it for life, you never have to worry about it again.

So why do we run lifetime licenses at LifterLMS? For about eight years or so, we never did. We said we would never do it, but people kept asking for it over and over again, “Hey, do you guys have a lifetime license? Can I get a lifetime license?” So we decided to offer it to meet the need, and honestly, I was a little overwhelmed at the demand for the lifetime license, which is great.

As a software company, in theory it’s actually better to not offer a lifetime license. Your business technically looks better on paper if you have all these subscriptions that are constantly renewing and all this. But at LifterLMS, we take a completely different approach.

We’re not trying to increase the valuation of our company. We have no plans to sell. We just wanna deliver the most value possible to our users, and we see the lifetime license as a great partnership with our users who are the most committed, who are the most successful, and it gives them a way to save a lot of money while, participating in LifterLMS for life.

We’d rather have a lot of people for a long time, and if they’re willing and able and interested in investing in a lifetime license, we really appreciate that. And, it’s just something that we do to meet the need that LifterLMS users ask for. Going back to the subscription fatigue issue, there are a lot of people who just don’t want another subscription that they have to keep paying for year after year, month after month, and we get that.

We’re okay with that because LifterLMS is distributed software. It, you put it on your website. There’s not a huge expense for us to maintain your, your website. That’s on you. So if you want a lifetime license so you can focus your resources and capital on other things, we are there for that.

So when we do these kinds of things, a couple things happen. One is we get people that only get lifetime licenses. They don’t want a subscription, even if it’s annual. And then we also get existing LifterLMS customers who have been around for a long time and have already spent way more value or way more cost on maintaining their annual license, and they’re still going year after year, that they’ve already spent more than the cost of a lifetime license, and it just makes sense to go ahead and invest in a lifetime license while it’s on sale during our discount between June 23 to June 25.

It’s 70% off, and it’s just the time is right. They’ve already spent that much. Their learning platform is here to stay, and they’re ready to go and just commit to a lifetime license. There’s also folks who have just gotten started with LifterLMS. Maybe they’re just on the Earth bundle, which is our e-commerce bundle with Stripe and PayPal and WooCommerce and cart abandonment recovery, and they they wanna upgrade and get some of the more advanced add-ons and other integrations that we have.

But when the lifetime license becomes available and it’s on sale- They just s- cut to the chase and they go straight yeah, I was thinking about upgrading to the Infinity bundle anyways.” I have a lot of faith that my learning platform is here to stay for the long run, so I’m gonna go ahead and invest in my upgrade, and while I’m doing that, I might as well get the lifetime license, ’cause I’m ready to roll.

So that’s cool. And the other thing to mention is, with our support, it’s not just tech support. We do live calls. We invest, like in our office hours mastermind, which is available to Universe Bundle and Infinity Bundle plan-level holders. But when you do it, when you have Lifetime, you get access to that live group call on Zoom for life.

So that’s a great benefit. A lot of people really appreciate the ability to not just interact with the faceless website or whatever. Like LifterLMS, we believe in actually connecting and helping our people as much as we possibly can, including on the office hours mastermind live calls which when you get the Lifetime license, you have access to those for life, which is super helpful.

Some people come to those calls, and they will go to, a couple or three or four and get their initial just getting started questions answered and request live demos and all of this. That’s fine. There’s other folks that come regularly. There’s other folks that come and then maybe they disappear for a while, and then maybe they come back ’cause they have a new project, or they have new questions, or LifterLMS releases a new add-on, like we recently released with LifterLMS Cart Abandonment or LifterLMS Events, and we help them with more questions, so they, re-engage.

So I would encourage you to explore the Lifetime license while it’s on sale at a seventy percent discount. You can find it over at lifterlms.com/lifetime. And keep in mind, LifterLMS does a lot of things. It’s a very flexible, customizable platform, and you may not need every single advanced add-on that we make, but even the ones that you do need, or maybe you’re using sixty percent of them or something, are really valuable to your business, so that’s important.

Another thing we see people do with a Lifetime license is they’re actually working with their accountant. Now, this is not accounting, tax, or legal advice, but I know some people like to record business expenses, like on a certain year. Let’s say they had a lot of growth, and they’re trying to reduce taxes.

So they invest more heavily in things like software or getting a new computer or a new video camera and so on. So LifterLMS can come in handy with the lifetime license in terms of when a education company is looking to invest significantly in their expenses, but not expenses like the tools that they use.

So sometimes it just makes sense from that accounting perspective. So how do you get the lifetime license? All you need to do is go to lifterlms.com/lifetime and go there on the sale dates, which is Tuesday, June 16th through Thursday, June 18th, and if you go there, the LifterLMS lifetime sale will be on sale during that time, and you can get the 70% discount, which is huge.

So go during that time. We do not close the lifetime license after the sale. It’s still up. It’s just going back up to the full retail price, which you’ll see on lifterlms.com/lifetime. So if you come on, for example, Friday, June 19th, the sale will h- will be over. So if you’re listening to this late, I apologize But we do offer this sale only in a limited window, ’cause if we offered it all the time, too much, it’s just too many lifetime licenses.

So it’s a special opportunity if you wanna get the LifterLMS Infinity Bundle lifetime license. If you have any questions at all about the lifetime license or all the add-ons included, or you’re on the fence, or you wanna talk to your business partner, or you have a web professional that’s helping you, we’re here for any questions related to that.

And if you’re an existing LifterLMS customer, all you have to do is reach out to us, and we’re gonna pro-rate the remaining value on your existing license. So what does that mean? That means that, let’s say you just bought the Infinity Bundle and you have, let’s say, $700 of value left on your Infinity Bundle annual subscription.

What we- we’re gonna do is we’re gonna create a custom coupon code for you so that you can get the 70% off, and then we’re gonna subtract an additional $700 off, so you’re gonna get the lifetime license even cheaper. So if you’re an existing LifterLMS customer with an active license, no matter what plan you have we will pro-rate you.

So time is of the essence here because it is only between June 23 and June 25. So if you’re curious about the lifetime license and you wanna get prorated, even if you’re not 100% sure that you’re ready to move forward with it, at least reach out to us, and in the subject line of your email, put the words “LTD upgrade.”

And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go look at your account, see the remaining value on your existing license, and give you a custom coupon code so that you can upgrade to the lifetime license at the 70% discount, plus save an additional whatever the amount of value that is currently left on your existing license.

So that’s it. If your learning plan is here to stay, the lifetime license on a deep discount sale is available for you. Reach out to us. It is between June 23 and June 25 only. It’s great to be with you on the journey. You’ll be joining a special community of our lifetime license holders. There are many of those, and we really appreciate it.

So you’re investing in your business, you’re canceling a subscription, you’re locking in or reducing future expenses, and you’re locking in all the future value that LifterLMS is going to continue to create. LifterLMS has been around for 13 years now. We’re not going anywhere. We’re still founder-led.

That’s me. I’m one of the co-founders of LifterLMS. I’m still exciting. I love what we do here at LifterLMS. I love our team. I love working with the education entrepreneurs and the LMS website pr- building professionals out there that build with LifterLMS, and we’re here for you. I’m lucky to say that my life mission is our company mission, which is to lift up others through education.

So if your learning platform is here to stay, you like saving money in the long term, I would encourage you to check out the LifterLMS lifetime license. The URL is lifterlms.com/lifetime. Go there between Tuesday, June 23 to June 25, and I wanna welcome you to LifterLMS lifetime.

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Get WP Fusion NowRyan Moore, the founder of PressPrimer and a previous leader at Uncanny Owl, discusses evaluation, one of the most important but often disregarded facets of online learning, in this LMScast episode. Ryan contends that whether or whether students really learn, remember, and apply the material being taught is the fundamental test of a successful learning program, despite the fact that many LMS conversations center on course development, marketing, and student registration.

By offering sophisticated assessment tools that concentrate on gauging learning outcomes, student performance, and information retention, Press Primer was developed to assist instructors in going beyond simple quizzes and completion monitoring. Instead of attempting to become another all-in-one LMS platform, Ryan continues, Press Primer adopts a specific approach to evaluation. Specifically, the solution focuses on making WordPress quizzes and assignments better.

It provides sophisticated question banks, thorough reporting, processes for grading assignments, AI-assisted question creation, and performance analytics to aid teachers in determining not only if students passed a test but also the reasons behind their success or failure. Press Primer assists course designers, educational institutions, healthcare organizations, certification providers, and corporate training departments in creating more robust learning experiences that can show quantifiable educational value by focusing solely on assessments. The distinction between true learning and course completion is a prominent subject throughout the conversation. Ryan proposes the idea of spaced repetition, a method of teaching that asks pupils questions that they are likely to forget over time.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. It’s Ryan Moore from Press Primer formerly Uncanny. Ryan is one of those people like me who’s absolutely obsessed with e-learning and WordPress and creating value for free, and helping online educators fulfill their goals and build cool stuff.

Ryan’s the creator of Press Primer. We’re gonna dive into that, but first, welcome to the show, Ryan. Thanks, Chris. It’s great to see you again.Yeah. I’m happy to ner- nerd out with you and get into online education and WordPress and helping the education entrepreneurs out there and the e-learning site builders.

And one of the things I love about e-learning is all the various niches and use cases and different things. It really feels like Press Primer is filling a need in certain use cases and niche scenarios. So let’s just start there. What is Press Primer as a solution? What does it solve for education entrepreneurs and e-learning site builders?

Ryan Moore: Sure. So what I’m trying to do with Press Primer is basically make assessment better in WordPress so that educators can better measure learning and assess student performance. So for now, I’m tackling quizzes first, so multiple choice, true, false, multiple answer, just to make them better, basically. So looking at what LMS plugins are doing and offering a solution for with a more academic focus that really looks at performance evaluation.

So making sure that people are driving learning from a course and able to apply it. And then also taking a look from the assignment side as well, so longer written works, to really measure and evaluate what someone is taking away from a course. So everything in the assessment sphere just making sure that education is better transferred to job performance, general learning, anything else people might be doing with it

Chris Badgett: And you have an educator add-on, school add-on, enterprise add-on.

W- how do you think about these? What are these buckets for?

Ryan Moore: So basically, they represent features that we offer to different groups of users. So individual teachers, m- what they might require in a classroom setting or with small groups. For looking at the school add-on, what larger organizations or more advanced institutions might need in terms of what they offer to students.

And then enterprises, there are things like there are features like compliance tracking, so audit logging, white labeling just extended features maybe AI content detection, plagiarism detection, things that maybe individual instructors don’t need but that larger institutions might. So offering features you might find in enterprise LMS products that aren’t generally available in WordPress right now.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. And how should. If somebody wants to try it out, you have a free version. Can you tell us about the free versus paid, like, how they’re different?

Ryan Moore: Yeah. So there are free versions of both Press Primer Quiz and Press Primer Assignment, so both are available on WordPress.org. Basically, they’re fully functional and offer complete workflow solutions for quizzes and assignments, so everything an individual instructor would need to get started.

On the quiz side, it would be, creating question banks, using AI if you want to generate quiz questions where there’s always human oversight too. Generating quizzes themselves, and then all the settings that you would need to deliver a unified and productive quiz experience, including with reports.

And then on the assignment side, we have a complete assignment grading workflow, so students can upload documents, or they can submit documents or text online, and instructors can grade it right inside the browser. So we’ve got preview tools and a grading interface built right in, and everything’s in the free plugins.

The premium things add additional features like spaced repetition or advanced reports a- anything like that might m- advanced users might need to support the assessment workflow.

Chris Badgett: This is so cool. One of the things that drives me crazy about having a WordPress LMS is, there’s this marketing advice that you should focus on your customer avatar, a very specific- type of user. But in online education or WordPress learning management system, there are so many different characters that show up to this party. Yeah. It could be just the subject matter expert teaching a hobby skill, all the way up to some enterprise compliance thing. And there and it’s just really hard to cover everybody’s use case and be the ultimate Swiss Army tool.

Ryan Moore: Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: So having a tool like Press Primer come in and focus on these advanced use cases is super helpful, and I’m really glad you’re doing that.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. It’s interesting. Like, when I was working or when I was looking at quiz plugins initially, because I’ve done a lot of work with LifterLMS and LearnDash in the past, and LMS plugins, and when I was looking at quiz plugins in general, almost all of them try to do everything right now.

So they’d have, a dozen plus question types. They’d focus on lead generation and integrations, and a lot of it was focused on marketing, but nobody was really looking at purely what educators need. So LMS plugins would offer quiz solutions, but they tended not to go deep into looking at the results, looking at insights, how to track what’s working and what’s not working, how to support students.

So the quiz plugins weren’t really offering those kinds of solutions, and then LMS plugins, it was… It tended to be more surface level because they needed to offer everything to all educators. So beyond just the quizzes, you’d have to look at, the course, courses themselves reporting integration with e-commerce systems.

I’m not looking at any of that. I’m just really focused on the educator quiz experience. So very narrow. Same with the assignment solution. It’s just looking at what do educators need to offer robust assignment solutions to their users?

Chris Badgett: I think this is really smart. And just to be clear, just ’cause there’s so much terminology and lingo in lear- learning management system space, when you say assessment, that’s like a bucket of in which quizzes and assignments fall under.

Yeah.

Ryan Moore: Yeah, it is- Is there

Chris Badgett: any other kind of assessment that-

Ryan Moore: not… I have some ideas about other things in the assessment space to potentially tackle- Yeah … but those are the main ones that people are using to evaluate student performance.

Chris Badgett: One of the things I’ve noticed among the LifterLMS user base is some of the most successful sites that stick around the li- the longest, and potentially aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, are in the compliance space.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And you said there’s a lot of really niche detailed needs in compliance. What are some example things that would, in Press Primer that are relevant to, let’s say, mandatory training for to keep a license as an example?

Ryan Moore: Yeah. So we see, I’d say here and previously for assessment work when I worked at Uncanny Owl there were a lot of companies doing annual recurring training.

We saw a lot from that, and then healthcare was pretty popular too, and is right now for the plugins. So I would say one of the tools that we offer that maybe other quiz platforms, LMS plugins aren’t is tracking potentially progress over time, and h- supporting measurement of how things change year to year so that people can go in and not only make sure that requirements are done, but that they’re done and there’s progress within the company.

So being able to measure some of that. Also on the compliance side, if you’re just looking at w- what do we need to make sure that we stay certified also building things into the plugin that other plugins aren’t. Like tracking if someone changes a quiz question, or makes changes to a quiz settings, or changes behavior, or changes answers.

Tracking all of that to make sure that everything has an audit log, and that, if the organization themselves needed to be reviewed for compliance purposes, then they could point to, “Here’s what changed year to year. Here’s who made the change,” and you can audit all that. So there’s a record that can’t be deleted of any changes to your assessment system

Chris Badgett: I love it.

There’s so many different angles on the LMS space, like the subject matter expert looking to make money online. This is sort of Lifter’s original beachhead market. Yeah. But you’re coming from… And it’s not that we don’t, we have a s- continuing education add-on and all kinds of stuff- yeah

but it’s really hard to serve all of these at once. If you were to d- to profile your ideal one to three use cases what i- what kind of thing is it? What’s a perfect scenario, either in the offline world, like something that’s happening offline that doesn’t really have a solid digital solution- or s- yeah what’s, who is the really perfect fit for this kind of thing? You’ve b- you’ve mentioned schools and enterprise- Yeah … but let’s go more granular. Who specifically within these?

Ryan Moore: It’s hard to say, and the Press Primer products are pretty new too, so I’m trying to stay flexible and agile in responding to what people are saying.

I would say there still is a good audience in the course creator, individual course creator market that Lifter was focusing on because you can prove that the learning is effective and that the courses are working. So people can go through a course and you can say, as a result of going through this course, average performance or test scores went up 23%,” something like that.

Or that by using our space repetition system to prepare for, a real world test that somebody was doing so using it for a test prep, then you could say, “By using, the quizzes on a daily basis, then, performance outcomes were 20% higher than someone who didn’t use this system.”

So I think just having that proof that learning is being delivered and transferred And having the follow-up too, so that you can, improve performance over time before people forget. Having those systems in place helps to improve and show like this course is useful, and people who take this are making more money from it or are performing better.

So being able to quantify some of that is, is good for course creators. So that’s one. And then a lot of what went into it too, was thinking about some of the projects we’d turned down in the past, or that we couldn’t take on at Uncanny for various reasons, usually budget. So thinking about the medical space and what they need there, like how to develop assessments that they could measure what’s working, what’s not working, hone them, deliver better programs.

So some of the enterprise users offering the tools that they really couldn’t get elsewhere or at this price point. So there are definitely a couple of markets that people will use the products differently, and I tried to tailor it to those. And then too, the tiers help to refine that a bit.

Here’s what we expect larger enterprises to use. Here’s what we expect schools or, smaller organizations to use, that kind of thing.

Chris Badgett: Just so I learn from you and the audience too, you went over it quickly, but I wanna make sure I capture it. What is the theory of spaced repetition?

Ryan Moore: So yeah, the idea there is basically that somebody takes a quiz, we’re capturing their results, and we’re looking at, okay, what topic areas did they do perform well in?

Where did they struggle? And then they come in on a repeating basis. So every day they come in, and then the system is basically looking at where did they perform well, where did they have issues, and it’s showing them questions again or topic areas that they’re most likely to forget when, like, when they need that information.

So somebody goes into the system every day for two weeks. Ev- each day they see questions that the system knows they’re most likely to struggle with, and tests them on those, and gives them feedback to try to help them learn and retain it more. So basically you go to the same page or something every day and you see a different set of questions that are designed to help you retain information from the larger question pool on a topic area.[00:13:00]

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You mentioned medical, and I… This is something I’m fascinated with, ’cause I know that some of our stickiest, bi- biggest spending users are in the medical niche. And when I look at it, there’s all these different niches within medical. Like- … I, we’re actually working on some content for 10 different medical sub-niches from- Yeah

medi- medical device sales rep training, nursing continuing education, hospital employee onboarding, telehealth provider training, mental health practitioner certification. It goes on and on. And that’s just, even in medical alone, there’s all these different use cases. And, what’s the primary goal?

I’m starting to see where Press Primer fits in because, for the… I’m just being super stereotypical here, but for a course creator, they wanna make money online. So they care about- Yeah … “i want to have a full-time income or do really well teaching what I know and all that.” Yeah. So their main goal is making money.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

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Chris Badgett: They still wanna help people, I’m not saying they don’t. But a school doesn’t necessarily care at all about making money through the LMS. Yeah. It’s all about the assessments and the learning, which is where Press Primer comes in with some tools. Yeah. And then there’s these companies, whether it’s a hospital or medical- It’s, they’re not concerned with money.

They are concerned with learning, but it’s more like compliance and data. So it’s just interesting, all these different- Yeah … what is the primary objective?

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Some of the tools that I’ve gotten in there too are designed specifically with medical in mind, and also safety programs. I- Absolutely … I’ve seen a lot of those where their question sets, their question banks are extremely valuable.

That’s what people are paying for. So how do they make the question banks better? How do they know if they’re working? The one report that I started on early was a question analysis one, where it’s evaluating each question and once there’s enough there, there are enough attempts to get, meaningful data out of it, then you can look at are distractors too easy?

Do we need to revisit feedback? Are the people who’ve demonstrated knowledge in this topic selecting the correct answer? Having all these metrics about are these distractors working? Is this question effective? Helps them improve the questions and data bank and program overall.

So not only can students perform better, but they have a better set of data that they can kind of market to people and use and see better results from.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s really cool. I’m envisioning a different val- asset. The course, the traditional make money online course creator, the asset is revenue.

A school, the asset is the student’s brain. Like it needs to- Yeah … we’re building the future generation here.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And in the business, the asset is… I never thought about the quality and effectiveness of the question bank as the asset. But that makes a lot of sense.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Like For a lot of customers we had, for sure that’s what they’re protecting, that’s what they’re trying to build out, and always measuring.

Do we have the best question bank to do our students perform better on these tests than, they do from competitors’ programs?

Chris Badgett: I have a side bigger picture question for you- … which is the e-learning industry is really interesting because it’s so fragmented and all over the place, and in some ways there’s all this cutting edge stuff like what you’re building, but then there’s also some old school antiquated systems that don’t get updated or whatever.

So this, it’s this interesting mix of old stuff, slow to change, versus innovative, hyper niche, progressive, making things digital. What’s your view on Like I’m a WordPress first person, so I’m like-

Ryan Moore: Yeah …

Chris Badgett: i, that’s my bias. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just my bias.

And then, I’ll get somebody who’s exploring Lifter or WordPress as an option, but they’re deep in the SCORM world and they- … they’re not WordPress native.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And there’s so much e-learning and SCORM and the authoring tools. I’m trying to come up with a specific question, but it’s basically like-

Ryan Moore: Yeah, I can s- I can talk to it though.

Yeah …

Chris Badgett: speak to this SCORM versus WordPress or an e-learning authoring tools versus building content, and quizzes as a specific example or assessments directly in WordPress versus third party tools. Who’s it for? Who’s it not for? How do we help with the friction between somebody who wants to transition to WordPress?

Ryan Moore: Okay. That’s big. Let me start with different pieces of it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Ryan Moore: So when I was thinking about Press Primer, so last year when I was starting to, get the ideas together, I didn’t really even look at what was in WordPress because I had an idea of what people were doing with quizzes, but they weren’t offering these advanced capabilities.

So when I was looking at what I wanted to do, it was more focusing on best-in-class products outside of WordPress. And e-learning too I feel like so much innovation was happening in WordPress from, 2012 to tw- to 2020 kind of thing, where all these plugins were coming out and offering new tools and then they got really big markets, and they’re pretty mature, and there was maybe less innovation that was happening.

So I wanted to look outside of WordPress just to see what other people were doing in the space to cap- capture some of those best ideas and bring them into WordPress to offer something that was a bit different. So that was part of it, just here’s what’s happening in WordPress, and then outside of that space, looking at that and where there’s innovation happening.

In terms of the different systems, yeah, so I got started really in corporate e-learning 25 years ago, and it was really using authoring tools, using dedicated LMS. And then bridging those has always been a challenge, and there wasn’t a lot of overlap where w- when I was at Uncanny, we built some tools that would help people in the corporate space port their authored courses into WordPress, but it was always awkward and felt like it was disconnected and not really a native part of the experience.

It was just targeted at a different audience and platform. So melding those two has always been tricky, and then I think some of that corporate audience has stayed away from WordPress. One of the biggest benefits, of course, is the flexibility and just being able to do what you want and bring in different pieces and combine things.

So like I, I think we’ll still see more there, where things are being brought together and combined, and it’s so much easier to integrate things than it used to be. There’s complexity, and there’s so many tools that discovery is a problem, but integrating what you’re using with, something that gives you the flexibility to add whatever you want is pretty powerful for WordPress too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What about that idea of, … i’m always struggling when I talk to somebody who’s using … you can fit SCORM content into a WordPress LMS, and there’s ways to do that. And a lot of times what people have is a huge back catalog that they have no interest in redoing.

They just wanna keep using that. Yeah. But they’re interested in moving forward with some of the benefits of native content creation in WordPress. Any tips with that? What would you say to an organization who’s “WordPress looks interesting to me with all this customizability, and I’m warming up to the idea of a learning management system can also be a content management system or e-learning- content creation system, but I’m like, I’m straddling two worlds here.” What would you say to them?

Ryan Moore: I’d say take time to explore it. The nice thing too with WordPress is that everything is so low cost either free or very inexpensive. So if you can invest the time just to try things out, build a proof of concept, experiment, do those things, then maybe you can properly assess.

I know it’s tricky to find that time, but just putting that in, trying things out, can provide a better picture of what’s possible and maybe how it can grow in future. I just say it’s worth exploring. And Chris too, there is a question. I don’t know if you wanna deal with the comments, but maybe we could tackle that one.

Oh, sure.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: L- let me bring that up. So the question is at what point does a creator outgrow a plugin-based learning management system and need something custom-built? What are the signs in your community when WordPress stops being enough?

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, so you go ahead. I’ll ha- I have some comments too, but you go ahead.

Ryan Moore: Sure. I’d say, ’cause we dealt a lot with this, and it ties back into the previous question about just different systems. Because when we saw this happening the most with WordPress was when we started bringing in outside authored courses, and we started having to capture SCORM and xAPI data.

So really high volume sites with hundreds of simultaneous users that are generating, maybe 50,000 statements per day around learning. And then WordPress can have trouble scaling and handling that kind of load. Even in good hosting environments where it’s load balanced and everything else, unless plugins and everything th- is extremely optimized, you’re still gonna run into some bottlenecks.

So I’d say the limitations there are very high that we experienced, but there were situations where, if there are a couple thousand people on the site at the same time doing SCORM courses and tracking all that data, and you’re running reports on millions of records, then, WordPress can potentially be inefficient.

But it’s such a high threshold In terms of what I experienced, that it’s not the individual course creators, it’s not the mid-sized companies. It’s really big ones that m- maybe need to assess something that’s really optimized for the use case, that, has the budget, and they can look at every line of code and build something that’s really unique to their situation.

So I’d say for 99% of the users that we’d had in the past, WordPress has the room to grow, and is the right solution, and offers the flexibility and the right pricing. But there are some enterprise users where that’s when you start looking at something custom. And I don’t know how that compares to your experience.

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Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’d say that’s… Yeah, WordPress, I lo- I love it, but it’s not the solution for everything. The cool thing that I’ve seen, I’m sure you have, too, over a decade plus, is that WordPress hosting has evolved a lot and gotten a lot better, and there’s, different options, from a low budget host to some for a real serious business with lots of performance optimization and whatnot.

At Lifter, I actually really love it when somebody shows up with some scaled out situation “Hey, we have 75,000 courses and we have this problem.”

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Or, “We did a product launch,” and, like- You know, 20,000 people had to take this quiz at the same time, and w- and then we see oh, there’s a issue there.

Sometimes we can solve it- … like in the code of the LMS, but sometimes we can’t, ’cause it’s a hosting limitation- Yeah … and resource allocation thing.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So can WordPress scale? Absolutely. Yeah. Is e-learning more challenging to scale? Absolutely, because it’s not just a static site with… It’s very different from a high traffic news site that may get- a million visits a day, but they’re just serving cash page views. Yeah.

Ryan Moore: It’s

Chris Badgett: totally different.

Ryan Moore: Yeah, and a- once you get to a certain point too, we did a lot with custom caching solutions. Like, where are we hitting the bottlenecks? Doing that analysis and then building a way, like maybe the data that populates reports, only the core data, the metrics only get processed, overnight.

And then maybe you’re looking at records that are a day old for the, largest reports. Again, very atypical solutions, but if there are solutions even if you get really big, where you can implement changes to support whatever the needs are,

Chris Badgett: let’s do a a term thing since we’re doing a lot of education here on terms.

I, when I first discovered the concept of a learning record store- Yeah … like a LRS, or this idea that like some situations have multiple LMSs reporting into one learning record store. Yeah. So there’s these hybrid solutions where, let’s say you have a WordPress LMS site here, you have like a SAS LMS over here.

You have an in-person training thing that’s scanning ID cards or something, and it’s feeding data in.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So it can get like super complex.

Ryan Moore: Yeah, and that’s something we had to do. This is outside of the w- the Press Primer space. But-

Chris Badgett: Yeah …

Ryan Moore: yeah, in the past, if we were storing a lot of records, then some of those records might be passed off to a different system where reporting was run from.

Again, just to offload the WordPress site itself. Which you can do, and then centralize learning records, and it’s like a single point that’s the authority too, which can be helpful if you’re collecting learning information from different sources.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I would also just add that WordPress and tools like LifterLMS and PressPrimer are often creating a ton of value in micro niche scenarios- that don’t necessarily have huge volumes of users. So for example like you mentioned compliance stuff, medical stuff, it could just be one company with an internal training si- pharmaceutical sales company, and they’re training their sales team, and it’s super valuable to them. And they need this they need to make sure the learning is awesome, and they’re using the qu- the question bank optimization and all this, but it’s not like an LMS for millions.

It’s like this niche thing, or this one- Yeah … hospital has this thing, or this one company has this thing, or this one franchise network has this thing that only the business owners look at. There’s just so many niches.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. There are. There are.

Chris Badgett: I always like to remind myself that the internet was literally invented for education.

It’s really education, communication, and defense. That’s why the internet was invented, and it started as a academic thing. It’s just, we’re just continuing on that path, and things are just getting more advanced and more niche.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Do you at PressPrimer do agency work, or strictly product focused?

Ryan Moore: Right now we’re offering a bit. Again it’s new products, a relatively new company. We just started in December of last year, and the first plugin just came out in January. So it’s still at a point where I want to have the experience of working with customers. We did something similar with Uncanny Owl first.

We released the first plugin there in 2015, and we were still doing a lot of consulting work, and using the consulting work and talking to customers to inform the products we were building, just to make them more useful and seeing the use cases. So there is an element of that I just wanna do now, just to have the relationships and conversations with heavy users to figure out, how can we do this better?

How are students using it? Just again to make sure that we’re collecting the feedback and offering things that are of value. So I know some of the things that we might be building are unique to an organization, but there are still lessons and value we can get out of that apply to the wider [00:32:00] market.

So yeah, limited consulting at this time i- in terms of the agency work, but mostly focused in, on what we can offer to the public.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And you mentioned AI detection. AI is a hot topic these days. It comes up on most podcast episodes. Tell us about AI detection and how it works and any other AI features or plans you have, ’cause it’s an interesting time right now with how does AI affect learning?

So it’s just interesting. There’s a lot of change and disruption happening.

Ryan Moore: Yeah, for sure. So in both of the plugin suites there are AI-based tools to help educators produce things, grade things more efficiently and effectively. So on the quiz side, we can help with things like distractor generation, quiz question generation from really large input data sets.

So I- I’ve seen some other examples in the learning space where, instructors are putting in a paragraph or two and then asking it to generate a quiz, which is not helpful. It’s not getting the full context. Whereas, we’re offering a tool where people can upload entire textbooks or chapters or, visual aids, whatever, and it’s gonna generate relevant questions based on that.

And again everything goes through the instructor, so it’s just you can go in, make tweaks, reject any questions that don’t fit. And then it’s based on, question category or topic category, difficulty, things like that. So there is that element on the quiz side. We can do more on the assignment side in terms of if people are submitting text-based assignments, looking at things like basic proofreading in different languages, and again, just offering suggestions to the reviewer so that they can save a bit of time not populating feedback, or integrating with third-party plagiarism and AI content detection systems so like Winston or GPTZero, just so we can pass assignments through, and it can provide feedback on what it thinks.

And so it’s not gonna tell a student, “Here’s… you cheated,” or, “You copied this person,” or, “This came from Wikipedia,” whatever. It’s just gonna say, “Here’s what we found. You do with this information what you want.” And things like rubric based grading for assignments. So basically for the AI, you can define, here’s how we want to assess the assignment based on these categories, within those categories.

Here are performance levels. Here’s what they look like. And then the AI can use all that feedback and context to suggest feedback about the grade and just about the assignment quality to the instructor so that they can just use that as an input to the grading process. So not replacing what they’re doing, but just offering different inputs that are informed and have the context so that the instructor has another source of feedback they can look at if they want to use it

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s very cool.

And I can tell you’ve done your research. Like you said, you went outside of WordPress and you saw what was going on in other assessment and LMS spaces, ’cause it’s a vast universe out there, and I love that you’re staying super focused on assessments.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause

Chris Badgett: that’s the challenge. If you try to do it all, the, all of these areas are, like, a million miles deep, and that deep dive on assessments is really cool.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: One more AI question since you’re into AI and been in the e-learning space forever like me. One of… One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is, and this may not really apply to the assessment space, but I’d love your take on it, is- we’re like getting Lifter in a place where AI agents, as an example, can consume courses.

Like, where somebody would send an agent to take the course instead of the human take the course, similar to how we might use ChatGPT today to like, “Hey, can you summarize this article and give me the little bit?” Or take this course and then add it to your as a resource in your, in the agent file as part of your training or whatever.

Like, how do we, … This idea of there’s gonna be m- demographics are expanding. It’s not just humans that will consume e-learning. In fact, it’s probably already happening. Just I think I heard the other day that more than 50% of the traffic on the internet is bots, it’s not humans.

So how’s it … What’s coming for education? And obviously, humans need to learn and grow, but what’s your take on agents or AI as student?

Ryan Moore: Yeah. I think it … there’s the risk, too, with cheating and students using the AI to do things for them and just get the certificate, whatever.

We’re trying to incorporate some of that consideration into Press Primer, so things like offering proctoring tools. So I know you can’t eliminate it, but just like forcing people to complete a quiz in a full-screen mode and timing it so that they don’t really have time to ask questions.

Limiting what’s output in the HTML to make sure there’s no clues given away. Pulling from the course material, making sure that it’s unique and it’s, somebody potentially can’t view the course material as they’re taking the quiz or something. I think, too, you have to look at how involved is the instructor.

Is there any face-to-face or in-person kind of discussion assessment? The longer evaluation, just with the assignment side of things, so that it’s not just multiple choice questions that an AI could potentially answer. But looking at making sure that people understand the information enough to apply it and synthesize new information.

So incorporating some of that into the assignment side where someone has to do the reflection and write something, based on the course that an AI couldn’t do, and then adding some detection in around that. So I think pushing it so that students are forced to do a bit more can help prevent some of the AI intervention.

People should still use it to learn, if it helps their learning process, then they can use that. But for the evaluation, like just, you can put tools in place that kind of reduce the incentive and also the opportunity to use AI tools

Chris Badgett: I love that. And just a feature request, ’cause I haven’t been able to solve it, but maybe you’re the guy is, and I say this a little bit in jest, ’cause there’s only so much you can do from a compliance and proctoring thing remotely.

But I’ve gotten requests for, like, how do I set up LifterLMS for eye tracking to make sure somebody’s not cheating. Yeah. That sounds like- Yeah … i’m like, dude, I’m still, we’re not there yet, but I don’t know. Yeah. This whole compliance proctoring thing is another example of a niche thing of we care very strongly about not cheating.

And it’s a very specific kind of thing, and then there’s accessibility concerns and all kinds of stuff that it’s just fascinating.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. It’s, it helped too, my wife’s been doing some undergrad courses lately just for personal education. She enjoys learning. So as part of that, like, when I was building out the spaced repetition feature- how can she leverage it for her own learning? And then, too, she had to take an exam with that was proctored. So just looking at what schools are doing right now so she could walk me through it, like, how they had her move the, her computer around, what had to happen on her phone, and then thinking about how can we potentially offer some of those tools in a more automated or easy way in WordPress.

So I think we can push proctoring more, and that might be helpful. I don’t know. There are lots of opportunities there.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s cool. We have some questions. Let’s run through these. Yeah. So this person’s building a custom LMS for a client in the math education space to compete with, it sounds other math education products.

How would you leverage AI to differentiate from what’s already out there? And one thing is you’re saying you can use AI to reduce cheating and increase actual learning, but what else?

Ryan Moore: So I wanna be careful. AI normally for educators and the way we’re building it out and looking at it is that it extends what they can do and augments their capabilities and what they know in the space and their expertise.

So I wouldn’t necessarily lean on it too much to say that you’re delivering a better product because you’re using AI. I’d say you’re just trying to incorporate it so that it enhances what you’re already offering. Maybe you’re using it to, ingest more material and offer feedback or students, as students are going through things so that you can offer additional supportive tools.

But I wouldn’t say AI is necessarily a selling point. It could even be a distraction. But just looking at tools in general that can support better performance and learning in the course.

Chris Badgett: And a follow-up question we have here is how can AI actually improve learning for the students so they don’t just mark stuff as completed and move on?

And I think I’ve tie- I’ll go first and just say I think this sort of ties into what you just said-

Ryan Moore: Yeah …

Chris Badgett: about using AI to augment, not to replace. Like some of the ways to make sure students actually learn and don’t just hit the mark complete button, there’s several. I’ll just give some LifterLMS examples.

One, we have an advanced videos add-on which requires the whole video to be played before they can move on. You can inject an assessment that has a minimum passing grade requirement before somebody can move on. You can do micro quizzing just to reinforce the content of the lesson to make sure they got the key knowledge checks or whatever you call it.

These are… This has nothing to do with AI, it’s just like- yeah … if you’re focusing on learning, these are tools the instructor has to help make sure it happens.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: And what was the thing we discussed earlier? What was it called? The spaced repetition. That’s another example, this is a Press Primer thing, that helps make sure that the learning happens.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. And it’s something we used to struggle with. It’s not necessarily an AI question. People are always gonna look at how they can skip ahead. A long time ago when people were authoring SCORM courses, and we were too, then there’d be shortcuts, like hotkeys that they could press to skip slides.

Like just taking some of those tools away so that someone has to ingest the content themselves. There’s… They’re forced to, or ideally they’re incentivized to. Like they get rewarded for going through it or spending more time on things. But yeah, there are interventions you can put in to reduce people’s dependency on AI and just how much they wanna use it both before the course, like during it and after, having follow-ups and just some of the larger assessment pieces so that, if they did find a way to move forward quickly and just mark things as complete, then they would hit a wall.

If they’re talking to the instructor or they’re submitting something that requires them to demonstrate mastery of the topic that they can’t do it unless they’ve gone through the course and spent the time actually learning things like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. And just a quick plug for LifterLMS, we do have a lesson time feature in development right now, so if you have minimum lesson time, this is just another way to try to help ensure students stay for the amount of time that’s required.

You mentioned and this question involves somebody sort of gaming a system and just clicking a mark complete button. On the note of the mark complete button, can you explain how Press Primer integrates with LifterLMS, LearnDash, and others in terms of the mark complete button the WordPress LMS has?

Ryan Moore: Yeah. So the integrations we’ve built so far for the plugins are basically around controlling course progress so that someone can’t move forward unless they’ve had a positive outcome for a quiz or assignment. So basically you’re mapping a quiz or assignment to a LifterLMS lesson, and in order for someone to complete it, then they have to earn a passing score, either through automatic grading or through with the assignment, an instructor actually looking at it and giving them feedback.

So yeah that’s how we integrate and control progress based on assessment performance.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. That is Ryan Moore from Press Primer. We’re gonna have to do this again ’cause there’s so much we could continue to talk about.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But that’s at pressprimer.com. And do you have a recommendation on where somebody should start or how sh- they should choose which plan is right for them?

Yes. And also, if they have questions before they make an investment what should they do?

Ryan Moore: Yeah, I’d say definitely start with the free plugins. So they’re both on wordpress.org, so Press Primer Quiz, Press Primer Assignment. See what they offer out of the box, and then once you have an understanding of their capabilities, then you can check out the website at pressprimer.com to better understand what the features are, how we allocate them to different tiers, and maybe what would add value to your specific course.

It’s hard to jump in and just tackle everything, so the free plugins are a good gateway just to get onboarded. That’s awesome. Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show. You out there listening or watching, head on over to pressprimer.com, check it out. Also check out the free version on WordPress.

Chris Badgett: And there’s two, there’s the Press Primer Quiz and Press Primer Assignment. Thanks for coming on. We’ll definitely have to do this again sometime, Ryan.

Ryan Moore: Sure. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me on.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get WP Fusion NowChris Badgett and Emily Middleton from WPCourseGuide examine the quickly changing effects of artificial intelligence on online learning, course design, WordPress, entrepreneurship, and the nature of employment in this episode of LMScast. They talk about how AI is enabling creators to develop courses, produce content, build software prototypes, and automate complex tasks more quickly than ever before. Chris provides real-world examples of utilizing AI to produce comprehensive product specifications and functional software prototypes in a matter of minutes, while Emily discusses how course designers may utilize AI tools to develop course structures, lesson content, and learning materials.

They stress that while AI makes it easier to create, it also increases the bar for quality, making knowledge, originality, and well-considered user experiences more crucial than before.

Key points from the discussion include:

AI is speeding up software development and course design, enabling developers to transform concepts into functional products far more quickly than with conventional techniques.
The threshold for quality is rising, so merely producing material is no longer sufficient. Delivering original ideas, improved learning opportunities, and superior instructional material must be the main priorities of successful course designers.
AI helps entrepreneurs, educators, and company owners boost areas in which they may lack experience, acting as a potent helper rather than a total replacement for humans.
Because students still need human connection, individualized instruction, accountability, and mentorship all of which technology cannot offer coaching and community are still very important.
With AI technologies improving website development, content management, and commercial operations rather than displacing these ecosystems, WordPress and open-source platforms are well-positioned for the AI era.
Self-directed learning is becoming more and more crucial as people who constantly acquire new skills, explore, and adapt will be better equipped for possibilities in the future.
With AI offering immediate access to knowledge and human educators increasingly concentrating on deeper learning, critical thinking, mentoring, and practical application, traditional education paradigms are under increasing strain.
AI-related fear and anxiety are understandable, yet history demonstrates that technology advancements can bring forth both disruption and new opportunities.
As mundane jobs are automated, human abilities like creativity, leadership, empathy, communication, and relationship-building become even more vital.
Both speakers urged audiences to embrace innovation while remaining connected to real-world experiences, communities, personal connections, and well-being, emphasizing the need of striking a balance between technology and humans. The episode’s main takeaway is that AI is radically altering how individuals start companies, design educational opportunities, and pick up new skills. But those that mix the effectiveness and power of AI with genuine human skill, creativity, mentoring, and community-building will be the ones who prosper.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideHere’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. She’s back on the show, it’s Emily Middleton, and today is gonna be a little bit of a different episode. We’re gonna dive into some trends, some changes that are happening in society that affect online education, website building, how we work as humans with technology, and we’re just gonna dive into some various issues from artificial intelligence to the changing landscape of education, what we’re seeing from our different perspectives.

We’re gonna discuss WordPress. We’re gonna discuss how the economy and economic pressure is affecting things like course creation, building websites, and so on. We’re gonna dive into the interplay of company… Or sorry community coaching and courses, and how that’s changing. But first, welcome back on the show, Emily Middleton, and that’s from wpcourseguide.com.

Welcome, Emily.

Emily Middleton: Thank you, Chris. I’m excited to be here. And you said we’re gonna jump into talking about AI, is that right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah let’s start there.

Emily Middleton: Okay.

Chris Badgett: What are you doing with it today? The thing is that blows my mind is that AI just moves so fast. In fact, I love… ‘Cause I’m a technologist, so are you. I like opening Twitter, or X, in the morning, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, Claude does this now. Claude does this now, Claude does this now.” And there’s this master class of somebody of, like, how to do X with AI, or ChatGPT’s doing this now and it’s just increasing exponentially.

But what’s your experience with AI recently? What excites you? What’s going on? How are you using it?

Emily Middleton: Yeah. I, okay, so I do a lot of vibe coding stuff when I’m putting together prototypes, and you use VS Code now, and I was like, I never thought in my life that Chris would open up VS Code and be, like, building prototype products.

You were like, “I’m never gonna learn any CSS,” and now you can build products, especially prototypes, without it. And so prototyping things that we’re trying to do in WordPress is really awesome. I’ve been releasing some videos on my YouTube channel a bit more lately about how to use AI. For example when creating courses in Lifter, which a lot of the listeners are probably doing, you can consult a bot like Claude now and say “Hey Claude, here’s an export of my LifterLMS course.”

It’s a sample course that LifterLMS imported so that Claude can get a feel for the JSON structure. And then you can talk to Claude and it can build you a course to say “Hey, this is the example course that I want you to learn the structure of how LifterLMS technically works, and I want you to interview me and build a course in the same format that I can then import.”

So there are some things to speed up the course creation process like that, but then it also raises the bar for what a good course looks like. Because I can create a course really quickly with AI, so can everyone else, and so what really makes a course good, I think, will be pushed. It’s I don’t think you’ll have to put less effort into making courses.

I think if you do put less effort into making courses, you’ll have more competition ’cause more people will also be doing it because it’s easier. But then you as a course creator, at least me as a course creator, I spend more time quality assurance. I spend more time picking certain images, creating images, working on the artistic user experience side of things.

So that’s primarily how I’m using AI and helping my clients in their business using AI.

Chris Badgett: That’s a really interesting point. It reminds me of YouTube. So like when I was a kid, I remember, I remember my parents’ generation had first of all no TV, then it was radio, then they had TV with one or two or three channels.

And then there was cable. And fast-forward, now we have YouTube and everybody has a TV station, and which one is the most popular? It’s MrBeast, who does these giant million-dollar productions, right? So just because now you’re more empowered the bar goes up in terms of quality. So it’s just an interesting thing to look at.

And I heard this idea that one of the cool thing about AI for meetings, like as a in a company, whether you’re building websites and you’ve got like project managers, developers, designers, or you’re building an education company and you have all these ideas and all these things you wanna do, is it instead of showing up to a meeting with some words for the agenda, you can actually show up with a functioning prototype.

And what that like really accelerates things. And I, when I got that idea I was writing a spec for a new product for LifterLMS called Name Your Price, which is where people can, the end user can select a price. Maybe there’s a minimum, maybe there’s a maximum, maybe there’s a suggested price.

And there’s all these like details with this kind of pricing add-on for Lifter. But AI helped me come up with a spec, fill in the gaps of the things I wasn’t looking at, analyze a similar product that w- is in the WooCommerce ecosystem, and at the end of creating this awesome spec, I was like, “Hey, can you just build that for me as an installable plugin?”

30 seconds later, I had it and I put it on a site and it worked, and that just blew, blew my mind. When it comes to an organization, like in LifterLMS as an example, we all wear a lot of hats, and course creators do, too. Let me try to do this quickly, and then I’m gonna pass it back to you, Emily.

So in a software company, there’s seven hats, right? There’s product, there’s engineering, there’s marketing, there’s sales, there’s operations, there’s customer success, there’s design, and then there’s like the CEO role. That’s actually eight hats. I’m decent… a lot of entrepreneurs can wear multiple hats.

I can do all of that to a base level, and some things I’m better at than others, but engineering I could never do. But now I can with AI. Now you can. That doesn’t mean that I want to s- become the lead developer of Lifter. No, I want real developers classically trained to understand everything, like how code works-

and AI has to be managed. But it’s like a huge unlock. So for course creators, we look at the five hats, which is being a subject matter expert, being a teacher, being a technologist, being a community builder, and being an entrepreneur. And wherever you’re weak, just like I’m saying I’m weak on engineering, I can augment myself with AI, and that’s really fascinating to me.

A- even, like- Yeah … where I’m strong, like I can get stronger. If I have a subject matter expertise, I- I’m good, but I can actually f- get… fill in gaps with AI. Yeah. Or if I’m a decent entrepreneur and I’m good at marketing but not great at sales, AI can help me with sales. Or if I’m good at marketing but I don’t really…

I’m not really good at business structure stuff like accounting or should I do a L- LLC or an S corp or whatever, AI can be my little sidekick legal advisor. Just help me figure that stuff out. It’s amazing. But ta- talk to me about multiple hats and how you think about using AI for yourself and with clients and whatnot.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. I, the five hats framework that you came up with is really good. I think things like community building are gonna be really hard to replace, and AI doesn’t really get humans the way that humans get humans. I think it calls for a further development of what art means. How when… I it’s a scary time because things are changing quickly.

There’s a lot of socioeconomic tension on people in a lot of levels But it’s similar to times when cameras were invented, and then portraiture artists were out of business. They were like, “These cameras are just gonna do our job for us. They’re not- They’re gonna capture reality better than we can.”

Abstract art then took off. And then when it came to personal cell phones, all the photographers who existed and had professions in photography their profession diminished a bit. And because everyone can take photos on their cell phone, and it’s a little more rare that someone would hire a professional photographer, but they’re still needed in the ecosystem.

And so I think more people will be building things with AI. There will be more opportunities for mistakes, and so those technical engineers, I don’t think they’re gonna get replaced. I just think there may be more specialization coming to that field to where those experts are gonna be studying things at a higher level rather than a lower level.

Rather than how do we build things, it’s how do we think about building things? Because we can think in ways that AI can’t. That’s how I see it, and people like you and me are product people. We can come up with interesting ideas, solve problems in interesting ways. Now we can talk to the AI and get a technical solution for us in just a matter of minutes.

In a matter of hours we could have a product that’s actually working really well. But if we really want to make that product solid and ship it, we need the, that support from the engineers. But I think it’s creating new categories such as product, and more specialization in categories such as engineering.

What do you think?

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Yeah. That’s very well said. I’m personally an optimist. I do have concerns with AI and the Terminator and everything, but- … for the most part I see it as an accelerator and a amplifier than a like something that’s just gonna replace me. It- or team members.

I just wanna see people using it to do more faster, cooler, better. Yeah … if you look at intelligence as a technology, like artificial intelligence, it’s just another tool. In the same way that WordPress allowed non-technical people like me to build a website, AI is just another layer of abstraction to allow somebody to do something that they previously couldn’t do or do to a level that they can do now.

One interesting thing I know you’ve experienced with your work with LifterLMS I can just have a thought as an entrepreneur and then immediately send a PhD-level intelligence out to do it. And whereas before I- dude, I’m an entrepreneur. I have ideas all the time. But I can’t act on them ’cause I’m limited by capacity.

But with AI, I’m not limited So for example you and I both know there’s this question that comes up with LifterLMS “Hey, I’m not sure what is free and what is paid.” It’s a friction point because there’s only so much information you can put on a pricing page or on product sales pages and product descriptions and whatnot.

But we have an AI agent at LifterLMS named Maurice, and I was like, just in a, as a passing thought on the weekend, I’m like, I’m using WhisperFlow to talk to Maurice so I can get a lot of information across quickly. I’m like– And Maurice is tied into all our code bases and everything, and I’m like, “Hey, Maurice, sometimes we get this particular person who’s like really wants like a super detailed, like spreadsheet report of what is free, what is paid, not just like which products, but like features, like everything.”

I’m like, “Can you create like a co- like look at all the code bases, look at every line of code that makes LifterLMS across the free plugin and the 25 add-ons, and build me a report. By the way, here’s our brand guideline, here’s the Figma files that we use to design our website so this thing can look awesome and really professional.”

So when somebody comes back to us with that question, frustrated ’cause they can’t quite figure it out from our pricing page and our add-ons pages I came back like 15 minutes later and saw the most beautiful 15-page report that was like beautifully designed, and it just blew my mind. Like that’s amazing.

Like you, you and I have dealt with that issue at Lifter. Yeah, I remember at one point you had a, I think it was like a saved reply in Help Scout or something that was like, “Hey, this is what’s free and paid,” and there’s all these bullets and these lists. Like we’re trying to help people. But now I got like the ultimate answer that’s dude, this is the compromise, comprehensive 10-page report organized by category, and it was made in six minutes.

This is, it’s mind-blowing.

Emily Middleton: Literally. And I love that, and it’s a little bit scary because some people were paid, and the time they spent was g- in generating those reports, right? And now it can generate that 10-page report, something can take someone 30 hours now takes an AI 10 minutes. And so like you said, getting people using AI and learning like how the skills that we have contribute to how we think about things versus just what we think about.

I like the quality of information I think is gonna have to go up across the board for courses, for us as software creators. Like LifterLMS is releasing like a lot of add-ons. I have no clue if Brian is a coding god or if both coding god and AI are a part of the picture. But it creates a software product that can develop faster, online learning that can develop faster, and it gives more power to the hands of those who are those independent creators or doing something on WordPress.

So I’m super optimistic. People say all the time, I- “You’re still building websites with WordPress? There’s AI now.” But people said there’s “You’re still building websites with WordPress? React is faster.” They’ve been saying this kind of thing for a long time, and I think AI is just gonna accelerate the space that WordPress already occupies.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 100%. And WordPress can move slow because it’s like this open source community project with this core and it is harder to steer a like established thing than it is for like a scrappy startup. And because WordPress already powers, 40% of the internet or whatever, like it’s not a scrappy startup anymore.

Even though it is free open source thing, it’s like it’s… It can be slower, particularly with all the community aspects of it and like collaboration. But at the end of the day, I am… I’ve never been more optimistic about it-

Emily Middleton: Yeah …

Chris Badgett: because of the open nor- open source nature of it, which means like AI tools can just like immediately extend it and ingest it.

So whereas like a closed software company, they may have an API-

…

Chris Badgett: But they don’t… Their entire code isn’t visible. They may use AI internally inside the company. But when you have this ecosystem of creators, like LifterLMS, or WooCommerce, or Pay Memberships Pro, and Barn2 plugins, and PapaMaker, and WP Fusion, all these like creative entrepreneurs who are all not working at the same company, like innovating faster on top of WordPress, it’s super interesting.

And WordPress I believe 7.0 just dropped, which has the AI connector stuff built in. Like it’s getting there. Yeah. And I’ve built like a, I’ve vibe coded a landing page for whatever project I’m working on, like a sales page. But the first thing I do is let me convert that to a structure of WordPress blocks and whatnot that I can, suck into my WordPress site, ’cause I’m not trying to have a static site.

I get it. There’s a place for those kinds of things, but WordPress isn’t going away. It’s like that whole… It feels really familiar to that idea that as a marketer I’ve heard forever, which is like, “Oh, X is dead. Email is dead.” No, email is not dead. Email is alive and well. Are open rates lower?

Emily Middleton: Sure,

Chris Badgett: yeah, everybody’s overwhelmed. Email is not dead.

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Blogging, is it dead? No, people use articles all the time. By the way, most of what the AI is trained on are, is blog articles.

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Do you- Is Facebook dead? No, Facebook isn’t dead. Yeah, like older people use it in general, but it’s not dead.

It’s not-

Emily Middleton: Do you think anything is gonna go away? Do you think anything is gonna is there a- any kind of online product right now or thing people do that you think is going to diminish significantly or go away?

Chris Badgett: I’m sure it will. Like creative destruction is a part of the process.

I forget the name of the documentary, but there’s an awesome movie about how life is basically death. For example, I forget the s- the science, but did you know your skin is brand new every year? Interesting. Most of what your skin does is die.

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then you get a new one, right?

So there’s this … Yes, things will be disrupted, but it will create new opportunities that we can’t even imagine yet. But if you wanna get ahead of it, the best advice I could give is be a creator more than a consumer. Use AI even if you don’t know what you’re doing. I am writing … I’m in VS Code now, and I never thought I would do that.

Luckily, my business partner has helped me figure out how to just use the basics of a IDE or terminal with Cloud Code, with our custom agent. I’m really fortunate to be more on the cutting edge of what’s happening. But this is why you need people. I need smart engineers who are, like, way in the fut- they’re, like, on the bleeding edge of AI.

What Jack Arturo has done with AutoMem is part of our AI agents. It’s mind-blowing, and it’s so cool, but these are all humans that are leveraging technology. It reminds me of, … with, there will be a ton of d- disruption, so when we talk about economic pressures, sometimes things have to die, but new things will be reborn.

And the key is to be on the path- Yeah … of you don’t have to have it all figured out, but just be working towards where the puck is going. And-

Emily Middleton: Yeah …

Chris Badgett: be, like, play around, just experiment. Try. Try and fail, try and succeed. If you succeed, do more of that.

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and having a content management system like WordPress and all the cool software that exists in the ecosystem of entrepreneurs and agencies like yourself that support businesses and people that have projects, it’s like, this isn’t going away.

It’s actually getting even more exciting. And by the way- Yeah … let’s figure out how to do all this without exploding, because everybody I know that’s using these tools are not working less. They’re actually working more ’cause they’re so excited.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, that, that is a really interesting point. I- they’re working more because they’re excited.

I feel at the same time the terror that I’m not gonna have something to provide for myself. If I don’t have this job, if I don’t have this position, if I don’t have this skill set that the industry needs from me, then I’m gonna have to change my career, and that might just be too hard.

I have that fear of change going on inside me, but I also am embracing things and I have enthusiasm. I’m building products in a new way. But it’s forcing me as a person to change faster, get comfortable with risk faster, try out more things faster, and so there’s an adjustment there. What do you think about that?

This

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reminds me of the internet. I’m old enough where I remember the pre-internet world.

And the whole reason, like- some of the success that I’ve had is because in the early days of the internet, just like we’re in the early days of AI right now, I really leaned in and figured out this internet marketing thing, this how a non-engineer can build a website thing, how to be a content creator on YouTube and write blogs that the whole world can see, not just a billboard or something I put in my local paper.

Be early is key and and don’t be afraid. There’s, I was listening to the Moonshots podcast recently with Peter Diamandis and some other folks, and there was a conversation around how in this rapid AI and technology change period we’re in, there’s an immune system response when somebody feels like their career is threatened, which I totally get, which is what you’re talking about.

Yeah. And I, and I feel it, dude. I feel it also. There will be a day when an AI will be a better small company CEO than me. I need to come to terms with that and not just reject it and put my head in the sand, right? And by the way, there’s probably a future in which the human is still needed to collaborate with the AI.

In fact, we’re probably already there. As a CEO, I use AI a lot. It’s not replacing me, it’s making me better. But how do we avoid that immune system response? So if we look at education as an example, what’s the first thing that happened when ChatGPT came out in education? I have friends that are teachers, their very first concern is, “Okay, these kids are not doing the work.

AI, ChatGPT is doing the homework.” And then that we can tell “Hey, this 17-page essay was not written by Billy. This was written by OpenAI,” right? Yeah. And now so Billy is cheating, but what is, Billy is actually doing is actually cool, like experimenting with AI. In the same way that students got graphics calculators or they got laptops or iPads came in the classroom or whatever, so we gotta adapt and, but I totally feel it. If we look at education specifically if you wanna learn something AI is putting a lot of pressure on traditional education in terms of learning something. So what does that… If I was a teacher, I would feel very threatened, like my job is at risk.

But what do you do about that? Like- I think the I think the AI teacher, I what it does is it changes roles. So if an AI- like, if a teacher is gonna use AI to help build curriculum, cool. If the AI’s gonna help grade papers, cool. If the AI is gonna provide more personalized tutoring, that’s awesome.

It’s what… It’s the whole point is, like, how do we do education and scale better? That’s the whole point of the modern education system, and you have this technology that’s helping, but it’s disrupting people. What if the AI has better content than the t- human teacher because it’s more relevant, it’s more plugged in, it has a PhD, genius IQ, whatever.

It’s totally disruptive, but that doesn’t mean that teachers like human students won’t be in a human classroom, and the teacher, they need an adult to facilitate a learning process. It’s just changing, and, like, how do we- … bring technology in a classroom? In my day, as a young man or a young boy the teacher would literally wheel in, and you probably remember this too, like a TV on, like a rack with wheels, and we’d watch a documentary about cane toads in Australia or whatever in biology class.

So that TV and that video, that piece of content was, like, a piece of technology, and it actually- Yeah … enriched the classroom, and the teacher’s still there but educ- Yeah … let’s nerd out on education. And there’s so many different types of education, but what are your thoughts?

Emily Middleton: I have been a firm believer in spiral learning since I heard Julie Dirksen talk about it on your podcast and read her book.

Spiral learning, for those who don’t know, is the process of learning where you learn the basics of something, you learn the intermediate of something, and then you learn the advanced of something. Sometimes when we’re learning, we get a deep dive on one specific component of a learning process. So for example, if we’re talking about a course on cooking, we don’t need to know about every single type of pan, like before we start our cooking process.

Maybe we just need to learn something basic about how to make a rice dish. It doesn’t necessarily matter what kind of pan you use, whether the heat’s too high, too low. We’ll talk about that later. You just need to get access to a pan for step one. But then maybe we could come back around. You’ve made your first couple dishes.

Now it’s time for step two, and we wanna talk about the quality of the pan, whether it’s steel, cast iron, or coated with something that’s hopefully not a PFOA different types of pans. And then we’ll go even more advanced and say what pans should we aspire to have depending on what kinds of food we’re cooking.

We learn about things as we go in deeper and deeper levels, and I think AI will inspire definitely the first level of learning. When you get access to information for the first time, you hear about a subject for the first time. AI can give you really good overviews that we used to rely on humans- we used to rely on industry experts to get an overview on accounting.

We can talk to the AI and have an overview on accounting, and then when we talk to an actual accountant, we take an actual accounting course, what we’re gonna be diving into a little bit deeper with that subject matter expert is that next level, the intermediate level. Why would we consider this? Why would we consider that?

What are the things a real person encounters in the job that an AI wouldn’t think to tell you? That’s how I see it impacting education. So most websites I see will be using AI at least to create their basic content or even have a little AI chatbot talking to people about their subject matter, and then you can take that real human-made content for that deeper learning.

What do you think about that?

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. It’s like a dance. Humans have been in a dance with technology and machines for a long time. Just like we dance with cars, like we dance with computers, like we dance with the internet, the AI is just… we’ve basically already become cyborgs.

There’s this whole idea that Neuralink, once we get the internet in our brain we finally become cyborgs. In my opinion, as soon as we got laptops and iPhones and our smartphones in our hands, we’re already cyborgs. We’re already connected to the technology. Yeah. So it’s already here.

In terms of the education, s- if we look at it through the LifterLMS lens or the online education lens, there’s this concept of courses, coaching, and community. And one of the, one of the things I’m thinking a lot about is- The course aspect of a learning management system is rapidly influenced by AI in terms of creating content or creating course outlines and things like that, worksheets, quiz questions, curriculum basically.

What- and that’s true, that’s can also be true for the in-person classroom as well. But what is not going to AI is the coaching and the community.

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yes, we can have an AI tutor, which I 100% am a fan of, ’cause one of the problems with the traditional education system is that humans are not robots. In a cross-section of 30 students in a class, there’s all kinds of personality types, learning styles, learning disabilities, levels of motivation, all kinds of things.

So having personalized AI tutoring is great, but there will always be a place for human coaching and community connection ’cause nobody is like, “Hey, seriously, I wanna be in the Matrix. Just pl- put me in a bathtub and plug something into my brain, and I never wanna talk to another human again.” That’s not really the human experience.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Coming in, in 2028, your brain in a bathtub. You have that opportunity. I love that. You, so you mentioned community. And that, there’s so much more to the human experience, like you said than just this mental work that we do. There’s physical touch. We hug people, we talk to people, we get a sense…

h- human body warmth is fundamentally important to us. You know how you, you have this background in, in human studies and how there’s a sense of community. It doesn’t just cr- created through the people we’re even talking to. In-person meetups, they feel so great. I’ve been in a course program- Yeah

for three years, and I’ve just met the people who do that course program in person in Texas a few months ago, and they’re actually a LifterLMS customer, and I, It just was so different

Chris Badgett: to see those people. It’s pretty cool to pierce the veil, right? To pierce the veil- Yeah … of the internet. Just going to a WordCamp or going to a, an event that you always did online.

It’s it’s amazing.

Emily Middleton: Yeah, there’s so much more to that human experience. Giving hugs, sharing meals, discussing things. What information gets retained in our mind is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. So like oftentimes I need a certain person to tell me something, someone I view as an authority or someone I trust rather than just having the information told to me.

So if the AI tells me a bulk of information about a subject, but then someone in person who’s a professional in that career tells me that thing, I’ll take it a little bit more seriously. And so there’s that aspect too of what information do we retain and that comes a lot from community and coaching rather than just the stuff that we watch.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s super interesting time and, in many ways I think we have to lead because as entrepreneurs we’re, we have a n- like apparently, I read somewhere 3% of the population has the entrepreneur personality type, whatever that means. But what entrepreneurs are good at is risk, chaos, creating value, making sense out of nothing organizing things.

This is, th- these skills are becoming more and more value, valuable. So for example let’s say the truck driving industry, the most popular job in America is a truck driver. There’s a lot of them. If and when self-driving long haul trucking is completely taken over by autonomous driving without humans, that’s gonna disrupt a huge part of the population, right?

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And th- this is what I’m talking about. First level there’s that immune system response. Let’s form a union as teachers or truck drivers or business owners or accountants or lawyers to not let AI take our jobs. That’s level one, the immune system response. But then there’s the way technology works is like it will break through.

It always does. The internet became… It just did what it did, and there’s no turning it off. And people like it because there’s demand for it, right? And it created so many n- new opportunities. True. And then there’s this concept of unschooling or self-directed learning.

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I think the folks that have already been doing that in a way need to help others just through leading by example.

For example, you built a career in web, in learning management systems, in building sites for clients, in customer success. You figured it all out on your own, not by yourself. You were in programs. You’ve got mentors. You showed up every day. You studied things on YouTube. You just did trial and error, saw what worked, what didn’t work, optimized.

I, I don’t have a academic background in business or engineering, but here I am the CEO of a business with- … a software business and I can’t write a line of code. Why is that? Like how did that happen? And it’s that self-directed learning, entrepreneurship, surround yourself with other humans that can support and you can align based on common vision and goals, and create value together and be on the journey together so you’re not just isolated and alone.

And I think we just need to keep doing that through the AI era.

Emily Middleton: I completely agree. Completely agree. I, I think about how the working for, like you said, the internet changed a lot and it has a lasting impact. For example, the work at home experience is now a thing. E- you know, the work at home experience, it didn’t used to be a thing. There are some people who prefer working in person and going to work every day, working at an office in person.

There are some people who prefer working at home and not going to the office. And so probably at the end of all this, like you said, with the internet and the wave that it created, AI will create a wave, and at the end of that wave things will go up and down, but we’ll probably be better off overall than we were before, right?

That’s how I see it.

Chris Badgett: I think so, but it t- it also takes a serious… Like when all the, with all these economic challenges and economic pressures and you gotta provide, you gotta add value, and now this AI thing is competing for market share of the value that humans can create. It’s it’s a challenge, but if what it feels like is like, “Oh my God, I’m too late,” but you’re not.

I thought I was late to WordPress in 20 13 when Lifter launched.

I wasn’t. I was solidly working from home starting in 2010, and then it was a decade later with the pandemic situation where oh, here comes everybody to work from home, right? And many returned to the office and so on, but many like stayed working remotely or moved forward with a hybrid approach, and the world was just a lot more accepting of remote work or working online or conducting meetings on Zoom instead of spending all this money to get on planes and hotels and all this stuff.

It forced people to upgrade. But it took that event to cause, to force people to upgrade. Yeah. And I think we just need to have an open mind and explore and cross-train and get outside of your lane. What I mean by get outside of your lane is- I try to do stuff all the time that I don’t know how to do.

But that’s never been easier nor more fun with AI to help support me, yeah. ‘Cause I’m not bugging somebody to “Hey, can you show me how to do this thing?” Or whatever. I had the opposite problem. I’m like, “Oh my God, I coulda had my AI agent working for 12 hours on this thing, but I don’t even know what to tell it to do.

I’m too productive.” Yes. I have too much productivity. It’s a weird, it’s a really weird thing to think about. But I do have concerns about … not everybody has the same personality type and thrives in chaos and everything, and I do see a a really challenging time ahead, particularly with like the cost of college education, for example.

I’m a parent with teen- teenage kids right now, and I’m looking at the cost of a college education and I’m like, man, that is serious,

But then there’s… I heard a statistic, I don’t know if it’s true or whatever, but that there are… Right now there’s more unemployed college graduates than high school graduates.

I don’t know if that’s a true thing or not, but it’s that kind of stuff that makes me like, “Wait, hold on a second. Let’s… Maybe the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed, and we need to figure out different ways to learn, like through actual internships or self-directed learning or pop-up educational entrepre- education opportunities through courses, coaches, and communities or mastermind groups.”

There’s lots of different ways to learn. And so it’s exciting- Yeah … too, but it’s also scary as hell, particularly for people that are just not as used to living in this kind of chaos that entrepreneurs just, for whatever reason, innately do.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Reexamining who we are as entrepreneurs and going back to our roots, people who are willing to step out and take risks and try new things.

That’s… Yeah. I think that’ll be a really awesome experience. We’re those people who would put together a boat and see if we could sail across the ocean and inevitably die in the ocean. But we’re the curious humans who wanna push things and see. I like AI also as a forcing function.

For our society, we need to generate things like power in a cleaner and efficient way, and that issue’s being pressed as a part of AI taking up so much power. And there’s a lot of risks that didn’t go well in the past, like nuclear power plants. There were some really bad accidents that happened, and there’s much more safety and governance that needs to go into that kind of thing.

But the- there’s no cleaner generation of power that we have yet, and that’s the kind of thing that’ll support us in our AI journey and quantum computing. I know everyone’s talking about quantum computing as if it’s the thing that’s gonna come next, but it was crazy. AI came out, and it just has been taking the whole world by storm.

Yeah I think that there’s definitely value to giving AI credit for having been a part of your process as well. A lot of people try to take credit for the things that AI makes, and so if you say that your stuff is made in support of AI or it’s very clear that it is, I also make sure to endorse that because there will become a real distinct feel and value to creating something that’s human versus creating something that’s human plus AI or mostly AI.

And so- Just think about that. It makes it easier for- Yeah … yeah.

Chris Badgett: I think about that kinda like organic food.

Like organic food is healthier, more nutrient dense, and lacks poisons in other food, right? And I’m not making this the exact analogy, but I feel like organic art, organic music, organic writing, organic videos, like with zero influence of AI, will always be important.

Yeah. But it’s al- it’s also okay to augment those things with AI, right?

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But to take credit, there is like a plagiarism thing there, and to you can lose your humanity by pretending that whatever you create with AI was 100% done by you. And I think that’s disingenuous in the same way that, it’s kinda like pretending you’re at a organic restaurant and, a lot of the food that’s being served on your table is actually full of pesticides and glyphosate, hormones and chemicals or whatever, and you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t actually organic food,” but you said organic like on the menu or on the name of the restaurant or whatever.

Yeah … so like that raw, organic thing is cool. I, that’s a pro-tip I just wanna put out there is like- I’ve always felt that one of the things that keeps me going in technology and entrepreneurship with all the stress, all the chaos, all the ups and downs, the good times, the bad times, is my connection to nature and also fitness.

If I didn’t have this grounded human experience th- without technology, like this organic experience that keeps me grounded, I would go insane. Sure. And I’ve seen a lot of people burn out or not necessarily go insane, but just have a challenge because they- you lose your humanity.

And having parts of what you do that just remain organic or disconnect or unplug has never been more important to to do that.

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So like- Yeah … n- don’t lose your humanity in all of this opportunity is what I’m saying. ‘Cause if- it’s like just chasing money for money’s sake and f- and losing sight of your values and humanity and all the non-monetary values of life, you can get really lost.

And unfortunately, I think a lot of people are gonna get really lost in this technology revolution because they’re losing touch with their organic human side. So keep that even if it’s… It doesn’t always have to be, like, perfect, like you live on a island and there’s no te- there’s no t- electricity or whatever.

It’s just don’t lose your humanity in the process.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good point. And if you don’t have any more questions, we could end on that point. I think that’s a really good point. Don’t lose your humanity in the process. Watch your immune system, and take advantage and try to leverage the things about you that make you unique as both a person and an entrepreneur.

Chris Badgett: I’ll end it there, and I’ll just say I’m a fan of the barbell strategy. This is from Nicholas Nassim Taleb, which basically means the barbell strategy is put the extremes in your s- in your strategy and forget about the middle. And I’ve never felt more strongly that the barbell strategy is more relevant than what we’re experiencing now with technology.

So what that means is if you’re in the middle, you’re fighting AI. You’re also really digging into your current ways of thinking, and mindsets, and everything and productivity, and all the news, and it’s all just crazy, right? But what’s on the end is go be an extreme human.

Get offline, touch grass, hug people, hold hands walk in the woods, put your toes in the sand and in the ocean. And on the other end, be like Chris, who n- who never thought he would code before and start coding apps and stuff with AI, right? Like, why not? Do the extremes. The middle is danger zone.

So w- if you’re having an immune system response with disruption, I would encourage to, you to push out both directions. Be more human, and be more leaning into technology and innovation for good with ethics. So that’s it for this LMScast episode. Emily, thank you for coming on.

In the spirit of being more human, if you want an awesome human on your team, I would encourage you to reach out to Emily at wpcourseguide.com. ‘Cause for one, you’re an awesome human. Two, you’re awesome with technology. You’re on the b- you’re on both sides of the barbell, and you’re delivering that to the people that you work with, which is amazing.

Thank you. So go check out Emily at WP Course Guide. Any final words or any other ways people can connect with you?

Emily Middleton: No. That’s the best thing, wpcourseguide.com.

Chris Badgett: All right. Thank you for coming back on the show. And Emily and I have worked together for a long time. It’s great to be with you on the journey.

Reach out to her. She’s a great resource if you’re looking to connect, and we hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get WP Fusion NowChris Badgett argues in this LMScast episode why LMS and CRM should be handled as a single, integrated system rather than as distinct tools by any professional online learning company. He highlights that whereas CRM technologies handle marketing, automation, and customer connections, platforms like LifterLMS handle the learning process. WP Fusion, which serves as the connection layer that synchronizes student activity with marketing platforms and enables sophisticated automation across WordPress-based educational websites, is the missing component between them.

He explains how WP Fusion unifies important WordPress plugins and features into a single solution. Supported platforms mentioned in this LMScast episode are below.

LMS Platform

LifterLMS

Form Builders

Gravity Forms
WPForms
Fluent Forms
Ninja Forms
Formidable Forms E-Commerce Platform

WooCommerce

CRM & Marketing Platforms

ActiveCampaign
HubSpot
FluentCRM
GoHighLevel
Salesforce
Mailchimp
Kit (ConvertKit) Course developers may automate tagging, segmentation, and customer journeys based on actual student activities, such as enrollments, lesson progress, quiz completions, and payments, thanks to this broad interoperability. Chris also emphasizes how these linkages produce actual business results. After a student enrolls in a free course, for instance, they may immediately start a nurturing sequence; after they finish the course, they may get certification emails or upsell efforts. He highly advises creating a free course lead magnet as a growth engine and maintaining a straightforward CRM structure that relies on tags and custom fields for segmentation while utilizing a few core lists (prospects, free users, and customers).

He adds that strong eCommerce automations like cart abandonment recovery, refund-based tagging, and lifetime value tracking are made possible by integrating WP Fusion with WooCommerce. In general, the episode presents WordPress as a more adaptable substitute for all-in-one platforms such as Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, or Podia because LifterLMS, WooCommerce, form plugins, and WP Fusion combine to create a fully customizable, scalable, and automation-rich ecosystem for expanding online education businesses.

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Episode Transcript:Chris Badgett You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris, and today I’m doing a solo episode about how every LMS website needs a CRM and a bridge that connects them, and that bridge is WP Fusion. If you’re building an LMS website, every single one I’ve ever built, I would recommend to every single LifterLMS user to also install WP Fusion for seamless connection to over 60 plus CRMs.

Now, let me unpack this a little bit. There’s a lot of terminology here. So LMS stands for Learning Management System. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. But a CRM also includes the basics of just having an email list that you can send broadcast emails to, and doing advanced marketing automation And there’s other things you can do in CRMs as well in terms of having sales pipelines and other fancy lead scoring and contact records and all of this.

But at the fundamental level, the most important thing is that a learning management system is where students or learners take action and they do things. The CRM is where the business decides what to say and how to automate parts of their business process. The sad truth is that many learning management system owners don’t even connect the CRM or marketing automation to the LMS.

So what ends up happening is they have two separate systems that aren’t even talking to each other. They may do something where they’re doing some marketing and a lead comes in through a form from the CRM, and then they promote the course, and then somebody goes to the LMS website and buys the course.

But these two systems aren’t linked together. That’s where WP Fusion comes in. And WP Fusion doesn’t just work with learning management systems, it works with WordPress in general, it works with contact form plugins in WordPress, it works in WooCommerce and many other systems in WordPress. So if I could only install five plugins on a website a learning website LifterLMS would of course be in there, but so would WP Fusion to connect To make the connection and the automations, which we’re gonna talk about in a little bit, totally possible. And by the way, I personally am a very heavy user of WP Fusion myself, both for e-commerce and learning management system work, so we’re gonna dive into all of that. But essentially, the most important thing about WP Fusion and connecting your LMS to your CRM is that you can personalize and segment and do behavior-based actions and create automations.

I was looking into some 2024 data, and currently almost 35,000 sites rely on WP Fusion to connect their WordPress sites to their CRM. And WP Fusion also supports 60-plus CRMs. So some of the most popular ones are ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Salesforce Zoho. There’s Kit and MailChimp as an example as well.

So there’s all kinds of… And many more. So there’s literally… If there’s a quality CRM out there WP Fusion integrates with it. So first I wanna talk about LifterLMS and WP Fusion So first of all the, team at WP Fusion is amazing. There’s Jack, the founder, and Steve, and many others, and they just do amazing work.

So first, I just wanna give props to some great people. And me personally, I like to do business with people that I know and trust, and the folks at WP Fusion, 100%, I like them, and also I very much trust them, and they’re also super smart. So just to give you a little story LifterLMS natively in our add-on bundles has a ConvertKit, now called Kit, and a MailChimp integration add-on where, which are plugins that you add that do some of the things that WP Fusion does for just MailChimp and Kit.

And it was back in around 2016 or so where we were getting ready to add another add-on for ActiveCampaign, which is actually the CRM marketing automation platform that I still use today. And I actually did a crowdfunding campaign to raise $10,000 to fund the development of an ActiveCampaign integration, and we raised a bunch of money.

We didn’t quite meet our goal in the way that Kickstarter works is, and the way we did the crowdfunding is if we don’t hit our goal, we don’t get the money. So we almost got there, but we didn’t get the money. But still we’re weighing on this decision, should we focus on building a bunch of add-on plugins for Lifter because every LMS website needs a CRM.

We knew that 12 years ago, and it’s still true. But what that does is that distracts us from developing the core learning management system and focusing on all these CRM connectors. And that’s when we met Jack from WP Fusion, and Jack literally built the ActiveCampaign integration with Lifter, but n- not, through just ActiveCampaign, but adding LifterLMS to his, at the time, new w- newer WP Fusion platform.

And then it w- it could automatically connect to ActiveCampaign, which was what we were trying to do along with many other platforms. So it was in that moment when we decided, hey, we’re not gonna chase all the 60-plus CRMs that people are using. For example, some larger, more enterprise corporate clients will use a fancy CRM called Salesforce.

You may have heard of it. It’s very enterprise. It’s expensive. It’s, but it’s like the standard CRM for big companies. And then there are certain people that use other platforms like Zoho or ActiveCampaign or many, others. There’s Keap. Lately, there’s a platform called GoHighLevel that’s gaining in popularity.

And instead of us having to chase all of those integrations, WPFusion just made it possible, so then we could focus on just developing Lifter. So anyways, that’s it for story time. What you can do with LifterLMS and WPFusion is pretty remarkable. So the most basic way to think about it is when a student enrolls in a course or membership powered by LifterLMS they jump in and then they start, for example, in a course start on lesson one.

But what WPFusion does in the, background is a student enrolls in the course, it takes that student, remember WPFusion is the bridge to the CRM, it goes to the CRM, and in the CRM it creates what’s known as a contact record. So what that means is the person’s name and email address is added as a contact.

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But not only that, the CRM knows which course or membership on the Lifter site that person came in from. Certain tags can be applied that allow for segmentation in the CRM or the marketing automation. But the most simple way to think about this and the core value is similar to how you really shouldn’t host your own website videos in WordPress we use and recommend platforms like Vimeo Pro for hosting the video.

When it comes to broadcast email and doing really fancy marketing automation that’s often better done by a separate CRM system. So WP Fusion is the bridge. Now, there’s a nuance to that, which I’m gonna talk about, which there has been a lot of innovation in the space, and WordPress-hosted CRMs, like FluentCRM, that live in your WordPress site are really powerful and cool too.

By the way, WP Fusion helps you integrate with that, with FluentCRM as well. And the other really neat thing is some people are more LMS-focused, and some people are more CRM, marketing, automation, business-focused. It’s actually a two-way sync. So what that means is you can do it in WP Fusion, where if somebody in the CRM, let’s say ActiveCampaign, gets a certain tag, that can then…

It can go the other way. It can create the user on the WordPress site and enroll the user in a specific course based on the tag that was applied in the CRM, which is super powerful. And these kind of tagging situations can happen when a course is begun, when it’s completed, when a lesson is completed, a quiz is attempted or passed, a membership is joined or canceled.

A specific access plan in LifterLMS is purchased can fire a specific flow in WP Fusion. It also ties into LifterLMS tracks, vouchers, and groups. So there’s really so much you can do, and you can get really advanced. But what I’m saying, if you’re kinda new to this concept, the first thing you need to do is go get WP Fusion, put it on your site, connect it to your CRM, and then your WordPress and LifterLMS install, and then do the contact syncing and the segmentation by just applying tags based on what the what the user enrolled in, whether that’s a specific course or membership or a specific access plan and if you’re new to setting up a CRM, I’m just gonna give you a couple of tips that I’ve learned over the years.

I like to have minimal numbers of email lists. I actually recommend three at most, and then everything else you can do with tags and something called custom fields, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, which WP Fusion also helps you with. But the way to th- think about lists and tags differently is that you may have…

I like to build three email lists. The first email list is the prospects list. The second one is the free user list, and the third list is the customer list. So you really only need three email lists. You don’t need a separate email list for every course. For example, if you had 500 courses on your website, you don’t need 500 email lists.

What you need is three email lists and one tag per course so that you, if you wanted to just send an email to people in a certain course, you just send it to all the customers that have that course’s tag. It’s a little nuanced if you’re new to it, but the difference between tags and custom fields is a, user can have multiple tags, or a contact record in a CRM can have multiple tags.

But a user, when there’s fields, can only have one option in the field. So an example of that would be like a level. Like you could have a bronze, silver, gold version of the membership, and you can only be at one at a time, and those are custom fields and not tags, as an example. That’s a whole rabbit hole to go down to learn the difference between tags and custom fields, but I’m just going over that with you to discuss the nuance of tags, lists, and custom fields.

And remember, WP Fusion allows you to create all this automation. LifterLMS, as an example, has… Over the past decade, we’ve had around 120,000 people join our email list. WP Fusion has been involved with every one of those interactions, as an example. The other thing to think about with using LifterLMS with WP Fusion, if you go to the LifterLMS Academy site and you enroll in the LifterLMS quick start course- That is a free course.

So when somebody enrolls in that course, they basically end up on our free user list if they’re not already on a customer list, and then they get tagged as having come in through that course. And then what we can do is we can build marketing automations, which is a series of nurture emails that don’t go out all at once, but are spaced out to nurture that student enrolling in the free course.

So if you’re looking for something to do, a project to do with WP Fusion and LifterLMS, this is my number one tip for you, which is to create what I call a free course lead magnet. So for us, the LifterLMS Quick Start course is that. It’s had about 50,000 people enroll in it over the past 10 years.

We’ve rebuilt the course several times to keep it current, and all of those people enrolling are getting passed to our CRM for nurture through email automation via WP Fusion. So that’s how to think about LifterLMS connecting to a CRM through WP Fusion. The other big elephant in the room is e-commerce.

So in WordPress, the largest e-commerce platform is WooCommerce. Now, LifterLMS integrates with WooCommerce. So if you’ve been listening to this and you’re thinking, “Hey, that all sounds great, but I don’t use LifterLMS’s payment system, I use WooCommerce integrated with Lifter,” which we have a Lifter add-on for that hey, it still works.

You can get the best of both worlds. You can use WPFusion to work with LifterLMS components like course enrollments or course completed, but you can also integrate it with WooCommerce as well for the e-commerce stuff. Tags can be applied and removed, and people can be unsubscribed and subscribed based on refund status or new orders and so on.

There’s so much that you can do. So LifterLMS itself when we first started, we actually used Infusionsoft for our marketing automation CRM. And about 10 years ago, we switched to a company called ActiveCampaign, which is where we still are today. That’s our CRM. And the LifterLMS software is actually s- sold through a WooCommerce store.

So we use WPFusion with WooCommerce. Anytime anybody buys anything from LifterLMS it’s creating, it’s adding context to our ActiveCampaign through WPFusion. It’s triggering automation nurture sequences based on what somebody is buying. It’s checking to make sure somebody doesn’t already exist, so we don’t send too many emails and all of that stuff.

So we’re- we deeply use WPFusion with WooCommerce as well. And once you get super big, like you get a lot of traffic, you have lots of orders every day and everything, a lot of the management of all that is fully automated using WooCommerce, WordPress, and WPFusion. Another cool thing you can do with WPFusion and WooCommerce is cart abandonment.

Now, LifterLMS has a cart abandonment recovery system that does what it does But you can also do another cart abandonment campaign using WP Fusion as well. And then the cool thing is WP Fusion also has even more advanced e-commerce integrations where, for example, with ActiveCampaign, it can push ActiveCampaign data or WooCommerce- advanced WooCommerce data to ActiveCampaign and vice versa.

Things like lifetime value, deal stage and whatnot to the CRM. So it’s the same thing like with LifterLMS, with WooCommerce. You can– WordPress, things can happen in– with WooCommerce checkout, and tags get applied over in the CRM, but it can also talk back the other way and create things to happen in the WooCommerce store based on what’s happening in the CRM.

This episode of LMScast is brought to you by WP Fusion, the powerful WordPress software that connects your website to your CRM and marketing automation platform, whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, and many, many more. If you’re selling online courses, memberships, coaching, digital products, and more, WP Fusion turns your WordPress website into a smarter, more personalized, and more automated online business.

Speaker: So it’s super powerful The next one is probably even easier to understand and more basic than LifterLMS or the WooCommerce integration with WP Fusion, and that’s using WP Fusion with form plugins. So these are form plugins like Gravity Forms, WPForms, Formidable, Ninja Forms, Fluent Forms, and so on. So the simple way to think about that is when you get somebody to sign up for your email list on your WordPress website, they need to come in through a form.

Now these CRM platforms like ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, HubSpot, and so on, they do have form builders where you can kinda create a form on the CRM and you take this embed code and you stick it on your site. But often they don’t look very good. They look like a different design ’cause they came from somewhere else.

They’re not aware of the site you’re putting them on. You can do that, but what most people do is they will use a WordPress form plugin and then basically get the, sign-up, the name and email address through the form plugin, like Gravity Forms, and then via WP Fusion, pass that, that data and create that contact and deliver the lead magnet, or deliver the newsletter, or sign them up for whatever list in whatever CRM they’re using, passed over by WP Fusion.

So we do this all the time at LifterLMS. So on our site, we have a lot of Gravity Forms, and whenever somebody completes a certain form, it could be something like a automated webinar, that Gravity Form will capture the name and email, and then it’ll pass that data to the in our case, ActiveCampaign to deliver whatever needs to happen behind the scenes by email or just segment the contact with certain tags or custom fields and so on.

So this is the power of automation. If you’re new to using form plugins, this is the first thing I would do with WP Fusion, is to create a newsletter sign-up form, make it easy to f- to find on your site. And once you learn the basics of that, you’ll be ready for more advanced marketing automation that you can do.

But the, form, like a newsletter sign-up or a lead magnet form, like to get a e-book or a PDF or a worksheet or something like that, is a great place to learn the basics of using WordPress, WP Fusion, a form plugin, and whatever of the 60 CRMs you are using. And just a pro tip for you out there if you’re beginning- there’s some great CRMs that come with a free plan.

So for example, MailChimp has a free plan and many others have a entry-level thing. WPFusion also has a lite version that you can get for free, which you’ll need the pro version to do stuff with LifterLMS. But if you wanna just kick the tires and learn the basics of syncing users on a WordPress site to your CRM you could check out WPFusion Lite.

So- In terms of the CRM landscape, C-CRM is one of the most cluttered, crowded markets there is. There’s so many CRMs out there, it can be mind-blowing. So if you’re trying to choose, I’m gonna tell you what’s the most popular today from what I’m seeing. So the, biggest ones right now are FluentCRM, which is a different one.

That one is hosted inside WordPress itself. And there’s still a lot of great reasons why to use WP Fusion to keep them connected, even though they can exist on the same site, or maybe you have the FluentCRM on a different site, and there’s all kinds of reasons to still use WP Fusion. ActiveCampaign is still popular.

It is in decline. I’m an ActiveCampaign user, have been a long time. Their pricing is getting a little out of control, but it is still popular and it does what it does well. HighLevel is growing fast. It’s more kinda popular among the marketing crowd, the scrappy entrepreneur crowd.

HubSpot is kinda mid-market very popular as well. Infusionsoft, later rebranded as Keap with a slightly different offering, has been in com- decline for a while, but there’s, many more. There’s, Drip, there’s Zoho CRM, there’s Brevo, Mailchimp, Kit, Klaviyo, Ontraport, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Customer.io.

There’s Groundhogg, another WordPress native CRM, Mautic, AWeber, Bento, and many more. The most important thing you need to think about when choosing your CRM is to pick one that you can live with for five-plus years. Like I said, I’ve been with ActiveCampaign for almost 10 years, I think, and it would be very hard for me to move because I have so many automations and so many things built in there.

So it’s choose wisely ’cause you’re probably gonna be there for a while, and it’s kinda painful to move later. However, WP Fusion actually makes it easy if you do wanna switch CRMs and stuff. It’s not as challenging or as hard as you might think. And particularly today, with the help of artificial intelligence and the AI tools, these kind of migrations have gotten much, much easier the next thing I wanna talk about is what are the real automation unlocks that you can get when you add WP Fusion to connect your learning management system website to your CRM or email marketing, automation platform?

The first thing is you can do personalized learning paths. So based on all the things that happen in an LMS that can trigger a tag or sends, send a behavioral note to your CRM you can customize. So if somebody fails a quiz as an example, and you want a coach to be notified via your CRM to engage with the student and recover them before they get lost, that’s an example of a personalized learning path.

The other big automation thing is really just for sales. So- There’s this saying that your– somebody has to touch your marketing like seven times before they buy from you. So they visit your website, and then maybe they come back later and they join your newsletter, and now WP Fusion captures that lead and sends it over to your CRM, and then they forget about you.

But because you’ve p- used WP Fusion and passed that lead to your CRM, let’s say a five-part nurture sequence that fires every three days or so sends an email just adding value about the niche that your LMS website problem solves. And in the last one, there’s a message to come back and try a free course.

Now they come back, they sign up for the free course. WP Fusion passes that detail over, which now adds them to the free course nurture sequence and so on. And then it just– it keeps rolling until they become a customer. And it’s not about… The beauty of this kind of work is it’s not one size fits all marketing, sales, or learner experience design.

We’re actually creating a lot of personalization. So if they’re– It’s meeting them exactly where they are. It’s sending emails when it makes sense to send them because they just got this tag, because they just completed X action, and so on. And when they become a customer, it’s smart. It knows it’s not gonna send them marketing-related emails anymore.

It’s gonna switch to sending customer success-related emails. And now it’s possible for the site owner to send segmented emails to just the students in that one course via a broadcast email. We know that WordPress can, and LifterLMS as an example, can send these one-off emails for different things.

But when you’re doing these big broadcast emails whether it’s twenty people or two hundred thousand, this is where the CRM and the email broadcasting tool, that’s what it does really well you can also do win-back sequences. So for example, if a customer hasn’t completed something or, cancels and you wanna do a re-engagement campaign to see if there’s anything you can do to help them or save them or point out resources that they missed, the marketing automation and tagging that you can do with WPFusion to your CRM allows you to build those win-back sequences.

So basically, your students will feel seen, and as a business owner or web professional your business is running much more efficiently, so both the business and the student win bigger. And this whole thing with WPFusion and LifterLMS or WooCommerce and the four plugins, it really illustrates what makes WordPress and LifterLMS far superior to a platform like Kajabi or Podia or Thinkific that does– has one way of doing things, and maybe you can send us some emails, but they’re just not customizable in the way that you can customize with WordPress a CR- your own CRM in a tool like WPFusion that is a two-way sync that keeps them talking.

And these are things that just aren’t possible at all to customize and innovate on with platforms like Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, or School. They may have some email capabilities, but it’s gonna be very limited compared to the kind of marketing automation, segmentation, and just communication that you can do with WordPress, a CR- a good CRM, and LifterLMS.

In terms of our stack at LifterLMS, we do– we use WooCommerce, we do LifterLMS, we do Gravity Forms, and we do ActiveCampaign, and WPFusion is the bridge between those. But you can swap any of those out. So for example, WPFusion also works with LearnDash. It also works with other WordPress e-commerce solutions besides WooCommerce, like Easy Digital Downloads.

It works with many other Gravity f- form plugins besides Gravity Forms. And like I said, there are 60 CRMs. I’m on ActiveCampaign a- actively looking for something else, but I– Just check out the WPFusion website. I bet the CRM you’re using or thinking about using is already on there the other cool thing with WP Fusion from a pricing perspective is it doesn’t scale with your size of your email list.

So you could have a 200 people in your LMS, or you could have two million. WP Fusion is not gonna cost you any more. And the same is true for LifterLMS as well. Now, the CRM platforms will charge you, which is one of the reasons why FluentCRM is becoming so popular is ’cause now you have a WordPress solution that’s not charging you based on the size of your email list or, and all of that, the number of active contacts that you have.

So go check it out. That’s at wpfusion.com/pricing. I believe they do have a lifetime option available as well. Yeah, WP Fusion is one of the top five plugins I would install on any site. The first thing I usually do is okay, I’m putting LifterLMS in there. I’m putting the LifterLMS Stripe payment gateway in there.

I’m putting WP Fusion in there. I’m putting the Switch User plugin in there, and I’m putting the Sky Pilot theme on there. And just with those five things, you’re basically unstoppable, and you have a system that is so powerful and actually quite affordable as well. So go get your license of WP Fusion and connect it to your LifterLMS.

If you’re using WooCommerce, connect it. Connect it to your form plugins. Also keep in mind, WP Fusion has some of the best written documentation I’ve ever seen, so if you’re ever trying to figure out how to do something and sync your contacts or, connect something in a certain way, their documentation is just phenomenal.

So go check out WP Fusion. I highly recommend it. And if you just wanna kick the tires, you could try the, lite version and start playing around with it. But if you’re- have a serious LMS business or a serious WooCommerce or e-commerce store business, I would encourage you to jump right in with the Pro version.

So that’s it for this episode of LMScast. Thank you for checking it out, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

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Get WP Fusion NowIn this LMScast episode, Jonathan Denwood talks about how WP-Tonic makes it easier for instructors, coaches, owners of membership sites, and educational institutions to create robust WordPress-based learning management systems without having to deal with complex technical settings.

He clarifies that WP-Tonic is a comprehensive solution that includes managed hosting, premium plugins, CRM tools, email marketing systems, templates, support, and website development services. Jonathan emphasizes that their hosting packages include with useful technologies like LifterLMS, FluentCRM, WP Fusion, and other automation and performance tools, which help customers save money and avoid the hassle of handling numerous subscriptions and integrations on their own.

Jonathan and Chris Badgett stress the value of quickness, clarity, and professional understanding while developing online learning companies throughout the discussion. According to Jonathan, many developers find it difficult to select themes, plugins, hosting, CRMs, and automation tools on their own. WP-Tonic makes this process easier by offering a carefully chosen and fully maintained technological stack designed especially for LMS and membership websites. Additionally, they talk about how WP-Tonic helps companies switch from systems like Kajabi to WordPress, offering consumers more long-term flexibility, scalability, ownership, and customisation.

Heal Your Heart, a multilingual international coaching platform with thousands of facilitators, and Psychiatry Education Forum, a professional medical training platform, are two real-world examples that Jonathan uses to illustrate how WP-Tonic assists businesses in creating scalable, high-performing educational websites while offering continuous support, upkeep, and strategic direction.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Jonathan Denwood from WP-Tonic. That’s wp-tonic.com. Jonathan runs a hosting company and a services company. It’s all under WP-Tonic. He has a e-learning focus, has done a lot of great work with LifterLMS.

But first, welcome back on the show, Jonathan.

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, it’s a pleasure to be back on the show, Chris. It’s always great having these discussions with you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And hosting in the WordPress space is a little interesting. There’s huge players like a GoDaddy, for example, and then there’s n- micro niche players like WP-Tonic- Yeah

which provides hosting, but is really focused on courses, coaches, training-based membership sites, LMS sites. And you do something particularly cool where you bundle in, It’s not just hosting. You’re not just getting a rack of server, taking a monthly fee for that, and then crossing your fingers and hope the client figures it out.

You take a totally different approach. You also include software, which is awesome, and one of the unique advantages of WordPress and the general public license and strategic partnerships that you do and all this stuff. But let’s start there. Describe what WP-Tonic offers for hosting and how it’s different, and what does the plus mean.

Plus what? Hosting Plus.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. It’s a all- it’s a all-in-one service really. It’s a hybrid. Hosting’s really important. We p- we provide hosting, but hosting plus, which includes a suite of the some of the best plugins if you’re looking to build a coaching learning management system membership website in e-learning, or you’re looking to build a community educational website, which a lot of people are looking to do.

We provide all the best plugins that WordPress can offer, so you don’t… And we, provide- We find out what you’re looking to do, and then we install what we feel is the most suitable from our library, and they’re all fully licensed. And then we can build websites out for the client as well if they haven’t got the time but they still want to use WordPress for all the benefits it provides, but they just don’t wanna do it themselves, we can do that, or they can build it out themselves.

We provide some templates, some starter websites based on Kadence that are quite good to start out with. So we offer a load of options if you wanna do it yourself or you want us to build it out. And then our hosting, we specialize in coaching, in membership, in learning management systems, so we can advise.

We do offer support from our lowest plan. We offer more time on our larger plans. And then we’ve got separate support plans for those that want more time or don’t even have to host with us. So- It’s comprehensive

Chris Badgett: I love it. And when you look super closely at what’s included in the plans, it’s a ton of value.

Jonathan Denwood: It is.

Chris Badgett: And you pass most of that value on to your customer. So for example, I’m just looking at some of your plans. You can find these at wp-tonic.com/price, prices. It includes the LifterLMS Infinity bundle, which is huge. Even just that alone is right around the monthly cost, but you get so much more.

You get the hosting, and there’s so many things on here. I’m not gonna name them all, but you have you can add FluentCRM as an example. You can do WP Fusion. You can do a booking system like FluentBooking. You can do Document Library Pro and, which is awesome for membership sites and e-learning for having a r- a well-organized resource library.

You have performance stuff, caching stuff, CDN stuff and I’m just naming 10% of what’s in these plans. And it’s super cool. This is the, really the beauty of open source, and I’ve always wanted to see more people build these kinds of websites as a service and kind of get outside the mindset of, oh- Yeah

we’re a technology company. We offer hosting. No you actually have a full service solution for the e-learning entrepreneur or skill- or school or organization that doesn’t have to get in the weeds of all the tech. You’ve already curated and assembled the stuff, and you’ll also help set it up. You can do everything from basic templates to full service.

So you can meet the client where they are, and it’s an incredible value for the monthly for the monthly investment.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, if you pay yearly on our microsite plan, which covers most people starting out, and it will cover them quite a while, it, and they pay yearly, it’s $35 a month which is amazing value, or you can pay month to month, and it’s $55, and you get all that value.

But I think the other factor is the support, we have knowledgeable people. I do the support tickets. Kirk helps. Got a couple other people help. And we- It’s a ticketing system but we respond p- normally in less than an hour. And your problem will, we will be able to help you when we know about WordPress and we know about these platforms, where you’re not gonna get that from GoDaddy or something else.

And the truth is, a learning management system that starts to get some traction you do need good hosting. And the other factor I wanna point out is that we provide all the email functionality as part. We don’t provide inboxes, but everything else, transactional and marketing email, we provide that through FluentCRM and our partner SendGrid, and that’s part of our package.

So you’d be able to send loads of email, newsletters, email, transactional email and you won’t have to buy another service to do that. That’s part of the hosting package.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. And for you out there listening or watching, I just wanna do a quick educational marketing positioning thing here.

I always… There’s three things that we’re s- whenever you have any business, you’re selling only three things, and there’s actually a fourth, which I’ll tell you about. And one of these is primary, and I’m trying to figure out which one it is for WP Tonic, which I’ll touch on in a second. But people buy, and companies buy, and schools and organizations buy three things: speed, certainty, or insight.

One of those is primary. And the fourth thing, which is funny, is staying out of jail. So when you hire your tax accountant, you are basically hiring them to stay out of jail. When I buy a plane ticket to cross the country instead of using a car, I’m paying for speed, as an example.

So anyways, just to tie this into WP Tonic, we’ll leave staying out of jail off the table, but I think you’re actually hitting all three, speed, certainty, and insight really well, and let me explain that. The first one is speed, which I think might be your primary. And the reason I can say that is because I know when I talk to LifterLMS prospects, people who are- haven’t bought yet, are exploring the options, they’re absolutely exhausted, ’cause there’s 500 LMSes out there.

There’s several in WordPress. There’s all this research. And by the way, even once you get your LMS, you start missing other things like transactional email CRM. You are saving people so much time by just including it all together that’s just a beautiful thing. ‘Cause just doing one of these things, like figuring out which theme should I use or how to set up Kadence or whatever you’re saving so much time.

So that’s speed Certainty. You’ve been doing WP-Tonic podcasts since before LMS Cast started. And you’ve been in, you’ve been in this membership site, WordPress, LMS, and all the surrounding utilities and other needs as well. So when somebody purchases a plan from WP-Tonic, you’re also paying for certainty that you’re getting the best tools that have been thoroughly vetted, researched, and correctly implemented.

So that’s certainty. And then the insight piece, you mentioned the support, and even just talking to you now about your system, whenever somebody partners with WP-Tonic or becomes a customer or client, they, they get to learn. They get to learn tips and tricks from the industry. They get to learn how to think about things like marketing automation and SEO and website performance.

They’re getting insights just by being a customer from working with you. So anyways, I just wanted to take my hat off and congratulate you on nailing all three, which is speed, certainty, and insight.

Jonathan Denwood: Thanks.

Chris Badgett: What do you think is your primary in working with your people? If you had to pick one, is it more the speed from idea to website?

Is it more the certainty of having the best tech stack while saving a ton of time? Or is it more the insight of we’re gonna be your trusted advisor and partner, your secret weapon to your L- LMS business?

Jonathan Denwood: I think it’s difficult because one of, one of the great things about WordPress is you get all sorts of clientele.

But I suppose you could say that in all software offerings. You get people that really are not DIYers, but they like WordPress. They’ve used it before, and they like the flexibility. Then you get the DIY type, and then you get the people that are, that DI- that can do it, or from the two groups that I’ve just mentioned, but they just want it built out for them, and then they want a, player that…

Basically what WP Tony is a reverse, host, a reverse agency. There’s a lot of agencies that do hosting. We emphasize hosting and support, but we also are agency as well. But we also work with other agencies, and that’s quite common as well, isn’t it? There- there’s loads of agencies that specialize in one thing, and they do work for other agencies as well.

So we do a bit of that as well. WordPress, but we specialize in the hosting and the, and that. Because I think we’re really offering something unique which you don’t see that often now in the marketplace. That seems to be a big statement, but I think you would agree with it, wouldn’t you?

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the

show.

Chris Badgett: I would. It’s clearly one of the situations, and this is something I’m always harping on, which is the best companies put their customer at the center of the business, not their product. And when I look at what WP Tonic offers, clearly you’ve put the customer at the center, and then surrounded them with what they need, which is the hosting, the services, the vetted licensed plugin packages and all that.

And it’s not like a fractured solution, it’s the full solution. Like even LifterLMS, we say it’s all-in-one, and it truly is, it does a lot of things, but you still need to go out and get web hosting, you still need to figure out what to do with your CRM and that kind of thing. And

Jonathan Denwood: you- Yeah. I just want to, I just want to interrupt.

It just occurred to me what we’re doing is we’re trying to get you at the place where you would be if you bought a kind of SaaS competitor to LifterLMS. We’re trying to get you… That you’ve still got to configure everything, and you’ve got to get the course in i- if you don’t want to hire us to do it, all that for you, which we can do.

But we’re getting you… And it’s the same with, there’s loads of consultants in the SaaS world the leading competitors in there that will set it all up and put your course content in. There’s a whole industry around some of these SaaS products. But we’re, getting you to that level where all the main plugins, if you’ve got some that you want installed we’ll install them for you, but we’ve got an extensive library, and then we configure everything, and then it’s there for you at a much higher level, configured for you just to concentrate in getting your courses and getting your course live.

So we’re removing a lot of the time delay That’s what we’re doing

Chris Badgett: That’s the speed aspect.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And my hat’s off to you because I think I- if I’m doing the math right, I’ve been in WordPress for about 18 years, and I think you’re the same, maybe 19, maybe more. Yeah. But so we take it for granted as power users of WordPress, like we got the lay of the land, we know how things fit together, and we keep up with news and all that.

But for the average busy membership site owner or company that needs to spin up some kind of training or entrepreneur that wants to get into courses, coaching, online community, and these kinds of projects, they don’t have all that 20 years of experience in the industry. They need a tech solution, but they don’t wanna get…

They don’t necessarily have the time or the desire to get involved in all the minutiae of the details of setting something like that up. But WP Tonic is the answer to that, and I think it’s important to recognize that and commend you for what you’ve done as you’ve… People, when they buy software, it’s, they don’t just wanna buy software, they want a solution.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Y- you have the full solution. It’s not just like a piece, it’s like the whole thing. So good job on that one. Can you tell us a story of Heal Your Heart as a recent customer?

Jonathan Denwood: They’ve not been, they’ve been with us for over, oh, five or six years. Okay. They they’ve been a great client.

They are in the spiritual educational coaching space.

They they license the intellectual property from a founder that died a while ago, but is very well thought of and has a number of books out there still in pu- being published. And they provide education courses ar- around the books and thoughts of the the founder.

And they have over, over 4,000 coaches. Each coach has a place on the website, and they run live courses in the area, i- in their location, and it’s a global website. What I mean is it’s running LifterLMS, it’s running a number of plugins. It- It offers, it’s quite a large website, and it also does internal courses as well.

And it offers all these in multiple languages.

Chris Badgett: Wow.

Jonathan Denwood: So we’re running a, la- trans- TranslatePress on it, and it’s running about seven languages, and it’s running WooCommerce. It’s running a lot of software, so it’s on quite a large server. And we’ve got it on one of the fastest bare metal servers that we offer, and we maintain everything for them.

And being up and keeping the website running is really important to this operation, Chris.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Congratulations on that. And even you just describing that of courses and coaches and internal training and all this stuff happening, that’s a complicated project to build, and it’s

I don’t wanna discourage somebody who’s a do-it-yourselfer from dreaming and rolling up the sleeves and is gonna learn WordPress and gonna learn all these different tools and servers and scaling or whatever, but for most clients, they just want the solution for their dream to come to life, which you provide to Heal Your Heart, which is awesome.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, they were in a bit of a mess. They had gone to another developer or developers, and they had a build out, and it hadn’t really gone very well. So they came to us, and we had to build out the whole website for them. Act- Kurt was involved in this, and we had to build it out and- They had a, so it’d been built out in WordPress, but they had a learning man- a custom learning management system done for them and it wasn’t working.

So we suggested that we use LifterLMS and adapt it, and we added a load of other functionality that wasn’t working. We replaced it and customized it slightly. Where the original build-out was really customized a lot and it just wasn’t working. So there’s a sweet, point to this. You can customize things, but I would suggest that you don’t go totally the full custom route because you might have to pay a fair bit of money, and then you might have to junk it all

Chris Badgett: Yeah

Jonathan Denwood: If it doesn’t work out. And they were between a rock and a hard place. They’d spent a fair bit of money, and they just didn’t have a functioning website. So we came in, and we quite rapidly saved the situation, and it’s been running now for six… And they’ve grown from a couple thousand to getting close to 5,000 students and facilitators.

I think that’s what they call them, these people that run courses locally. And they’ve got a big presence in India, in the Far East all over the world, so that’s why they have these pages in multiple languages as well, Chris.

Chris Badgett: That is really incredible. Yeah I think what’s important to mention there is WP Tonic is not just for first time LMS projects.

Often you’d come in at… This is a WordPress story, but it’s also more specifically a WP Tonic story, where most pro- in my experience when I ran a agency, a lot of projects were not starting at ground zero. We’re taking a solution that somebody’s not happy with, and we’re upgrading it to a solution that’s more customizable a- and even more affordable with WordPress.

So the fact that you do the migrations from whether it’s a mess from a previous attempt either on somebody’s own or with a an agency or an app builder or whatever it was that didn’t work out, or maybe it did work out, but it’s really limiting and not customizable. We see a lot of people coming over to WordPress and LifterLMS from Kajabi, and I know that’s a sweet spot for you.

‘Cause when somebody gets some traction on Kajabi and they’ve, they get things moving, but then they start to realize how un-customizable, how locked in they are and they start seeing all the potential of having their own platform that’s more customizable. WP Tonic is a great fit for the Kajabi site owner that doesn’t, that wants the performance, customizability, and affordability of WordPress, but they don’t want to actually figure out all the tech details themselves.

They, WP Tonic can just move you over, and then be your r- your right hand and your more customizable LMS.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. I think this is the area where AI is really helping- Yeah … because when you’re on one of the, one of these SaaS platforms like Kajabi, actually moving to WordPress or to any other platform another SaaS, is such an undertaking that most people only consider doing it even though they’re fed up with the platform they’re on if they’re gonna do a whole redesign of the website, or because there’s no way- Easy way of getting all the content and the pages out, out of Kajabi.

It has to be done manually. And if you’ve got a reasonably large website y- taking all that content and putting it somewhere else. Using AI now, it can be done a lot less painfully and at w- at a sl- slightly lower cost. But it’s just, gonna be less painful to get stuff moved.

And I think it’s the argument if you’re gonna spend a lot of money on your website, on your marketing, on your students, on your course, having the maximum control, which you do get with WordPress, I think that becomes very important, doesn’t it, Chris?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it does. When the, when a client or a customer realizes that the LMS and the hosting and the setup there is not a commodity, it’s actually an asset of the business, they s- that’s, those are the folks that are a great fit for a solution like WP-Tonic.

I’ve

Jonathan Denwood: got another client that we’ve been helping. I’ll put it into chat. Psychiatry Education Forum.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Jonathan Denwood: They’ve been with us for a number of years as well. A great client. This is in the medical field, but it’s, they provide training in psychiatry to other psychiatrists.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Jonathan Denwood: And resources, books and they do a course.

And they’ve been with us for y- a number of years as well, and it’s quite a nice website. It’s using LifterLMS as well. And, Yeah, he’s he the guy that runs this, he’s a psychiatrist himself, and he runs this course, and he’s been with us a number of years as well, Chris

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I get that.

A lot of times somebody, a professional, is so busy in what they don’t have time to figure out all the tech. They need help, and that’s-

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, funny enough, this guy, I think he is a bit of a DIY. Is he techie? Okay. But I think he does it to relax his mind. Hey,

Chris Badgett: that’s good psych- psychology if some- someone out there is listening would like to have a chat with you you have on your website, Get in Touch, there’s a big button at the top at wp-tonic.com. They can schedule a 30-minute call. Can you tell us what happens on those 30-minute coaching consulting calls?

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. Basically if you’re looking for any advice, it’ll either be me or Kurt that will take the, your call.

We normally do it over Zoom. And basically, we just find out if you’re looking for general advice, or you’re thinking of moving hosts or providers, or you’re thinking of having a website built out, we can give you some general advice. Most people- They’ve done now, especially with the age of AI, they’ve done a much deeper dive, they- they’ve they’ve been recommended WP Tonic by AI or they’ve just gone on the web in general. People still do a kind of mixture of AI now and going to people’s websites and… But they normally check people out through AI now, and then they go to the website, if you’ve got a product or service.

Or the- or they find two to three and then they go to the website. But they are either using AI overviews, Google, or they- they’re using chat or Claude, whatever, Perplexity, whatever their poison is. Gemini. They’re using those to much more detailed questions. But a lot of people don’t even know what the questions to ask.

So they know that’s where normally the conversation starts. They have some questions. They can put them in chat, but that can lead to even a bit more confusion, because it tends to give them even more options. They- they’re trying, to find what would be the best solution for their particular…

And sometimes chat can do that, but a lot of the times it can throw out even more questions. That’s my viewpoint. I don’t know if you agree with that, Chris. So we get a lot of people that book a chat because they basically, they’re thinking of using us, but they also want to see what are the best options for their particular needs on WordPress.

So that’s why they’re booking that con- that initial free consultation with us, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And you should do that and talk to Jonathan and/or Kurt. Again, that’s on their website, WP-Tonic. And to go back to our three-part framework, speed, certainty, and insight, this is the insight piece. Like, when you’re a good coach or advisor and a client is considering working with you, that’s a lot of they may not have the perfect questions to ask and but that’s how it starts.

You just start by having a conversation and and, get good advice. And the cool thing about WP Tonic is- It’s not For LifterLMS as an example, we’re all about LifterLMS, obviously. But WP-Tonic is more about a lot of different things. It’s about LMS, it’s about videos, it’s about hosting, it’s about performance, it’s about CRM.

And all, within all those categories, there’s lots of areas to explore and figure out. And even a client may come to you and ha- and may not have even thought about having an email list, but you know if somebody comes to you in that way, that part of the package includes some CRM and thinking about that email list stuff.

So you’re gonna help them do better and fill in their blind spots by simply having the package put together and the coaching and consulting you do on the call to help people build a well-rounded solution and be set up with the highest odds of success as possible.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: All right. Thank you, Jonathan, for coming back on.

It is awesome, it is truly awesome what you have built. And I wanna encourage you out there listening or watching to go check out the WP-Tonic website. Schedule the 30-minute call. And also Jonathan is a prolific podcaster. Check out the WP-Tonic podcast. It was… It’s does lots of different things.

You’ve done different types of shows over the years.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, we also do the Membership Machine show, which is spe-

Chris Badgett: Yeah, tell us

Jonathan Denwood: about

Chris Badgett: that.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah … which is specifically do with Kurt, and we discuss WordPress marketing and anything else that will help somebody build a membership or build a community- Yeah

on WordPress in 2026. We c- we’ve been doing that for a couple years now, and it’s got a lot of information that really helps somebody starting out or thinking of moving to WordPress or just the different plug-ins. But it’s all around the subject of membership and learning management systems, basically.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Keep up the amazing work, Jonathan. Go visit wp-tonic.com. And thanks again for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for being a great partner with LifterLMS and most importantly taking good care of the course creators and education entrepreneurs in our community who need a full solution like WP-Tonic.

Thanks for coming on the show, Jonathan. We really appreciate it.

Jonathan Denwood: That’s all right.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get WP Fusion NowIn this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett discusses how clever popups may be effective tools for increasing course sales. Also, learner success on an LMS website.

Chris illustrates why popups should assist, support, and customize the student experience rather than just interrupting users for marketing goals by using Popup Maker in conjunction with LifterLMS.

He investigates tactics including employing targeted upsells or cross-sells following course completion, providing discounts or lead magnets to reluctant customers, and recovering abandoned carts with exit-intent popups.Chris places a strong emphasis on student engagement in addition to sales, demonstrating how popups may greet new students, promote community involvement, assist students in picking up where they left off, or offer extra assistance when students seem to be having trouble with a subject.

Additionally, he talks about creating tailored learning experiences by utilizing behavioral triggers like quiz scores, time spent on sites, course progress, cart value, and membership engagement.The program also discusses gamification strategies like Easter eggs and celebration popups, free course lead magnets, and operational notifications like event reminders, time-limited deals, or geotargeted pricing depending on purchasing power. Chris stresses throughout the conversation that the best popups are purposefully created to enhance user experience, offer value, and assist students in successfully completing their learning journey rather than seeming invasive or bothersome.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideHere’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris, and in this solo episode, we’re gonna be doing a deep dive on how to use pop-ups on your learning management system website for your courses, your coaching program, your membership site. However you’re doing online education, we’re gonna show you how to use pop-ups not just to make more money, but to also improve your student experience and improve your learner results.

So almost everyone hates pop-ups, but that is only because you’re being confronted with pop-ups that weren’t designed well, that weren’t designed to add value. We’re gonna go into how to build pop-ups the smart way. But even though pop-ups in general are disliked, it’s really interesting that eight- almost eight hundred thousand WordPress websites all use the same pop-up tool, which is Popup Maker.

That’s at wppopupmaker.com. Go check it out. They are actually a sponsor of this show. But hey, I use pop-ups powered by Popup Maker all over my websites, whether that’s for e-commerce, learning management system. I’m gonna give away all the best tricks, but go to the LMScast website. In the show notes, you’ll see a link to go get WP Popup Maker.

That’s at wppopupmaker.com. This is Code Atlantic’s pop-up tool. It’s awesome, and there’s some really interesting stats around it. Those pop-ups powered by Popup Maker have been triggered over thirty-two billion times around the world, which is crazy. It’s a hundred and forty-eight pop-ups every second.

It’s kinda mind-blowing. But again, I’m gonna show you how to do pop-ups and how to think about pop-ups in a more intelligent way in this episode, and we’re gonna dive deep. But be sure, again, to go to the LMScast website, find this episode, and look for the link to go get Popup Maker at a fifteen percent discount.

That’s something the creators of Popup Maker had made, has made possible for you. And just to drive the point home I’ve used Popup Maker to, drive over half of our a hundred and fifteen thousand email subscribers at LifterLMS, and that’s just collecting a lead. I do all kinds of other pop-ups with Popup Maker.

To recover carts, do exit intent to do remarketing, to guide users where to go after they make a purchase, or how to get the most value out of a course, and so on. We’re gonna dive into that today and tour the six categories of how to use pop-ups. Now, you can use pop-ups to make more money, but the whole point of this episode is we’re gonna show you everything else you’re gonna do.

So I’m gonna go over six ways to use pop-ups. I am gonna start with pop-ups that make you more money, but stay tuned for the full episode, ’cause we’re gonna dive deep into other kinds of pop-ups, not just ones that make you that, that make you more money. So w- we’re gonna get into the technical details of how pop-ups work at the end of this episode, so if you hear any lingo that I’m gonna discuss here I’m gonna do a deeper dive at the end to talk about the technical implementations and things like targeting and triggers and actions and all these things that Popups Maker does so well.

But to start with making more money with pop-ups, the baseline problem is that cart abandonment is actually a huge issue in e-commerce in general. So there was one study that showed that 70% of carts, meaning somebody adds a product to the cart and is getting ready to check out, 70% of people do that and then leave.

Now, some of those people were never gonna buy anyways. But that, there are some that maybe they got confused, maybe they got stuck, maybe they have a question, maybe they would buy if they had a little discount, and so on. So this is where cart abandonment comes in. So cart abandonment is really cool.

Now, by the way, LifterLMS has a cart abandonment add-on that’s awesome that can send automated emails that are already designed. You basically just install the add-on, it’s included in the Infinity Bundle, turn it on, and it’s gonna start working for you immediately and recovering lost carts by sending three follow-up emails that are spaced out, pre-written, and the third one even has a coupon discount that’s automatically set up that inspire- expires in three days, and so on.

There’s more info about LifterLMS’s cart abandonment recovery system add-on that you will, you can find on the LifterLMS website. But using Popups Maker, I would do both. I would use the LifterLMS cart abandonment recovery system. But on top of that, I would use the exit intent pop-up. So for the LifterLMS cart abandonment system to work, a user has to type in their email before they abandon.

That’s how we can follow up with them. But sometimes they don’t even get that far, and they start they don’t type anything in and they abandon. We can still capture them using exit intent technology. So what is exit intent technology? So basically, when somebody’s on your website, and we’re talking about the checkout cart abandonment, but you could literally do this in any part of your website.

When somebody moves the mouse up to the top left to close the window or close the tab or navigate away that’s called exit intent, and Popup Maker can detect that, and that’s a trigger where you can present a popup. So if you’re doing cart abandonment, exit intent-based popups, a couple of the classic things you can do is, one, just offer a discount.

So that’s something you can do. Oh, maybe they’re leaving ’cause they’re trying to find a better deal or go find a coupon code. Just go ahead and hook ’em up with a coupon code on exit. Another thing you can do on a exit intent on a cart is present a lower price product or even a free product that they’re gonna need to warm up later and they’ll decide to buy later.

The other thing you could do is just give ’em some kind of lead magnet. They’re not ready to buy right now, so I’m just gonna nurture ’em with some free value through another resource. The the other place you can look at for making money with popups and Popup Maker is targeted upsells.

So for example when somebody completes a lesson in LifterLMS, and it’s the final lesson or completes an entire course, you can instantly have a popup that recommends the next course or upgrading to a membership or all access pass or whatever. So that’s an, example. And Popup Maker is super intelligent in how, all this works.

It hooks into a lot of things inside LifterLMS so that as certain triggers happen, like completing a course, this popup can just fire. So not only is Popup Maker of general use for any kind of site, it has a ton of LifterLMS specific triggers inside of it that you can use to do upsells, cross-sells, down sells to make more money.

So I’m not gonna go super deep into the making more money with popups. We’ve gone over the main stuff with upsells, down sells, cross-sells, cart abandonment, LifterLMS behavior triggers in the LMS, using as an opportunity to automate sales through popups. There’s a lot there. But the next one- type of popup that I wanna go over with you is popups that engage your students.

So this is where we flip the script. It’s not where we’re using popups to try to get more money out of the audience or to close sales. It has everything to do with students finishing what they start. So this is where popups are not annoying, as an example. So the way I think, like to think about this is you have a website students are progressing through various lessons or flows, quizzes, assignments, so on, but they’re alone.

And by having intelligent popups that are aimed at the learner, not the buyer, there are certain things you can do. So one example would be to increase engagement. When a student enrolls in a specific course or any course, or maybe it’s their first purchase on your site, you can have a popup that encourages them to introduce themselves in your online community, which we know is really important for helping people stay committed, stay motivated in online training, is to get involved in a community.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the

show.

And sometimes there’s so much going on, they just made the purchase, now they got content to learn. There’s so much on your site, they can get a little lost. But by using a popup based on a certain trigger, like first time purchase, now this popup can be like, “Congratulations. Welcome. I’d like to invite you to join our community.

Here’s exactly how to introduce yourself, and how our community works.” That’s like a user experience or learner experience design flow that you’re making possible with popups. So one of the cool things about popups is they can pop up, but they can also hold focus, so it’s, can gray out what’s behind or even be a full screen popup.

So it’s a, very powerful tool to use popups to create focus and to give people an opportunity to say yes or no to something. So the beauty of popups too is it… Let’s say somebody bought the course, they’re super motivated, they’re not interested in the community. That’s fine. They can actually close that popup and not introduce themselves and continue.

So you’re never forcing somebody to do something, you’re just providing a little nudge a lot of, a little guidance, but it’s optional. So the other thing you can do is what’s known as a course re-engagement popup. So this is where somebody returns to the site, and you can guide them to where to pick up where they left off.

So that’s another cool thing. Pop-up Maker also ties into LifterLMS’s engagement system. So you could do things… Let me back up and say that the LifterLMS engagement system has several things it does. You can create automated emails that fire from your site. You can do achievement badges that pop up on the screen.

You can do certificates that are dynamically created. You can send te-text messages through our Twilio integration. So Pop-up Maker has a feature where you can tie into those things and trigger engagements, like automated emails and achievement badges, text messages, and so on. That could even be from a button click on a pop-up.

So if you start thinking about this is where the architects and visionaries out there listening and watching who build systems and flows and think four-dimensionally through time, you can really start customizing and guiding the learner experience. The other thing you can do is be proactive.

So a lot of us build learning management system experiences that are just reactive, like the student’s just driving the show. But an- another example of an engagement for students pop-up would be a s- a stuck point rescue pop-up. So part of the technical details of a pop-up is there’s… It can be time-based or scroll-based and so on.

But let’s say somebody’s spending 30 minutes on a lesson that’s only supposed to take 15 to 20 minutes. You could have a pop-up automatically pop up that does deeper explanation of the content or the assignment or whatever was going on that lesson. So you can be proactive and think about if somebody’s slipping away after X amount of time, what could I present to them to try to save and capture that person from getting lost, getting distracted, or worst case scenario, abandoning the course?

So learners who feel seen finish more courses. That’s just a part of the psychology or the pedagogy of learning. Pop-ups can be the cheapest kind of ICU signal that is really valuable in online learning experiences. So this is being an instructional designer or a teacher and leveraging pop-ups as a tool in your toolkit to create more engaging online

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Learning experiences that students actually finish So the next type of pop-up we’re gonna get into are pop-ups that grow your email list.

This is super important. A lot of times we think, “Oh, if I could just make more sales and make more money.” The reality is you have to nurture an audience and a community. You build trust over time. You add value in advance of making the sale. So getting people on your email list that you can nurture that are a great fit for your offer is the name of the game.

And most sites are just under optimized in terms of capturing people who are interested but not ready to buy right now. The classic pop-up to build here, to build your email list, I’ve already mentioned it on the cart abandonment aspect, but you could do it on any page or even site-wide on your site where you offer a lead magnet based on exit intent.

So when somebody starts to abandon the site, maybe they’re reading your blog posts, maybe you have a podcast at part of your site or other content pages on your site that are not part of the training and people try to leave, that’s fine, but right… “Hey, before you go,” we throw a pop-up and offer some valuable resource that they need to give their email address for.

That’s a super powerful thing to do. So the way that works technically, in Popup Maker, you can embed email opt-in forms into the pop-up. Those could come directly from your marketing automation CRM tool, whether that’s ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, ConvertKit HubSpot, GoHighLevel, and so many. There’s also advanced connectors you can do with WP Fusion and Popup Maker.

You can put a WordPress form solution like Gravity Forms in the, pop-up as well and pipe that, opt-in to your CRM or marketing automation. Anyways, that’s just some of the technical aspects of how you insert a form in a pop-up. The other thing you can do is capture not capture the lead on exit intent. But capture it based on a certain amount of time or even what’s known as scroll depth.

Let’s say you have a long article that’s three thousand words. If you don’t really want people who just land on the page and they exit and say, “That’s not for me.” You want people who are more qualified and more interested. In what you’re doing. And in that case, when somebody scrolls like 1,000 words through the page, then you throw the pop-up offering the lead magnet, ’cause that’s a more qualified lead that’s actually interested in what you have to say.

That’s another way to think about a lead magnet. One of my favorite lead magnets to do for an learning management system platform course. Our website is to do a free course lead magnet. Maybe somebody’s not ready for your big paid program. Whether that’s low cost or high cost but you have a free course that would be perfect for them to just think about it, get some results in advance, maybe become even more ready to be a good fit for your paid offering.

So think about using a free course lead magnet as one of your top opportunities in a learning site for a a lead conversion, lead magnet capture through pop-ups. The other thing you can do is just guide the student to the next thing after you do the lead capture. Let’s say somebody’s in a free resource like a blog series or something like that, and you wanna push ’em.

You can do like a slide in from the side after a certain amount of time that gets somebody opting in off your free content or potentially opting in to a later stage in your sales process to another free re- resources that makes them even more qualified to become a paying customer. There’s all kinds of things you can do to generate leads from pop-ups.

It’s also important to note that there are so many different triggers that you can do to cause a pop-up to happen. So it’s not always just about exit intent, time on page, scroll depth. You can also do a click triggered pop-up. For instructional designers, I love these and for marketers because what this means is you could have a link or more likely a button on your site.

It can be anywhere. It can be on the side. It can be in the content. It can be on your main menu. It can be anywhere you stick it on your website. And when somebody clicks that button, it triggers a pop-up with a clear call to action. So it’s a way to create signal when there’s like a lot of different options on a website.

You can do a button click That really focuses the user on “Hey, enter your email here to get X, Y, and Z benefit.” They do that, they close it, it adds value, everybody’s happy. So think about it that way. Think about designing the lead capture pop-ups that you would want, that you wish existed on your favorite brand websites or tools that you like to be using.

And if you look closely, you’ll start noticing how pop-ups, also known as modals, and different kind of guided experience things exist in the world. There’s a lot, including like the GDPR consent pop-ups that we see on a lot of sites. Now we’re gonna get a little creative into the fourth type of pop-up for online course and membership sites, and that is the ones that surprise and delight.

So not every pop-up is about making you more money. Some of them we just wanna surprise and delight our user. One thing, one way this is called in s- software or application design is, or even video game design, is a concept known as an Easter egg. So an Easter egg is when you hide something inside of a experience, and if somebody happens to find it they get some kind of crazy cool virtual high-five or even some monetary reward, like free access to an expensive paid thing or crazy big discount.

An Easter egg is something you hide in your LMS site that nobody finds it. And you can do Easter eggs a couple of ways. You could just keep it a secret and not tell anybody about it, and if somebody happens to find it, they get the reward. Or you could challenge your community, which is a gamification motivation thing you can do, and let them know about a Easter egg that exists.

Maybe you give them a hint or two, but it’s on them to try and find it. So we did a episode on this podcast about designing Easter eggs and gamification fairly recently, so go look for that episode. Another example is you can just have fun. Like on April Fools, Daniel Iser from Popups Maker built a like a funny pop-up that does what you don’t want pop-ups to do, which is when the pop-up would fire, the X to close it would start running away when somebody tried to close the pop-up.

Obviously, that’s not something we would wanna keep until after April Fools. But Daniel Iser from Code Atlantic, the creator of Popup Maker, created this fun… He called it Twitchy the Close Button thing that was just a fun little game to in- inject a little fun and humor. So the reason why these Easter eggs and popups, the surprise and delight work, is that the human brain remembers a surprise.

If you hide something in a bonus lesson somewhere, or even like something as silly as… This isn’t Popup Maker, but I’m just giving you some ideas. There’s another tool called WP Confetti, which explodes confetti on the website virtually when somebody purchases a LifterLMS course or membership, or completes a course or lesson, and so on.

It’s these types of surprise and delight that we can have a little fun with our popups. And if you create a interesting or fun popup, please share it with the LifterLMS community. We’d love to learn from each other and help do gamification that actually works and is fun and that users love.

So another and f- the final type of popup that you can create that’s not just about making money is to do operational and announcement-based popups. Again, most sites owners don’t really think through time. They think in a static kind of just like everything all at once kind of way of thinking about it.

But if you think through time, there’s so much you can do. So you can do time zone popups. If you want popup to announce a sale during a certain time window, you can do that. If you have a announcement about, let’s say, access to private or group coaching or a new event has been created and so on, you can do that.

You can do news announcements. “Hey, we’ve hired new coaches or tutors. We have a new course available,” and so on. You can do geographically targeted popups. So there’s a concept called price localization, which just means that different people in different parts of the world have higher or lower ability, to purchase based on the value of their local currency.

So an extreme example of this is the Nordic countries like Scandinavia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and so on- Have a high, the highest willingness to pay for products. Whereas there’s other countries like Argentina, a lot of Southeast Asia is an example, where traditional American or Western Europe or Canadian-based pricing is cost prohibitive.

It’s way too expensive based on their ability to pay. So you might wanna do geo-targeted pop-ups that promote your offers to people in various countries that have a much lower purchasing power. So you wanna give them either higher discounts than you would give in other parts of the world, as an example.

If you really care about engaging the whole world with your offer, it’s good to look into that because this price localization and purchasing power is a very real thing, and it is not equal around the world. So if you wanna help the most people possible, eventually you’re gonna look, run into price localization and making your training accessible to all the world’s people based on their purchasing power.

That is the fifth type of pop-up, so for operations and announcements. And you can see that through most of what we’ve talked about here, it’s not just about making money. What we’re actually designing through time is an experience. It could be a prospect, somebody who might be interested that we wanna get their email.

That’s like a user flow through our website. It could be somebody who’s becoming a customer, and we’re trying to help them grease the wheels of the checkout, and we use pop-ups there. We could be helping students right when they first buy to join the community or sign up for their first coaching call and so on.

We could be trying to re-engage learners who are falling out of losing focus or motivation and so on. So there’s so many different types of jour- or, I should say landmarks or places on the journey for different scenarios that pop-ups can be very helpful for. Just to get into some of the tech details, everything we just covered with pop-ups is covered from three main building blocks.

Once you understand them. You can build any kind of pop-up you can imagine. This kind of abstract concept of the learner journey is gonna start to become more specific and concrete. So when you come up with an idea, you’ll know exactly what you need to do and which levers to pull. So by levers to pull, what I mean is there are three aspects To all pop-ups.

The trigger, the targeting conditions, and the actions. So the trigger is when the pop-up fires. So there is a free version of Popups Maker, by the way, that you can go find that at wppopupmaker.com, and that’s gonna give you the basic triggers, which is the click, the time delay, the scroll position.

It’s the pro version of Popup Maker that adds th- triggers like exit intent and event-based triggers, like LifterLMS course or membership added to the cart, or LifterLMS course progress, rated events. So if you’re gonna get serious about pop-ups, I definitely recommend getting one of the premium plans from Popup Maker.

Again, you can get a 15% discount. Go find this episode in the link below. But after triggers, we have the targeting conditions. So this is who and where the pop-up fires for. In the free version of Popup Maker it handles basic page-level targeting. So this is a key concept. It’s one thing to set up an, a global exit intent pop-up that fires across your whole website, yes, you can do that.

But for a lot of these kind of user experience design, customer experience design things we’re doing very specific targeted things based on specific pages. And but you can get much more fancy with the pro versions of Popup Maker. For the LifterLMS integration specifically, Daniel has done so much at Code Atlantic.

There’s 50 plus conditions including course enrollment, quiz score, group membership, cart value, lifetime customer spend, subscription status, and more. So what does all this mean? It just means let’s take cart value as an example. If there’s a certain amount of money in the cart at checkout, then a pop-up could fire to do something like, “Hey, ’cause you’re purchasing the, all of this awesome stuff, I’m gonna give you a little discount if you add this other thing or upgrade to the even bigger membership,” as an example.

A course, a quiz score as an example. This is a fun one. So if the score is high, you could celebrate. You could do a gamified pop-up. If the quiz score is low, you could actually have a pop-up that’s designed- to save that customer. It could be to schedule a tutoring session or a coaching call or whatever.

So in addition to triggers, targeting, there is actions or calls to action. So what does the pop-up do when it’s clicked? All right. Does it apply a coupon? Does it enroll a user in a course? Does it award an achievement badge? Does it trigger LifterLMS email engagement? Does it add a specific LifterLMS access plan to the cart?

This is the layer most pop-up tools don’t have. They’re much more simple. Pop-up maker over at wppopupmaker.com is super advanced in this way, and that all the ver- different things that can happen based on a pop-up engagement directly tied to pop-up maker’s integration, deep integration with LifterLMS.

And I should mention, pop-up maker also integrates with other tools like WooCommerce as well. So if you’re using that all these concepts map over to WooCommerce as well. So, basically the mental model for all of this is to de- detect a behavior, that’s the trigger, decide who this applies to, that’s the targeting, and then take an action, that is the call to action.

Every pop-up in this episode is one of these if this then that combinations. So if you’ve never run a pop-up, I know I’m getting super advanced ’cause I’m a marketing nerd, a user experience design nerd, an instructional design nerd, so I know we’re getting detailed. And this is the hard part about pop-ups is because they’re so powerful it can begin…

come overwhelming, and you can just start getting messy and just making all kinds of things. I would encourage you to slow down and think strategically and pick very targeted specific pop-ups. Do one at a time. Make sure it’s working well before you move on to another one. If you have not designed a pop-up before, my recommendation for the very first one you should design is an exit intent lead magnet.

So a lot of course projects unfortunately never work out simply because a lead was never captured and nurtured. So if you want something super simple, the first place to start, I would do a global exit intent lead magnet email capture pop-up for your site. You can do that with pop-up maker. If you have any questions on how to do that, you can ask in the Lifter community or in The Popup Maker community.

Again, there are almost 800,000 websites using Popup Maker. So there’s so much cool stuff going on, and Daniel over at Popup Maker has a community you can engage with, share ideas, and whatnot. So again, this is all about… It’s popups do not need to be annoying. They’re not just for trying to squeeze money out of people or force them to give you your email address.

It’s more about delicate, strategic, intentionally polite, designed user experience elements of which you use a popup as a tool to engage. So if you wanna see a bunch of popups in action that, in my opinion, are intelligently designed, just go to the lifterlms.com website, abandon our cart, abandon articles.

Go to the LMScast podcast website, which is a subdomain, and you’ll notice after a certain amount of time, we have a popup that captures an email in exchange for giving you the five most popular episodes on the LMScast, which has been running for 13 years. We have popups on the LifterLMS Academy.

That’s at academy.lifterlms.com. You can see how we’re doing those there. But most importantly, head on over to the LMScast website, find this episode, scroll down below the episode, and look for the link in the button in the message to get a pro version of Popup Maker for 15% off. I highly recommend it.

I use popups myself. I love helping people design user experiences that are profitable and helpful, that the end user actually loves and actually finds helpful. So if you need any help with that or ideas, just reach out. Thanks for checking out this LMScast episode, and be sure to go get yourself a copy of Popup Maker.

That’s at wppopupmaker.com. They do have a free version, so you can always start with that. But I definitely recommend getting the 15% off coupon from the LMScast website and getting a pro version, and get started today.

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Get WP Fusion NowAccording to Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliate, affiliate programs should be much more than just discount systems or referral links in the modern era. According to him, companies particularly those that provide courses and software should consider themselves to be media and education enterprises that require ongoing content, collaborations, and audience trust in order to expand.

Alex advises locating niche specialists, bloggers, podcasters, influencers, and producers who already cater to your desired audience and offering them incentives to produce worthwhile material about your product or sector rather than attempting to produce all of the content yourself. He refers to these individuals as “multipliers” since they help you reach audiences that you would not be able to reach on your own. Additionally, he stresses that consumers start their trip long before they are prepared to make a purchase, so companies should provide content for earlier phases of the customer journey rather than just product-focused searches.

He also makes the important point that AI is revolutionizing this process by assisting companies in finding SEO possibilities, identifying possible partners, automating outreach, and eventually developing AI-powered partnership platforms. In general, his argument is that rather than depending solely on direct sales or conventional affiliate marketing, modern growth comes from creating networks of rewarded connections, content collaborations, and community-driven marketing.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Alex Standiford from Siren. You can find Siren at Siren Affiliates. Alex and I have done a lot of work together over the years. We co-created some content on how to build a Udemy clone website, i.e.

a course marketplace using LifterLMS and Siren. He’s been on the podcast multiple times. Siren is not just an affiliate program, it’s really about incentivized partnerships, of which affiliate is just one of those. Before we dive in, welcome back on the show, Alex.

Alex Standiford: Hey. Hey, Chris. I’m super glad to be here. I always, glad to be on the show.

I could talk to you about this stuff all day.

Chris Badgett: I like that. I laugh because Alex has what I think is one of the best-kept secrets in this kind of incentivized partner program development. There’s… It is so cool, and I feel like more people need to understand and know about it, and it’s so much bigger than just an affiliate program, which, by the way, Siren does better than any other solution in WordPress, and you just released your Siren 3.0.

But to start to get people excited, we’ve done… We’ve talked a lot about affiliate programs, and yes, you can do that with Siren whether using LifterLMS, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, other solutions. But tell us about creating a incentivized partner program or content engine with Siren and why that’s important today.

What’s happening t- that makes this even more valuable in the world we live in today?

Alex Standiford: Yeah, okay. Whenever people think about affiliate programs, what they usually think about are the, I always hear coupon coupon sites or media buyers where people are basically traditional affiliates.

The ones that you can find on ClickBank or sh- you know, things like that, those, the affiliate marketplaces. And while those are a potential option for some markets definitely not all that is just one very small way you can find partners and find people to work with. And I pitched this idea about talking about this with Chris because he was recently talking in a previous episode about, You were talking about how different how AI is impacting course creator discovery and how you can’t necessarily hide all of it behind a paywall anymore, and some questions and things like that kind of have to be out in the public so that your course can be discovered in the first place.

And I think

Chris Badgett: that’s- And that you’re a, and that you’re a media company. You’re not just in the course business. Exactly. You’re, in the media business too, whether you realize that or not.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, exactly. And that is… That really struck a chord with me because I realized that I am using a strategy in my own media business with Siren that with using Siren, right?

I was lit- I’m literally leveraging Siren to do this. The thing that really struck me about what you were talking about before was sharing sharing all those details and sharing making sure that the content is discoverable by AI and figuring out how to make sure that you’re able to give the information that people want while still be, and to be able to provide value and get them into your top of funnel that leads them to still being able to buy your course.

And the thing that really, I really that struck me was the way that you can… That a lot of– There’s a lot of situations where the content that you’ll find that you’re gonna publish, that you want to publish or you want to rank for, like if you’re doing SEO keyword research or you’re trying to figure out what…

You’re, looking at different watering holes like Reddit or something like that, and you’re finding questions that people are asking. Sometimes, obviously, you can answer those questions yourself, and you can publish that content directly on your site, and those are great cases. But there are also situations where you can’t.

I think about, for example in the context of Siren, right? I probably can’t write a review about one of my competitors directly on my site. I can’t do a compar- I can write a, I can create a comparison page, right? And I can make a case for the pros and cons of both and talk about how Siren is different and all those things.

But I can’t necessarily do that, or I can’t write a tutorial on a specific aspect for a very specific market in all cases. Or if I do, it won’t be that impactful. That’s, the basis for what I’m wanting to talk about and what I wanna… How, we’re using Siren. What we’re doing to basically find people who can publish that content for us, right?

We find basically partners or affiliates if you can call them that content partners who you incentivize to publish content on on their site to be able to talk about your product or link to it or discuss it indirectly or otherwise.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the, an affiliate who just does a link versus becoming part of your content engine.

Alex Standiford: Yeah,

Chris Badgett: so- And by the way, that, that affiliate or partner could publish the content on your s- on, your site- Yeah … or their site. So talk about the difference between that and how Siren solves that.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. There’s a few different ways that you can leverage that. So the first thing that comes to mind is for me, for example, I am literally…

I’ll do keyword research with various SEO tools, whatever, and I’ll find a keyword. For example, the other day I just found a keyword for Siren that was, like, how to start an affiliate program or how to start… Yeah, it was literally how to start an affiliate program for your veterinarian business, literally for vets, and that is so hyper-specific.

I could publish that. I could write that post. But whenever I look at that, I see that as there is somebody out there, there’s a coach, there’s a podcaster, there is a person who does nothing but talk to medical professionals about how to grow their business, right? They’re, they exist. I don’t know who they are, but I know they’re out there, and I know they would rank for that keyword way faster than me, and that we could have a really fantastic conversation, and I could create something and really pitch something fantastic to them.

So this is how I’m identifying what I call a multiplier, right? A person who I can pitch an idea to, and then they multiply that idea to their audience, and it, ends up translating into a sale. You’re actually seeing this happening right now as I’m talking to you, Chris, right? ‘Cause I’m literally talking about Siren and how it coincides with your own business, right?

So that’s one example, right? But then the other one is, of course, like you’re saying where they can publish content directly on your site. If you find… The, a different route here could be that you need a series, you want a series of professionals to write content on your site. Maybe you have a bigger platform, a learning platform or something like that, and you have a series of courses that you wanna publish publicly and/or that you have published publicly and you’re selling online as an upsell, and you need a large body of content on your site to talk about these things from different aspects, and you wanna have professionals, or maybe you need to have licensed professionals or something like that, having a conversation about these things with real authority.

You can use Siren to be able to incentivize those people to write that content, where they get credit if somebody reads the blog post, and then it converts into a sale for the course, right? So there’s, those are two different ways that you can leverage this tool as a piece of your your, media company to be able to form a team of people who are able to support you and multiply you in the process.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. There’s several big ideas here which I wanna zoom out on. Yeah. One is we’ve mentioned every company is a media company, whether they realize it or not. Related to that, every company is a education company, whether they realize that or not. And then the third big idea here is that if a business puts their core customer at the center of their business, not the product, it changes how you look at things, and you actually build a more effective company that grows faster, which creates some content challenges, which I’ll explain.

So if I put LifterLMS at the center of the business, in s- in many ways, this podcast doesn’t make sense. But for over 12 years, we’ve done this podcast to help our customer, ’cause remember, they’re at the center of the business, with issues even not related to LifterLMS. Now, Alex and Siren adds value as another technology you can plug in to create incentive referral programs.

There’s all kinds of interviews we do on this podcast about things like instructional design, community building entrepreneurship topics that are really outside of the scope of what the LifterLMS software does, but our core customer needs to know in order to be successful. So you create this web of subject matter experts and valuable content.

But we were chatting about the other day, sometimes, if I really look at my customer and go really far back in their journey, before they’re actually shopping for learning management system software, just as one entry point, they s- one place people start, and this is way before they’re aware of the LMS world, is they have a thought, which is, “I hate my job.”

And it’s this thing that they’re about to transition into wanting to become an entrepreneur, and then they figure out how can I make money online?” And then, “How can I build a location into business, independent business? What types of businesses are like that? Oh there’s courses, coaching, services.

I think I like the courses thing.” And now they’re ready for us. But for me to make enough content ab- about I hate my job, what should I do next, and then put that in different niches, like I hate my job at the hospital, I hate my job at the school. There’s so much content that I could create to help my customer.

Remember, the customer’s at the center of the business not the, software. But I can’t make all that content. And like you said there’s somebody else out there who’s probably written a book. I remember, for example, this is super random , but a woman named Pamela Slim wrote a book called Escape from Cubicle Nation, which is about helping people who hate their job figure out plan B in life.

If she wrote that content and pitched Lifter as a solution, it would be even more valuable, ’cause she’s the expert on that topic of job dissatisfaction So I don’t know, jam with me on that- Yeah … context.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I I, was just– Yeah, that’s exactly a, such a great example of what I’m talking about here.

And I love that you brought up the fact of before in the journey, right? Like you– ‘Cause that’s… And I think that’s a big piece that I’ve actually been exploring a lot lately as well and, that’s why all this is so fresh in my mind, right? Because I’ve realized that there’s about– That by the time they get to Siren, right?

By the time most people are at a spot where they’re leveraging Siren affiliates, they’re ready to start using it, they have gone through a lot, right? They’ve already decided they were gonna quit their job, decided they were gonna make a switch. From a, founder standpoint, they decided they were gonna quit their job, they decided they were gonna switch over to something, they decided on WordPress, they decided that they were gonna use e-commerce and sales tools to be able to grow their business.

And there’s, so many things that has to happen before they’re even in a spot to be able to even have a conversation about Siren. And the earlier in the life cycle I can be there, the more likely they are to choose me whenever that moment comes, right? And especially with something this is maybe a little, off-topic, but especially with something as powerful as Siren because it has so many different ways it can be used.

If I can start having conversations with people about that, every time I have a meeting with people and I talk about Siren and I start listing all the different ways they can use it in their business, I see their eyes light up. I see them realize all the different possibilities of things that they can do.

And if I can present that to people earlier in the life cycle more often, then I am more likely to be able to start to find people coming to me and gravitating toward me naturally. And I think that’s a lot of what you were alluding to there, especially around the idea of being customer-centric instead of product-centric, right?

‘Cause honestly I published, I just published an announcement post the other day for the 3.0 version of Siren, right? And I did it because, of course you have to do that, but it is not something that is… But there’s like a whole bunch of other content that I published at the same time around the stuff I published there that is on several different blogs, right?

So on some partner blogs, on my own website on different, platforms like Medium and, off, off-site as well. Not to mention on X, podcasting, all that stuff, right? There’s so many different channels these days, and I am but one person. You know what I mean? I can only do so much to be able to manage and write all of that content, even if you’re using AI to help you or whatever.

But then more importantly, like I said, a lot of that content is going to be better served by somebody else who is helping that customer through the current journey, current phase of whatever journey they’re in. So if I can look back earlier in the journey and I can say, “Here are the steps that they’re going through.

Who are the people-” that are the key piece of that conversation, those are my affiliate, those are my partners. Those are the people I need to be talking to, right? Those are the people that I wanna connect with, I wanna work with, and I wanna have conversations with them, and I wanna think deeply about how I can provide value to my future customers that are in their audience at that point in their life.

And w- it’s really convenient whenever you’re a founder building products for founders because you’re, by the very virtue of existing, a few steps ahead of them, so you’re able to have those conversations, which is very convenient, of course. But so that, that is a lot of what I’m talking about whenever I think about reimagining what it means to have different partnership programs and, programs like that.

It’s not just affiliates with links and coupon codes. It’s genuinely finding people yourself, prospecting, finding them, identifying them, and having real conversations just like what we’re doing right now.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Incentives and relationships, and then a s- a tool like Siren to manage all that is really mind-blowing when you think about it.

It’s that whole African proverb of you wanna go fast, go alone. You wanna go far, go together. Or I might have gotten that backwards. But the going together is better, which means you need relationships to be successful in business. There’s a lot of buzz around the solo one-person company, of which I’m a fan.

I love that kind of idea and thinking. But if you really wanna go far getting partners and not just affiliate partners on board is, can really help.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. And-

Chris Badgett: Let’s do the l- Go ahead … do the bullet points of high-level different types of partnerships. We have affiliates, affiliate sales partners.

We have content creation partners.

Alex Standiford: And then

Chris Badgett: there’s- And within that, there’s a specific one the Lifter integration that Siren has is for course creation partners.

Alex Standiford: Yep.

Chris Badgett: But what else is in these list of, to get people’s juices flowing?

Alex Standiford: Yeah the course creation one is particularly interesting ’cause, like you said earlier, you could create a, essentially c- we talked about this a lot, right?

A Udemy clone where you’re able to basically pay course creators for their own course content, and it’s, I call it a royalty program, basically. And what’s interesting is there’s a variation of that I’ve seen that’s been truly awesome, which is I have a customer right now who has Dungeons & Drag- they build this really awesome Dungeons & Dragons table that doubles up as a kitchen table, right?

And they’re, about to launch, and they’re all excited about it, and I’m, excited to be there with them, right? But what, one of the things that we’re, they are, they’ve launched is they have these, mats that cover the, cover their tables, their, the Dungeons & Dragons table, and they can print art on those.

And instead of, and I told, I directed them that instead of just finding and paying, just solely paying artists, use this as an opportunity to create a program. So he created a royalty program where artists are able to provide art that can be printed on these mats. And he also doubled it up as an affiliate program on top of that.

So it’s an incent– an affil– So they get paid every time their mat is purchased, a mat with their art is purchased. But then they also get paid more if they use an affiliate link to actually direct the sale, right? And it flipped the script for artists because now artists always struggle with promoting or selling things online.

This flips that. It gives them a way to be able to incentive or to earn money with their, they, what they can do, right? It gives them a really cool product to talk about that’s relevant to them in some way. And it also gives the company both a way, a couple of channels to get their product promoted, and also helps them improve their product at the same time because people are able to directly contribute to them all at the same time, right?

Royalty programs are so cool and so underutilized, I think, in, in a lot of businesses. There’s a lot of opportunities for that kind of thing. But then of course, like you said there’s, the traditional affiliate program where you have people who are promoting your product, talking about it.

This is more aligned with what you’re talking about with influencers. Today, that’s usually what I think about whenever I think of them today is, an influencer who is on TikTok or YouTube or something like that talking about your product in some way. A lot of them often want to have some kind of cash paid in addition to actually doing the program, and I don’t think that’s a problem, especially the first time around, ’cause they’re just trying to de-risk it, right?

They don’t know you. They don’t know if you’re gonna convert. So they have to, you have to do that. But what I’ve found is a lot of times if you do convert and you do lead to sales and it does work out, they’re a lot more willing to do the follow-ups without necessarily needing a giant pay, like some kind of paycheck up front, right?

Because you, they are now de-risked. But then, like you said, there’s also the content program, which is like a variation on the royalty program, and the beauty of it is you’re solving two problems at once. One, you’re getting content published on your site regularly, and two, you’re able to incentivize people to publish content that converts.

So, those are the big three that I really think about. Whenever you start getting into bigger, sales and higher dollar things, there’s also more traditional sales programs that you can do where you have direct outreach campaigns where people are being directly contacted, emailed, demos being shown, things like that.

A lot more similar to what you would think of in a, in a sales kind of scenario. Those are probably the big four that I think are relevant to this audience. There’s- So many more that are also potentially doable. I had another one where somebody created a program where every time somebody purchases a product on their- at their- through their business, a part of their business is they donate a portion of the proceeds to a different 501 nonprofit.

And what they did was they set it up to where you can pick at checkout which nonprofit you want your donation to go to, and they’re using Siren to track that, right? So that is so far removed from the idea of an incentive program. It’s not even about incentive at that point. It’s just about keeping track of who do I owe, and things like that.

Chris Badgett: Now you, have, I noticed on your site, now, if you go to sirenaffiliates.com, you have a beacon GPT to help people figure out their programs. Can you tell us what that is, how it works, and the problem it solves?

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So one of the biggest problems that I’ve had with Siren historically has been that it doesn’t, It is powerful, and it is capable of building a lot of things, right? You can build almost any kind of program you want. However, the challenge I’ve run into is a person who comes to me and says, “I just want this program.” They’ll say it to me in words, right? And I realize every pers- whenever you buy Siren, you get a– you are able to schedule a one-on-one with me, where I basically help you onboard it.

I look at it, I help you. And almost every one of those calls was basically me helping them set up their first program. And I realized, oh my gosh, this is th- this is how I’m overcoming that onboarding process, and I’d really like to do a better job of making sure that people, if they wanna just describe the program, the vision that they have for a program, that they can just get that back, and that they can get exactly how it would be built in Siren and have it with a one or two-click setup on their Siren install to be able to build it for them.

So what I ended up doing was I ended up creating what I call a beacon, which is my AI system. It’s an MCP server technically, but it’s also, there’s also a GPT on ChatGPT, so you don’t even have to set anything up. You could just talk to it. And what it does is it does exactly that. You can have a conversation with this AI agent, and it will look at all the knowledge that it has about Siren, and it will help you build out exactly what your program would be in Siren.

And then once it’s done, you click a couple buttons, and boom, it adds it to the system for you, and it’s installed.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell us about the recipes that just released.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So that’s the, that’s the underlying magic of it is the word to put it. AI, the AI agent, the beacon agent uses, creates recipes.

It can create its own custom- recipes, but then the site itself has also a series of recipes on it that are published that you can also one-click install as well. And basically, a recipe is a combination of Siren, what I call primitives, basically Siren th- pieces, right? So programs, distributions program groups are really the big three.

And it can, it- they are basically pre-made combinations of those things that build the different programs you want. So instead of me saying you’re gonna create in order to be able to, for example, create a program where some affiliates get 10%, but you have a set of super affiliates that are getting 15% but you don’t want those beams to cross.

You only want one person from those programs to win. How do you set that up in Siren? Technically, it’s with two programs in a program group, right? So all of those things put together allow you to do that. But a customer, the person, doesn’t think about it that way. You don’t think about your affiliate program as two programs in a program group, but Siren does.

So there was a disconnect in that thought, so I ended up creating all these templates where you can go to the site and say, “I want an affiliate program. How do I do that?” And then it shows you, here you go. This is exactly what you need. You click a button to add it to your site. It asks you what percentage rate you would want for your affiliate program.

You give it your s- your website so it knows where to go, and you click go. Goes into the Sir- your Siren website where it’s installed. Of course, if you’re logged in, it only does it if you’re logged in. And then it allows you, it says, “Hey, did you wanna build, did you wanna import these programs into your system?”

And you say yes. It goes through, and bing, bang, boom, it’s added those different programs to your system and set up your program for you.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So you’ve solved the blank page or the blank screen problem with pre-configured recipes or- Yeah … templates. Yeah. That’s awesome.

Alex Standiford: So it solves, for me, it solved both onboarding, the onboarding challenges for my customers, while also solving the sales problems, because now people can look at it and say, “Can Siren make an affiliate program?”

And the q- or, “Can Siren create this wild, wacky program that nobody’s ever thought of?” And the answer is always yes, but now I can prove it. I can say, “Here you go. Here’s exactly how you would do it in Siren. Do you wanna buy it?”

Chris Badgett: I was just trying to count. There’s so many recipes you have on your site.

These are sirenaffiliates.com/recipes.

Alex Standiford: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: This episode of LMScast is brought to you by WP Fusion, the powerful WordPress software that connects your website to your CRM and marketing automation platform, whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, and many, more. If you’re selling online courses, memberships, coaching, digital products, and more, WP Fusion turns your WordPress website into a smarter, more personalized, and more automated online business.

Chris Badgett: And just to name a few, obviously there’s the basic affiliate program. There’s the fixed rate affiliate program, the refer a friend program, blog content program, sales team commission program content creator profit share, and I’m just naming a few of them.

Yeah. And these are like, yes, you could read the documentation and build all these from scratch, or you can just pull a recipe in and then just make some minor tweaks however you want, and you’re good.

Alex Standiford: Yep.

Chris Badgett: My, my hat’s off to you for that.

Alex Standiford: Thank you.

Chris Badgett: I’m also a big fan of the freemium model, and you have a Siren Lite version.

Yep. Can you tell us what that is and how people should think about that?

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I I, genuinely was afraid that I was giving away too much. And I- Which means

Chris Badgett: you’re making a very good free product. Yes. It is always uncomfortable to give away- Yes … like your best stuff for free- Yeah … but literally that’s the point with freemium- Yeah

right?

Alex Standiford: For sure. For sure. So the free version has the ability to create multiple programs. And it’s, Siren. It is everything that makes Siren great, makes Siren powerful and capable. The things, there’s some things that you don’t get that require an upgrade, such as distributors, which are insanely powerful.

I I’m still learning about the different ways you can use distributors. That’s a whole nother conversation, but like I had a customer come to me who wanted to build a multi- not a multi-level marketing kind of company, but a company that had sales teams that had trickle-down commission from, like a sales manager earns commission from their team, and their team earns commissions from…

It’s a whole architecture, and I was able to build that whole architecture with one single well-built distributor, and it just- Wow … It, just cra- it’s insane. So a lot of power there, but that’s, a paid feature. But the fe- the free version gives you a more than enough, more than pretty much any WordPress paid plugin, free or paid plugin gives you out of the box.

I, honestly think that the o- I wanted to make sure that it was enough that if you were considering Siren and you just needed a relatively simple program just to get started, or you, and you needed to know that you had a little bit of, you had wiggle room to grow if you decided you wanna do other programs as well I wanted to make sure that you would be able to do all of those things without needing to upgrade right away.

So it does all of that. And I honestly, I think that if you’re looking at any other tool in the WordPress space right now, it probably covers, I’d say, 80% of the use cases that a lot of people are paying for right now if and several cases that still can’t be done by competitors even at the free level.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m a big fan of that model. And I’ve, seen this movie before, like with LifterLMS as an example, the free version being more powerful than a lot of paid versions or most of paid versions and so on. So go check that out. That’s sirenaffiliates.com. On the pricing, you can see the free- I wanna just explode people’s minds in the last part of this episode.

You’re somebody who I really respect as a creator and an innovator. I know you’re leveraging AI ’cause you, you’ve mentioned building a GPT, a custom GPT in your MCP and all this. But AI, there’s a little bit of overwhelm, but also excitement.

Alex Standiford: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So when people think about… I’ll just rattle off some things, and you can build on it.

Like, when I think about incentivized programs, how could people use AI? Now I’m a fan of human in the loop and the co-pilot concept and not just trying to let AI do everything. But-

Alex Standiford: Yep …

Chris Badgett: For affiliates, AI can write swipe file. So if you’re an affiliate, you know what that means. It’s starter content that you give your affiliates to remove friction, to give them some email messages to send as is or tweak, social media posts and so on graphics.

If you’re doing,

Alex Standiford: You’re gonna love this, just

Chris Badgett: a sidebar … if you’re doing outbound sales and stuff like that there are AI agents that can… Let’s say there’s an expert who’s gonna promote you and get sales commissions kinda different from an affiliate. That person may– could leverage AI prospecting tools for the– even voice agents and all kinds of stuff.

That– it could get wild. You mentioned graphic design competition for artists. AI is pretty good at generating images and things for design contests, and that’s just- Oh, yeah … a really niche thing.

Alex Standiford: Yep.

Chris Badgett: But I’m sure you have a billion ideas. I just wanted to wet the whistle and pass it over to you.

What kind of AI innovations could people who are in these incentivized programs and relationships what’s possible, and where are we going?

Alex Standiford: So one thing that comes to mind immediately is, again, Beacon with the MCP and being able to do that kind of thing. It’s become my swipe file.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Alex Standiford: You know what I mean? Because it’s, there. It exists. People can read it, ke- they can, they can– my affiliates can actually use it to be able to riff on ideas and understand Siren and be able to do those things deeply. But also whenever I think about incentivizing there’s, this entire concept that isn’t quite here yet, but where you can literally leverage, you could potentially leverage AI, where the AI itself represents an affiliate

Chris Badgett: Like the agent is an, a partner.

The AI agent is a partner. Not a human partner, but a, AI partner.

Alex Standiford: Right.

Chris Badgett: Where the- Like it’s agentic.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, literally it’s agentic. Yeah, there’s, there is a world where that could exist. There’s probably some places where that is a thing. I don’t, I can’t speak to that a lot because it’s still a new concept, but the tech’s there right now.

We have everything we need. You have the ability to create affiliate links. If you create the right program you could absolutely do

Chris Badgett: those things. That’s the thing too, just with that, is agents cost money via token usage and stuff. Yep. So therefore, but if you remove that, this is where incentives matter.

If somebody who’s the mastermind behind these agents if now they’re getting paid via Siren for being effective at whatever they do is profitable above their token expenses, then it makes sense.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, totally. I, have this vision in my head of there’s probably gonna be some personal brands out there that are going to end up creating their own MCPs that are literally just AI servers that are literally their AI agent, right?

That literally just takes care of, manages their content, understands the wealth of information from that person, and provides responses, advice, and input in that way. It’s almost like a branded version of that person, right? That can then sell products, recommend products genuinely, right?

Based on what its pool of affiliate links are and stuff like that. This is a little bit, out there but those are some of the things that come to mind for me. But in terms of how a person can use AI, what I’m really excited about today, right now, is how people can use AI right now to find those partners.

That’s been a lot of my a lot of the stuff that I’ve been doing a lot of. I have a, machine that runs a background task that does… uses data for SEO, which is a an MCP that allows you to basically connect to it and very inexpensively do SEO research and search for keywords and stuff like that.

I’m using that with a really well-curated feed of different RSS feeds of podcasts and stuff like that to basically bring in stuff and have AI automatically find an opport- find and identify potential affiliates for me, right? So it’s helping me do a lot of that stuff, and it’s allowing me to, Riff with it on how this could potentially work, what kind of a how that affiliate would work, how the positioning works, how all of that aligns with whatever whatever agenda I may have, whether it be promoting Siren or whatever.

And assisting that audience, right? Just like what we were talking about. So that’s been a pretty big thing that I’ve been pretty excited about from a str- strategy standpoint. It’s basically what I’ve always historically done when I’m looking for affiliates, which is, like I said, primarily keyword research, finding the words or finding the terms, and then identifying where my customers are in that journey and who was talking to them at that point, and then trying to make– working to make them my partner.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Alex Standiford: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And just for those of you that are kinda newer to the AI conversation you probably know about the AI chat interfaces like ChatGPT or Claude.ai, but when something goes, an agent is– can do a lot more and can be outcome-focused. They loop back and can keep improving on a task or even spin up sub-agents.

So what Alex is talking about with partner recruitment, I did something similar where I wanted to source information that adds value to our core customer outside of Lifter that’s just going on in the industry around things like instructional design, technology, community building, entrepreneurship, and so on.

And I have an AI agent that just weekly searches the entire internet, not really the whole thing, but it’s looking through YouTube, Reddit threads, social media, Twitter, all kinds of places, finding interesting content that would be of use to my core customer. But this idea of there is a, role when you are more of a professional affiliate program operator where you hire a affiliate partner manager, but it, that only makes sense when you’re at a certain scale or size business.

Yes. But if an AI agent can f- help you find partners, create swipe files re-engage partners basically look at your Siren program analytics and whatever so that you can get weekly reports and there’s just so much you can do. That can be an AI team member, basically-

On the partner program.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it is, It’s pretty wild, to be honest the automations that can come out of that stuff. And in particular, finding and identifying those questions. Another thing that I’m doing- My idea of prospecting or trying to find potential affiliates in this context isn’t even necessarily directly looking for their content.

It is trying to find and identify questions that people are asking at earlier phases in what I call watering holes, so like Reddit and, stuff like that. And if it finds questions there, I take that question, I do a little bit of research, and I find out who’s answering it, right? If it if, it’s, if it can’t be me or it shouldn’t be me one step in my process is always: Is there somebody who’s better equipped to answer this question than me?

And if the answer is yes, then the next question is: Can I get that person to become an affiliate to talk about Siren? Or can I get that person… Can I– Or if not, can I get on that show or on that blog and be a guest writer to provide that value to those customers from my perspective and kind of blend in my, my perspective on things, and then work my way from there?

And I think that’s really relevant to knowledge, to, to knowledge workers to… Not knowledge workers, but to course creators and things like that, just simply because that is a great way for you to be able to bring people into your, net, and it’s a great way to prospect.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And we’re, definitely gonna have to do another episode in a year, whatever- Yeah

and see where we’re at, ’cause all this stuff is moving so fast and is super interesting.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, for sure.

There’s probably gonna be a service that exists that just descri- does exactly what I just described.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Alex Standiford: You never know.

Chris Badgett: So for those who are out there watching and listening, what’s the best way to get started?

You have Siren Lite, the free version. I see a try the demo on the site. Tell us about that. You also have… People can just buy it and then get on a call with you. They got the GPT. H- how else… Those are– You have a lot of cool ways for people to get started, but let’s hear the what you’d recommend.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I think the first thing that comes to mind is if some of this stuff is like resonating with whoever’s listening to this and you think that there’s potential value in this kind of thing for you the first thing I would do is start with you, of course, you could download Siren and try Siren.

I- by all means, please do. I’ll be here. There’s a little chat bubble in the corner. I’m always answering questions there when I’m, awake. And then of course, there’s the AI agent where you can have those questions answered figure those things out and think about it. I, love talking about different ways to use Siren and will always be happy to have conversations.

The free version is always going to be a great place to start, just simply because it allows you to try things out, see where things work, and then understand why or if you even do need the paid version. So that’s where I would recommend starting is what you just described.

So if you’re, if you like to use AI agents and you like to, and you’re comfortable with ChatGPT and you wanna just kinda riff on an idea, start with the GPT. If you wanna kinda shop around and see what different things are that Siren can do use the, look, take a look at the recipes or take a look at the demo, which is at demo.sirenaffiliates.com.

That demo is actually it’s literally the entire front end of Siren, and the only difference is instead of it being stored into a long-term place, it just stores it in your session storage on your browse- in your web browser. So you can just, you can use it to try out creating programs and kinda get a feel for what the interface is like.

But it doesn’t actually install or anything like that. It’s just a, it’s a down and dirty way to get in there and take a quick look at how Siren functions and things like that. The interface also will look pretty different in terms of color scheme to what you’ll see in WordPress because I have some plans with with Siren in the future that doesn’t necessarily involve relying on the WordPress dashboard specifically.

But the interface is identical. The only difference is the colors are different. So that’s another option. And then obviously if there’s something that you need to know or you’re not sure about, there’s always just that chat bubble. You can just ask me a question directly, too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m so excited about Siren Affiliates. Go check it out. That’s alexstandiford@sirenaffiliates.com. And again, if you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. That’s the African proverb. And using relationships and incentivized partner programs, there’s nothing like Siren that makes this possible in a way that where you can create the program, manage the program, automate the program.

It’s– And create different types of programs. It’s so cool. It’s so flexible. Thank you, Alex, for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it.

Alex Standiford: Thanks for having me, Chris. Always a pleasure.

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Get WP Fusion NowIn this episode, Chris Badgett provides a thorough guide on how contemporary course designers are use Claude to greatly expedite and enhance the process of creating and marketing online courses.He says he switched to Claude because it is better at handling long-form content, retains more context, and generates more dependable, less “hallucinated” outputs all of which are particularly helpful when working on big projects like entire books, courses, or sales pages.

In addition to the chat interface, he breaks down the larger Claude ecosystem, which includes tools like Projects for work organization, Claude Design for making slides, visuals, and even interactive lessons, and Cowork/agents that can connect with tools like Google Drive, email, or analytics to automate workflows and produce insights. He emphasizes useful applications for course designers, such converting student support letters into new lesson ideas, translating courses for international audiences, developing sales pages and email sequences, summarizing and making FAQs, and building quizzes from lesson content.

Additionally, he places a strong emphasis on advanced use cases, such as evaluating business data (such as student behavior or course performance) and enhancing coaching through knowledge structuring, gap identification, and learning path customization. Despite all of this power, his main point is that AI should be used to enhance human expertise rather than replace it: in order to create high-caliber, influential courses, creators should give the initial guidance, let AI handle the majority of execution, and then refine the output with their own voice, experience, and insight.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. This is a solo episode. Today we’re gonna dive into using Claude, the artificial intelligence tool, and why smart course creators are al already running some smart playbooks using Claude. I, myself personally, switched my primary use of AI from chat GBT to Claude.

I’ve been blown away with the results, and I want to give you all the things I’m seeing across my work, my view on the industry, what I see team members doing with Claude what I see Lifter, LMS and other course creators and education entrepreneurs doing with Claude. But first, the reason why I switched is I just saw.

So many people who are developers. I have a lot of engineering friends. I saw them primarily using Claude and not using chat, GBT. There was a lot of, particularly among developers praise for Claude Code. And we’ll talk about the different types of Claude in a little bit. I still use chat, GBTI haven’t fully abandoned it, but I’m definitely all in on Claude.

And if you’re listening to this episode, you’re probably a forward thinker, early adopter of technology if you’re using chat GPT and haven’t tried Claude yet. I’m gonna give you some unique insights today into how they’re different and the suite of tools that Claude has that you may not know about that are super relevant to course creators.

So this is gonna be a tactical playbook with ideas and action items that you can take away if you use the full anthropic suite of tools. Anthropic is the company behind Claude, and there’s a lot of different things that Claude can do, which we’re gonna get into in a little bit. So the main reasons why Claude is really a daily driver for me over chat Chi PT these days, is I find that it works better.

For long content. It could be a long sales page, it could be a giant course project or book project or sales page project that I’m working on. And Claude has seems to have a better ability to just hold context for larger amounts of information and memories that needs to have. Claude projects are awesome.

So that you can organize and categorize better different things that you would be using. The Claude tool for, I believe Chat, GPT has folders. I just find that Claude’s Projects system works a lot better. I’ve also found that Claude Hallucinates a lot less than chat GBT according to Anthropic.

Claude is trained to flag what it doesn’t know, so you’re less likely to get. Inaccurate information that is hallucinating. I already mentioned it, but the develop, all the developers I talk to prefer Claude over chat, GBT. And then the pace of innovation at Claude, particularly recently in the past 60 or 90 days is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

It’s almost like every day I wake up, I see something new on YouTube or on social media. About some new capability or tool that Claude has added. And I’m really impressed ’cause even though they’re moving fast and shipping a lot, everything that I’m seeing is really relevant to education entrepreneurs well thought out and just makes sense.

And in my experience using it, I’m super happy with it, despite the fact that it is changing so much, I’m still able to keep up with it. And that’s the goal. Of this episode is to help you keep up. Anybody I talk to, even if they’re on the bleeding edge of using AI tools, they all, everybody feels like they’re falling behind.

So first of all, if you’re listening to this episode, I guarantee you’re not at the back of the pack. You’re not falling behind a continual investment and learning and keeping up with artificial intelligence, I find is very important. I’m not one of these people who thinks that AI is gonna do absolutely everything and everything’s gonna be replaced.

I’m just more optimizing pur purposely to augment my capabilities and my strengths and help cover my weaknesses by using Claude. And we’re gonna make this super relevant to you today as a course creator. So the first thing that’s important to go over is the clo, the Claude Product family in Plain Eng, English.

’cause this can get confusing often find that when people start using a tool, they stay with it and they don’t necessarily notice the other developments that’s going on around it. So there’s four levels to Claude. The first level of Claude is claude.ai. Which is just like the chat GBT chat interface.

You’re basically have the thread going and you’re chat chatting via Claude through their large language model. And that’s very effective and it can do a lot of different things. But that’s really level one. Claude Cowork is a different level, so that’s an Ag Agentic desktop app built around deliverables, not prompts.

So if you haven’t done it yet first use claude.ai, create an account. But if you haven’t done, if you haven’t done that, do that first, then go get the Claude Desktop app, and that allows you to get into cowork as well as regular chat. And then the third level is called Claw code, which is like a terminal grade for developers who are.

Creating code and coding with ai. And the thing is, I’m not a developer, but my business partner recently got me set up on cloud code with an agent that we’re custom building and taught me the basics of using the terminal and the command line. And this is where it really stuck for me, the whole concept of vibe coding and how.

Even if I’m not a developer, I can do this stuff. I don’t have intention to like ship lifter LMS product features or anything like that without the talented development team at Lifter LMS being involved in really leading the the code level of the software. But I do find that working in cloud code, I get the and, our custom agent that we’ve developed.

I get some incredible output that is way far and beyond just working with the regular chat interface. As an example, Claude also released Claude Design, which is part of the desktop app, and that is pretty awesome. It is also inside cloud.ai where you can design prototypes, slides, social assets.

Interactive prototypes, even entire websites. And even one of my favorite for course creators is inter interactive content that you can put into your lessons. I’m playing around with club design and it is blowing my mind. If you’ve been in our space for a while, you’re probably familiar with Canva as a graphic design tool that kind of made.

What power users of tools like Adobe’s Photoshop were doing made it accessible to the average person like myself, who’s not a trained designer. This is like that feeling again where you know, you can create great designs in cloud design even faster than what’s possible with Canva as an example, and then.

The final thing is agents. So agents can operate within all four of these layers. And like I mentioned, we’ve been developing a custom agent at Lifter LMS and what makes agents different than, let’s say just working through a chat interface is. One, they can have a lot of memory and additional context and things like certain skills that they’re trained on or, and processes to follow that are way more in that is way more advanced and outcome focused than a call and response through a chat interface.

The first thing I just want to get into is what you as a course creator can do with Claude today to get started faster and to basically accelerate what you can do in a given day. The first is just quiz creation at scale. So if you’re creating a video lesson. The cool thing is a tool like Claude can read the summary like in a second and then help come up with knowledge, check multiple choice questions and things like that.

So quiz generation can really speed up rapidly and it doesn’t mean that you should never like review the quiz questions and put your own human touch on things. But if you find the creation of quizzes to be tedious, you can use Claude to really speed that up. You might also have different content that’s repeatable, that you could build a process around and use Claude for like lesson summaries.

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So let’s say your lessons are really long. They’re one to two hours a piece of video content. You may have the transcript below. A video, which I definitely recommend in a lesson for accessibility. But you can also use Claude to generate a lesson summary, a lesson objective an FAQ library on, the lesson or quiz level as well.

I find sales page generation as a really great place to use Claude, particularly if you’re not a copywriter or a sales professional. One of the great tips for AI is to give the AI an example of what you think is a great looking sales page, and then that, allows the AI to very quickly map what your course is all about to that kind of sales page structure, which you of course can modify and make your own course descriptions and email se sequences.

These are other just great places to use Claude. Translation and localization for international students is a great place to use Claude to really free up your time. I see this a lot in French Canadas as an example where there’ll be an LMS has to be in both French and English, and there’s different ways to do a dual language LMS but.

One of the things you can do is if you have a quiz and there’s a, the English version and then the French version you can do all that translation really fast with Claude. Same with things like lesson transcripts. Let’s say you have in a lesson, a French video and an English video, and you want to crank out those French and English transcripts.

You can do that. Really fast, which is great for accessibility of course as well. And the cool thing too when you think about Claude is you can use the projects to organize what you’re doing. So you could ha you start developing processes around, let’s say creating a sales page for a course. You could have a sales page project, you could have a quizzes project, or.

Maybe you want to use projects where each course has its own project, and that way all the context is related within there. So those are just some pro tips on getting going with Claude. But there’s also an easy way to get started. We’ve actually already solved this for you with chat GPT some time ago.

We have a free course for this. That already exists and it’s, here’s the trick. It has all the prompts and everything in it. You just need to use claw.ai instead of chat GBT to create an entire course from start to finish. So if you go to the Lifter LMS Academy, that’s at academy lifter lms.com, and you find a course called How to Create an Online Course with Chat, GBT.

Take that course and then just use the prompt templates that are in the course. You just copy and paste them over to Claude. Just copy and paste ’em over to Claude instead of chat GPT, and you can use the, same, the exact same flow. The other cool thing about that course is it shows you how to not delegate too much to the AI and not get your leverage, your own unique special.

Experiences and skills. I call it a human knowledge dump. And that’s a great way to add, that’s a great thing to add to as a permanent file in your Claude setup so you don’t have to paste it into every thread. And, because Claude has a longer context window, it’s called, it just means Claude can hold.

More information at one time. You can do huge knowledge dumps and it all fits inside of the context window, which just means that Claude is gonna be more efficient and better to handle large volumes of kind of reference material that you put into an area in Claude while you’re making your online course.

So Claude also has this concept called artifacts that you can use as your lesson canvas. Chat. GBT also has a concept called Canvas that you can work on, but basically it’s side by side editing in real time. So you’re chatting with Claude and on the other side you’re seeing the lesson come together and as you make edits and revisions or add more information.

It’s a more iterative process, which people really like the way that Claude does that. So take the free course on the LiFi MS Academy and just swap in Claude for chat, GPT and you’ll, and use the prompts that exist there and you’re gonna love what you create. And you’re basically getting a ton of instructional design.

Context added in, you’re getting website building LMS website building context added in. So that course is, can really supercharge your output while also still leveraging the best parts of your knowledge, skills, and life experience into the training. So the next thing I wanna talk about is Claude design.

So this is for creating visuals. Even interactive lessons. So we all know you can use a tool like chat, GBT or any kind of AI to create a picture real quick, but cloud design is more higher level than just creating one picture. You can create much more complex projects. So things like course covers, slides.

Social media assets even an articulate storyline replacement that nobody saw coming, you can do with club design. So what are some obvious places that you need visual help as a course creator or a WordPress LMS website builder? We’ve got the featured images for courses and memberships featured images for blog posts and other content outside of your courses.

We’ve got lesson graphics. Could be diagrams, could be info graphics. We have sales page banners. There’s all kinds of things we could do. We could do slide decks. You could export to PowerPoint, PDF, Canva or even HTML. Somebody showed me recently how to do a presentation that I developed in Claude.

But export it as A-H-T-M-L file and then it actually works like a slideshow presenter. So I just jumped in my Zoom webinar that I was doing, and I had this HTML file that included my slideshow presentation that I co-created with Claude. It was amazingly fast and efficient. And the cool thing about claw design is you can put in a bunch of context before you get started on stuff like.

Your design system. So what is a design system? If you don’t know? A design system is everything from your brand guide, maybe your logo, variations of your logo. Your fonts, your typographies, your colors all that stuff that creates a unique brand. Then a design system. Maybe you have certain ways of doing different com components, like a testimonial tends to look like this.

Our headlines call to action. Sections look like this are grid of featured content like blog posts or podcast episodes or courses, looks like this, and so on. And once you give that to Claude Design, it has all of that concepts con that context there. There’s so many artificial intelligence, image generation tools out there, but I would encourage you to check out what you can do with Claude.

And the other thing I just wanna mention in terms of interactive lessons I’m trying to remember the guy’s name. I think it’s Tim. I saw a video. He’s an instructional designer who I. Has an instructional design community and he was showing how to create interactive content that you would make in a tool like articulate storyline or rise.

But doing it inside cloud design, which basically means club design can do what a really expensive. Tool like articulate storyline can do. And it’s not just like a one shot, Hey, build me a course about X. Or a experienced instructional designer is going to approach the claw design tool with a storyboard, a bunch of reference material, and so on.

So we’re building like a complex interactive lesson. What I love about this in the WordPress LMS space, like with lifter LMS, is it’s, you don’t have to just do videos or text space courses, like digital textbooks. You can give fancy, you can build interactive experiences teaching aids, quizzes and things like that.

That’s what the H five P. Technology is for, and there’s a WordPress plugin for bringing all that H five P interactive content in all. That is to say all these tools like the e-learning authoring tools like Articulate storyline, and many more, as well as interactive e-learning content creation tools like H five P Claude Design allows us to create these kinds of interactions.

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And then just easily embed them in our WordPress LMS lessons, which is pretty incredible that you can do that and essentially replace a really expensive tool, like how cloud design can replace Canva, it can replace Photoshop. There’s a lot of interesting things happening in terms of the power you’re getting with these AI tools.

And not only are you replacing a tool, it’s helping you actually use the tool and get the most out of it. So let’s talk about how to get leverage with Claude Cowork and the connectors. So it’s one thing to chat with ai. It’s another thing to give it access to your Google documents your calendar, your email inbox, and so on.

But this is where you go from chat to a agentic use of ai. You’re actually creating projects that maybe they’re on Aron job or a timer, and this, they’re gonna happen every day. So what am I talking about? The first thing to think about with Claude Cowork is that you can do file organization. So you can do research synthesis, you can do document prep, you can do data extraction from unstructured, files.

You could scrape content from an external resource to add to as raw materials for whatever you’re doing. So what are some of the most common connectors that you can connect with Claude? We’ve got Gmail, we’ve got Google Drive, we’ve got calendar systems. We’ve got Notion we can integrate Canva, Stripe, Figma.

These are all just example, other software tools that we could integrate with our connectors. So then instead of us as the human doing something, the Cowork tool could do that for us. What’s a practical example for a course creator? If the cowork has access to your email and you do email support for your students in your courses powered by lifter LMS, you could ask Claude to summarize last month’s student questions by Gmail, and then turn the top three into new lessons in your course.

So that would be an example of really. Leveraging Claude to look for patterns and not just find patterns and report back, but also create a learning asset that you can use going forward. You can also do business intelligence. So if Claude Cowork is connected to your Stripe account let’s say it could look in and just immediate, you could just ask it like, Hey, which one of my courses.

Converted the most last month, and then what do you recommend I focus on? Or something like that. Let’s say you have a huge catalog of courses. You can think about it as like chatting to your e-commerce analytics and that sort of thing. It’s super powerful. I’ve connected our Claude AI agent to our Google Analytics as well as our.

Podcast analytics. And now that because this business is almost 15 years old, been podcasting for almost 15 years. All, there’s so much data in the analytics, it’s almost overwhelming for me to look at. But I can talk to our Claude powered AI agent and just ask it to look for, Hey, what are the most popular topics?

It can basically look through Google Analytics, cross reference what’s going on in SoundCloud, our podcast hosting service, and help figure out like what kind of episodes are people most excited about and so on. It’s really blowing my mind of what, because the AI kind of has unlimited shelf space, whereas my brain can only hold so much analytics and data and reporting.

I’m able to be much more data-driven, informed, and deal with that data lake of a large amount of data that’s hard for the human to gr that the artificial intelligence can. The next thing I wanted to mention to you is using Claude to become a super coach. So what do by becoming a super coach.

The thing is, first we have the experts curse, which means sometimes it’s really hard for us as subject matter experts to teach to a beginner. ’cause we were already so far along, we kinda lost the beginner’s mind. Maybe We have so much information and skills and we’re not trained as a teacher, so we don’t know how to organize it or coach somebody effectively.

But. Using Claude you can take that body of knowledge and extract frameworks that are approachable to your coaching clients at the stage of development that they’re at, and solve the experts core curse In that way, the Claude can also help you construct your offer.

That’s a big part of the expert’s curse in that we have too much information. We tend to make our signature course too big ’cause we don’t know how to trim it down to what our target market needs. We’re building a, what I call a giant resource course, which won’t be effective. We may need to brainstorm the actual offer that we have with.

Ai how do I support my people? Should I do an online community? Should I do private coaching, group coaching? Should I do virtual events, office hours, all these things. And figuring out your offer as a coach is, super helpful. Especially even refining the basics like the customer avatar, who is my.

Coaching, ideal coaching client. What’s the ideal customer profile or student avatar? Some, a lot of great coaches will do an intake process where they need to take various data points on where the client is at. So if it, was a fitness coach, it might have to do with the fitness level, current fitness level.

If it was a business coach, we might need information around. The niche how, much our annual revenue is our team size and so on. If it was a relationship coach, we may need some history of what are the, your biggest parenting challenges or dating challenges and so on. And then what Claude can do is can help the coach prescribe and go into the course catalog.

Of resources already available that are relevant based on this person’s intake form of data for that client to get started with. So that’s just one example in terms of speeding up with the intake process. And if Claude has eyes on your current frameworks and stuff and you’re getting these intakes, it may identify a gap of a new.

A new framework that you could create or resource to help your clients get results that may be missing from your current offer. And I also just wanna men mention one of the things with Claude is a pro tip, A friend of mine over at very good plugins the team behind WP Fusion built a tool for persistent memory.

It’s a persistent memory layer for Claude called Auto Mem. So that’s at auto mem.ai. We use that with our agent to have the persistent memory. And once you get going with Claude in this way you, it’s almost like you can’t go back, like your mind’s blown when you first use chat GPT or where when you first use claude.ai, the chat interface.

But once you start working with agents, then the persistent memory comes into play. It feels like a super superpower. Yeah, so it’s, all about amplifying yourself and not replacing yourself. And these are just some pro tips on how to best use Claude. But I’m also just encouraging you to just go learn.

If you haven’t done the desktop app for Claude yet, do that. If you haven’t done cowork yet, do that, which is gonna get you started on the basics of agents. If you’ve never done Claude code, try it. Even if you’re not a developer, and learn how to type in the command line. I never thought I would do that in my life, but now I spend most of my time in Claude Code and I’m not a developer.

The output, my understanding clog code is the most powerful way to use that. And there’s different. Plan levels, right? So there’s like the $20 a month level, and I’m sure these prices can change. And, then there’s like the a hundred dollars a month level, and then there’s something called Max, which I think is $200 a month.

I’m currently at the $100 a month level. But just get started do the free stuff if you can afford it, get on the $20 a month starter premium plan to get more tokens, which just means that you’ll be able to do more with Claude. And then once you get up and your output is really getting strong, it makes sense.

I was like glad to upgrade to the a hundred dollars a month point because of how much value and time saving I was getting. It is, it’s a total. No brainer. Claude is a co-pilot. It’s not the captain. Do not give up your seat at the front of your education company. I have to do that. I have to try hard not to try, give too much to Claude.

And what I mean by that is. If you do the first 10% of the, like setting up the project, then Claude does the the middle 80% and then you do the last 10% to like Polish, introduce your unique insights and so on. That’s what I find is like really good. The idea that you spend the first 1% to give something to Claude and whatever comes out, it’s the finished product and you walk away.

That’s, I don’t recommend that. Even as Claude continues to improve always inject your humanity in the beginning, the during and the after. ’cause it’s gonna make a superior product. Whatever it is you’re working on, you still need other tools besides flawed. So Claude is disrupting a lot of things right now.

But you still may use other AI tools to do various things. You’ve still got video editing to do, video hosting to do. You’ve got your learning management system, lifter, LMS, and your WordPress site. This is a pro tip for you. I just want to encourage you, if you’re not necessarily all in on WordPress, keep an eye on the space because because of the open source nature of WordPress and the community around the project it is getting easier.

Even with Claude to quote Vibe code a website. But trust me, when I say at the end of the day, 95% of people are gonna want and need a content management system like WordPress and the LMS that sits on top of it like lifter LMS, to actually run the day-to-day and be a tool that both the AI and the humans.

Can really feel comfortable, stable, strong, and secure. And so Claude is the multiplier. Try it out if you have not done it yet. The smart playbook is augmentation, not replacement. The course creator, the top course creators in 2026 are using artificial intelligence as a force. Multiplier on top of human judgment.

And I would encourage you to do just try one cloud upgrade this week. Try the desktop app if you haven’t yet. Try cowork. Try design try cloud code if you haven’t tried it yet. And most importantly, if you’re really trying to get a course out and you haven’t done that yet. Go to the Lifter LMS Academy, that’s at academy dot lifter lms.com.

Look for the free course called How to Create an Online Course with Chat GBT. Jump into it. Every lesson has training, and then below it has a prompt that you can use to move forward in the course creation process. And just swap out Claude for chat, GPT. And I think you’re gonna be blown away at the results that you get.

If you know somebody, a course creator, who is just using cat GBT currently and hasn’t tried Claude and you’ve tried Claude yet, I would encourage you to tell your friends to give Claude a try, and also check out our course on creating an online course with ai. Always keep the human in there.

We want to amplify ourselves. Not replace ourselves to create the best work to help the most people with the impact from our online courses. Thank you for checking out this episode. We really appreciate it, and we’ll see you in the next one. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get WP Fusion NowMost membership sites do not die from lack of effort. They collapse under their own weight. In this solo episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett walks through why most membership sites fail, and the three-part alignment model that keeps the winners standing. This one is for course creators, coaches, and education entrepreneurs running (or about to launch) a membership site on LifterLMS or any WordPress LMS. If you have ever added “one more” benefit to your offer and quietly regretted it, pull up a chair.

The failure pattern is almost always the same. Creators get excited, they hear about group coaching, template libraries, second memberships, surprise upsells, and they bolt all of it onto the site. What started as a clean offer becomes a Rube Goldberg machine that nobody wants to run, least of all the owner.

Chris breaks the fix into three pieces that have to align: the business model, the pricing, and the offer stack. Miss one and the site stops paying rent on your time. Get all three in sync and the membership starts to compound.

He walks through four core subscription-style models worth knowing. Training-based. Resource library. Community-first. And the Netflix-of-learning catalog. Each one has its own rhythm, pricing ceiling, and content obligations. The fastest way to kill a membership is to build one model while secretly trying to run another.

Most membership sites collapse under their own unnecessary complexity.

Chris Badgett

Take Funk Roberts and Over 40 Alpha. Training-based model, weekly live coaching, a clear niche (men over 40), tens of thousands of paying members at $29 to $49 per month. The business model, the price, and the offer stack all reinforce each other. Or Ziv Raviv and Balloon Artist College, a six-figure business in a niche with roughly 3,000 people in the whole addressable market. The alignment carries the day.

Chris also covers three off-pattern models worth a look: one-time lifetime deals (great for early-adopter funding), cohort memberships (group moves together through a defined stretch), and continuing education or professional association memberships. CE memberships are quietly one of the most durable and profitable categories on WordPress right now, especially in regulated fields like healthcare, legal, and the trades. The LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on handles compliance tracking end to end.

On pricing, Chris leans on a story from SaaS pricing legend Patrick Campbell, who famously tells audiences, “Let me guess. You just guessed.” Most creators do. The fix is good, better, best tiers (three, maybe four, no more), annual over monthly when the price allows, and a real free or $1 trial at the front door to filter serious buyers from tire-kickers.

The offer stack is what sits inside the box once somebody joins. Courses are the anchor. Templates, live events, coaching, community, members-only newsletters, all of it can compound value, but also compound your workload. Add it only if you can keep the promise.

Chris closes with a three-question gut check. Does your model fit your niche? Does your pricing match your member’s willingness to pay? Does your offer stack support retention without burning you out? If the answer to any one is no, that is exactly where the collapse is starting.

Here’s What You’ll Learn* Why complexity, not demand, is what usually kills a membership site * The four main subscription membership models (training, resource library, community-first, Netflix-of-learning) * Three alternative models worth considering (lifetime deals, cohorts, continuing education) * How to price using good, better, best tiers, plus how to think about annual versus monthly * How LifterLMS access plans map to any membership model you can imagine

Key Takeaways* Align three things before adding anything else: business model, pricing, offer stack * Cap pricing plans at three (four max). More tiers confuse. Fewer leave revenue on the table * Default to annual pricing with a 20% discount when your price point allows * Offer a free or $1 trial to lift conversion and filter serious buyers * Play inside the LifterLMS access plan UI until the settings feel native. The tech is already there. The work is the business thinking * Use the three-question gut check: does the model fit the niche, does the pricing match the value, does the offer stack support retention without burning you out

Resources Mentioned* LifterLMS Academy (home for the free and paid training memberships) * Course Pricing Focuser (free course on the LifterLMS Academy) * The Perfect Offer Playbook (premium training on the LifterLMS Academy) * LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on * LifterLMS Social Learning * Document Library Pro by Barn2 * BuddyBoss * Funk Roberts on Over 40 Alpha (LMScast episode) * Tim McIvor’s CPD platform for school psychologists (LifterLMS case study) * Ziv Raviv on niche membership sites (LMScast episode) * Ziv Raviv on $377K in 5 years (LMScast episode) * Alex Standiford on Siren Affiliates + Netflix-of-learning (LMScast episode) * Siren Affiliates * Dan Martell’s SaaS Academy * Patrick Campbell on ProfitWell (sold to Paddle)

About the HostChris Badgett is the co-founder and CEO of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Chris hosts LMScast, the #1 podcast for course creators, membership site owners, and education entrepreneurs. Together, we build the future of online education.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and in this solo episode we’re going to look at why most membership sites fail, and a model that you can use today so that your membership site does not fail and has the highest likelihood of success. Most membership sites collapse under their own unnecessary complexity and lack of key missing pieces that we’re going to talk about in this episode. The winners keep three things aligned. The first thing is the business model, the pricing, and then the offer stack.

Just to jump in, why membership sites collapse is like why WordPress websites collapse. When you’re new to WordPress, you get really excited about all these different plugins, and you start installing all these things, and you hear about this tool so you add it to your site. You just overcomplicate and build a Rube Goldberg machine of a website.

The same thing happens with membership business models. Part of the reason this happens is because education entrepreneurs and coaches and course creators, they get really excited, and for good reason, and they hear about a new idea like, oh, I should host office hours, so I’m going to add office hours to my membership site. Oh, I should add a template library. I’m going to add that to my membership site. I’m going to do one-on-one coaching, group coaching. I’m going to do this upsell. I’m going to do this continuity offer. I’m going to create a second membership about X. I’m going to put part of this course in the membership, and then the rest of the course in another membership. You see where I’m going. Things start to get overly complicated without a structural foundation.

I do want to highlight, we do have a training course on the LifterLMS Academy called the Perfect Offer Playbook, which gets into the offer aspect and building up your offer stack. It’s a really in-depth training, so go check that out.

As we discuss this, I want to define some terms for you because it’s easy to get a little confused. We have the LMS, the learning management system like LifterLMS. We have courses, so you could have big courses or mini courses, which are basically structured content of lessons that provide structured data that a student can learn from through videos, content, quizzes, assignments, whatever.

Then you have the concept of a membership. The way I’m using a membership is to define what content is protected. Perhaps you want to put multiple courses inside of a membership, so you’re creating a course bundle. You can also use a membership to protect and sell access to other parts of your website, outside of courses, like a template library, premium blog content, a calendar with events on it, and so on.

Then there’s the concept of the subscription. That is a recurring payment usually at a fixed amount, a recurring payment mechanism. In the world of LifterLMS, we have a concept called access plans. What an access plan allows you to do is you can put one or multiple access plans on a course and/or a membership that defines the pricing and the access rules around accessing that course or that membership.

It’s important to get clear on the difference between a course, a membership, a subscription, and an access plan. The LifterLMS access plan is the most flexible system that I’ve seen on the internet for pricing. You can do any pricing model and access model you could possibly think of, from one time payments, to free trials, to lifetime access, to payment plans, to group access plans. What else could we do here? We could do yearly, we could do monthly, we could do daily. There’s all kinds of start dates, end dates, enrollment periods. All this is possible with LifterLMS and the access plan system.

The main thing so that your membership site does not fail is to align three things: the business model, the pricing, and the offer stack. If you miss one of those, or overcomplicate one of those, your membership site is just going to collapse under its own weight. Let’s plant ourselves on the membership site business models first.

I’m going to go over four subscription style membership models and start there. The first one is one of my favorites, which is what I call the training membership, or a training based membership site. This is where you usually have a catalog of courses, or potentially one big signature program type course.

Example. LifterLMS user, and we did a podcast with him. Funk Roberts has a training membership called the Over 40 Alpha Brotherhood, which has 10,000 paying members at $29 to $49 a month with weekly live coaching calls. You can check out the case study we have on Funk on our membership site.

A training membership, or a training based membership site, will have courses, but then often other benefits like access to group coaching, whether that’s live or virtual, and so on. We’ve got some exciting stuff in LifterLMS 10.0 for group coaching events, virtual and in person, and how you can integrate events into your LMS. But that is a conversation for another day.

The next membership site business model I’d like to explain is what I call the resource library membership. This is courses plus a searchable library of downloadable templates, swipe files, and tools. For example, LifterLMS has its own media protection mechanism that solved one of the biggest content privacy issues in WordPress, which is that when you upload a file to your WordPress media library, it’s public. It’s not actually private. Anyways, LifterLMS users can actually protect files that they upload to their WordPress media library and include them in their courses and memberships. That could include downloadable templates, PDF documents, audio files, video files, whatever.

There’s also a really sweet implementation you can do with a third party plugin by Barn2 called Document Library Pro. If you’re going for a very resource rich template library that has a ton of files in it, you need a lot of organization and filterable, searchable document libraries. Check out Document Library Pro, which works great with LifterLMS. We also have a blog post on our site, as well as on the Document Library Pro or Barn2 website, about how to use LifterLMS and Document Library Pro together. Essentially the second membership site business model is the resource library. You may not be leading with the courses, but you have some, but you also have this rich collection of files that helps the ideal learner in your membership.

The third business model of subscription style membership is the community first membership. This is where courses plus community is the primary product. You could have forums, live events in person or virtual. You could have peer accountability. You could have mini mastermind groups. Essentially the content supports the tribe, not the other way around.

In this age of artificial intelligence and isolation, and people going more and more to the internet to connect with other people, community-based membership sites are very important. When you throw in the education component, so we have courses inside of our community, community can become a very sticky type of membership when they’re well designed around a specific customer avatar or learner profile. That is the community first membership. I should also mention LifterLMS has a social learning add-on, so you can quickly turn your WordPress LMS website into a social online community site. It’s sort of like having your own kind of private Facebook group, but on your website that you own and control. So that’s the community first membership.

The fourth subscription style membership business model is what I call a Netflix of learning. If you think about Netflix, it’s like a collection of movies and shows, and you pay a subscription every month for access to the catalog of content. One subscription unlocks the whole library. A Netflix of learning is an awesome opportunity. Those are great for broad audiences with lots of niche interests.

In my early days of building membership sites, I worked with some photography focused membership sites where they had courses and lots of niche topics within photography, from wedding to product shots, to portraits, to architecture, and so on. It was like a Netflix of learning for photographers. This is a really cool membership site if you are prolific, and/or you’re also leading a community and getting a bunch of creators together to all contribute to the Netflix of learning.

We also did a podcast here on LMScast with Alex from Siren Affiliates, where we go over how to exactly build a Netflix of learning with Siren Affiliates, WordPress, and LifterLMS. There’s also a dedicated YouTube video that shows click by click how to build a Netflix of learning or Udemy clone type site on our YouTube channel. Go subscribe to the LifterLMS YouTube channel if you have not done that yet.

I’d like to give you three other popular alternative membership site models. The other three models change the pace or the cadence. One of these is called the one-time or lifetime payment memberships. This is something like a course plus lifetime access paid once. It’s basically evergreen content with no ongoing deliverables. You could think of it like an AppSumo style, lifetime deal pricing. Zero churn risk, one shot at the revenue.

Sometimes when you’re first launching your membership, you might want to do an early adopter or founding member offer like this, where you plan on doing one of the subscription or recurring revenue based memberships later. For those people that take the plunge into your membership early, join you in the early days, they might get a lifetime membership for one time cost, and they get rewarded by not having a recurring payment. It also helps you fund the early days of your membership site, and also to test and validate your membership site idea.

The other thing you can do is cohort based memberships. LifterLMS, as an example, has a concept called course cohorts, where you can have different cohorts that use the same course over and over again, but for different groups of people moving through at a different time. You can also do this at the membership level, where you have cohorts of people that belong to say the 2026 spring membership, which has its own course catalog, community, and other features. Cohort based memberships are really about a group of people joining at the same time, at a similar stage, and then moving through the training in the membership or in all the content and resources together, which can be very powerful.

I joined a great program by Dan Martell called SaaS Academy. That was a membership I was in for two years. It was not cohort based. I came in and there were a couple new people around when I came in, and then every week or month there were always new people joining, and so on. It was still great, but it wasn’t cohort based, and it actually worked really well. I liked the way he had it. For some membership sites, it might make sense to really lock in, move people through together, particularly if you’re doing a lot of instructor led training in person or virtually, and you’re working through a process, so everybody is on the same page as they work through the membership.

The other type of membership site, which we’re seeing more and more of in LifterLMS, is the continuing education or professional association membership site. This is where you have things like courses for continuing education units, or CEUs. LifterLMS has a dedicated add-on called LifterLMS Continuing Education that has everything you need to build a compliance tracking and continuing education business from your WordPress site.

It’s very popular to see these kind of membership sites in regulated professions like healthcare, legal, and the trades. There’s often a recurring need to stay certified, recertify, or get new credit hours every year. We’ve done a couple interviews on LMScast, like with Tim McIvor, who does continuing education for school psychologists. There was another one we did a while back on pharmaceutical continuing education. Continuing education is a major profit center for memberships, particularly around industries that have an ongoing need for recurring continuing education. These membership sites can be very profitable, successful, and sticky.

Alright, so we talked about the membership model. You just have to get really clear on what it is you’re building, what is the business model, and you need to challenge your assumptions. Sometimes just get started. You don’t have to figure all this out perfectly, but it’s important to keep revisiting and ask yourself, do I have the right membership business model for my membership site that’s in alignment with what my market wants, the pricing, and what it is that I actually offer?

Let’s talk about the offer stack. The courses are the fundamental piece of the offer. They’re the anchor. If you’re using LifterLMS and LifterLMS’s membership functionality, the offer stack is the courses plus everything else you layer on top. It could just be more courses. You’ve got that, start there. You can do course bundles where you do all the courses, the Netflix style, or you could do groups of courses and course bundles. The offer stack can continue to grow. By offer stack, I mean once somebody purchases your membership and now they’re an enrolled active user on your learning management system website, what do they get? What’s inside the box?

We talked about courses. What else could they get? They could get templates, they could get swipe files, they could get downloadable assets, they could get other files. Or even I see people doing things like custom GPTs, or certain spreadsheets, or Canva files, or other kind of newsletters that are for members only. These are fast to consume, high perceived value, easy to add monthly.

It’s really important if you’re charging a recurring monthly fee to add recurring value, which means you’ve got to keep those things up to date. You’ve got to keep adding new templates, downloadable assets, resources. If you do a members only newsletter, you’ve got to keep that rolling monthly. You want to be sure not to over commit so that your offer stack is sustainable for you as a creator.

The other thing that can add an incredible amount of value to your membership is live events. LifterLMS has an events add-on. When you’re watching this, it may have come out, or it is about to come out as of this recording. We were just testing, it’s in the final stages of testing for a launch. That basically allows you to do virtual and in person events from your membership site, whether they’re location based or virtual. We’ve got direct Zoom integration and so on.

It’s in the offer stack that we can add things like group coaching calls, or one-on-one private coaching calls, or an in-person event, like on location somewhere in the world. It could be a hybrid model where we do both. These synchronous, or asynchronous but replayable, events like webinars, recorded workshops, guest trainer sessions, all these can get added into the offer stack in addition to courses.

Just a pro tip for you. If you ever do guest instructor stuff, some people use LifterLMS, they use a structure of a course, they use each lesson to house a specific webinar or workshop. That way you can use the existing course structure in a slightly non-traditional way to put all the webinars in one place, or put all the guest workshops in one place, and so on. Just an idea for you.

The other thing is the community part of the offer stack. You could do that with the LifterLMS Social Learning add-on. You could do that with tools like BuddyBoss, or a forum, Slack community, Discord, Circle. There’s so many different ways to do online community. You can even do in-person community if your target market is in the same geography.

I just want to reiterate in the offer stack, some kind of coaching or one-on-one access can be very powerful. This could be one-on-one private coaching monthly or even weekly. It could be group based. It could be a private forum that the site owner is active in. It could be like a red phone where you can call the coach in an emergency. It could be email access, it could be text message access, or something like a Telegram community for support. When you give one-on-one level support, this really needs to be priced appropriately or in the premium tier. That’s a very important part of your support mechanism, which by the way, we talk about in the Perfect Offer Playbook training course, which is on the LifterLMS Academy. Go check that out.

The subscription economy is estimated to hit 330 billion in 2026, growing at roughly 12% annually. This stack matters because there is a lot of demand for subscriptions in the world. A lot of us think, oh man, I don’t want another subscription that I’ve got to sign up for. But if you do your offer stack correctly with your membership site, you can take a piece of that $330 billion subscription economy. That statistic is from InternetRetailing.net.

The next thing I want to talk about is pricing. Now that we’ve figured out our business model, we’ve figured out our offer stack, how much do we charge for that? Let’s talk about the pricing. Before I dive in, I want you to know that we do dive deep in a free training on the LifterLMS Academy, a free course called the Course Pricing Focuser, which is going to go super deep on pricing. I would encourage you to look at that. I’m going to remind you at the end on how to get access to that and a lot of other things through a free membership. So stay tuned.

The price is really where most membership site owners guess. The winners of the membership site game don’t guess. They match the price to the model. I remember being at one of Dan Martell’s in person SaaS Academy events, and there was a pricing expert and a subscription economy expert there. His name’s Patrick Campbell. He sold his Price Intelligently software to a company called Paddle, I believe, for $200 million. This guy is one of the top pricing experts in the world.

I was basically learning from him about software pricing. One of the funniest things he says when he does a talk on stage is he asks the audience how they chose the price for their offer. Then he says, wait, let me guess. He holds up a finger in the air, like he’s just going to lick his finger and he’s just going to guess. What he says is, let me guess, you just guessed. That’s exactly true. Most people don’t put a lot of effort into pricing, or they just do a quick look at competitors and fall somewhere in the range. But there’s a whole science and art to pricing.

Again, the Course Pricing Focuser course goes into a lot of detail, and I highly recommend that as a takeaway so that you can nail your price. But the first thing is recurring versus one-time pricing. Recurring is obviously better because it compounds over time. One time is great, but you limit your revenue. It’s just per user. You’re constantly needing to get new users. Basically you have to get really clear and honest with yourself about the recurring value that you’re going to do if you want to do recurring. You need to make sure that you can sustain the promise that you’re making for recurring value over the long term.

One of my favorite pricing tricks I learned from a pricing expert named Marcos is the three tier pricing approach. He calls it good, better, best. It’s like bronze, silver, gold type pricing. According to MembershipSolutions.com, good, better, best pricing generates roughly 60% more revenue per cohort than single plan pricing. It’s really important once you start building pricing plans to not overdo it. I recommend not doing more than three. You can probably get away with four. But any more than that and you’re just confusing people and overcomplicating your offer.

Really, the reason a good, better, best pricing plan makes more revenue is because you’re able to capture more of the market. You want the middle plan, the better plan, to be the one that most people buy. The cool thing about having one lower than that is that if the middle plan is too expensive but you can still add value in a lower plan, you get somebody else in the door. Then there’ll be people in your market who are not price sensitive, who want everything. Let’s say you offer the private coaching in the top plan. It costs five times more than the middle plan, or even more. You can charge a lot more for that.

There’s always a segment of your market that is where your primary offer is just out of reach, while at the same time there’s people in your market who could afford to pay way more and get more value. That’s why good, better, best pricing works. There’s other reasons it works, but those are the main reasons.

Then there’s the decision of annual versus monthly. If you can go annual, I recommend that, because annual subscribers are roughly 40% less likely to cancel than monthly subscribers and carry significantly higher lifetime value. That data was found on the MembershipSolutions.com website. Monthly is cool because what it allows you to do is, if the annual price is really expensive, it’s much easier to charge, let’s say, a thousand dollars a month than $10,000 a year in general. In that case, if I was at that price point, I would probably consider monthly.

If you’re in a lower price point offering, annual only is a great idea. Let’s say your membership is only $50 a month, and let’s say you do it annually for $499 a year. That’s still within reach. What you can also do is put a toggle on your website and give people the option to do either, where they could do annual or monthly, then leave it up to them to decide.

The other thing, when you do an annual and monthly offer, just a pro tip for you out there, the annual plan in general is recommended that it’s discounted by 20%. When I say a thousand dollars a month or $10,000 a year, what I’m saying is it’s not $12,000 a year. I’m giving you two months free. That’s another way to think about that 20% discount if you’re trying to nail your pricing. If you give them monthly and annual, on the annual option you can just multiply your monthly price by 10 and not 12, which gives you a good spot where if they commit to annual they’re getting two months for free, which incentivizes people to go for the annual to save money if they’re going to be in this for the long term.

I’m a big fan of trials for membership sites. There’s a couple types of trials. There’s free trials, there’s cheap trials, and then there’s expensive trials. What do I mean by that? A free trial is fantastic because you’re literally saying, hey, I’ll give you a day for free, two weeks for free, a month for free. I believe so much in my product that I’ll let you in the door, and then after that trial period is over, your credit card or PayPal account will start getting charged. And by the way, you can cancel if you don’t like what’s going on.

I’m a huge fan of free trials. I think they’re great. I also like paid trials, a little bit of skin in the game. I’m a big fan of the $1 trial. Just getting somebody to pay even a nominal amount of money is really helpful as a filter for serious buyers and to lift the conversion and eliminate some kind of lower quality folks that don’t really have any intention. They just wanted to see what was in here for free, but they’re not that serious. By having a $1 trial, it really filters out and you get some really great leads in your platform.

If you want to do more sales by having that dollar there, that paywall, it reduces the amount of people that you can reach out to if you’re trying to promote your main offer, or do some live connecting with them to see if they’re a fit, answer their questions, and make sure they stick around and decide to stay. So it’s trials. LifterLMS has trials built in. It’s optional. You can turn it on in your membership access plans.

Then the expensive trial is where the first payment is actually much bigger than the ongoing payment. This is what’s also known as a continuity offer. The trial period might be a thousand dollars the first month, and then cheap, like $30 a month ongoing after that. That’s a different style of trial or continuity offer where most of the value comes in the first month, but then there’s still ongoing value but a lesser amount until they cancel.

In terms of churn, when you’re pricing, nobody is going to stay with you absolutely forever. There might be a few, but it’s important to figure out what’s an acceptable churn rate for you. I’m a fan of recurring cancel anytime forever access plans, but I also like to hold in my mind that I want to get my person in my membership successful and have the transformation, solve their problem, help them discover the opportunity in a set period of time, ideally.

As an example, when I joined the SaaS Academy membership, I looked at it as my version of graduate school. I did not go to graduate school or university, but that’s typically in the United States a two year program. I was like, you know what, I’ll try this thing, and if it’s good I’ll renew for a second year. They did annual, by the way, and it was good. I stayed for a second year. At the end of the second year, I decided to move on, and I was super grateful for my time and I learned a lot. My business grew by 2.6 times. It was awesome. But it had a shelf life of about two years for me.

Some people stayed in there for one year. Some people, there’s people in there that have been in there probably for seven years or eight years, however long it’s been going, and there’s a couple different tiers in there. My whole point is to think about healthy churn. Churn, if you’re not used to the terminology, is what percentage of your people cancel every month or every year. It really depends on the industry.

Usually if you’re going after the higher end of the market, more enterprise or more professional into the market with whatever your membership site content topic is about, you’re going to have a lower churn than something that has more of a market that’s more price sensitive and maybe more hobby based, less serious or professional. That’s okay. Figure out your churn rate. If you could do 3% or 5% monthly churn, that’s pretty healthy. That’s a good target.

The goal, if you really want to get into the math of it all, is where you have net negative churn, which is where your existing members are referring so much that even with the natural churn rate that is there, more people keep coming in the site. It just explodes exponentially. Or maybe if you’re using something like LifterLMS Groups, people keep adding more team members. It’s known as net negative churn, where you’re just doing amazing.

The final piece of pricing math that we’re going to talk about today is the lifetime value, or LTV, to cost to acquire a customer, or CAC, ratio. Basically what that means is that if we do a three to one ratio of lifetime value to CAC, that’s good. What that means is if it costs me a thousand dollars to acquire a customer, that’s my CAC, my cost to acquire a customer. Let’s say the average lifetime value, or LTV, of one of my members is $3,000. That’s great. That means that for every $1,000 you spend to acquire a member, you get $3,000, which is basically the average of retention and churn and all that baked in.

You’ve got to find your healthy customer acquisition method, whether that’s paid or organic, and also get super clear on your churn and your lifetime value of your average member. All that comes together to create a training based membership site that is aligned.

I wanted to give a specific example of a membership site where this alignment was really done well with the offer stack, the business model, and the pricing. He’s been on the show several times now. His name is Ziv Raviv, and he’s an expert at building niche membership sites. He’s a really interesting guy. He’s in a lot of different niches. I like one of his early projects, which was Balloon Artist College, which is a membership site that helps child entertainers or balloon artists start and grow their businesses.

This is a really unique niche. There was only like 3,000 balloon artists in the world, or in the addressable market that Ziv was going after. I find incredible that he made $277,000 a year when I interviewed him, and this was a while ago, about his membership site. The business model works here because it’s in a tiny niche, and the pricing was good. It wasn’t super expensive. The balloon artist has a lower willingness or ability to pay. His offer stack really matched up with what the community needed. So he had courses, community, tactical resources. Nothing extra, nothing missing. Ziv is one of my favorite education entrepreneurs. I look up to him and see him as a shining example of lifting up others through education, our company mission. If you want to learn more about Ziv, I would encourage you to go listen to all the episodes we’ve done with Ziv Raviv. I think there’s been three of them.

I want to just go over a little bit of the technical pieces of how to think about putting all this together. This is the part that most people skip, which is that the technical mechanism for setting up your membership site is already in your learning management system. The LifterLMS access plans, you’ve got to get Zen with them. Play around with them. Try to come up with your good, better, best strategy. Play around with just the settings, so you can see, oh, I could do the sale pricing, I could do a trial, I could do a free thing, I could do sell to groups. It’s just going to stir your imagination.

You’ll see the payment flexibility options, like one time, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or until cancellation. Duration can run indefinitely, or you can, if you have an eight week program and that’s it, you can do that. Look at the visibility options. Plans can be public, featured, or hidden. If you need to create a secret backdoor plan to your membership to let somebody in who’s doing some testing for you, or as a benefit to an industry partner, you can create these kind of secret backdoors or hidden access plans.

The main point is that every one of the models we covered here maps to a specific access plan configuration in LifterLMS. The tech is already there. The work is the business thinking, not the setup. Get your offer stack together, choose a price, choose a business model, and then come up with pricing and keep working on it. This is one of those things where for your membership site to succeed and not to fail, you’ve got to test all your assumptions and keep tweaking and fine tuning. Sometimes a little change can dramatically impact something.

For example, if you have a more expensive membership, let’s say it is a thousand dollars a month, and maybe you’ve got a couple people in there and it’s going all right and they love it, but you’re just not closing sales. Potentially introducing a one week free trial or dollar trial could literally be game changing. Just by removing that friction and letting people basically try before they buy or commit to the ongoing payment.

Here’s the whole alignment right here. It’s just answering three questions. Does your model fit your niche? That’s question one. Does the pricing match your value, your member’s willingness to pay? And does your offer stack support retention without burning you out? If the answer is no, this is where the collapse is happening, or something is missing that you really need to fill in.

I would also encourage you to keep simplicity in mind. It’s really easy with a membership site to try to add in too many bells and whistles, benefits, different options, pricing tier complexity. Keep it super simple. You can test things. If you add a benefit that nobody really uses, take it away. Or if you’re unsure if a benefit’s going to work, add it, see what happens. If it works, great, keep it.

I wanted to encourage you to check out a real membership using LifterLMS. If you go to the LifterLMS Academy, that’s at academy.lifterlms.com, I’ve got two memberships for you. One is free and the other is paid. No matter what, definitely get the free one, which includes our Course Pricing Focuser course, as well as a bunch of other free trainings to help you. If you want to go big and get all our free stuff and all the premium training on the LifterLMS Academy, sign up for that one. Just go to academy.lifterlms.com, click on memberships at the top, and you’ll see that.

The LifterLMS Academy has a bunch of courses that you can get into individually if you want. Some are free, some are paid. We have two memberships that basically give you access to some or all of the courses. Go check that out.

Just keep in mind, your LMS is a membership site. Align the three pieces and let the complexity collapse into something you can actually run and manage for your membership. Last time, those three pieces are your membership site business model, your pricing, and then your offer stack, what’s included in your membership. I’m Chris from LMScast. I want to encourage you to keep building your membership site. Keep going. Keep taking action, and we’ll see you in the next episode. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get WP Fusion NowIn this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett takes a deep and honest look back at more than 12 years of creating LifterLMS, detailing seven big blunders that molded both the product and his evolution as an entrepreneur. He starts out by discussing content and SEO, stating that one of his first regrets was not learning how to write effectively for search engines earlier.

Even while the team regularly produced blogs, videos, and podcasts, he subsequently came to the conclusion that they might have had a greater early edge in search visibility especially in the cutthroat WordPress ecosystem, had they produced more strategic, technically optimized textual material. He then discusses supplementary aspects that are under-marketed. Although LifterLMS is well-known for its ability to create courses, he notes that many users were unaware of the full potential of the platform since significant features like memberships, social learning, and coaching tools were not adequately articulated.

He also questions the widely held belief in entrepreneurship that markets act rationally. Chris discusses how branding, emotion, perception, and “vibes” frequently influence user decisions rather than just rational comparisons. This is evident when rival WordPress tools become dominant not usually because they are objectively superior, but rather because they rose to the top of their respective categories early on and gained a great deal of reputation and trust. Design is yet another important lesson. He acknowledges that design was not given enough attention early in the company’s expansion.

Over time, he discovered that even in cases when the core product is solid, UI/UX, branding, and visual presentation have a significant impact on trust and conversion. He considers how the product and brand impression were greatly enhanced by subsequent investments in expert design teams. After that, he discusses operations, stressing the significance of recording standard operating procedures (SOPs).

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we’re doing a solo episode about seven things I got wrong over the 12 plus years of building lifter LMS. Now, it’s important to note that I’m gonna be talking about my journey with lifter LMS, but the failures that I had, these top seven failures that I have.

Apply to any entrepreneur, but especially to education entrepreneurs. So I also wanted to note that normalizing making mistakes and failures is something I really believe in. As a parent, as a boss in personal development, all of that. So as an example on our all hands meeting, we have at Lifter LMS, there’s a section in the meeting called Failures.

And in that section anybody can add anything that they failed on since the last meeting. Because failure is just feedback. It’s essentially a learning opportunity. And if you pretend they don’t exist, then you’re really limiting your ability to grow. I wanna celebrate the failures here. Be open and honest and vulnerable and share them with you.

And if I could go back 12, 13 years, I would try to help the earlier version of myself avoid these failures. So as a brief origin story of Lifter LMS, I used to do nothing with web technology at all. I used to. Live on a glacier that you can only get to by helicopter and manage a sled dog tour business.

There’s a couple hundred dogs up there, about 30 people, and that’s what I did for almost a decade before lifter LMS. After I left Alaska I started building websites for myself, then for clients. Then launched my own online courses in the permaculture niche. Also partnering with experts. I focused my web design agency on the LMS or course creator coach Niche.

I merged my agency with another agency who had some bigger clients, and we joined forces and went even deeper into courses, coaching, marketing automation, WordPress, custom development, and through some of our clients over there, we developed. The LMS that never existed in WordPress that we really wanted, and that was launched in 2013 or 14.

And when we first launched Lifter LMS, we got 42 customers in that first week, and that was the beginning of lifter LMS. And here we are 12 years later, 12 plus years later, it’s been a very windy road. There’s been some ups, there’s been some downs. We’re gonna talk about the downs today, and I want you to learn and grow and try to avoid these mistakes in your business and your entrepreneurial venture.

So the first failure I made when looking back over the past 12, 13 years is not developing early as I could have as a SEO writer. So what do I mean by that? I have been blogging on the literal LM s website and not just me team members as well since we first launched, even before we launched. But over time, I wouldn’t say I became a decent content writer for my type of business until about five years ago, and I’m still a work in progress and improving all the time.

But what I noticed is in the software space where we exist some other. Brands who got on the content game earlier, the written content, the blogging game earlier with strong SEO skills really got a huge advantage in the early days. And it’s not that I wasn’t blogging or writing, but I just didn’t have the deep technical SEO skills as well as I was a decent rider, but I really hadn’t mastered the skill of.

Technical writing and storytelling and so on that to the level that I now possess. And I could have developed that sooner and gotten some of that SEO advantage. And it’s not that I didn’t do anything else. I also poured a lot into YouTube. Even this podcast you’re listening to is older than lifter, LMS plugin.

We launched this back in this podcast back in 2013. So I’ve been creating audio, video, and text content for a very long time. But if I could go back in time, I would’ve put more focus on the early text and blogging content, and particularly for the education entrepreneurs out there. One of the challenges we have is that a lot of our content is behind.

An enrollment or a paywall. So we spend all this time creating video content, audio content reports, text content, but we’re not really putting as much effort as we could in that SEO driven blog content and pages on our site. So the lesson is to diversify your content types early and make sure you have a lot of great free written SEO optimized content, which also becomes extremely important.

For AI to train the large language models on so that you have some freely available text-based content for the artificial intelligence to ingest. The second big failure I had at lifter LMS was under marketing secondary benefits. So what do I mean by that? The primary benefit of lifter LMS is related to the courses feature.

So you can create, launch and scale high value online courses with lifter LMS. The course creation is like the main thing that makes lifter LMS special and unique. Chris, myself is an online course expert, excuse me. And but. Because Lifter is a platform, it’s a learning management system.

There’s so much it does in addition to courses. A perfect example where we under marketed is the membership features of Lifter LMS. So Lifter, LMS has been a membership plugin since the very first version, but a lot of people don’t even realize that they think they need Lifter. And another membership plugin, which it does work with other membership plugins like paid memberships Pro.

Lifter’s own native membership features are very powerful for creating course bundles, locking down other parts of the website and so on. But we under marketed that. Another example would be the social learning add-on that lifter makes. It basically allows you to create an online community website similar to having a private Facebook group, but on your WordPress LMS website that you own and control.

When I look at something like Buddy Boss, which is an online community building WordPress plugin, which also integrates with Lifter Al Mess, by the way, which we’re grateful for. Buddy Boss did an exceptional job marketing the online community system to the WordPress website. And of course they did ’cause that’s their main feature.

But for us at Lifter, that’s a secondary feature. Social learning solution that we offer. So we under marketed that. And there’s many more inside of Lifter as a complete system, a learning management system. There’s so much that it does that we’re not telling the full story and we hear this we, know we’ve made this failure.

When I hear from the market, it’ll say something like oh, wow. I’ve been using your software for years and I didn’t even realize. You guys had memberships or that I could build an online community here, or I could do my coaching business, or you had this email system and marketing automation system built directly inside lifter LMS.

So that kind of thing is what I’m talking about. So it’s important to know the main thing, the one thing, your primary benefit, but also be sure to market your sub benefits and other aspects. I would use the rule of thirds here, by the way. So think about your primary benefit and then what are the three sub benefits below that, and then go out three more.

So like primary benefits, number one, then the main three, then the main nine, and that’ll keep you busy for a while. So focus on that in terms of marketing and. Content and social media and selling and landing pages and design for all those things. The next big mistake that we made was thinking that the market is rational.

So what do I mean by that? The market is, and I think there’s even a book by this title called Predictably Irrational. So I used to think that the best product would become the most popular product, and that’s not the case. It’s almost never the case. One might argue that in very few cases, is that actually true?

It could be. There’s other factors like cost and stuff like that. But what I mean here is. In the market. So what do I mean by the market? The market is your niche. It’s the people, it’s your target market. It’s the prospects that are a good fit for your service or product. Those people are not rational.

They are irrational. And by the way, I say that with love because when I’m a consumer, I can also be irrational. So a market is irrational and is driven by. Things like emotion vibes cognitive biases, misinformation, group think social pressure, all kinds of things influence a, market and makes them not critical thinking, looking at base reality with a complete logical and objective perspective.

So how has this hurt us at lifter LMS? I realized early that we really, this software does a lot. We need to tell the story of it. It has a lot of features. We need to basically be sure the market understands all the features that we have and those benefits. So we spent a lot of time in documentation, YouTube tutorials informational pages, blog content on our site, but then.

What I noticed is the I’d see in the market when, like on social media, like on Reddit or in a Facebook group or in Twitter somewhere, a lot of the stuff people say when they compare our solution to other solutions were factually inaccurate. Lacked complete information, even lies and misinformation.

I was like, why is this happening? I’m like, oh, okay. Yeah, the market’s just being irrational. And a lot of people are just going off vibes and jumping on the bandwagon of this or that. If you look at the WordPress ecosystem WordPress has this challenge called the king maker problem. So what do I mean by the king maker Pro problem?

The king maker problem is where an early winner kind of dominates for a long term. So even if they’re not actually. The best or based on pure value, features, benefits, all that. Like they have an unnaturally king size portion of the pie that’s irrational if you were to just compare apples to apples across the various solutions.

So in WordPress, as an example, the divvy theme and page builder, if we look at WordPress page builders, now, a lot has changed with full site editing and Gutenberg and all of that. But at one point, divvy really nailed the WordPress premium theme market. They got early traction. Elegant themes used to have a lot of themes.

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Speaker: Then divvy really took off. They focused on divvy. They built a page builder around Divvy, and they got huge. At one time, the Elegant Themes website was one of the most trafficked websites in the world, so they really got that king maker crown. And over time, other page builders came like Beaver Builder or Elementor, and many more.

A lot of times Divvy has always had the biggest market share, I believe. And is that rational, is divvy better than Elementor or Beaver Builder or some of these other ones? This is the king maker issue and I’m a fan of Divvy. I’m not a, an expert at page builders. But this is what I’m talking about and it, you has this tribal mentality.

Like I was a, I used Beaver Builder for a long time. I really loved it. And I see folks in elementary using elementary really loving it, see people using divvy, really loving it, and they’ve been using it forever. The same thing happens in the WordPress form space. If we looked at the early winter there, that was a company called Gravity Forms.

I’ve been a Gravity Forms customer for probably about 14 years, something like that, 15 years. I use it on the Lifter LMS website. Lifter integrates with it. It’s an awesome, huge solution with a awesome ecosystem. Tools like Gravity Kit or out there that work with Gravity Forms, and some of those have lifter integration, which is awesome.

And. But there’s other forms. There’s like a lot of form plugin solutions in WordPress and a new one, like a newer one. It’s not new anymore, but WS form by Mark West Card is an awesome form solution, but I know it’s hard for Mark West card of WS form to compete with gravity forms simply because of that kingmaker issue.

Some of the, there’s stuff that WS forms does that is so awesome. Gravity formed, can’t do, doesn’t do, and so on. They’re both great solutions, but this is what I’m talking about. The market is not rational and sometimes that early dominant player their snowball just gets bigger and bigger, and it takes on its own life and vibes in terms of popularity that’s not really based on rational analysis.

In terms of as a creator it’s important to build things like audience trust and a brand that basically play the irrational game, but do it with ethics. So what I mean by that is build a strong brand. ’cause people want to do business with people that they know and trust. One of my big things, particularly in tech that I find.

Amusing just from or more sad is actually the word. If I go to a start a software company’s website and I go to the about page and I see no human faces, I see such a lost opportunity. ’cause people want to connect, they want to do business with real people. They want to take a quick peek at the people behind the company and so on.

While building a personal brand. May feel like a sideshow to your actual product. It’s a big part of just building the vibes that the market actually responds to in addition to the logical analysis of your features and benefits. So the next big fail that we had at Lifter LMS was not elevating design to the executive level sooner.

So what do I mean by design? Design is a lot of things. It is for an online business, it is graphic design. It’s website design. It’s user interface design. It’s user experience design. It is if you’re doing courses, there’s instructional design. There’s all these different flavors of design that are super important, and let me back up and say that any online business, I divide into seven categories, and design is one of those, but I’ll just list them off here.

One is product, one is engineering. One is marketing. One is sales, one is customer success or support. One is operations. And then the final one is the CEO hat and design is of course in there too. So all of these areas need to have a baseline level of proficiency for a business to do well, and design often gets ignored for too long, or overemphasized in the beginning.

So in my case, we had, we were underpowered on the design front in the early days. So I heard it on a podcast, I can’t remember where, but I’d cite the source if I remembered. But it was something like, investors looking to invest in startups. They look at three, they want to see three main characters in the founding team, the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler.

The hacker is the engineer. It’s the coder. It’s the person doing the tech, the hustler. That’s a person like me, who is the visionary, who gets the people together, who goes out and does the marketing, sales, what we call hand to hand combat to get your early first customers. But then there’s the hipster.

The hipster comes in and sprinkles all kinds of design. Goodness on top of what the hustler and the hacker are doing. So to give a specific example, the hacker or the engineer is building interfaces for lifter LMS as an example, like interfaces for the software. The designer comes on top as a UI or user interface designer and makes them pretty standardized, intuitive.

User experience aspect of design comes in and knows exactly where to put tool tips and helpful pointers or informational text to make an interface clear, and that’s just one little spot. The designer might come in and help the hustler with a slide presentation or to make the product graphics look better.

Or to make the website key sales pages, landing pages and homepage look 10 times better. That’s what the designer does. And we’ve been lucky at lifter LMS to get some quality design leaderships at several points in the business, but I did not do it soon enough. And if you happen to be early in starting your business, one, I’d recommend don’t do it alone.

See if you can assemble the team of the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler, which one are you most like? And then find the other two. Not being alone is key. Having a partnership is great, but having the hipster hacker hustler trifecta is an unstoppable unbeatable, beautiful team. So that’s what design is like.

And to give you some examples of. Where design came in and really helped lifter LMS and it was way too little, too late kind of thing. In a perfect world, I’m very grateful for everything that we did, but I made, I prioritize those design needs too late. Okay? The first one was about three years into the business.

When we actually got lucky. We used a service called 99 Designs to do our logo. Our colors, our typo typography was known as a brand kit, and we should have done that way earlier than with the scrappy design we had. I definitely admit if you’re just launching a product or business, don’t overfocus on design.

Don’t spend a lot of money on a logo or anything. You can just go minimum viable product and find your product market fit. Once you have it, assuming you succeed and you have some traction, invest in that design for the brand kit early. We got lucky with 99 designs and paid about 300 and got basically the brand kit that we still use today for almost a decade, which is awesome.

Now the next big move we did was around I think it was 2020 or so. We hired web dev studios to come in and help do a redesign of our whole website, help with the design of the lifter LMS screens, how our launchpad theme, or I’m sorry, our Sky Pilot theme would look. Web Dev studios is awesome. We’ve done some webinars and they’ve been on the podcast.

They also have a product called Theme Switcher Pro. I’d encourage you to check that out. Which allows you to switch. Your theme, but only on certain parts of your website. But anyways, the design team at web dev studios did an incredible job building designs that we could then implement. So that was a huge win.

And that wasn’t cheap either. We invested many tens of thousands of dollars in that design but it really paid off. It wasn’t just like the website. It was also software and interface and all these things. So that’s web dev studios design, overhaul of lifter LMS. And then the next one is when Kim Coleman joined the leadership team as a co-owner of Lifter LMS with Jason Coleman.

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Kim has a really unique ability. She’s an amazing designer, but she’s also a fantastic entrepreneur, developer, marketer, and so on. She’s super strong on design, so she was able to, in a major way, help implement the designs from web dev studios to create reusable templates for all kinds of things like YouTube thumbnails, webinar slides, product shots, and everything inside Canva so that our non-designers, including myself, can implement great designs using templates in Canva.

Kim did so much to and, also in the interface and the UI and just her design sense was so strong. It is just just a wonderful thing to have in the leadership team of lifter LMS. But, so if I could rewind the clock and go back to the early version myself, I would have prioritized that design.

Leadership sooner. And that also feeds into the last failure I mentioned where the market is not rational. It took me a while to realize that having good design can help with your vibes. It’s not rational, but it’s true that sometimes people buy from. If they’re exploring product A, B, and C, they’re gonna go with a ’cause that website has the best catchy design.

Apple as an example, has great design. People talk about it all the time. So design is a huge part of the irrational mind buying on vibes. So the fifth failure that we made at lifter LMS in 12 years. Was not documenting standard operating procedures or what I also call business playbooks early.

And these are standard operates. Standard operating procedures are like having a baby. There’s never really a convenient time to make them, but you should, so if you’re new to SOPs or standard Operating Procedures playbooks, it’s essentially documenting your systems and processes so that it’s easier to delegate and make your brain hurt less when you’re doing a task.

For example, publishing a lifter LMS podcast episode has 40 steps. So Nadia on the team will publish that and she’ll follow the steps. If she’s away and I’m publishing it or somebody else is publishing it, I’m gonna follow those steps. Even though I’ve done it before, I can never remember. And it takes such a mental tax to have to try to recall the 40 steps without looking at the documented steps that I wrote.

The other thing is getting your team to contribute to the standard operating procedures is. Really powerful. We actually use lifter LMS on a site, not our main site that’s public, but it has our private site on top of it so the public on the internet can never get inside of the site and see our standard operating procedures.

But we use lifter LMS and courses and lessons to organize and catalog and index all of our standard operating procedures broken down by department. Like sales as an example, or product as an example. When you’re, when it’s just you, if you’re a solopreneur and it’s all in your head and you’re never delegating anything, fine, you don’t need ’em.

But as soon as you need somebody else to do something for you, I’d recommend slowing down and documenting your processes, whether for a team member, a future team member, a contractor you’re gonna hire, or even just for yourself to make your brain hurt less. If you ever have, like when I do I do like this biweekly payroll, cashflow accounting, invoices, money management thing for the business, right?

Every two weeks, it’s 57 steps every single time. I’ve done it many times, every time I pull out the list and I just start working through it. If I didn’t have that playbook, my brain would hurt trying to remember everything that I have to get done to execute that process. If I had done this earlier, it would’ve helped my brain hurt less for some of the complicated things I would do, like product launches as an example, like we have our product launch process documented.

If I had done this earlier, it would’ve been easier to delegate. There’s a great book by a guy named Sam Carpenter called Work The System, which I, read that book man 15 years ago and it really sold me on the power of SOPs and playbooks. I recommend you check that out if you haven’t listened to that.

It also helps your team member do better. It also helps you delegate things better. You can delegate if some, you have more options of who you can delegate to if a process is really dialed in and clearly laid out. Whereas if you don’t do that, if you try to delegate something, you’re gonna need somebody who’s more like you, who’s just gonna figure it out and it’s gonna be really inefficient time-wise and so on.

So document how you do what you do. And if you use the framework I gave you earlier about the seven parts of a business, each one of those has processes. Design has processes, operations, like I mentioned, payroll has processes sales, how we do product launches, marketing. These all have processes. So document those.

Check out Lifter, lms, private site if you want to put all your playbooks inside of an LMS. The next thing that was a big fail for me in building lifter LMS over the past 12 years is stressing too much, which some find funny hearing that coming from me because I seem like a chill, laid back, slow talking person.

But that is just me on the outside and it’s not a front, it’s just who I am. But I do get stressed. I take things seriously. I take a lot of responsibility. There are families including my own, that depend on me for food on the table or depend on the business for food on the table. There’s all kinds of relationships to maintain across team members, customers, users, community industry, partners all kinds of things.

There’s changes in the macro economy, the geopolitical situation things happen. And that affect the business both for good and for bad. And we all would like to have less stress. But what I find is there’s this weird thing with entrepreneurs. And I, want to hear you or find a way to reach out to me if you’re listening to this and you agree with what I mean, by the way, I don’t hear that much from the podcast listeners.

You folks are always like listening in your earbuds while you’re doing the dishes or exercising or in the car, whatever, and commuting. But I’d love to hear what you like about this show. But anyways, here’s the counterintuitive insight about entrepreneurs. I look around YouTube as an example, and I see all this content about like motivation and how to find your motivation and all this stuff, and I’m, I’ve never needed that my entire life.

Like I am born with the batteries included and I have the opposite problem of motivation. I have too much motivation, which creates stress ’cause I can’t, there’s so much I want to do and can’t get done. BA based on constraints, whether that’s cash or time or capacity or skills, that’s stressful, right?

So I think the counterintuitive thing and hit me up if you agree, is I look out the world and sometimes I see a lack of motivation, but when I look inside myself, I see too much motivation, which causes a lot of stress. So for me, it’s actually counterproductive. To try to get more motivated. ’cause I don’t need more.

I actually need less, which is weird to say. Luckily for me I’ve had some things that help me manage the stress. The big ones are, and I’m just speaking for me personally. The big ones are rural living. So a slower pace lifestyle in the country. The second one is nature connection. I do spend a lot of time outside.

And the third one is exercise. If you know me I’m an ultra runner. I can run far along and I didn’t always used to be this way. I’ve always tried to keep moving and stuff like that, but once I really found Ultra, I’m like, oh yeah, this is what Dan Martel means by train the body to tame the mind.

So when I get to the. Out there in the distance far, not just like on a big thing, but even just even today. Today I’m gonna go run eight and a half miles after I get off this podcast later in the day. And I’ll feel way better after that. But anyways, going back to the earlier days, stressing too much particularly in the early days, I did it the way where.

I didn’t try to start I didn’t try to start it as a, my business as a side job. I did the burn the boats thing, which just means for me, I left Alaska. I stopped what I had been doing for almost a decade. It’s 100% on me to figure everything out while I also have a young family. So that’s pretty stressful.

When you cut off your, dependable income. Do that. And it was really rough in the beginning, particularly going from that zero to like sustainable level. So there’s just so much stress in that period. And part of it, I do believe in the early days of a startup of any kind, you do need to grind. You do need to have some late nights and put it all out there, leave it all out in the field.

But as much as you can build in stress reduction, things that work for you, whether that’s. Massage walks, hanging out with friends, doing something with your partner. Nature connection, some kind of sport. Maybe it’s a float tank, a sensory deprivation chamber, whatever it is for you. Try not to stress too much because unfortunately I see so much burnout and so many people that quit.

Or flame out that shouldn’t in, in the space of entrepreneurship and stress is really the killer. It’s the, it got outta control and for whatever reason mostly luck. I would say just with how I’m wired and what I’m into, I was able to tame the stress to a manageable level through the movement, the exercise, the nature connection, and so on.

So find what that is for you. Find it as soon as possible, and just remember that entrepreneurship is a personal development program. So the biggest personal development thing you can do is figure out how to be an entrepreneur without burning out, blowing up, or getting super stressed out. Or if you already have.

To move forward in a better way to learn to transcend and learn how to manage stress in a much healthier way. The last failure I had with lifter LMS over the past 13 years is two things, hiring too fast or hiring too late. So both extremes hurt. Hiring too fast is an example. As an overwhelmed, stressed out entrepreneur, you want to delegate, but everybody, all the advice is like, oh you gotta, delegate, you gotta build your systems and delegate.

I’m even telling you that here, but before you can afford that you, can’t do that. Here’s what I mean by that. In the early days of Lifter LMS, we had two support team members. In addition to the founding team, lifter, LMS is way, bigger now over a decade later. And we still have two support team members in addition to the rest of the team.

And that’s good. But those early two I, we hired way too early. And it could have just been one is what I’m saying. There’s. Hiring is really hard. It’s it’s extremely hard. I could do, I should do a whole episode. I’m taking a note to do one on hiring ’cause I’m actually pretty decent at it and I’ve learned a lot over the years.

So I’ll look forward to sharing that with you in a different episode. But the other thing is just hiring too late. I mentioned the design situation, figuring out how to get design hired into whether it’s a contract project. A team member, a new business partner, doing that sooner would’ve been way better for the business.

So that was an example of a too late situation. So one of the ways to think about it is to hire at an inflection point, not based on emotion. ’cause sometimes we’re just like, oh my gosh, I’m so stressed out. I’m so burnt out. I just need another human to dump all this work onto or whatever. That’s not a healthy way to think about it.

You want to think about it as an inflection point. So an easy way to think about that, like in software as an example, is when you’re doing support. You get like a certain number of tech support tickets or emails a day. You can look at that oh a support team’s capacity is about X tickets per day on average.

Once you’re consistently past what your team can do on average, that’s just an inflection point where you either have to hire or some other members of your team or maybe even you need to also help to keep up with the demand in that need. So try not to hire based on emotion or desperation or frustration.

Hiring should be more mechanical, methodical. If you look, we have a free course on the academy about end of year planning and 10 year plans, five year plans and all this stuff. Go check that out. But one of the ways I like to think about hiring at the right time is to build your dream org chart like how you want it to look.

For example, if Lifter LMS were to double the revenue of where we’re at right now. I already know that what the org chart would look like and what roles to hire, and I know when at which revenue milestone we could afford to hire, which role next. Now, that might change. Plans can change, but I already have that figured out, so it won’t be an emotional thing for me.

I won’t know if we have the budget or not for it. It’s already planned out. And the other thing I’ll just add with hiring now is. If you look at artificial intelligence, there’s a lot that AI can do to increase existing team capacity, including yourself. And there’s just more AI can do, even ag genetically as a higher of sorts.

So you may hire AI in some cases. And that’s one of those areas I’d look out for is. As artificial intelligence moves from the chat interface to agentic to agents you want to think about how the agents can fit into your org chart or augment your existing human team members in the org chart because with the pace of change with ai, you really.

This whole problem of hiring too fast or too late is gonna become even more and more of a problem. So by hiring too fast, what I mean is bring in an AI sales, outbound sales rep that’s gonna do all this emailing and calling for you, but you haven’t even figured out what your selling, how you sell, what your sales motion or sales conversations look like to train the agent.

So you’re just, you’re hiring way too fast and you’re just gonna cause problems or. There’s a ton of stuff you can do with AI for graphic design as an example. There’s people that are doing things with Nano Banana, which is a AI graphics tool. And other tools too. I’ve done some great designs with chat GPT and Canvas AI tools.

But if you find all that stuff too late you might be, you just might be underdoing your design capability. ’cause you, tell yourself the story. I can’t afford to hire a human at x dollars per year to do design. But you could actually get started with AI like right now. So a couple of themes from these mistakes or failures I’ve made.

There’s imbalance whether that’s content or. Marketing or team or mindset. So it’s all about balance and we’re all unique individuals, unique snowflakes, if you will. We have our strengths and weaknesses. We have these different aspects of our business that are either doing great, average or below average.

But when there’s imbalance, that’s where a lot of the biggest failures come from. So I like to think of balance in this way. You don’t have to bring everything to exceptional, but everything does have a baseline. And then there’s gonna be a couple things you do really well. It might be product, it could be operations, it could be the tech side.

But you definitely need a baseline across those seven parts of the business as well as an education entrepreneur. The five hats that we talk about all the time on this podcast. I would just encourage you to become more well-rounded and first of all, don’t be too hard on yourself. Like to me, even just telling you these stories, there’s a lot of pain When I look back at all that stress and struggle and bad timing or a decision we, I made that was suboptimal, but hey, this is how we learn and it’s okay to be an imperfect human.

That’s why. I like to say that entrepreneurship is a personal development program. You just gotta keep going and, learn from your mistakes. Be honest about them. Pretend they don’t pretend they don’t exist and work with them. Examine them. Look for patterns. Try to improve. And yeah. I want to thank you for listening to this episode.

I’d love to hear from you. Which one of the lifter LMS fails over the past decade plus resonated with you the most? And yeah. Just send me a hello. Let me know that you listened to this episode and you appreciated it, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get WP Fusion NowIn this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett offers an important perspective change for anybody making online courses: you should conceive of yourself as a media firm rather than merely a course designer. He says that since systems like ChatGPT and Claude can rapidly give answers and learning resources, knowledge is no longer scarce in today’s environment.

Because of this, merely packing content into a course is no longer sufficient to succeed or stand out. Instead, people’s attention and trust have become limited, particularly in a digital world that is overrun with content, short videos, and subpar AI-generated content. This makes it more difficult for instructors to keep students’ interest long enough for them to finish courses, which are inherently lengthy and need dedication.

Chris emphasizes that producers who regularly provide worthwhile, non-salesy material are now rewarded by platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, as opposed to those who actively attempt to sell goods. The previous approach of “create a course and then market it” is no longer successful as a result of this change. Building your audience first, providing them with useful information, and then making money is the new paradigm. With this method, your course turns into a backend product, and your main responsibility is to continuously inform, interact, and cultivate connections with your audience via various channels.

He presents the concept of a “media stack,” which consists of important platforms including blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and email newsletters. Since the email list is a direct channel of communication that you own and control, it is the most crucial and non-negotiable of these. Over time, even a basic monthly newsletter that shares well chosen updates or insights in your industry may establish credibility and trust.

YouTube is a great place to start when creating content, particularly when it comes to responding to commonly asked questions in your area and topics that your audience ought to be asking but aren’t. While blogging can create authority, enhance thinking, and increase SEO, as long as it’s done deliberately and not just through low-quality AI content podcasting is a fantastic tool for fostering deeper relationships and drawing in high-attention audiences.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode Transcript:You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we are going to go over an important mindset shift and framing for you to change. And that frame is going from being a course creator to being a media company. So this is the only way to win going forward. And the reason is courses alone aren’t enough anymore, so just having a course is not enough.

You gotta think bigger as a media company. This actually happened to me many years ago with LifterLMS. The software business. I refrained from thinking that, hey, we’re a software company to, hey, we’re a media company.

This podcast as an example, which has been going for 12 years. Is a part of the LifterLMS Media company, so as our YouTube channel, we also happen to provide software for the e-learning industry. But I very much see myself as a creator, a content creator, a media company, a media brand, and not just me.

Team members on the LifterLMS team are also brand personalities for LifterLMS. Anyways. It’s basically a shift from thinking of your course content first to thinking of your audience first and then monetization later. So you’re not in the course business, you are in the media business. You just happen to make courses.

So what changed all this? Why is this happen? Part of it is that artificial intelligence, the rise of that is further commoditizing information. So information wants to be free at a base level. For example, the WordPress core software is completely free. It’s just code, it’s just information. But when it comes to ai if, I want information quickly, I can just ask ChatGPT or Claude.

And we’ll get some decent information for a question I have or a skill I wanna develop or something I wanna learn. So what has become more scarce is trust and attention. For example. We can’t always trust artificial intelligence because it does hallucinate, even though that hallucination is getting a little better.

And also our attention has never been. More fractured as a human species that’s driven by so many different things. The amount of media that’s out there, the number of social media channels, the rise of short form video content like TikTok has created what people call short form video brain rot, which means our ability to hold attention and focus.

In general, as a human population has gotten a lot, worse. And if you think about it, when you create an online course, you’re actually asking somebody to hold their attention for an extended amount of time. A course is it can be varied in length, but they’re usually a very committed timeline for.

Attention that you’re asking the user to take, not just in one sitting, but sometimes over multiple days or even months, or even in some cases years. So that is a big attention ask when attention globally in general, as is that an all time low? Also, just like with the rise of YouTube where essentially everybody could have a TV channel.

When I was a kid there was like. Whatever, 30 TV channels on cable, when my parents were kids first they didn’t have tv, they just had radio, but then they had three channels if they were lucky enough to be able to get ’em. But now there’s like a billion YouTube channels. Course creation has gotten so easy with tools like Lifter, LMS, that unfortunately there’s a lot of low quality.

Courses in the same way that there’s a lot of low quality YouTube videos, channels content and so on. And then we have the AI issue of what’s known as AI slop, which is where you’re using artificial intelligence, not in a smart way to create content that’s just low quality. So that saturation of low quality courses.

Also further contributes to the challenge of just being a course creator. And then finally, if you look at the algorithms, whether that’s a social media algorithm like YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or LinkedIn, or you look at the way search engines do their rankings. They reward creators far more than they reward products, which means, especially on social media freely available, non-salesy topic driven information that’s high quality is what the algorithm rewards and helps drive attention to.

So if you’re a. Media company and not just a course creator. You start thinking about this oh if I want more eyeballs on my media, what kind of content do I also need to create? So the old model was to build a course and then sell it. The new model is to build an audience and serve a community.

So it’s about putting your. Audience, your community at the center of your business, not your product or your course. And then one way to think about this too is shifting from being a teacher or a course creator to being a publisher. So a publisher just thinks about things differently than just a teacher.

Now you will be publishing online courses, but it’s important to also publish other types of content as a media company. The other thing we want to think about here is that as a metaphor, some of the hugely successful companies are. Netflix, that’s a publishing platform for movies and shows.

You’ve got YouTube, which is a publishing platform. There are content creators on there that are publishers. There are newsletter brands out there that are publishers. So this is these are, all media companies. So it’s important for you to design your media stack, and I just want to acknowledge that.

Not everyone out there wants to be on camera or enjoys talking for extended periods of time, like in a podcast for, as an example. So you don’t necessarily have to do all of these, and I definitely don’t recommend starting all of them at once. But the media stack that comes before or in addition to your online courses.

Is number one, a email list. This one’s pretty much non-negotiable. So at a fundamental level, email never dies, and it is a key important key to your success. If you don’t have an email list, I guarantee your business as a course creator or education company is not gonna go very far. So I recommend you do some kind of email newsletter.

Now, if that sounds intimidating to you, like you have to do like a daily news kind of email broadcast thing, that’s not what I’m talking about at all. Let’s talk about a minimum effective email newsletter that takes the least amount of time, but adds a lot of value and authority and builds your email list.

So the first way I think about that is first, the cadence. Even just a monthly email newsletter can be very valuable and help you grow your list. So that means you only need to create an email once a month. Now, in terms of creating a great email newsletter, I just recommend, first thing is slowing down and creating a structure for your newsletter That makes sense.

You can re repeat and fill in every time. So the structure is like a template for every broadcast that you do from your newsletter. So the, I see a lot of these, so I’ll just share like what would be the absolute easiest email newsletter to start. Whatever your niche is, whatever your industry, you can do.

A link to five cool things that happened in your niche or in your industry in the past month. And they don’t necessarily have to be things that you’ve done and they could be, have nothing to do with what you’re working on, although I recommend including your work and, what you’re up to in your email newsletter.

But I also recommend being a reporter for your industry or your niche. Now, with tools like artificial intelligence, you can. It’s never been easier to find news and relevant things quickly, but particularly if you’re looking over the past month, just as an example if you use rock, which is the artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence tool on the X platform, it can be very helpful at finding news because.

It is, has access to all the data on X or Twitter, which means whatever news was going on or marketable, notable things in your niche, in your industry, it would’ve been talked about on X or Twitter. And if you just ask Rock to look back the past 30 days and give it some prompting about. Your niche and subtopics your audience is interested in, you could quickly source five cool things that happen this month in your niche, and there’s your email list.

Of course, you wanna put your email capture everywhere you can, or a link to it from social media profiles from. YouTube video descriptions on your website. This is why it’s really important to have a WordPress website that you own control, so that you can easily capture emails. You can use tools like WP Fusion to easily pipe those emails over to your email list service software.

You can use tools like Popup Maker to throw a popup with a message about your newsletter and get people to sign up right through the popup. So there’s so much you can do to build your email list. We can do a whole topic on email. In fact, I did do one a while back. About how I grew a, an over 100,000 person email list myself at Lifter lms.

So go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast now to say 15% or sign up for the free plan and start getting more leads, sales and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

So if you want some deep dive on email, go find that episode. The next in the media stack if, I could only pick two, it would be the email list and the YouTube channel, particularly for course creators because. Of course, creators in general, for the most part, leverage videos in their content, which means they tend to not be as resistant or camera shy or unsure how to work with video and audio.

So you’ve already got the base skills to be a YouTube media publisher. Using YouTube my number one strategy to get started as a media creator, if you’re like, I don’t know what to make videos about or, you have the experts curse, you’re just like, I don’t even know where to start.

Here’s where you start. If you look at your niche, what I’d encourage you to do is to find the 10 frequently asked questions that come up in your industry. And I would make a video a short, like question, answer video. For example, I was talking to my wife Sam earlier today and she’s looking at some marketing for her running coaching business and if I was gonna advise her I’m on ultrarunner, so I, know what kind of questions people would ask an ultra running coach.

So it could be things like this, like one video might be the 10 10. What things do I need to know before my first 100 Mile Ultra run? I recently completed a hundred Mile Ultra, and I literally did this. I went to YouTube and I said, what do I need to know before I attempt my first 100 Mile Ultra Run?

And YouTube came back. There was a guy with a video it was about eight minutes and he went over like the top eight things that you need to know and be aware of for your ultra run. It was great. Other things like what kind of shoes do I need, how to maintain fitness in the winter. So on. These are like the 10 frequently asked questions for that niche.

So write those down for your niche. And then here’s my favorite twist on this. Then you write 10 more questions that people should be asking you but aren’t. So this is where you put your expert hat on and hey, nobody’s really as a ultra running person, everybody’s always asking about how to do your first ultra, what shoes do I need?

What’s my training plan? But you know what, nobody ever asks, but should, how do I take care of my feet when I’m running? 30, 50, a hundred hundreds of miles straight. So foot care, that’s an example. It’s not like a super if you’re not into running it sounds funny, but that’s an example of a question that my audience, if I was a running coach, should be asking but isn’t.

So I’m just gonna put that out there and that kind of content gets picked up as well. So if you do that exercise. You’ve got the 10 frequently asked questions you get in your niche, and then the 10 questions that people are asking or are not asking, but should, that gives you 20 video ideas to kick off your YouTube channel.

I actually did this a long time ago when I had a web design agency and I sat down with a piece of paper in about 10 minutes. I had my 20 questions, and then I actually went. Filmed all 20 videos all at once and batched produced those, and that kicked off my YouTube channel and it started attracting and building my audience.

So that’s how I recommend getting started on YouTube. The other thing to do is podcasting. Now, obviously I’m a fan. I’ve been podcasting for over 12 years, and even though the LMS Cast podcast. Is not super huge and famous. It is a very micro niche podcast for this audience, of course, creator and LMS website building professionals.

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On your LMS website, we use WP Fusion ourselves on our LifterLMS website, which is powered by WooCommerce. For selling software subscriptions, but we also use WP Fusion on the Lifter LMS Academy. Where we are selling access to courses and memberships, powered of course by lifter LMS WP Fusion connects our websites and CRM seamlessly together so that we can create a better customer journey, deliver the right offers, and automate follow up.

And the coolest thing about the podcast as a media company, first with the audience at the center of our business, is you add incredible value to your audience. By giving them this long form content. Also, the people that listen to your podcasts tend to have longer attention span. If somebody can listen to a 30, 40 minute episode or even multi-hour episode, they have the kind of attention span required to complete an online course.

And then over time with the podcast, you’re building so much trust. And depth of relationship and authority with your listener. The cool thing I love about podcasts is a media type is they are what’s known as portable content, and there’s not that much portable content. So when you think about it, when you’re at a computer and your eyes are locked onto your computer or your phone, there’s so many different types of content.

When you’re washing the dishes or exercising or going for the run or driving, you basically need something that’s portable and you’re your eyes are busy. Your hands are busy, you’re doing other things. There’s only podcasts audio, books and music. Basically, that’s all you got. So it’s not as crowded over here in podcast land.

And you get some of the best, listeners and audience, and of course you can mention your, newsletter and your podcast, or if you do a podcast that’s another simple way to start a newsletter. That’s all it is a feed of your latest podcast episodes and that’s, how you start building your email list.

The last one I’ll say in the media stack is to be a blogger, be a writer. This is why using lifter LMS and particularly WordPress is so important. WordPress started as a blogging platform. It’s so much more than that with tools like Lifter, LMS and WP Fusion and Pop-Up Maker and so many more great tools.

But as a blogging platform you can write. You can write blogs, and that is a type of media to put in your stack. Now, I do not recommend that you use artificial intelligence to just create a bunch of quick content for SEO. You need to put your heart and soul, your unique insights into your writing. You can leverage AI tools for research and clean up and fleshing out ideas and so on.

But create some blog content. And it doesn’t always have to be long. I’m a fan of the, at a minimum 500 word article but I’ve written articles that are much longer. There are thousands and thousands of words. So writing is the ultimate skill as a communicator. It will sharpen.

Your expertise as does podcasting. One of the great things about podcasting and writing or blogging is that you can bring on guests. So you’re actually getting smarter or in your writing, you are doing research across your industry. You’re keeping up with what other leaders in your space are doing.

You’re creating opinions and thought pieces and weaving in your own expertise and experience in the blog content. So that’s it. That’s the media stack. So if you think of yourself as a media company and not just a course creator that has to do some marketing, it becomes a lot more clear of what you do.

And the course kind of moves to the background of the free other types of media. It’s basically means you want to get as much exposure to, your audience as you can in your free content, whether that’s emails, YouTube videos, blog articles, podcast episodes but in the backend you actually sell courses.

So instead of being like, I’m a course creator, I need to sell my course, what you’re saying is, I’m a media company. I work across these content types of media. And by the way, for those that are at the right place at the right time I do have a course or membership offer that you can take, up on.

So this is where you do things like. You get like for every 100 subscribers to your email list, two of them will become customers. So that’s a 2% conversion rate, as an example. So that’s the media stack. The courses are the backend they’re the monetization layer. So the audience warms up first through the content, the media content, and then they buy.

So the way to think about this in terms of what to create instead of just a course is to create an ecosystem versus a single product. So if we put our audience at the center of our business, our course, or our membership, those are just satellites on the core of our audience. But maybe we’ve got our YouTube channel.

We’ve got our blog, our podcast, and our newsletter. So all these things are in service to our audience, and a percentage of them will monetize and purchase the course. So it’s like a content flywheel. So once you start getting that traction, even at when it’s small, at first, if you only have a hundred people across your.

YouTube channel, your newsletter, your blog, your podcast. But two of them buy, that’s a 2% conversion rate. Now, if you can get those flywheels of media content, the free stuff scaling exponentially, that’s when a business can really take off. As a media company, so that means when you jump to a thousand.

Audience size: you now have 20 customers. When you jump to 10,000, now you have 200 customers. And so on. When you get to a hundred thousand, you have 2000 customers, and that math tends to scale well if you are not just chasing engagement. With your media, but actual super relevant content for your clearly identified niche market.

So just to give some examples of creators who built Media First Brands, we recently did a fame jacking video on our podcast, which was basically a breakdown of Ali Ab Doll’s. Course creation business. And the thing he does with his course is he had a huge YouTube channel before he launched his recent course.

And he just constantly interviewed his audience about what they were interested in and stayed with him. And it was through building up that YouTube channel that he was finally able to monetize it. As a as a course creator. So you can also do this with podcasting. The great thing about podcasting is particularly if you do an interview show, if you commit to say, three years of podcasting before you create your course, maybe you have an idea of what you want your course to be.

You have an idea of what audience you want to serve, and you’ve got you’re clear on the foundations of your future offer. Then you spend three years interviewing experts in the space. Not only does that make you smarter, but it also builds relationships with people who you may do business development and partnership with later.

That’s a great way to think about it. It’s like you have to give a lot of value first before you take or ask for the sale with your online course. And if I see it all the time, like if I look at the YouTube space, there’s so many YouTubers that could be course creators.

’cause they have a great audience. They’ve developed a niche focus. They haven’t monetized they’re not packaging their stuff in a course, and that’s a challenge for a different day. But a thing, when you see create YouTubers that really take off, that are more educational than entertaining and really niche focused, you can just see how much more they could monetize not through YouTube ads or a simple Substack subscription.

Patreon or something like that, but with an actual online course. So to start making the transition from course creator to media company, what I would recommend is to pick one channel first and, just stay with it. And if you ask me which one should I start with, I would say definitely the email newsletter.

’cause you need to have that email list. Everything else should feed that. It’s basically the center of your marketing engine and sales engine. So build that email list, focus on a like creating a template for your newsletter so that when you sit down once a week or once a month to create your newsletter, you’re just filling in the template and you can use.

AI tools or capture systems when you see something interesting so that you can add it to your next newsletter. And then when it is time to add another channel, I wouldn’t add ’em all at once. Don’t try to become a podcaster, a YouTuber, and a writer and a newsletter creator all at one time. If you are very comfortable with the newsletter and the writing game, I would recommend next focus on writing blog post articles. Do at least 10 to 20 before you even think about adding another media channel. The next I would do is probably a either YouTube or podcast. It’s really up to you which order to go in, but the general thinking is it’s never too early to start building your email list.

So start there and then focus on one media channel, systematize it. Get your flywheel of audience growth going first. Before you transition to another one. Yeah, you want to build that audience before you sell. Trust me when I say course creation gets so much easier when you’ve been interacting with your audience through your free media content, like in the comments or live streams or whatever you’re doing.

You know what, how they think, you know what they want. You’re not just guessing. So when you build a media company, I want to encourage you to build it on your own property since you’re essentially building an asset. That’s why having your own website powered by WordPress and Lifter LMS is so important.

You control it. It’s your website, it’s your media company. The content is in your media library. When you go with a hosted platform you’re essentially renting space on somebody else’s website, which is very dangerous in the long term. They may raise their prices on you, their business may shut down or whatever.

You basically don’t own and control it, and you, the other great thing about WordPress and Lifter is you have the flexibility for courses and memberships and online communities and newsletters. And WordPress as a content management system or CMS is what it’s all about. And as a media company, you, you have content your courses and lessons and quizzes and certificates and everything are, just a other types of content besides your articles and videos and so on.

So WordPress and Lifter LMS essentially supports the backend of a. Media business. Now, of course you can use those tools as a course creator, but from here on out I want to, I want you to think of yourself as a media company, so stop trying to sell a course and start building a media company today.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this episode, Chris Badgett explains how AI will significantly reshape online courses by making creation faster, cheaper, and more accessible, while also increasing competition and lowering average quality due to an influx of generic AI-generated content. He emphasizes that although those who use AI as a co-pilot, combining it with their own brand, voice, and expertise, will stand out and deliver higher-quality courses, those who rely solely on AI will suffer.

He highlights that the value of information diminishes as it gets simpler to provide, and the true premium moves to human components like coaching, community, accountability, and change. AI will also make it possible for more flexible course delivery, intelligent student assistance, and customized learning experiences.

AI may serve as a tutor by assisting students, bridging knowledge gaps, and dynamically modifying curriculum. Additionally, operational and student support systems will become more sophisticated, with AI assistants proactively assisting students, providing real-time answers to inquiries, and even stepping in when students are ready to lose interest.

It will be crucial for creators to post public material and maintain visibility as marketing and discovery grow more competitive and move toward AI-driven platforms. Additionally, Chris promotes openness and human supervision while cautioning about ethical issues, including authenticity, false information, and data privacy. Ultimately, his main point is that creating a comprehensive, AI-augmented education company with a human connection at its core is more important for success in the AI future than simply selling courses.

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And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. My name’s Chris, and today we’re gonna do a solo episode. We’re gonna talk about AI and course creation, but it’s gonna be a little different than probably what you’ve been thinking already or what you’re already seeing happening. We’re gonna look into the future and look at 10 ways.

AI is gonna be different in the life of the course creator. What’s gonna change in the course creation economy because of ai, things are already changing. Things are already happening now, but we’re gonna look a little further out into the future. And the reason this is important is when you think about.

How AI is changing online education. It opens up opportunities for you. It also creates risks for you. So the more that we can see what’s next and get a feel for what’s coming, the better we can prepare to take advantage of the opportunities and remove the risks. Where are we at today? AI is already here.

It’s also not something that is equally. Used or distributed. There’s early adopters, certain types of people who are leveraging and using AI a lot more than others. Some may not even be using it at all as course creators, but most techie folks are in some ways experience experimenting, playing with ai, using it at work.

So in terms of course creation, we’re already seeing course creators. Use AI to help create outlines, to create lesson drafts or talking points for slides, or even slides themselves. Create quiz questions from a body of material to do support in some ways with chatbots. We’re using AI and video editing.

This podcast is actually edited in a tool called DE Script, which has AI video editing we’ve been using for a long time. People are using AI in marketing copy, and, but still most course, creators are under using it. This is like the early days of email marketing or social media and even online courses themselves.

So the first prediction I have for you of what’s coming in the next five years with AI and course creation is that. Course creation is gonna get a lot faster. Cheaper. Cheaper and easier. This is good and bad. It’s bad because it lowers the barrier to entry so that kind of, anyone can create a course. But it’s good for people who are not trying to replace themselves entirely by ai, but they use it to create a small team effect so that they can get things done faster.

Video editing curriculum, design, lesson content, using AI to accelerate those things. Course creation gets faster and cheaper. The next prediction I have for you is that average course quality goes down but the top tier gets a lot better because of ai. So the, low end of the, course creation market actually gets worse.

And the reason that is, is that course creators will, or entrepreneurs will chase opportunities and create what’s known as AI slop and just see an opportunity, oh, here’s a hot topic. I’m gonna have AI a hundred percent make a course for me and I’m gonna sell it. And it’s gonna sound like every other generic AI generated course.

On that topic. So the low end course creation, because of the barrier to entry, is actually going to get worse. We’re gonna get flooded with more and more lower quality AI slop content. We’re already seeing this on social media and YouTube where AI content is flooding. And so it creates more noise but the creators at the top end of the market who are leveraging AI in an intelligent way are actually creating even better courses, higher production value videos, websites, and so on.

The next prediction I have is that. The personal brand aspect becomes even more important in the future of online education or as an education entrepreneur. So personal brand has always been a thing. You have one, whether you choose to accept that idea or not. I’ve always been a big fan of not hiding behind a website and really putting yourself out there as much as you can.

In your online education business as a teacher, as a coach, as an entrepreneur, as a topic brand personality, all these things are really important. They’re just becoming more and more important. Humans have never been more lonely and isolated because of technology. So the desire to connect in an educational format with a real human and not just with robots and artificial intelligence is only gonna increase.

Your personal brand really matters, and even if you’re augmenting yourself with AI to be more productive increase your production value and so on. I recommend just keeping that personal aspect of you in the business and that could be things like just having an, even if you use a lot of AI in creating your course, you could have an ask me anything office hours once, a once a month, and that keeps the human in, that keeps the personal brand strong do not let AI slowly take over your everything and now your personal brand is completely gone from your online education company. The next piece related to the human side is that coaching community and accountability becomes more premium in the course creator education offer stack. So what I mean by that is as content becomes more and more commoditized with ai, it’s the other aspects of learning, the coaching, the community, the accountability systems, the peer-to-peer connection the masterminding if you will, the social learning things like memberships, cohorts.

Private communities certifications that include a, human aspect of certifying this. This makes premium content in the future. So information at the end of the day wants to be free. And what I mean by that is your course content, the information in your training. There’s much pressure on that.

The, just the info part of what you do is a, in some ways a commodity. You can have unique ideas and unique insights and blend unique things together, but at the end of the day, information wants to be free and in an AI world, which is unlocking information at scale the things that are valuable going forward or add more value or premium value.

Are the human things. That’s the private coaching, the group coaching, the online and in-person communities, the event-based learning, any kind of social learning or certification and continuing education that requires a human component. This is why we have all those great tools in lifter LMS, so that. You can, what we’ve said since the beginning of lift drill LMS is you can scale the human touch with robotics.

We’ve always said that, and what that means is even before AI was a big deal, we believe that the technology of building a website, using WordPress, using lift drill LMS will accelerate you, but you are still a human in the machine and we are scaling the human, not replacing the human. So my next prediction is that personalized learning will become the new standard.

So what this looks like, some call it adaptive learning, but essentially if we look back to the old in-person classroom education style learning is not very personalized. There’s a teacher in front of the class, it’s one to many. There’s instruction and mass, everybody’s hearing the same thing at the same time, at the same pace, taking the same tests.

What personalized learning is where and this is where AI provides a big opportunity and unlock, is the learning can adapt to the learner. So if there’s knowledge gaps that one individual’s having. The AI tutor as an example, could revisit concepts until that knowledge gap is filled or could adjust quizzing and knowledge assessments based on that learner’s strengths and weaknesses to make sure whatever the gaps are filled.

So how does it, what does this look like? It looks like having a, let’s say, a AI tutor on the site. Or even just some kind of monitoring that’s happening, that’s looking at the progress tracking and the grades and the reporting and the content consumption. How much of a video has been watched and so on, where the AI can help guide that learner to more content if they need to, fill in some foundations before they move forward, or if there’s some kind of competency that’s already met.

That learner can move forward and move on into something new, something else. So personalized learning is becoming more and more powerful and possible with ai. If you think about it this way, in the old days, there were like three TV channels on a television. If you were lucky enough to have a TV and now.

There’s unlimited content on the internet and there’s all these algorithms and AI running in social media or YouTube as an example, just feeding you and adapting to you the type of content that you like to watch or sh have shown interest in. That same thing has not progressed as far in education, but now it is.

It’s happening. And we’re just gonna see more and more personalized learning. The next thing that’s gonna really change with AI and education is the student support and the operations of education of the classroom. So what do I mean by that? Think of. An AI tutor. Think about AI agents or assistants or bots that are available to or questions or to proactively help in the tutor context or nudge based on progress.

If you think of something like an exit intent popup, by the way, if you’re not using popup maker, you should definitely use that to get more engagement, sales and retention on your lift LMS powered site. But there’s this concept with a popup called an exit intent. So what happens is when the mouse is going to the top left corner to leave.

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Speaker: A webpage that creates a trigger that causes a popup. So you can put whatever you want in the message to get people to stay or use a coupon code and complete their purchase. But that kind of, thing applied to learning. You can actually do this with pop-up maker. If someone’s trying to exit a lesson, you can throw a up to encourage them to stay.

That’s something you can do with pop-up maker. But now imagine an AI assistant is there notice somebody’s about to abandon the training that they’re supposed to be doing or said they wanted to do. And not only can we throw a popup or a message, we could actually immediately initiate a conversation.

That’s the power of AI in terms of responding to user behavior on the site. It’s, it basically creates a better learning experience that’s much more scalable. So it’s like AI student support. Ai, LMS Automat automation. So again, we’re scaling the human touch with robotics. There is a lot we wanna do with automation and robotics and artificial intelligence, and having helpful AI assistance in the learning experience.

Is, or we’re just gonna see more and more of that. And if you think about how that might change in traditional education I could see the role of the teacher changing to be more of a facilitator and a coach than how they currently work, as an example. So as some of the more operations side of.

Education folds into artificial intelligence. The human teacher can be there to more facilitate a process, hold space, provide the human connection even help improve AI systems and so on. But at the end of the day, keeping the humanity in the education will always be important. So in terms of. AI in the future.

My next prediction for you is that the marketing side of online courses is gonna get even more competitive. So gone are the early days of online courses where if you happen to be early and you really put up a quality course on a topic, and nobody else had done it. You could scale huge, particularly on a platform like Udemy.

In the early days I saw people teaching basic Excel courses making millions of dollars as an example. But as this market gets more and more saturated as artificial intelligence accelerates the marketing and advertising of courses, coaching programs, membership sites and so on, it’s just.

It’s gonna get more noisy and harder to stand out. So folks are using AI for their blogs, for making video content, writing emails. Some of the ai innovations in the paid advertising department that are happening right now are really interesting. And in five years I having an AI. Run your ad campaigns and optimize them over time is awesome, but you’re still gonna need to be a human and participate in all that.

So AI doesn’t, it doesn’t remove the need for marketing. What it does is it punishes lazy marketing. So if you just create AI slop blog posts with a very lightweight SEO strategy. And you don’t even edit the posts or put your personal touch on it. That’s AI slop. That kind of garbage in, garbage out is not gonna be productive from a marketing standpoint.

But those that use AI for ideation, repurposing SEO optimizations, funnel optimization. Testing, split tests playing with hooks and offers and all these things. This is where AI really shines I just wanna throw a plug out there. I use a AI tool called Ojo that’s at ojo.ai. And what’s cool about that is one of, I’ve been in internet marketing for about 20 years now.

It’s a couple decades. And one of the early internet marketers I followed, his name was Frank Kern. He’s a great marketer, direct response copywriter interesting guy. He’s done a lot of different things in marketing and information products and ads and all the rest. But a, marketer like Frank, you could probably hire him and pay him like $30,000 to write one sales page for you or.

What you could do is, and this is fairly recent, within the last year, you could pay $50 a month for his AI tool that has been trained on how he thinks and his style and his structure of copywriting and creating marketing, advertising, communications, messaging that works and converts. I love using that tool and it’s not like I just put a quick prompt and out comes a sales page.

It’s I, won’t say annoying to work with. It’s just time consuming because if you’re gonna do a sales page with ojo.ai, as much as Frank would like to say it’s easy, saves you a bunch of time, which it does do all those things. It’s gonna ask you like 20 questions and dig into you’re, you have to talk to it for about 30 minutes at least to come up with a good sales page.

But once you put in that work and you really jam with it as the human and tell your story and your voice and all these things, the actual sales page content is pretty awesome. So that’s but it’s not lazy. It’s not like a one-shot prompt to chat GBT. Hey, build me a sales page about my. Course, and here’s, the, here are the lessons in the course, and you’re done.

It’s not like that. It’s, much much more in depth. So use AI to co-pilot, not to replace you. Another trend that we’re gonna see more of is that search and discovery. Is gonna change dramatically beyond traditional Google, SEO. So what do I, mean about Google? SEO? For those who are early adopters of ai, you will have noticed that you use things like a Google search.

A lot less than you used to. For me it’s probably about 50% less. So I’m going to tools like chat, GBT, Claude and so on to search for answers, not just Google. So what does that mean? That means as a course creator AI. Tools, the language models will surface your course and people will find you and find links to you or at least discover you there on on a chat with an AI somewhere.

In addition to traditional methods like Google search, YouTube, social media, AI is gonna become a bigger and more and more important category. This is where all the opportunity is though. So when you have an AI optimization plan as a course creator, let me share some things that will help you stand out in a, in AI tools.

I’m learning this from personal experience and I’m, I found myself actually grateful and really lucky for some decisions I made over 13 years ago at the beginning of lifter LMS. Those decisions are this we have created a podcast. You’re listen to now, we’re somewhere around 500 episodes.

Each episode is on average, somewhere around 45 minutes, so I don’t do public math, but whatever, 500 times, 45 minutes, that’s a lot of minutes. All those episodes are out in the public domain where AI can crawl. Information. We also publish our podcast to YouTube. YouTube is al is also ingested by all the ais all the transcripts and all that stuff.

And that’s just our podcast. We have over a thousand pages of documentation on how to use lifter LMS. We have about a thousand blog posts and many pages on our website, informational pages. That describe what we do. We have our own social media presence in public discussions. We’ve been involved in on Reddit x YouTube comments and so on.

So because we have this large surface area of publicly available open content.

Theis know who we are. They found us like we’re not hiding. The problem with course creators is if you put all your intellectual property is basically inside the course or the membership, and the only public thing you have is a sales page and a checkout, you’re almost invisible to ai. This is why it’s important to do things like start a podcast.

Start a blog if you do a newsletter. Which I highly recommend publish the newsletter, the historical newsletter, post publicly on your site so they don’t just disappear into the email EERs make, start a YouTube channel. Get involved in conversations and help people. Don’t just be salesy and spammy, but help people in your industry, in your category.

For free. In places like Reddit and other public social media places, the AI is gonna be scraping. If you think about grok, that’s the the AI from X. So Grok obviously has optics on everything happening on X. If you’re not doing anything on x, gr is less and less likely to be aware of you.

This is all to say that Google search is not going to die. It’s gonna evolve. Google itself has its own AI tools, Gemini, which is awesome. But put, my advice is to put at least as much public content out there that you have behind the paywall so that the AI systems can discover you and help people find you when they’re looking for people, courses, resources.

Like you have. The next thing that I see in the next five years in an AI driven world is an increase in bigger issues around ethics, authenticity. And just doing the right moral thing. So what do I mean by that? One, AI today, if you look at. Video generated content or even text content.

You can’t always tell if it’s AI or not. So the line, it used to be obvious when something was ai, particularly in in video. But even videos as we call it, a deep fake, is now pretty possible. Like I know I’ve seen some AI content that I thought was real that is actually. No, not, and AI is just gonna get better and better the worst ai today is the worst AI’s ever gonna be.

It’s just gonna keep getting better and better which creates issues. So it’s okay to create a digital version of yourself. Whether that’s like a chat bot that’s trained on your knowledge base and helps people it’s okay to. Use AI to help with your writing and so on. But what’s not okay is to mislead people into, people need to know when they’re dealing with a human or not.

So I’m not this is just for informational purposes. I’m not a lawyer. Consult a lawyer. Get your own legal advice. But in your terms and conditions and your privacy policy page and everything on your website, I would encourage you to think about if you are using ai, how to incorporate that fact into your terms and conditions and your privacy policy and so on.

For example, with a privacy policy, if you are doing coaching and you’re really getting unique personal information from your clients and. You as a coach are leveraging AI to help you process and best coach those clients. If you’re sending that personal information away to another tool like chat, GBT, or wherever that’s a privacy policy issue.

So you just need to be upfront around all those things and be careful as well. Like it’s one thing to share that information to an AI tool about a coaching client with zero personally identifiable information. Versus actually like just dumping in their real name, their real email address.

They filled out this form with all this data, their company name, all this stuff, and you just push that out into chat GBT servers or whatever. You have to think about all of that. And the other thing too is AI tends to be affirming and it also can hallucinate. So sometimes we, don’t want AI to always be saying, Hey, good job.

You’re so smart, you’re doing the right thing. We sometimes we, need to do a little bit of tough love or not always be so positive. I am a very positive person. I love positivity. I like to default positivity of ai. But when it comes to education and learning and coaching, sometimes you have to give a little tough love or a little hard feedback or disagree.

With your client or your student. So think about that. And also sometimes AI will hallucinate, it will give incorrect information or straight up lie. And you need to have safeguards in place for that. Some, one way we talk about it is, we call it human in the loop, where a human will always review anything AI creates before.

It goes out. Or if you’re not gonna do that, let’s say you have an AI chat bot that’s trained on your knowledge base or whatever you wanna have a big disclaimer up front like, Hey, I am an ai, this is, I’m an AI chat bot. Sometimes my results may not be a hundred percent accurate or whatever. So just think about all that.

The authenticity, the ethics and the morals and all that stuff are really important when we’re using AI to accelerate us. We don’t want it to move, it go so fast to a point where we’re crossing ethical boundaries and not being authentic and true. Then my last thing is that AI for the course creators, it’s so much bigger than courses.

It’s about building AI augmented businesses. So as I was saying earlier, course content is somewhat becoming commodified and the value of it’s going down and down. So for an example of that is. Why would I sign up for a course about X when I can just ask AI to get the same information or even better information?

One reason is the course. There’s only one you teaching that course, and maybe they have a feel a connection to you or you have a unique style and, the people want you. Again, this is why your authenticity and personal brand really matter, but outside of courses. The winners will be building they’ll be accelerated by this AI content and research got, gets a million times easier than it is today.

That’s gonna lower the barrier to entry. Like part of me loves course creation because it had a little bit of a barrier to entry. ’cause getting on camera and building a website, a LMS website and everything. It’s not as easy as opening up a social media account and becoming an influencer.

So there’s a little bit of a barrier to entry AI’s blowing that all out of the water, even in WordPress. Keep a close eye on WordPress, the new AI stuff that’s coming into core WordPress. Basically where it’s going is you’re gonna be able to chat with your website and what that means is, think of it like chatting to chat GPT, but you’re actually chatting with your website like, Hey, add another service offering for this.

Create a new product for that. Change this sales page in this way. Replace that image with different image. So we’re moving to conversational interfaces. We’re already, there in many ways. But we haven’t really done that with our website. You know what the conversational interface for our website was in the past and is today for the most part.

It’s a developer, it’s an agency, it’s a freelancer. So what that means is it’s not that AI is going to take jobs from website builders, it’s just that will happen for people that don’t. Evolve as freelancers and developers and agencies to better serve their clients in the AI world. But you’re gonna be able to chat with your website and get stuff done just by talking to your website.

This is one of the cool things about WordPress and where the, AI map is and direction is going with that. Scale with automation. And, but don’t over automate, don’t remove the human entirely. Think bigger than just courses is where you can get into the memberships and the course cohorts and the community and the social learning and the the private coaching, the group coaching, the office hours, all of these things are becoming more and more important so that you can build a full stack AI augmented education business.

I’d recommend that if you’re behind the curve on ai, just start playing with it. It’s changing so fast. The main thing is just to start playing with it. Try to make videos with it. Try to make images with it. Use it for some research. Use it for some of your content things. Double down on niching, double down on your personal brand.

Double down on community and really obsess about human transformation and not just giving people the best information, help your target market transform into the better person that they want to become. So I want to encourage you to own your platform. Build your online education business on your own website, please do that.

That’s what WordPress is there for. That’s what lifter LMS is there for. Remember, these are open tools. You know where we’re going with ai. Let’s say you wanted to customize your LMS that’s so much easier on a platform like WordPress that you own and control that’s open source than some closed, hosted, overpriced, expensive course tool.

So build your AI augmented education business on your own website with WordPress and lifter LMS. And remember, AI lowers barriers. So it creates a lot of noise, but it also creates opportunity. So chase the high end of the market in terms of becoming an AI augmented. Education entrepreneur that’s building even better learning experiences with the help of ai.

So that’s it for this episode. Thank you for listening. Don’t forget with all this AI and technology and website building, it’s good to go outside and take a break and connect with humans in nature and we’ll catch you in the next episode. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this episode, Joe Gorup goes into great detail about how his platform CourseAvenue uses a highly developed AI system called Course Advisor to transform complicated, dense source materials (like technical documents, PDFs, or government regulations) into fully structured, instructionally sound online courses in a matter of minutes.

Joe Gorup founded CourseAvenue and is a software developer and innovator in e-learning. Using API interfaces, these courses are then smoothly distributed via LifterLMS, enabling student tracking, course structuring, and lesson development to be done automatically. In contrast to simple AI prompting tools, his system employs a multi-step “AI factory” process that evaluates the length, context, and purpose of the content, applies instructional design frameworks such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, and creates assessments and lessons that are appropriate for various learning levels.

He emphasizes that the true issue this addresses is that the majority of subject matter experts such as attorneys, engineers, or compliance officers are not qualified teachers, which makes it challenging and costly to transform their expertise into useful training (which often costs up to $100,000 per course). Beyond creation, the platform offers sophisticated learning analytics that analyze everything from individual question performance to completion rates, assisting in the identification of gaps in learner comprehension and course quality. By utilizing a specially designed bridge to enable bookmarking, scoring, and progress tracking, it also tackles important technical issues like SCORM integration within WordPress. Additionally, it guarantees complete accessibility compliance (WCAG/Section 508), making courses usable for students with disabilities.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Joe Goup. He’s the founder of course avenue.com. You gotta see what he is built over@gov.education. Which is a super cool implementation, of course, avenue’s, unique way of creating course content and then feeding it into a lifter LMS site.

But first, welcome to the show, Joe.

Joe Gorup: Hey, thanks a lot, Chris. I appreciate the chance to chat with you and the folks. Yeah it’s a wild rule in the LMS and education and content space these days and to throw our hat in the ring and show people what we’re doing. So I appreciate the opportunity.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a, it is a busy space. There’s literally 500 LMSs out there. AI is taking over the world. The economy’s in flux and everybody’s just trying to figure things out, and you’re doing some really interesting stuff at the intersection of all those. Tell us about gov. Do education, what is it?

Why’d you build it? How does it work?

Joe Gorup: Great. It came from the notion of as a company course avenue, which I started early on works a lot in the federal government. People use our core our, authoring tool to build courses on everything from inspecting meat packing plants to ethics compliance for federal lawyers.

And so over the years, we just saw this kind of huge gap between there’s dense regulations. Are hard to understand. And then the volume of time it takes to actually educate someone on what is in these regulations. And the one rule of thumb that we’ve used within the federal government is a hundred thousand dollars per course.

One of my associates, director of training, yeah, I had a million dollars budget and I had to build 10 courses in one year, stressed out to the to the max. But he did it. And I can I can vouch for that. Yeah. It a fully baked compliance course that, that the, to transform that dense regulations into education.

It’s a very expensive process. So with that is my background as, yes, the AI train is, in full of gear here. We were fortunate, one of our one of my co-founders was early on in LLMs having to write Python code before there was any chat. He would talking to LLMs through writing Python code and having Python code, write other Python code.

And we started playing around with. The AI with the goal of, I know instructional systems design. I know the time delay, I know the source content, and we saw what could be done not in chat, and what government education represents is the end of, I don’t know, 15 years of experience management and work in the federal government.

And it, what we do is we take regulations, use AI to transform it and to make courses so people can actually understand what’s in the regulations and yeah. And so we go from federal register document, a document comes out in the federal government and in about four and a half minutes. We have a course, a marketing page, and a course in lifter.

And there could be a lot of skeptics out there. What are those? Oh, how is that possible? And I know in the l in the in the AI space there’s a lot of talk about you can’t use, you can’t really build a course with an LLM and just ai. And I’m here to tell you it, it can be done, but not through a simple chat interface.

And so that making sense? Am I

Chris Badgett: That is making sense. You get the document from the government, you full, you fold it through your course advisor software.

Joe Gorup: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then it creates course content that you then feed into Lift rails. You’re doing it through an API. Tell us about your setup. Like why does WordPress, and why did you choose WordPress and Lifter as part of this stack?

Joe Gorup: WordPress. It was just handy. It’s ubiquitous. We can pull in plugins as needed. The eco, I didn’t have to worry about the e-commerce interface.

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Joe Gorup: and so on a pure convenience and it as a software engineer, as my background, I cringe a little bit about the underlying WordPress ecosystem because like I know we’re, down in the Willy weeds, we’re down in the PHP, we’re down in the code.

And sometimes it gives me heartburn. But from a convenience standpoint, for me to st for me to custom build something, to do everything WordPress does, right? That’s outta the equation. Then we looked at delivering, so we’ve been in the LMS delivery space tangentially, right? Because we have people use our software to build courses.

We have our own little mini LMSA little tracking system. And, but we go, we didn’t wanna have to modify ours, and we looked around on the, like most people do Google searching AI things and Lifter came across our desk and we poked it. We used your trial period and we said, Hey, we kicked the tires, but we wanna kick ’em to kick the tires from the bottom.

How scalable is it and a thousand courses later using your API? It’s been rock solid. And one of the things we struggled with out in the market was our output from our product is a storm compliant. Or 10 can compliance course. And there’s that little bit of a gap of how do I launch those?

And there’s some solutions out there and I didn’t like. We tried one and it was it was klugy and it was funny because we like the lifter API, we know our code and we just need something to bridge the gap. So we wrote a little thin interface layer between a course, avenue course that I can create publishes score.

I can put it in my corporate LMS or wherever else I wanna put it. But then we can also just put that in lifter, like you said, we create the lesson, the course wrapper for that lesson. And then. Our course shows up as a little piece that gets launched in track. So all the bookmarking, the things you want, the book especially bookmarking and completion status are the top couple things that we leverage back and forth.

It’s a very, so we, again, we love the scalability the fact that we can talk to it. The API has worked to the tune of I think 1,005 courses.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s amazing. And can you tell more about how you solved the SCORM WordPress problem of playing SCORM content and tracking in WordPress?

Because there are some off the shelf solutions, a couple players out in the market, but it sounds like you built your own, which is awesome and it’s always been a little bit of a friction point between. Because WordPress native people see WordPress as a content management system. So they’re gonna create their content in WordPress, right?

Not necessarily separately, but when you do create SCORM files or some benefit to that,

Joe Gorup: right?

Chris Badgett: But as well. So how did you bridge those worlds?

Joe Gorup: What? Having been in this role a long time, the essence of what people want is I wanna launch a course, I wanna know who’s taking the course. So from a, if I had my course perspective hat on I wanna launch, it.

So I have to know those per in score, right? It’s just a set of parameters, the CMI data of the for the learner. And so our little, it’s basically a little shim. I, call it, it’s a, it’s not a massive piece of software that’s, below. It’s basically, I know the, I can talk to the lifter side, you’re gonna tell me who this person is, and then we have a little piece that just launches our course, pretending like it’s being launched from a score compliant system.

And we have a little, and in there we have a log file. So I can tell you like every time we send a bookmark, so any learner that takes a course in lifter from a course avenue built course, I can tell. I, our log file will tell you the learner id, the learner name, all the communications back and forth, and it’s just, it came natural to us.

’cause that’s, we’re software company and that’s what we do. So we weren’t trying to solve the, I have course builder 3000, the publishes score. ’em and, now I want to use WordPress to connect the two. So we aren’t trying to mill. Ubiquitous. We’re not gonna try to retire on a, scoring to lifter tool, but for anyone that uses our product, they can press a button and with our little, with a plug, with a little course avenue plugin, your course and Lifter will communicate back and forth.

We will set the completion status back to lifter. And as they’re going through, the course of the bookmarks are all stored, which is usually that’s the, those are the main things people want. And then if I could plug one more piece to that puzzle what we know is people like bookmarking, they like completion status and they like scoring.

And the one problem it’s, it goes deep into the whole scoring of 2004 revision you on. I wanna know. Is everyone missing? Question five, is the question bad? I have knowledge checks Are PE what Most everyone puts knowledge checks in their courses or they should, or they like to question. How do you, how are people doing?

Do you have any notion of not you got storing ’em ’cause they’re just knowledge checks. Course avenue we have for years we’ve had this module called Analyze. Where we, track that. And so the people that take our courses in Lifter, if they launch the course with, I can, if I look at my analyze reports, I can tell you, I can tell you how many seconds someone took, to answer a question.

We have a whole suite of learning analytics down to that individual learner, taking an individual question. Data, which is extremely helpful. One of our customers is the Federal Aviation Administration. Medical doctors that wanna be certified by the FAA have to be re-certified, right? So in that level of high consequence training, knowing they got a 75% on the test isn’t good enough because again, like I said, maybe everyone’s missing the same 25%.

The questions are bad.

And, I kind and without knowing, is everybody missing these eight questions or is everyone choosing C and the actual is B because the distractor is wrong? And so I, it’s so I’m That is a, very powerful element on top of the fact that yes, it’s just scor we know score.

It’s been confusing from the score world of tracking individual or responses. There’s, It is not standardized, but we’ve standardized it and it’s, it works extremely well. So we get not only just bookmarking data completion status scoring, but then scoring down to the, if you check a box to track it, I can track it down.

Or of course, avenue courses can track down to the individual response the individual response and just That’s awesome. Yeah. And just a page, just to how that works is, you build your course in course Avenue Studio when you hit the publish button, we have, this is really fascinating when you’re looking at the course from a course developer standpoint, if you click on the learning analytics tab, we will tell you up to the, basically within probably four hours, we summarize all the data.

So you can literally click on a section, a lesson, an exam, a question, and get the individual learner responses, including survey questions. That’s a very powerful piece of the puzzle. And that’s how people that use Course Evan do to build the courses. It’s not just publish and forget it, it’s, it becomes, if you’re using that analytics, you get learning analytics as a part of the development process.

So you can go and fix the question that everyone’s missing, republish it and see how, see what happens next.

Chris Badgett: Does that, mean that Course Avenue is a learning record store as well? So this, L-M-S-L-R-S, all these,

Joe Gorup: yeah.

Chris Badgett: 10 can API. It gets a little confusing, but is it

Joe Gorup: I guess if I put my 10 cat, 10 K or XAPI.

In that respect, it’s an option when you’re using our product. And so we, we’ve literally had this before TinCan came out. And so I was at the conference when, at the TinCan announcement. I’m like, we’re already doing that. And yes, if people want that data, you check a couple boxes, enable this for this.

Maybe I don’t want analytics, I want the final exam, whatever it is. And we will send back that data and we do store it in course Avenue Studio. Some people hate that idea. I just want just, I wanna publish it and get it outta your authoring platform. Hey, I got that. That’s fine. A lot of people are wanting to know the effectiveness, of their learning by measuring and seeing that level of detail.

Chris Badgett: But on Gov education

Joe Gorup: Yep.

Chris Badgett: Does the SCORM file live on that website?

Joe Gorup: We have a storage mechanism within Course Avenue. So it, you, the courses are, does

Chris Badgett: it kinda I frame in or does it actually serve from your WordPress

Joe Gorup: site? It’s, it serves from our WordPress site.

Chris Badgett: Okay,

Joe Gorup: cool. So you’re in Lifter and you take, you click on Launch My Lesson and it just, a window appears.

Yeah, and that’s our course. And it’s talking, it talks back to the WordPress site that. We have hosted and then it updates the score or lifter with the status

Chris Badgett: and talks back if they choose to. The course Avenue Analytics as well.

Joe Gorup: Yeah. Yeah, we do. And I, and part of that is for those that are skeptical of an AI created course, and I get that we have literally spent, like I said, we were very early on in the AI world before there was a chat, and so we have refined the process of creating education.

And I was, one of the courses we have is on maritime education and I was really proud that people were taking the course and the feedback has been extremely positive and it’s one thing to build a course, and in our case, we don’t know, course Avenue was not a maritime cybersecurity expert, but we sell a course on it that was created by a course advisor.

I’m like and, we knew it was good. We’ve done enough of, and enough QA know, like we think it’s, but to have an external third party who we’d never met before, right? Some company in Ohio bought the course and then bought 10 more copies for their folks and. So for us, from a validation standpoint, a director of cyber security for a company in this domain took our course, liked it so much that he bought 10 more copies.

And for that we, our custom order, we actually manually sold them that. So we, did the manual enrollments in in lifter for 10 of those folks. But so that was another, I guess another feature was the fact that we could, API it people could make it self development and then. We put our, LMS management hat on, and we just use, we use the lifter manual enrollment, which worked great, and they’re all there and it’s in there my courses list.

Yeah, so not only did we develop the course took, the maritime san course took about, I think four and a half minutes to create. It’s sold through our lifter L-M-S-L-M-S piece and it’s revenue positive.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to be clear course avenue.com is like your course creation, content creation business.

Joe Gorup: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And Gov education is an example where you’re using your own software to create profitable training, even though you’re not like a maritime No captain expert. Your process is able to create valuable training materials for an industry. Yeah. Which is really cool.

Joe Gorup: Yeah. What you mentioned the the subject matter expert ker.

So like how do you extract this information and what we wanted to do with gov education, it’s a real thing, right? There is a problem with, there’s new HIPAA compliance laws federal man derivatives trading, new rules, regulations from the SEC, it’s

Chris Badgett: say 95, I just wanna say 95% of subject matter experts are not trained as educators, teachers, or coaches.

So this is the huge problem. There’s a lot of great subject matter experts that maybe they make a technical document, like in this case, a legal

Joe Gorup: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Thing. But it’s a great problem to focus on and I’m so glad you’re doing that at Course Avenue.

Joe Gorup: Yep. Yeah. And yeah, but you hit the nail on the head.

Course Avenue is the authoring tool, the product that we have that has course advisor built in and to quell the, or the, naysayers. We created Gov education because it’s like we’re gonna, we’re right, we’re gonna use our own tool. We’re gonna automate like the

Chris Badgett: hair club for men. You’re also a client, right?

Joe Gorup: Yeah. Yeah. My, my hair’s a whole nother story, but but yes. But yeah, that we wanted to make it, is it scalable? Is it repeatable? And it could produce high quality. And we saw that for, we have basically every significant federal regulation since, 2024, is on government education. So we skipped some of the little the, Prune Festival celebration in in, Georgia.

We’re not gonna build a course on that. But again derivatives training, maritime, cybersecurity, huge changes. Food stamp program, the SNAP program. I one, there’s 200. When they change, they’re actually changing the packaging rules for products at the USDA. And we have a course on it, but it’s buried the logic, the actual what is happening is buried in that document.

So for anyone that’s listening, if you do have those, you’re the subject matter expert in whatever you’re, in. If you have some source material, as Chris mentioned, that transformation part. It’s not easy. You’re not trained in ISD. And so our thought is, hey, if we can augment that, take what you give us.

We do the ISD, and then your job is to just correct if it’s wrong. So we have our, marketing phrases, AI powered, human refined, and that’s what we believe in. They aa might, they might get it wrong. You may want to t you’re gonna want to tweak things. You wanna put your own stamp on there, personalize it.

And that’s, so you use course, so we generate it, it’s in course Avenue Studio, which is targeted towards non-tech. Gees. If you wanna get down and use the course Avenue API, you can do that. But we’re really about enabling subject matter experts to edit Main, and we’ve been doing that for a good long time.

Mostly in the US government is helping people do just what we’re talking about. And now we see we can actually enable lots of people, with all the content we do have and or reaching out folks like you guys to help spread the word that, yeah, we wanna solve that problem.

Chris Badgett: Cool. Who, are like some of the clients, like what type of person is a really good fit for course, avenue or company or business or organization or whatever,

Joe Gorup: someone that wants to, to what?

We’ve used the term measured communications. In other words, you have, like today, what we see is a lot of companies are struggling with the fact that I have again, standard operating procedures, rules, regulations a manual. And that transformation has taken so long using traditional methods with instructional systems, designers sitting down, it can be very expensive.

And so if it, and then, so having people that, that have those problems, if they want to transform it into education, that would be a great. C prospect for us. Also it’s like folks that are currently today, they’re taking their p their, domain experience. Their domain, I’m sorry, their domain expertise.

They’re putting it in a PowerPoint and posting it somewhere. Or I’ll put it in a, I’ll take my notes. They’re in A PDF or create a YouTube video. I did a demo. You did a demo of your product. It’s in YouTube. You may get some little analytics. You may. You may see how many views you had in A PDF. You post somewhere, it’s you may, you hope someone read it.

But what about if I took your PDF and transformed it into an education piece that was now measurable?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Oh,

Joe Gorup: I can now tell you how many minutes the person spent on it. I’ll generate questions based on your PDF and you, the person that wrote it, can see how they did. And then you know how long they spent on it.

And did they get it? So as opposed to just throwing stuff out in the ether and like hoping, and I hope they get it, the education aspect and what course advisors can do is can transform that into something. Now you have a shared context. You’re, setting a learning objective and the things that don’t come natural to.

Expert, right? A subject of expert is not gonna think in terms of learning design, but what that power that does is it, now makes it your communications from this linear PDF out or YouTube out in the ether to a measurable element that you can gauge and understand how people are they learning something, which is really what you want.

So that’s the, kind of a big picture. The second picture as I think I mentioned. For people that are trying to sell content online, right? And again, we big fans of your product and lifter, we, I say big fans, there’s a thousand horses in there. It’s help helping people with that problem.

Your domain experts, you’re not ISDs are you hiring people? You hire, you got the course out there, now you, oh, geez, you wanna make some changes, right? We’ve seen a lot of cases where a subject matter expert really knows tax accounting, really knows how to grow fruit trees in Arkansas. Like they just wanna, they wanna make some money on that.

They hire someone to develop the course and then they, oh, how we make an update. There’s a, new frost thing we learned. They have to go back to the person they paid to create the course, all the content and that can time consuming and expensive. It can be really expensive in some cases.

So all about pushing, enabling people to build and manage their own education without, and making it key is instructionally sound and available just quicker. A lot quicker. And then self maintainable. That’s we’re about. An

Chris Badgett: AI question for you. ISD instructional design curriculum design course content creation.

It sounds easy, but it’s not, and

Joe Gorup: no.

Chris Badgett: And if a human steps up to an AI like ChatGPT, with my. Let’s say I wrote a nonfiction book on a topic and I plug it in and tell Chad, GBT to make me a course about this. That’s like a very junior way to do it. I’m sure what you’re doing, there’s there’s way more that goes into working with AI to actually create a valuable course.

Like what’s an example that a non-instructional, a concept that a non-instructional designer would be helpful to just learn.

Joe Gorup: I, in our experience you see all the stuff online about ai either a, it’s gonna actually change the world. Everyone’s gonna lose their jobs. We’re gonna be doing as humans are gonna be doing nothing.

On the other hand, epic failures, it deleted all the code and it, aired out and as a train wreck. And so what we’ve seen is you could, the chat gpt of the world from an end user perspective are deceivingly powerful. You can create an outline of a course. It gives you this positive feedback.

You can, you could do some things, but how do you operate? The key is operationalizing that and to the essence of your question is, that how can I not just have it do something but actually manufacture and make it part and do this process because ISD is not a one stop, press the button and get something out.

And so I, wish I had a great answer for people. Other than with my self-promotion hat on of use Course Advisor. But there’s that gap between I wanted to use chat to get some valuable information out and fully operationalize it as we have is huge. Again, and under our covers we’re, an education company, but under the covers we’re a software engineering company, so our techniques have been working on.

Interface like we interface with you guys with, lifter, LMS, user API, we use the APIs of the LLMs to have a, it’s an extended conversation when it takes four or five minutes to create a course. In our world the conversation that’s going on, how much content do we have? What’s the essence of the content?

How do you maintain context? When you’re going after building a given page of content versus in 155 page document. So there’s all these tools that unfortunately today they require programmatic conversations. And so I don’t have any handy tips for your listeners that say, oh, if you just do this prompt it’s not, it’s prompt engineering and software engineering combined with.

Our 20 plus years of doing course development put into a big, we call it the factory. So our gov education is run by our AI factory, which is a very complicated piece of software. I give you one a quick example. It’s like you can’t be generic. So if I have 150 page document. How the structure of that’s gonna be different than a 10 page document.

And so we have different models that we’ll use depending on, we analyze the, so we analyze the source material dynamically. Oh, this is this, I don’t want, I don’t want one section, in one lesson in 50 pages. I don’t want in my course, but I don’t want that the, but I don’t need 50 core, 50 sections, 50 lessons and isn’t going support so much.

So what we do is we actually have this conversation with the content and ai, with our own knowledge to actually construct, to like literally hand build just really, quickly. Of course. And so, for example, that again, that differentiation of. What is the overall source material? Girth, for lack of a better term, and I just wanted to use the word girth, but and then that’ll affect the output of the course. And then there’s still another dimension of that, which, let me stop for a second if you have any other questions, but I wanna talk about the source material can provide a course, but that’s just the first leg of the journey, am I making sense about your AI question?

Did I answer that?

Chris Badgett: You are making sense. I have a another question about accessibility. I’m not sure to drop that in here or not

Joe Gorup: Sure.

Chris Badgett: But okay. Yeah, keep going.

Joe Gorup: Okay. The okay. I’m trying to think of what I kinda lost my train of thought there when I, paused. Oh, the I know. But, so we talked about the course. So I upload my PDF and we’ll take, I’ll take a a, federal government example, look at watershed management and all the elements. There’s new regulations about what’s a watershed and how we’re gonna maintain it, and how you do these measurements.

It’s a 95 page dense regulations headache inducing, written by extremely savvy. Subject matter experts, right? The team that built that, they’re half lawyers, they’re half geologists, and this thing will just it’s brutally hard to understand. We can build a course on that. We call it a baseline course.

When we come in and the topic is the document. Educate me on what’s in this thing. Overall that’s valuable. ’cause I can’t sit through the 85 page document, but it’s again, it’s a baseline course and what we know, right? In good learning design, you’re targeting a topic, an audience to a certain depth of learning.

And I think that’s one of the other things that we see with the people that use, that try to generate a course with Chet ut of why they fail so often is because they’re not factoring those other dimensions. So in my watershed example, I create a baseline course. I can give it to you, you can buy it from us, and hey, great, I now understand what’s in the document.

In course advisor part of the, magic, if you will, is I can then press the button that says, run me a training matrix, build me a training matrix. We then look through the document and identify the main topics. It’s watershed surveys. It’s watershed soil recognition. It’s water it’s stream development and water flow diagramming.

And then there’s compliance, and then there’s fines. And what happens if you do something wrong? So our training, our course advisor will run through the document, pick out the topics. For every given topic, we’ll identify reasonable target audiences. Is it an inspector, is it a landowner, is it a developer?

So given topic, I have a set of audiences, and then this is really cool. Then it comes down to what level of detail and to put my learning geek hat on using Bloom’s taxonomy. Are we talking a level one, an awareness level or an application level? Course, and I can then check a box. I literally check I want, give me four watershed management, soil analysis composition elements.

Give me an awareness level course for landowners, and then an application level course for inspectors. You press the button, have a grab a cup of coffee I’m not kidding. Come back and you’ll have the courses ready to be edited and reviewed. And, now then you edit them, tweak ’em, change ’em. And then just for those, not in the tech geeky world, like what does it mean by this taxonomy level and level of detail?

What’s fascinating is when you look at a an awareness level course, you just wanna know Hey, yeah, there’s soil, there’s composition, and I need to type. There’s four different types. Got it. Now an application level. You just can’t know. There’s four. You have to know the four, and you have to know why it’s a 1, 2, 3, or four.

And what’s what I, this gives me, this is fascinating to me. In our courses that we create, you can really tell by the assessment, by the questions that are generated. And it is fascinating to see that the questions for level one will be that are there, how many different types of soil compositions are there?

Four. In the application level, it’ll give you a case study. In the case where soil composition is 87% manure with a hydro acidity level of 6.2, what is the most appropriate level or assignment for this next step? I’m like, wow. We can literally create that level of education that challenges people to understand.

And you can’t, I, you can’t, you can guess. You may get it right. But I will the every course that we’ve seen that does that, it is a the, you just can’t really, you have to know it. Like I hydroxy level is the type two I it’s fascinating. So bigger picture, yes, it’s a course. But then the course matrix is what is extremely powerful.

’cause I can now target a, securities dealer in New York, or am I talking to the broker manager or am I talking to our SEC regulator all on that route document. So again, from a. Not everyone has federal documents, but everyone hopefully listening, you have some domain experience. You’re trying to educate somebody on something.

So what? Do whatever you have of it’s like that transformation and I’ll call it like transformation plus. That’s transformation. Plus a matrix opportunity to target the learners as opposed to trying to create one giant course. For everybody. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a tough one. Yeah, so there’s that.

And then you asked about accessibility. Should I talk about that for a

Chris Badgett: second? Yeah, go for it.

And I just wanna say for those that don’t know, accessibility is really important in online education. It could be somebody using a screen reader who had, who doesn’t have vision, or somebody who can’t hear if there’s audio content and all kinds of stuff.

This is what accessibility is if you don’t know.

Joe Gorup: Yeah. And another, a good example is lapu. Some that don’t have hands. Simply use voice command software. We’ve seen people have disabilities where they literally will say the word keyboard tab.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Joe Gorup: And then they’re it’s not really a screen reader, it’s a voice recognition software will actually issue the tab.

And so all that is essentially, it’s kinda like you can’t build a restaurant with having, without having a handicapped access bathroom. Yeah. Or yeah, go up the spiral staircase. In your wheelchair. Like you can’t do that in the online world. There’s WCAG is the foundation of accessibility rules, and there are a set of rules, like how do you make something bold and HTML there’s a rule for how you make something accessible.

And HTML and those rule sets, it’s coming called WCAG which is part of WAI, which is part of W three C, the overall, so we’re talking foundational internet. Operations. It’s extremely difficult to achieve that. I’ll just tell you a lot of other tools out there will say, yes, you can build accessible e-learning with our product.

Step one, become an accessibility expert. Here’s wca.com. Oh gosh, no, very few people can do that. And let alone know what this, so if step one is learn how to build your own wheelchair ramp oh gosh, that’s a tough road to hoe. So what course avenue is done? We’ve actually integrated in.

The accessibility rules, section 5 0 8 and WCAG. Section 5 0 8 is within the government W. So if you’re a government supplier, you get to be quote section 5 0 8, which is basically just the rule. It’s the rule set for government. Outside of that, it’s WCAG. We build it into our product. So we’re like the only e-learning offering company that will say, if you build a course in our product, we will guarantee the output.

The output will be five away compliant. And we have a built-in accessibility analysis tool that will actually run through and, tell you page by page, object by object, if it’s good or bad. I’ll give you one, one common example that most people can relate to, and most people are probably guilty of this too, right?

You’re in Microsoft, I’ll give you a word example, but this applies to a course as well your honor. You’re writing a document. You have a, please remember the following, four key, ethical the following requirements, and you take the requirements sentence, please. Please review the following requirements.

You highlight it, you make it bold, and you increase the font a couple notches. So most of your body text is 16. Now you have a 20 pitch font bold. It’s ah. And then you have your list, right? That’s a violation of five compliance. That’s a violation of accessibility right there. Why? Because visually that looks like a header.

The person using the street mirror that’s blind doesn’t know that. It just says the following. Now they can infer it, right? They can infer like the, if you literally say the following, four things are important, colon. But there’s a zillion cases where they don’t know that, and then it gets really complicated because if you have these following in these three sections, and then the three sections has another subsection, visually you can see it looks like subheading, subheading.

The person using the screen reader can’t, they can’t see it, so they rely on it being header tagged. In our product, if you, we actually have like fuzzy logic in there that says if we see a page and we see something bold with a colon after it. So all these little rules that we have, we’ll call it out as an implied header.

Do you, are you really. Like ahead of us. It maybe not be, but it probably is. And then, by the way, here’s the fix, highlight it format. H three, make it a heading. Visually, you probably won’t even know a difference, but it’s literally the difference between making it accessible or inaccessible.

Yeah. And so if you’re, working off of a grant with the federal government, the document you sign says is five W. It needs to be accessible. And I it, is literally part of just it’s federal law. Not many people do it well, and we do it well. And so I give talks on five away compliance and all that kind of stuff.

So I, I can go on for a lot more, but I won’t. But if you’re concerned about that the people that can’t tab. Keyboard accessibility is so huge, especially we’re seeing more and more of that, of everything from, I had personal experience with returning veterans that can’t use a mouse. And if your course or your content says, welcome to our course, click here to begin.

And you have to, you don’t recognize the keyboard. It’s just, not cool. It’s, doing a disservice. And as more content’s being pumped out. That divide that gap between people that need to get the content that just happen to have some kind of mobility issue. They can’t use a mouse.

It’s not all about the people that just visually can’t see. That’s a big part of it. But again, the key is another thing that is, is big. It’s important ’cause you, it just, again, it’s the right thing to do. And I’m, proud of what Course Avenue has been able to do in that community to, to, and generate.

To make it, so again, I call mere mortals, normal people can create something and then the output is five away compliant. And if it’s not, if there’s a question, we as a company will back, we’re there, we have your back. And I can say that because we do work in the government. We have literally millions of learners that have used our courses and there’s never been a, technology issue with a course having a course.

So that’s all about accessibility for now,

Chris Badgett: working with government that you would have to meet the accessibility need or requirement. But that’s awesome that you’re so passionate about it anyways, that really every course creator, it’s like a cherry on top. Not only are you helping subject matter experts solve the experts curse.

By turning volume of content into actual usable online course, but you’re also making it accessible to all types of people.

Joe Gorup: Yep. That’s

Chris Badgett: great.

Joe Gorup: Yeah, it is. The funny is we got, started in the whole federal government because of our promise, inaccessibility. ’cause that’s a, it is a really hard problem to solve and I’ll just.

It bothers me when I see a sexy demo. So I authoring tool out there, look at all these cool flashing lights and bells and whistles and whirling fans. And then they’ll also say, you can make five way compliant software e-learning courses. And what they don’t tell you is the demo you just saw.

Isn’t fine, isn’t accessible, it just looks really good. And then so I’ve seen people have that buyer’s remorse where it’s like they realize it, they did all these, things. And then they found out later that, oh yeah the questions aren’t really accessible or if you want to use that interaction type.

The whirling fan interaction? That’s not really accessible. Oh that’s horrible. So interactions, of course, avenue Studio are accessible. Flip cards, accordions, drag and drop even. You build a drag and drop interaction in our product and we spend a lot of time, effort, energy to make sure that it’s available using keyboards.

It’s a keyboard accessible. Oh, drag and drop element. So

Chris Badgett: that’s incredible. Yeah. That’s Joe Gora. He’s from Course Avenue. Go to course avenue.com. Also check out Gov Education, which is an implementation using Course Avenue’s technology called Course Advisor.

Joe Gorup: Yep.

Chris Badgett: And Joe, thank you for telling your story.

Thank you for being a shining example of a innovator and technologist using lifter LMS, but also with a lot of. Strong values of helping subject matter experts and making the web accessible. It’s really admirable. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Joe Gorup: Oh, I appreciate it.

Appreciate Chris. Thanks a appreciate.

Speaker 2: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this episode of LMScast, learning and development specialist Lee-Anne Ragan, who has over 40 years of experience working with international organizations, such as the United Nations, shares useful tips for designing more successful and captivating learning opportunities. According to her, many course designers fail because they don’t always understand how people learn best, not because they lack knowledge.

In order to assist trainers in creating well-rounded learning programs, Lee-Anne presents her SAKE framework, which stands for Skills, Attitude, Knowledge, and Experience. While many courses place a lot of emphasis on knowledge such as theory, frameworks, and information, Lee-Anne highlights that students really appreciate experiencing the most, which means having the chance to put what they’ve learned into practice after the course.

However, the component that online courses and training programs most commonly lack is experience. Additionally, Lee-Anne talks about “information overload,” or what she refers to as “infobesity,” which is a condition in which individuals are overloaded with information and have shorter attention spans. Because of this, course designers must make their material interesting, helpful, and instantly applicable in order to lower learning friction. She suggests planning instruction for both before and after the learning experience, in addition to what occurs during the course. For instance, teachers might use resources like her HARP technique (Highlights, Actions, Resources, and Pictures) to assist students capture important discoveries in advance. Through challenges, communities, or practical projects that promote ongoing practice, designers should assist students in putting their knowledge into practice after the course.

The significance of establishing a psychologically secure learning environment is another important idea Lee-Anne emphasizes. She describes how the amygdala in the brain affects learning by assessing whether a student feels scared or comfortable.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Lee-Anne Ragan. She’s at rock paper scissors ink.com. I met Leanne at a conference in the UK for membership sites. It was awesome to connect and she has an interesting life, as well as interesting skills, tips, and knowledge to share about how to be.

A better teacher, workshop leader, coach, communicator. But before we dive into it, first, welcome to the show, Leanne.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Thank you, Chris. I am so excited to be here. And just a big shout out to all your listeners and your viewers for being interested and showing up and times are challenging right now.

And thank you for being here. We appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: Let’s share a little bit about your life. ’cause I find it so interesting, like some of the things you’ve done and places you’ve lived. Give us a little context. Into the leanne that we’re, listening to or watching today?

Lee-Anne Ragan: That’s a good question.

I am a learning and development expert. I’ve been in that field for, gosh, 40 years or something like that. I hold a Canadian passport. I’m a proud Canadian, and I just spent the last 14 years living in Kenya in East Africa. And you might think to yourself, this does not look like a Kenyan background.

It’s because I’ve just moved to France. So I am in Southern France adjusting to weather that is very different from Kenya. And I’ve just, I think I’ve been here a few months and I’ve just about finished the, when I see a little thing out of the corner of my eye, I’ve just about stopped thinking, oh, it must be a monkey.

Not too many of those in Southern France. But I, I’m all about changing the way the world learns. I think that if we put more emphasis on learning, really good learning, that’s engaging and interesting and raises curiosity, that’s a game changer. I have taught more than 50,000 participants.

I think it’s almost close to 55 now. In and from more than 150 countries. I’ve worked with all sorts of un teams and agencies all over the world, and I’m the founder of the Learning Development Roundtable and the Transformative Trainers Academy, and I’m also a huge fan of Chris’s. So super excited to be here.

Chris Badgett: Funny when we met we were at a conference and just making introductions at a table. And then you recognized the podcast voice, which has never, rarely happens to me in person. So it was it was a lot of fun.

Lee-Anne Ragan: I just about got whiplash. I think I was looking down, taking some notes, and my head literally flew up.

I’m like, I know that voice. I would recognize that voice anywhere.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s, fun. Yeah. That

Lee-Anne Ragan: was really fun.

Chris Badgett: It’s a small world in reality.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: We talk a lot on the show about the five hats you have to wear. One of ’em is to be an entrepreneur. One of ’em is to be a subject matter expert.

One of ’em is to be a community builder. One of ’em is to be a technologist. And the final one where you really sit strong is to be a teacher or instructional designer or coach. And that’s often a weak point. Like somebody may be good at tech, good enough to put a website together, do some marketing. Start a business.

They have their subject matter expertise. They’re super passionate, but they never went to teaching school, or they don’t necessarily have a lot of experience like running groups or learning environments. So dial us in. Take us in on some of the ways that any course creator or coach can get past the writer’s block or the fear of.

Teaching and taking all this passion and subject matter expertise and actually creating an engaging learning environment.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah, I’m so glad you mentioned that, Chris. Those different hats. ’cause I think much like you, I think lifter talks about reducing the friction. And I think we put so much friction in place with learning.

And I think you’re absolutely right. People are, I talk about being info busy. And Infobesity we are so busy, we are walking and talking faster than we did generations ago. And my youngest son is a filmmaker. And I did a little bit of research. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a film from decades ago, like the 1930s, but the average shot length, you’ll notice this right away if you haven’t seen one recently.

The average shot length of the where they hold the scene is 500% shorter. 500% shorter. Like our attention spans are just like, I don’t you gotta grab ’em in five seconds or someone’s off to the new thing. And despite learning being one of the best predictors of personal income and country income, but despite all that. We don’t put a lot of emphasis on that. We want to know without going through the process of learning. And I’m sure you face that all the time with tech, right? People want to know, how do you use this tech thing? I just wanna understand it. And I remember a colleague, the most mild mannered professor, brilliant PhD, world renowned expert, super gentle, super soft, not a fan of tech. And she actually threw her computer down on the floor and broke it ’cause she was so frustrated with the tech. Yeah, I think this whole notion of really trying to bring acknowledging that your listeners and viewers have a lot on the go.

We all do, but if we bring that learning a little bit more to the forefront and reduce that friction. I think we can have so many huge benefits. You’ve got coaches and trainers and game changers and change makers all in your in our community working together.

And it just makes a huge difference. I, remember. Doing a workshop for the UN and Mogadishu in Somalia. We’re in a conflict zone. We are in a highly secure area, and I did a a conflict resolution workshop for, a team, a UN team, and I was in the. The restaurant eating dinner that, that night.

And this woman comes flying at me and gives me this big hug and she’s just all exuberant. And she was Syrian actually, and she talked about using one of these really simple techniques from, the workshops, and she was able to really deescalate the conflict. It made a big dis it made a big difference.

So just backing up there, I think. Placing an emphasis on learning. And I know folks have worked so hard to get to where they are with their subject matter expertise. So putting a lens on that learning can mean growing your audience, making a bigger impact, making a difference, building a bigger community all of those kinds of things.

An example of not doing that. Is, I remember years and years ago I went to a coaching workshop and it was like like a sports coaching. And Chris, I know you run these incredibly long runs and you climb mountains and I’m as far away from that as you can get, right? I’m quite happy on the weekend to hunker down and read and I’ll go dancing, like whatever.

So going to this coaching clinic, I was so nervous and anxious and it was a big stretch for me. And this happened I don’t know, maybe 30 years ago. I don’t remember anything from the workshop except for one thing, which is where the teacher told us that if he caught us, and there was, by the way, there’s a hundred, about a hundred people in the class.

If he taught us, if he caught us rather with our hands in our pockets, he would point at us and we had to come down to the middle of the auditorium and do 10 pushups in front of everyone, like chris, all we can, all I could think of is wear my hands. Wear my hands. Don’t put your hands in pockets.

Wear your hands. Wear your hands. Don’t put them, don’t wear, no, don’t just pay attention to your hands. Just focus on your hands. Don’t put them in your pockets right now. What does putting your hands in your s have to do with coaching? I don’t think there’s a good case for a connection there but it definitely left an impression in terms of I didn’t learn anything else except keep my hands on my out of the pockets.

You asked about some tips and such for creating, really engaging, sticky learning. Years ago I was at I was doing a, workshop for U United Nations team and I was in Cairo and there were people from all over the world. It was like a five day workshop I was leading and.

I remember it was supposed to be a competency based workshop, and I remember a couple of the participants coming to me saying, Leanne, if we don’t have this competency, does it mean that we’re incompetent? And Chris, I don’t know if you’ve had something in your world happen where someone asks you the best question and you end up thinking about it for a month after.

That led me to designing this tool called, it’s an acronym called sake. So you can look at it for your sake as a course creator, as a coach, as a trainer, as a changemaker, a game changer. You can look at it for the sake of your participants, your community, you know the world, however you wish, and it’s where S stands for skills, right?

So whatever your content is, what skills do you wanna teach? A stands for attitude. Chris, I don’t know if you can remember. And I know you’ve got two girls when they were little. When they were toddlers. Do you ever remember trying to get them dressed? One of them dressed when they did not want to get dressed?

Can you remember doing that?

Chris Badgett: I can’t.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah it’s hard to tar toddler that does not wanna get dressed. So the A stands for attitude, which is mission, vision, and Values and Motivation, right? So how can we help our participants? And by the way, I’ll use different words. You might use clients, you might use contacts, you might use students whatever works in the world of the listeners.

How can we help motivate them? How can we create some attitudinal like I wanna be here, right? It’s the difference between dressing a toddler that wants to get dressed and not. So S is skills, A is attitude, K is knowledge. So that’s all the information, the theory, the frameworks, the research, right?

And then E stands for experience, and that’s how do we get the learners to experience your content. Outside of the course. So how do we get them to use it? Practice it when the course, when the workshop, when the seminar is over. So that’s my sake to, I have a survey I can share with your listeners. ’cause we all have biases, right?

We love we, unconsciously, we teach how we like to learn. Which is great for the people who learn like we do, right? So you’ll probably have a bias. In the S, the A, the K and the E. And I’ve done this survey for years and years, and the thing that people are looking for the most, it never moves out of top place.

So Chris, can you guess if, someone’s coming to a workshop, right? They’ve signed up for a course, right? They’ve, they’re going to a conference, they’re going to a. An online webinar, whatever. Maybe people listening now think which one do you think is the most important to people?

Is it skills? I wanna learn how to do something? Is it attitude? I want to focus on my mission, my vision, my values, my motivation. Is it knowledge? I wanna learn theory and information and research? Or is it experience? I want to use what I’ve learned outside the classroom, whatever the classroom is. What do you think?

Chris Badgett: It’s probably knowledge, and this goes into the maybe the infobesity thing you were mentioning. Ah,

Lee-Anne Ragan: okay. So

Chris Badgett: that would be my guess, but, or maybe it’s an experience. I’m not sure.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Ding ding,

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Lee-Anne Ragan: It’s actually experience.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah. So pe, which is. Fantastic. I’ve, people have taken this survey from all over the world and it never comes out of top place.

And if you think about that people have signed up, they’ve paid money, or if it’s free they’ve set aside the time ’cause they wanna learn from you. Chris, they like, they’re like, I am in this place where I wanna learn this thing and I want it to make a difference. That is like the angels are singing, the confetti is falling.

The neon lights. Strobe lights are glowing. That’s fantastic. As opposed to, I just wanna do this thing. ’cause I just wanna check it off the list. Now, if experience I wanna use your content, right? It’s not just, I wanna learn how to use lifter LMS, I want to learn how to use these tools. I actually want to use them in my business.

It’s not like a. Technical thing, or like a university big lecture thing. I wanna be very pragmatic if, that’s what most people are looking for. The E what do you think more, most course creators leave out of the four, the skills, attitude. Knowledge and experience, which is the thing that’s missing from most courses?

Most webinars, most complex,

Chris Badgett: probably attitude.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Oh,

Chris Badgett: or skills.

Lee-Anne Ragan: I love that you, I love that you said attitude. When I chat with folks that I’m teaching. People tend to think, they either get the attitude piece of course we people, we need to have a vision. We need to hold that motivation. Or they’re like, my content has nothing to do with attitude, which I would pick to differ.

Like different content. You’ll have different percentages in these things, but each one is really important. It’s actually, are you ready? It’s actually experience. Okay.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Lee-Anne Ragan: So the thing that people want the most,

Chris Badgett: they leave out, this

Lee-Anne Ragan: is the thing, this is what we’re leaving out. Yeah, this is what we’re missing.

What most, and if you think about it, Chris, I don’t know, I don’t wanna put you on the spot, but if you can maybe think about a course that you took or a webinar or a workshop, did the instructor build in a way to help you apply that learning? Can you.

Chris Badgett: In most cases, no, but I’ve had the fortunate experience of having cases where that was there.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Great. Great. And can you think of how they did that?

Chris Badgett: Yes. So two main ways. One was this was more of a coaching program that had a lot of course content and knowledge, but it also had three in-person events per year. So those are everybody coming together.

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Lee-Anne Ragan: Okay.

Chris Badgett: Which creates an experience. And then there was a lot of in a training there would be time set aside to actually this, creator had a concept called no homework.

So when you came to the to the session, you would learn some information, there’d be some coaching, but there will also be time in that time boxed hour or two where. Everybody’s actually working on a worksheet or something to implement the ideas we just learned about. So it was all packaged together.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Great. I’m super happy to hear that. And I’m gonna just gently push back a little bit ’cause the, e for experience happens. Outside of the course, so it’s when that person who’s leading the course is not there. It’s when you’re not meeting with people inside the cohort. It’s say, the workshop is Monday from nine till 11:00 AM What’s happening two weeks on a Friday?

Yeah. Like how are they helping you when they’re not present? There’s no course happening there’s no cohort, there’s not, there’s nothing like that happening in real time. Have you had an experience of someone helping you?

Chris Badgett: I’ve definitely had community, yeah, the cohort community thing where I help people or somebody helps me.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Whether that’s in a Facebook group or someplace like that.

Lee-Anne Ragan: That’s a great one. Yeah, that’s a great example of deliberate deliberate community, right? Where I can go and ask a question, I can support other people. That’s a great example. There are

Chris Badgett: one I just wanna add is I’ve participated in challenges, so like outside of the training.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: We’re gonna do something like go live on social media for 30 days straight, just to get comfortable with it and start doing it, that kind of thing.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Exactly. That’s a great, that’s a great one as well. I like to call this kind of a three for one. Like how can we triple the impact that we’re having with our participants?

Most people look at the engagement the actual course, the actual seminar, et cetera. But we also wanna look at what happens before that. And you and I talked before we. We started recording. One of the things I like to do is give participants a tool to help them capture their learning, right?

In the show notes, there’ll be a link to a tool called a harp, which once you download it, it’s a PDF and it becomes editable. And you can look at your highlights, the actions you wanna take, resources. And then pictures. Pictures are great. It’s permission to doodle. ’cause our brains interpret images 60,000 times faster than text.

So images are, fantastic. So that’s one tool to help people engage before your workshop. And then there’s lots of tools to help people engage after. Chris I’m gonna guess that you know the term Easter egg. Do you like. In the world of gaming, is that something that’s familiar for you?

Chris Badgett: I do not.

The Easter egg.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Okay. And have you ever used it in learning? Have you ever put an Easter egg in a course?

Chris Badgett: No, but I have it myself.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah, that’s another great way to, to have people experience the learning after the workshop. And for folks who, aren’t familiar with Easter eggs, it’s where you hide something, right?

You hide a little surprise in the content. So in the past, I’ve. I’ve directed people back to, for example, the PowerPoint deck and say, Hey, there’s a hidden watermark on slide 12, and slide 12 just happens to be the summary of the whole course. Like it’s a strategic slide that I’m guiding them to, or I’ll guide them to an emoji.

And if they click on that emoji, they get an audio clip, it’s me summarizing the course. Or it’ll connect to a playlist, like a musical playlist where the first letter, now these. I can feel some of your listeners, like their blood pressure’s going up like, Leanne, do you know I don’t have that much time like you do.

You pick the ones that work for you and your time, so you know, a little bit com more complicated one. I have playlists where the first letter of each song spells a message, right? Because when we raise the curiosity of our participants, it’s just people will work very, hard to satisfy that curiosity.

Does that make sense?

Chris Badgett: That does make sense. Okay. That’s awesome. I do have a question for you around I think it’s pretty unique and awesome that you’ve had all this experience with the UN and working across cultures and countries. What’s something you think is the biggest takeaway of having had that experience that perhaps, you know, somebody who’s not working in that?

Kind of intensity of a conflict region or having to do all this cross-cultural communication and change management. Let’s say they’re, teaching something like dog training and they’ve, never left their home country, but they’re just as passionate. What’s the, skill that comes from all that UN experience or a counterintuitive insight about communicating and creating change?

Lee-Anne Ragan: Oh, I love that. That’s a great question. I’m gonna ask you to repeat the word amygdala when I count to three. And for folks that are listening, if you wanna do this as well, feel free. So on the count to three, please say the word amygdala. 1, 2, 3.

Chris Badgett: Amygdala.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Okay. You now know the Greek word for almond.

So Chris, you’ve probably never been told this. I’m going to I’m pretty sure you’ve never been told this, but you are an amazing almond massager right now. What the heck am I talking about? You may know We have two amygdalas. Again, the Greeks named the part of our brains and they didn’t know what these things did, but they look like a almond.

So they named them almond or amygdala, and. Our amygdalas are really, important in learning. They help decide, can I eat it? Meaning I’m calm, I’m safe, I’m okay. I can proceed to learning, or it’s going to eat me. Meaning maybe I’m embarrassed, I’m ashamed, I feel awkward, I feel left out. I don’t feel included.

I’m exhausted, like any of those things. So no matter what the content is. No matter where you are in the world, massaging people’s amygdalas is super important because there won’t, it’s like that coach who told us that if he caught us with our hands, like I, I can still feel my blood pressure go poof.

Like I’m anxious and nervous just talking about it. So that’s my amygdala. Completely flaring. By the way. When our amygdalas get upset, they grow to be the size of walnuts. They go from almonds to walnuts. So there’s no learning happening. So thinking about how do we help our participants to feel welcome, engage like they belong?

Because putting ourselves in the learning seat, if you think about it, there is no other. Act that has such potential for vulnerability, for hope, for optimism, for growth for development, right? Because I’m coming to you saying, I don’t know this thing, and hey I’ve chosen you. I wanna learn from you. And that can be anything from your voice like you. So there’s three different kinds of communication skills. You’ve probably heard of the first two, which is verbal and nonverbal. But Chris, your para verbal skills are off the chart. Any guesses what para verbal is? Have you heard of para verbal? I have

Chris Badgett: no idea, but I’m excited to learn.

Lee-Anne Ragan: It’s why I recognized your voice. Okay, so it’s the tone, the pacing, the volume. You may have noticed, like at some point I dropped my voice and I whispered for a while. If we weren’t on camera and I asked you to put your your fingers like right underneath your mouth. If you weren’t on camera you can’t see them.

But it’s right there. It’s like our voice. Our voice is a, it’s right in front of us. It’s such a powerful tool for teaching. One tip I’d say, and by the way, this is built into PowerPoint. PowerPoint you may or may not know, has this incredible ai option where you bring up your deck and then you go to, I think it’s called Presenter coach.

I can put this in the notes for people to access. And you have your 24 hour a day 24 hours a day, seven day a week, private personal speaking coach. It measures all kinds of things, including it it measures how often things like that, it measures your pace, right?

It’s all at your fingertips. Yeah. So one thing I’d say is your voice, like in terms of massaging, amygdalas helping people feel comfortable and confident and able to learn your voice engaging beforehand. We can’t all do that. Sometimes people show up and we don’t know who’s, coming.

But if you can try to engage folks ahead of time and then engaging them after simple, things like here’s a link, which I’m gonna do with all the resources that I talked about. As long as you remember this one link, everything’s there for you, right? It’s a sweet spot. It’s easy. It’s not gonna take a lot of time.

Everything’s there in one place. Also. Knowing what kind of trainer you are I have a tool called Life Lenses, which is it’s like a personality assessment that I’ve trademarked and tens of thousands of people have used it. And it really looks at what comes onto your radar easily, naturally, and comfortably.

And what do you miss? ’cause it’s we’re getting into awkward territory here. So Chris, let me know if this is something. That you would do and you would notice or you’d be like, that is not me. So true story. I’m doing a workshop. It’s in person. There’s maybe 200 people in the room.

I do this workshop on life lenses, and I’m pointing out carrot life lenses. So carrots are very detail oriented. They, look down detail focus, focus, And at one point. This woman stood up. True story. She turned around. It was behind her. She was not looking at it. This was behind her, and there was a big banner in the conference hall that was missing a comma.

It had a phrase on it and it was missing a comment. And she said she ran up to the banner and she took a felt and she put the comma on the banner and she said, that has been distracting me all day. So Chris, is that, does that speak to you? Do you like, oh, I so notice all the details. Are you like, no, that’s not me.

Chris Badgett: That’s not me. Okay,

Lee-Anne Ragan: so you’re probably the opposite of a carrot, which is a mountain. Mountains are big picture, look up visions strategy, right? On a bad day, carrots can get their head buried in the sand on a bad day. Can have their heads in the clouds. Oh, Chris, sorry. We’re supposed to meet Monday at two about kaka dunk.

Ah, sorry, I thought it was Wednesday at eight. About, so I have a survey. People can look at what kind of trainer they are because the, life lenses that you identify as, those are your sweet spot. That’s where the sun shines. You are automatically going to do really well, and the people that have the same lenses.

As you will love your workshops and in terms of massaging those amygdalas and not leaving people out, there’s some tips you can take. The Full Life Lenses assessment, it’s on my website, it’s free. You get a report that describes everything. So the key then is to look the lenses that you’re not. So Chris, if I was to take a workshop from you.

I would expect to be like the vision, the big picture like, oh, the sun is shining. That is what you do so well, and maybe, you would. I need to focus a little bit also on details for the people who are carrot lenses and are like, okay, my head isn’t, there’s not as much oxygen up there. I need some more oxygen.

I need some more details. Does that resonate? Does that land?

Chris Badgett: It totally lands, and you mentioned your website, which I just wanna say is rock paper scissors inc.com. We’ll also have a link in the show notes to all the resources that Leanne is mentioning. So that’s it. The LMS Cast website. This is amazing.

Lean Ann, tell us what’s going on in the academy. It’s the Transformation Transformative Trainers Academy. What’d you create there? Who’s it for? What does it do?

Lee-Anne Ragan: Oh, thanks. Thanks for asking. So this has been a lifelong dream of mine and. It’s for game changers and change makers for coaches, facilitators, trainers who have some content that they are already getting out into the world, or they wanna start getting out into the world.

You’ve got a, you’ve got a topic that you’re passionate about and you’ve got crisp behind you. You’ve got your tech stack. You or you’re working on it. You know where to go for that. This is a place, it’s a global community. It’s an online membership. Where people can come together to learn how to design.

And deliver. ’cause those two things need to go to together, design and deliver workshops that wow. Like really engage and make a difference. There’s online resource portal that people get access to with 40 plus years of tools that I’ve created. And then we have a once a month live call that’s divided into a masterclass where I teach a workshop and then a learning lab, which is where the members can say, Hey.

I’m doing this workshop and I’m really, I don’t know how to start. I know I’ve got my ending or I don’t know how to make it more inclusive, or I am stuck on a tech tool. So it’s a time to really live up and support our members based on a topic they’re talking about.

Chris Badgett: So unique approach to pricing with that, which is very cool. It’s affordable. I’m always hesitant to mention exact price points ’cause it may change. But you set it up so that it’s approachable for anybody or groups and whatnot. It’s awesome.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah. So it’s really important to me. I’ve worked in.

Urban settlements slums. I’ve worked in C-suites and I think we cordon off ourselves into our little bubbles, and I think a lot of learning can happen between folks. So I really wanted to make it as accessible as possible. So there’s three pricing levels and if none of those work, I’m happy to chat with folks as well.

But one is a a pretty. If you’re having issues. Beyond meeting your basic needs, that could be an option for you. Then there’s a mid range, and then there’s a range for folks who want to cover that, the cost, but also support other people. And we have people at all levels in the Transformative Trainers Academy.

And people don’t know. They don’t know who’s who, so there’s no, and we like, oh, it’s just, yeah I’m just I feel so lucky to get to do that work because there’s. There’s a young climate, Ugandan climate change activist. There’s someone working with the World Bank, there’s a couple people who are university professors.

There’s people have all these different subject matter expertise and it’s about getting their content out and helping them really craft it into an engaging piece of learning, whether that’s a workshop or a seminar, conference, whatever. Yeah. And we have a lot of fun.

Chris Badgett: That’s good. You are fun to hang out with.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Ditto

Chris Badgett: itest to that. And there is an Easter egg on the about page on Leanne’s website. So see if you can find that. That’s at rock paper scissors inc.com. Check out the Transformative Trainers Academy. Leanne, if people want to connect with you outside of that or have questions, what’s the best way for anyone to get in touch with you?

Lee-Anne Ragan: Oh, that’s a good question. I’m on LinkedIn, so LEE. There’s as many syllables and letters in my name as possible, so LEE dash a NNE, Reagan, R-A-G-A-N. Or they can email me. The resources will have my email on it, but my email is LA Regan, R-A-G-A-N, at RPS as in rock, paper Scissors, Inc. INC as in incorporated.

Do ca.

Chris Badgett: Awesome Liam. Thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it and thank you for sharing your wisdom and getting everybody, myself included, excited about the opportunity to teach and lead in a better or more holistic way. ’cause there’s, that unlocks so much to really develop that skill and the way you help people do that with the Transformative Trainers Academy and all your content and everything you do is awesome.

Leanne has been very generous. There are a bunch of free resources for you. Go to the LMS cast website, find the episode with Leanne Reagan and get those resources. And thank you, Leanne, for doing all that you do. And love that you’re called to help the change makers and the people that are changing the game, sending out those positive ripples out into.

Their families, societies, and communities. That’s what it’s all about. So thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

Lee-Anne Ragan: Thank you, Chris. It’s just such an honor to get to do this work and I’m so grateful that I had snapped up that day at that conference. And I got to meet you in person and I really appreciate being here.

And just a real hats off to all your listeners and your viewers your content matter. It really makes a difference. And I’m really grateful for all the, I know how much work goes into how much a, how much work went into learning all that and becoming an expert. Then all the tech stuff and now also the learning piece of it.

So hats off to everyone and thinking about you all and celebrating you. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett discusses how course designers may choose which e-learning materials should be paid for and which should be free in this episode. He emphasizes that while many producers are afraid to share too much information for free, free material is actually crucial for gaining a following, developing credibility, and creating authority.

Introductory ideas, concepts, brief advice, blog entries, tutorials, webinars, podcasts, or mini-courses that assist individuals in learning about the subject and grasping its fundamentals are examples of free content. These tools serve as a marketing engine that attracts new students to the ecosystem and motivates them to continue participating. Conversely, sponsored material need to concentrate on providing learners with deeper results and actual transformation.

This includes advanced lectures, certificates, coaching, community access, organized, step-by-step training programs, and effective templates or tools that enable students to accomplish a particular objective more quickly and with greater assistance.

Chris offers a straightforward test: if the information primarily raises awareness or teaches an idea, it may be free; but, if it aids in a major shift or the implementation of an entire system, it should be paid for. In general, he advises course designers to reserve the organized systems and results-oriented training for their premium paid products and to provide more worthwhile free content to expand their audience.

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Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we’re gonna be doing a solo episode on how to decide which of your e-learning content to make free versus paid. There’s a whole free versus paid dilemma when you’re creating an online course or a membership site, a coaching program, an online education company.

There’s this tension between what kind of free content or free products should I put out there versus premium content That’s only for my paying customers, students, or members. So there’s a fear of giving away too much for free. And, but it’s a super important one because it dramatically impacts your growth, your scale, your profitability, and your brand authority.

Essentially free content, fuels paid success. So that’s the way to think about it. If I had to guess, and you’re out there listening or watching, most people don’t give away enough for free. But there are some that give away too much and just put it all out there and can never monetize. So both problems are bad, but the more common problem.

Is people not giving away free stuff. They get a little too in their head about protecting their intellectual property, and a customer has to pay me money in order for me to help them at all kind of thing. That’s not the right mindset for growth and scale. So essentially the core principle is that you use free content to attract and then paid content to create the main transformation.

Or benefit. So free is about discovery building trust, audience building, and paid is about deeper outcomes and implementation or implementation support. That’s more direct. So there’s like also like within the ping bucket of e-learning content. There’s things that can be very cheap, and then there are things that can be very expensive.

So think about free content as creating awareness, low cost content, courses, memberships, coaching calls, whatever that create activation. But then the most expensive thing is actually what creates the transformation. So let’s. Talk about what makes really perfect free content. And to clarify what I mean by content on a learning management system, website is, could be a lot of things.

It’s lessons, it’s courses, it’s quizzes, it’s assignments, it’s memberships or course bundles, but. Around all this. There’s also just the broader content that goes on your content management system website, powered by WordPress and hopefully Lifter LMS. So we’re also talking about blog content.

We’re talking about YouTube channels, we’re talking about podcasts, social media pages on your site. All these things you can make a decision to make it free versus paid. So some perfect types of content for free would be things like intro introductory content or concepts frameworks, mindset industry education, some kind of quick win that you could put out there.

And the benefits of giving out this kind of intro concept, like thin content. Is that it’s good for your SEO. It’s good for YouTube and Podcast Discovery. It’s authority. It’s authority building, and it also puts the first thing you need out there in order to build your email list. So examples in e-learning context of this kind of free content would be like free mini courses like the Lifter, LMS, official Quick Start course.

You should definitely go check that out. You can do webinars, you can do tutorials, you can do blog posts, you can do podcast episodes. But let’s shift gears and so we talked about what should probably most likely be free. Let’s talk about what should almost always be paid. So paid content should focus on a structured outcome, so step-by-step implementation certification.

Cohorts or any kind of community, any kind of advanced mastery and extremely powerful templates, tools, and frameworks. Definitely like one-on-one in depth or even group coaching access to the instructor or coach. So people pay for results, speed, accountability, and structure. So when you’re delivering content that includes those things, this is premium content that you have and should likely it should likely be paid content.

And one way to test it is a transformation line test is, should I make this thing free or paid? Does it teach awareness or produce a transformation? If it’s learning something new, then it’s free. But if it’s becoming something new, then that’s should be paid content. Let’s also talk about the audience maturity factor.

So different audiences need different free versus paid mixes. So if there’s, if your content is for beginners they’re gonna need a lot more free content. And they also just have more capacity usually, or shelf space to make space for your courses and videos and podcasts and things like that.

But if you have a very mature or experienced learner. They’re gonna pay, they’re gonna be much more willing to pay faster for transformation that is quick and efficient. For example I’ve been in a software CEO coaching program before I went through a couple pieces of free content and then immediately signed up for a high ticket coaching program.

The person who led that, it’s called Dan Martel. You may have seen him on YouTube. But of all the software CEOs in there, they were yeah, very willing to pay. And many of us had seen the free content, but we quickly went to the paid education offer because we’re experienced learners in our space.

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Just to throw like some warnings of like how not to give away too much for free. So teaching an entire course and putting all the videos on YouTube, if it is not a free mini course, and particularly if it’s has a high result or transformation value you don’t wanna put that on YouTube and then wonder why nobody buys.

Cause you’ve already given away everything. One of the best ways to think about this more abstractly. Is a teaching framework. I learned from Evan Pagan back in the day, which is when you’re teaching something, you gotta appear, appeal to the different learning styles. And he calls them the why, what, how, and what if type of people.

Content consumption, practices. So like, why learners? They really need to know why, like, why do I need to know this.

What people, they’re like, show me the process. The how-to people are like, all right, show me step by step exactly what to do. Give me exercises, action items, and I will take those off.

Then the what if people need to learn about the opportunity cost of not taking action. What if they do this? What if they don’t do this? And so on. But one of the ways to think about it is giving away the why and the what is fine. But when you start giving away the how, now you’re going into the premium territory.

And I’m not saying never teach somebody for free how to do something. But once you get into, particularly in depth, high result value transformation and a how that should probably be paid content. Let’s talk about some practical examples for different niches in the course creator industry.

If I was doing a fitness course, some free content I might make are workouts. Tips just general education about certain topics. But my full like transformation training program is, that’s a paid thing. So I would have some free workouts and tips and idea content out there, mini courses, but my main zero to your first marathon.

Training course is a paid course. So if we were doing a marketing course, I might do some free content or free mini courses on certain strategies or just tips or hacks. But a complete marketing system, I’m gonna be charging for that. So that would the step-by-step paid market. Your business effectively training would be a paid offer, and if I was doing a language course.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you definitely wanna check out the Marcus Carter interview on LMS cast. He’s a language teacher. Incredible story. But for free you might, as a language instructor, you might want to give away some vocabulary lessons and just quick conversation exchanges and translations and tips, but a structured fluency path to learn, a language to go from zero to I speak this language now that’s gonna be a paid offer.

So just some course creator specific free content ideas. Don’t underestimate the power of a mini course. So it could even be a one lesson course or even a three lesson course. You can also do a challenge, which you can do, use the course structure in LMS and lifter LMS to create your challenge.

If it’s a five day challenge, you have a five lesson course. Each lesson is like day one, day two, day three, and so on. You can also do webinars and some people use lifter LMS to deliver. Free and paid webinars. You can do free lessons. So Lifter LMS has a free lesson feature where you can mark one lesson as free in a paid course, and then the public can access that without buying.

It’s actually really great marketing. You can also do email based courses. That’s another, way to just do a light version of your course to nurture somebody to becoming a paying customer. So a couple things to think about when doing free versus paid. Lifter LMS has all the infrastructure you’ll need to create a free to paid customer journey.

We’ve got, you have free courses, free lessons, inside paid courses. You have lead magnet courses. Membership previews, you could do like a free membership level. You could do course bundles. You could do upsells and order bumps. You could bundle in templates and other files using the lift LMS membership functionality.

So you can do all kinds of. Things with WordPress and lifter LMS to create whatever kind of free paid mix you’re going for. The key is creating the right mix for you and your audit audience. So my final advice for you as an education entrepreneur is to move the free line. Most people are not giving away enough for free.

Particularly if you’re at the beginning and you’re just getting started and you don’t have an established like email list or authority brand on social media or YouTube or wherever start doing the free content. ’cause that’s going to. Over time compound into organic marketing for you. And there’s nothing more motivated, motivating than watching people engage with and love your free content.

That’s very motivating and gives you direction on creating paid content. So give away as much free knowledge as you can. Move the free line to further than you’re comfortable with. Really focus on the transformation and the big results that you deliver. That’s what you’re selling. But use free content as your marketing engine and build a ladder of value.

You can see this at LifterLMS, like we have a free core plugin, and then we have add-ons and various bundles that we can add after that. So give away more than you’re comfortable giving away, and move that free line and create a value ladder of paid and free, and use lifter LMS and your WordPress site to create, to house all of this great content.

That’s it for this episode. We’ll catch you in the next one.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett and Alex Panagis delve deeply into the meaning of corporate culture and how it influences every aspect of a business in this episode of LMScast. They clarify that a company’s culture is its actual conduct rather than merely a collection of words on a “About” page. The founder’s character and principles are the foundation, but as the team expands, each member adds to it.

Culture will develop whether or not you want for it to. The secret is to intentionally mold it with a distinct vision, goal, and guiding principles. Hires, firings, product choices, and even crisis management are filtered via LifterLMS principles, which include clear communication, extreme ownership, continuous improvement, reducing friction, community, and prioritizing student success. Chris compares what seems strange to those ideals in order to determine the mismatch. They also talk about recruiting people based on their character rather than their abilities. Character and value alignment cannot be taught, but skills can.

In order to guarantee cultural fit, LifterLMS incorporates a probationary term into the recruiting process, allowing candidates to grow while being open about expectations. It’s never easy to let someone go, but when they consistently behave against the company’s basic beliefs, it becomes a vital move for both the organization and the individual, who could do better in a different setting. Alex adds that sometimes releasing someone is ultimately beneficial for them, helping them find a workplace that aligns more naturally with how they operate. Intentional communication and organized thought are two other key themes.

Chris describes how LifterLMS meticulously defines and documents projects before creating them using the Shape Up technique, which was influenced by Basecamp’s developers, 37signals. Rather of making a haphazard decision to “build a feature,” they develop comprehensive proposals that include customer pain points, goals, risks, and strategies for implementation.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s been a while since he’s been on the show. We’ve got Alex Panus from Scale Math. You can find alex@scalemath.com scale. Math also works directly with Lifter LMS on growth initiatives. It’s been several months.

It’s been awesome. Today we’re gonna dive into culture, IE, company, culture and mission, vision and values, how to shape culture, what you can’t shape, how it can work well, how it can’t work well, how to hire and fire against it and make your life easier. We’re gonna get into a lot of culture topics, but first, welcome to the show, Alex.

Alex Panagis: Thank you. Great to be here.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, this a, this is a fun one to dive into. I have a background in anthropology. So for me, culture has always been interesting internationally and even within the United States where I live, there’s all kinds of cultures and subcultures and all kinds of things, but culture is alive and well in business and entrepreneurship as well.

I think one of the wildest ideas with culture is you have it no matter what. It’s just, it’s gonna be there. It starts usually with kind of the personality of the founder, but particularly as a team grows every member in that business contributes to the culture in the same way that every person in a society or a nation contributes in their own way to the culture.

So you can’t always control it, but it will always. Be there. Maybe let’s start just with a general question. When you look across like history or businesses you love, what’s a company you think that has great culture?

Alex Panagis: I think it’s hard to point to from the outside companies because I wouldn’t know what the culture is like on the inside.

And if history has proven itself, I would say that typically what on the outside isn’t always a perfect reflection of how the company works on the inside. But I’d say Lyft, LMS is a pretty great example of a company that. I, think the it’s a cringey perhaps saying or phrase, but culture is what you do and nobody’s looking.

And I think, like you say, with employees and the team as a whole, it’s essentially what would the team do if they were to use their best judgment in the absence of the founder? Because ultimately the more the company grows. The less the founder can be involved in everything. Yeah. In our work with Lifter, that’s an example.

If, I’m away and something goes straight to you, can I trust my team to act as an extension of myself without stuff going to you? And. Me having to criticize after the fact, the way that they’ve done things. And I think that’s pretty, like for most types of companies and the work they do, it’s pretty difficult to build that level of trust.

So a lot of them put off trying to do it which I think delays them from getting there. At the end of the day, instead of if they actually actively try to do it and build that culture higher for it deliberately, then I think they’d have a much easier time.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned an interesting thing where sometimes culture is different on the inside versus what’s presented on the outside in the marketing as an example.

But I find the biggest compliment that I would ever get is if I go to a conference and I meet somebody and they’re like, oh, you seem like exactly the same guy that I met or I saw in content or whatever. Authenticity isn’t necessarily one of our company values, but it is part of our culture. And when you go to a great restaurant as an example where the staff are friendly, you can tell there’s a lot of love poured into the food, what’s happening inside that restaurant’s company culture, it just bleeds out and it becomes part of the experience.

And when it’s authentic and not just an act that’s like great culture. I know, I think Apple is a great example of a company that, you know has, there’s mixed reviews on how good of a leader or how nice Steve Jobs was, but clearly Apple has a culture for the crazy ones, the creatives, the people that push the human race forward, as they would say in their marketing.

But it’s true. There’ve been some great people that have worked at Apple and amazing innovations, done on amazing timelines, and obviously Steve Jobs played a big part in shaping the company culture at Apple, both intentionally and just by being himself warts and all. There were bad aspects of Steve.

He could be mean demanding and all those things, and that doesn’t make a valid excuse to not be nice or whatever, but. Culture is complicated.

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I think, yeah, I de I definitely agree. I would not to run back what I said, but in the sense that obviously it can be inauthentic and come across in a certain way to, from the outside, but like Apple is a, good example in the sense that to us, the company culture that they had worked really well for them.

I think if you try to take the Apple company culture in Steve Jobs era and apply it to. Pretty much any other company now, it probably wouldn’t be a good fit for that company. And I think that’s largely the, uniqueness of Apple as a company. But also if you were to look at scale Math Lifter and other companies in the audience, the, not just the fact that they’re obviously very different from the way Apple.

Operates and what they do. I think there, there are some core values which almost every company can adopt, but like some of the principles, I think the way they would’ve done things on the inside wouldn’t apply in smaller, different organizations. The same as if we, for example, were to try to operate like a company that has 50 or a hundred people, it wouldn’t make sense to try to.

Build the culture ahead of building the team to that point. So I think there’s like that’s an interesting thing where I’m curious what your take is on it. Like how much of culture, in your opinion, should be deliberately built and managed versus at the end of the day, the team grows, we do more work, and as a consequence of that, we shape the culture.

And I’m, yeah I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to it, but I’m cur very curious how you approach that.

Chris Badgett: I think shaping company culture starts with really being honest with yourself and who you are as a founder or a leader in a company. And when you’re authentically in touch with what lights you up, how you like to work, the type of people you like to work with you culture is not something you install.

It’s something that you discover and then shape. I would also add that. There’s a lot of negative cultures or culture aspects out there. If you think about a cult, which is a, culture, a subculture of sorts, you’re often gonna see a charismatic leader. You’re gonna see like a mission statement of what wrong we wanna right in the world, or what atrocity we want to go after.

You’ll see indoctrination protocols happening when people join the cult and cults have a negative impact. But it’s the same thing that goes on inside of a company. If you’re doing onboarding, it’s not just this is how you do things. It’s also, this is how to think. This is how we approach problems.

This is how we treat our customers. But the first step is to get honest with who you are as a founder. Whether you’re a course grader, a coach, running an agency. You think about what kind of clients do I wanna work with or students, what types of team members do I wanna work with and who are my best clients?

And ask yourself why is that? Why was there, there’s often some kind of cultural resonance that happens there. But for any company, the place to start is to do the che, it’s known, it can be thought of as a cheesy exercise, but to do your mission, vision, and values. ’cause culture at the end of the day, comes down to values, applied to the mission you’re on to achieve the vision that this organization is set out to accomplish.

So the values exercise, it’s not okay. Honesty, integrity, like these are you, those can be company values of yours, but if you really dig in to your uniqueness, let’s just assume those things are table stakes. ’cause you’re, you like honesty and integrity, but what really makes this business work and makes people love working with each other, love working with the customers and enjoy the work they do.

So coming up with those values is a great exercise. And if you’re bigger than one person, that should be done with a team where, and I’ve done this before, where we all just like separately around the table, list out the 10 values we think that make up this company culture, and then we review what everybody said regardless of whether they’re senior or junior in the organization.

And then we look for overlap. Oh, what’s really lining up here? Or, what’s not? Oh, that might just be a unique thing to this one member’s personality, which is cool, but that’s not necessarily a through line through this whole culture. So if you go to a, if you’re building a website for yourself or for your client, the about page is, they should always have your values on there.

The homepage should always have your mission, vision. I ideally in the hero of the mission we’re on. Lifter LM S’S vision is to lift up others through education and our mission is to do that with as many. Engaging LMS platforms as we can with without while helping our users level up and figure out everything they need to do to achieve their vision.

So your about page is something that should never be just brushed over and do a quick bio about the founder or the team member and their favorite sport and what kind of cats or dogs they have at home. Get, spend some time on the vision.

Alex Panagis: I completely agree. I’m also really curious. One of the other things that I’ve seen Lifter do really well internally, which more so than most other companies we’ve worked with is internal training.

And I wonder how you built out like. Maybe ev every, a couple times a week or every other week at bare minimum everybody on the management team will update some developer documentation of how to do something internally or how, where to find this thing to deal with a certain pre-sales conversation.

I think that’s something that probably for you feels after doing it for a while and working with people that do it. Feels like that’s actually quite natural and it’s should be the baseline of how every company works. But in reality, it’s quite far from the truth the, like element of, oh, we’ve now dealt with this specific situation of marking a license as a staging license or whatever it is, like a basic thing, which it might have been also in, in some cases.

It might actually have been the fifth time that it happens. But eventually getting it documented. I’m curious if that was something that you specifically. Trained people on and reinforced all the time. Or if that was more so, a hiring decision. Like you can tell when people are happy to document their work.

Chris Badgett: Internal training happens. All companies do it at the wrong time. IE too late. So if I were gonna start a new company. I would start building internal training on day one. To document processes and procedures. But when it comes to onboarding there is a moment where we go over the company values and whatnot. But the truth is, they would, that team member would not even be there if they hadn’t already been screened through the interview and hiring process for values alignment.

So that’s already happened. But in terms of attention to detail all that really comes down to one of our company values, which is continuous improvement. And it really ties into three of our company values. One of them is continuous improvement, the other one is extreme ownership. So if you’re responsible for the documentation as an example.

Really owning that and owning the quality of that is important. And then the other one, the biggest, probably the meta value of lifter LMS is remove friction. And I realized very early on in building software, particularly a complex platform level learning management system, software. There’s a lot of friction and there’s a lot of pain in the space.

There’s all the pain around people trying to figure out which LMS to use. Maybe they’re new to WordPress. There’s all these add-ons and all these different use cases, and they’re trying to figure out how to put it all together. So I see a lifter, LMS mostly not as a software company, but as a friction removal company.

And that’s one of our core values, remove friction. And whenever we’re working on new add-ons or improving what we already have, it’s always filtered through that lens of removing friction, which ties into another company value, which is. Student results first, which means none of this matters unless the end user who’s taking a course or in a membership on a lifter LMS powered site gets what they want.

So we’re always trying to, we care about our customer and our users, but we actually care even more about their customers and users. ’cause if we don’t make that person happy, nobody wins. So when people come in to the company. Even though those values bleed through in our language, like we had a call earlier and we were talking about communication with partners and stuff.

Clear communication is an important part. It’s an important value. And part of what we do at left LMS, whether that’s on a support ticket and a marketing message, a landing page, partner communication, social media. How we write project plans for each other and ourselves, that communication is everything.

And in terms of the hiring and firing, it’s to me, it’s so easy. Since I’ve been doing this for a while, I’m not looking for a job. But if I was looking for a job, the first thing I would do is go to their about page and I would look for their mission, vision, and values. Then I would honestly ask myself, am I personally and professionally aligned with that mission, vision, and values?

And if so, once I get into the application, I’m going the questions in lifter LMS job applications are, all just screening across our six core values. That’s how you get an interview. And then if we’re, let’s say we have two to three candidates for one position. All we’re trying to do is find out who is the most in alignment with our culture.

And by the way, the people that work at Lifter LMS are very diverse from all over the world with different religions, backgrounds, time zones, all that stuff. It’s not about demographics, it’s more about psychographics, like how we think, how we. Work how we approach problem solving and things like that.

That’s what we’re looking for alignment on. So it’s, more of like a internal culture of how we work and how we think than what we look like or where we live and that kind of thing.

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I think so. Just to share from my perspective on core values as well. I’ve always thought of them and I, this was in our 2025 year in review post. The one we, I wrote for scale math, which is probably one of the more fun things I do every year is to reflect on everything and. We spoke about this before we started recording, but I think it’s also worth mentioning here is because we work with different companies, it’s quite the culture aspect of culture in building a company.

I think I see it probably at a faster rate than a lot of companies do because we are affected by. Perhaps let’s say at any given time. Almost a dozen or so, different cultures of companies and the way the leaders decide to run them. Obviously in a, in the cases where we do our is a customer a good fit for us?

Do we want to partner with a company in the first place? We tend to screen for mainly that like founder, fit. If I don’t have the fit with the founder, which I think in the lift RMS case is probably as close as it’s ever been, then it tends to be. The standpoint of not being the best start for a relationship doesn’t necessarily rule it out entirely.

And I think there are ways to make working with people which have different cultures work when the need and the desire for that is there. But the way I always explain, and I like to think about it, I think AI has made the analogy a little bit easier. And I think this is, in my view, at least for the foreseeable future, predictions are probably not a good business to be in when it comes to ai.

But I think decisions are one of the, final things that will remain is like that. If you, if we were to distill work down into like a, the as bare bones of a nutshell as we possibly can work is a fundamentally a series of decisions, trade-offs, bets and dealing with ambiguity and pressure. And I think when I meet somebody and I, interview them or I want to hire them, or we start working with them together on probation, the main thing that I’m evaluating for is how would they deal with.

Making a good decision when making the good decision isn’t necessarily the easy choice. So if they’ve messed something up and they have to come clean about it, they have to communicate upfront, are they gonna be able to take the right decision? I think in a, in an ideal company where everything is super easy.

And everything goes right. They never have to do that. But I think that’s why you like only challenge the core values when stuff becomes difficult because that’s when people will try to, circum will have the upside of not necessarily obeying a core value, let’s say communication or if you have one, which is like extreme ownership, people will do something wrong and an initiative won’t go the way that it does. So then their mindset is, I don’t want to be responsible for the way that this turned out. So they’ll deflect and they’ll put the responsibility on something else, for example. I think it can manifest in many different ways.

So I think one of the other questions that I think is worth adding is in terms of. Do you think that there’s anything different or more difficult? And I know I think the answer is yes, but perhaps more what is vastly different? Because you’re building lifter LMS remotely as we are as well, fully remote.

I think that it is a little bit more difficult to build culture when you’re fully remote. But to me it’s, been the natural way to do it. Are there any elements of not being able to meet your team in person? And I think you do meetups once a year if not more, so that might become more possible, but I’m curious if you have thoughts on that.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Building culture online is both harder and easier at the same time. It’s easier because you have, you can control the environment. Like we’re talking to each other through Streamy Yard. I can see a three feet window into your world as you can into mine. We’re not sitting in an office together.

I have had the pleasure of meeting Alex several times in person over the years. But it’s easier because in an office environment you’re basically always on stage, which is good and bad because you can. In the online world, you can put your best fit forward through your three foot zoom window, and you can control the environment in a way that you can’t in person.

But this comes back to authenticity. If you’re putting on an act, whether it’s online or in person, it’s exhausting. That doesn’t mean like sometimes a leader needs to step off the stage and just like collapse and rest ’cause they’re tired or they’ve been out front for a long time. But yeah.

The best thing that could happen when you start blending offline and online is that when you do get together in person, it feels exactly the same, if not even better, because now you don’t have the three foot window. You have the 360 degree view in real time with each other, and you can break, bread together.

But there’s a saying I love from, I don’t know, it comes from some anthropology thing. What people are looking for when it comes to culture is a sense of belonging, number one. But number two is a sense of quote, finding the others. So this, has happened to me many times where I’ve run with a lot of different groups of people, whether.

The mountain climbing community, the long distance hiking community, the dog mushing community, the WordPress agency community, the WordPress product community, the course creator community, the affiliate community. When you find the others, it feels great. And this is the cool thing about online is that it connects everybody all over the world.

It’s no surprise that. Lift our team is really spread out because we’re pretty niche and specialized in what we do and how we do it. But when you find the others, when you have that sense of belonging, what you’re actually feeling is culture fit. So I remember the first time I got out from behind my computer after building an agency and in the very early days of Lyft all mess.

I went to my first WordPress conference, which was actually I didn’t know it at the time, but I jumped over the whole Word Camp thing and went straight to CaboPress. Where in Mexico, where some of the some of the great WordPress product companies of the time the founders were getting together and.

I got there and I realized oh wow. There’s a bunch of men and women just like me who have the same weird entrepreneurial interests. And like we have, we share a language, we talk about things like working on client projects or terminology we use in software and marketing and things like that. And it feels oh my gosh.

’cause in my hometown. I’m just a regular guy who works from home who like there’s not a lot of digital entrepreneurs around where I live. So when I step into an environment, even if it’s just a pop-up moment in time, you feel that culture fit and it’s really refreshing. I think one of the biggest tragedies and it’s also a privilege when it goes the other way, is to actually love your job and like your work and the people you work with.

I don’t know the exact statistic, but I would hazard a guess that somewhere around 95% of people hate or tolerate their job. Because they have to. And that’s unfortunate and there’s not like an easy fix to that. But one of the things I love about Lifter LMS is we’re in the business. Of helping people love their job.

Like when they have this entrepreneurial project that’s successful, not only do they create income and impact in the world, but they get the creative freedom to be the person they really want to be and work with the people they wanna work with. That’s why it’s so important when you’re. When you have an agency or you’re a course creator or a coach, that your clients that you like, your clients, if you have this opportunity to design an entrepreneurial venture, do it with a culture that you like working with.

It’s so important and, but obviously it’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Yes, we need safety and we need a roof over our head and we gotta make money. But always keeping your mind that aspirational goal of. Once you have the roof over your head and we’ve all done it, we’ve taken client projects that we, where we just did it for the money and it wasn’t a great culture fit, but we did what we have to do.

But never forget the, goal of creating that kind of positive cultural re resonance.

Alex Panagis: I think that’s such a important point because I think at the end of the day, running a business is difficult enough as it is that if you make choices that deliberately go against making it an enjoyable experience it, you’re, it’s.

Making it impossible because it’s already, I would say the, again, the stats, we don’t know the specific numbers. But the stats of companies that make it past the first year. Let alone the th second, third, and then fifth year are incredibly low. I think, again, a big part of that is it’s very difficult.

It takes a lot outta the founder to run a company. And if you have the ability to make small decisions. Whether that’s in hiring a specific person because their personality is quite significantly more aligned with the way you think, and that means that you are excited to get on a meeting with them as opposed to looking at them as just a series of can they do more work necessarily?

And yeah I, think that fundamentally wouldn’t that’s what the beautiful thing of, running your own company is that you get to choose that and you get to build it. But in, in a way, it’s also the curse because as you do it you’re doing it you’re learning it as you’re doing it. So if you fail to do it necessarily in, the very beginning.

It often feels like you can’t fix it. And I’m actually super curious because you mentioned that you had some lessons about that when you, in the past I, made hiring decisions related that what you would have to go back on because they ultimately ended up somehow making it past all the steps of your screening process.

Then still didn’t end up being a good fit long term. Or maybe they were I dunno what the case was. Were they a good fit for six months a year and then they just started slipping and they lost the like mindset that you need to have for lifter LMS.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So this is, I’ll give two examples here. One that would not related to hiring, but when you filter things through the company values, everything gets so much easier.

Like last year we, LifterLMS had a security release that was important and we looked across the space and we saw that some companies with the same kind of release did not communicate it. And they just swept it under the rug. But like our value of clear communication is like we have to communicate it.

We also have a value of community, and part of community is holding space and protecting your community. So we needed to roll this thing out in a way that we protect all our user sites, while also giving them time to update and communicating what was happening and encouraging people to update. And that whole decision of what do we do here?

Should we say something? Should we not say something? It was so easy if you just filter it through the company values. The same is true when something’s not working out. If, I as a founder or CEO have like my intuition’s, like something’s up with this team member or this group we’re working with I’m not sure what it is, but I just have this feeling in my gut.

What I’ll do is I’ll look to the company values and be like, which one of these is not being met? Are they not communicating well? Are they not really owning the work they do? Are they actually increasing friction and not removing it? Do they care about our customers and our end customers? Do they care about commu all the different kinds of community interactions we have?

And I’ll always find it. So what? And also, we’re not ruthless. We’ll give people a chance to correct. And something might be like something simple if you’re working on a support ticket and the communication from the ticket in question is not great, we’ll just use that. It’s usually just a training opportunity, so it’s Hey, we value clear communication and removing friction.

This is how we could improve this ticket. And that’s just part of training and onboarding. What you’ll see is most people will just improve. It’s like in a cult, it’s called indoctrination, right? But you’re doing the same thing in a company culture. You’re just reinforcing and indoctrinating the values.

You can train the skills. But you can’t train the character. So we always hire the character, and yes. They need to have some skills for the role. We care way more about the culture fit, ’cause we know a lot of those other things can be improved. When it comes to working with people. You mentioned the term probation earlier, it was Seth Godin who said that the only way to hire people is to work with people.

So for us, like the first 30 days or 90 days. Is it’s part of the interview process. There’s only so much you can suss out in an interview. You actually have to get to work with each other.

And I recommend that anytime you work with somebody or hire somebody or outsource something that you treat that first 30 days or test project or 90 days as it’s just part of the interview process.

And ideally you’re upfront about that where. They know that they’re on probation using, your words. But we’re just making sure, not just for us, but also for them. That it’s gonna fit and our. We’re gonna work together in this culture. Culture doesn’t mean everybody has to be exactly the same.

It’s more just there’s a base level of shared vision, mission, and values that just align and everything just gets. So much easier in that standpoint. And when it’s time to let somebody go, there are usually multiple instances of offering opportunities, pointing to values and areas to improve.

Like in the corporate world, they call it a pip, a performance improvement plan. You don’t have to be that kind of lingo heavy with it, but like you can give somebody, always give somebody the benefit of the doubt to grow and evolve. All that. ’cause sometimes you may be inheriting a great team member who has all the raw materials, but they’ve been traumatized from three, five years of being in a toxic culture.

But you can see the gym inside of them and they’re gonna need time to recalibrate, integrate with a team, absorb the values, relax a little bit, and move forward. So it’s not it’s not like a cult where you’re in or you’re out. It’s, something that happens over time and what’s really cool to see is as you get a little bigger, it’s not just the founder that is creating the culture the leadership, the people in more leadership positions start influencing it more.

And it just evolves over time. But you do wanna keep your. Eye on it to make sure it doesn’t get away from you. Or if toxic elements start creeping in, somebody could just be having a bad day and that’s just a bad day. But if you get repeated violations of the company culture that you’re trying to hold space for firing or termination of an employee is actually, I wouldn’t say it’s easy, it’s my least favorite part of the job, but it will, it’s.

It is much easier to do when you’re. You can just clearly point to the values and then actions that aren’t in alignment with the values, chances to course correct that weren’t done, and then it’s time to call it and let’s just put our best foot forward and move on from each other.

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Alex Panagis: And assuming in a company like Lifter, that’s always been done in a way where at the end of the day, it’s not like you’re doing it from one day to the other, from a week to the next.

It’s, a matter of okay, we’re gonna give you opportunities. And there’s ongoing feedback and a culture of consistent feedback throughout. Every week. So it’s not like the person would ever be surprised that happens. I think it’s more so that Okay. You’ve been at that point. And the way I’ve always, I’ve been told when I started hiring we worked with a recruiter and we had people on probation and.

I was struggling to say I guess un say I could still see them improving, but at that point you have to make a decision. And the way they put it, which I think is a great, how I think of it now, is in a way you’re doing them a favor because if they’re not willing and able and don’t enjoy working the way that you, the.

Want them to work and the culture that we have as a company, then at the end of the day, they will find a better home. Oh. And obviously that’s assuming like a good job market. So that’s the difficult aspect of it. ’cause we, are obviously having the, like sympathy and the care and we still care about the people even if they weren’t a good fit.

As I’m sure is the case with Lifter as well. It’s a diff that part of it I don’t think can be made easier. But the way I try to frame it in my mind is. At the end of the day, they’re not enjoying their work here. So given the fact that they’ve had chances and probably saw this coming I hope that they’ll leave here with lessons that they can use to find something that’s a better fit for them or also just generally improve like a lot of the time.

I. They they, maybe don’t fit into our culture, but because they’ve worked with us for x number of years or months before they were let go, they then moved on to another company where because of the person they developed into over time with us, they became a great fit for that company. And the other the, new company, sometimes you, in a small world, you can even have a connection to the company that they move on to.

I think there’s a funny aspect there. I want to talk I think one thing that you mentioned before is. Quite interesting is the diversity of culture, not necessarily in demographic, but that’s also part of it is in. In skillset and focus and the way that they, they do things, as I think you said, it mostly happens in leadership, but sometimes in individual hires as well, is somebody joins a company because in, in certain co certain situations where they’re hired because of the way they are different.

They have a different way of looking at things. Maybe that is that they have. An obsessive amount of attention to detail and the people currently in the company don’t. And that’s can be quite difficult for the person joining if it’s like something that they have to work against. But again, in, in essence, that’s the value that they then bring to the team.

Are there specific examples of that in Lifter that you could point to of we these are people that we brought on specifically for X, Y, Z, that they’re exceptional at these things and it’s a skillset that we don’t yet have. Or not a skillset a culture or characteristic of a subset of a skill set.

Let’s put it that way.

Chris Badgett: I like to think of the Lord of the Rings to answer this question. So the the elf, the dwarf. The Strider guy, the hobbits, they’re all, they’re, they become a culture on a shared mission, vision with shared values, but they’re, they couldn’t be more different in their specialties and what they do and what, where they excel and where they don’t excel.

So personality whether that’s something like big picture or attention to detail, extrovert or introvert. You can have all this variety of these things, but you’re still like in the same culture. And when you have that diversity it’s nothing bad can come from that only good. For example Kurt on the team is very, extroverted.

That’s great. If I go to a conference, I talk to a lot of people. But I’m also an introvert and I get tired. Whereas Kurt will be jacked up on energy and cool, which party are we going to next? What are we doing? And so it’s great to have all that diversity and I’m, a big student of personality types.

Personality is different from culture, but the most diversity you can get. Personality types or like Chris Lima’s work on the different types of motivation that people have. Those can all be very different while sharing a culture and a common vision mission. So yeah, that I love variety. Variety is awesome.

It’s culture is more about the how and the why than the the what of our differences. And I, just wanna say like the one point and one final question, one of the most important things you can do as a leader, even if it’s just you by yourself as a course creator, is to lead by example. Like to embody your stuff.

And if your culture and your values or in alignment with your true self, that’s not hard to do. You’ll get tired at the end of the day, but you just. Stand up for what you believe in and don’t get steamrolled. And people are watching, like maybe you’re just making marketing content on YouTube or social media, but you are on stage even if it’s you’re a bus, a solo, one person business.

And that you are demonstrating culture. Culture is more demonstrated through your actions than what. You say, so actions speak louder than words, so if you, like lifter you mentioned has a value of extreme ownership. So I really try to, if I have something, I really try to own it. And people, it’s not I, don’t walk around saying I’m owning this.

I just do as best of my ability. And if I fail or let something down, I’ll admit it. You know what, like I messed up here. And that’s also refreshing to a team to see that. Everybody is continuously improving, which is one of our values as well as fulfilling potential. So if I am not continuously improving and I’m not fulfilling my potential, and I’m open and honest about my struggles with that’s really empowering to the team.

’cause we all don’t have to be perfect, but we’re all still trying to move forward and grow into better people, more effective people, and all of that. The last thing I wanted to ask you is lift your LMS is almost 13 years old at this point, so I’ve been here a long time. I’m one of the co-founders and you can’t always see the culture from inside the bottle.

It’s like when you travel to a distant land, you’re very aware of the different culture you’re in because it’s not your culture or you didn’t grow up in that culture. But I’m curious, like what are some of the things we’ve mentioned some of our company values, but what do you think are some of the things that are interesting about the lift, draw, mess, culture and working with the company?

Alex Panagis: I think there, there’s a few core pillars. We touched on some of them, one of the ones we didn’t interestingly I thought it would’ve come up is shape up. I think the, process of working with the idea that you make certain bets on projects that you work on throughout the year and the ShapeUp principle for those who want to read more about it was originally pioneered by 37 signals.

The people behind Basecamp and the way that Lift elements uses it is a variation of that approach. And I think that way of working where. You write up a pitch that essentially outlines a core project that you wanna work on in a given cycle. If it’s something that doesn’t just happen in everyday work, I think first of all, it makes you think about the types of things that you’re doing a lot more as an individual.

Writing the pitch is a, ritual I would say where. As you do it, you shape how? Given the name of the pro like Shape up itself you shape how you’re gonna approach it, and then when you share that with other people, it gets buy-in. It also lets other people weigh in and I think that’s an aspect of it, which you don’t have a lot in a lot of companies, which is.

Why is why some companies are quite painful to work with and why it can be painful to work in some companies is that the teams are very siloed off from each other, so you can’t really get involved in something else. It’s this is my thing, I own it. I don’t want anybody to have like their input because I know I’m right.

And I think nobody at Lifter has that mindset, and I think that’s a really toxic mindset. And then I think the other thing is feedback. There’s. There’s a couple of ways to look at fe feedback. And then the last thing I’ll say is attention to detail on the feedback aspect. We, always have the way of you’re criticizing and critiquing the thing, not the person.

So go all out and critique the thing, but you’re like, ultimately none of that is meant towards the person. I think Lifter does a really. Great job internally on lift, lifting each other up helping each other progress as people, as opposed to using something as an opportunity to put oh, why did we do this in this way?

Ultimately, something has been done. It’s more about what happened, why did it happen, and how do we go from here as opposed to sitting on an idea or thinking like, oh, we shouldn’t have done this. We shouldn’t have done this. And a lot of companies do that and it makes, it becomes really toxic in my opinion.

And then the last thing, which I just said I completely forgot now was feedback. And then the last thing. Do you remember? I don’t remember what I said.

Chris Badgett: Feedback, attention to detail. Was it attention to detail?

Alex Panagis: Yeah, attention to detail. Sorry. Sorry about that. Then attention to detail is the, last one, which I think is.

It comes down from leadership when you can tell that people care about how things are done. The vulnerability is a good example, like a security release and how competitors approach it. We can like shrug off and think oh, that’s like a detail who we don’t really care how that happens and.

I think more founders than we’d like to think are unfortunately, like that they would look at the way something is done and to say oh yeah, we can do it like that. And they treat decisions that are quite important as unimportant, and that’s painful as well because it basically, it means that even the things that are important happen without ceremony.

And it’s not that oh, everything that the company does needs to be. Celebrated and at praise that every, step of the way. But if it isn’t, then eventually people stop caring in the company. And I think that then is how you build bad culture, which is ultimately how lift drill ms. I think I mean, I haven’t been involved for all eight years, but I think that’s a largely how I can imagine lift trail.

L ms has avoided it for so long.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I appreciate all that, and I just wanna highlight for you out there watching and listening, if you’re looking for a value, the one that. I would recommend from our list is clear communication. So Alex mentioned the shape up process we use in the early days of lifter LMS.

As a founder, I might say to a technical partner let’s, build a continuing education add-on. There’s the project, right? That’s not clear communication. So what we do is, this happened in 2025, Hey, let’s build a continuing education add-on. I worked on probably a seven, eight page document using the shape up process of what that would look like.

I interviewed both on Zoom and by email some of our users that were already using lifter LMS for continuing education for their LMS platforms to find out what the pain points were. As a team, we looked at the document and figured out technical things, we need to figure out gaps in our thinking.

So that document becomes like a pretty clear communicating thing of not Hey, let’s just build this software. It’s goes into great detail of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re doing it, what the interface is gonna look like. It’s clear communication, embodied. And then once we get to the.

Part where we start prioritizing projects in the shape Up process. And that one bubbled to the top. It’s really ready to roll and it’s gonna be. I already know it’s gonna be successful before we even build it. Which a lot of companies don’t know, they’re just guessing. But when you put your customer at the center of your business, not your product like we do at Lifter, the product market fit. I don’t wanna say it’s easy, but if you actually listen to your customers and care about their pains and observe the friction pattern match against that, where it’s happening repeatedly, it’s not a guess. It’s just a project that needs to be flushed out. Alex, I wanted to thank you for coming on this episode to talk about culture.

I’m lucky to have scale math working with LifterLMS. As you’ve said before, like our cultures, our company cultures are naturally so similar. It’s really easy to work together and do big things, and that’s, the power of like alignment. Whether it’s with team members, your partner. Even your personal life your clients, other companies you work with, and vendors and things, when you feel that belonging and that you’re, you have similar or even almost the same culture, it’s really powerful and it makes life so much more fun and enjoyable and easy, and you can make hard decisions easier by just looking to your culture and your values and your mission and all of that.

Thank you for coming on the show. If anybody wants to connect with scale math, what’s the best way to do that?

Alex Panagis: The best way would be to check out scale math.com, but I want to turn that around more importantly to say thank you. And likewise, it’s a real pleasure to work with you. And I can say on behalf of the, everybody on that works on the LifterLMS work that we do.

It is a real pleasure to work with you and everyone on the team. And it’s always exciting when we work with a company where there’s elements of things and the way that they operate where we actually want to adopt them versus having to think, oh no, the way this company does it, we want to like, try to not fall into those habits as opposed to with, Lifter, which is what the case is actually like this is a company we’re really proud to work with yeah.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Alex.

Alex Panagis: Thank you.

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Get Popup Maker NowKurt Von Ahnen discusses in this LMScast episode that continuing education (CE), which is one of the most reliable and scalable options in online learning, is basically corporate training provided in accordance with certification or licensing criteria.

He draws attention to the fact that professionals in fields like healthcare, real estate, and technical professions need to renew their certificates on a regular basis, which generates steady income for CE providers. In addition to providing compelling features like credit tracking, expiration management, recertification, and group-based bulk sales, Kurt illustrates how utilizing WordPress with LifterLMS can significantly cut costs by citing actual cases of businesses overspending on enterprise LMS platforms for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He also highlights hybrid training, which combines online theory and in-person practical, as a way to save money and explains how seasoned professionals frequently choose CE entrepreneurship as a wise career move. Kurt argues that many agencies and course designers ignore continuing education as a lucrative, impact-driven, and recurring niche.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScasts. I’m Chris and I’m joined by a special guest, Kurt Von Onan. He’s back on the show, and today we’re gonna go over the world of continuing education, doing it in WordPress, and really get into the opportunity. Of continuing education and how to think about it, how to do better at it, whether you’re a continuing education provider or an agency who’s assisting a continuing education provider with delivering the product.

But first, welcome to the show. Kurt

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris. Yeah, it’s amazing, dude. I’m so glad to be back. It’s always fun to chat with you.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. And this is good stuff ’cause you have a lot of experience with continuing education clients at Manano, NOMAS and a lifter for over a decade. We know that the people that are the most successful with our product are in the continuing education niche.

That doesn’t mean you can’t be successful if you’re a coach or course creator or a school. But based on what we know from our interviews and everything, the continuing education platforms that are successful are sometimes very successful financially and also in terms of the impact and reach they have.

One of the first things I wanted to ask you you had a great insight on differentiating the difference between corporate training and continuing education. So I like, where you went with that, tell us how you see those things as being different, but very related.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So I, I think that’s interesting actually, Chris, because I don’t know that a lot of people would see things the way that I see things, but it’s because I’ve had the benefit of being I was the corporate training manager.

I, I am the agency owner and I do. I’m a course creator so, I have the, view, the perspective of all three. And when you are making continuing education, you are basically a corporate trainer, but it’s under contract. And a lot of people just don’t make that connection. They don’t really, they think corporate training is this weird, sterile, like some other kind of platform, some other weird thing that they’re taking where it’s mandatory training or whatever.

And then they think that continuing education is, some kind of other product. And then we think of course, creators as being like. This like soft cuddly I’m really committed to this is my passion and I wanna share knitting with you. There’s, like a lot of overlap between those things.

And continuing education to me is corporate training. It’s just, it’s corporate training under contract. You’re doing it to, certify people for another realm of expertise somewhere.

Chris Badgett: And it’s also course creation, right?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, A lot of the services that we offer at Manana, NOMAS deal with not just course creation, but we think of course authorship or we think of instructional design or whatever the phrase is you wanna put on it.

But a lot of times we deal with clients that have some kind of overarching, like large training content, and maybe it’s some kind of legacy content that they had before, but they need to figure out like, how do we take this legacy content? And how do we chop it into pieces so that it could be like micro learning that fits in the modern learning environment.

And then when we take that large legacy content and we cut it down into those pieces and, we make that’s what becomes. For this conversation. That’s what becomes the continuing education, right? It’s okay, so we can take this giant course, we can block this down into three courses with micro learning lessons, and then the summation of those lessons become a course tracked, which become a certificate.

And then they take that every year or every two years, and that becomes the recertification to stay within that industry. And it’s. Gosh, I just realized everything I said probably sounds like a foreign language to a lot of people watching or listening, but that’s like how continuing education works.

It’s a major corporation or a major vertical in an industry is saying we require a certain amount of education and a certification for people to be qualified to do something, and then you have to create something online that says, yes, I have taught them. I validated their expertise and here’s their certificate, and then that certificate needs to be renewed every one year, two years, or three years based on whatever the continuing education requirement is.

And lifter LMS with the new continuing education add-on, just it nails it. Perfect. Chris? Yeah,

Chris Badgett: and we just did an episode on validation, and this is one of those things like. I knew before we created continuing education specific software add-on for lifter LMS, that it was gonna be a home run. Because you know what, these people showed up 10 years ago.

They were using lifter LMS to deliver continuing education. Through all our interactions, we knew what their pain points were. We knew how to better serve things like credit tracking. Expiring access and recertification, making sure the certificate was perfect for what people who take continuing education, like my father who worked in the in pharmacy, he had to take, he still maintains his pharmacy license even though he is retired and my entire life I’ve heard my dad say.

I gotta go take a CE course and he would go to a hotel conference room and then they started doing some online. And then during COVID they did more online. And it’s just always, it’s a thing that’s been around forever, like so many license licenses, like nursing doctors, different healthcare positions.

Real estate.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Banking, all this stuff.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Dentistry,

Chris Badgett: sure. Yeah. It keeps going. And it’s funny you mentioned dentistry because if somebody is just, I’ve always heard it in the online business space or really just entrepreneurship space is if you can get a dentist as a client, you can do really well.

’cause they financially you every time, I don’t know about you. Every time I go to the dentist, I’m shocked at the bill and the dentist is there’s a nice car outside and they’re, doing well. Basically what I’m saying is there is a lot of money in continuing education and it’s also a recurring problem.

I say problem in the sense that just like my father, he had to re, he had to get 15 hours or credit hours, whatever, every single year for an entire career. And by the way, there’s a lot of pharmacists on planet Earth and that’s just one niche. The pharmacy continuing education need. Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. That drives me.

I’m always struck on these talks that you and I have, how that comes to like personal experiences, but. Think about Dr. Obie that I’ve mentioned to you, right? She’s I think she’s skill, skills made easy.com or whatever. I, by the way, I am very good at doing sutures with, scorm, by the way.

She has a SCORM related course. It’s continuing education. It’s all about every couple of years nurses in the field have to re-certify in how to properly suture a patient. And so her course is like how to properly suture a patient. And so we have this a SCORM related course that’s continuing education every couple of years people gotta dive back in, get re-certified.

And the idea that the platform tracks. Expiration dates when they’re due again, sends ’em a notification that says you’ve gotta recertify and resells the course. Again, it just keeps that recurring income thing going from a business perspective, but it’s deeper than that. Like you didn’t create a course on suturing people and being in the medical field unless you were attracted to that in the first place, and that’s somewhat of a passion for you.

So if you’re the course creator that went that direction, you now have a platform. That takes care of your passion and treats your people well, and keeps people on time, keeps ’em certified, keeps ’em working, keeps ’em employed and keeps ’em making their money. And that’s like such a cool thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And the other thing too is like in all these industries, whether it’s pharmacy or other healthcare or real estate.

There’s technology and like everything is just changing, so there’s retaking things the way a lifeguard needs to have a CPR, the same CPR training every year and so on. But there’s also industries like I’m sure the pharmaceutical continuing education. A lot of it’s changed in the past 30 years, and there’s just a lot of new drugs and technology.

Illness, understanding of illness and disease and things like that. It just, it’s a constantly evolving so, not only do they have to re-up every year, they have to stay current on their changing industry. So it’s a very sticky business that’s like essential.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I am a mountain bike coach with the NICA organization.

So we, work with students between sixth grade, fifth grade, sorry, fifth grade this year, fifth grade and 12th grade on mountain biking. And that sounds oh, you’re a volunteer, you’re a volunteer mountain bike coach. That’s gotta be great. No, it’s a pain in the butt. I have to certify every year on if you’re not alone with the student, there’s always an adult present. You don’t touch kids in weird ways you like. And then once you get past all that, then it comes into this is how you ride a mountain bike. This is how you go over a rock. This is how you go over a route. And so you have to do this certification every year to be qualified to be able to volunteer.

And work with these, kids. And just from the standpoint that sometimes when we talk about these e-learning projects, we talk about it from a revenue standpoint or from a money standpoint or from a career standpoint. And sometimes it really is just as simple as I just wanna volunteer and add value to people.

But you have to be qualified to be able to put yourself in those spaces, and that’s what continuing education helps us do.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. What else makes ’em so sticky? Part of it is that it’s, not, in some ways it’s direct to consumer because, but it’s not really, ’cause a lot of times, like in your case, even though you may have to, it depends on whether the business or the individual has to pay for the CE or continuing education.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But there’s usually like a business or a licensing body or a corporation or something that requires this thing. So it’s very much a much more of a business-like version of e-learning. It’s very business heavy in terms of. Like the transaction, like I’m doing this to keep my job, but also to be the best I can do at my career, which is my, the work I do, it’s my career.

Kurt Von Ahnen: See, that’s the weirdest thing about continuing education is as you create your continuing education courseware, you’re not really sure who your customer is. And I’m just throwing that out there, honestly. So for instance. When I want to be a mountain bike coach, I’m the mountain bike coach, I gotta do it, period.

I just gotta do it right. If I am a mortgage broker and I want to keep my mortgage licensing active. Gotta, I’ve gotta pay to take those courses and be certified and do those things. If I want to be a real estate broker. If I wanna be a dentist, I’ve gotta pay for those things. But there’s the other side of the coin, and that is like the continuing education.

That was like my other, my, my previous life when I was the, training manager for Ducati and Suzuki. When I worked for Ducati and. Likewise, when I worked for Suzuki those companies paid for the training for all of the technicians to be able to, update their licenses, right? So to be able to say, yeah, I’m fully qualified to work on this year, make, and model of motorcycle so that I can do warranty work in, these areas.

And so when you get into the continuing education. Vertical of e-learning. You have to understand who is your customer, who’s actually gonna pay you and how do you approach those people, which Chris, I’m gonna make it sound like a commercial, but I can’t help myself. Lifter LMS has continuing education.

But it also has the groups feature. And so if you can combine continuing education and groups, now you’re not just selling to individuals, you can sell to those groups. And then the people that manage those groups externally of the LMS, like so. say somebody at Ducati wants to do training for 2,500 technicians, they can buy 2,500 seats of training.

They can buy a group. Invite the 2,500 students continuing education and manage all of it through a page on the front of lifter LMS. I don’t know of another LMS that lets me do that out of the box without custom development. And that’s just me, like me being like totally both feet in with the lifter LMS thing.

I know I’m biased, but that’s you guys are knocking it outta the park. It’s great.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that and I just wanna say like sometimes. Because Lifter, LMS is built on WordPress in continuing education markets. It seems too good to be true from a price point because it’s relatively cheaper than some other software as a service that’s super expensive with these enterprise contracts and all these things, it’s like how is that?

How is that possible with at lifter LMS price points to get all that and much more customizability and everything. I realize that it’s because a lot of the costs are not embedded in the product. So what I mean by that is because WordPress is open source software with a whole ecosystem, just the WordPress core software that has been built as a open source project.

Now, there are people that are paid to work on that from different organizations to kind of sponsor. The, common core software that we all use and build on top of. But if WordPress Core was a private company, it would be hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build what has become the WordPress core.

But because it, the foundation is that open source software with a huge ecosystem of community contribution, some paid some unpaid. That’s part of the reason why the price is so approachable to what some continuing education providers see as a sticker shock. Not the bad kind, but the low kind. It seems too good to be true, but this is it.

It just takes an understanding of the WordPress open source community project and then what things like lifter LMS does on top of that. It’s, affordable, but. Don’t mistake that price for being a lack of effort and skill and contribution put into the underlying software.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I feel like you are goading me.

Okay. I feel like you’re dragging. I’m into the conversation. Chris,

Chris Badgett: I’m not goading you.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Let’s just have it out, right? So the people that are listeners and viewers that are watching LMS cast, now, I’m just gonna say it, when I was the corporate trainer at Ducati, at Suzuki, I did work with BRP, with Triumph, with we’re talking about big companies.

I’m in charge of their budgets. I’m literally the guy that has to write the purchase order to buy whatever the next year’s maintenance and hosting is for the e-learning package. And. This is why I came to lifter LMS in what, 2014 15 when I was watching our company spend $400,000 on hosting and maintenance for e-learning, but still ran a department of six people to manage the e-learning.

That didn’t make any sense to me because think this through, right? If you have six people on salary, even if they’re a hundred grand a year, that’s $600,000. So that’s 600 grand a year just for salaries to manage the content of the learning, and then 400 grand a year that we’re spending on. Maintenance and hosting, and that was for these like weird, like SCORM specific custom learning platforms.

And for a lot of companies, especially in the continuing education space, this seems to be true where, they’re paying anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000 a year for hosting and maintenance. They’re still responsible for all of the content. Chris, part of why I got so excited and why I relaunched Ana Nomas the way I did when I left Suzuki is because I looked at that and I said, those numbers, the math ain’t mathen.

The math ain’t mathen. If I can have really good hosting. Even if I pay $3,000 a year for hosting for a company with 2,500 students let’s go crazy. Let’s just say I need the best hosting I can possibly get. I’m gonna pay three grand a year for the hosting lifter. LMS is 1500 bucks a year. I’m at 4,500 bucks.

I’m nowhere near $400,000,

Chris Badgett: right?

Kurt Von Ahnen: And so, that is where my head went. And then as I began to, relaunch m and Omas and help people transfer their SCORM content to WordPress and use lifter LMS and do things in different ways. And I realized that this call might be going a different direction than what we originally said.

To me, it was a whole, for an agency perspective, it was a whole other market to look at. And the weirdest part is when you talk to people and you say, Hey, you’re currently paying $300,000 a year for your e-learning platform. I can do it for 60 grand a year. It sounds like for people in the WordPress space, 60 grand a year seems like a lot of money, but for people in the e-learning space.

60 grand a year sounds like it’s too good to be true. It prob it can’t possibly be good and what we’re actually delivering is. A learning management system surrounded by a content management system that gives us a premium student experience and gives us the ability to add features to our LMS that corporations haven’t had in years.

And it’s the same with continuing education, a lot of continuing education. People are still locked into finding a platform that will run scorm. Which means they’re learning at Learn upon Bridge Blackboard, things like that. And so they’re looking at these other platforms instead of realizing, Hey, I could move this over to WordPress, surround it with a complete CMS, put marketing information and blogs around it.

Add community features for learners if that’s what my client needs, and I can give them a much better experience for, I don’t know, 40%. 35% of what their initial budget was.

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

The Secret World Of Continuing Education Entrepreneurship: it’s,

Kurt Von Ahnen: I went crazy. I’m sorry.

Chris Badgett: No, that’s good. It’s, mind blowing. I appreciate the way you frame that in. I want to talk a little bit about like the who, like the, who is involved in continuing education.

One of the thing I’ve noticed in lifter LMS community is that I’ve seen this pattern enough times that I see it as a pattern. Sometimes people work in a job that require continuing education and maybe they ultimately have that moment where they realize they want to become an entrepreneur, they wanna do their own thing, and they’re probably far along in their career, they’ve mentored a lot of people in their, job and they maybe they think that the continuing education that they’re getting.

That they have to take, they’re not that happy with it. And they have this idea like, you know what? I think I could do a better job or, do a good job and make continuing education for my industry. Which by the way, I really understand because I’ve been doing it for 20 years or whatever, and I’ve watched so many entrepreneurs pivot from employee to continuing education provider, and they get going with WordPress and Lifter LMS.

Then the funny other pattern that I see a lot of them say is something like, geez, I’m I’m not great at marketing, but this business is so successful and I’m just, I’m not even, I don’t even, I’m not even good at sales, or I’m barely even selling, or I do something like. When it’s time in a certain niche to get your ce, you got, you go to your, like your licensing board and they have approved providers and you have a menu of, companies that you can source your continuing education from that are like approved.

Like I know someone who did something where they their entire marketing strategy was, they went to the board. The board was like, oh, that’s awesome. We need some new fresh content in the space. Can I get access to see what you got? The content gets reviewed and they’re like, this is great.

We’re gonna add you to the list. And that is the entire marketing strategy. And it works in building huge, these entrepreneurs like X employee entrepreneurs or maybe they’re transitioning out of their active role. I’ve watched them become CE providers and it’s, fascinating.

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Kurt Von Ahnen: I, people are gonna get mad, but that, that to me is like the who not what you know, situation.

There’s a lot of who you knows that really find great success in the e-learning space because to your point. They’ve become experts in the field. They’re tired. So I come from a technical background working on cars, working on motorcycles, working on diesel trucks, airplanes. I have an aviation background.

And so what happens is a lot of these people, their backs hurt. They’re just tired. Their bodies are tired and, but. Through 20 years or 30 years of working in an industry they, that

The Secret World Of Continuing Education Entrepreneurship: they

Chris Badgett: care about.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. That they

Chris Badgett: love. Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: That they care about, that they love they, end up knowing the fixed operations director of X, Y, and Z.

Right? And they go, you know what I really think I could just create a course about this and teach people how to do what I do without me having to do it all the time. And it’s a really good exit strategy for some people to get out of the whole idea of. In the power sports field, the best mechanic in the shop, the absolute, the the most knowledgeable, wonderful, most awesome mechanic in the, repair center is probably the worst person.

To be the service writer and the service manager in the service department. It just doesn’t work because you’re taking someone from the physical hands-on portion of it and you’re trying to squeeze them into a relationship position with customers and a lot of times that doesn’t work.

But if that person with a high tech background says, you know what? I could make technical training that shows other technicians how to do what I’ve done for the last 20 years and shortcut the, pains and, the mistakes that I’ve made. If I could take the 20 years of mistakes out and just give them the highlights, I could help them fast forward their own progression through the space.

Those are the people that seem to, that come up with really good courses that seem to be able to sell things really well to people at the higher levels.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and a funny thing happens when you make the pivot from employee to entrepreneur is you wake up one day and you realize, oh my gosh, now I’m just as busy and I’m just as overworked and stuff.

But then there’s something else interesting I’ve seen with these continuing education providers is they will start. Partnering or paying a subject matter expert to come in, they’ve figured out like lifter, LMS and like how to actually do it. They will license content to include in their courses. Maybe not the whole course, but like we need this piece or this template to show people and so they start building team around the project whether, and that could just be outsourced content or whatever.

I see some of them. There’s also a huge opportunity with continuing education is a slow moving industry that takes a while to catch up. So it took the COVID pandemic to cause or to basically force the CEU. You can’t just stop, like you gotta get your hours. So it forced it to go more online, which was a part of.

LMS and other continuing education industry tool growth because of ’cause of COVID. But the transition from continuing education being delivered in hotel conference rooms or in business parks or corporate offices and things to online is still very much unfolding if you’re very tech forward. You may think it’s all already been done.

Everybody’s online. No, they’re still going to these conference rooms. So sometimes all you have to do, and this is, part of my story with Lifter and starting in the organic gardening. My whole strategy with the permaculture thing that I did back in 2012 or whatever, was to actually go to this education thing.

This wasn’t actual continuing education. It was more classic course creator world. I would show up with my video camera. I would take the offline world, bring it online, make it available to the whole world through the internet. So there’s lots of great educators who operate in the continuing education world that have no interest in starting their own continuing education company, but would be glad to contribute to somebody else’s continuing education platform, ideally getting paid either a one-time fee or a royalty.

Or something like that, so you don’t have to do it alone. And I also notice a lot of times this is a classic setup, not just in continuing education, but all the e-learning niches. I’ve seen this so many times. There’s a partner, like a husband, wife or whatever, and one of ’em is a tech person and one of ’em is a subject matter expert.

So they’ll work together. Like I, I’m thinking of one continuing education platform where the wife. Is the subject matter expert has all those connections you’re talking about, knows all the speakers used to organize the conferences also worked in the field of that industry, but the husband is like the tech person and they bring it all together so that as a husband and wife, they start this continuing education company and one person isn’t trying to do it all.

You can pull it off. I’ve seen it done where you can have a one person continuing education business. More than, more likely than not, there’s a couple players involved. Somebody to manage the tech, the subject matter experts, business strategy and so on, and or like they can do all that except for the tech and they work with an agency to bring it all together for em.

They’ve already decided on the value of WordPress and lifter LMS and this continuing education features and certification and all that. So if you’re excited about this, you don’t necessarily have to do it all alone. I just wanna put that out there.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You as, you were talking, Chris it, really took me back to my experience 2013, 1415 with Ducati.

And when I originally went to Ducati, they had a, contractor based training system, meaning everything was external. So if you were a Ducati dealership and you wanted to train your technicians, you had to send your technicians to whatever city. The, training was in, and so there was training for people to go to, and they would go to a live training.

It was typically two weeks long and it was theory and practicum. It was, theory and workshop oriented stuff. And then when I got the job with Ducati, my job was to, how do we bring this, all this contract training? How do we bring this into an in-house platform? That makes sense, right? And so this is an example of what continuing education could be for somebody to just let you know the benefits to the main company and to the people getting the training.

What we did was we took all of the theory, all of the theory from the classroom, and we put it into an online platform. That online platform was people could learn at their own pace. It was DYI, baby, it was you do, you go in, you take, you train at your own pace. That’s fine. Then you test and you quiz, and we make sure you know what you’re talking about before you come to the, in-person practicum.

So for a lot of continuing education platforms, hybrid training is the thing. So there’s gonna be something online and something in person. So what I want people to realize is the old system had people traveling for two weeks at a time. So that’s hotel rental, car per diem meals, the whole thing, right?

And then, so we took the training and we said, let’s put all of the theory online. And then we said, let’s do a practicum course in person, where we just really highlight the features from the online training. And then we take people into a workshop and we put tools in their hands and we say, okay, show us what you learned.

Like shim, this crank set set the gap on these intake valves. Set the gap on these exhaust valves. Set, like there was all these things and we said, you have to do all these things. They would do all these things and then we would take a final test and they would pass. Now for corporations that are listening and, viewing this podcast, what that amounted to was we cut the training budget in half.

Half, and then we certified twice as many technicians in that year. So we went from a model that was twice as expensive and certified half as many people to a system that was half as expensive and certified twice as many people. And that was from using online tools. And now think of that moving forward.

So if you think about it moving forward from a recertification standpoint. They’ve already been in person to certify, like they know how a torque wrench works, and they know how Dandle works. They know how these feeler gauges work. You don’t have to bring ’em back for the impractical personal thing.

Now you just have to refresh them electronically so all that expense is gone. All the per diem, all the travel, all the nonsense is off the spreadsheet and all you’re worried about is paying for the online platform and the cost to make the content. And in Ducati’s case, it ended up being a huge win.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point that a lot of continuing education is not 100% online, but that doesn’t mean none of it is.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah

Chris Badgett: Just, like in my father’s case with pharmacy, even still, like there’s a certain percentage or number of hours per year that have to be in person, and that’s okay.

It doesn’t mean the online version. Won’t work. And I also want to just mention like in a past episode we talked about validation and sometimes you need to pivot on the who you’re selling to. So for example, if you work in the legal field or the real estate field. And you’re trying to like here’s a, real estate example.

Let’s say you’re trying to sell a course to real estate agents and it’s doing okay, but not doing great. If you pivoted to wait a second, let me look at the National Association of Realtors, or my state chapter of that. ’cause real estate agents have continuing education requirements. I’m gonna take the same knowledge I have.

I might package it a little differently for the CE market instead of direct to agent like, and I’ll go through the need in the existing river of demand that recurs every year to keep a real estate license. That one pivot can make a dramatic impact. So if you’re a course creator, I would, no matter what the niche is.

I would just ask yourself the question, is there value in what I teach to some kind of continuing education market that is out there hungry for training on repeat every year?

Kurt Von Ahnen: You your phrase of what you know, what’s more efficient, one-to-one sales or one to many sales. Every every time you say that it, shortcuts the whole thing about continuing education, it’s do I wanna sell one to one or do I wanna sell one to many?

Do I want to talk to a person and sell ’em one course, or do I want to talk to a person and sell ’em 50 examples of that course.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And that to me is okay, I’m seeing it. Like I’m starting to, I, like I start, I’m starting to get it. So now how do I leverage that? Then it just becomes a thing.

Chris Badgett: Then there, there’s also another exponential multiplier here, which is a lot of this continuing education stuff. You, if you think really big, like I may work at one hospital as a nurse and I get excited about continuing education and then I figure out my state or my hospital systems need for continuing education.

Then there’s more hospitals, and in the United States there’s 49 more states who may have like slightly different requirements. I’m not saying it’s easy to rinse and repeat like, oh, I did it in Ohio, now I’m gonna do it in South Dakota. But the scale of where you can go with this is pretty impressive because continuing education and licenses.

Tend to be subdivided by state boundaries as an example. Or even different countries have different requirements or maybe you figure out a model and then you can change the geography. You could potentially change the language oh, maybe I’m gonna hire somebody to come into my organization to do this in Spanish.

And then we’ll go after the Spanish speaking continuing education market for the people that are in the exact same role as the English speaking world. And it just goes when you start seeing all these like layers of how you could expand. It’s really interesting. And, but sometimes, like with a lot of these that I’ve seen, the entrepreneur gets to the point where they don’t need to expand.

They’re I’m good, I’ve. I’m making enough here. I’ve been able to pivot from employee to entrepreneur. I’ve built a team, we’re doing well, everybody’s making enough money, we’re good. But there really is, I’m not saying unlimited upside, but there’s a lot of upside potential for just taking it to a slightly different market or even it’s Yeah.

Or different geography, different language, different niche, even. Because some industries operate very similar I’m trying to think of a specific example. There could be something that happens in a lawyer continuing education that’s also relevant to like a judge or court system continuing education or something that the person who ends up needing that is in a slightly different role. There’s just all these pivots that are just like stacked up and ready to be tested if you have the capacity, desire, and ability to expand.

Kurt Von Ahnen: We’re so disconnected. My, my brain went right to bartending.

Okay? So I have a client that has a bartending course.

Chris Badgett: Does bar do, bartenders do continuing education.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Turns out that bartenders have continuing education and in the state of California you have to be certified to be a bartender.

Chris Badgett: Okay,

Kurt Von Ahnen: I wasn’t aware of this. So one of the things I did as an agency was I connected the state of California’s website to our customer’s lifter, LMS website.

So people actually register through the state of California, they get their student id. That student ID becomes part of their lifter, LMS id, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it goes on. Yeah. But to your point. That client recognized that California is not the only state that requires a certification for that.

And so they’ve worked with other states and we’ve created automations for them that connect the lifter LMS reporting data to those sponsored states, if that’s the way to say that. So that the states sell the training, he gets the revenue. The reporting goes back to those states and the states get copies of their certifications with every recertification and they have to be re-certified every two years.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you just,

Kurt Von Ahnen: it’s amazing. It’s just an ATM machine after that.

Chris Badgett: And I just thought of another PI pivot, which is like public sector, private sector, government sector. Like for example, like doctors or nurses. There’s different sectors. There’s also nurses in the military who need training.

And maybe I don’t, I’m not an expert in military medicine, but there’s still nurses, there’s still doctors. They still need their stuff. And the gov governments do contracts all the time where they’re not, everything is provided 100% in-house.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So, all these pivots or just verticals pop up once you nail one.

Obviously stay with it, perfect it, but look around a little bit and see where else you can expand into

Kurt Von Ahnen: land and expand.

Chris Badgett: That’s it. So if you’re looking to land and expand and you’re looking for, you’re intrigued by this I wanna encourage you to check out lifter LMS and the continuing education. I do wanna mention our continuing education add-on works no matter what you call it.

So this is part of the software and all our research and everything. You can rename it to CME, continuing medical education, pdu professional development units or whatever your, there’s a lot of lingo and vernacular in all this. But like Kurt was saying in the beginning of this episode, it’s very similar to corporate training.

It’s all not as different as you think. It’s just more about the application and the use case and the purpose and who you’re selling to and how they need their certificates and stuff. But the end of the day, it’s still courses that have continuing education attached to them. So check out Lifter, LMS if you want an agency to help you with this.

Kurtz got a very unique set of experience as a education provider himself, as a manager, a leader, a trainer as a website, WordPress lifter, L-M-S-C-E-U, niche, massive amounts of experience in all of that. So check out Manana, NOMAS for that and we wanna hear from you. I love interviewing on this podcast, continuing education entrepreneurs ’cause their stories are so cool.

Not just because they build great businesses, but it’s often a lot of lifestyle stuff. You know what, just like Kurt said, I was, I’ve been in this industry for 30 years. I either wasn’t financially ready to retire, or I just didn’t wanna stop working and I still love my industry, or I wanted to figure out how to do a business with my partner or my friends and make it happen.

I’ve seen it in my local community where doctors are. Conspiring on, we need to get in this continuing education game. I’m like, guys, I got a learning management system over here. Let’s, talk about this. And they’re like, oh, you know about that stuff. I’m like,

Kurt Von Ahnen: oh

Chris Badgett: I do. Check out Lifter LMS.

Check out Manna Nomas, and if you have questions about building a continuing education platform or how any of this works, check it out if you’re sitting on a backlog. SCORM content as an example. We have a whole free course on the lifter LMS Academy, how to integrate with that. We also teach you if you wanna do hybrid, if you’re moving away from scorm and you have a, you want to use a more modern WordPress content management system for creating your e-learning.

We show you how to ride in both worlds. Anything’s possible. But thank you Kurt, for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. And reach out to lifter LMS and Manana nomas with any kind of continuing education question. We’re unique in the space and that we’ve really been around this industry from a long, for a long time in a lot of different angles and have seen people.

Even from the very early days of lifter LMS, which is 2013, immediately start using it for continuing education and our certificate system and making it work. Fast forward 12, 13 years, it’s now super set up and frictionless for continuing education and I just would love to see you use it. Check it out.

Thank you so much, Kurt, for coming on the show. We will do this again down the road.

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Get Popup Maker NowKurt Von Ahnen from MANANA NO MAS, demonstrates in this LMScast episode that even if you are certain of your knowledge, you must validate an online course. Since he thought his ideas would succeed, he acknowledges that as an entrepreneur, he used to detest validation. However, experience has shown him that ignoring validation results in a waste of time, money, and energy.

He highlights the need for creators to think like entrepreneurs and consider long-term viability, profitability, and demand in addition to their passion. One of his best lessons is about pricing: when he first offered his program for $1,500, it didn’t sell because people thought it was too inexpensive rather than because it wasn’t worth it. Significant price increases resulted in higher sales, demonstrating that assessing perceived worth and willingness to pay is part of validation.

Additionally, he emphasizes that various price points necessitate various sales procedures, ranging from straightforward checkout pages to protracted relationship-based sales cycles. Kurt promotes testing concepts on sites like YouTube or in-person meetings, asking viewers directly if they would sign up, and making sure that feedback is provided by actual customers rather than friends or relatives. In the end, he emphasizes that validation is continuous, flexible, and closely related to knowing who drives purchasing decisions, what the market really desires, and whether or not your product-market fit is genuine—not presumed.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Kurt Von Ahnen from Manana Nomas. Kurt also works with Lifter LMS. You’ve seen him on some of our live calls, many of them. Actually. Today we’re gonna get into how to validate an online course before you build it.

We’re gonna go a little deeper in this one than the usual advice, which is good advice to pre-sale and put up a landing page and all that. But we’re gonna go into more detail around validation to save you a lot of time, energy, and money. But first, welcome back on the show, Kurt.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Thanks Chris. It’s always awesome to have a chat.

Chris Badgett: I love validation. Partially because as an entrepreneur, which. You are, and many of the listeners out there are. Opportunity all around you. So I know when I’m hanging out with my entrepreneur friends and we go to a restaurant as an example, you’ll see you’ll start constructing in your mind like, oh, this many plates, the food costs this much.

And you start you just start thinking like a entrepreneur, like a business person. Oh. Or you’re at a conference and you’re like, oh, how much money do they make from this conference? There’s 2000 people here. The tickets were this much. Anyways, but part of that entrepreneur brain is that you have your radar up and you’re just scanning the environment.

Entrepreneurs are, they’re often seen as risky, but they’re actually risk averse, so they’re like looking for risks and opportunity, but part of that scanning brain that you have. Is for finding and validating a good course idea or online business or coaching program, or multi instructor school or whatever it is that you’re building.

So let’s dig into validation. I feel like the radar comes in handy. I can’t turn it off. That’s how you know, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you have that kind of brain and no matter what you do, you just can’t turn it off. It’s always there. You’re an entrepreneur that’s called the entrepreneur personality type.

But validation is, more like harnessing that awareness and that scanning to a really specific target. Should I focus on this project? How do I know it will work? How do I reduce wasted time, energy, and money? So before even you get to the sales page part. Like pre-selling, which lifter, LMS is an example, has all the tools you need to set that up.

Technically, that’s the, in many ways, the easy part. Once you learn the mechanics of that and you’re, you get good at writing a sales page. But one of my biggest tips that I think people don’t talk about a lot is if you’re a subject matter expert in a space following other subject matter experts in the space.

Just basically keeping tabs on your market. So like I know what’s going on at SaaS LMS companies, I’m watching their marketing, I’m on their email list, I’m watching them launch products, and I’m not looking for something to copy. What I’m actually looking for is demand. Oh, when do people get really excited about something?

Not the company, but the customers. And when you’re in a topic. One of my favorite things to do is to look at Amazon. So if I have a course idea as an example, and let’s say I am, I’m really into I’m just using a real example of beekeeping and I have done beekeeping courses before. In that case, I actually did it with one of the top beekeepers in Montana, so I had him be the expert.

But if you know anything about beekeeping when you go to amazon.com. Look at books or other products, you’ll see the number of reviews. And beekeeping is actually like this huge thing that is all over the world. And so there’s like a river of demand there. With you with power sports there, there’s like certain magazines people read.

There’s certain forums they go on, there’s certain podcasts they listen to. So the first layer of validation is, and this comes in the last episode, we talked about the difference between grandiosity and shame. Sometimes in the grandiose mindset, you don’t need anybody. You’re just like, I got it.

I’m gonna crush this. I’ve, got my blinders on. Keeping your finger on the pulse of not just your, not really your competitors. It’s more like the people who have problems that you wanna serve and seeing what they’re up to, seeing what people are trying to sell to them, seeing what their complaints are on social media and reviews, YouTube comments everywhere.

And these aren’t platforms that you own, so it’s free. It just takes time to keep your finger on the pulse. What do you think about keeping your finger on the pulse in your niche?

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’m sitting here grinning to myself because this is one thing where you and I have a fairly large disconnect, Chris.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Kurt Von Ahnen: From an entrepreneur standpoint. I hated validation. You’re like, I love validation. I’m like, I hated validation. I was like, I know what I’m doing. I know it’s the best I’m gonna, I’m gonna forge forward. I’m gonna make this thing happen. And as an agency, I’ve had a lot of clients that have been that way where I already know I’m an expert.

I know what I’m gonna do. This is gonna be awesome. I’m gonna make a million dollars. And it’s no, we gotta slow this down. ’cause now I’m an agency. And now I’m like, we gotta slow this down. You gotta validate this thing. You gotta figure out what is the market, what is, what’s it gonna take to bring it to market?

And then what’s your margin gonna be? And you gotta think it through. For instance, and just like you said, going to restaurants and stuff, I love to cook. Like anyone that knows me on social knows I love to cook. And I always think, wouldn’t it be so cool to have a food truck? Wouldn’t it be cool to have a food truck and then.

I go to Sandhill Brewery and at Sandhills Brewing, someone’s, they do a kitchen takeover and they were selling these like they were awesome, Sam. It was like 15 bucks. Awesome. Like it was a great plate for 15 bucks. But I said to my son, I said, there’s 25 people here, and if all 25 people bought a plate for 15 bucks and there’s four people making the plates, how much did each person make?

And he’s Ooh, that’s not so good. I’m like, yeah, that’s not so good. You gotta figure out what does it actually look like? Because whether you think you’re running your course as a business, or you’re running your course as a hobby at the end of the world, it’s gotta pay for itself somehow some way.

So you gotta validate it, whether you like it or not. You gotta validate it.

Chris Badgett: And here’s the funny part I’ve had, this is a direct thing that I’ve done, is. At Lifter LMS we have validated that there is a lot of demand for agencies that build websites that to be familiar with LMS and e-commerce and all the, needs of the e-learning website.

It’s a niche that you could build an entire agency on. So I like scream from the mountaintops hello WordPress professionals and website building pros. Of which I come from this, I was one of these and I did it all. I did restaurants, real estate agents, psychics coaches, course crew. I’ve done all of it.

So first you just gotta do what you gotta do to survive as an agency. But we’ve probably been asked the question 2000 times like, Hey, this software looks great. Do you know anybody who can help? Build a site for me. I, have validated there is a river of demand here.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And but as an entrepreneur, like as an agency you can be scrappy and just be like, I need to take whatever comes in the door, which I totally respect that and understand that.

But there are LMS specific agencies. Magna Nomas is one. And I’m sure you take some projects sometimes maybe that are outside the scope or on the edge a little bit or whatever, maybe not. But there’s validated demand for, in the same way that there’s validated demand. If we’re talking about WordPress, WooCommerce is really complicated.

You can do a whole agency where all you do is WooCommerce work. Yeah. WooCommerce, the product has validated that for you. And not everybody who does, who buys software, wants to set it up, learn how to do everything, and customize it and all that. So there’s just that validation there. In terms of validating before you create the course.

This is why I love YouTubers. If you’re on a, it is so much easier to make one YouTube video than be like, I’m gonna make a course. So even if you’re a subject matter expert and you’re like, I wanna do this course business, this is my topic. I would, if I could wave a magic wand, you’re gonna need to learn how to make video.

In most cases when you do online education, you might as well get some practice and make some videos.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah,

Chris Badgett: and the crazy thing about YouTube, and at this point I’ve been on YouTube like 18 years or something like that, and Lifter has, 2000 videos or something on the channel. I am always shocked.

I never know in advance which videos will take off organically. That’s the market that is validation. Like it you, make assumptions, which we talked about in the last episode, but then you find this little spot of validation.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Boom.

Chris Badgett: Right?

Kurt Von Ahnen: So the perfect use case for that is Emily Middleton, one of our team members.

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Kurt Von Ahnen: so Emily will, people will ask her questions and then enough people ask enough questions and she goes, you know what? I should probably just make a YouTube video about this. Then she makes a YouTube video about it, like how to, make a custom course catalog with Elementor, right? And it’s that’s one of the one videos that just keeps taking off and keeps taking off and keeps taking off.

And she’s made hundreds of others. But that’s the one that just keeps going, and to me, it’s so amazing that, she’s been able to create like a whole niche outta that. If you look at how she actually runs her agency and you did a podcast with her recently, it’s like she jumps on Zoom and runs people through things and answers those questions like in real time.

And that’s that is a perfect example of this is what validation looks like. You had an idea, you sampled the idea, the sample was positive, so now you optimize the idea.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s I call it active listening. If you’re listening, a lot of what you’re doing is like research, which requires listening.

Like you have to listen to your market. If you’re just trying to steamroll them with all your assumptions, you’re gonna have a lot less success than if you listen and spend time like exploring your space and reading all those comments and reviews. It’s, so powerful. And also, the other thing is that this is where pivots come from is like you mentioned in the last episode about you were, you realized you were selling to the wrong person.

And so like your validation test with the wrong person failed. But then once you pivoted to the boss of the business or whatever. And then that started to click and validate. And that doesn’t mean that course was a failure or anything like that. It just means you had to validate an assumption about who it was for, which sounds like we all think we know who it’s for or they just want our information.

But there’s a lot of detail in that. Like one way with that specific example that you have to, one of the things you have to validate is who’s gonna make the buying decision? Sometimes you’re gonna do marketing to a, to let’s say to kids, but the parent is actually gonna make the buying decis decision.

Or you’re going to market to the parents, but the kid’s gonna make the buying decision. Or it is a spousal arrangement. And you realize for your your, let’s call it like save your marriage course. You need to get buy-in from both parties for this thing to move forward. And maybe one, the husband is on board, but it’s not really landing with the wives or whatever.

All that has to be validated and tested.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, it’s it’s interesting to me how many people. Because we’re talking about validating and, making sure like, checking the boxes. How many people forge forward without those basic tenants in place?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So like you mentioned YouTube. What do you think are like viable ways to validate an idea?

Because I’m sure I’m thinking about like the listeners and the viewers of this podcast right now, right? So they’re thinking I don’t have a YouTube following. Or I don’t have, I’m not part of a Facebook group, right? So it’s so, then you have to think of things out of the box and go, so how would you validate your idea before you invest in creating a whole course and a website and a, platform to offer that to people?

How would you validate it?

Chris Badgett: This actually reminds me of the, interview we did with Marcus Carter recently. Some of that is or has assumptions to be challenged. If you don’t have a following, that doesn’t mean you still can’t validate on social media as an example. So when Marcus started and he told this story, he started on TikTok and he, grew really quickly to hundreds of thousands of views and follows or whatever.

But then he realized that the TikTok audience wa was not the best to lead into the sale, but he got some validation SIG signal, so he pivoted to Instagram. And let me back up and say, one of the great things about TikTok is it gives everybody a fair shot. It doesn’t matter if you’re a popular influencer with tons of followers or you’re, this is your first TikTok video.

TikTok will give. They, will surface the content. They will test the content on people and then surface it and spread it if it’s if the market likes it. So TikTok is a really interesting place to look. That’s newer in our space. But ultimately what Marcus realized is he got strong validation from TikTok.

He then got strong validation from Instagram, but ultimately he knew that he had to get to YouTube in order to connect his social media marketing efforts to actual sales. But he found his way there through confirmations of validation while testing different platforms as social media platforms as a vehicle for lead generation for him.

Now he puts almost all of his efforts into YouTube and everything’s working great. So there’s a lot of testing there. I think you’re muted, Kurt.

Kurt Von Ahnen: That was ’cause of my dog. It’s so interesting that you mentioned the TikTok thing. I recently just got permission from TikTok to go live and I didn’t have it before, and I think anyone that watches knows, like I’m on five podcasts a week. I’m all over, like I’m all over YouTube, I’m all over the place.

But I wasn’t really big on TikTok. And then I got this chance to go live on TikTok, and it was on a weird Sunday morning and it just came up and I said, okay, let’s try it. And my first try going live on TikTok, I did 28 minutes. I had over 250 people show up and interact on the live.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And I was like, that has never happened On a live podcast through Streamy Yard, through Facebook, through YouTube, through Instagram, through anything like TikTok is a huge channel to just sample a broad audience.

And see do people even like the crud that’s coming outta my face? And then it turned out that some people did. So now, that put you in this different position where you go, okay, so what do I do with this new data set? Do I create in this channel or do I create in a different channel?

Or do I try to redirect this channel to something else that I’m currently working on? And that’s the challenge for every creator as they come into the space.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Another area that we need to validate, and this is critically important, is price. And this is every market has like a willingness to pay, an ability to pay a perception of value of what you’re offering.

I was at a software entrepreneur conference and there was one of the top software pricing experts on the wall and hi, the way he started his talk on the stage. His name is Patrick Campbell. He walked out and he held a finger up in the air and he said, let me guess. When all of you picked the prices for your software, you just held a finger up in the air and just guessed.

And the the whole audience was like, felt like busted at the moment. And he went into a whole science of pricing and, all that. But price testing and validation is super important. First you have to be like, reasonable are we selling to. CEO executives, are we selling to young parents? Are we selling to a new entrepreneur?

Are we selling mid mar like when we, pricing is not something you should just completely guess on, but you need to test it. And one of the ways to do that’s very common in the course creation and membership site space. A strong validation is when you do your first launch. Remember, we’re just trying to go from zero to one or zero to some is okay.

Based on all my research, competitor analysis, the willingness to pay the perceived value of my product, I really think I can get $500 for this thing. I’m gonna give my founding people like 50 or even 80% off on my first launch. So you’re still validating. You’re trying to, you’re trying to get a large enough sample size in that you can really test your course and your product.

But people have to break out their wallet. This is why one thing that gets people stuck is they will try to validate with friends and family that aren’t even in the niche. And mom, brother, sister, friend says. Oh, honey this is, great. I love this. You’re so good on camera, right? This is gonna be awesome, but they’re not in your target market.

They didn’t pay anything. They love you and are trying to support you. It can’t be helpful to get a second set of eyes on your stuff. But what you really need is your markets set of eyes and your market’s wallet and credit card information. There’s arguments where you can try to just make ’em pay $1.

Will they pull out their credit card at all? That’s a validation test of in and of itself, but I’m more of a fan of do the founding early adopter cohort through your product like we did in lifter LMS in 2013. It also came with special privileges. It also came with more intimate access. It came with the ability to shape the future of the product since it’s so new.

We’re not just gonna invent out of our mind exactly what we know a hundred percent that the market needs. We want to hear from you and hear where else are your pains? Or how can we help you more and really co-create a product. I’m a big fan of that. Of Lifter has been co-created. We very much listen to our market.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You, you are hitting on so many things. It’s, you’re almost, I’m almost having PTSD thinking about how I grew the Powersport Academy. If you remember Chris. You helped me with some copy on the pages and, I wasn’t really hitting the right people and, then when I started to hit the right people, they still weren’t buying.

And I was originally offering my training in a very specific niche that was like 1500 bucks. 1200 bucks, 1500 bucks. That was like what I thought I would sell it for. I thought if I got 200 people to take this at 1500 bucks. That’s gonna gimme a year’s worth of money. That’s what I thought.

That’s, so that’s the finger in the air. I also call that SaaS math. We do that in software companies. It is like the old. Christmas thing. Oh if I could just get a million people to gimme $1, I’d be a millionaire. Yeah. But that’s it’s optimistic thinking.

No, it didn’t work.

And so then I did a validation process where I put seven dealerships that, that I knew where, I had a personal relationship with the people running those dealerships. I said, I’m gonna put you into this training and I want you to take this training. And then, and the thing is you have to give me the feedback.

What’s missing, what’s good, what’s great, what’s horrible, what sucks. Don’t worry about my personal feelings, just gimme what your feedback is. And what was weird about this particular product was the feedback was this training’s awesome. It’s the best training we’ve ever had. We’re making more money than we’ve ever made and that, that’s awesome feedback.

But the feedback I got after that, Chris was the one that changed the entire way that I ran my project. And that was, my boss would never have bought this. And I said what do you mean? And all seven of the dealerships said, my boss would never have bought this. And I said, why? What do you mean? And they said you’re offering all this really cool training and all this great advancement.

We’ve gotten really great results from it. But for 1500 bucks, they’re just expecting it to be junk. And I thought coming in from, a, corporate training perspective to a course creator perspective, I thought the 1500 bucks was like a, this giant reach, because I was used to course creator selling things for $49, right?

So I thought, oh, I’m gonna go from $49 or 1500 bucks. Nobody, I’m gonna struggle to sell it. For that. I had to raise the price to $12,000 before people started to see the value in it and purchase it. Now we currently offer that training at 4,640 $6,000 a year per dealership. And so people that hear this podcast or that know me from other channels, they’re gonna go, oh my gosh, he’s getting 45 grand a client, blah, blah.

Like it sounds huge. Oh my God, he is got this giant training project. And it’s no, the price has to match the value of what you’re offering because if the price doesn’t match the value, the purchaser. Is gonna assume it’s not gonna meet the standard. So, you really like when you talk about validation isn’t just, is it worth the $49?

Is it worth the 1 49, the 1 79, the 1 99? Sometimes it’s, is it worth the 1500 bucks? Is it worth the $12,000? Is it worth the $40,000 like you really have to sell based on value? And you really don’t know what the value is until you validate it and you get the feedback from other people.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and this is a problem we have at Lifter LMS as an example.

’cause we wanna make the software a approachable from a price perspective and we even have a free, the free core. But when it comes to a lot of people who would in businesses that would really benefit from Lifter, they see it as so cheap. Compared to the expensive enterprise LMS they’re using, which has per instructor, per course, per student pricing and all these fees that it seems like impossible.

And I’m not saying everybody out there raise your prices a hundred x I’m just saying you have to find your sweet spot in the, pricing game and, you have, the only way to really find it is to test it. Not just copy competitors. You can look at that for a data point. And then there’s this whole thing where you have to build your product around the price in a way.

I think of Ziv Aviv, who’s been on this podcast who teaches people how to tie animal balloons and built a million dollar business around that kid, entertainers, clowns that sign up for his program because they’re, they wanna. Do better animal balloons and all the stuff they do, which is a really interesting niche, Ziv has to play a volume game.

’cause these folks are not gonna spend thousands of dollars for this. So he has to do a lower price because that’s what that market is willing to pay and he needs to go after more people. But if you go up market like you’re doing and you’re selling to businesses that bring in team members and stuff like that that.

Often requires like a more high touch experience, less self-study, more live delivery feedback on assignments or whatever.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Well,

Chris Badgett: so pricing and product is a dance and whatever your first guess is, I can almost guarantee you it’s suboptimal.

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Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. People don’t like to talk about it. Because I, ’cause I notice a lot of the entrepreneur meetups I go to, people don’t talk about the sales pipeline very much, but the pipeline is very much in tune with what the value is that you’re offering.

And so if my course is $49, that sales pipeline is 15 minutes. If my course is $1,500, that sales pipeline might be 45 days. If my course is $45,000, that sales pipeline is. Nine to 12 months. And so I’ve got to understand that, my potential clients might see the Powersport Academy. They might see it now January, 2026, but they might not sign up until March of 27.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, a very real thing. And just a pro tip on what Kurt’s talking about with pipeline and how it changes based on price point. The way you convert the sales also needs validation. So as a simple rule of thumb a low priced offer can convert off. I call these conversion tools. You can convert off of a landing page, a sales page.

That’s it. So this is from $1 to $500, even a thousand sometimes. And these aren’t hard and fast, there’s exceptions. But then when you start getting into the mid ticket range, which is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 grand, you’re gonna, they’re gonna want to talk to you. A lot of people don’t pull out the credit card for multi-thousand dollar purchases without talking to you and.

If you’re on the lower end of that’s where you see like a webinar sales funnel. So you want to fill your pipeline with prospects that come to that webinar, which allows you, because it’s a group format, it’s not eating your lunch for time. ’cause you’re doing a bunch of one off and then you get into high ticket, like 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 on up.

You need to have some one-on-one calls. Nobody is going to just pull out, go to a landing page. And process that information. It is possible. By the way, I just wanna note that in Stripe, ’cause I’ve looked into this like lifter, LMS is a stripe integration. The most that you’re, that will go through now, this is assuming you have a huge limit on your credit card, is $99,999 and 99 cents.

But good luck doing that from a sales page. And by the way, if you’re up there, you’re probably gonna be looking at things like. Bank transfers and bank checks and different. So all of these are assumptions.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I I was gonna say that the manual payment gateway and lifter has been a godsend.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Because I don’t wanna pay 2.9% plus 30 cents on $45,000.

Chris Badgett: So how do you do it? Do you do a check or A transfer or,

Kurt Von Ahnen: typically it’s an A CH transfer.

Chris Badgett: Aach H.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. And it usually comes from a line of credit from the Wells Fargo account,

Chris Badgett: right? Yeah. And all these,

Kurt Von Ahnen: that’s business to business, right? Like when you get into the B2B sales, things are completely different than B2C.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s also where you need to validate the, like the information you’re getting. If you’re selling mid-market and up where Kurt’s talking about, but you’re studying what scrappy course creators and coaches are doing, that’s not, and what they’re recommending, that strategy may work better for the individual buyer or the very small business buyer versus like a corporation.

So you might spend way too much time building out, sales page marketing funnel for something that needs a completely different conversion tool. The other thing I just wanna note on validation is growing an audience before selling a product is a great way to validate. The whole idea of getting everything done and you have zero people to sell to is very, it is a very difficult situation to be in.

This is why I recommend starting a YouTube channel, and you can also play to your strengths. So if you’re a writer, start a blog or a newsletter. If you’re a video creator, start a YouTube. If you like to talk, start a podcast and have ways on those sites to have email capture and start building that list way before you need it.

If I could wave a magic wand. Let’s say you’re the type of person who is looking to exit your day job. I would spend two years just giving away value for free while building a, an email list, a social following, and all those things before I even thought about like the exact specifics of the product and pre-selling and all that.

So audience building, when somebody gives you their email address, it’s a very important step in validation.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Can I, is it okay? We’ve got a lot of time. I wanna I wanna take you back to something you did to me. I wanna say three years ago. Okay. You told me about Ziv and the balloon animals thing and I lost my mind.

Chris Badgett: Everybody loves that story. I like to tell it because it is, it makes you think if that guy can do it, what’s wrong with me? And I don’t mean that in a bad way. Ziv is a wonderful guy. Yeah. I love talking to him. He’s been on here. But when people hear that. I’m not trying to hurt their feelings, but they feel a little dejected just from how we compare ourselves to others.

Right?

Kurt Von Ahnen: So I lost my mind. So let’s go back to, I lost my mind. I thought to myself, I’m smart, I’m intelligent. I’ve got the best training product. I’m, I can’t sell nothing. And this guy’s making bank off of balloon animals. Are you freaking kidding me?

Chris Badgett: Right?

Kurt Von Ahnen: And then you said, this is when, as a private conversation with you and I can’t remember if it was Zoom or a phone call, but you said Kurt, it’s all product market fit.

It’s he’s answering what people really want. Maybe what and it made me think maybe I’m in the wrong market. And you said what do you really love to do? And it was right when I was doing the Great Cycle Challenge where we, every September I ride to raise money for kids’ cancer.

I’m a bicyclist and every year. They have this Facebook page, and every year, 14 or 15,000 people go into this Facebook page and ask the dumbest questions about bicycling. But because I’m a bicycling person, I answer a ton of them, right? What kind of pedals? What kind of saddle? What kind of shorts? What kind of top, what kind of water bottle?

What kind of protein to take before you go on a ride? How do you get, how do you ride longer? How do you ride faster? How do you ride? Like all these things, answer all these questions. And you told me on that phone call, you said you should just ask that Facebook group if they would want to take a course on how to be a better bicyclist.

And I said, that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. And then I went into the group and I said, Hey. My name’s Kurt. I answer a lot of questions on this page, and I just want to know if I gave you free access to a course, how many people on this list right now would want to take a course on bicycling from the basics?

And do you remember what that was three years ago?

Chris Badgett: I don’t.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Within two days, 600 people responded to that post and said, I’m in. Yeah, I’m in. And I’m like, okay. So for the Great Cycle Challenge, we’re all raising money for kids’ cancer. I guess I would give them free access. I could give ’em a voucher or a hundred percent off coupon and they could take it for free.

But then I would have an evergreen course that I could sell to every other bicyclist in the country for $29 or $49 or whatever. The product market fit would be there because I would already have 600 active users in my bicycle training course.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. This is the power of the free course lead magnet. Like it’s, that’s another thing to do to validate is don’t make the main premium product, do a free mini course that adds value and that’s gonna help you build your list.

There’s a lot less friction ’cause there’s no money involved. You get the feedback loop open and you start talking to people, which takes me to where I want to land it. This is the craziest part of validation. The crazy irony of it all is that what you think your superpower is, your market likely sees something completely different, and so I may wanna.

Make a course about you and I, Kurt, are both into leadership and stuff like that. I like leadership and management. So if I decide to like, make a course for f first time managers and give them some, a basic toolkit to like how to manage an organization and lead teams and things like that, I would enjoy that.

I would love that. But I know what would happen. If I go around and talk to people and like basically the question is based on everything you know about me what’s my superpower? Another way people say it is or is just to ask yourself, what do people keep asking you for advice on? Because the weird thing is that the thing we’re often the best at in our superpower for us as a subject matter expert or whatever that angle is, I.

What were our greatest strengths or come on autopilot to us that we don’t recognize the value and how far we’ve come, or maybe so much time has passed that we forgot about everything that went into developing that skill or that expertise. So that’s something else that has to be validated.

If you’re somebody who’s interested in a lot of different topics. That’s an area where validation is really key, because like Kurt is like this, he’s really into bikes. He’s really into mechanics. He’s really into leadership. He’s written books. And thank you for the comment there, but the you don’t know you, you really don’t know.

You’re making a giant assumption and. This is why and oftentimes people won’t tell you like you have to ask or really dig. This is like the effort and the work of validation is, you know what’s, I’ll just do it right here with you, Kurt. Like when I look at Kurt he’s great at so many things and I’m not picking one or saying, oh, you should do a course about this.

But he’s really great at managing a room of people. Which is a unique skill. You probably feel like it’s just natural. It comes to you. Last night you organized a meetup in your local town. You or you hold space for group meetings in the lifter LMS audience. You’re just a I’ve watched you operate a conference and like at an event or a party or whatever, you know how to work a room and just hold space.

You’re obviously really good at the tech stuff. You have your whole power sports stuff and motorcycles and bicycles, stuff like you have so much, but the more people you survey that know you in this life and previous lives, or people that have been with you for a long time and like have seen your trajectory.

You’d be shocked to find out we’re so close to our top strengths, that they’re often invisible to us, and that’s like a tragedy of it all. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you should make a completely different course about x. It just means maybe your angle or your approach to the topic, you need to integrate more of the superpower into that.

And it’s just interesting.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a book called Strength Finders that a lot of corporations will send to their directors and developers. And and that’s the whole idea of focus on your strengths and not try to fix yourself through fixing your weaknesses. And that, that’s like this topic of validation, right?

So what are the strong points? What do you really knock it outta the park with? How can you put yourself forward in the best positive light forward and newsflash. If you identify that there’s something that you lack that’s not an obstacle, that’s not a dead end, that’s an opportunity for you to go, okay, who can I bring in to bring up this thing I’m lacking.

So if you lack on the tech side, we have the experts page. If you’re lacking on a concept side, bring in a coach. If you’re lacking on sales, bring in someone that can help you with the marketing. It’s there’s all kinds of ways to find success in your project.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I just, I wanna share one more thing that I noticed this morning, which makes me smile.

I was on Twitter and this is what somebody who’s operating in a space has really done a lot of validation and really figured it out. This guy’s name is Danko, spelled KOE, and he I was listening to his podcast, this is five years ago or something. He’s creator economy, solo person, solopreneur business creating he is big on digital writing and stuff like that.

And I was listening to his podcast and every time I’d ever talk to anybody I’d be like, Hey, have you guys ever heard of Danko? And everybody said, no. And then I’m listening to one of his like long hour and a half things and on the podcast, and he was like. He’s I really understand my market. If you’re here listening to me, you’re probably an INFJ, which is the Myers-Briggs personality type.

There’s 16 of them. I am an INFJ. I’m like, I got it. That’s why none of my people are, have heard of this guy. And INFJ by the way, is one of the, in the Myers-Briggs framework has a very small percentage compared to the other types. And to be a male, INFJ is also more rare just in terms of the mix.

So he was an INFJ, and he realized that his market was people like him that were this like strange personality type. So sometimes when you go to. Your market the biggest mistake you could make is try to sell to everybody. But then you find like these niches of who are the people that listen to me and vibe with me?

Your vibe attracts your tribe thing, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to sell to people exactly like you, but you will over time realize and validate like the particular type of person. That is gonna be a good fit for you and your training. So that’s just, it’s just more clarification on the who, that kind of work is never done, like still as a mature business.

I’m still obsessed with figuring out with who, who are these education entrepreneurs? Who are these forward folk facing WordPress, LMS agencies that move with complex technology who are keep leveling up ’cause the internet and tools are changing so fast. Who are these people? I’m constantly asking that and challenging my own assumptions of who our customer is.

Sweet. That’s a wrap. Go validate. Don’t give up. And build an audience first if you can. And just know that the work of validation actually never ends, but it’s the most important in the beginning. And you have to get past the imposter syndrome and the, and everything else to make sure that you’re open to challenging your assumptions, and that’s just part of the process. It’s not a problem. It’s just part of the process.

Kurt Von Ahnen: It’s fluid.

Chris Badgett: It’s totally fluid. That’s it for this episode of LMScast, and we will catch you on the next one.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen elaborates on the notion that an online course that has “failed” is typically merely an unfinished endeavor. He explains that a lot of creators quit too soon after making their debut, particularly if they just have a few students or no sales, but those first results are only feedback. Kurt claims that poor positioning, communicating to non-decision makers, focusing on the incorrect audience, and having irrational expectations brought on by internet marketing hype are all common causes of failure.

He emphasizes that the key is to understand the course’s purpose, the problem it solves, and how it adds value. Purchasing software, rebuilding websites, or pursuing new technologies won’t solve the fundamental issue. Additionally, he emphasizes that development is slowed by perfection. Learning from the market is delayed when months are spent revising material or waiting for the “perfect” launch.

Rather, developers ought to release an initial version, collect input, and refine it over time. Kurt also draws attention to the emotional aspects of failure, such as humiliation and impostor syndrome, and he urges artists to seek support from masterminds, communities, and collaborations.

His own experience demonstrates that perseverance, iteration, and clarity are more important than quick success since a failing course may become a lucrative, even six-figure, enterprise once the proper audience and sales strategy are discovered.

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Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Kurt Von Onin from Manana Nomas. Kurt also works directly with Lifter LMS. You’ve probably seen him around at some of our live calls and events. Today we’re gonna get into a different way to think about and deal with a failed online course project.

Things aren’t necessarily what they seem. We’re gonna give you some ideas of how to think about and react and work with a project that isn’t quite working out. But before we dive in, first, Kurt, welcome back on the show.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Dude, again, thank you so much for having me. It’s always great to have a chat with, Chris Badgett.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. You, were just on a team meeting we had that we do monthly at Lifter LMS and there’s actually a section of the meeting where we talk about failures. And I got this idea from some podcast somewhere where a parent advice to other parents was. To basically ask their kids, not just, Hey, what’d you, what went great today?

But also what’d you fail at today? And turn failure not into a, something that you don’t talk about that you hide or you diminish, or you denial and pretend didn’t happen. But let’s talk about failure. So let’s, in the game of entrepreneurship and online business and creating education products, there is a massive amount of failure.

Failure could be the giant goose egg, which is zero. Like

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah,

Chris Badgett: site didn’t launch or it launched and zero people bought. Some people call that crickets. But there’s other kinds of failure too, where you’re really excited and you think you’re gonna get like a hundred students and you get one or three.

These kinds of things happen a lot. But to start the conversation, let’s keep it philosophical at first and talk about failure as feedback and not something to just be shame shameful about, or pretend it doesn’t exist, or just like quickly tap into entrepreneur A DHD and move on to something else, like in your life, particularly in your professional life, but maybe in other areas too.

How do you. Approach failure when it rears its ugly head.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, I am John Maxwell, certified in leadership and speaking and training. And while I haven’t grown my business based on the John Maxwell certification, I do embrace a lot of the ideologies and the theories that John Maxwell put forth. I like I, truly consider him a mentor in that space.

He has a book called Failing Forward.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And I, will say and, you know this about me, but maybe the listeners and viewers don’t, I have a list a, distinguished list of failures in, in my background and I’ve learned from them and it’s given me a tenacious, sense about how I address things now, because there was way too many times when something failed and I gave up.

Instead of learning from it and developing it and knocking it out of the park, I turned it off and then a year later, two years later, someone else came along, took the idea and knocked it outta the park and became a millionaire. Right now I’ve had that three separate times that I could literally point to and say, here’s what I had, here’s what I gave up, and here’s what someone else did.

And it was exactly what I did. But it didn’t succeed. And now I look at things and I go, I wanna fail. I want to fail. I wanna fail as quickly as possible. I wanna learn from the failure and I wanna optimize the failure for future growth and to move forward. And that’s why I think maybe it’s my age, but maybe that’s why some of my projects now seem from the outside to look like they’re succeeding but, they’re not succeeding from chance or happenstance? They’re succeeding because I went, okay, let’s try this. Oh, it failed. How do we tweak it? How do we move it? How do we, get things to go? You give yourself six months, eight months, nine months to find success with something, and sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes you need to fail, and then you like recalibrate and then relaunch, and then maybe you find the sweet spot.

The product market fit, you always talk about that’s like, your thing. Your thing is product market fit. Let people pull it from you. But the problem with a lot of people starting up is you don’t have, man my dog’s excited. You don’t, have, you don’t have something where people are pulling it from you.

You’re still in the phase of trying to offer it, right? And so you’re trying to offer it, but nobody’s buying. You’re getting those crickets. So you have to analyze where does that failure come from? Don’t be upset, don’t get up don’t, get dejected and quit. Tweak it like recalibrate and figure out what is the success.

Chris Badgett: I like that there’s so much in what you just said. And, I just wanna mention one of the last episodes we did, we talked about speed, how to launch a course fast. Yeah. This is why it’s important, because you wanna reduce the time to getting the market feedback, whether that’s failure. Modest win or runaway success, but those all are of equal value in terms of feedback and not minimizing the fact that you failed.

Just do it as quickly as possible and product market fit and minimum viable product and things like this come from a seminal book about startups called the Lean Startup, where they really built the. A methodology around how to be lean, how to move fast, how to be agile, how to pivot, how to work with failure, all these terms.

I gotta give credit to Eric Reese, who like, codified all that 20 years ago. And I’ll just share a personal story in terms of failure. Like you, you also mentioned that. You have a project that’s successful and then whether it’s your local community or perception online or whatever, people are like, oh, he’s so successful, or whatever, and we get that.

Like at Lifter, LMS Lifter, LMS was like my fifth online business that I tried to start, did I stop after I started doing video marketing for local Main Street businesses where I got two, three clients. It wasn’t a goose egg, but. No, I just kept pivoting and, kept trying things when I did like an affiliate marketing business and tried to get into that.

But there’s lessons I learned from all my quote failures. Do I use video marketing? Yeah, we’re doing it right now. We’re creating videos.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Do I, do affiliate marketing? Yes. It’s like a side thing we do as part of lifter LMS and recommending tools that we like and trust. So oftentimes you can take a failure isn’t necessarily always burn the entire house down and build a new house in the location.

Sometimes it’s just a renovation and a, pivot. That’s the whole point of the pivot. Maybe it’s, the who you’re helping. Maybe it’s your messaging. Maybe it’s. Maybe your course was too overwhelming and too big and felt like such a, too big of a time commitment. Maybe your marketing strategy, you might have a great product, but the way you wanted to go to market wasn’t optimal for that particular project.

There’s so many reasons and everything is like a test. That’s an experiment. You never know.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, think it’s, super important to. We made the episode about launching a course quickly and I don’t wanna launch, like I don’t wanna group everything together, right? But we made the episode about launching a course quickly, and that’s super important.

Get your minimal viable product out, get something going, build your tribe. But I think what a lot of people run into Chris. And this is from my agency experience, is people make an investment. And maybe they think the investment is to launch for the first year. They give themselves this like fake deadline and they go, oh, okay, I’m gonna get the hosting for a year.

I’m gonna get access to the platform for a year. I’m gonna get these plugins for the CRM for a year. And they build whatever they want to build. But the thing is, it’s gonna take ’em two, three months to build what they really want. So now, they’ve got nine months that they’re gonna launch, and a lot of people don’t launch the way that we advise to like like, you’ve got content with La Musk has content about pre-selling and pre-launching and all these things, but a lot of that doesn’t get addressed.

A lot of it, a lot of what we talk about doesn’t actually get action pe people take two, three months to, to get a product on and then they try to promote it. Then it’s that goose egg. It’s that, and it’s hard. It is hard. And then people get dejected and then they pause for a month or two, and then they, say, oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna recommit.

And then they get back into it and the next thing you know, the year is up. And they go I failed. You didn’t fail. You created something pretty awesome. You just don’t have the audience yet. You just don’t have the people that you need to have that, that give it life, that give it energy, that give you the feedback, that give you the ability to grow.

And that’s the hard part. So from an agency perspective, I run into this a lot. Where I have people that they’ve fallen for the hype. And I, think maybe, I’m, a little too aggressive on this I’ve seen the commercials, I’ve seen the ads that come to my own feed that say courses are dead and webinars are dead, and you just need an, you just need a mobile application.

You’re gonna make five grand a week. And it’s that’s not realistic. It’s, you have to make a product, you have to develop the product, develop an audience that wants to consume the product, and then you have to take that feedback. And redirect from there. And it takes time.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. One of my favorite things when I’m like thinking about a business strategy or whatever, is I like to think of what are the assumptions?

Because a lot of what you’re doing as a course creator is you make, you’re making an assumption of who it’s for, what the result is, the best way to teach it, how you’re gonna sell it, what your website needs to be effective. It. They’re not facts. They’re all assumptions. There are some facts like, yes, you do need a website.

Yes, you do need to have a course. Yes, you do need to connect your Stripe account, but a lot of entrepreneurship is assumptions and then challenging those assumptions and when the assumption gets challenged and the result is negative IE failure, that’s just something to fix or try something different or pivot

Kurt Von Ahnen: when.

When I first did, so here’s a little transparency with Kurt. When I, first did the John Maxwell certification, it wasn’t cheap. I don’t want anyone to think that’s cheap and it was $5,000 and you had to go to Orlando. So for me, that was another 2,500 bucks, right? So I’m out $7,500 to go to this John Maxwell thing, but that’s not the end of the expense.

The expense before that was the time. The training, the courses, the online stuff to go to the in-person practicum to get certified in person by John Maxwell and the staff. So overall, we’re gonna say it’s, maybe it’s a $15,000 value, right? That that, you’re throwing out there. And when I look at that and, then I look at the people that took the training.

So there’s 3000 people a year that are going into this thing. And, everyone thought I’m just gonna make a leadership course and I’m gonna be a leadership coach, and I’m gonna go back to my hometown and I’m gonna be the the, I’m gonna be the thing and I’m gonna make a bazillion dollars doing this.

And if you don’t, put in the work, put in the reps. Build your own tribe, your own audience, your own email list, your own, you don’t have anything.

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Kurt Von Ahnen: it takes time.

Chris Badgett: That snowball thing is very real. How it starts small. That’s why if somebody does a course and going from zero to one is like super hard and respectable.

So even only if you got one customer, that’s still not a zero. And it reminds me. I was so impressed. We shared it at our team meeting at lifter LMS today about Marcus Carter, who teaches English to Spanish speaking world. And once he had to shut the doors to his in-person language learning schools in Spain, he pretty much said I’m not stopping until I figure this out.

He already had the validation that like people, he’s good at teaching English. He’s been doing it for a long time, and. But I love the acronym focus follows Follow one course until Success yeah. ’cause it’s easy to get distracted and be like, okay, I’m gonna try a course that didn’t work. Okay, now I’m going to become a coach.

Okay, that didn’t work. Now I’m gonna do an AI startup that didn’t work. Now I’m gonna be a vibe coder. Now I’m gonna write a book. Now I’m gonna do a newsletter. And when, and I get that, like as an entrepreneur, I love all those things. I play in all those sandboxes, but. One of the number one things that’s made Left our All Mess work is just a relentless focus in never giving up.

And even when we first launched it, our initial plan was we’re gonna get a hundred customers and if we don’t, we’re gonna shut it down and do something else. And we got 42, which is awesome, but I was like, let’s not shut it down, let’s keep going. And it was very painful. There’s a saying in entrepreneurship.

I don’t know how mathematically true this is, but when you really commit to entrepreneurship at least I’m talking in the online business context. It’s known that it if it’s gonna work, it’s gonna take three years to replace your day job. It took me five so part of it is just, okay you’re, not that smart, or you didn’t quite figure it out what you are is relentless and consistent and open-minded and all those things really stack up over time.

It’s one of the reasons why I believe there’s an argument that you shouldn’t, you should. Follow your passions or you shouldn’t follow your passions, you should follow the money. And both have like valid points. But what I’m saying is if you need to be consistent and show up month after month, year after year, decade after decade, it probably should be in alignment with your passions.

Like I know you’re passionate about leadership power sports website technology and marketing and online business and all these things like. It’s okay to have multiple passions, but staying the course is a big part. And the first year of a business is so fragile, like you’re, there’s a reason why like a shark or whatever has like a hundred babies and one will live, right?

Because it takes a while to get a fully formed thing that’s gonna survive and stand the test of time. And it’s confusing because. A lot of the marketing out there for like software tools, for online education stuff, they do nothing but and we’re guilty of this at lifter. LMS is show like the success stories.

Oh, this person got 500,000 and this does happen. Those are the, runaway successes. But you don’t hear about the people that went from zero to one. And then maybe the second year they got 20 people while still working a full-time job trying to figure this thing out and support their family.

And then maybe year 3, 4, 5, that finally takes off.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And I can see people when I talk to ’em, which this is the more common story for, successful projects, is it was a grind. It took a lot of time, it took a lot of failure, it took a lot of pivots. Some dark nights of the soul, blood, sweat, and tears, failed assumptions.

But when they can finally say I made it like, this is my income or career, it’s it’s really great to see, but you can also see the scars and the pain on their face from what it took to get there.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, don’t wanna make it sound like it’s torture, but I haven’t listened to him in a long time, but I used to listen to Gary Vaynerchuk a, a fair bit, like when I would travel and commute a lot, and one of the things that he would say in his messaging that really, stood out to me, that really struck me hardcore was he would say people are looking f like they want to be the next Facebook.

They want to be the next ex. They want to be the next whatever. He’s you don’t need that. He’s if you’re trying to buy your freedom, what does your freedom cost? If you’re in a job that cost a hundred thousand dollars, like your job’s a hundred grand a year, let’s just say your job’s a hundred grand a year.

What are you spending on commuting? What are you spending on this? Whatcha are you spending on that? What do you really need to make off of a project? And so if you can turn 50 grand off of a project. You’ve done well, if you can turn 60 grand off a project you’ve done well, if you can turn six figures you’re, kicking ass.

And if you get better than that, then the sky’s the limit. And so in my space as an agency I’ve worked with a couple of clients that have. Thousands of students. And that’s always interesting, right? Like, I get into a website and I say, okay, we’re gonna migrate, or we’re gonna build, or we’re gonna do and we’re gonna bring in these 3,600 users.

And in my mind, I think to myself, oh my god $499 a year times 3000 people like, this is revenue. People are making revenue. And then I work with a startup, and the startup is I’m trying to sell my course for $49.

And they gotta get to that first $49, or they gotta get to that fifth $49.

And when they get to the top, what when they get to the first 10, if you have 10 paying students in your course, you’re kicking butt, you’re doing great. And, you just gotta keep moving forward. But, I think it’s. People have these unrealistic expectations, maybe based on some marketing that’s out there like, school and the other platforms that are out there that talk about hey, jump on here and, get access to our marketplace and get thousands of users.

And that’s just not reality. If you want to build something that’s got longevity, something that has teeth, something that has traction, it’s gonna take some work and some skin in the game.

Chris Badgett: And it takes time to build a personal brand too. Yeah, absolutely. So if, particularly if the content is tied to you as the subject matter expert and you’re somewhat newish to the internet, that’s gonna just take time.

It’s funny ’cause at Lifter we’re a software company, but I’ve often recognized that people buy the software outta order. I’m glad they buy the software, but I’m glad they buy the software,

but it would be better if you had you’ve already built the website, you’ve been building your email list for a while, you’ve sat down and like fleshed out on a Google document or whatever, what your course is gonna be.

Maybe done some validation testing, which we’re gonna talk about in another episode, and then. I think I’m ready for software or signing up for, if you’re new, like signing up for web hosting, which is gonna hit your bank account every month it can feel like a moving forward to buy software, but it’s, not, that’s just a means to an end in the sense that it is just a tool and you don’t need to buy the tool until you’re really ready.

But it’s, it can be a trap because you feel like you’re making progress when you buy the green screen or buy the nice camera and then you end up in like this kind of tech overwhelm.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Whereas if you like, really get clear on your offer basically, and validate it and test it, and then go shopping for tools with a minimalist mindset.

Maybe I can use my existing iPhone for my camera that I already have, which is what I’m using right now, 12 years into this business. You, get a, you’re a lot less likely to get seduced by the Siren Song of software because software can become a one of those things that keeps failure happening because, oh, I need to do this CRM marketing automation thing.

I have a background in Infusionsoft, which they used to call Confusionsoft, and I saw it was, like what we’re talking about. You go to the Infusionsoft conference, the people that speak on stage are making $10 million a year and saying it’s all because of Infusionsoft. And they share their campaigns and like their strategies and stuff.

As an agency who operated in the Infusionsoft space, some people would just get way too into the software weeds. And too they’re, creating too much techno tech complexity.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So if you’re listening to this or watching this and you’re, I love software. I like shopping for software.

I like watching demos and I like creating software. We’re about to do a new events thing for lifter LMS, which I’m really excited tonight. I’m gonna be designing the interface for that. I like software, but, slow down. Like people don’t buy your software stack. They buy the, your training and the result that it brings them in their life.

That’s the most important thing.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I can tell you right now the way you started that last section as an agency owner,

Chris Badgett: you like software. I know you like software.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, I like software. I got a little bit of a disease there. But when I’m dealing with clients. And they’re like, oh, I wanna do a, I wanna do whatever the dream is, if they have assets.

Okay, so newsflash for people that are listening, if I’m interviewing, if I’m doing a needs assessment with a client and the client says. I’ve already got a Google Doc and I’ve got my sections on my courses. I got my lessons laid out. I know what the courses are. I’ve got some graphics here that I’ve already got pieced out.

I’ve already got a website. I want to add this feature to my website, but newsflash. As an agency, I’m charging them less. Yeah. Like they’re getting a smoking hot deal because all I gotta do is ad LMS configure their existing content and put it up for them. And, it just makes it so easy. And then with within a 30 day span, they went from I want to build this to, Hey, we’re gonna launch it.

The, issue though is people that are coming at it from a, piecemeal perspective of I got a website, I got a blog. I think it’d be cool to have a course. They, buy the software and then they get into the course builder and they go, oh so it’s gonna be sections and lessons. And then they start to figure it out.

It’s gonna take ’em two or three months to put something together. But, they have to be aware of that. And that’s if they put the time in, if they don’t put the time in, it’s gonna take longer.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s a, great point. And I’ve, I remember working with clients who, when we got to the table to figure out the project, they literally had all their videos already shot, sitting in a Google Drive folder, like everything is ready to roll.

When you do that with an agency, you’re setting up the relationship to have the highest possible positive outcome for the least amount of money, and you trust the agency, particularly if you’re non-technical, to guide the tool selection. Be mindful of your budget and so on. And that’s like a dream.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Because we say in, in agency work, the biggest challenge is always the content. Getting the content from the

Kurt Von Ahnen: client, getting the content. Yeah. Yeah. In a real life experience. And, I can call her out by name ’cause she’s a really great client of ours. Art of Makeup is a lifter LMS website that we made and.

They initially were gonna launch within three months. They already had content. Everything was great, everything was on schedule, everything was going. I thought everything was going wonderfully. And then about 45 days into the project, they said we wanna reshoot all of our content. We’re gonna hire a professional videographer and we’re gonna go to LA and we’re gonna make all this new content.

And it put us back about nine months on the project. Now the end result ended up being stellar. If you go to the R to make up. Com website. You look at it, it’s a beautiful website, and the videos are phenomenal. Like, everything’s topnotch. Everything is topnotch. But the reality is, did that need to happen to launch the course, or could they have launched the course within two to three months, made revenue and then done a version two a year or two later?

Chris Badgett: If I could wave a magic wand, I would’ve preferred the latter to Hey, let’s just put this thing in the market. Because then you start the branding engine.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

How to Deal with the Failed Online Course Business: You

Chris Badgett: start practicing your launch methodology, which you can then build on.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And hindsight’s always 2020 in the end we have a beautiful website.

It’s part of our portfolio and it’s a wonderful piece, but it’s one of those use case situations. When I talk to clients, I’m like, if you have content. We can launch you pretty quickly. If you, wanna redo the content and you want to put back the calendar, we can do that, but that’s gonna increase your costs as well.

Or something as simple as you’ve gotta renew the things that you’re subscribing to. So whatever the website’s built with that’s a nine months or a year into another year’s worth of subscriptions and renewals.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. We’ve talked about software complexity, we’ve talked about content complexity, is what you’re talking about there.

Another one that leads to a lot of failure that I’ve noticed in this space is actually the marketing and sales strategy. ’cause a lot of, particularly people who sell solutions in that space, whether that’s training or. Tools that help you. The software or the, those marketing and sales tactics, strategies, tools are often pitched as a magic bullet.

Oh, you just need this one perfect ad for Facebook and you’re good to go. Or, this is how you build a giant email list and then you just need 2% to convert. Or this is the perfect social media marketing campaign or. But there is no perfect.

Kurt Von Ahnen: No.

Chris Badgett: And that whole thing of like software, shiny object syndrome happens in marketing strategy too.

And my advice there is to pick the one that works the best for you. That’s most in, alignment for you. So if you’re already a YouTuber with a following, sure, maybe YouTube ads is a great idea, but you don’t have to do that. And then ads on seven other platforms or. Get into all these different content marketing strategies, like you gotta get one working before you move on to another.

This goes back to the failure thing. If the ads don’t work, pivot, try something else. Pivot again. If you get three strikes, you’re out, change to a different thing. Okay? I’m not gonna do paid ads, I’m gonna do relationship marketing. I’m gonna do sponsor stuff, or guest posting, or guest podcast appearance.

If that doesn’t work, then move over to the, he, the heavy lift of organic content marketing and so on. But you can’t do all those things at once simultaneously. And every time a new thing drops, you just, it create, that creates a lot of chaos and entropy that you almost forget that you’re a course creator and you’re just like a marketing and sales person at that point.

’cause all you’re consuming is you’re looking for the magic bullet, the needle in the haystack, if you will.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, it’s it’s really interesting the way that you started to phrase that, because every. Use case is different, Chris. And that’s, I think that’s the part that a lot of people get lost on is that their use case is unique and that they’ll try to emulate or they’ll try to copy or they’ll try to they’ll try to say, oh if I wanna learn from someone that’s successful, I’m gonna learn from someone that’s successful.

I’m gonna try and duplicate what they did. But your use case might be different. Your audience is definitely gonna be different. And so things change based on use case. It’s a, completely fluid environment. And so when you talk about ads or organic or podcast guesting, all of those are gonna have different results based on your niche and your tribe.

And so it, it’s very hard. It’s very difficult to have these discussions with people and project their outcome. That’s why I’ve always been suspect of we all get those spam emails, right? We’ll get you to the first page of Google, or we’ll we’ll, get you 15 paid appointments a month, or we’ll get you, it’s you don’t even know what I do for a business yet.

Like it’s all use case derived. And so I, think it’s really important to take stock of who you are, what you’re offering. Who you’re offering it to and what you’re communicating as your offer. And if all of that seems to fall within alignment, maybe you just need a little longer of a runway to get things launched and going.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, Time is your friend. And part of that too is to reduce the amount of shame that comes with failure, or even on the other side of shame is grandiosity. So this is grandio. Shame is oh my God, I’m failing so bad. I don’t want anybody to know this sucks. And grandiosity is overconfident.

I’m definitely doing this. This is gonna work. I know exactly what I need to do. But in the middle there’s like this wisdom area and part of the way you move from shame or grandiosity to wisdom is to be open and ask for help. This is why I’m a big fan of masterminding. If you’re a course creator, get yourself in some groups of other course creators and be open about your challenges.

Use the lifter LMS support systems. If you have a question, email us or submit a ticket. Come to the live calls. Yeah. Ask for, help and and just be open and honest. ’cause I heard Dan Martel once say ask for help, get him an investor. And I was like, that’s never gonna work.

And then I got, I found myself in a position where I needed an investor for lifter and I asked for help and I got investment. A new business partner. I’m like, oh my gosh, Dan was right. Ask, for help, and it works. So I don’t know. What do you, if somebody’s failing and they’re feeling shameful or feeling like dug in and overconfident, what would you recommend?

Kurt Von Ahnen: You already touched on one, Chris and, I’m partial. I’m very partial because I run the lifter LMS Mastermind call on Thursdays.

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Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’ll just be blunt and honest on this podcast. We don’t get enough new faces in there. Know, there’s

Chris Badgett: so many that could come that don’t. And to me that’s like a serious issue.

Like what’s, and I know there’s time zones and all the rest, but

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, there’s so many that could come that go. We have people from the Netherlands, from Bavaria, I mean like people from all over Europe have come to the call. People from Australia have come to the call. So I’m not gonna give the time zone is the excuse.

Yeah. I’m just gonna give the I’m busy already didn’t get to it. Or maybe it’s the imposter syndrome. Maybe you’re afraid that you’re gonna jump into the call. And you are not ready for the call with all the experts. That’s not. That’s not the flow of the call. So, I, I don’t think people recognize, ’cause they, don’t come.

But you’re invited. You are invited, the call’s open and the call’s open in a Zoom environment where we can do screen shares and we can talk about people’s what is your marketing solution? What are you using for extra third party plugins? What do you like? We talk about all kinds of things.

On the office hours call. And so I think that’s a really good driver. We’ve got a comment right now as we record this live that says, create courses for business instead of creating courses and hoping that it just sells. Yeah. And that’s one option. It’s, one option to say, is your product market fit?

Correct. But the other thing I want to encourage people is. You signed up for lifter LMS to build your course because you want to follow your passion. You want to add value where you think you can add value. So maybe it’s not always for businesses, maybe it is for a certain people group, but maybe you’re having a hard time reaching that people group like I did when I first marketed the Power Sport Academy.

It sat and did nothing for more than two years, and it took me a lot of like real introspection to go, who am I actually marketing to? How am I marketing this? What is my pricing? Does my pricing match the value for what’s being offered? And then literally came to, you know what? Chris said, I need to partner with somebody.

I need to partner with somebody that’s gonna take over the sales, the marketing, and the push through their network to sell my training almost as a subcontractor at that level. But you know what? At the end of the day. I’m still thrilled that I’m actually delivering the content and the training to the people that I wanted to train.

So I’m still able to hit my passion point. I might not be hitting my revenue goals to be really clear because I’m splitting that with a partner, but I’m getting where I need to go. I’m getting the traction and I’m moving forward on the project. And at this level, I would say it’s very successful.

Chris Badgett: And that’s awesome.

The partnership with marketing and sales. But a lot of people get stuck in the technology weeds, and I think hiring an agency like Manana, NOMAS or other, there’s other agencies out there too. We have the Lift Lifter, LMS experts page. But if you’re in the tech weeds, you don’t have to stay there. And I know it’s hard when, particularly if you’re brand new and you don’t have a budget.

One of the reasons why I knew as an example, that your Powersport Academy should and would work is like you were paid to do that kind of work in the real wor in the quote, real brick and mortar world. Yeah. Guy’s got the skills, guy’s a great communicator. Technology’s not a problem for this person.

So it’s something else. And then you found your way to unlock that. But. For a lot of people, they do struggle with the technology or get overly obsessed with it. And manana, NOMAS is not like a dirt cheap agency, you guys,

Kurt Von Ahnen: no.

Chris Badgett: It’s not where you serve the market you serve, but even if you’re a startup and you’ve never built a WordPress website before, you can go to fiverr.com.

Get somebody else to set up your website for a very low amount of money.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And it’s not gonna be, you can’t go in there expecting the white glove and consultative experience that you would get from an agency like M Noma. But you can still, even with limited budget, get the website out of the way and just be okay with it not being 100% exactly what you wanted and just move on.

’cause you have other things to get going and

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah,

Chris Badgett: pivot and test.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, it’s it. It’s so amazing to me because. When, you first came to me, Chris, and you said you should run the mastermind call or you run the office hours, I was like, I’m not an expert. And you were like, oh, no, you are you’re, a WordPress power user.

You need to run the call. After I ran the call, I was like, oh my goodness, I guess I do know what I’m doing. ’cause some of these people really don’t know what they’re doing.

Chris Badgett: And you’re great with people. You’re wonderful with people, and you know how to manage a room, which is also a skill that you get as a manager and a leader, which of course,

Kurt Von Ahnen: but that’s, the beauty of the lifter.

LMS echos sphere, right? Is like people can get in. Whether you’re an expert or not, it’s like the platform works. You can get your course up, you can run your membership. There’s support to help you get where you need to go. If you have questions that go a little bit beyond what support would normally cover, we’re probably still gonna help you or at least point you in the right direction.

And there’s a really good chance for success with this platform that you’re not gonna see with other things.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Land the plane here. I would just encourage you out there listening or watching to embrace failure as like a, it’s actually a good thing and there’s so many, you want to get a lot of failures along the way and then just retool do something different.

Try to fix what’s broken. It’s not like it, a failure is just like this binary thing oh, it worked or it didn’t. It’s which part? Which part failed? Or. What’s good, what’s not good? Let’s work on the not good try and, just think of it more like a scientist and an experimenter, particularly like in your case, if you have already been paid in your life, in your niche and on your topic, either even if it’s not a lot of money, but you have delivered value in that space, like you have that validation.

So that’s not the issue. It’s not like you failed. Because you don’t know your stuff. It’s, something else. And those that requires a lot of experimentation to unlock that. And

Go ahead.

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s where that imposter syndrome really takes over though, Chris, it wasn’t. Oh, this is so hard to say, right?

’cause it makes me sound like I’m patting myself on the back. But I was the, North American training manager for Ducati, which put me in charge of Canada, United States, Mexico. And then I led the sales training internationally so that put me in Spain, France. Italy, like I was traveling the world doing this whole thing.

And then I went to Suzuki, recruited me and they said, we love what you did at Ducati. Could you do that for Suzuki? And so I started working with Suzuki, and then when I went independent, there was that, oh, I couldn’t even keep a corporate job. I failed. I lost. You know what I mean? And when I built the Power Sport Academy, it was like, I think I have some really good stuff here.

I’m just not sure. It was a year, into the failure, 18 months into the failure. I was like, I don’t understand it. Like I know that I have the best training content period in the powersport space. Like I remember I had a really frustrating call with you one-on-one on the phone. Yeah. And I was like, I have the best training content in the country.

Like I know that, I know dealers are gonna come in and they’re gonna take the training and minimum they’re gonna double their service sales minimum. If they did a million dollars in sales, they’re gonna do $2 million in sales next year. I still couldn’t get people to sign up for the course, and that was very, difficult.

That was hard to swallow and, I had overcome the, I had overcome the imposter syndrome. I had acknowledged my expertise, but I still had this failure. And it was, I realized, you know what? I can market to service managers and service writers, but I’m not, marketing to the people that are actually gonna swipe the credit card and buy the training.

I realized I got the wrong people. I’m trying to sell this to the wrong people and I can’t seem to reach the right people. And that’s when that partner came in and that’s when things made sense.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and that just brings the point right home. It wasn’t like a binary, oh, it failed or it was a success. It was like you just had a part in the machine of it all that had to be fixed.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then once you got that, everything started unlocking

Kurt Von Ahnen: dude, that project is on track to be a six figure project.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And so in the terms of Luter, LMS is $1,500 a year for the Infinity bundle. That’s, a small cost of doing business in terms of what the budget has become.

But for the first five years that 1500 bucks would’ve been like, oh my God, 1500 bucks. Another year’s coming 1500 bucks, another year’s coming 1500 bucks. And now five years in, I’m like 1500 bucks. Who cares?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And that’s why we do the 50% off your first year at Lift R Mess. ’cause we know it’s gonna take longer than you think.

You’re gonna have to go through those failure pivots. You might get a modest win. And you’re still very budget conscious and so on. So we do our best. So the key takeaway here, if you’re watching this, is when you experience failure, don’t give up. Ask for help, reach out to lifter LMS. We have our tickets, our live calls, and so on.

If you need help. With the website front, hire an agency like Man Noma, and just keep moving forward. One foot right in front of the other. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. I want to thank you, Kurt, for coming on the show and doing this series. We’ve got more to come. Next up we’re gonna get into validation.

So if you want to. Decrease. I can never guarantee there will be zero failure. But if you really want to decrease the fa the likelihood or the odds of failure or the extreme cases of failure we’re gonna share our best ideas on validation and there’s a lot to go over. So you’ll likely see that in the next episode.

Kurt, thanks for so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing all you know and your stories. And we’ll see you in the next episode.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen discusses the challenges of rapidly establishing an online course and the typical errors that hinder developers. He clarifies that the most significant obstacles are frequently psychological rather than technical, including the expert’s curse, impostor syndrome, and overanalyzing before beginning.

Kurt stresses how crucial it is to have a well-defined plan before using the platform. Frustration and stalled launches result from the fact that many course developers purchase tools and start creating without first defining their content, structure, or delivery method. Kurt highlights the importance of attention and time dedication. He cautions against attempting to construct courses in brief, dispersed time blocks, stating that frequent disruptions impede progress and make the job appear more difficult than it actually is.

Rather, he urges authors to set aside concentrated, uninterrupted time to complete the course’s primary components. Additionally, he minimizes the importance of great manufacturing quality. Kurt emphasizes that solid concepts, well-defined frameworks, and practical approaches are far more important than flawless production by using a real-world example of a sizable, well-funded training firm providing great information with subpar images and sets.

In general, Kurt supports:

Putting execution ahead of perfection
First, developing a bare minimum of a workable course
Maintaining concentration on resolving a particular issue
Allowing content quality to take precedence over technical or aesthetic excellence

His message is straightforward: action, clarity, and focus rather than over-optimization are the keys to speed, and done is preferable to flawless.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, Kurt von Onan. He’s back on the show. Kurt is from Mana No Mas. You can find that@manananomas.com. Kurt also works with LifterLMS directly. You’ve seen him on some of our live calls and office hours, masterminds. Today we’re gonna get into how to launch an online course quickly and get really specific, tell some stories around that.

Talk about some of the things that happen if you move too slow. I’d just like to say when it comes to online education, particularly in the entrepreneurial context, that speed is your friend. But before we dive into it, Kurt, welcome back on the show.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Thanks, Chris. It’s great to see you again, man. I love our chats.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s good to see you too. We’ve been around this industry for a long time. Over a decade you’ve launched courses, you’ve helped many clients launch e-learning websites. What would you say, let’s say if an entrepreneur wants to launch quickly. Their course, but it just, it’s not working or it doesn’t launch, and it’s just where the speed is not happening.

What mistakes are they likely making or could be making that are causing challenges with the speed to market?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Without trying to be somebody’s psychotherapist, Chris, there, there is a strong, like you call it, the experts curse. And then there’s the imposter syndrome. There’s, all these things that people can mentally sabotage themselves with just to even get to a point where they can launch.

And it’s really important to overcome those things. But the thing functionally that I see with people is just not. Really having a, strategy or should I say a, like a real plan like, a real what is my content gonna look like? What’s gonna be included? How am I gonna build this out? Like they have an idea, they have an overall concept of, Hey, it’d be cool if I made a course about, but then they, buy a platform, they start to work in it and they start to get frustrated because they haven’t actually sat and created any kind of pre-planning to get into the project.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, there’s a lot there. It’s one of the reasons why I like to recommend people start with a free course. ’cause it takes a lot of pressure off.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: It also helps you build an email list. It’s easier to get free enrollments than paid enrollments. And just to tell a quick story, we’ve always done the lifter LMS Quickstart course, which is essentially 45 minutes of content that teaches you the 5% most important parts of lifter.

So that you can launch an online course website quickly, but remember I said 5%. We’re not teaching a hundred percent. We have thousands of videos on our YouTube channel, other courses a thousand pages of documentation. It can be used in all kinds of different ways, but I realize that to launch the quick start course quickly, I can’t cover everything and I also don’t want to overwhelm people.

And the very first time I made that course. We did a pre-sale where at the very beginning of LifterLMS, where we sold LifterLMS at a discount before we even built it or finished building it, we had a specific date that it was going live. So we had a deadline and then we’re scrambling to the last minute to get the software ready and then the afternoon before the launch.

I sat down for four hours and recorded the first version of the Quickstar course. And where I was at the time, I did not even have strong enough internet to upload those videos to. I was using Vimeo, so I actually got my car. There was a developer named Mark Nelson who worked for us. I drove 45 minutes down the road in Montana, which was the halfway point between where myself and Mark lived.

I handed him a hard drive and asked him, he had high speed internet, and I asked him to upload those videos to our Vimeo. And then once I got back to my house, couple an hour later, he had got all the videos uploaded. I used the first version of Lifter to launch that course. So literally we launched the first course in about six hours and every single person that bought Lifter signed up for that course.

And then a lot of people who were interested and curious signed up for that course. And it became the main engine of our growing our email list. And I’ll say something that’s really important here. That was almost 13 years ago. We have redone that course at least five times.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So the first course was not the perfect thing, but we just got it done.

Kurt Von Ahnen: No, done is better than perfect. And there’s a key element in your story, Chris, and I think it’s really important when you had the deadline. That, that, okay. All that’s great. But when you started to do it, you sat and you did it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Kurt Von Ahnen: like I’ve run into a lot of want to, I want to be, that’s a bad way to say it, of potential course creators.

I run into a lot of potential course creators that, that they want to do it. 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, half hour there, 45 minutes there, and. I have that huge background in automotive and fixed operations and technicians, right? So I know firsthand, especially through data, that every time you interrupt yourself from a task you, don’t just have the delay of the interruption, but you have the lost productivity to restart the process.

And so a lot of people that can’t. Commit the required time to get some major element done. They try and piecemeal it out a set a little piece here and here They end up frustrating themselves because it seems like it’s harder than it is. It seems like they have to keep redoing or rehashing or going into something and they’re just not seeing it get done.

But it’s because they haven’t given themselves the time and the space to actually execute.

Chris Badgett: That’s important, what you’re saying. I call it deep work like course creation. When you’re in the content production aspect of it, it’s deep work. So if you’re gonna drop into the zone, almost any course I create, not all of them, but I create the whole thing in a day at or two.

But I have to give myself that container of time and space to get in the flow. Stay in the flow, don’t stop till I finish.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And at this point in my life, I I was staying up later than I should have, but I just got the thing done. I just said, I’m not stopping until this is done.

And the other thing that’s important is I did not introduce a bunch of technical friction to my workflow. All I did was open up Zoom and do a screen share, and press the record button using my camera that was built into my laptop and a microphone that was built into my laptop. That was version one, and that was it.

I didn’t start I’m fancy now. I got like green screens and all kinds of stuff, but I didn’t start there and I could have done that. I could have gotten really obsessed with video production and. Editing. I don’t think none of those videos were even edited. It was just, I just went, and I’m not saying you should be that raw and that cut and

go, maybe cut and go running and gunning, but it’s definitely viable, particularly if.

If you’re doing a paid course and you don’t even know if anybody will buy it there’s all that goes into it as well.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I had, and my wife could back me up on this one because I, basically had a short circuit a month ago, Chris. I’m, John Maxwell certified. I paid the money. I went to Orlando.

I did the thing with 3000 other people to for speaking leadership and training, right? So I got this certification and it’s five grand to get this thing. Thousands of people do it. And I just wanna put people at rest here because I swear there’s a message to this story. I, got tired of their content and stopped watching years ago, but they had announced and it came to my email and they were really pushing at the, new year to come to this webinar.

Chris, I signed into the webinar and it had an atrocious background like a green screened in. Background of like their corporate logo two subject matter experts sitting at a counter with each other having a conversation. And when they went to do like visual aids or when they went to break into a really cool breakout idea.

One of the subject matter experts literally, turned around with their back to the camera and started writing on a paper post-it flip chart thing on an easel. Yeah. And so I just wanna bring people back to the reality that if your content and your ideas and your methodologies are sound, your delivery mechanism is less important.

We’re talking about a multimillion if not billion dollar training organization that started in like 2011. And they’re still they’re still trolling the internet with bad backgrounds and paper flip charts. It’s, don’t worry about production value so much. Get your idea down. Get that minimal viable product done, and then see what traction you can gain with it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I like that. And I won’t go into it super deeply ’cause we just did a podcast a couple ago about pain. But if you really know what pain you’re solving and it’s acute pain, particularly if it’s time bound, people don’t care. If you get let’s say you get diagnosed with something at a doctor or you, don’t, you’re gonna go look for information.

You’re not caring about production quality. You just want quality subject matter expertise and help with your issue. Like it just doesn’t matter. So if you have like your subject matter expertise, it’s not like you have, I always call it the Library of Alexandria. You don’t have to put the whole library in the course.

Just help the person solve the pain with the minimal amount of information as possible to get them from A to B. And that’s what it’s all about, doing a thousand lesson course or a membership full of 50 courses as what you’re launching with is just too much. You’re not it’s, unfocused, but maybe that’s your goal.

Maybe you do want to have a library. I’ve seen it like you accompanied me and Dan Martel’s SaaS Academy. There’s a lot of stuff in there, but you know what Dan did really was. Every kind of micro course or coaching session was very pain specific, and he did his best to help you through it through a teaching framework that was very consistent from one training to another.

So you learned how to learn from Dan, and it was very well done, but I know when he started it, it was just. He had a couple courses and 20 entrepreneurs, 20 entrepreneurs in a room now he fills out auditoriums and stuff.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. He’s a really interesting guy. His, book on buy Back Your Time is a real game changer for folks that are looking for something to read.

It’s a good book.

Chris Badgett: It is good.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So when we’re saying how to launch a first course as quickly as possible, we kinda have to get ourselves back into that mindset of like first course. What was it like when we first got started? And so we mentioned we say minimalism, right? So we want to keep things simple.

But to you, Chris, give me an example of, minimalism, because I could literally just do, I could literally just do WordPress, the free core lifter plugin, and launch a course as a sample product.

Chris Badgett: Yeah you could totally do that. And, just, I want to give an example from my history, like I have a, I had a project for a long time.

It’s no longer aro around. It was called Organic Life Guru. So I chose the Permaculture Niche, which is a subset of organic agriculture. My wife has a degree in conservation based agriculture, so our first course for this platform, and I had big plans working with subject matter experts, which I did. It started with my wife made a course in a day about how to do raised bed gardening in a organic way for the first timer, and she did it all in a day.

And now that I had that one course, then when I went to a famous author in the space who had tons of books, but no course content. I could show them a real kind of course marketplace that I owned and built, and here’s a sample of what my wife Sam did, and it was real. And then this other expert came onto our platform.

And for him, like as an example, there was a guy named Toby Hemingway. He had the number one bestselling course in the world on permaculture, or sorry, book called on Permaculture. I saw that Toby, I was living in Montana at the time that Toby was going to be doing a talk in Washington State, which wasn’t far away in a, couple weeks.

So we sent him an email and we’re like, Hey, we have this thing we’ll do this revenue share with you. You don’t even have to change anything. I just want permission to come and film your presentation that he had a packed auditorium full of people at. He was like, sure. And then literally we, that’s a situation where we’re working with an outside subject matter expert, but we recorded his talk in a day.

We chunked it through video editing into the lessons, launched it sent out an email to our little list and did some social media marketing on permaculture forum and stuff. And I woke up the next morning and there was our first sale. From a somebody in New Zealand who I did not know. Yeah. And that, that all happened really quickly.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then once that worked I, partnered with other experts in different permaculture sub niches and things like that, and we just rinse and repeated that strategy.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So what I like about that story is. It’s not all up to you. You’re not an island all by yourself. It’s totally cool to partner with other people or share assets or come up with partnerships and arrangements.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and just we talk about a lot on this podcast, the five hats, the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the community builder, and the technologist. If you’re not strong on the website. I see tons of people get bogged down on the website aspect, the technology, the making, the e-commerce work and all this stuff.

You can work with an agency like Kurt’s. If you are like the subject matter expert and you’re not a WordPress professional or a you’re not like an e-commerce expert or you’re not a marketing expert, you can work with people to remove those bottlenecks and really speed up. So just know your strength, know where you’re strong, and know where your weaknesses are.

So with my organic gardening thing I was the WordPress expert. My wife was the subject matter expert, and I wore the entrepreneur hat and figured out the business of how we’re gonna do this and the contract with the the royalty share and the, all that stuff. Then we started going to stronger or more popular experts.

We’re not doing it alone. And I think the most common mistake is really between the subject matter expert and the technologist. If you really strong subject matter expert and you know nothing about websites, but you really know you want this thing, you can DIY it and learn it. That’s why the lifter LMS Quickstart course works.

Yeah. But if you wanna move faster or have more budget and you want to invest in like your whole website and all these other things you want to do, just work with an agency that can help you just not have to wear that hat yourself. You don’t have to do it all yourself.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, I think that’s huge.

And then as far as tools go, I really don’t think the tool list is all that extensive. If I’m looking at a a simple first course to launch.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: What, do you think people really need to bring to the table? For me I’m, a basics person. I’m a just back to basics guy. I’m like in with both feet, man let’s, do this thing.

And maybe I have some social media, Facebook posts, a Facebook group. I’ve got a group of people somewhere. I’ve got a tribe that I’ve been talking to about this topic for some amount of time. And now I just want to get some people in there to see what I’ve built so far and get some feedback.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It’s validation. It’s just moved fast. I know how to drive WordPress, but so what I would do if I was doing a new course is I would do the, I would get the Lift LS Earth bundle plan, which is gonna give me the e-commerce and selling ability as a website person, I already have web hosting.

I know how to buy a domain name. I know I would just use the Lifter Tech. That’s the least of my concern, just, but I’m a strong technologist and I would focus more on the sales page for the course.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So I love this idea from Jeff Bezos at Amazon, I believe this was from where before they would launch a new product, they would write, the very first thing before anybody did anything is they would pretend that it was already launched and they would write the press release.

First, and what that forces you to do is it forces you to say here’s this thing. This is what it does. This is why it’s awesome. This is who it’s for. This is what makes it unique. And you do that first, and then that becomes your north star of what you’re driving towards. And a simple way to think about that in websites is build the sales page first and even before you’ve launched it. We’re gonna do another episode on validation, but even if you’re just playing with the idea, if you’re not ready to launch it, at least put a coming soon email list, capture up and see and start promoting it before it’s done.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And there’s nothing more motivating that will speed you up on a launch than just knowing people have the hands up and they’re interested.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You’re a really huge proponent of that whole concept of product market fit, right? Get people to pull it from you. And so the only way that happens is to let people know what you’re thinking about doing and or, that you’re an expert in the space and then you know that product market fit gets to be a more, more viable thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m also a huge fan of live delivery of the first version.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. So yeah, I am.

Chris Badgett: I did that. I did that and that when you have a live audience, even if it’s small, it gives you the opportunity to not create the content in advance of selling it. And you just record that live delivery and you do it like one week at a time or one day at a time, whatever your cadence is.

It just forces you to pre-sell it and then forces you to stay on schedule, delivering it to the best you can with the time constraints you have.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I would say another thing that I, again, from my agency perspective, what I see, especially new course creators stumble on is. It’s odd because let’s say that they went to another, let’s say they went to some kind of SaaS platform.

If they were in a SaaS platform, they wouldn’t have a lot of design choices. They wouldn’t have a lot of opportunity to customize each and every page and font and, shading and all that. But for some reason, when they’re in the WordPress space and they understand that it’s possible to customize everything, I think that opens up, for me, it’s an obstacle, right? I know that some people say it’s an op, it’s an opportunity. But it’s an obstacle because it, prevents a fresh creator from delivering ’cause they think their content’s too simple looking if they don’t overdesign or over style either the learning content or the the framework around the learning content.

And so I think it’s fairly important to mention that stuff. If that can come later get your con, get your, use the course builder, get your sections in, get your lessons in get, that stuff published and get some people. Taking the actual content. And then if you get feedback that says, oh, it would be better if the background was baby Blue.

I guess you could consider that. But the idea that before you release it, you’re thinking this page should be baby blue and this page should be periwinkle and this page should be sky blue and this page should be cyan. I think people get lost in the weeds on that. And it prevents them from launching.

Whereas if you just and I’m probably dominating this part of the conversation, I apologize, but I’ve had so many clients tell me I need a highly designed, highly styled website. I need and they, it needs more sizzle, it needs more pop. And the, and you’re like, define that? What, are you even talking about?

And then they’ll say like Apple. And then you go to the Apple website and it’s a white page with black letters on it, and you’re like what do you want me to do with your website again? It’s,

Chris Badgett: I’m a big fan of the comment the best marketing is a good product.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: In my opinion, like I think in WordPress or whatever, or lifter.

So I’m very comfortable building a course, like in the course builder from scratch. But even still, like before I even open up something that’s gonna give me a bunch of design options, I, and even still this goes for when I write emails as well, like a marketing email. I intentionally write it on a text editor pad with zero formatting, no bold, no italics, nothing.

Just get the words out courses and education at its foundational level is words like the design and making the website fancy. That is all just like icing on the top. We talked in our last episode about the black box. Part of the subject matter Expert Curse is you’ve got it in your head, but to get it outta your head, you need to start writing words on paper or on a text document or Google document or in the course builder.

And your first version, like a lot of writing is editing. Just start. For me personally, I like to go, I start with the creative write brain and I do mind maps and I, just put bubbles on a paper. And then from there, once I do my brain dump, then I’m ready to start going to a text document and start.

Kind of thinking and chunking and sections and lessons and things. And from there, once I’m pretty happy with it, I move it into the course builder. And then from there, now I can work on one thing at a time. So you mentioned getting into deep work before. So now when I have my outline, now I have to do that again where, okay, we had this individual lesson, now I need to list out what I want to cover here.

Then like we mentioned with Dan Martel as an example, his trainings all have a similar flow of like big ideas, key principles, worksheet. So he has like a teaching framework that he uses. So if you have a teaching framework that puts even more guardrails or bumper lanes on your focus and energy and all that can serve you very well from just getting the.

The idea, I wanna have a course about X, like into actually having and launching a course about X.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. That’s really good stuff. I was trying to think if there was anything else that would make me say, how do I launch the course more quickly? And it’s gonna seem a little self-serving, Chris, but you mentioned deadlines and the other thing that comes to my mind is accountability.

And so sometimes. Maybe you’re a person that has the best of intentions. I had a client that helped people publish their first book, right? And so you have a subject matter expert. They’re gonna write a book and they actually hired my client. I built the website for the client, but they, I would hire my client to basically do live meetings, masterminds, chapter reviews, and try to keep people inspired to keep ’em on a timeline to actually publish the dang book.

Because writing a book is similar to, making a course, I think there’s a lot of value in. New people, whether you call it a coach or you call it an agency or you call it a mentor like for lifter LMS. If someone’s in the universe or infinity bundle, they can come to the office hours, call.

What a great place for accountability. They could do a screen share, they could show the rest of the members what they’ve done so far. People could kick in with ideas and then they can come back a week or two later and show updates and then have some kind of inspiration to move forward. But if you’re a reclusive kind of person and you’ve locked yourself in your one bedroom apartment with a laptop and you’re trying to change the world with this new course of yours, but you’re just not making headway, sometimes you need to.

To bring some accountability into the picture to keep you focused and keep you moving.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m a big fan of that. We recently did an episode several back where I just mentioned that I had done a hundred mile run and I did not think that I needed accountability. But through all that process, that was like a two years of training.

I hired a running coach and. I ran today. I still have the same running coach. I opened my phone and there’s what I have to do. Like I, before we got on the call together, I ran four miles with a certain type of speed thing that I did. But just knowing that his name’s Kevin is on the other end, he’s given me my marching orders for the day.

I didn’t think I needed that. I’m a highly motivated, fast action taker, capable of long efforts, but there’s no way I could have run. I figured out how to run a hundred miles and stuck to it. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Without having that accountability.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’ve done some long distance bicycling, Chris, but a hundred mile run is the same as a 400 mile bicycle ride.

I don’t know if you knew that.

Chris Badgett: I didn’t know that.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, so I haven’t done a 400 mile bicycle ride yet.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. A hundred mile bicycle is a century they call it. A century ride. Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s like the equivalent of a, marathon for you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. But that was a big goal. And even before that, like I did a 50, like on that journey, I did a 50 mile run.

And in the very beginning of all that I’ve always been somewhat athletic and getting outside and stuff like that. But my first run. Was like I was getting back in shape. I had gotten outta the habit. I was having some chronic back pain issues, but I just had to start and take imperfect action, follow the plan, and it worked.

Is that whole thing about you, what you underestimate what you can accomplish in a year, but overestimate what you can accomplish in a day is totally true. So if you stick to it, I remember when a fast six mile run was like really hard for me. Now that’s, now like a warmup and it’s but that just took, so my point here to tie it back to launching courses quickly, you mentioned a lot of things early, but one of the things besides imposter syndrome and shiny object syndrome with tools and stuff, I think one of the worst.

Things that affects all of us, myself included, and I’m sure you too, is perfectionism. It’s your relationship with perfectionism. So like it is really easy to get sidetracked, particularly when a website comes into play of having the perfect website. I know a lot of people with websites, and I don’t think any of them are 100% satisfied with their website and from a, it’s absolutely perfect.

And even if it was for a MI for a day, a minute a month some new tech rolls out, some new design trend rolls out and it’s no longer perfect again. So we have to check our relationship with perfectionism.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. And even if you had the perfect website, the audience would change over time, which means it’s not the perfect website.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it never happens. It’s like, a aspirational goal, like having the perfect course, having the perfect online business, having the perfect e-learning product. It’s, aspirational, but it’s not a prison. It’s good to want quality, but it’s better. I always say the people that are most successful with lifter LMS.

Have take forward imperfect, consistent action that every single case study I’ve ever done from an interview standpoint. I always find that element no questions asked. Yeah, I launched, but I wasn’t really happy with it or. I messed up this part of the marketing or my sales page is not what I want.

Things like that, but that they took action. And then once you get that signal of product market fit it starts taking off like I know you did in some of your work. There’s a concept of startups called pivots. Sometimes you have to pivot a little bit or like course correct on the fly. So you did something where you were doing tell us the story, but it was it was a training for certain types of organization and you found like another person that could help sell it and then you would deliver it.

Yeah. And that’s that’s a pivot. You’re just moving you’re moving, and then you find like resource and then you pivoted.

Kurt Von Ahnen: That project is a great case study for people that are getting into learning because it has multiple pivots and you can’t, and you just can’t give up. So I have.

Very clear memories of experiences where I tried something and it didn’t work and I got frustrated and I turned it off. Whatever the, it was I quit. And then a year or two years later, someone else comes along, does the exact same thing that I was doing and becomes a millionaire.

And that happened to me three separate times. And so when I launched the Powersport Academy, I knew. I knew that I was the subject matter expert on the subject, and I knew I had the best product in the country. So when I went to release it, I I was shocked that nobody bought it. And I think I was talking to you at the time, Chris, you helped me with some copy on the homepage.

I remember that you’re like, you’re not even talking another pain point like you’re talking about how great your course is, but who cares? What pain point are you fixing for them? So you helped me with that a little bit. But then after about a year of failing, I recognize that I was selling to the wrong people.

I was trying to sell the course to the people that I would be actively training rather than trying to sell the course to their employers. Who would be investing in the training for their staff to take. And that seems like a basic mistake, but I made the mistake for a year before I really caught on. So even after I had the right target audience to sell to, it still wasn’t really meeting the.

It wasn’t meeting the potential that I had for it. And so I was getting a little disgusted and I thought maybe I’ll just turn the thing off. But I didn’t wanna do that ’cause of my experience before quitting and then finding out that I missed an opportunity. So out of the blue. Someone that I had talked to three years prior hit me up and said, Hey, do you still train motorcycle dealerships how to do more service sales?

I said, yeah, we do. And he said, Hey, I have an organization where my organization trains groups of dealers in 20 groups, so there’s 20 dealers in each group. He says we’ve got four groups now we’re gonna have five real, real shortly, and they all wanna have service training. Is that something that we could contract through you?

Then that just became a partnership made in heaven. Chris, I, so now I do a revenue share with them. I do the training with the dealers. They use my content, and the partner is in charge of sales distribution, follow up, invoicing social media shares. They have staff that does. All of the heavy lifting that I didn’t want to be bothered with or that I was frustrated with.

Over a five year course of time, they’re handling that for me and our sales are up.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s land the plane just like a quick AI segment.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So I knew it was coming.

Chris Badgett: One of the things AI can help you do is speed up. I definitely don’t recommend that you just try to delegate the entire project to ai, but I’m just gonna give some examples of how to launch an online course more quickly using ai.

When you do write your syllabus or your curriculum, your lessons. Do it first as a human with your unique knowledge, but then ask the ChatGPT or whatever tool you use to like, Hey, is there any gaps? Anything else that would be helpful to really complete this? I’m trying to take this type of person from this A to this B.

That’s an example when it comes to the website. Oh, I need an about page on my website, and you see yourself as not a great writer. Okay, just. Tell, give AI a bunch of facts. You can even, it can even be full of typos. Give it the context I need an about page for my website. It’s an LMS, and it’ll give you a first draft of about page content.

Websites need a privacy policy terms and conditions page. I’m not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice, but if you just need a first draft of a, you’re not used to writing privacy policy pages, who is. Just ask the AI to give you a first draft.

How To Launch Your First Course As Quickly As Possible: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Terms and conditions there’s all kinds of stuff you can do with visuals.

People get hung up on the logo all the time. My advice, if it’s your first course and your first course website, don’t even do a graphical logo. Just do a text-based logo, which is just, means like even, I don’t know if it’s still this way, but the Facebook logo. Is a certain white font on a blue background, and it just says Facebook in the font.

It’s just the words, right? You can get fancy with it later. If it’s a personal brand, your logo is your name written in a nice, heavy font for, that’s your title font for your website. You do not need to spend $300 and three months of time designing a logo for a version you

Kurt Von Ahnen: wanna change anyway.

Chris Badgett: What are some AI just unlocks for, that you would recommend to help with speed?

Kurt Von Ahnen: You nailed the one about am I missing content or am I missing key elements? The other thing that I stress to people when it’s depending on what type of training it is, it’s, don’t forget where you are. You are the expert and you’ve forgotten more. Then, these people could, learn in some cases, you wanna make sure you cover the basics.

You wanna make sure that you don’t skip over the basics and then leave your student lost and what the heck am I doing here? A perfect example of this is like in technical training for motorcycle training. What I used to do for a living, we used to have these advanced diagnostic courses for electronics for technicians to take.

But then when I actually went to teach the courses in person, I realized half the technicians really don’t know. You know how the diagnostic tool actually works. They don’t know how a multimeter works, so we had to make a multimeter training course so that they would understand the basics so they could do the advanced.

Don’t get hung up when you’re trying to make your first course thinking that you gotta wow people and knock it outta the park and come up with these crazy great ideas. Use AI to be like, what’s the basis, what’s, what are the basic concepts that I need to include so I don’t leave the my learner behind?

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah. Yeah. ’cause it’s, that’s part of the expert’s curse is you for, you forgot how to teach to beginner’s mind, if you will. For you out there watching and listening. If you wanna launch an online course fast, I recommend getting the litmus free plugin. And if you want to do the automated e-commerce, get the Earth bundle, it’s our lowest tiered plan.

If technology is your struggle and you’re not in the WordPress game or the website game, reach out to Kurt. He is at Manana Nomas. Also, Kurt is online for our Ask Me Anything Call. So if you’re intrigued by this episode every Thursday, if you just google Lifter LMS community events, you’ll find the calendar page that has the, link to join and register to attend one of those.

So if you’re experiencing some friction and you’re you just want to talk to us, come to the Ask Me Anything Call. Anything else you wanna say, Kurt, about Manana, namas and who you help?

Kurt Von Ahnen: It’s, the fun part about Manana Nomas is we really do focus on two different verticals. One is advanced enterprise level e-learning conversions from purpose-built SCOR sites to enterprise training websites.

Like we love that work, but we backfill our entire calendar with people that are. Startups and entry level businesses and just getting people into the space. ’cause I really love sharing what we can do. That’s why we run the WordPress meetup in town.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Kurt, thank you for coming back on the show.

We’re definitely gonna have to do this again soon.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And we will catch you on the next episode.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen elaborates on the notion that corporate training is a continuous process that changes with the company rather than a one-time event. He argues that many businesses put off documenting their procedures because they think things will change all the time. However, when teams expand, this kind of thinking frequently results in confusion, inefficiency, and knowledge loss.

Kurt Von Ahnen is known as a highly skilled corporate training and e-learning specialist who has worked with LifterLMS for more than ten years. Before working directly with the LifterLMS team and starting his own company, Manana No Mas, which focuses on LifterLMS and WordPress-based training solutions.

Businesses establish clarity and consistency even when processes change by documenting them early on through lessons, screen recordings, and organized training. Kurt highlights that corporate training reduces risk when people go and stops the emergence of unhealthy “this is how we really do it” workarounds by transferring knowledge from individuals to the firm itself. Beyond onboarding, he notes that training may be used for a variety of strategic objectives, such as enhancing sales effectiveness, assisting with customer education, uniting teams around common standards, and raising business valuation.

By combining training materials into a single, adaptable platform, assigning content by role or group, and continuously improving their internal “business product,” WordPress and LifterLMS enable organizations to transform training from a reactive expense into a key driver of stability, scalability, and long-term growth.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideHere’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. We’re joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Kurt Von Onan from Manana Nomas. He also works directly with LifterLMS. Kurt is awesome. He’s been around the LifterLMS project for a decade or so, a very long time. Uh, Kurt started as.

LifterLMS user started coming to our office hours, then got a job doing some work for LifterLMS. He has an agency called Mon Ana Nomas and does a bunch of lifter projects. Uh, I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with Kurt at various conferences and things. Kurt’s awesome. He has a lot of unique experience.

We’re gonna be diving deep into corporate training and using WordPress and. LifterLMS and other tools to solve a different kind of e-learning use case, which is corporate training, which is very different from being a subject matter expert trying to make money on the internet selling courses to any people all over the world.

Corporate training is very different, but first, welcome back on the show, Kurt.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, it’s awesome to be back, man. I love having chats with you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I love to get into your experience ’cause you have so many stories and so much unique experience. Uh, from your career and just in life, but let’s start, for those out there listening who may be a little fuzzy on exactly what corporate training is, how, how would you define it?

Both like at the large scale, maybe the medium scale and the small scale?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Well. Corporate training, it, some people say, well it’s just course creation and it’s not. They’re, they’re, they really are separate entities in how they function, how they work, how they, how they do. So corporate training really is the idea that, you know, any kind of function or process within a corporate frame set should be documented and disseminated to the staff in an organized way.

And, and that’s like, that’s the elevator speech for corporate training. And then from an e-learning perspective, that’s kind of, it’s, it’s almost still like an evolution in process, Chris, because there’s so many things. From an HR standpoint that that haven’t seemed to gotten to, you know, corporate training yet.

There’s so many things that have the potential to be put into corporate training, which in turn would add to productivity, efficiency, and profit for these companies that, that haven’t fully adopted yet.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I like that definition a lot like documenting process. And I was coaching an entrepreneur the other day who was having trouble.

With getting a team member really invested in their standard operating procedures, and I gave them a framework which was, Hey, try to coach this person into the idea that we’re building two products. We have our main product that we sell to the public, but the business is also a product.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah,

Chris Badgett: so in this case it was a software company, so our users have documentation.

But we also need documentation for the business product and present that in a organized way. Like LifterLMS as an example, is not a Fortune 500 company, as you know, it’s a small business, but we have our own corporate training, which is powered by LifterLMS. We use the LifterLMS private site add-on.

We use the courses in our case to represent different key parts of the business, like. Marketing, uh, support operations and so on. Each of those are courses. And then we use the lesson structure for individual trainings or standard operating procedures. And the cool thing with corporate training in my small business use case, it gets really, it can be hard to get the momentum going, but it gets to be kind of fun when people start using it, contributing to it, and not just like.

The owner is creating everything. Everybody’s working on it, making it better, like basically making the business product. And like you said before we started hitting record, I found interesting when you said it, that a lot of companies get into corporate training way late in the game. If I could wave a magic wand, like I didn’t, we didn’t even do this until like more than.

60% through the current life of the business. Before we’re like, Hey, maybe we should document what we do and how we do things. And sometimes that starts kind of sloppy with like, well there’s a Google Doc here. There’s a note over here. There’s a slideshow presentation. Check out this YouTube video over here.

It’s very disorganized. But yeah, I just want to pass it back to you on. Why you love it. It can sound like sort of a stodgy topic, but it’s actually really exciting when you think of the business as a product and you document it and the efficiency gains and the knowledge transfer and everything. Like what?

What makes you excited about it?

Kurt Von Ahnen: See now you’re, you’re kind of incorporating there. There’s parts of me that I can’t separate. So while I’m very focused on e-learning and corporately, I loved being like the publications and training manager at Suzuki, motors of America. That was like a great job, right?

Great title. But I couldn’t separate the marketing or the entrepreneur person from the education manager in that company. And so for me, I get really excited with corporate training because it’s. People, a lot of business owners in the corporate space, they see it as a necessary evil. They see it as an expense.

They see it, you know, in, in the world of debits and credits. They only see it as the debit. Instead of recognizing that, corporate training can very much be a marketing tool that can drive performance. Ambition within your staff. Restore or build, corporate culture, right? So, so that you reduce your turnover.

Uh, it can also be a really, really great marketing tool for the sales side of things. So if you’re a company that has a and I, and I might be going. I might be like fast forwarding us through content right now, but if you’re a pr, if you’re a production company that does consumer goods, you automatically have three verticals of courses that your company requires.

You’re, you should have, uh, training so that people in the field can effectively sell your product to the consumer, right? So you make something that’s somewhat technical. You assume people in the field are familiar with it or they’re enthusiasts and they know how it works. What you really need is a features and benefits type course for them so they know how to sell the product.

Then you need public facing courses where people buy the product and they can take a course that tells ’em how to properly use the product. And then you need a separate vertical of courses for all of the people that are in the, the backend, what we call fixed operations, what we call, you know, after sales in some companies, and that’s people that are in staff or in the field that would have to fix whatever that product is, if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

And a lot of times. The people that make these decisions, the people that are in the position high up in these companies, it’s taken them a long time and a lot of effort to get to where they’re at. And they, they deserve all the respect for getting there. But the thing is, is that they haven’t stayed crisp on all the other nuances of what business can do when they got there.

And training is usually one of the last things that they consider on the budget, uh, items. ’cause they’re mostly concerned about how do they make more sales, how do they move more units? You know, how do they monitor, you know, the customer service lines? How do they, there’s, there’s all this business operations that seem to take that, that that urgent classification rather than the important classification.

And if they focus on what’s important, instead of urgent training, kind of bubbles to the top. And if they trained everybody, all that other noise would quiet down.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you and I have a history of just being in like management and leadership positions. And one of the things that makes me so excited about it is like 99% of companies, when a new hire comes on board, their, their solution to corporate training is follow bob around, Bob, tell, tell this new hire everything, you know?

And then, and then another new hire comes, and now Bob has to stop working. And be shadowed again, which is good. That’s part of training and mentoring and things like that, but that whole thing can get so much more efficient. And what if Bob quits? What if Bob goes to a competitor, you just lost Bob.

Kurt Von Ahnen: What if Bob opens up his trainer onboarding with this is the way they want us to do it, but this is the way we really do it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, even worse. Yeah. And that’s, that’s how you get into toxic c corporate culture, right?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, absolutely. And, and so a lot of people think that maybe I’m a little too oversold on, on the whole training thing, but it really has become quite a passion point for me. I love to train, I love to teach, I love to help with curriculum development, so a lot of that is kind of just instilled, I guess.

But when I see the actual benefits. Of corporate training when it’s used from a different perspective than necessary evil or bottom line on the budget thing, when I see it actually leveraged as an asset, that’s when I really see growth at the corporate level. Like I said, that change in internal culture is huge.

You mentioned the stuff that you do with Lifter. I do the same thing with Ana Nomas. When I started my agency, I thought, well, anybody can have an agency, like, you know, everybody’s nephew knows how to make websites. So if I ever wanted to have an exit strategy from Manana, NOMAS, what would set it apart?

What would make it different? Than any other agency. And we have a similar thing. We have a backend course in the back of Ana Nomas, and every time we add a new process to Ana Nomas, I do a screen share with one of our staffers. We create a quick lesson about it and we add it to a section in our course.

That way, if I ever need to sell Ana Nomas, or if I get hit by a bus and someone in my family wants to sell money, Noma, they don’t have to learn how an agency works. They can just say, Hey, this agency’s turnkey, and it comes with the complete directions on how to run it right here.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a great point.

And you mentioned earlier that some higher ups in bigger companies may see corporate training as an expense. I actually see it as the opposite. Like you, it is actually an asset.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But in terms of company valuation, no matter what kind of company it is, uh, when somebody buys that, they’re not just buying whatever property is there.

The staff that are working there, but they’re buying the process. It’s actually the most important thing that you’re selling as a company in many, many cases. It’s how you do what you do. And is that documented somewhere? Uh, that’s, that’s key. And e-learning comes in because e-learning implies structure.

And it, you know, you can be flexible. Just get it in there somewhere. But if it’s spread all over, like massive Google Docs folders or spreadsheets on somebody’s computer and not here and there, it’s, it can get messy really quickly and not unified across a company, particularly a bigger one with multiple divisions.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Well, and, and a big component of, of what you’re alluding to but haven’t said is expensive. Because each platform that some department head decided to use or incorporate or, you know, create an addendum to came probably with some kind of subscription expense. And so, for instance, when I worked at Ducati and did their training, there was three or four different e-learning platforms that were used, and then there were multiple.

Physical external hard drives that were like backed up and kept secure on site. You know, we had an IT guy that, you know, you had to get a certain, a certain privilege to be able to access this sacred documentation. And at the end of the world, you know, that’s, that’s not the efficient way to run stuff.

That’s not the affordable way to run things. When you have something, you know, like to throw the commercial in for Lifter right here. When you have something like Lifter that can consolidate all of that information and different types of media into something that’s structured it, it takes away the needs for all those other channels.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And then you throw in WordPress, which lifter needs as well. That’s a content management system with things like categories for organization. And, you know, lifter builds on that further in the e-learning context. But I think it’s sort of like, you know, if I could wave a magic wand, the moment a new company starts, they should build two websites.

One for their marketing site or their business, and then another for their company. That’s internal training or corporate training and like start from day one that way. But it never happens that way. The training always comes like years and years and years later, right?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, it’s a lot of times people hesitate in a new startup or a younger company, they hesitate for the documentation part because they assume everything’s gonna change.

They assume, we’re constantly gonna change, we’re constantly gonna evolve. You know, if, if we stay still, then we’re going backwards. We gotta keep moving forward. And those are great catchy sayings. But at the end of the day, if you don’t, you know, if you don’t take a bite out of it and start. Really starting to track the things that you’re doing.

It can spool outta control pretty quickly.

Chris Badgett: It just popped in my head too. I wanna mention, like, I wanna fight against this thing that, like corporate training is an expense. ’cause it’s not. So for example, uh, let’s say you, you bring in an outside sales expert that teaches sales to your sales team. All you have to do is be like, Hey, if it’s all with you, I’m gonna film this training session.

So that we can review it later and the team can review it, and then that means every year you don’t have to hire the same sales trainer to come in or a different one. Like you’re, you’re, you’re creating an asset and you’re capturing value. And organizations are messy because people come in and out or go to a competitor or things happen in life.

So it’s, it’s like curating value and like the wisdom. Because we call it, you know, like in software or any kind of company really, there’s something called the guardian of the black box. The black box, which often for a startup is the founder. Everything’s in their head. So they need to get it out of the black box and get it public and like known, like how does this thing work?

How do, how do we do this? How do we sell this? How do we make this, how do we do the back office operations? Like, what is it? It’s not always just, well just go ask the founder or the manager or whatever.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah, and I think it’s important to recognize that when we start talking about this topic, we’re not just saying, oh, create a course, but everything in one course and everybody gets access to it.

A lot of people at the corporate level have different, tiers of information they wanna share with people, and you’re able to do that through, you know, most learning management systems. You’re, you’re, you know, when it comes to corporate training, you could say. Directors get, you know, these courses and managers get these courses and clerks get these courses.

So you can be super, super specific and distribute the training in a way that makes sense for your business.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and even tools like LifterLMS groups can help with that.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh yeah.

Chris Badgett: And, and in terms of like, oh, well this is. This is for like, if you have multiple franchises with locations and each location is a new group and so on.

There’s so many different ways to organize it and make sure you control the access the way you wanna, the way you want to control it. Why, what, anything else about why you think WordPress is a great fit? ’cause I gotta, like in the early days when we launched Lifter. It’s predominantly the creator economy, like the YouTuber, the coach, the subject matter expert.

These were our first customers, but then Kurt showed up in his office cubicle interested in like getting really excited. Tell us more about that moment of like, why WordPress, why LifterLMS.

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Kurt Von Ahnen: Well this is probably the number one target channel for our agency Mana No Mas. And it’s because of my experience at the corporate level.

These corporate companies that I worked at, where I was in charge of the learning programs, the learning, you know, learning departments, their budgets were, I mean, for me. I started to get used to the numbers, but for a person outside of corporate training, the numbers seem huge. So when, when you look at, you know, hey, we’ve got this commercial product that you know, we need to train.

2,500 people on, and, and you think, okay, and they build that up. These corporations, again, they made these decisions maybe 8, 12, 15 years ago, and they, they made a decision that said, we’re gonna use, you know, this type of software and this type of platform, and this is, you know, how we’re gonna afford this, right?

How we’re gonna, we’re gonna budget for this. What a lot of people don’t recognize is these companies are literally budgeting. A quarter million dollars a year to a half a million dollars a year to run these e-learning websites. And so part of my enthusiasm when, when Chris met me in the office hours was, here I am this guy who’s authorizing $400,000 a year for hosting and maintenance of a learning management system for a corporation.

And I’m sitting there thinking to myself. I can host a website in WordPress, you know, super cheap. But for corporate enterprise purposes, let’s say even if I paid three grand a year for the hosting, that’s $3,000. And then I was looking at the price of LifterLMS and a couple of CRM tools and a couple of things I’d like to plug in.

And now let’s say I spend another. $2,000 on software for the year, let’s just say that, right? So maybe I’m at $5,000 for the year for the software, the hosting, and now it’s just my time that, that it’s gonna go into like the, the maintenance side of it. And, uh, I really started to look at it as an opportunity.

And not that I’m gonna take $5,000 in costs and, you know, a couple hundred hour, couple hundred hours of my life every year and sell that to a company for $400,000. That’s, that’s not, that’s not the picture that was in my head. The picture that was in my head, Chris, was we can create. E-learning now in WordPress with Lifter that looks better, feels better, functions better, can play the same legacy content that some of these companies insist on keeping and using, which I fully understand.

And we can go from three to $500,000 a year on maintenance and hosting to, I can run that as an agency for a company now. 60, 70, $80,000 a year. Our margins are strong, our product is superior, and the company is, you know, saving 65 to 80% of their e-learning costs by using us. So that’s how I got excited.

So, so when I started to plan and exit from the corporate world and do my own agency, I was like, there’s a whole world of, of corporate clients. That are paying for purpose-built SCORM websites, or they’re in Learn Upon, or Bridge or Blackboard or something, but those e-learning sites that they’re paying the retail plus dollars for, they don’t have all the features that a WordPress CMS delivers with an LMS embedded in it.

And so we’re able to give them something much, much better and more fulfilling. For less of the investment. And it’s, it’s kind of a backwards thought for a lot of the people that run the businesses. So a lot, it’s too good to be true kind of thing. It’s, it’s almost a hard sell. It’s

Chris Badgett: too cheap.

Kurt Von Ahnen: But once we get them and we treat them well, they’ll never leave.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And the cool thing about Mana No mas too, like I know the WordPress freelancers and agencies out there listening are like, they’re getting excited because they’ll be like. I love life coaches as an example, but that’s an example of a subject matter expert with a particular expertise. There’s only so much a life coach would be willing to pay for an LMS website.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But if you start, if you do it for a corporate client, it’s just, it’s much higher value to their business impact and to their. Value generation and asset protection and stuff like that. It’s a different game altogether, but they’re not just hiring you to put the best hosting theme, WordPress plugins together.

Manano Nomas also has like the knowhow of how corporate training works and where the friction points are. And

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, because

Chris Badgett: you, you, I know you end up not just building a website, but actually. Kind of coaching your clients through the transformation of installing, uh, effective corporate training in the organization.

Not to mention the fact that it’s not just getting the technology implemented and, and the business buy-in, but you also know how to structure e-learning content ’cause you’re a trainer. So

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: You know how to just help remove all that friction and coach them to success.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. It’s a thank you, that’s flattering.

But yeah, having some curriculum development expertise where you can come in and, and you can do a needs assessment with them and based on their, based on their vertical for industry, you know, is it an industry that has an appetite for long form training, which some still do, that’s great, but you know, hey, do we take this existing legacy content and break it down into, you know, more of a micro learning situation where we really.

Take advantage of some of that learner psychology. We know about, you know, about dopamine hits and, and little short wins and, and making things happen. Do we gamify it? Do we give people, you know, badges and prizes for accomplishing certain things? You see corporate training’s completely different than course creator.

You know, marketplaces, if we think about corporate training, it’s all about course completion. It’s all about, you know, current certification in a certain job set and. The corporate training that they offered previously on those outdated websites with the old legacy content. It’s not entertaining. It’s not fun.

There’s no dopamine hit, there’s no leaderboard, there’s no, there’s no engagement. It’s, you do it ’cause you need to do it. This needs to be done by Wednesday. Hey, if you don’t have this done by Wednesday, I can’t give you a check on Friday. Like that. That’s like corporate training has this like overlord sensation to it.

You know where, where everyone kind of dreads it. But there’s a way to reinvest in corporate training. And, and again, this makes me sound overly hopeful. I think sometimes, but I still say it this way. People could reinvest in corporate training. Leverage the tools of WordPress on a platform like lifter, LMS, you, you can gamify it, you can make it fun.

You can create micro learning. And then with corporate training, what’s really, really important is a lot of corporate training needs involve blended learning, which means you want to have a, a strategy to reduce costs and, and cost corporately refer to like travel, hotel per diem, you know, all that stuff, right?

And so, you want to create content that gives them as much effective theory online as possible. And then once they complete and certify themselves in the theory side of it online, then you bring them in for a consolidated, succinct in-person practicum where they demonstrate whatever those skills need to be.

So a perfect example of that is the work I did at Ducati. When I worked at Ducati. Their training was contract based and it was kind of scattered. It was, they did like local in-person trainings. Uh, and it was like a two week session for technicians to get certified as, as a motorcycle technician. What, what I did in my first year at Ducati was I took all the theory from that course.

And I built a curriculum where the technicians could certify themselves for theory online. First, they had to successfully complete and test out of all the online training first. Then they came to a one week practicum course where we refreshed the training, reviewed some high points of the training, just to make sure everybody was on the same page.

Then we put him in a workshop and we said, okay, each technician gets an opportunity to display the skills. They learned through the online training and once we could witness that, they actually could, you know, perform the skillset, we could certify them so they could work on customers motorcycles.

Corporately, the benefit was we cut the training budget in half from 2013 to 2014. We cut the budget in half, but we certified twice as many technicians. So when you look at that from a corporate expenditure standpoint, that is not. That is not an expensive training. That is an asset of training.

Chris Badgett: I love that.

And one other note on the asset thing is sometimes when you get really good at corporate training, you actually create a new product that you can sell. Like you would know better than me, but. For example, a lot of people have studied the Toyota production system, which is a, uh, it’s like how Toyota does what they do.

Their stuff is so good that made Toyota so effective that it became stuff that other companies would invest in. I don’t know who wrote the book on it, or if Toyota actually sold it or licensed it or whatever, but. You can’t, your corporate training can be so awesome in how you train your salespeople that you can just train.

You can then sell that training to other people who have salespeople, which is

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: In the franchise space, that’s super, super common where the, the main company will make, like addendum training, right. So like different specialty training, and then they’ll sell that to their franchisees as upgrades.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. See, it’s an asset. You, you know it, I know it. We’re trying to get every, everybody to know it. The reality is, if you really think about it, every company in the world is an education company. They just, a lot of ’em don’t realize it. So once you realize that it’s, it’s really mind blowing when you think about it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I was gonna say, I actually do a local talk here for entrepreneurs about why every company needs to have a learning management system.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Just onboarding people. If I hire a new contractor to come into Ana Nomas to help me with social media or SEO or you know, helping build things in zip wp, I literally just send them to a section of our course and say, this is what I hired you for.

You know, I’m gonna pay you for the time to take this section of training, but then you have everything you need to perform the task I hired you for.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah. That’s that’s awesome. Tell, tell us about, the kind of corporate training clients that you work with at your agency. Like, who’s a good fit and what do you offer and how should they get in touch with you?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Do, do you want the secret mojo on, on how to work through the nonsense or do you, do you wanna just know what I do?

Chris Badgett: Uh, all of it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So usually when you work with corporate, the first person you talk to is not the person that you want to talk to. Someone reached out to you, or your marketing landed in somebody’s mailbox and, and it, and it got the actual, you know, web form filled out or the lead came in somehow.

So when you work with corporate clients, it’s super important that before you start doing like. Needs assessments and proposals and, and really getting wrapped up in what this project could look like. You gotta make sure that you have the actual stakeholders within your circle of communication. So sometimes it’s harder than it seems.

Uh, but, uh, Chris will tell you I’m a pretty direct communicator, so, uh, I just ask people, I just flat out ask people. I have a really good story that maybe I’ll share sometime about how I landed the actual position at Ducati. It’s pretty funny ’cause I basically just told the whole room of people, I said, I’m pretty sure whoever makes the decision isn’t in this room right now.

So we can have a conversation later. And thank goodness I said that ’cause it worked out perfect. Working with corporate clients, you gotta find the stakeholders first. You have to, you have to find them, identify them, and then make sure that you have their attention or their buy-in. Like I said, corporately, the people that really make the decisions, the people that really, you know, draw out the spreadsheets and the budgets for their different divisions or departments, typically they’ve been in the game for a bit.

They, they, they’re, they’re tired. They’re, they’re just trying, they’re not really looking for changes, right. We, this is the way we do it. ’cause this is the way we’ve always did it. Right. So it’s, you, you’re trying to overcome that. And I’ll be honest with you, Chris, if I feel that there’s. Too much of an obstacle there, or this has taken too much of my personal energy to educate them on why this is a great move for their business.

I just move on to the next lead. You know, I, I don’t try to convert people that aren’t really looking to be converted. I want people that very willingly are looking forward to the breath of fresh air that we give their company. So. Working with corporate clients, the main thing is finding the right person inside the company.

And then the next step, Chris, is something I think that most free, most freelancers. Bail and, and totally dismiss it, but I think a lot of agencies do too. And that is, you gotta sell discovery. You, you, it’s not like you’re gonna talk to some dude for 30 or 45 minutes and then know what the project’s gonna be.

You gotta,

Chris Badgett: well, you don’t instantly know like, okay, well you need exactly this corporate training after this kind of. Implementation after a quick conversation.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, I mean, you can, you can dream build with somebody pretty quickly, but when it comes to, Hey, what’s the scope of work actually gonna look like?

I think the only way to really tackle that is through paid discovery and where you say, Hey, I’m gonna need 4,000, 5,000, $8,000, whatever you. Think you can, you can muster, but, and you have to come up with work that justifies the expense, obviously. But you are going to interview multiple stakeholders within the corporation, depending on the size of the corporation, because marketing’s gonna want one thing.

Sales is gonna want something different. Uh, operations is gonna be like a whole different channel and world to talk to. And then there’s customer service and then of course hr. And so you’re gonna have to get information. From all of those stakeholders as leaders. And you gotta remember that in a lot of corporate frameworks, it really does come down to almost like design by committee, which is uh, uh.

That’s like a phrase that most people hate. But the trick to this is out of all those people that you interview, out of all those people that you have in the stakeholder circle, you have to figure out how do you make yourself the hub? How do you become the project manager where you’re actually in charge of what’s happening on the project, and they’re just kind of along for the information.

They’re not really making decisions. You’re informing them and you’re telling ’em that you’re the expert in the space. And then if you can make that happen. It’s gonna be a lot smoother sailing for you. If you don’t do proper discovery and you let somebody else, or, or two or three other voices percolate to the top, you’ve got a disaster on your hands and you’re probably gonna get sued at the end.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I like what you’re saying too, like about the mindset of

. Group think isn’t always a bad thing.

Chris Badgett: Like you need to just, you need to get inside like what all these different stakeholders want. ’cause you’re not just building a website, you’re like working within an organization and you need to meet their needs.

And all the stakeholders need to be left better off than how you found them. And that requires a discovery process. You can’t just like. Kind of hold your finger up in the air and guess what would be perfect for this company?

Kurt Von Ahnen: It’s weird because I know that there’s people that’ll will watch this.

I know that there’s people that, that will listen to what we’re saying and they’ll be like, oh, that’s silly. I’m just gonna need these three plugins. I’m gonna slap those in, and then I’m gonna show them a sample course, and then they can build what they want to fill in the gaps for their courses. And from a freelancer perspective.

That might work for a course creator or that might work for a very small startup or something like that. But if you want to get into the, into the real corporate training space where you’re dealing with department heads and operational managers in, in multiple locations and, and things like that, like imagine trying to sell Audi of America.

A new e-learning platform. I worked at a bunch of different Audi training centers and I know 35 of the people that, that work there and train people. Like you need to have a relationship with those people so that you can do the needs assessment. You can come up with a plan of attack and a strategy, and then you need to relay it to them to get their buy-in where you let them know that, Hey, I’ve heard you.

I know what you’re asking for, but this is our answer to that and this is how we’re gonna proceed. Then you execute and you execute well. You execute on budget, and you execute on time, and you deliver on time and under budget. And then the project has a chance to land and expand to steal one of Chris’s favorite phrases.

That’s that’s one of my skill sets by the way. I land and expand. Hey, what’s next?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, if somebody out there is running a business, whether it’s small, medium, or large. They understand the value of corporate training and they want some help, and they want to leverage the power customizability and affordability of WordPress Lifter and, and work with a leader in the space and an innovator, and a consultant, and an implementer in the space like you and your agency.

What should they do from here? How should they connect with you?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Our website is manana Nomas, uh, so that’s like tomorrow no more, right? But manana nomas.com. Uh, I’m also the only Kurt Van Onan on LinkedIn. If you’d rather connect on LinkedIn and then see what other things are linked to or who’s in my circles there.

If you wanna research me more before you contact me, that’s fine. And then anything on social media is Ano Nomas or Kurt Van, and I’m super easy to find and connect with.

Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming back on the show and thank you for bringing the corporate training use case to LifterLMS. ’cause I don’t know if I’ve ever said it directly, like you were the first one I saw where like, oh, this is somebody in this use case who’s here.

Interested, excited, passionate, just trying to help. People and businesses is, it’s awesome. So thank you for, for joining us on the Journey.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, you’re, you’re very welcome. And, and just to give people a little sense of reassurance about what Chris is saying about the corporate training thing, the free core Lifter plugin is usually sufficient to get corporate training launched.

’cause you’re not selling the training, you’re delegating the training to staff. So you don’t need the, the payment gateways and some of the marketing tools.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that’s the key with corporate training and SOPs, standard operating procedures and things like that is the key is just a start.

So a good content management system and learning management system together gives you everything you need

Kurt Von Ahnen: and we can always scale later.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Awesome, Kurt. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. We’ll have to do this again. In fact, we will likely see you in the next episode.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowAccording to Emily Middleton, the way she operates WP Course Guide is purposefully distinct from a standard agency or freelancer model since she bases her company on close, intimate connections with her clients.Her early exposure to entrepreneurship through her family and her long-standing relationship with LifterLMS, which provided her with a strong feeling of commu nity, trust, and mentoring from the start of her career, have had a significant impact on her approach. Emily also explains key LMS website-making strategies using WordPress.

As a result, she views each project as a part of a greater human tale rather than a straightforward technical assignment, treating clients as partners and frequently as friends, and engaging emotionally in their success.

She highlights the value of live collaboration, particularly via Zoom, stating that it enables her to work more quickly, prevent misunderstandings, and gain a deeper understanding of the tactical and emotional difficulties her customers are having. Emily sees her work as both a technical problem-solver and a soothing presence, and many of the individuals she assists come to her during stressful times when a website is faulty, a launch is failing, or a business choice feels overwhelming. Face-to-face communication allows her to pick up on tone, impatience, reluctance, or doubt, all of which might disclose deeper business issues that would not come out through email alone.

Emily also talks about how her work is greatly impacted by ADHD. Instead of viewing it as a drawback, she characterizes it as a strength that enables her to think fast, adjust rapidly, pick up on minute details, and maintain a high level of engagement when working with others.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest today. Her name is Emily Middleton. She’s from WP Course Guide. You can find that@wpcourseguide.com. Emily runs an agency. She specializes in a lot of LMS related work. She’s been around the block for about a decade, maybe more.

I don’t know. It’s been a long time. So there’s tons of experience here. One of the things that Emily does differently is how she runs her agency and how she works with clients. We’re gonna start with that. But first, welcome back on the show. Emily.

Emily Middleton: Thank you for having me, Chris. I’m happy to be here.

Chris Badgett: Let’s start with WP Course Guide. I’ve always been impressed with how you work with clients. For example, we, Emily also does some work directly with LifterLMS and some of our. Live calls, like the Office Hours Mastermind that universe bundle and hire people get access to for a weekly office hours mastermind as well as our ask us anything calls, which happened weekly.

But one, one time we were getting together for a Zoom meeting and you were actually at one of your agency clients. Place, which was really interesting, and I’ve seen that before where you’d pop up on the radar and you’re like, hanging out with LifterLMS users and clients of WP Course Guide. Tell us your approach to working with people and how you’re, you perhaps approach it a little differently than other freelancers or agencies when they work with clients.

Emily Middleton: Thank you. That’s a really good question. I, think it’s a funny thing that. That I do, that’s bleeding my personality into my business and part of how I run things. I do business on a very personal level, and I think the way I was intro to business was on a very personal level, so my. Mother did some work with lifterLMSlong time ago, like accounting work and client management work when LifterLMS was an agency Right.

Doing code box stuff and then the LifterLMS product launch. My mom was around at the time and I think Chris, you might have found her on Hire my mom.com which is funny ’cause you hired my mom there. And there was a little bit of nepotism, but I feel like I’ve proved myself because I really embraced Lifter and you as a mentor helped me with like my entrepreneurial journey.

Growing up through LifterLMS was like a family to me. And my granddad who inspired me to be an entrepreneur in the first place was a family member. And having that sense of family in business from the beginning, as I was a kid, being influenced by my entrepreneurial grandfather who was bringing me in on his projects and his random apps and his ideas, integrating me however he could.

And then. Having this sort of freelancer culture with my mother as a peer who is like recommending work to me. And I remember that I started with LifterLMS on the LMS cast. So I would this podcast we’re on now, I would write the summaries and the tweets and all the kind of summative text that went along with the episode.

And that was like my integration was as a young person. I had that opportunity to engage with Lifter as a form of online education, but I was also educating myself at the same time. And there was a sense of familial nature because you were my mentor and my mom did some work with the business. And so I treat that family culture carrying forward into the clients I have today.

I friends with most of my clients. I just had a client die. The first client. Who’s ever died and it really struck me. I remember seeing the email and then falling apart in the car. I take all the work I do super personally, and that’s why you’ll find me popping up at clients’ houses, going out doing, cool stuff, partying whatever we do.

Building LMSs.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s important to remember the humans on the internet, behind the website, behind the companies, behind the support tech, support. A client may have goals and dreams and it’s like challenging the project you’re working on, but there’s still a human there and with emotions and hopes and dreams and all that stuff.

So you it’s like holistic medicine. You gotta treat the whole thing, not just one part. There’s lots of different ways to run a agency and it can be very transactional with like minimal communication, but. That’s not very holistic and, the way you do it adds a lot of the humanity back into the types of work we do online, which is part of what gets lost, which is part of what we try to do at LifterLMS in terms of how we build the software.

We’re trying to connect the humans, not just facilitate transactions and content delivery things like the community aspects of lifter or the coaching aspects of the software. And things like that. So that’s, super cool. The other thing you do, which I find super fascinating, and it’s the way I would wanna be treated as a client, I don’t want to just be treated as a client.

I wanna be treated as a collaborator or, and I don’t just want to delegate work to an agency or a freelancer. I want to collaborate with them. Because like I may have my expertise, you have yours, let’s mash ’em together and see what happens. And if all that happens is you sign a contract and then you ask for the content and then you deliver the website, there’s very little collaboration there.

So tell us about the way you like to collaborate. And I’ve also seen you do it at speed. A lot of freelancers and agencies don’t like to get on the phone or the Zoom with clients because. It can feel time consuming, but when you get on a Zoom with a client, you’re actually creating work product at the same time, working way faster than a bunch of emails back and forth and time delays.

So tell us about that.

Emily Middleton: Yeah, I do a lot of work with clients on Zoom. I created this system somewhat out of necessity, and for me it works really well because I have a DHD. I struggle with reading things. I’m dyslexic and so when I’m hit with an email that’s multiple paragraphs, I honestly get overwhelmed.

And so I, if I’m gonna be handling emails, I might need someone to help me on my team, or I might need to take longer amounts of time to read it. So for me, it’s much faster to have a conversation over Zoom. I think you, as the audience members might get an impression. I talk and think like very quickly.

I’m just like, my mind’s all over the place. And I liked what you said about a holistic approach. That’s what I say in my business all the time, is that. We might be dealing with a problem, but that problem could be a symptom of a larger issue. And so when we’re on Zoom, when we’re communicating, we can sense more about what people are seeing, the confidence in their voice.

Maybe they’re frustrated about a certain issue. I can pick up more on tone. I can pick up more on what people are going through as a business challenge. I think a lot of business owners. Especially the ones who are stressed enough to hire someone to help them in the capacity. I often help people like a medical, like a firefighter or a coming in to be a medic on a website.

That’s often my role at projects and that can be really stressful when you’re like, when you need a firefighter to come help fix your WordPress website. You are probably stressed because something has blown up, or you wanna implement something for your business, you need to make something work. It can sometimes be stressful.

And so when we’re stressed, we often lock in on problems that might not be exactly the right solution. And when we communicate over Zoom, when we can get online, not only does it help me with my process of understanding and helping people and showing kind of the love that I have for my business, my clients, and the whole ecosystem that comes across.

But I can also get the light in the client’s eyes. Like we can figure out like what’s going on in the business? Like where are you struggling? Where are you successful? I have gotten so much help created for clients when in passing they make a sigh or a comment about, oh God, I gotta do all this marketing stuff now.

Or I am really dreading doing this. They just make like a passing comment about something and then that opens up a whole door where we can say like, why are you dreading this issue? What specifically about it are you stuck with? How long have you been stuck with this problem? And what support do you feel like if you could just press a magic button and have support in this area, what would that support look like?

We can ask questions like that if we’re live on, Zoom, and it, really makes like a friends and family kind of vibe, which is my, thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I totally get it. And let’s park for a second on a DHD.

Emily Middleton: Yeah,

Chris Badgett: I think it’s actually since we’re talking so much about family here, my grandfather once said it takes all kinds to make a world, right?

And he was like a manager, executive guy running a mill. But he that, that comment always stuck with me. So when you think about. There, there’s actually a ton of people that have a DHD. It’s very common and if you don’t have a DHD it may feel like different or uncomfortable to work with somebody with A DHD as an example.

But with everything as in life, it’s a double-edged sword. There’s also strengths to it. So one of the things I’ve noticed with working with you is you’re super. Fast and you’re very in the present moment, right? Which is super powerful. So we could be having a conversation, I could have a conversation with you while another part of your brain is like working on some project that we’re working on together.

And then this other thing comes up and you’re just able to adapt like so fast. And you’re also in tune with, like you said, the nuances of I just know in collaborating with you that. You don’t miss much like a DHD doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention, it just means I spread my attention around to lots of places.

And by the way, my attention is very open and like receptive, which creates like really strong collaboration, particularly when you’re working with a client and you don’t live in their and breathe their industry. But you’re open and you’re listening and you want to combine your skills with their industry and their goals and stuff.

It’s pretty cool. See, I’ve seen that in action. So good on you for that.

Emily Middleton: Thank you.

Chris Badgett: Since it comes up a lot, it’s just, I have to ask what’s your current approach to using AI in the work you do, you’re, you write code, you create content. You have to communicate with people and do emails and stuff.

There’s graphic design, which you do a lot of. What’s, what are your, what’s your AI tips or things you do these days?

Emily Middleton: That’s a good question and I appreciate, I wanna thank you for what you said. About the holistic approach and how the A DHD can be a superpower. I think a lot of, times people feel like they’re at a detriment for it, but it can work for you.

But ai, that’s another good use of A DHD if you struggle to focus, if you struggle to make task lists, whatever you specifically struggle with. AI can be a consultant in your business. Obviously the information AI is. Giving back to you has come back with questionable quality at 80% at, best with like accuracies and stuff.

So you wanna use AI in intelligent ways. But I did create a video and one of my most popular videos as of late was how to code with ai. And I’ve, taken the approach recently of I can’t stop people from coding with ai. I can just help them be safe about how they’re coding with ai. It’s it would be great if we’re like, Hey, code that AI writes. It could potentially have issues, it could break other parts of your website, and at worst it could potentially have malware style practices on your own website. It can be bad to create code with AI and just slap it onto your website, but people are gonna be doing it anyway there.

It’s an efficient solution, it’s an efficient tool, but with great power comes great responsibility, and at present it feels a little bit dangerous, so let’s make it safer. And so a lot of what I’ve been doing with AI is educating my clients on prompting. Specifically, how can we tell AI what its role is?

How can we tell AI what its limits are? How can we help AI help us understand our own problem? So when it comes to coding with ai, when it comes to developing marketing messages with ai, sometimes I will ask AI for copy because it’s, really easy for AI to help inspire getting the juices flowing and saying, give me 10 to 20.

Calls to action. I’m creating a button for my homepage, and this is my business. This is the product that we’re offering. We have a free lead magnet option for people to get involved with our organization with just an email, but we also have a paid offering. I want you to give me 10 options for what calls to action on my homepage could be, and I really want them to be compelling, to get people to click that button and I will generate you a list of 10 things.

You can tell it, Hey, this is. My favorite one of the lists that you had, can you gimme 10 more like it with just that kind of prompting around copywriting, you can already improve the process if you’re just trying to come up with copy out of your own mind. Oftentimes, people who are using LMSs or coming online are technical experts in their field, and sometimes they’re even teachers.

But when you’re online, you’re in this crazy ecosystem of. So many options for people to learn. They could go to YouTube, they could buy someone else’s course. Maybe your course doesn’t even come up page one on Google. So when we are fortunate enough to have someone land on our page, we really need to sell them on taking some action at that point.

AI can help you make copy. AI can help you with code, but you gotta make sure your copy’s not bland. You gotta make sure your code doesn’t blow up your website. You have to be able to structure the conversation with AI as if it’s like a super powerful child. It’s it doesn’t really know what it’s gonna break or how not to do things, but what it does know is a very powerful, like distillation tool of what information it can feed back to you.

So I, it was a little bit of a rambling answer, but does that answer your question?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to reinforce what Emily’s saying, if you go look at the title of this episode. That was written by ai. I, will choose it. I will give it some ideas, and I do exactly what you said. I’m like, okay, we talked about this, and this.

I need some podcast, some engaging podcast titles that would make somebody interested about the content to click and listen to the episode on Spotify or wherever. And it’ll give me 10 and oftentimes. I still have to tweak like, oh, this is 95% perfect, but I’m changing this word to that word. It’s good to go.

And it’s good. It’s better than what I would’ve done by myself, but I’m not just saying, Hey, just choose one for me and that sort of thing. Let’s talk about web hosting a little bit. As an agency as a freelancer, when you work with clients, a lot of times you hit like hosting problems.

We run into that at LifterLMS because it’s it’s a more heavy, complex piece of software, requires decent resources. Successful LMS sites require really good hosting for a lot of different reasons, and over time you start seeing patterns of oh, this person’s on this host and we’re having problems.

But anyways, I know you’ve run into that as an agency, like what are the. Web hosts that you really love these days. And I’m, I know it’s not an exhaustive list. There’s so many web hosts out there, there’s a lot of great ones, but which ones do you love working with? If you had a client who doesn’t already have something yet, and let’s say they already have a functioning business and they’re not worried about managed WordPress pricing, which is more than like the bargain basement.

Where would you send them to host their web, their LMS website?

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Emily Middleton: That’s a great question. I usually send my clients to Tan. For different size projects, I’ll recommend different hosting. A lot of clients I’ve been sending to tangible XP lately because Gabriel. Shows up on our office hours calls.

And so when you have a CEO of a hosting company who regularly comes to the LifterLMS office hours call, you know that LifterLMS is gonna be supported as a host there. And Gabriel’s been featured on the LMS cast, but so has Tom Fanelli from Conveo, right? And so there’s a lot of other great hosts on the LifterLMS recommended host list, and I wouldn’t blame you for going with any of them.

I have some posts on my website about my experiences with certain web hosts and which ones are often more difficult. I can say a avoid host Gator. I can say that don’t, if you’re on Host Gator, you wanna probably get off Host Gator if you’re doing LMS specifically. Like it’s a complicated, type of plugin that requires a lot of resources. People are logging in, content’s changing based on whether you’re logged in, logged out, there’s access restriction, there’s purchases happening. One second, you’re just a prospect who’s on the checkout page the next second. You’re a student who’s logged in and taking a course.

We need a web host that can support this more fluid functionality that LifterLMS wants to offer on the website. And that’s essential for us. And so I’ve been sending people the tangible XP WP Engine or the LifterLMS recommended host list because that list does change. And you can’t really go wrong in that area.

I’ve just noticed that my customers on tangible xpe, I’ve never had a single complaint and that it’s like LifterLMS specific hosting. It’s not WordPress managed hosting. It’s like LifterLMS. And I know there’s different levels of hosting, like WP Tonic does is Kurt and Jonathan, who you may have seen in the podcast ecosystem.

If you’re watching this, they do a concierge hosting very hands on, but a lot of options out there.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about WordPress itself. WordPress has a challenge of younger people coming in. I’m of the belief that the websites and WordPress is not dead. It’s literally 50% of the web websites on the internet and people use websites all the time, even ai.

Yeah, it’s cool. Where it’s trained on a lot of websites, many of them, WordPress it reminds me of the early days of internet marketing when people would say email is dead. Email has never died. It is still alive and it’s changed. It’s evolved. People use it differently. It’s harder to get people to open.

People are overwhelmed in their inbox and things like that. So the changes. Email will never die, at least not anytime soon. I would say the same thing about websites and WordPress as an example. It is sad to me that I don’t see as many younger people getting into building websites and to their credit, there’s social media has exploded.

TikTok didn’t exist like five years ago or four years ago, whatever. It was like a lot of people spend a lot of time on TikTok, but when they need to go buy something, they’re still gonna end up on a website. There’s the TikTok shop, but they’re either gonna be on the TikTok shop, amazon.com, a Shopify store, or a WooCommerce or some other lifter has e-commerce, like people use websites all the time.

But for a vibrant WordPress ecosystem it’s good for younger folks to get in. You’re a little bit older, I think, than half my age, and you’re very much involved in WordPress, partially because of your family, so you just got, you just got into it very early on and stayed with it, which I commend you for a lot of great things happen by just staying the course.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And it’s easy. There’s also a question in there, like, how does somebody with a DHD stay the course for a decade? Like, why is it, so I’m, painting a lot of broad questions, but what do you particularly love about WordPress and why have you stayed the course? And how what, are some young people, younger people I’m thinking like.

Back in my day or whatever. Now I’m sounding like an old person, but there 15 year olds were like building websites and like having fun and writing HTML and CSS and stuff like that. Or maybe it’s a thing where you’re a little bit older, like you’re getting into your career and you’re like, you start realizing you need a website for yourself and then somebody else is like, Hey, can you build me one of those and stuff like that.

But. Tell. Tell me about your take on WordPress and staying with it.

Emily Middleton: I like your comparison to social media. I think there’s a lot of opportunities out there, especially for young people to get engaged with social media and then get engaged with Wix or Shopify, which are doing like a lot of marketing on social media, a lot of marketing paying.

YouTubers to talk about WS or Squarespace. So when I talk to young people, WS and Squarespace are the ones that come up as far as CMSs. WordPress doesn’t really come up for younger people, and Shopify, of course. But

I would say WordPress not doing the level of entry level marketing. I don’t quite know how to categorize what Wix Brand awareness.

Chris Badgett: Like brand,

Emily Middleton: brand awareness.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. It’s like brand awareness. But even when you open the product, if you like open the box, so when you open your WordPress website for the first time, which everyone listening to this podcast has probably opened a WordPress website for the first time.

And if they haven’t yet, they’re going too soon. And what they’re gonna see is like a blog platform. Hey, this is what you’re gonna create. It’s look, we got a first blog post for you. That’s awesome. It’s like where do you go from there? If you’re not trying to create a blog platform, if you’re trying to go with an LMS, if you’re trying to create an e-commerce store, you are gonna have to go out of your way to find WooCommerce.

You’re gonna have to go outta way your way to find Fluent cart. You’re gonna have to find Lyft. You’re gonna have to find your LMS tool, or you’re gonna have to be looking up, how do I build an online course? Then you’re gonna think about teachable versus like LifterLMS, and it’s oh, if I get lifter LMS, I’m gonna have to use whatever WordPress is, and then you’re gonna learn about WordPress that way.

So there’s multiple ways to come into this, but I specifically started my WordPress experience with LifterLMS in WooCommerce. I didn’t really learn WordPress before Learning Lifter. I didn’t learn WordPress before learning WooCommerce. I learned them. At the same time, I was thinking, how do I create a fully customizable online course platform and I’m using LifterLMS, how do I do wild eCommerce websites?

I’m using WooCommerce and car flows. That was what was available at the time. And so that was my experience coming in and that’s why I think a lot of younger people are not coming in to the WordPress ecosystem, but I think a lot of younger people. Who are 25 to 30, they are getting jobs, building Wix sites, Squarespace websites, and then realizing that the capabilities they have in those areas are limited.

And they’re migrating to, like creating Figma websites as designers. And then things like. The bricks builder or etch, enticed them in using their CSS designer knowledge into WordPress. So many ways that you could come into WordPress, but you probably didn’t start at WordPress unless your mother was like working for a WordPress business.

Sorry. I that’s why I think it takes younger people a little bit longer to get into it. And A DHD and staying the course I.

Chris Badgett: A DHD is good in WordPress because there’s like tens of thousands of plugins and themes and infinite customizability. You can, spend an eternity exploring WordPress ’cause it’s so vast, right?

Emily Middleton: Yes. You can spend an eternity exploring WordPress and there’s a lot of noise coming your way and so you have to figure out what to exactly to focus on and. So with a DHD, it can be a superpower in that you lock in on certain things. Like I’ve used a lot of other LMSs other than Lifter, but I’ve used LifterLMS more than I’ve used every other LMS combined.

So I’ve really doubled down and I’ve been fortunate to double down on LifterLMS because it’s just got so much customizability, so many features, Chris. A founder and a owner. And that’s something that’s so rare to find in any business online, especially ones that have been around for over a decade. A lot of people get into online business and it’s like super dry and super boring, and it’s super hard.

And so basically they’re trying to be like, Hey, in three to five years we’re gonna sell this thing. We’re gonna take it from the ground and we’re gonna sell it for $10 million. But when you have like a lifestyle brand, when you have founders and passionate community and people behind the products. And you, specifically find the products people put their lives into.

There’s a level of interest and intrigue and fun that comes with that. And so I think part of staying the course is you’re a passion, Chris. I imagine if you were to sell your company and leave WordPress, I might too. I’m literally following you. You’re like actually like a leader to me to be in the industry and have your life in this.

We talk about all kinds of things that aren’t WordPress, like investing and personal stuff, and. I see you as a leader in this industry. So literally if you’re gonna sell out of the industry, I will too. I’m like but I’m following your pilot light here.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. And that’s the that’s the power of personal brand.

And again, like the humanity on the internet, like choosing software isn’t just choosing software. You’re choosing the people behind the software. And if you take an interest in that. Even from afar, like if you’re not gonna work at the company or anything, but you get into the people behind the company it’s, that’s the future.

I shouldn’t say that’s the future, but in, in a world of ai. There’s a, that whole human crafted thing of hey, check out this cool LMSI vibe coded over the weekend. And then you’re, getting clients and then you find this LMS that has like a bunch of passionate people and community that have been there forever.

That’s a decision point. And yeah, it’s, and it is super interesting and you made some excellent points about younger people getting into WordPress. I think first of all, there’s so much more. So many more options. Like young kids want to be YouTubers when they grow up. My daughter included. And even me to agree.

I, I still wanna be a YouTuber when I grow up. But the and now there’s TikTok and Instagram and and even WordPress got a lot of new users by writing, like having a public blog. But people tend to write less now or write less depth. They become podcasters or the people that do right, they wanna do like a substack or beehive newsletter and sell ad spots on it or, sponsor spots and stuff.

So there’s just so much more competition that I think you’re right, is like there is no easy way. People find it when they need to find it in their life, when whatever they have is not serving them. Smart and how to market that. Especially like as WordPress, which doesn’t have a centralized marketing department.

It’s, just an interesting challenge. I don’t have the exact solution, otherwise I would’ve put it out there already. Let’s land the plane on WP Course Guide. Tell us about the ideal types of clients you work with and how they can get in touch with you.

Emily Middleton: The ideal types of clients I work with are.

A wide range of people, but specifically people who are stuck, frustrated, and confused. And ready to get unstuck. I have a lot of expertise because I devote my life to this is like a marketing tech strategy and. Really just getting people unblocked. If you’re blocked in copywriting, if you’re blocked and you need a custom plugin. If you’re blocked and you don’t even know where to start with WordPress or how to put LifterLMS together. Or how to choose your host, or how to connect your domain name to your host, you could be struggling with any of these things.

I’ve spent a decade working on this stuff almost every single day, and so I can help you with a vast, array of things. So those are the people I work with, and you can reach out to me on wp course guide.com. You can Google it. You can Google Magic Emily Middleton. You’ll find me one of those ways.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check wp course guide.com. There’s a contact link right at the top. And I wanna thank you for coming back on the show, Emily, and thank you for being part of the Lifter Mess story. Really appreciate it.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett offers a comprehensive overview to the top WordPress plugins in this episode for creating and expanding an LMS website that goes beyond the LifterLMS core. He begins by emphasizing that LifterLMS itself handles almost all of the fundamental LMS features, such as creating courses, student dashboards, user accounts, memberships, e-commerce with PayPal or credit card payments, group sales, and engagement tools like achievement badges, certificates, gamification, and behavior-based emails.

He does, however, stress that extra plugins are frequently required to operate a completely effective and user-friendly LMS site. He suggests the free User Switching plugin, which enables administrators to swap identities to solve difficulties as a student or instructor, and WP Mail Log, which records all transactional emails received from the site, including enrollment notices and password resets, for site administration and user experience. He suggests the free User Switching plugin, which enables administrators to swap identities to solve difficulties as a student or instructor, and WP Mail Log, which records all transactional emails received from the site, including enrollment notices and password resets, for site administration and user experience.

He emphasizes Document Library Pro, a commercial plugin for organizing and graphically displaying files while managing member access, and Embed Any Document, which can be used to display PowerPoint, Keynote, or PDF files within classes. Loco Translate is crucial for modifying the site’s language and material. He recommends Popup Maker for interesting popups and WP Fusion to sync users with automation solutions for marketing, CRM, and revenue management. He suggests utilizing Gravity View in conjunction with a form plugin like as Gravity Forms to gather and present user-submitted data for forms and data management. Additionally, SEO is crucial, and plugins like Rank Math and Yoast SEO may assist increase the exposure of a website.

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Episode Transcript:Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today I’m doing a solo episode on the best plugins, the best WordPress plugins for your learning management system website. Besides, of course, LifterLMS, we’re gonna go over free plugins that I use on every LMS site that I build.

Also some paid ones that are my top recommendations for the best plugins. Now, an LMS site is not just courses and memberships and e-commerce and student dashboards. It’s also a fully functioning website that needs, you know, things from marketing, things for operations, things for user experience, and things for scaling for when your website gets really successful.

So think about lifter LMS as the best all-in-one learning management system solution for WordPress. It covers all the LMS features. Everything from courses, student dashboards, user accounts, reporting, uh, gamification, engagement, all that stuff, all that LMS stuff is there. All the membership stuff is there for course, bundles.

For locking down access to other parts of your site, outside of the courses. And, uh, also lifter LMS covers the e-commerce piece. So whether you’re selling with, with taking credit card payments or PayPal payments, or you’re using WooCommerce or you want to do group sales where somebody buys a bunch of seats for a group of people, that’s all covered within the lifter LMS E-commerce.

Then all the engagement features for gamification, like achievement badges, certificates, behavior-based emails that are triggered based on actions in the LMS. This is all included in lifter LMS. So just about everything you need for a learning management system website is covered by or LMS, however.

Lifter. LMS also plays nice in the sandbox with thousands and thousands of other WordPress plugins that do very specific things, some of which have specific integrations for lifter LMS built into their plugin. So I’m gonna go over my top ones today. I do recommend that. You know, you take a minimalist approach to plugins, even when you install lifter LMS, if you have the LifterLMS Infinity bundle, our top plan, I don’t necessarily recommend that you install every single thing we make and turn it on unless you’re gonna use all those features.

’cause LifterLMS has a suite of about 25 different plugins that do different things, but you likely don’t need every single one of those. The main part of this. Podcast is gonna be about the top non lifter LMS plugins that I recommend. So let’s start with some sort of utility plugins for site management and user experience.

So these are two free plugins that I put on every site, and you may not have heard of them. So the first one, which is probably the first plugin I put on any LMS website besides lifter LMS plugins, is called user switching. That’s a free plugin. You can just do a search for it. It’s made by somebody named John Blackborn, and I absolutely love this plugin.

All you do is you install it and what happens is. When you go to the users on your website, if you have this plugin installed and activated, you can switch to that user, which is super helpful for experiencing your website as somebody else on your website. So when somebody tells you, like if you’re doing support for your website, your LMS website, and they say something like, I can’t find X, or I can’t do X, or This thing isn’t working.

The first thing I’ll do is I’ll go to the users on my website. I’ll switch to that user, which is powered by the user switching plugin, and then try to recreate what they’re saying is not working or they can’t find, and I can literally just experience the website as them in the role that they are usually as a student or a teacher on the website.

So that’s super helpful. I use that plugin literally every single day. The next one is called WP Mail Log. Now what that does is it captures all the emails that are sent from your website so that you can look at them. And what I mean by that is we have a whole article on the Lit LMS website about the five different types of emails.

I definitely recommend you check that out. There’s a type of email called transactional email. So these are the most simple example of a transactional email is when somebody forgets their password and they click the for forgot password link. Uh, they enter their email, the website sends them an email, uh, to click a link can choose their new password.

That email communication is transactional email that is not a broadcast email or a marketing email. When Lifter LMS sends email notifications, and there’s many of these, many of these, like a purchase receipt or uh, an enrollment notification or, one of our premium add-ons like private areas, tells a user a new private post is ready for them to look at.

These are all transactional emails. So if you ever want to see all the emails that your website is sending, not from your CRM or your marketing automation tool, but from the website itself, WP Mail log, which is made by a company called WP Vibes, is fantastic for that. So it’s really helpful for just, if you, if someone ever says like, I didn’t get the email, you can go look and you can see like, oh, yep, here it is.

It was timestamped, it was sent. At this time, I can see the content of the email and so on. So, WP Mail log, I highly recommend and that is also free. The next is. Content delivery and learning assets related plugins. So WordPress is a content management system. You can stick anything you’ve seen on the internet.

You can stick on a WordPress website or specifically an LMS website inside of lessons or on course pages or anywhere on your site. Really. So there’s a plugin called Embed any document that I absolutely love. The creator of that is a wsm. There’s a free version I use. They may have a pro version, but the reason I use this is WordPress is great at content management, but sometimes.

It needs a little boost for certain specialized types of documents. So if I ever wanna put, say, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation or a Apple keynote presentation inside of a lesson and I just want to put that PowerPoint file or that keynote file as the content, I can do that with embed any document and I’m just using the free plugin for that.

Which is also great with when you have that document in your WordPress media library using LifterLMS’s features to protect that content and make that media private so the public can never find that document. Only the people that are supposed to find it can find it. It’s pretty awesome. But anyways, go get yourself the embed, any document plugin.

Another one, which is a premium plugin made by Barn two is called Document Library Pro. This is awesome. What this allows you to do if your LMS website. Your courses, or your coaching programs have a lot of files like templates, document, PDF documents, cheat sheets. And spreadsheets, certain images, maybe CSV files, tons of different files are part of your membership or your LMS document.

Library Pro allows you to easily organize those, present those in a beautiful visual way, even inside of a table and stuff. Stuff like that. So, for example, the easiest way to think about it is if you have a coaching program, and let’s say you have 20 courses in there. It’s all sold through one membership.

They get the courses, but they also get this resource library. You can organize all those files using document Library Pro. And present them in a very visual way. LifterLMS will then kind of come on top of that and protect access to those files for your members. So go check out Document Library Pro, which is made by Barn two plugins.

The next thing I wanna talk about is just internationalization and customizing text and language on your website. The top plugin we recommend for that, which is also free is called Loco Translate. That has over a million installs. It has, it’s made by somebody named Tim W and. So basically you can translate a lifter LMS website without custom development.

Personally, I use loco translate in a little bit of a different way where. Let’s say I want to customize something that LifterLMS does or another plugin does. There’s the text and the content you put on your site. But there’s all these words and language all over your site. That are kind of automatically generated that you can’t edit.

So an example of that would be at the bottom of every LifterLMS lesson is a mark complete button. And you can’t edit that the words mark complete. But if you’re using loco translate, let’s say your site’s still in English, but you want it to say finish class instead of Mark complete. You could just load up loco translate, find the mark complete string, and change it to finish class.

Super fast, super easy. That’s using the Free Loco Translate plugin. The next area of of plugins. I want to talk about is marketing, CRM and revenue operations. So a top pick in the LifterLMS community is WP Fusion. That’s made by, very good plugins. So what WP Fusion does, they do have a free version, but I definitely recommend the paid version is it basically syncs your site with your CRM or marketing automation platform.

So, for example, LifterLMS has integration directly with Kit previously ConvertKit and MailChimp. Back when we were building those, there were many others we wanted to build. But then WP Fusion showed up and built integration with LifterLMS. Which means that whenever somebody enrolls in a course or becomes a user on your site, they’re automatically synced to your marketing automation or CRM tool.

And there’s many companies, many CRM marketing automation platforms, most of them are integrated with WP Fusion. So, besides Kit and MailChimp, there are many other popular ones like ActiveCampaign. Keep HubSpot, Zoho, CRM, Salesforce. All of these can be, are easily integrated using. WP Fusion. So when things happen on your WordPress LMS website, a user is created.

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Or you know, they enroll in a certain course and you want something to happen in the CRM or the marketing automation platform, or you want your users segmented by course so that they can be emailed as groups or cohorts separately based on their enrollment. That’s all possible with WP Fusion. It has some more fancy stuff.

It does. I definitely recommend you get a license to WP Fusion. The next one is Popup Maker by Code Atlantic, which is an awesome tool. Popup Maker has actually sponsored this podcast, so you might be seeing a popup maker, spot in this episode. But Popup Maker is incredible. I use it on all my sites.

I use it on lifter lms.com. I use it on Academy dot Lifterlms.com and many other sites that we have, and popup Maker has super deep integration to Lifter LMS, so Popup Maker allows you to use popups. Now, we have done a webinar with Popup Maker recently, where we go over all the details and how it works and what it does.

But there’s a lot of reasons to have tasteful, ethical, fun, engaging popups on your site. There’s things like exit intent. If somebody’s gonna leave and you want to pop a message before they go, or let’s say somebody clicks a button and you want something to pop up for them to enter their email to download a resource.

Or let’s say somebody’s abandoning a cart on a LifterLMS checkout and you want to throw a pop-up up with a discount code or remind them the value of what they’re purchasing or whatever. That’s all possible with popup maker and the integration is super deep with lifter LMS. It will really blow your mind once you start looking at all the things you can do with popup maker and lifter LMS together.

The next area I want to talk about is, using data forms and building custom experiences. Now Lifter, LMS has integration with four form plugins, gravity forms, ninja Forms, formidable forms, and WP Forms, OS form or, what’s it called? Mark West Guard’s form. WS form is also another great one. So every WordPress website needs a form plugin.

I recommend one of those five. I’m gonna use Gravity Forms as an example, simply because that’s what I’ve used for a long time on lifter lms.com. So all my form stuff is really done with Gravity forms because I’ve been using it forever. And the next tool I’m gonna tell you about, requires gravity forms to work.

But, yeah, you, you, you have a contact page on your site. Maybe you want to do an application process before people can join your coaching program or your membership. Maybe you wanna register people for something, or you want to collect email addresses so people can get a lead magnet or a resource to add value to them while growing your email list.

And again, WP Fusion, which I mentioned earlier, integrates with all these forms. So when people fill out these forms, it can pass the data to your marketing automation tool as well. So if you’re using Gravity Forms, I highly recommend you get Gravity View, which is made by Gravity Kit. This is a premium plugin that has deep integration with lifter LMS, and it kind of, we, we have episodes on this podcast with Zach Katz that you can check out.

If you want to go deep into gravity view and gravity kit and what all that does, but essentially, what gravity view allows you to do is take form data through a form and then display that data on your website wherever you want, however you want, as a view. So to give you a simple example, you could have a gravity form.

That people leave testimonials for your website. They fill out, like, let’s say the last lesson in your course. Ask people to leave a testimonial. They fill out the form, you know, they add their picture, they add their message, you know, they put in their website name all the pieces we need for an effective testimonial.

And then they submit it and it can either publish instantly to, to the front end or go through a moderation step where you, as the site owner would review it before it goes live, but it basically automates collection of data and displaying that data publicly. There’s all kinds of fancy stuff you can do with Gravity View too, inside of courses, like where, let’s say you have a course that helps somebody build a business.

And they are building a business plan as they go through the course, through the various lessons and they keep submitting their information one lesson at a time. All that form data is, collecting into a. What ultimately becomes a business plan, PDF and complete business plan. But you’re collecting that data and you get this visual view that only that user can see of their business plan.

So there’s so much you can do with Gravity View, check that out. The other area is SEO plugins, which are really helpful for getting traffic and building your. Reach in your audience and the amount of people that discover you over time.

SEO still matters even in a world of ai. So there’s, there’s very specific, SEO is even more important for LMS websites than more of a regular marketing site because so much content is behind a login.

So to get found organically through something like a Google search. You really want to have some public content on your site, like a blog, you know, informational pages and so on. And what SEO plugins do is they kind of make sure your site is in the right structure so search engines can read it. It gives you opportunity to modify things like meta descriptions.

To work with your writing to make sure you’re using your keywords effectively. If you want to be found when somebody types a specific search into a search engine. So there’s many great SEO plugins out there. I’ve been using Yost SEO for a long time. I know folks also like rank math or all-in-one SEL.

Definitely any website. If it’s a business and you want help getting found on the internet, I do recommend installing an SEO plugin. Installing an SEO plugin and activating it doesn’t instantly mean that you have great SEO. Now. It just means you have the infrastructure to work on your SEO and improve things so.

You know, those are my top plugins. I’m not making this like my favorite 100 plugins ’cause there’s literally hundreds of plugins that. I love that do very specific things. But if I boil it all down into a plugin set that I would put on literally every LMS website I would build.

Number one is LifterLMS and whatever lifter LMS add-ons I need. But I would also put on user switching.

WP Mail Log, embed any document, Loco Translate, WP Fusion, popup Maker Gravity View Document Library Pro, a form plugin, and an SEO plugin. And that’s it. That’s my minimalist approach to the best plugins for a WordPress.

Learning management system website. So LifterLMS is all about helping you succeed. This podcast, we normally talk about topics, to help you grow, not just about how lifter LMS works and how software works and stuff like that, but I wanted to do a technology focused e episode because we get this question all the time.

Particularly if you’re newer to WordPress. Go check out all the resources I mentioned. It’s about eight different plugins. Try and take a minimalist approach. But just know that the eight or so that I’ve recommended here are the top WordPress plugins. Most of them are free or have a free version that I put on every learning management system website that I build, and you would get incredible benefit from using as well.

That’s it for this episode. Reach out to LifterLMS with any questions. If you have tech questions or tools, drop comments below this. If you have tech questions and are trying to figure out plugins, we also have a dedicated page on our website. Just do a Google search for LifterLMS recommended resources.

In there, we’ll have a more expansive list of the top plugins that we recommend and web hosting and all kinds of stuff. For other software and hardware tools that you need for a learning management system website. I’m Chris from LifterLMS, and I hope you enjoyed this episode.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast, Chris Badgett clarifies that “profiting from pain” refers to generating enormous value via the resolution of significant issues rather than exploiting people. Because conventional educational systems concentrate on teaching knowledge (mechanisms) rather than addressing why someone urgently needs that information, pain is frequently misinterpreted in the classroom. In actuality, they purchase pain alleviation and a clear route to a better result rather than classes, coaching, or memberships.

He presents Dane Maxwell’s client-Result-Mechanism structure, stressing that everything must begin with a single client rather than a product. The course or coaching program is only the means by which the client transitions from suffering to relief. The client has a problem they wish to avoid and a goal they wish to achieve. The majority of course designers fail because they don’t fully get the suffering that generates actual market demand and instead think like experts, creating material first.

Chris distinguishes clearly between severe pain and mild discomfort. An instigating event, such as a divorce, the birth of a child, sleeplessness, slowed company development, or an impending deadline like retirement or a lease expiration, can cause acute pain. People actively seek out answers and are prepared to spend since these difficulties are urgent, time-bound, and emotionally taxing. For this reason, pain-relieving offerings perform better than proactive but non-urgent “vitamin” courses.

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Episode Transcript: Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m gonna be doing a solo episode with you about how to profit from pain. So pain is very misunderstood in the education space. We’re gonna get into that. When I talk about profit, I’m not talking about exploitation, I’m talking about value creation.

So having a clear offer with clear conversions and more impact by solving pain, how to think about pain differently. By the way, we have a whole lesson in the Lifter LMS Academy course called the Perfect Offer Playbook, where we go even deeper on pain than what we’re gonna talk about today here. But I wanted to loop you in to start thinking differently about pain.

Either in a new online course or coaching program or even business that you’re creating and how does leverage that to your advantage so that you can create much more impact, make more profit, have more fun, have a lot less friction, and doing the hard work of education entrepreneurship. So there’s a great old episode on this podcast that I did with Dane Maxwell.

He dropped this solution from his book Start From Zero. He says that the holy grail of business is three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. And once I heard that framework and started using it and what I do, everything just started clicking for me. And we’re gonna. Unpack that, but basically you have to have a clear customer.

I’m a big fan of putting a customer at the center of your business, not your product or your service, or your course, your membership or your offer. So a clear customer, the mechanism is how you do what you do. Ideally, it’s a unique mechanism. Now your mechanism will be unique no matter what, because there’s only one you, which doesn’t mean you can’t borrow.

Pieces and parts from other folks, just like I just did with Dane Maxwell’s framework of the customer result mechanism. But the mechanism is basically how you do what you do when you create a course and it’s teaching somebody something. Maybe there’s quizzes, assignments, action items, and so on. The course is really the mechanism to create a result for the person.

The result is the third piece of customer result or customer mechanism result. A clear customer has a specific pain they want solved. They want the result, which is to move away from that pain towards pleasure. And the way that you do that is through your unique mechanism. So that’s the framework we’re operating under, but we’re gonna talk almost exclusively on the customer aspect and within the customer aspect, we’re gonna talk about the pain.

So the cost of mechanism first thinking, which is actually what most course creators do, and it’s not their fault. And I’ll tell you why in a second, is I’m a subject matter expert. I know all these things. Let me just give you my mechanism. Whether that’s getting in shape, starting a business, finding the love of your life, whatever it is, I have a mechanism for that, and my course just teaches you exactly what to do with all of that.

But the cost of mechanism first thinking is that you’re starting to build features of a product, a course in this case, or a coaching program without really understanding the pain deeply. So you’re giving either too many ideas or cool ideas versus really following the market pull that is generated by pain.

So this is a very common trap in course creator businesses, membership sites, any kind of e-learning or coaching co company. Is we as subject matter experts become mechanism first thinkers. Or we are basically, ’cause we’re in love with all these cool mechanisms that we found that can help somebody.

But the challenge is a lot of people don’t start with the most important question. When they’re creating an online education offer, which is who? Who is this for? And we’ve all heard about the customer avatar, the ideal customer profile. All of these things, but so you need to have a specific who to make your course targeted, but within that, who is the actual pain that all, everything that we’re doing bubbles up from When you understand the pain deeply, it makes it much easier to sell.

It makes it much easier to create content and so on. And the truth is that. An audience or a market does not buy a mechanism. They want a solution to their pain. Now that pain might just be boredom and they want entertainment. That’s what movies do as an example. So there’s different types of pain.

There’s what I would call big T trauma or little T trauma or, just a, there’s all kinds of flavors of how severe is the pain, how important is this pain? How much will this pain make the person want to take action, or is it a pain that they can just ignore? There’s a lot of details in the pain, but my recommendation to you is to find what’s known as an acute pain.

So what makes an acute pain different from vague discomfort? Acute pain often has something like what we call in copywriting, an inciting incident, and what that means is it says place in time where something happens and it generates a lot of pain and it’s very like time bound like this happens, then this pain happens.

And once we target that, we get really specific. With our acute pain. So just to give some examples of acute pain, there are so many out there, but I’ll just give you some off the top of my head. One example might be a relationship has ended, whether that’s a divorce or breakup, that’s an acute pain.

So back in the day when I used to study affiliate marketing exam as an example. On the affiliate marketplace called ClickBank, where you could find affiliate offers to promote the top selling information product on that platform was called. How to Get Your X Back. Okay, which is a very specific customer result mechanism, clear, plain pain point. Clear result, all in the name of the information product, which was like a course or an ebook, something like that.

So getting dumped by a partner or a spouse. Or even in your dating years is very painful. And so this offer. How to get your ex back is tying into the pain that comes when a breakup happens in a relationship. And that is a very acute pain when you have a new baby especially as a first time parent. It creates pain now.

Pain, having a child can be a beautiful, wonderful thing. It makes your heart grow bigger. I love my children, but when they come, new pains emerge. Like impact on sleep, impact on, let’s say the husband and wife relationship impact on your work. ’cause now you have this other full-time job called being a parent.

Okay? So there’s a lot of pain here. I remember watching someone launch a course and coaching program on sleep training for first time parents for their new babies. This person was basically a sleep coach. So that is a mechanism like I’m gonna, I’m gonna help give you the tools and tips and strategies and tactics to help set your child off on a good foundation of sleep.

And for you, the parents. But it’s very specific. Another example, if we’re talking about sleep there’s a lifter LMS user that does very well who works on the pain of insomnia. So insomnia is very painful if you’ve ever experienced it. I’ve been there. I’m not, I’ve always struggled with sleep, and that is a pain that I would be willing to invest in to get a solution or IE the result.

So that I can live in the world like a normal, well-rested human being. So, insomnia is an obvious great pain. There are all kinds of medical conditions or psychological conditions that create pain. When we think about pain, we’re often thinking about physical pain. Some of the examples I’m talking about are obvious, but there’s a lot less.

Obvious kinds of pain. For example, in business you might not have any physical pain. But let’s say you’ve created your product and nobody’s buying it. That’s very painful. Let’s say you have a successful business and you’ve been growing every year, and all of a sudden that growth stops, that’s called a growth ceiling.

A growth ceiling, even though you’re doing well, but you stop growing is a painful event. So that stalled growth. Creates pain. That was the I stalled. Growth is the inciting incident, if you will. Next, let’s talk about the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin. So a, let’s call it a course that is a painkiller will definitely remove and solve the pain.

S a vitamin is more like a proactive solution that maybe is a good idea, but there’s no clear, obvious pain underneath it. For example, if you look at something online like the biohacking community or the longevity community. These are people who want to get in the best shape of their lives, even when they’re older.

They may want to try and live forever. That’s the longevity community. And these people do a lot of proactive things and they, they actually take a lot of vitamins and supplements and things, but the biohacking community is super small compared to the global population because biohackers.

By design are very proactive and maybe some of their motivation is driven by an acute pain as well. But it’s a smaller market within the broader market because a lot of biohacking things are proactive and the reality is. A lot of the population is reactive. So an incident happens, they experience a lot of pain, and they they go looking for solutions.

So finding an acute pain it’s really obvious when you find one. So if you’ve ever experienced a challenge like it could be anything like, let’s say you’re a. Looking to buy your very first house. Alright, there’s some pain there because you don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to negotiate the price.

You don’t know. You wanna make sure you’re picking the right house for the largest financial transaction of your life. And let’s say your lease is up for your apartment in four months and you need to figure this thing out. So we have a deadline. This creates a lot of urgency around that pain of needing to find a place to sleep at night that you can afford and so on.

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and I also wanted to come back to what I said earlier about the reason a lot of us don’t focus a lot on pain is. Because we were raised in a traditional school system. Where almost all of that is just teaching you mechanism after mechanism. So if you remember yourself or you have a child who said a certain subject matter was not very interesting, and they’re not into it and they don’t like it, it’s because they’re being given a mechanism for a pain.

They do not feel. So it’s the concept of. Just in case information versus just in time. So if you create a course, like just in case when you’re ready for it, you may want to learn these investing strategies and financial planning strategies so that you can retire one day. That’s very different from creating an investing course for people who are, let’s say.

10 years away from retirement and have no savings or investments. You have a mechanism to help them get them to a retirement-ready financial position. They’re feeling the pain of retirement approaching and having zero nest egg. That’s very painful. If I was required in school to take a class on financial or investing literacy, but I’m not feeling that pain, I would be a lot less motivated to do that.

Let’s talk about finding the right pain for you. You wanna find the overlap of the pain that your niche or your target market feels. You want to think about your lived experience. And how you have credibility and interest in this specific pain. This is why we often give the advice if you’re looking to create a course or coaching program or membership site, to focus on a earlier version of yourself.

Because number one, you’ve walked the journey, you were the customer, you figured out the mechanism somehow, and then you got the result. You remember that earlier version of yourself where there was so much pain, whether it was wanting to become an entrepreneur and start your own business, or to find the love of your life, or make some kind of health and fitness improvement, if you have walked those miles yourself, you’ll understand the pain.

You will also understand the inefficiencies. The mechanisms that you tried to put together to solve that pain. If you think you can solve that better and faster, it can work out well to create a truly unique and great training course. And remember, people pay for four things, speed, certainty, insight, and the fourth, which is to stay out of jail.

So if we. Look at something like an example we’ve already used, let’s say about the insomnia when we’re buying a course or a coaching program, if we’re the target market, the customer, we want either speed, like we want this insomnia to stop fast. We want certainty that it’s gonna stop and we’re gonna transform and transcend this challenge.

We want insight into why is this happening? How does this insomnia thing work? And we also wanna stay outta jail because if we keep going through life, sleep deprived, we might make bad decisions that could land us in a bad place. And usually one of those four things is primary. You don’t necessarily hit all four.

But I bring that up to say there will be one. That is primary to the pain that you solve. It could be speed getting away from pain. It could be certainty that you definitely can get out of the pain and that the, this program is gonna work. Or it could be insight. Just like really understand what’s really going on here.

That’s part of what psychology and psychological health is. Is, it’s all of those things, but it’s also includes a lot of insight into understanding what’s really going on, trying to get closer to base reality. So insight is very powerful too. And when you’re finding your pain, you basically have to marry the pain and really just devote yourself and your product and your program to it.

And it needs to have a strong course creator. Market fit, like you may see a pain out there, but if it’s not a pain you’ve experienced before or you only want to go after it because it’s trending in society or on social media or online or whatever, that’s not a good motivation. It really needs to fit you to have that founder market fit in.

When you’ve walked those miles, if you’re solving a pain through a course that you’re creating and launching that you have solved for yourself in your own life, that gives you a lot more credibility. You’re basically teaching from scars your own personal life scars and trauma that you’ve transcended than just putting theories out there and ideas and research and.

When you fall in love with an acute pain that’s right for you it creates long-term sustainability and motivation. For example, the pain that we truly solve at lifter LMS is that I see all this value trapped inside of people where they could go help lots of other people with pain in the world.

It’s a Buddhist thing in terms of reducing suffering. That’s really motivating to me. I love being in the pain removal business. We’re doing that with software, we’re doing that with content. But I love solving the pains of education entrepreneurs, which is, there’s three results they’re going for, which is income.

Impact in the world and creative freedom. Creative freedom is just designing the life and the way you work, the way you wanna work. So that’s super motivating to me and that’s why I’ve been doing this for over 15 years at this point. So it’s important to remember the nobility of solving pain. Pain is a signal, it’s not a weakness.

There’s a reason the human body. Experiences pain, whether in the body or in the mind, because it’s a signal something needs to be addressed. And when you find a pain and you build a solution to help solve pain, it becomes much easier to sell because you’re in the business of helping reduce the suffering, if not solve it for other people.

That is the most ethical, moral, human thing you can do as a human. So when you know you can help somebody solve pain, it’s, it makes selling easy ’cause you’re just trying to help people. So the next thing I want to talk about is the practical application and how you can look at this with your online course or membership site.

Now, there’s two ways to look at it. If you’re already moving and things are going pretty well and you’re making in income impact and creative freedom in your life, that’s great, but maybe you can jump in and just reexamine the pain that you solve. Study it more. See if you can articulate better in your messaging, in your copywriting.

Weave the pain into what you do. You’re not trying to manipulate people. You’re just trying to throw the signal out that this is exactly the pain that we work on for these types of people. This is how we do it, which is the mechanism. And I would like to invite you to, for me to come, help bring this information, this education, this coaching, this content into your life to help solve the pain.

If you’re newer and you’re just getting started with like your first course or your first coaching program, you are in a great opportunity to do the reflection, to audit your own life, to look at the all the pains and challenges that you’ve overcome. Look at your skills, your life experience, your knowledge, the knowledge of others.

Look at the research, do competitive analysis, and really find those pains. And also look for pain that is urgent. So when you have a new baby come into your home, it creates urgency. When you, let’s say enter a new relationship, it creates urgency. If you really hate your job and you’re trying to find something else to do with your career and your life, there’s urgency there.

And there’s also opportunity costs. Like what happens if they do nothing? They don’t move forward. Like, how, what will the pain do? Will it just keep remaining chronic? Will it get worse? What opportunity costs are lost by doing nothing and so on. So think about this, even beyond software as an example.

So if and courses and coaching and online communities. How can we work with this pain in a way that where we’re just a catalyst for reducing the suffering out in the world? And what do we want to commit our education entrepreneurship work to? So when you have a clear pain, you get better students and you get better outcomes.

The mechanism or your course content, or your coaching or your online communities, it all gets so much better when you’re, you really start with a clear customer with a clear, very specific pain. It happens to me in my life. It’s happened many times where I have an acute pain and then I go online and I start looking and I start finding.

A hundred books on the topic or in these courses and these Facebook groups and Reddit threads and be a pain anthropologist because there’s, once you really isolate the pain and look at it just like when I was getting ready to have my first baby, I went into the the books and the websites and the content and the courses.

Because it’s urgent, like you only have nine months, probably less to once you’ve realize what’s happening, to get ready to solve the pain of not being ready to have a kid. And then you’ll see giant communities around these core pains of having your first child or starting your first business or, dropping weight if you’re, you’ve been struggling with weight as an example, or whatever the physical or the fitness goal is. So Lifter, LMS is an enabler in this process to help you solve pain for your people. Lifter LMS is not the hero. You’re the hero in your niche ending suffering for. Whatever your core customer’s main what their main pain is.

So if you’re already moving, I want to encourage you to just revisit, even if you think your business is pretty good and pretty solid, really dial into the pain. There’s a concept in entrepreneurship called a pivot. Let’s say your business is doing well, but it’s not, it hasn’t replaced your day job or anything like that.

A lot of times when that’s happening and you have some traction, either you’re not clear enough on the pain or there’s another pain adjacent that is, would be much better that your same person has at the same time. So you’re focusing on the wrong pain. So for example, in business coaching or in entrepreneurship, let’s say you’re focused on a specific mechanism about, how to sell more as an example. So you’re a sales coach, but you’re a full stack entrepreneur and you really understand all the stuff. But then you realize, a lot of my people, they’re taking my sales training and they’re doing all right, but they’re not doing great. Let’s revisit. Maybe I should also add some coaching or another course on developing the product that we sell, which happens before you sell.

Because maybe they’re trying, they’re selling too hard on the wrong product and then that, product aspect of your training takes off because you found an even hotter pain. So it’s okay to pivot or add on or even just try something new. So the best thing you can do as an education entrepreneur is listen to the market and.

A lot of times we stand around with our fingers in our ears, not listening to the market, just making what we wanna make, making assumptions about pain and results and who our customers are. But I call this, the ground game. You gotta get out from behind your computer. You gotta go hang out with the people that are having this pain.

You gotta talk to ’em. You gotta ask them what have they tried, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked? What provided temporary relief, but not lasting relief. Get dig into the pain is my point. So that’s it on this episode of how to Profit From Pain. Again, we’re not profiting to exploit, we’re profiting because we’re creating extreme value because we understand the pain, the nuances of the pain, and, pain is something we want to heal, so it’s not like we’re profiting from people in pain. We’re actually profiting from helping people heal.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett offers a comprehensive guide on how to strategically plan your online education business for 2026 in this LMScast episode. He emphasizes that planning is about developing clarity, focus, and adaptability to maximize the probability of success rather than forecasting the future. He starts out by emphasizing how crucial it is to determine your main audience, or the “who,” and comprehend their requirements, goals, and frustrations. Chris clarifies that many business owners erroneously concentrate on their product or method rather than the results that their clients need, and he advocates delving deeply into details like quickness, assurance, understanding, or preventing unfavorable outcomes.

Chris presents a multi-layered strategy for planning.In order to create ambitious long-term goals, he suggests beginning with a 10-year vision, reducing it to a 3-year vision for more achievable milestones, and finally creating a comprehensive 1-year plan. From there, weekly and daily execution guarantees momentum and advancement, while quarterly themes aid in prioritizing focal areas, important projects, and initiatives.

He highlights the significance of “anti-goals,” or things you consciously choose not to pursue in order to stay focused and avoid distractions. He also emphasizes how important it is to link your company with its goal, vision, and values. Values influence your decision-making and corporate culture, vision reflects the long-term effect you wish to generate for your audience, and mission outlines how you will do it. Chris demonstrates how these components influence hiring, team duties, and leadership choices using examples from LifterLMS.

Chris delves into operational planning, outlining how to view your company as a “product” made up of people, procedures, and technology. Even for solopreneurs, he advises creating a basic organizational chart to clearly define roles and duties and to choose where to assign or employ staff.

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Episode TranscriptYou’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today I’m doing a solo episode about how to plan for an entire year as I’m recording this. It’s the tail end of 2025, and we have a resource on the Lifter LMS website in the lifter LMS Academy called the Annual Planning System.

I’m gonna go over some of the highest level. Concepts in that, but I would encourage you to go check out the annual planning system. I happen to actually be a very big planner and believer in plans and there’s so much going on in our space in terms of. Change and disruption and the economy and geopolitics and everything that having a plan, an intentional plan, but more importantly than a plan, is the system you use to create the plan can really increase your odds of success as a course creator, a coach, a membership site owner as a WordPress professional who builds learning management system websites for clients.

I’m gonna give you all the secret sauce on planning. And, we’re in this interesting stage where the education market is maturing. We have artificial intelligence accelerating in the world, in the economy, in tech. But keep in mind that planning doesn’t equal prediction, but what a plan gives you is a much higher odd of success.

So there’s a famous quote that Mike Tyson says that everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. But what I wanna say is the act of planning and coming up with a strong plan is super important and makes you far more robust and capable and clear. A better leader and just an easier way of being in the world in terms of business and even life.

So this is for the course creators, coaches, membership site owners and agencies out there. And we’re gonna go over, the planning stack because it all cascades down from the plan. And the problem with entrepreneurship is a lot of us. I have to constantly zoom in and zoom out. We may zoom out and work on a strategic thing, and then we have to get in the weeds and work on a very small technical issue or work with a specific customer or work with a team member.

But what I encourage you to do is to create the space to actually stay zoomed out and create a really high level plan, but then also start taking step functions down. From a big vision to a annual plan, to a quarterly plan and, down to a monthly plan, down to a weekly plan, down to your daily action and project management and things like that.

The annual plan basically, which is what we’re primarily focused on today, is gonna set the direction the quarterly plan creates focus. The weekly execution creates the momentum of executing on the plan. But the common failure points are that plans are too vague or not committed to, or there literally is no plan.

I’m often shocked when I see. Entrepreneurs of all kinds, not just education entrepreneurs, literally with zero plan in 100% reactive mode. And it’s sad because life and business could be so much better with some planning. That doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get setbacks or some kind of macro shift from the global economy or whatever, and things are just gonna change in your plan.

Kind of gets outdated, but it’s the active planning that is super important. And it’s important to mention that even if your plan gets hit hit off track by some event, it doesn’t mean you can’t pivot the plan, edit the plan, change the plan, re or reprioritize what’s in the plan. The first thing we’re gonna talk about is really your core focus when it comes to a plan.

You’ve heard me mention if you’ve listened to this podcast, I think Dane Maxwell, who we interviewed on this podcast a while ago, said it best that a business is really only three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. So the customers who you serve, the result is the outcome that they want, usually pleasure, pain, or transformation based, and the mechanism is how you facilitate.

The result for the core customer. That’s literally all businesses. And we have a challenge in our industry where a lot of folks are super focused on their mechanism, like what we do, how we do it. I sell to people who want what I know how to do. It’s very vague, but the first part of creating an annual plan.

Is to really drill in on that core focus and find the signal and the noise. The first part I just wanna say, and I, the, I’ve been in this industry for almost two decades and I realize that the number one thing missing from most businesses that hold them back from successes online education companies is the who you should always start with.

The who. Who are we helping? Who is it? Who is the customer? Some people call that the customer avatar, the ideal customer persona. But what in reality happens is a lot of people are not very clear on the who, and they’re just saying I help anybody who wants what I do. So that’s not a WHO statement, that’s a mechanism first thinking statement.

So we gotta get clear on who we serve. As you create your plan, the number one thing I would recommend you do is to figure out and even challenge yourself if you think you’re clear on who it is that you help. So you gotta develop that. You gotta question even if you think you’re already doing it and you’ve got a clear.

Target market and customer avatar and stuff. I want to challenge you to keep drilling in on the who do you help? What are their pains, what are their frustrations? What do they want? What results do they want? I heard I think it was Dev Basu who said that customers only want four things to save time.

What was the other one? Sorry. Save time. Oh, here we go. Sorry. Lemme back that up. What he said is, customers are looking for four things, speed, certainty, and insight. And the fourth one, which is funny, but not really, is to stay outta jail. So when you are creating an offer for a specific person.

They’re either looking for speed, certainty or insight or to stay outta jail. So when you’re really clear on your who is, and you figure out which one of those like primaries are between speed, certainty, and sight stay outta jail, you’re starting to get much more crystallized around who it is you help, how you help them, and the benefit that they see in you, which now are tied into the result or the transformation.

So let’s assume that you have figured out who you help. ’cause your plan, if you make it about you and what you want oh, I wanna make more money. I want, I don’t want as many obligations on my time. I want to create passive income and automation and all these things. That’s not really a plan, that’s just what you want personally.

A great plan is built around. The people that you serve, the people that you help. So I’m a big believer in that you should put your customer at the center of your business, not your product. So let’s, when it comes to annual planning, let’s put our customer at the center, not our product. So we’ve got the who in the center of our business.

We know what they want we know we have the unique mechanism to help them get what they want. Now we need to come up with a plan to actually make this happen. So in order to make that plan happen, what we also need to do is work on ourselves and our company culture, and we need to do the mission, vision, values work.

So to go over it briefly, there’s a lot we could do on mission, vision, and values. We have a whole training on this and the perfect offer playbook in the lifter LMS Academy. But just to, put the basic ideas out there. A vision is the world that you want to create for your who, for your avatar, for the customer that’s literally at the center of your business.

One way to think about vision if you’re a little stuck when it comes to your subject matter expertise. Is to think about what wrong do you wanna right in the world? So that’s, you can back into your vision by doing an anti vision of the world you don’t wanna live in or you don’t wanna see.

Keep persisting and fix that for a specific type of person because you have the skills, experience, and knowledge to do that. This is the territory of vision. Mission is how you do it, what success looks like, or what the opposite of failure looks like. Lifter, LMS is an example. Our vision is to, in the broadest sense, lift up others through online education.

I believe that education entrepreneurs are some of the most powerful, impactful. Positive outcome generating people in the world. So I throw out a stone with my software lifter, LMS, an education entrepreneur, picks that up and then throws out a stone to help their ideal learner get the results that they’re looking for, that which then helps more people.

So it’s like a stone in the water that has multiple. Outward ripples of positive impact in the world while also creating financial impact and creative freedom. So this is the vision territory where I live, but the mission is to help, a million education entrepreneurs change the world through online education by launching successful courses, coaching programs, education companies.

Internal training resources for inside companies and so on. That’s the mission. The values are how you do what you do. So Lifter, LMS has seven core values and when the first time I heard about values, I think of it as being cheesy. So for example there are cheesy values like.

Integrity, honesty synergy collaboration. Now, those aren’t bad, if you, if those align with you. But to really create strong values, I think you have to get way more specific and not just come up with a name, but actually explain what it means for you. For example, the lifter, LMS company values are community focused.

Reduce friction, continuous improvement. Learner results First, extreme ownership, clear communication, and fulfill potential. Now, I’m not gonna go into a big thing about what each of these mean, but these are values that I embody as a leader in the company and I hire and fire against those values.

Whenever I have a difficult decision as a company, I go to those values. They’re super important and a lot of what we do is about reducing friction. That’s, if I had to pick one, that was our primary, that’s what we do. We reduce friction through software and also content like you’re watching right now, like this content is a, I’m trying to reduce friction in your life by sharing with you.

An annual planning system that I’ve used for a very long time. That really works. So that’s mission, vision, and values. So the next thing you wanna do is comes from the personal development world in terms of developing a a vision that’s more. Like a vision board, something that you can see and basically, even if you have a hard time thinking about that, like I know as a parent, when I ask my kids, where do you see yourself in five years or 10 years?

They have no idea. And you might be listening to this and be like I’m an adult. I don’t have any idea where I’m gonna be in 10 years, but I’ll encourage you to slow down, press pause. And Dan Martel says, dream a little bit. Think about, what do, where do I want to be in 10 years? I wanna see, a lot of people creating online training platforms.

’cause I personally believe that there’s a course inside all of us learning and teaching is part of the human experience. And I see all I’ve always seen this, I see all this value trapped in. People where they’re not sharing it, they’re not helping other people. I call it hoarding all the value. So in 10 years, I want to see a million people using lifter LMS, making money, changing the world and creating like ideal, extremely creative lives that they’re super happy with and proud of.

But we can get specific. In constructing a 10 year vision, so what do you want your annual revenue to be? As an example lifter as an example, we’ve already achieved this where we have customers in every country. I don’t think we have a customer in Antarctica, but we have a customer in almost probably 99% of every single country.

And that was on division on the plan a long time ago, and we’ve achieved that. What do you wanna be recognized as a leader of how many employees do you want? Do you want a big company? Do you want a small company? Do you want to be a solopreneur? Do you want to be a micro business, a big business?

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Do you want to go out on the stock market and have an IPO? What do you want? What kind of like sales motion do you want? What kind of conversion rate do you want? What do you, if you saw yourself on a stage 10 years from now, not from an egocentric way, but just from a celebration of success, what award would you be receiving an award for?

Is it a, like some kind of YouTube award? Is it a humanitarian award? Is it a Nobel Prize? What is it? Dream a little bit. So come up with your 10 year target. And the other thing to create a plan around is like, what’s your main marketing strategy? Marketing is attracting customers. So what does that look like?

How do you close sales after you’ve got the lead? Where what is your, go to market marketing strategy? Are you growing through partnerships? Are you growing through content? Are you growing through ads? So basically condense your marketing strategy down to your ideal customer competitive advantage, proven process and results g guarantee.

For example, at LifterLMS, our ideal customer. Is a a WordPress website freelancer or agency, or do it yourself site builder with at least two years of WordPress experience. Ideally they have four plus years of WordPress experience. They’re polite, they’re successful with their courses or their clients are very successful.

Then what’s your competitive advantage? What makes you unique? We’re entering a world of AI disruption, and I can’t impress upon you enough how important it is to know what your competitive advantage is as a human and not just the information. Because artificial intelligence is making information more of a commodity, in that light, for example, coaching, like going beyond the content and helping people when they’re stuck in their unique personal situation. Having that human connection even through the internet is an extreme competitive example. And then what’s your proven process? Do you like how do you get customers, how well, how do you get leads?

How do you get customers? After they become a customer, how do you make them successful so that they love what you do and refer their friends? And then what’s your guarantee? See, this is part of the benefit of planning. Some people get nervous about a guarantee when they have an offer because it feels I can’t really offer a really strong guarantee because it’s up to the student or the customer to do the work and get the results.

If you’re really good at what you do and you’re really good at qualifying the people that come in that you allow to purchase from you, you can put out a really strong guarantee, like I’m talking about a hundred percent of your money back after X amount of time, like Dr. Dream a little bit. A guarantee can be a very strong sales tool, but more importantly than helping with conversions, when you think about a guarantee and construct it.

What you’re doing is really putting your money where your mouth is in terms of what your online education is all about, and your confidence in the offer that you’re offering. And then, you’ve done the 10 year vision, you’re exploring your unique mechanism, which is where we’ve been about how you do, what you do, how it works, what’s the process, but dial it back to three years.

What’s your three year vision? 10 years feels really hard. But in three years that should be easier. Do you wanna be making a million dollars, $10 million? Do you wanna have a thousand customers? 10,000, a hundred thousand customers or clients? What is your vision for three years?

What do you want to have ac have accomplished in three years? Do you wanna have a signature course that just sells like hotcakes that you make better and better year after year. Do you wanna have a huge membership library of training? Do you wanna have this really strong coaching model with other coaches working inside your education company, helping people get results?

What do you want? What are dream a little bit, think about those three year desired outcomes and accomplishments. Then dial it back again to your one year plan. So now this should feel more approachable. One of the reasons we do the 10 year and the three year is we wanna dial it back to think.

All right, cool. I have these big goals. ’cause what you don’t want to do is you don’t wanna put a 10 year goal and a one year plan. Everything is just, all of it is unreasonable and unlikely. Unlikely to be accomplished, but it’s important to dream big at the multi-year, 10 year, three year level, so that you can come up with a reasonable and strategic one year vision.

So think about that. What are the revenue targets in one year? What are the key projects? Now we’re getting more into tactics. What constraints do you wanna remove? What friction do you wanna remove? And more importantly than anything is what are you not gonna do, even if it’s considered good advice?

What are you just not gonna focus on the first year? Like your anti goal list, even if you want to get to it to achieve your 10 year vision, but not this year? Think about that. So once we get past, 10 year, three year, one year, we start getting into quarterly planning, and this is where this should feel relaxing.

The more tighter the focus gets because you get more control, the closer in time you are to what’s coming up. So when you do an annual plan, in this case for 2026. We’re ultimately gonna end up looking really hard at quarter one of 2026. So I like to do themes per quarter. So what theme do you want to focus on to achieve your one year goal in quarter one?

So in your accomplishments from your one year plan, let’s say you wanted to, you had four goals like. Get over a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube, launch five courses develop like a coaching system. And the other one was to come up with a template library. So it’s not just about content, it’s also about this awesome value packed resource library you have that’s part of your membership.

I’m just making these up as an example. The cool thing about quarterly planning is you don’t have to do all those all at once and multitask and simul simultaneously work on them. So let’s prioritize like what is the theme for the quarter? Maybe you have a theme of we’re going all in on YouTube, or we’re gonna go all in on AI to accelerate our business, or we’re gonna focus on our website.

Conversions in quarter one. So you can, you don’t have to do ’em all at once. In fact, it’s super dangerous to try to do too much all at once. So like within the theme, like what are the key projects? So if we choose the YouTube theme as an example for quarter one, that can mean a lot of things. That can mean.

We’re gonna start a weekly live stream to attract new clients. We’re gonna hire a designer to improve our YouTube thumbnails. We’re going to upgrade our video and audio and editing equipment. We’re going to do brand collaborations with other YouTubers. So you start figuring out your key projects.

Which is super important. And then once you’re in your key projects it’s important to think of not always just doing brand new things. What do we want to amplify that’s already working? Let’s say we already have a YouTube channel and we see that, content about this.

Subtopic within our niche does really well. Let’s do more of that and get more exposure on YouTube as a, and then, like if we haven’t done live streaming before, that’s like a new project. So I recommend actually amplifying what you’re already doing well at a greater percentage to adding new projects.

So if I had to pick three things for YouTube as an example, I might remake. Some of our oldest top performing content for modern times, that would be a project. Another one would be doing collaborations with other YouTubers, which we’ve been doing, but do more of that. So those are amplifications, whereas like doing YouTube ads, that’s a new thing.

So I might do that as like a new project. The other thing that is part of planning is removing problems or constraints. So what’s constraining you in your business and how can you remove that bottleneck? So sometimes projects are not about necessarily brand new things. It’s about removing things that aren’t serving you anymore.

So if we keep going with this YouTube example, let’s say you don’t have a strong home office set up for creating videos and audios and things like that. So you wanna remove the constraint of always having to do all this setup to make a decent video so that you can just step into your office.

I can turn everything on and I’m ready to roll to make a high quality video. So you’re removing a constraint of. Time to create a high quality video, which then furthers furthers your goal. And then what do you wanna stop doing or not do? So maybe you’ve been, let’s say, blogging every day and doing a ton of social media every day.

But in order to do more YouTube. You might need to reduce those things. So let’s say you move your blogging to once a week or once every two weeks. And in terms of social media, maybe you just take a temporary break from one of your social media channels or find somebody to help so that you don’t have to do it as much, or, just choose to discontinue a social media channel that you’ve been working for a long time that is not yielding any results. So turning things off is just as important as turning things on. So another part of annual planning is developing the business. So I like to say we’re really making two products.

There’s like our education company offer, whether that’s a course, a coaching program, a membership site, or whatever it is. But the other product we’re making is our business and our business product is comprised of people and processes and technology. So that whole like business product. What do we want to do there?

And particularly what I want to focus on is the people aspect. So maybe you’re listening to this and you’re a solopreneur, but maybe you have, you occasionally work with freelancers or maybe you have a team or even have a giant team. So even if you’re a solopreneur. Creating your organizational chart is a very important part of the annual planning system.

And this doesn’t need to be fancy. You don’t need like a org chart software or have to even create something fancy and Google Sheets or Excel or whatever. But put down like the key functions of the business. The way I divide up an organizational chart is. It comes with seven areas. So those seven areas are product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations, and admin customer success.

And then we have the CEO or the leadership role under those, each of those. So if you’re doing it low tech, you can literally do it on a Google document with each of those, and then you put bullet points under those. And the bullet points are like breaking out the functions. So as an example, like under engineering or tech as an example, we might have who’s in charge of the website?

Who’s in charge of customizing lifter LMS to meet the needs. Who’s in charge of the hosting, who’s in charge of the marketing automation as an example, and if, and then you put people’s names by it. You really, you just build out your org charts so that each key function and functions within that function has one name next to it.

If you’re a solopreneur. Your name will be everywhere. But the reason it’s an important exercise to do this even as a solopreneur, is that you can start seeing where you want to get help first. Like perhaps it’s under the CEO role. Perhaps you wanna hire a virtual assistant to help you first. That could be, but when you do that, you’ll start to see I like being a CEO. I like being a leader. I’m spending a lot of time here, but I also need to spend time over here in marketing or in sales, or on product, or on engineering or customer success, all these things. And you can start to see where there’s a gap.

So part of your annual quarterly planning or 10 year vision, it’s about people. It’s about the business product. What kind of organization do you want to have? What seats need to be filled? What are, what is the personality of those people that you want in those places? So that’s a accountability chart.

The next thing is to develop a conscious artificial intelligence plan. We’re being. Disrupted as a society, just like when the internet became a thing by artificial intelligence. So think about that. When you’re doing your 10 year vision or your three year vision, or setting your annually plan, annual plan, or working on a quarter, start thinking about how will AI be involved?

How do we wanna leverage ai? Even if you don’t know like the tool you want or whatever. If we go back to our YouTube example. We might wanna figure out how to do better video editing using ai. I’ll tell you the answer right now. Get the script. Script is an awesome AI powered video editing tool. It can make shorts for you.

If you’re watching a clip of this on YouTube. It was made with the script very quickly. It can remove filler words and gaps and all kinds of stuff, what’s your plan for ai, for content creation, for coaching, for marketing, for developing ads, for making your videos better for doing research?

What’s your plan like or what do you need? And even if you don’t know the answer, that’s fine but come up with the question, how can I use artificial intelligence to help me? Be a better YouTuber. Bring that question to ai. Dream a little bit, talk to AI a little bit and think about that one. And the final thing I’ll mention, and by the way, I’ll say it again, I mentioned it earlier, the annual planning system that I use is free on the Lifter LMS Academy.

If you go to academy dot lifter lms.com and look for the annual planning system course. Enroll in that you can get the template I use that I use every year to work on my annual plan. And the cool thing is once you’ve done it once and you come back to do it again the next year, you might have a few updates to your 10 year vision.

Maybe you’re moving faster or slower in certain areas, so this gets easier the more you use an annual planning system. The last most important part is that you are a human in business. So what personal development goals do you wanna set for yourself? Maybe it has to do around your productivity or when you wake up, or how stressed you are, or your work life balance or your ability to communicate public speaking your personal relationships outside of work, whatever it is.

Doing an annual plan, I highly encourage you to incorporate personal development so that you become a better person in the process, not just have a better, more profitable, impactful business. ’cause those things work really well together. So planning is a practice, it’s not an event. It’s all about progress over perfection.

And. When you really commit to annual planning and give yourself permission to not be perfect, and sometimes you won’t hit your targets. Sometimes you will overshoot your targets and that’s great, but it’s a work in progress. It’s a way of being in the world of operating with a plan. It’s like the military.

If you think about an elite operating unit, the Navy Seals or the Army Rangers they have plans all the time. They’re really good at planning, but then when they hit the ground and the stuff goes off, they have to adapt on the fly. And you have to do that in business and in life as well. But planning is really important.

And the process of planning, the act planning even if the world doesn’t go exactly according to plan. Your odds of success are gonna be so much higher. You’re gonna be so much more clear, less stressed, adaptable. So I would encourage you to develop your annual plan. Head on over to the lifter LMS Academy, find the free annual planning system course.

Fill out the document. You copy it, you put it into your. If Google Drive or download it and upload it to whatever WordPress processor you use and work on your annual plan, it will change your life.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowMarcus Carter from Carter School of English returns in this episode of LMScast to provide a detailed look at how he turned decades of conventional English instruction into a scalable online learning company driven by LifterLMS and WordPress. Marcus, who has taught for more than 30 years, describes how the COVID epidemic compelled him to switch from traditional language schools to virtual ones. His tentative TikTok videos and lack of camera confidence eventually developed into a powerful social media presence, which helped him see the possibilities of digital courses as a long-term business strategy.

He distinguished himself in a competitive market by concentrating on his proficiency in phonetics and multilingual instruction for Spanish speakers. Marcus also discusses how, after months of trial and error and sluggish early development, YouTube turned out to be his most successful growth and sales channel.

One little alteration to a thumbnail served as the catalyst for a breakout video that has already amassed millions of views after more than 160 films were uploaded before gaining significant popularity. From there, he was able to create a devoted worldwide audience by using YouTube to easily integrate content with course sales through straightforward links and weekly live sessions. Marcus highlights his open, trust-first approach to marketing throughout the discussion, providing prospective students with thorough walkthroughs of his courses rather than depending only on exaggerated claims.

He talks on how producing top-notch courses takes a lot of time and effort often nearly a year each course and why having several revenue streams such as YouTube, teaching, sponsors, and digital goods is crucial for long-term viability. Marcus concludes by discussing how he is now utilizing AI to make language learning more dynamic and interesting, continuing to push the limits of LifterLMS’s capabilities while producing significant results for students worldwide.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Marcus Carter. He’s from Carter’s school of english.com, the Carter Method. And Marcus, what this episode is primarily gonna be about is how he’s figured out to make online language learning more engaging, more effective, more interactive, how to push the boundaries with WordPress Lifter LMS using AI to help.

This is gonna be super fascinating, but first, welcome to the show, Marcus.

Marcus Carter: Thanks very much, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here. Be here.

Chris Badgett: I’m real excited you’re here. And for those of you who are listening via podcast a little later in the show where Marcus is actually gonna get into screen sharing. So if you wanna see what we’re talking about, go to the lifter, LMS YouTube channel.

And find this episode. If you type in LMS cast Marcus Carter, you’ll find it. And if you have the ability to switch over to the YouTube while you’re listening right now, I’d recommend doing that. But first, Marcus, let’s give a little context. Tell us about the Carter School of english.com. Just bring us up to speed on what it is, how long it’s been running, and your brand and your approach, and what your mission is and what’s going on.

Marcus Carter: Okay I’ve been teaching English for the last 30 years and up until COVID the Pandemic I had my own language schools and we were all obviously, in different places and in different towns. And then COVID hit and that all went to pot, basically. And we had to diversify a little bit, although we did continue online a little bit with our students for a couple of years, but I could see that it was going downhill pretty quickly.

And so I. My wife convinced me to start uploading TikTok videos and super embarrassed at the beginning. I had no camera confidence at all, or even though I’ve spent years and years in front of people, I couldn’t speak to a camera. In fact, my first videos was like with a cartoon head you couldn’t even see my face.

And anyway, I kept going and eventually got a bit of traction on TikTok and managed to get lots of followers there. And trying to work out how I could monetize all of these people that were following me. I started opening telegram groups for people for free, but most people were on it for like the free ride.

There wasn’t much conversion there, and I didn’t actually have anything to sell. I was trying to get people into the online courses, that we were doing. And that was the time when I started thinking about, Hey, maybe a digital course would be something that I could sell to these people.

That’s when I discovered lifter LMS and that’s when I set up my first course, which was within the. The context of English teaching. I’m also a writer. I’ve written like nine or 10 textbooks but I’m also very focused on phonetics. I consider myself an expert in phonetics. I’m also bilingual in Spanish.

I’ve got certain things going for me on social media that maybe other teachers don’t necessarily have, and that gave me a niche that I managed to fill and became quite popular. And I transitioned from TikTok over to Instagram, still trying to work it out how I could sell courses. It was pretty slow at the beginning because I, it was, it was, everything was new to me and I didn’t really know how to, bring the people to the courses to do webinars and those kind of things.

That all was a kind of learning curve for me. And then from there, I always had in the back of my mind, I loved watching videos on YouTube and I always thought, I’d love to be a YouTuber, but I didn’t wanna transition over to YouTube because I knew that the editing process was gonna be so much more laborious than what it was on these social media platforms.

But I thought, I decided one day, that I was gonna be a YouTuber and started uploading to YouTube and took me 164 videos before I got one of my videos. And it was actually very funny because it was one of my videos that I uploaded, I had uploaded eight months previously. And I was just looking through my videos and I thought, I’m gonna change the background in that video in the little thumbnail.

I literally changed the background and even today, like three years later, it’s still my best performing video. It’s crazy how something like that can completely change your life, because from there, obviously it’s so much easier. In YouTube, you’ve got your links for your digital course into your website.

Under the videos, people just start clicking in and you’ve got hundreds of, that’s, that video’s got over 2 million views now. And that’s where I transitioned into then starting to earn money from the platform of YouTube and starting to sell my digital courses.

And I started with the phonetics course, which was my original one. Then I did a basic course for beginners, and then a year ago I launched an intermediate course, and just a couple of weeks ago I launched my Between basic and intermediate, which is my latest product, which is based on ai.

Chris Badgett: Wow, this is cool.

And before we get into what you figured out with your recent courses on how to make them more effective a couple quick clarifying questions. Do you do any like instructor led training on Zoom or it’s all kind of self-paced within the LMS?

Marcus Carter: I had, I’ve had everything. I had cohort, I had a, like a Saturday group, but there were like 40, 50 people coming every Saturday.

It’s pretty difficult with English because everybody’s at a different level. So I always had to invent like global concepts that I could teach to people. That’s where phonetics is great because phonetics is, there is no level in phonetics of in English. It’s not like the vocabulary or the grammar that you have to be a bit more advanced.

So I was focusing heavily on, on phonetics and just putting sort of global vocabulary. And so I did have the cohort, I was using my lifter LMS platform for that every Saturday for three years straight. And that was very successful. Had lots of students in those classes. That went very well. I do still teach online too.

Now I, because I’ve got more limited time, I only teach private classes to high level executives for for those reasons that I don’t have much time and to do groups and things. I still have a couple of teachers that work for me, two or three teachers. And, but my main focus is now on, I just love creating digital courses.

I just, it’s just so much fun doing that. And obviously the YouTube channel, I have to keep that going. So I’m live every Saturday at seven o’clock, always on, on YouTube, and I always have a good community of people that come there expecting my classes. And it’s really nice to, they’re all there before me, chatting to each other and, things.

And yeah, I’ve tried to create a nice community in YouTube, which that’s what I use to, to boost, the sales and to promote the courses while I’m live or in my videos.

Chris Badgett: Quick question just tactically, like what’s your advice to somebody who’s, using YouTube as a marketing channel?

You got like a link below the video and the description, but how do you, how does the actual conversion to sale happen? Is it pretty straightforward and that they click on the link and they’re like, yep, that looks good. Price looks good. I’m in. Is there any other kind of sales motion involved there?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, basically I’m probably not the, I’m, I could probably sell a lot more than I actually do, but basically all I have under my videos, whenever I’m live, the first thing I do when I’m live on YouTube is just say, before we jump into the class, just remember that the links are below to all my courses and I always have the one, the most recent course at the top.

And another thing I have is a a WhatsApp number as well, business WhatsApp number. So people can click on that and directly send a WhatsApp. And I personally answer those those messages. So that’s a kind of good way to get some more, personal engagement from from me. People are quite shocked sometimes when I answer with an audio and I say, it’s you.

And I said, yeah, it’s me. Don’t worry. And so yeah, I think that’s a good, and I also have a little WhatsApp logo on my website too. WhatsApp, I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s a plugin for WordPress where people can just click that on any of the pages and they directly send me a WhatsApp and I answer that too.

So I think that’s that’s important because people always have a lot of questions about, when they’re gonna buy a digital course. And another thing I’ve done for the last two courses that I launched, so a lot of people are selling digital courses online. Obviously when you go onto their landing pages, it’s full of promises and you’re gonna learn this, you’re gonna do that, blah, blah, blah.

This is what’s inside the course, click to buy, but. You are, you’ve just gotta trust what that person is saying is true on that website. And I’m probably not a very good salesman, but I am a very transparent, honest person. And so what I did in my previous, not this latest course, this latest course too, but the previous one is I filmed a, I had a webinar where I brought everybody in to launch this course and I showed them everything that’s inside the course.

Every little detail about what it was all about. And you click here and these are the audio, and then you listen to this and these are the videos and blah, blah, blah. And then that’s on my website. So anybody that goes to my, to the page to buy that course, it’s like a 45 minute video. You know exactly what you’re buying before you buy it.

And I did exactly the same thing with this course that I just launched as well. So I’ve got that, and I think that’s important because a lot of people have said to me in comments that it, things don’t live up to their expectations. That a lot of people are sending courses.

I’ve tried to do this one, I’ve tried to do that one, and then, I’m so pleased that I can actually see what I’m buying before I actually get it. And if you are, if you’re a quality content creator and your course is quality, why not? Don’t be afraid, in my opinion, that your competitors are gonna be looking at your courses and thinking, oh, that’s a good idea.

Fair enough. It’s worth the comp. Probably not many competitors are looking at my courses anyway, but I would prefer to be so open and to say I’ve created something that I know is quality. There it is. Have a look and if you’re interested, you just buy it.

Chris Badgett: I love that approach.

The, it’s, I would call it like in marketing, I’d call it like a video sales letter, but it’s not a bunch of promises in this. It’s Hey, here’s what’s in the box. Here’s how this works. This is exactly what you’re gonna see. Like we’re removing all the mystery. Come on in. If this sounds like a good fit to you, it’s awesome.

Marcus Carter: You go and buy an iPhone and you’re standing there in the i in the iPhone store, and you’re testing it before you know what it’s all about before you buy it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s brilliant. That’s my approach. Can you get into just a little bit of if we take a snapshot of today just the impact you’re having, like things like whatever you’re comfortable sharing, number of students you’ve mentioned it’s become like your full-time income stream.

Now you’ve mentioned, I’m curious like when you’re teaching English to Spanish speakers, like what parts of the world are you hitting and who’s, and also. Do you have any stories about how people have gone through the Carter method and got some job or some outcome? I’m sure you have all that stuff, but can you just tell us, inspire us a little bit with the impact of the site?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Obviously when you, the digital, the last digital course I just created, it took me 11 months to create this course, and the previous one before that, it took me a year to, to create that. So you’re I’m it’s not my full source of all income. Obviously I’m, I’m teaching and I had sponsors also on the website, and YouTube obviously pays me.

So I’ve got, MSI, multiple sources of income. I think that’s important for any kind of content creator to, open your. Possible sort of income sources so that if one isn’t doing too well, you’ve got another one. And you can more or less keep going. And so I know it’s difficult to spend a year creating a course, and not have any income at all for that course.

And you don’t even know if you’re gonna sell it when you get to the end of it. ’cause you are, you’re reaching a stage. You’re gonna try and do a webinar, you’re gonna try and bring people in, and then hopefully you’re gonna buy it. And then obviously from that moment onwards, it’s just a passive income that you are getting.

And I don’t know how many students I have, hundreds of students that have bought my digital courses. Definitely, maybe, probably 300, 400 I dunno how many exactly. I’ve sold. But the important thing for me is to always be have, they all have their separate telegram groups.

I’m in all those groups. I answer everything as. Quickly and as detailed as possible, anything they need to know, because they’re asking me questions about English. And what about, how do you pronounce this word? Audio message is to have a lot of close contact with the students after they have bought the courses, which then brings them into, a close field of contact with me to build up trust.

Because at the end of the day, when people, a lot of people come into the, to the webinar one thing I must say, when I do my webinars to sell the courses, the launches, I’ve actually only done about three or four launches. The last two were the most successful ones. The typical webinar that people are advertising come to the webinar and we’re gonna teach you this and blah, blah, blah.

So a lot of the time it’s using Facebook ads or YouTube ads or something, and you click on that and you sign up for the webinar. You might not even know that person. So what I did is I. Told people in the, I did YouTube ads in the last one, but I told people in the ad, I said, Hey, are you interested in seeing a new English course that I’m just about to launch?

It’s this kind of level or whatever. I didn’t say come to the webinar, which is another strategy I tried three years ago where people came, I gave them this webinar about phonetics. I was teaching them things and that, you’re gonna get a load of value and then here comes the sting in the tail.

I wanna sell you something at the end of it. And that is the typical pattern of webinars that me as a, not as a salesman I don’t feel comfortable hooking people in and then trying to, get that sale at the end and say, I’ve given you that value. You owe me, some of you owe me a sale now at the end, so everybody that came to that webinar, they knew why they were coming.

They were coming to see the presentation of a new course and. Almost all of them knew who I was. ‘Cause I’ve got, I dunno, 300,000 followers on, on, on YouTube. If they didn’t know me, they probably would’ve clicked on and seen my videos and things anyway. So I don’t have to prove that I’m an authority, which is what a lot of people have to do in these webinars.

Say, look, I’m this person. These are all the testimonials I have from other people that have bought my courses. Look how great I am. I just said, look, this is who I am and this is why you are here. And so whoever was there to see a presentation of a course and they knew that I was gonna sell it that day.

And that makes me feel super comfortable when I’m in these webinars. And I don’t have to like, start getting a lump in my throat when the sale’s coming up and then, all of a sudden come out with a price. But it’s a bit lower today because, and all of these things. I was just very comfortable.

So I’ve probably sidetracked a bit from your original question.

Chris Badgett: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Just the piece I was looking for on the reach which. Spanish speaking countries. If you have 300,000 views on YouTube, you’re probably hitting all of them, I’m guessing, but Totally.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. It’s primarily Spain USA, Mexico, Columbia, but it’s just all of them, everywhere really.

And I got a lot of people in, Australia and things because they’re just, Spanish speakers who have, gone to other countries to live and they need to brush up on their English. So yeah, it’s just wherever the algorithm takes me.

Chris Badgett: And just one more question before we get into our screen share.

I’ve noticed I’ve seen patterns, ’cause I’ve worked with a lot of course creators and ones like you that are just crushing it and moving it multi-year in. I noticed three things. One of ’em is they’ve already got some experience with WordPress, like maybe a couple years before they get into it.

The big one is. They’ve already been making money with this expertise probably in the offline world. Like for you, you said you’ve been teaching English for 30 years, so you’ve been in the space a while. And then the most interesting one is you people take forward imperfect action and just keep going.

You’ve played around and experimented across social media. You’ve gotten better, better at tech. You’re implementing with ai. You get in the weeds sometimes and you get tech support or get help from AI or just mess around until you figure it out. You try a lot of tools. I’ve just seen this movie before, but is there anything else you would add to even if it’s motivation related, like why do you think you’ve been successful here, besides those factors that I mentioned?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Don’t have a plan B. That’s probably number one thing I would say. When I, yeah, when I closed the academies, all like the furniture, I had three schools all that furniture went into storage. And I still had, receptionists that was still working for me, but they didn’t really have anything to do.

And I, we had five at the beginning, we had to get rid of some of them. There was just two left at the end and they were like, okay, Marcus, what are we gonna do? We’re gonna reopen the schools and take all that stuff out. And I was like. No, we’re not gonna do that. I was like, Hernan te, like I’m burning the boats and I donated all the furniture to some local schools, and I said, we’re going digital 100%.

And I, and it was just like, there is no plan B. These digital courses have to work. Yeah. And when you’re, when you find yourself in that corner, you’ve got no other option than to make it work. And that is when, you kick into overdrive. And I love what I do. I love my studio. I love coming in here.

I love creating content. I love tech. I’ve always loved tech since I had my, Zi X Spectrum, 81 in my bedroom, when I was a kid and things. So I’ve always loved that side of things. What was difficult for me was the camera confidence, and being natural on camera. But, it’s just press record, just keep going.

It just, and just, there is no. Escape. You just gotta keep going in that direction and eventually you will get there. And if you are, if you’re struggling, and it’s you’re in a specialist niche, keep learning all the time. Just keep learning and learning, looking at other creators and try taking something from there.

Put your spin on it and just keep, because you can have the best course in the world, but the biggest problem, or the best I, telephone in the world or whatever product the number one pro problem for every creator or any kind of product or service is, how do I put that product in front of the people that are gonna buy it?

I could have a physical shop, that’s one way of doing it. But if you’re online, like most of us now. How do you get it in front of those people? And so you can pay your Facebook ads, your YouTube ads, but then you are somebody that isn’t, you don’t have an authority channel where people can say, oh, okay, this guy, all right, let’s click on here.

Okay, he’s, he must be good ’cause you’ve got 300,000 followers or something like that. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good just ’cause you’ve got that. But and so organic reach for me has been the number one way to, to reach people and to create that authority and that community by just keep going and going.

And, as I say, 164 videos on YouTube before, I remember my first check from YouTube was like $2 36 cents, like two years in. But for me, it was like I said to my wife, I said, I’m just so happy that I’ve monetized the channel. Finally people are coming to the channel. But it, because it was just, I’m like that kind of terminator mentality.

It’s just, I will not stop.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Marcus has already dropped a ton of gold and he’s got a YouTube play button behind him. I don’t have a YouTube play button. I’m looking I’m taking notes on these YouTube tips. But another thing about the great course creators is this not just about having a great website and making the sale and figuring out your marketing channel.

You actually have to deliver, quality, engaging, effective learning content. And Marcus is gonna take us on a tour, some of the stuff he is done with his latest course to inspire. If you’re listening, go find the YouTube version of this LMS cast with Marcus Carter. I’m gonna pop your screen up here, Marcus, and just.

Can’t wait to see the show and tell here. So it’s it’s up in the window.

Marcus Carter: All right. Okay. So what you were saying just then about having a great website. I don’t have a great website. That’s one of the things I gotta work on a bit more. I’ll actually show you my my, I was just like fiddling it.

It’s not a great website, it’s just a basic elemental website that I’ve created here. It’s nothing special at all. And I need to improve it. I know I do. ’cause that’s my son keeps telling me, dad, you gotta get this website sorted out. But even that doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, it’s not about, I don’t think it’s about the website, it’s about the landing page.

It’s the link that goes from wherever you are. If you’re in TikTok, in Instagram, YouTube, whatever, that people land on that page and that page is well explained. I’ll just show you for example, what I was explaining before, so this is Genesis is the name of the new course, and this is the landing page for Genesis that I just recently created.

Here is the video where I explain the course in detail inside, I streamed it on YouTube live at the same time. I was doing it on Zoom. And so that’s the first thing people find. And it’s just a basic basic web, a basic page that goes down here with your buttons. One thing I’ve created here is I’ve got four courses now.

A lot of people like to buy bundles, and that’s when I use the memberships obviously in lifter MS. And so here you can say, okay, I want the basic course, gives you the price there, and I want to add it to Genesis. It’s telling me this is in Spanish, but it’s telling me how much I’m saving down here and I want to add this one too.

Or I can have all four. So making things easy, as easy as possible for people to be able to upsell very easily. I always, whatever, this is my, my phonetics course is the one on the right here, pro Speech, so that’s 249 euros, about $280. But if you buy that course with any of the others, it’s only a hundred dollars more.

So I always, when people contact me, I say, buy the phonetics course. You need to add that to any of the others. And it’s just, it’s almost standard now that people buy the package of Genesis Plus Pro speech or Intermediate plus Pro speech or Basic plus Pro speech. Yeah. As I say, my website’s nothing, nothing special at all.

It’s just a basic thing that I throw together and I keep every course seems to have a different theme. So as you can see, this one here is kinda like purple, I dunno why. But the other ones are like orange and green and things like that. So I show you that now how I’ve changed the colors and that’s one of the problems because really my logo is blue and white and my, sun keeps telling me that I should keep the same colors and things like that.

But let’s go into my area where my courses are. So what I just wanna

Chris Badgett: add while you’re pulling that up, I’ve seen this movie before too, where it’s the offer and the training. Like we can get really obsessed with web design, but when you have the right offer for the right people and you’re good at what you do, like the design, while important and a website can always be improved.

It’s the offer that matters. And you nailed it. And I think, by the way, that’s a beautiful landing page that you were just showing us.

Marcus Carter: Okay, thanks. Yeah, but even looking here, my courses, like the basic course doesn’t have a background, the intermediate course, that was, I’m looking at it now, I’m thinking, why didn’t you just do them the same?

But these are just things that I overlook, as a creator or genesis. I just threw this together ’cause I didn’t have a featured image for the Genesis course, but I’ll show you, for example the intermediate course, which is the course that I launched a year ago.

And this is when I started going a little bit higher in my technological skills as far as the course is concerned. So I’ve got all my modules here. There’s 63 lessons in this course 10 modules, and they all have like evaluations at the end of every module. So if I just click into to lesson one.

Each. Listen all my videos are based on videos and this is why this course took so, so long. ’cause there’s 63 videos that I had to edit, which took me an eternity to do that. And I’ll explain the way I changed it in the next in the next.

The way I teach English basically is I have this is what the counter method is based on, is that there’s a set of vocabulary there and I introduce a word and then I immediately ask a question to the student. As you can see at the bottom here, it says, do you play chess? And what I do is I leave a gap here.

So yes, I play chess,

play. Do you play chess? So as you can see here, I ask a question, students are supposed to answer out loud, and then they compare their answer with mine. Yes, I play chess, or no, I. I don’t play chess. And so there are always what we call closed questions, which is a yes or no answer. They say it out loud, there’s no real interaction.

I’m just hoping that students are actually saying these answers out loud. Okay. That has worked very well up until now, but I wanted to change things for my new course. So after this part here there’s another series of audios. I’m keen

AI: on going camping in summer

Marcus Carter: for people to

AI: camping

Marcus Carter: people to listen to the audios here.

And then I used this is a plugin that I used here for some different kinds of exercises. You can put the cursor down here, see the translations. No. Okay. This is a pretty basic lesson. This is the first one. I actually got better as I was going along with this course. If I go into one of the more advanced lessons, I can show you how I advance, and let’s go up to here or something.

Chris Badgett: It’s funny how things. You start making something and you’re, that’s that continuous improvement. You just keep getting better. And it’s you can’t, you don’t always have time to go back. I’m not gonna reshoot everything.

Marcus Carter: Yeah, you could, you just gotta keep going here. I learned how to do these audios and put these in.

So that happened after about less than six or seven, but I didn’t go back to change the first ones ’cause there was a lot of work done there already. These, this, the one thing I should say for everybody listening, I’m not a coder, I know. Ha I just know like super basic things, like the and I could not write code myself at all.

Everything that you’re seeing here, all of this has been the help of chat GPT to be able to do these things. And so what you do need to, what I would definitely advise anybody is to become an expert on using chat GT on a daily basis or whatever AI you want to use. So I started putting, different kinds of, exercises in dragon drops and things like that you could do here. These are audios that you can play. She

AI: looked at herself in the mirror and realized she had forgotten her glasses.

Marcus Carter: Or I can play it at N 0.5 speed if that’s a little bit too fast. I put my cursor over here and this come, this pops up.

So this was a great course, and a lot of people bought this course. They really liked it. It’s got lots of listening vocabulary, it’s got the videos and yeah, great success. This was the intermediate course,

Chris Badgett: but lemme ask a quick question here. How do you go from getting custom functionality and chat GBT to your website?

Are you. Like building an A custom plugin with chat GBT or are you, is there something on this page that it’s just unique for this page that has an HTML block in it or something?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s all it is. All I’m doing is, I’ve got Elementor, I’ve got the Elementor Pro plugin. You could do this in Cadence as well.

Cadence is my website theme, but I always use Elementor Pro for building everything. And so these are just nothing more than HTML blocks, that’s all they are. Then once you are, once you wanna design what you wanna do, you just chill. Tell chat, GPT, I wanna do this. You’ve gotta go back and forth loads of times with chat, GPT sometimes, for, to get the buttons right and to do this.

But he will just basically design it for you and explain, paste this. And if you don’t, if you’ve got the paid version of chat G tbt, which is 20 euros, $20 a month or something, just screenshot and just say, oh, this button’s over there, why is that? And then he’ll just do it again until you get it, and then once you’ve got it, it’s just copy and paste. And I’ve got all of these blocks here are in templates. So all I do is I just paste a template into a new lesson, change that vocabulary, and I’m ready to go for another one. So I’ve got a, and

Chris Badgett: Are the audio files living in your WordPress media library?

Marcus Carter: No, the, I use bunny.net. Yeah. As a content delivery network. That’s where I have my audio files and sometimes PNGs and those kind of things, rather than clog up my WordPress site with with too much audios and things. And to, and also because I think Bunny is a better content delivery network.

Yeah. All over the world, they’re everywhere. They’re super fast and they’re super cheap as well.

Yeah. Anyway, so these kind of exercises I’ve got, I dunno, about eight different kinds of exercise. And every lesson there’s two or three, two or three, and I just rotate them and they’re just different and yeah.

So that worked very well. So let’s go back to where we were

and where were we, sorry.

So when I designed the new course, this one Genesis is a course that, it was my original course before I even did my phonetics course. That was the name of it. And I did three or four lessons and then I left it. So I thought I’m gonna, give it birth again to Genesis. And my intention was the only thing that was missing from the intermediate course was the interactivity.

And because students just speak out loud, but they’re not actually using their microphones. It does have a, at the end of every module, it has a, pronunciation recognition lesson where students listen to sentences and then they record themselves and it gives you a scoring on your pronunciation. So I’m connecting to APIs.

Nobody knows what these are basically their, chat. GPT in my new Genesis course is connected to my Genesis course through what we call an API. So it’s just basically a little let’s say a wire or a bridge or something that connects chat, GBT, the brain of chat GBT to my course. I’m connected to another two or three more APIs.

One of them is this pronunciation scoring API. Another one is 11 labs, which is the the voices. And can’t remember which other one I had. Anyway, those are the three main ones. So now I’ll show you the course. The basic course is very similar to the intermediate course although it was the first course I did after the phonetics course, I revamped all the exercises and made them very similar to the intermediate course, but at the basic level.

But Genesis is a different concept. So this is the course page. Obviously what you’ll see here is a league they people win g coins. And I was actually watching one of your one of your guests just recently who was talking about gamification and things like that and saying and she was saying, you can do more than just a league and and streaks and things like that.

I was thinking, oh, I only had leagues and things. But anyway this is just this first concept that I put in. The other a PII have is with telegram. So the telegram group is connected. To the course. And when people are on the course for an hour, there’s a power hour, message in the telegram group that Peter is on the course for an hour.

It’s a power hour. If they’re three days, they get a streak message into the Telegram group. If they reach 5,000 G coins or 10,000 g coins. For Genesis coins 10,000 or whatever, that these messages are popping up in the Telegram group.

So one of my, one of the big problems, I would say, the biggest problem for creators of courses that, have students on their courses is getting the students to finish the courses.

It’s a real I know that students would learn a lot of English if they finished the course, but if you just buy the course in the heat of the moment and you don’t finish it, you’re not gonna learn English. And it might be the best course in the world, but you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna get there.

So one of my, missions with this new course was actually to try to hold students’ hands as much as possible in the telegram chat. And putting these things in for motivation. Students dunno this yet, and I can say this ’cause none of my students are gonna be watching this podcast, but I also have with print full.

I dunno, that’s a merchandising thing that I used to have on my website, on my YouTube channel. I still have all my products on there, so I have the phonetic table on a mouse pad or a cup with some expressions on it or something like that. I will be sending those when that guy, Luis.

When he gets to 30,000 G coins, he doesn’t know this yet. He will be receiving through the post, his mouse pad with the phonetic table on it. Yeah. So that, just to take it a little step further, what does it cost me $20 to do that, and to be able to reward somebody who’s got 30,000, this guy’s doing really well.

So I thought that was important. Anyway. As you can see here, I’ve changed the lifter LMS. This took me a lot of work, Chris, it looks like it. To get in here and to get this to look like this. Yeah, it was not me, it took chat, GPTA lot of work, let’s say, because it’s, you’ve gotta go into the little source code details of lift drill MS to be able to change the colors.

And it was really difficult to do this, but I just wanted it to look a bit more futuristic than the basic courses that I had before, which were all just a white background, with the normal squares and things. There’s 50 lessons in this course, and instead of it being on video, it’s all through ai.

So I’ll just click here on lesson one.

I. Okay, I’ve got five monitors and my Mac Mini is a little bit slow at showing these things on the screen. So this is just like an automatic popup that you get on the first lesson of every new module. So the first lesson is all about the present simple. This is the grammar that is in this first part.

It pops up on the first one but it doesn’t pop up on lesson two for students to read through that and they just click off here. For my course, because I’ve got people all over the world, it’s important that they have the option of British or American accents. So I’m British, let’s go for British.

And also they can choose, masculine or feminine voices or masculine.

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That’s coming from 11 labs, right?

Marcus Carter: The voices are coming from 11 labs. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yep.

Marcus Carter: So this is what I wanted, instead of it being a scrollable course where students go down, as I was showing in my previous course what I wanted to is to have the sensation of a web app where you are, on this screen.

This part here substitutes the video part where I, had to edit all those 63 videos. Now I don’t have to do that. Now I’ve got a CSV, which is on Google Sheets, and I’m pulling from that CSV and it automatically fills in all of this vocabulary, and it’s connected to 11 labs. And 11 labs has given me the word.

So when I click on the word, always, do your parents always visit you on holidays? I’m also using cashed audio because it, it turned out a little bit expensive to be continuously generating. That’s why it was so fast the way it gave it to me. And basically here, I just, these are the yes no questions.

The same as before, but I’m gonna actually say it. Yes, my parents always visit me on holidays

and it will give me a correct answer if I said it correctly. I can check my pronunciation here. And that’s the other API that I’ve got connected there. It also comes out this API in other parts of the course. So cut me off if you want me to make this shorter. No, you’re

Chris Badgett: good.

Keep going. My mind is being blown here, so keep doing it. I’m so impressed. And as a especially as a non-developer, I think that’s just incredible.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. You don’t have to be a developer nowadays to do these things. So some of the problems I’ve had, for example, where if you look down here, it says back to the Genesis course, just to get rid of that button that lifter LMS had at the top there, which was interfering because it, I had to put that in there.

So this now works, and I can go back to straight back here. Let me just click back in. Go to lesson two this time.

So it’s slow loading because of all these lemme just close Google that I have somewhere else. Yeah. So as I say, so the good thing about this for me is that I didn’t have to create 50 lessons. I just had to create A-C-A-C-S-V with all the vocabulary. And the AI does the rest for me. Basically. You can, I can click on, if I click on this rest word here.

Do you often rest when you travel? I can also click here and, it gives me the translation. So I’ve got, I’m using I’m deployed on the courses up on GitHub, which is the repository, which is then connected to render, which is what deploys it all over the world. And that’s where all my nodes are of like, for the translations and the speaks and all of those things which are connecting to the APIs.

So as I was saying before, what I wanted is like an app. So you’re looking at like a web app. So when you want to go to the next part, or lemme just show you this, if I wanna bring up that grammar part again, I just click here and I can, I. Have a look of any of the grammar that I want that will bring that popup back up.

That was another thing that I added. I try to think of everything that a student might need while they’re in the course. Oh, they don’t ans understand that question. You can translate it. Don’t worry. Oh, what was that grammar? You can look at the grammar. Wherever you are in the course, you can check it, you can change the accent again, if you want to, you can start the lesson again.

Once you’ve answered one question, then it graze out so that you remember which ones you actually answered. You can repeat the question. You’ve got your progress bar. You can let’s, it’s too fast for me, so let’s put it down here. And, ask another question. Relax. Do you think recycling helps the environment a bit slow?

Or if that’s too slow for me, and I want it asked fast early. Do you wake up early to enjoy your hobbies? So I’m trying to think of everything that a student might find challenging and to help them out so that they can calibrate the course to their liking along the way.

So when I click next, this is what I call the training section where they’re learning the vocabulary. They’re just using close questions. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. If I make a mistake, for example, if I say yes, I wake up late to enjoy my hobbies is it will detect that as a mistake and it will tell me the, what I should have said there.

Yes, I wake up. Early to enjoy. So just to, and then you just say it again and then it’ll update the progress bar. So go to the next part here, which is practicing with the ai. So you’ve done the training, you’ve learned those 10 words. Now the AI is gonna converse with me and induce me to use that vocabulary.

So I start the lesson. Hello Marcus. Let’s practice the words you learned in the training section. Our first word is wake up. What time do you usually wake up in the morning? So it says, hello Marcus. It’s pulling from the lifter LMS ID of my name to say that it says that in a couple of different places in the course.

And now I can basically converse in this part with whatever I want. I don’t have to answer his ques, I can say whatever I want. So I can say I wake up at three o’clock in the morning because I’m a fireman and I have to go and rescue people from houses.

That’s quite early. I see you have an important job. How often do you wake up at that time for work? Yeah, this is quite a long conversation. So he’s using how often he’s using the vocabulary from the first part. He also tries to interact a little bit and say, oh, that’s an important job, to acknowledge what I just said.

It’s not just a cold next question that he’s saying. If I make a mistake and I say, wake up me every day,

I noticed a small mistake change. You said, wake up me every day. The correct way to say it is I wake up every day, please repeat this sentence. I wake up every day.

Well done, Marcus. That’s much better. Now let’s practice, get dressed. What do you usually do after you get dressed? Okay if I didn’t understand that, I can also, see the translation here and it’ll show me in Spanish. And if I dunno what to say, I can also click on this here and it will give me a a suggested answer.

I usually have breakfast after I get dressed and they automatically disappear those things. Okay, so then that’s the part where you put into practice everything that you’ve learned in the training section. And then you go over here and this is the exercise area which substitutes what I had in my other course, the part where those audio things were and things.

So I wanted to go to town with this. And you start off with just the basic flashcard exercise, which is, pretty basic here, where you just got flashcards and if the idea is to get a streak here. So if you knew it, you just say, I knew it. I knew it. And you get a diamond for the first ones there.

Get another one here and then that’s it. And you go back. So that’s just to, to start off the exercises. What I didn’t say before on the AI conversation is when you finish the conversation, it analyzes everything you said with your mistakes. And a popup comes up and it tells you all the words that you used.

It gives you recommendations on the mistakes that you made if you might need to revise the present. Simple or something like that. Do you want me to go through all these exercises, Chris?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, let’s see. ’em, my mind is completely blown. And also, you’re doing all this in chat, GPT, right? And the APIs to the various tools like 11 Labs and the per.

Pronunciation checker or the grammar checker or whatever.

Marcus Carter: Yep. Everything. Sometimes I have to go to Gemini or gr if I don’t get it right with with chat. But yeah, basically I’m just 90% on chatGPT.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. Let’s see these other interactive learning tools, I think this is fascinating.

Marcus Carter: Ooh, that’s not good. Could not load. Breathe. Refresh your paste. That’s not good. Something’s happening here.

These are the, I’ve been like literally the last two weeks just ironing out all the bugs that people keep telling me. Should have loaded. Why is that? Failed to load exercises. Okay, that’s not looking good. Forget that part. We’ll edit that out. Let’s go to a different one here. Okay, this one here is like a bit of a game that I decided to a bit of a stressful thing here where you get 30 seconds to answer the question and I’ll show you what you can do here.

There are different kinds of questions, so you’ve gotta fill in the blank here. You, I’m just gonna reveal the answer here. Finish, and then I just press and it gives me the right answer. I can ask for a little tip if I don’t know. It says, oh, it’s one word and it begins with an S. Okay. So it’s gonna be some here because it, I’ve gotta use one of these words here.

If I’m get stressed out with the time, I can freeze it.

Chris Badgett: Wow. You do think about your students like and their experience?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, a lot of my students are actually very senior. I’ve got 75 year olds, quite a few, over 60. A lot of students. Yeah. This is just a multiple choice here which is, pretty basic.

Nothing interesting going on here. You can translate here if you click the translations on, then when you hover over it, you get a tool tip pop out. So that’s that one there. Fill in the audio one here so they gray out, because I’ve obviously been testing with this course whoops. So you listen, we will arrive at the station by noon.

So here, I’d have to write, arrive, and then go to the next one. Nothing. This one’s a pretty cool exercise where you, this is a pronunciation exercise, so students have to listen to the sentence. I wake up early every morning for work and then record themselves. I wake up early every morning for work, so it gives me a a rating for my pronunciation here.

And if I do it, let’s just go to the next one. If I make a mistake,

the new telephone costs less than my old one. So what I do is I click on these and then it opens up another little modal here, and I just say this word. So more.

Okay, now I can continue. Now that one will be. Green more. I dunno why that shifted down a bit there. But anyway, shouldn’t have done that. Then I have a listening exercise here where basically students listen to a dialogue.

AI: I usually wake up early on weekdays. How,

Marcus Carter: If I don’t understand that dialogue, I can flip it out here and you can’t see.

’cause I’ve got my toolbar at the top, but that’s not normally there. And I can translate everything that’s there and it will translate it into yellow text, which should do. There you go. And the good thing is if I what times I wake up early? I usually wake up early. I’m gonna, I’m gonna make a mistake here.

If I make a mistake,

AI: I usually wake up early on. Weekdays

Marcus Carter: it, how

AI: about you? It

Marcus Carter: actually. Plays the part of the dialogue where the correct answer is. And when I get it right, it just continues. So that’s my listening exercise. And then writing here is the final one. There is when you finish the writing here you’ve got different kinds of writings.

You can do a story, a diary, an opinion, a description, an email, for example. And it would generate your prompt, write an email to your manager about your late arrival. And you have to use five of these words at the top here, not all 10 of them. And when I use one, if I say I wake up as I write the word, my progress bar highlights and it shows me that I’ve done that word, but I’m not gonna write it.

But you’ve gotta write a over a hundred words to finish the writing as it says down there. It doesn’t go green until you get to a hundred. And then you click check. And then the I AI gives you all the feedback, the mistakes. How could you could improve it. Yeah. So that’s,

Chris Badgett: that’s basically it. I’m gonna pull your screen down and just say I’m completely blown away.

This is this is incredible, Marcus. And I know, ’cause I also like you, you’re like, I know my students need to freeze. Like I know what the people listening or watching this are gonna ask. Could you just re rehash the tech setup there? Like the APIs chat, GBT, WordPress Lifter and also, yeah, I guess let’s start with that.

Just, so if somebody’s interested in this, can you describe your, the tools you use and the workflow you use to create a new lesson?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Okay. I’ll show you. I can even show you. Do you want me to share again and show you the

Chris Badgett: yeah, I’ll add your, I’ll add your screen back so we, we’ve got the Genesis screen back up here.

Marcus Carter: Okay. Yeah. If I go in here, are you not seeing, ah, yeah sorry. There it is. Can you see the backend now?

Yeah. Okay. So this is the template here, and in this template there are different HTML blocks in Elementor. It could be in cadence or whatever theme you’re using. You just add an HTML block.

Now, as I say, I’ve been doing this for 11 months now, and there are like 30,000 lines of code for that, for, for what you’ve just seen. So if I click on this one here, this is section two AI conversation, HTML. So that’s where we were doing the AI conversation. This big one here is the the first part, the training.

Each one of these is the exercise menu and the different exercises. So it’s just basically. An Elementor page with blocks of HTML stuck into it. Now I’ve learned what, how I should have done this. I should have used global CSS styles and even had those CSS styles on Bunny. I didn’t do that. I didn’t know anything about that at the beginning.

Chat GT didn’t tell me that because I started with the training section and I said, Hey, let’s do this next part. Oh, let’s do this. And it wasn’t, I didn’t have the, the experience of the architecture of the way I could have done this much more easily. So it’s given me loads of problems. I had loads of problems with.

Making the course responsive to all the different screen sizes. Yes. And realize that was gonna be a problem. And I’ve literally just finished today, two weeks later, getting it to work on iPad, which has been the biggest problem I’ve had. It’s taken me literally three days to get one button working on the iPad because it was receiving, merge files or whatever.

Lots of things that I had no idea, I didn’t realize I was gonna have problems. Literally two or three days before the course launch, I was testing with a teacher. I said, just go through the lessons and things she was saying, but I can’t see the screen. It’s all off the screen. I said what are you using?

I said, I’m just using my laptop and I’m using a 27 inch monitor and I’ve only ever tested it on this. Yeah. So I didn’t realize I was gonna have all of these problems. But as I say it’s basically just modules of HTML files. And the only reason I put it into different modules is because I was getting really confused in the first one when I was with chat GBT, it was like over 3000 lines of code.

And then he said let’s put the next one. And I said can we do it in a different block at least? So I can just scrolling through, be organized and just to get there. Yeah. So basically I have a template in my WordPress site with the, with all of this on. And in lifter LMS in every lesson I have one little HTML block stuck at the top, which calls all of these lessons.

That’s all it is in lifter LMS. So I have one template a global template, and then in each lesson, like the 50 lessons, there’s one little HTML block, which calls the CSV and calls the template and that’s all it is. And then That’s very

Chris Badgett: cool.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. And then it’s I can show you if you like.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

And a question I have here when you’re doing this is the how much are you writing, like all the individual like phrases and things you use in all your different blocks? Or is chat GBT like selecting the question about waking up earlier or whatever?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, none of it is hard coded.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Okay.

Marcus Carter: Everything comes from ai.

So what I’m doing is I’m caching the I’m caching the files the audio files because 11 labs. Has turned out to be quite expensive, a bit more than I expected with loads of, it’s like doing loads of things. So I’m caching it onto Bunny. Like different versions. There might be for one word, five different possible questions that they could ask you in the cached file with the different accents so that at least, there’s a variety of five or six different questions they can ask you with the different accents that they might use and different genders.

Chris Badgett: So do the students get do they all have the exact same experience or not necess necessarily? No. Yeah, that’s

Marcus Carter: the beauty. Yeah. Nobody does the same course.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. But driving towards the same outcome of learning that level of language.

Marcus Carter: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. The conversation part, everything’s different.

So if I go here to lesson one and I go into Elementor that’s all I have. Yeah. I just have a, that’s all it is. I’m just calling the template.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Marcus Carter: In lesson one.

Chris Badgett: Wow.

Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s it. That, that, that’s what’s in, that’s what’s in lifter.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. I’m pulling your screen down again just to Okay. Lay on the plane here. But, and this, especially since this is December 19th, I’m gonna say this is the coolest AI thing I’ve seen all year.

And and I am just so impressed because, WordPress, myself included I can’t write code. We have talented engineers on the team, but I understand the whole point of democratizing the web is to make it so anybody can be as creative as your being while leveraging technology. Sure. Maybe you’re a developer or maybe you just want to keep it simple and WordPress, but you’re empowered to just go with WordPress and chat GBT and all the AI tools that integrate in.

It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating. And the also notice, like you, you’ve removed yourself as the teacher, like the 11 lives, voices and stuff, but it’s not like you’re not teaching, you’re orchestrating this whole thing like a conductor. And so you’re still teaching, but now you’re just leveraging technology and your body of knowledge together to come up with a wonderful learning experience.

It’s amazing.

Marcus Carter: Oh, but the whole idea is scale, yeah. I can’t edit 63 videos, it’s just. Burning out my eyes sitting here, yeah. Doing that. So the whole idea, now I can now create my next level course and just take that template and just change the CSV, maybe update a little bit of the exercises, make them a little bit more difficult.

But more or less, in a month or less than a month, I’ve got the next level of the course. I can do three or four courses, and one of my ideas now is to do tailor made courses for, for example, some of the big companies I work for, they don’t know this yet, but I’m gonna give them a presentation and say, look, this is a financial banking course in your corporate colors designed for you.

They’ve got the one, one of the things I’m talking about, they’ve got like 35,000 employees. And so I’m like, this is. Designed specifically for you and your employees. How can they not buy it? It’s if they’re gonna be teaching English, why would they go with the normal, these big English teaching companies when they can have something completely tailor made for them.

Very easy for, for human resources to see the results of how they’re doing. If you’re using the the groups plugin and things like that for them to pop in and see how they’re getting, the results on their evaluations and things. The good thing about what, AI has given us is your.

Only limitation is your imagination. Now there is no excuse for you to say, I dunno how to do it, because knowledge is 100% free now. And so it will be a learning curve, obviously, because you’re gonna have loads of problems. And I’ve had them, I’ve had, I’ve literally, as I just said, I’ve spent three days trying to get a button to work on the iPad, and that is super frustrating.

Yeah. But as I say, I don’t have a choice because there’s a woman who bought my course and she and my course is 600, 600 and something dollars. That course is, on offer. It’s actually $800. That course. She only has an iPad, so I have no choice. I have to make it work on the iPad. And I spent the first few days doing some other things, but then there was just one button that I couldn’t get to work and I finally got it working this morning.

So Amazing. Yeah, it’s just

Chris Badgett: You’ve gone exponential Marcus. This is impressive to watch. And that’s a, yeah. And as a, I think what’s most important here is developers can write code and, or accelerate with chat GPT and stuff, but you as a subject matter expert in education and language learning, particularly in the English, Spanish you’re just, you can do anything now.

It’s it’s amazing.

Marcus Carter: Totally. It’s amazing.

Chris Badgett: I see why you wanted to show this, ’cause I’m proud of you, man. This is so cool. Yeah. And I I just wanna ask the question again, just ’cause I know people watching or listening are gonna be curious. I’ve heard WordPress, I’ve heard lifter, LMS I’ve heard some of the add-ons, like groups and so on.

You’ve mentioned chat, GBT, you’ve mentioned 11 labs, some other APIs for niche language learning scenarios. You also mentioned GitHub. And you’ve mentioned Elementor. Is there anything else that kind of fits into this stack that’s like critical for somebody to understand? And particularly, could you touch on the GitHub piece?

What, how GitHub gets involved? Yeah. And for a non-engineer to start using GitHub, like I’m sure that was a little intense for you and. Here you are.

Marcus Carter: I still have no idea how GitHub works. I don’t even know what it is really. It’s just basically, I know it’s a place where people put their codes, and they call it a repository, whatever that is, and so I was designing the course for the first 11 months locally. I had it on local server here, on my computer. And then, chat said later we’ve gotta deploy this on on whatever. And I was like, okay, we’ll do that later. And then when it got to the stage, about two weeks before I said, okay, we better start moving this, because I didn’t do it initially because it just takes longer when it’s deployed onto the servers.

If you wanna update something, you gotta wait for it to deploy and then come back and I locally, you just press enter and then it’s ready.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And

Marcus Carter: Literally chat. GPT walked me through every single step. He said, press, you gotta have the screenshot thing, where you pay the $20 so you can screenshot and upload that to him.

And he says. Press that button there in the corner that says upload file. And then you know, it you got no excuse for not doing it. And then from there you connect it to render. I still don’t really know what render is and what’s the difference between bunny and render, but I had to do that.

He said, you need, he told me you had to choose render or one of the others or something like that. I don’t know if I pay five or $10 a month to render for that. And so he just walked me through it and it was surprisingly easy. It was literally a couple of hours and you are live worldwide.

I was like, wow, that was amazing. I also use Python Anywhere, which is another, some kind of server or something like that where you can put Python code, which is what I have no idea, but I’ve got quite a lot of Python code on that thing. And that is what connects everything to my Telegram groups.

That’s where all the messages go through there. And yeah as I say, I have no I might have said GitHub, like it’s a repository, but I’ve got no idea what that is really.

Chris Badgett: And in terms of, I’m just, I’m left with this question what do you do when you get stuck? Like I know you’ll email Lifter a support ticket as example.

But there’s only so far we can go like in helping with chat GBT and render and all, and Bunny and all this other stuff. Maybe you’ve hit elementary with a message about something. It sounds like predominantly you’ve just figured out how to work with chat GPT as a co-pilot to get you unblocked whenever you get stuck.

Marcus Carter: Totally. You will never get stuck with chat GPT because it’s he knows everything, and it’s his language and he speaks all the languages, all the coding languages. He knows everything. He will make mistakes and he, you will do things and he forgets, like what he said two paragraphs ago.

And you have to always keep, quite often, I just re I just say, here’s the code again, here’s the code again, just in case, you just have to learn how to work with him, but he will always get you out of the. Out of the wherever you are stuck. And and I have obviously, lift LMS sometimes I need some support from them or something like that if I’m trying to find workout things that are in the plugin.

But really no other platforms have I needed to use any kind of support. I had a problem with Elementor. I, when I started trying to save my, because it’s got so many lines of code on the same page, I was getting a server error from SiteGround, which is what hosts my WordPress site, and I had to open up support with them, and they just upped the memory that I needed in my PHP and that was it.

Away you go. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s absolutely amazing. And on that note of like hallucination in chat, GPT, when it says something wrong or it doesn’t work, I would, if I was. Guess, I would think at some point you’d hit a wall, you can’t get over and it’s, you’re just totally stuck. But maybe not Marcus Carter.

He’s not giving up. He’s burned the boats. He’s going forward no matter what.

Marcus Carter: Yeah, it literally, sometimes I have been stuck on certain things of code that it didn’t work, and I’ve had to go to Gemini and then I’ve had to go to Grok and then I’ve gone to Deep Seek and I’ve had perplexity open and I’ve had like, all five of them are like, we gotta work this out.

Like this block here is halfway down the page. Why can’t we put it, yeah. And it’s taken me different ais to actually find the the problem to solve the problem. But you will always find the solution with the ai because it’s just like having a full stack developer in your pocket.

Chris Badgett: I think part of the reason you’re so good at this is that you actually, you have really strong vision. You know where you’re trying to go. You’re continually protecting like the integrity of the learning experience and the learner. Yeah, because it’s easy to get into AI tools and just start messing around and being like, oh, that’s cool.

Oh wait, I can do this. But you know the outcome you really wanna have and that’s impressive.

Marcus Carter: It all started with the intermediate course when I started making those exercise and I thought, hang on a sec, I can create any kind of exercise I want to create where you can press a button and something happens on the screen and you listen to an audio.

And that’s when I thought maybe I could make like the whole screen a different color and have some kind of UI and where people could actually, and it just went from there, just like I thought, right? I don’t want to be making video courses all the time ’cause it’s just too time consuming.

I can’t scale them. And I can now make the course for the big companies. I can, very quickly I can change the CSS, change the colors, put their logo on it, change the vocabulary for this, for their industry, and away we go.

Chris Badgett: And you you do continue to make videos for YouTube, but that’s for YouTube, right?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s where the sales come from. So I can’t, YouTube is I haven’t actually uploaded a video for six months to YouTube. Because I’ve been so full on with this course, and one of the problems with the course was when do I launch it? When’s it gonna be ready? And I was like, more or less, I had it done, but I still had a load of things to do in sort of October and I said, November the 30th, that’s the date.

And then it was just a massive rush up until then. And literally two hours before the webinar I finished, it wasn’t even working properly. There were bits that weren’t working properly. I finished two hours before, but if I didn’t put that deadline, it would’ve just kept dragging out.

So I thought, let’s, and I had, like in the webinar, I had over a thousand people that are supposed to be coming, but you normally get a quarter. So about 250 people came to the webinar and yeah. I just hope this is an inspiration for people to think you can do what you want. Yeah, you can do and build whatever you want.

Whatever you can imagine, you can do it and just try, go on an HTML block, go into chat, do say, Hey, can you put a button in the middle of the screen that when I press it explodes and says, hippy hip, hip, hooray, and he’ll do it for you.

Chris Badgett: Do you have an example where you use chat GPT to help with lifter?

For example, one of the questions in my mind is okay, if we’re delivering the experience through this interactive content that’s coming from somewhere else, how does lifter know when the lesson is complete?

Marcus Carter: That was another thing I had to hack. I had to hack the listen complete button.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Marcus Carter: I dunno if you saw that. It says, I finished the lesson, did you see on the exercise menu at the bottom it says, I finished the lesson. Okay. That’s your button. But I had to I had a little bit of a problem with the toggle because you can toggle it on and off in lifter LMS and so at the moment you can just say, I’ve completed the lesson.

You can’t re toggle on yet, because when you re toggle on. I get the button pops up at the top of the screen, so I said, okay, I’m just gonna toggle it off at the moment if you’ve completed this. But so basically chat, TT he’ll go into your website and he’ll look down through your documentation and he’ll find out what are the IDs, for that button.

But very often he hasn’t been able to do that. I’ve had to go into your plugin myself, and it’s super extensive and there’s just so many things you’ve got there. And I’ve just and I take a screenshot and he says, click on that bit where it says that and open that bit of code and paste it here.

Ah, so the student ID is, this is the thing that they use. And and then eventually I find things but, and sometimes I actually go onto your website and I look at the little videos because he can’t read the videos. And so you’ve got videos where it explains how to do something if you wanna, whatever.

And so I go in there and I look at the video. So I’ve just seen it in the video. It’s this, and he’s oh, okay. Like it’s just so yeah, he will dig in.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. I’m serious when I say that is the coolest AI thing I’ve seen this entire year. I’m passionate about online education, so there’s a lot of cool AI things, but this is something else.

My, my hat’s off to you. That’s Mark Marcus Carter. You can find it at Carter’s or Carter school of english.com, the Carter Method. If you are a Spanish speaker looking to learn English check out the courses. Yeah. And you have all kinds of different levels and stuff like that, but Marcus, thank you for being a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur.

It is just amazing. You’re obviously really good at both education and entrepreneurship, which includes, marketing and sales and building a product and all that stuff, but it also includes innovation and you are just innovating at a crazy exponential rate. It’s really fun to watch. Thank you for coming on.

I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to talk to you from a year from now. ’cause then it’s, I don’t know where we’re gonna be, but thank you so much and keep up the amazing work. Thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett explains the main distinctions between cohort-based and self-paced online courses in this LMScast episode, assisting course designers in selecting the approach that best suits their objectives.

According to him, self-paced courses are very scalable and manageable since they let students learn on their own, at their own pace, and at any time. These courses may produce everlasting revenue with minimal expense, and they are particularly effective for information-rich content and big, diversified audiences. The drawback of self-paced courses is that they frequently have lower completion rates, worse responsibility, less community involvement, and lower perceived value, which typically translates into cheaper costs and fewer student changes.

Chris compares this to cohort-based courses, in which students progress through the course on a same schedule. Better learning results, more engagement, a deeper sense of community, and inherent accountability are all produced by this system. Cohorts frequently feature peer interaction, group coaching, and live training, which greatly raises the perceived value and enables producers to charge higher costs.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris Badgett doing a solo episode here, and today we’re gonna get into cohort based online courses versus self-paced online courses. How to decide which one is the right one for you. I’ve got a surprise for you in this episode. There is a hybrid version, which we’ll get into too, which I’m a big fan o of.

First, let’s start with a self-based course. Like what does that mean? So, a self-paced course is like the courses that you see on websites like you did Me or Masterclass. They often contain a series of valuable. Video lessons, maybe some quizzes, maybe some worksheets, but it’s self-paced. There’s really, uh, not much teacher interaction, probably none at all.

This is why you have some of the best instructors or subject matter experts in the world on a platform like masterclass. They create a wonderful course with awesome ideas and content and stories. But you can’t interact with them at all. And that’s why Masterclass costs $20 a month, basically. Similar, same is similar with Udemi.

It’s mostly just self-paced. Online courses and self-paced online courses are great. For example, we have a self-paced online course at LifterLMS called the LifterLMS Quickstart course. It’s a self-paced course that essentially. It teaches you the 5% of the most essential features of LifterLMS, so that you can create and launch an online course website and start getting sales, which show you all the critical steps in under 40 minutes of training.

That’s a very powerful, popular free, self-paced online course that we make at LifterLMS. So what is a cohort based online course? A cohort based online course is where a group of people come into a course and they kind of go through it together at the same time. So if you think back to the offline world, so when you go to school, you’re the class of whatever year you’re kind of with a cohort of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and so on.

You move as a cohort through the system. So that’s what a cohort based online course is. So that’s how they’re different. And a cohort has a lot of magic that comes with it, but it also comes with some trade-offs and by magic that comes with it. What I mean is it’s a very different thing to be an individual like by yourself taking a self-paced.

Self-paced online course learning about a subject versus kind of joining a group of people or a cohort that are going through a training at the same time. So they’re, they’re very different and they have their pros and cons, uh, which we’ll jump into. So a self-paced online course can be great. I’m gonna go over the benefits of those.

For one, they’re extremely scalable, so you could. Put a self-paced online course up on your website and it get, if it gets very popular you literally have no work to do primarily except for to keep the website online. And you could have 10 or 10,000 or 300,000 people in the same self-paced online course moving through it.

And that’s great. So it’s like extremely scalable and can create evergreen revenue. Now if you do do self-paced online courses, which a lot of people do I do recommend, you know, revisiting it every couple of years, maybe making it a little better, making improvements based on what you’ve learned and user feedback and things like that.

But the nothing beats the scalability and the evergreen, uh, revenue nature of a self-paced online course. The other benefit is it’s super flexible. There are benefits in a cohort based online course of having a community and, and group of people. But that also creates a lot of, you know, kind of social pressure.

It can where okay, the student’s gonna be more involved with the instructors or the coaches. So there’s a social demand, uh, if you’re going through it with a community or you have a community aspect to your site. That’s set up so that the cohort kind of sticks together. That can be a lot of pressure.

So like a self-paced online course. There’s literally no social pressure. Like here it is. This is an awesome course. Uh, it’s designed to get you the result that you’re looking for. Good luck. Do it at your own time, at your own pace, whenever you want. So on. So that kind of autonomy, that learner, flexible learner autonomy is a, a big benefit to a self-paced online course.

Uh, in terms of the course creator, there’s a much lower overhead to doing a self-paced online course. You don’t have the pressure of a live audience if you’re actually delivering the content live or doing. Like a cohort based group coaching model that kind of bolts on to your course and so on. So there’s just, it’s sort of like you build it once you set it up, you launch it you do the marketing, you get students and you’re good.

It’s just self-paced and it’s just more on autopilot with a lot less management. Overhead sitting on top of that. So where self-paced online courses really shine is. For information heavy courses, so similar to how in traditional school there are only so many hours in the day and school weeks in the year, there’s only so much information that you can put in there.

But a self paste online course could literally have tons of information and maybe you have somebody who’s gonna move through it really fast, or you have somebody who’s gonna take a year to work through the material. So you, you have that that ability, if it’s self-paced, that people can pick and choose, set it around their schedule, their availability, their speed, they like to learn and implement and so on.

If you have an information heavy online course. A self-paced online course can be fantastic for that. And also, self-paced courses really fit well when you’re doing. A large audience, right? You can have large cohorts but if you have a really big audience, a self-based online course is gonna be easier to manage.

And particularly if your audience is very diverse and you know, there’s more variability in what we would call the student avatar or customer avatar. A self-paced online course can be good for large audiences. Come with people coming from varying backgrounds where the cohort just wouldn’t be as effective as a tightly scoped, you know, smaller group with very similar people in it and things like that.

So the cons of a self-paced online course, is the dirty little secret in our industry is that they do have lower completion rates and lower. Results or students getting the transformation that the course offer promises.

The reason for that is when somebody is like, kind of alone in a self-paced online course with very little support around them or community, it is much easier for somebody to get distracted, not finish, lose motivation and so on.

So that’s a drawback too. The self-paced online course, you know, ’cause there’s really limited accountability. You don’t have that peer accountability or that instructor, uh, accountability. And it’s much harder to build a community around a self-paced online course. For example, you could have a self-paced online course and then put a social learning community on your website or on social media, like in a Facebook group or a Slack group.

But for a self-paced online course. When people are coming in at all different times from all different backgrounds. It’s much harder for them to connect with each other. The example I like to give there is if you’ve ever come into a community. It feels like, the people in the community have been like doing this thing for like many, many years, and they all know each other.

It can feel really intimidating and so on. And they’re just at a different level. ’cause they’ve already. You know, they’re further along in the training or implementation and so on. So community building with a self-paced evergreen online course is much harder. Self-paced. Online courses also have lower perceived value because you don’t have that benefit of the cohort and.

A group coaching model that’s designed or even one-on-one coaching that goes with it. Where it’s designed to work with a cohort of people. Who are all progressing through something at the same time. Because of that, a self-paced online course does not, cannot command as high of a price point as a well orchestrated cohort based course.

So switching gears over to cohort based online courses some of the benefits is they do have higher completion rates and student results and transformations simply because the cohort supports on top of like the training content. A self-paced online course is mostly the training content, uh, but a cohort.

Just adds a, a whole other value layer that that helps, you know, it helps you command higher prices and it, but more importantly. It helps support students. It’s a support mechanism. A cohort is, part of the offer, if you will. There’s a saying in the online business world that I’ve experienced myself on.

The other end of which is sometimes you’ll. Go to a learning opportunity and the saying is you come for the content, but you stay for the community. That’s definitely happened to me before where I came in with a cohort, made friends, colleagues, business, relationships and so on, and I stayed month after month, year after year.

Because of the power of the cohort, though, I originally came in my mind just for the high value content. So co well done, cohort-based courses have built in accountability and structure. I’m a big fan of cohorts that are delivered live, so like a training call that happens at the same time every week where you have the main training content and then you have a window of time open for q and a or coaching.

And once you get in that rhythm, week after week, and I’m not saying you ha cohorts last forever. A lot of cohorts are for like four weeks, six weeks, nine weeks, 12 weeks, three months, six months. I personally like cohorts that don’t go on forever. Because what that does is the education entrepreneur gets really good at perfecting a process that.

Has a starting point and an end point with the transformation. It’s not a lifelong commitment, and they get better and better at delivering those results. That is super powerful. Whereas in a self-paced online course you’re, they’re going for scale and to get as many people in as possible. Whereas a cohort based model, yes, they want to get as many people as possible, but it’s more about.

Perfecting the transformation and supporting the learner and, you know, providing all the different types of content and support and coaching so that they actually get the result that they promise while adding the benefit of a community of peers. IEA cohort that moves through the training with them. The CO Because of that, a cohort based online course does command premium pricing, so higher, higher price points. And there’s that whole learn do teach loop that goes around and around. Cohorts are much more powerful in terms of having a open feedback loop with real people. So that the course creator can get better through feedback, and the learner can also get better by giving and accepting feedback.

So the feedback cycle is just much tighter and more powerful. It’s more of a flywheel in a cohort based online course. Some of the drawbacks. Of a cohort based online course is the scheduling and just the facilitation of it. So recently at LifterLMS ran a cohort based online course. It was a nine week course but with a weekly call for an hour.

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I did what I recommended earlier, which is I would have about 45 minutes of. Training and content for the lesson of the day that I prepared, I prepared a worksheet. I had time open on that call for questions and coaching, and it’s a lot of work. And once you, and I’m a big fan of pre-selling that offer was out in the market before I was, had completed it. I hadn’t done any of it except for the, the work of figuring out what I was gonna do and the outline and my plan, but I hadn’t actually created the training. So at launch I didn’t have any of it, but I, I just had to stay one week ahead of the people coming in and the next lesson. So for every hour of class there was about, at least four hours of prep before, and then after it’s over.

There’s a bunch of work to do to, get the video ready and all the stuff ready for the people that couldn’t attend live that were also in the cohort. So it’s a lot of scheduling and facilitation, facilitation. It just has a lot of operational complexity that’s much more complex in the simple self-paced online course.

A cohort based course can also be much harder to scale because. Um, as cohorts get bigger it can be more challenging to give them what they need. And what I mean by that is if you’re doing coaching as part of the cohort experience, if the coaching group gets too big you won’t be able to get to everybody’s questions, which has happened to me before.

I’ve been in cohorts where that’s happened. It’s kind of a, a letdown and the way you can solve that, you can systemize and scale with bringing in other coaches or coaching assistants and things like that to, you know, provide some scale, but it is much harder to scale. And then a cohort based online course.

Also has higher expectations from the learners, particularly if you have charged a more of a premium price for the cohort based learning experience. So you really need to, it’s not really a con, but just you gotta know that you got to rise to the occasion and deliver the value that you promised with your cohort and the cohort based price.

My favorite thing to do is what I call the hybrid model. So this is where you combine the best of self-paced with a cohort-based model. So the simple way to think about that is I wanna have a self-paced online course, but instead of me going into my office cave and creating that. Self-study online course and making all the lesson videos and being by myself talking to the camera.

I like to do a live delivery through a cohort and then take the recordings of all that and then turn that into an evergreen course that stays up on my website for a long time. So that’s a kind of a hybrid model. Another way to hybridize it is to make the course self-study, but make the coaching that accompanies it cohort based.

So what I mean by that is you could have your signature program online course. That’s self-study, and let’s say you launch it twice a year or four times a year. With a new cohort of people, so this is like a open cart, closed cart scenario. You have a product launch two or four times a year, but you’re launching the same product.

But what’s new in your launch is the group of people coming in to form a cohort that you actively support with additional group coaching calls or even private coaching calls and so on. That’s a really awesome hybrid model where you deliver the best. Of self-paced courses while tacking on cohort-based coaching.

So let’s, let’s talk about the technical implementation of this. It’s easy to overcomplicate it, but I’m telling you, it doesn’t have to be a super complicated. So if you have a WordPress site and you put LifterLMS on there. LifterLMS out of the box. Everything you need to make a self, self-paced online course.

You can add your videos, your lessons, your worksheets, you can add quizzes, assignments, and so on. So it’s, it’s really good to go like just lifter self-paced online courses. It’s been around forever on the internet. Lifter does a great job at that. But when it comes to cohorts, you can also do that. So there’s a, there’s a couple of things you can do.

One of them is to start using some of the lifter features, like course start and end dates, or course enrollment periods. So an enrollment period is how you do product launches. So if you wanna do a product launch on the, you can even use the same course over and over again if you’d like, and you can, let’s say people can enroll in the new Year cohort between January one and January 14th. That’s your product launch window. But then the course start date is let’s say on January 14th, and then we’re off to the races with that cohort. So that’s, that’s one way to think about it. Lifter, LMS actually has a dedicated course cohort add-on you can use.

So you put in the course co cohorts add-on plugin onto your WordPress site. And what that allows you to do is to take any course on your site, click one button, and it immediately creates a new cohort where you enter in, you know, the future start date for that cohort and so on. You can even, automatically hide the previous version of that course from the public website. It’s still in the background for people that need retained access to that course. But, um, that way all the, um, future cohorts, like the current cohort is the one that’s like live on your site that people can actually buy and sign up for.

Check out the LifterLMS course cohorts. We also have a continuing education add-on, which does some fancy stuff. In the CEU market. But what it also has is the ability if you wanna.

If you have a situation where a user needs to take the same course over and over again, like once every year or once every three years as a new cohort you can just click a button inside, uh, the CONT continuing education add-on setup so that people have retained access to that course for a year.

But after that. You’re, they’re moved out, their progress is gone, and then they can rebuy and come in again in a year as a new cohort in the exact same course. So there’s a lot of different ways to do it. The reason, like an example of people that do that is in health and safety training, sometimes you have to recertify every year.

Like as a lifeguard, you gotta get your CPR first aid skills re-upped every year. You go through the same training as a cohort every year to recertify. That’s what’s why it’s called continuing education. And then in terms of integrating live components of a cohort, it’s really easy to overcomplicate it.

But I don’t think it needs to be that complicated at all. So first you have your LifterLMS site. Maybe you’re using the course cohorts add-on or continuing education. You can deliver lessons live with a tool like Zoom as an example. You can record those core cohort based trainings. They’re called instructor led trainings to be technical, ILT instructor LED training.

So that’s how you deliver your course content. You hit the record button when you’re in the Zoom. After it’s over, you take that recording video file and you upload it into your LMS into the lesson. And before you put it in the lesson, like before that lesson, there was a link to join the Zoom call at the scheduled time.

So now you’re just using the learning management system and a tool like Zoom to deliver the cohort based experience as well as capture the video content for that. Lesson. Um, you can also add communities inside your LMS. So Lifter, LMS has a social learning add-on, which you can use to create an online community, sort of like a Facebook group on your website.

And it will have different pockets for each cohort. If they’re all in like one course. So they could have their own discussion area as just that cohort. So instead of like a broad community that anything goes you have the ability to segment by cohort, which is pretty cool. And then finally, I would say that there’s really no limit to how fancy you want to get with tools and technology, but try to keep it.

As simple as possible for your cohort-based courses and for your users is really powerful. Again, there is nothing better or worse. Uh, one is not better than the other self-paced versus cohort-based online courses. They each have their pros and cons. Just decide on the one which is right for you.

If you want a more intimate experience, you wanna have a higher price point, and you really care deeply about student results and value. Community based learning, a cohort based model is probably the way to go for you. But if you have like a signature program and you would prefer to keep your interaction with others to a minimum.

More like a, the way a, a nonfiction book author publishes a book. There’s no cohort, there’s just people out there reading the book, and it’s an awesome book if that’s what you want. A self-paced online course is a great way to do it. I also wanna mention there is an add-on for lifter, LMS called Groups, which is a cohort of sorts where a company or a school or organization.

Buys a group of seats in a course so that. They give out those seats to their employees or team members or students. Or friends or whatever. That is a cohort of sorts too. So there’s really a ton of options. If you go to the LifterLMS website and take the Perfect Offer Playbook course, it, we go into much greater detail about how to design your model.

Today I wanted to speak with you specifically about, the difference between self-paced and cohort-based models. It’s very important that if you can figure out which way you want to go or if you want to do a hybrid model to kind of get your plan in place. Before you start creating content and, you know, getting on a recurring you know, live delivery schedule, like really think it through, think about your constraints, your capacity, your personality and really plan out the structure before you get too deep into the implementation.

So that’s it. I’m Chris from LifterLMS, it’s great to be with you on the journey and if you have any questions at all about how to do whatever self-paced or cohort-based learning model, you can always connect with the LifterLMS team and myself. We’re easy to find. You can find us@lifterlms.com, all over social media and everywhere else, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Chris Badgett outlines a comprehensive, useful process for utilizing ChatGPT to create an online course that centers around your special skill.

He emphasizes that while depending exclusively on AI results in generic. Low-value course content. ChatGPT should enhance your creativity rather than replace it. In order to determine the course’s path. He starts by selecting a targeted, outcome-driven topic and creating a distinct student avatar.

The “Human Knowledge Dump,” a 20–100 page compilation of your thoughts, frameworks, notes, examples, and any pertinent research, is the foundation of his system. It provides ChatGPT with rich context, enabling it to produce material that genuinely sounds like you. Using this framework, ChatGPT assists in creating a solid course overview, well-structured lesson material. Scripts, slides, and talking points appropriate for various teaching modalities, including teleprompter delivery. Informal talking-head videos, and slide-based lessons.

For accessibility and clarity, Chris advises creating written courses first, then turning them into video material. Following the creation of the course material, ChatGPT may assist in creating the course name. Sales page text, short and long descriptions, and even a launch marketing strategy.

He ends by illustrating how to put everything together within LifterLMS, demonstrating how ChatGPT can greatly accelerate the construction of courses without compromising authenticity or quality when done correctly.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we’re doing a solo episode about how to create an online course with ChatGPT, and to do it in an effective non cr cringey way so you can move faster without losing your voice and while actually creating a valuable, unique course.

So the good news is. You’re listening to this or watching this right now in the podcast format. A lot of the things we’re gonna talk about here from an ideas and conceptual standpoint, we have created a full free course called Create an Online Course with ChatGPT that is available on the LifterLMS Academy.

So you can head over to academy dot lifter lms.com. And sign up for the free course called Create an Online Course with ChatGPT. It has video walkthroughs, video demos, all the prompts, templates that you can use to create an online course with ChatGPT. But first, it’s important to note that ChatGPT is not going to do the whole course for you.

If you try to do that it’s gonna come out generic. It won’t sound like you, you’ll lose your voice. But what ChatGPT is excellent at is being an assistant to you, a co-pilot to you. It will give you leverage, but you still have to create, and even just using all the templated prompts we use, you’re gonna create.

A much better online course. Faster using ChatGPT now to go over some of the secret sauce of how to use ChatGPT correctly. ChatGPT is great at structure filling in gaps in research iteration, rewriting concepts, filling in the blanks, giving you a sounding board to bounce ideas off of or provide new insights.

But it’s, if you don’t use it correctly, you’re just gonna end up with garbage in and then generic out. But the method that we teach in our free course called Create an Online Course with ChatGPT, we help you avoid all the mistakes of using ChatGPT in a suboptimal way. Basically what’s in the course is like seven kind of steps and ways of using ChatGPT.

So the first is around selecting a topic and outcome. Next is creating your student avatar, your ideal learner profile. The next is to do a human knowledge dump, which is the secret sauce that makes working with ChatGPT effective, and I’m gonna go over that in detail in a little bit here. Then you can leverage ChatGPT to create an effective well-written course outline.

Then you can actually use ChatGPT to create lesson, video scripts. Text content. Finally, you can optimize your course title and description or sales page content using ChatGPT. And then finally you can use ChatGPT to help you with your launch plan and marketing. So to get started. We actually have another course called the Perfect Offer Playbook.

It’s not free, but offer construction is the foundation of any successful course. So instead of going to ChatGPT and saying make me an online course about how to get better at marketing that’s just. You could do that prompt and it will give you a course outline and stuff like that.

That’s not really a strong offer. As an example you could do something more outcome focused how to get your first clients in seven days instead of marketing 1 0 1. But we’re starting to drill in on offer construction a little bit here. So part of the human work you have to do is to.

Figure out your, who you’re helping, how you help them, which is their, your unique mechanism and the result that they want. Now that sounds simple. And you’ll hear copywriters use frameworks like how to get X and Z amount of time with without Y objection, something like that. These concepts sound simple, but to truly create a great offer, you really need to understand who you’re serving.

What their hopes and dreams and pains are, and that’s all included in the free course we have on how to create an online course with ChatGPT. If you want to go deeper on offer construction, we have our perfect offer playbook because if you get the offer wrong, nothing else matters. And after that, after you get through some of these offer steps of understanding your student avatar.

The result they’re seeking and how your unique mechanism, which is a course and a certain training concept, is gonna help. You have to do what’s called a human knowledge dump. So you have to fight the urge to ask ChatGPT to do all the just come up with all the content on its own. That’s not how it works.

That’s where you get garbage in generic out. The human knowledge dump, think of it like a Google document. The great thing about ChatGPT is you don’t have to be super organized. You can just start copying and pasting some of your content into this document, and ultimately what we want to end up with a human knowledge dump.

Somewhere around from 20 to a hundred pages of content. So in the human knowledge dump, this is about providing context for ChatGPT. So if whatever you’re teaching, I bet you have blog posts on the topic. Copy paste them into the Google document. If there’s like certain things that you really wanna cover in the course.

Type it out okay, I’m going to teach about this thing and I really want to teach it in this way through these kind of three phases or milestones, the core concepts or big ideas that underlie my methodology, which is also your unique mechanism are X, Y, and Z. And then you can also pull in external resources, be like, Hey, I’m really influenced by.

This influencer or this author, this subject matter expert, they have a core idea called X Here’s and then you copy like a piece of that content, put it into your human knowledge dump. If it’s a, it’s not like you’re stealing, it’s just like you’re doing research. ’cause you’re like, this is how research works.

Like when you write a nonfiction book you get sources and you do research. You put it all together into a book, but in this case, we’re putting a course. And of course when you mention somebody else’s ideas or philosophies or things like that, you can always give them credit when you teach.

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants and not just purely inventing from. A blank slate with no external influences. Put your external influences into the human knowledge dump. That’s the slowest part of creating an online course with ChatGPT. But it’s very important because what you’re doing is you’re asking ChatGPT to not just look at everything that it knows on what it’s been trained on, but you’re asking it to really focus in on.

The human knowledge dump as like a very important part. If not the primary part of the source material for your training. Now what you’ve done is you’ve focused the AI onto. What’s most important, what’s unique. How you think about things. What your unique course is about. Who it’s for and what your kind of unique takes or mechanisms are.

That’s the human knowledge dump. And once ChatGPT has that. By the way, in the free course on the Lifter Elements Academy. The prompts of you know how to do all these steps are there. Instead of just typing real quick, like this quick thing into ChatGPT, we have big prompts that you copy and paste in and replace the places with it with unique things about yours.

For example, the next step is creating a course outline. And we have a special prompt for you that you copy and paste into ChatGPT and then that you include your human knowledge dump, either as a copy paste or as a PDF, that ChatGPT can then ingest and then it can create a course outline. If you skip the human knowledge dump and you just say, create a course about x.

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Chris Badgett: You’re gonna get something really generic, but when you do the human knowledge dump step, you’re gonna get a great looking course outline that’s unique to you, that’s exciting and fun and targeted and good. So do that. A couple of pro tips when we’re doing this work with ChatGPT. I like to keep it all in one thread.

That way it has the context of everything you’ve discussed along the journey to creating the course. It has your human knowledge dump. Everything is in one thread, and when you’re doing something big with ChatGPT, like creating an entire online course, it’s important to stay organized and not end up on a million different threads and losing your place and doing things out of order and so on.

That’s why our course on how to create an online course with ChatGPT, it gives you all that structure so that your course can flow out quickly and also in the correct order without. Skipping steps. So once we have the course outline, this is a pro move right here where a lot of course creators want to create videos and they want to create if they’re gonna use ChatGPT, they’re gonna create either teleprompter reads or talking bullet points or things to put on a slide deck.

And you can do that. But I would encourage you, here’s my pro tip for you. To not skip the step of pretending that you’re doing a text only course, which can actually be fine. But one of the great things about ChatGPT is it’s awesome at text and humans are slow at writing text. So what I’m encourage you to do next, now that we have the course outline, all the context from the Human Knowledge dump clarity on our offer is that.

We create a text only version of the course. So if someone were simply going to read the course without watching videos or listening to things the course text is there. Now this is also good because people have different consumption styles. Some people like to watch videos. Some people like to listen.

Some people like to read. Some people like to get tactical and do worksheets and assignments and things like that, and you’re doing your students a great service by providing a text version of the course, even if you are most excited about making the videos and doing PowerPoint presentations or talking head or action motion videos.

Put the text content in there. And that’s something that used to take a lot of time that you can do quickly with ChatGPT. So imagine a lesson ultimately is gonna have a video the text. So maybe somebody’s can’t play the video there at work or they’re on a plane and they don’t have their earbuds or whatever, and they’re excited and they want to, keep going. They can just read. So it’s good to have and a lesson when you build your course with Lifter L Mask and have multimedia content inside of lessons. It’s also good, by the way, for accessibility. So some one of your students may be hearing impaired, and by having the readable version, it’s great.

The other great thing is. Once you’ve created the text content, and again, we have the prompt that you just copy and paste to do that in the flow in ChatGPT in the free course on the Lifter Elements Academy. You just need to follow the steps in the course. But once we have the lesson text content, if we’re gonna do video now we’re in a better position to do video production.

So video production you have a ton of options here and it depends on your style. So now that the lesson, you have the text content, you can also ask ChatGPT to create. My personal style that I like to do is now that we know what this lesson’s about, create me a bullet list outline. To just jog my memory, so when I’m talking direct to camera, I can reference my outline and then it comes out in a casual, naturally delivered way.

So ChatGPT will spit out that lesson’s outline for a talking head video so that I could record a video like I’m doing here, but have my notes to reference to keep me on pace. Another option you have is to actually create. Teleprompter read like some people really want the words perfect.

And ChatGPT can easily take the concept from the lesson that’s written more like for reading and give you a script that you can teach the, on top of that content. And you can do that with a teleprompter or, read it on the screen as you’re delivering the video. It can also help you with creating slides if you wanna do a slideshow presentation.

And in the course I also put a bonus lesson, and this isn’t I don’t really recommend this, but I just played around with this because I am just curious about ai. I actually cloned myself and made an AI version of myself that is not me, that can speak and deliver. In the course, I actually created a real course about course pricing, which you can take, and the lesson videos.

In that one, I actually used my AI clone to deliver the content. So the way that worked is I clone myself using a tool called 11 Labs. And then, when I was at the step in, in the, how to create an online course with ChatGPT where we’re making video content. I had it create a script. Then I had my AI clone actually deliver the content for that lesson.

Doing that, I didn’t just co. I didn’t do a bunch of copy pasting. And I would modify the scripts, make sure it was perfect.

Add some nuance, cover some things that ChatGPT didn’t come up with. I’m constantly interjecting myself as a human in the loop with that pro project. So I don’t recommend making an AI clone of yourself.

I was just doing it experimentally. But it is an option that you can do, which can speed up the process. But I personally like to have the, raw human element present. So that’s how you get to video. So the slowest parts of all this are creating the human know human knowledge dump. Then actually creating your lesson videos if you’re gonna do that, because that does take time.

But if you use ChatGPT to create an online course, you can you can get through this whole flow 10 times faster than the world, the way it used to exist in the world before ai. So that’s the video production part. Next. I personally like to name a course at the end because. After all this work and all this insight, I often will come up with a better name for the course than in my initial planning stage.

So we have a prompt in our free course to help you where you kind, you’re at the bottom of a long thread. You’ve been creating your course and it has all that context and you can ask it for name suggestions. And we have a specific prompt for that. As well as the course description, which a simple version is there’s two kinds of course descriptions.

There’s like a quick description ChatGPT can help with that. We have prompt for that, but it can also create an entire sales page for the course that’s designed to encourage people to purchase or if it’s free, enroll in the course and ChatGPT is excellent at that. Again, there’s some, you want to be a human in the loop and like constantly, interject and modify and edit, because remember, writing is equal parts, research, writing and editing.

So when you have ChatGPT as a course creator, assistant, you need to have that back and forth in the research. You need to have that back and forth in the writing. You need to have that back and forth in the editing where you’re interjecting yourself as a human in the loop. Then finally at this point, you’re done.

You created an online course with ChatGPT. When I did this, I created an entire course focused on course and co coaching program pricing how to create optimal pricing. But I was able to go through that whole process of creating the entire online course, which is really valuable in a single day.

And you can see that also over on academy dot lifter lms.com. That’s course is called the Course Pricing Focuser. So check that out. Then finally, once you’ve created all the raw materials. You have the text for these are the lesson names. And this is the syllabus, this is the course name. I have the words I want from my course description.

The next step is to simply put it on your website. Put it on your LMS website. Now, obviously LifterLMS is a great option for actually publishing your course. And having your learning management system and processing the payments and all that. We have tutorials on how to set all that up really quickly, which we actually showed step by step with no Step skipped in the how to create an online course with ChatGPT course.

So you can see how I moved everything from ChatGPT into my learning management system website powered by. LifterLMS. And then the next thing you need is to make sales, to generate revenue. We have a bonus lesson in how to do course marketing with ChatGPT and generate your first initial sales.

I’m not gonna go over that in this podcast episode. But you just need to find that one in the bonus lessons that are included in the course. How to create an online course with ChatGPT that’s at academy dot lifter lms.com. AI is great, but it’s not going to replace you. You wanna be careful to continuously remain involved, to be the driver, to not try to delegate too much to ChatGPT.

The wild thing about it is if you take our free course and you learn how to prompt correctly in the right order and do the human knowledge dump step, which really personalize it to you and how you think and stuff like that, you’re gonna end up with an amazing course in a very short amount of time.

Compared to how long it used to take. So use ChatGPT as an assistant not to do the job for you. Follow our process, and you are going to create an awesome online course using ChatGPT. I’m Chris. I hope to see you in the course. If you have any questions about any of that, just reach out to us and build your course site with WordPress and LifterLMS and leverage ChatGPT to be your co-pilot on the journey.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares the growth of creator burnout poses a danger to the prosperity of companies that rely on human ingenuity. Content development, editing, uploading, marketing, analytics, audience interaction, and customer service are all tasks that many producers attempt to manage on their own, which results in mental and physical strain.

In addition to decreasing productivity, creativity, and consistency, this unrelenting pace can eventually cause artists to lose touch with the love that first motivated their work. Not only does burnout damage the individual, but it also negatively impacts the company, resulting in decreased quality, lost opportunities, and slower growth. In order to thrive, artists must create sustainable processes that prioritize high-impact work, assign or automate repetitive activities, and produce material in batches rather than continuously.

To preserve energy and mental health, it’s critical to set boundaries between work and personal life. Take deliberate pauses, and practice self-care. Reestablishing a connection with the original intent of the work and reframing success in terms of sustainability and quality helps artists stay motivated, create better work, and make sure their business and themselves can prosper in the long run.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett. Today we are doing a solo episode, and it’s just gonna be me. We’re gonna dive a little bit into some pain and help you find some solutions around what I call creator entrepreneur burnout. So if you’re listening to this, if you like this show, you are probably a creator.

Whether that’s a course creator, a content creator, a media creator, an entrepreneur, you may be doing it full time. It might be a side hustle, what comes hand in hand with these activities? Burnout. And I see burnout everywhere in our industry. I’m constantly seeing entrepreneurs burnout, businesses fail that don’t need to.

And I want to unpack some different ways that you can. Work through burnout, recognize burnout, and eventually, or ultimately overcome it. The main thing here is when you’re a creator or you’re building a business as an entrepreneur, there’s this invisible emotional la labor of always having to be the expert, to be the, if you’re leading the company or you’re leading the business.

You have to have all the answers. You gotta come up with a strategy, you gotta do the execution. If you’re managing a team, you gotta guide the ship, if you will, and always being the expert can really burn you out. And one way to get past that is first in mindset of I don’t necessarily have all the answers.

I may not have all the resources, but I can be extremely resourceful. So learning when to. Say, I don’t know, but I’m gonna go find that and be okay with taking the time to go find the answer, to not be the expert, and do some research, some reading, some podcast listening, reaching out to a friend or mentor for guidance and help that can help reduce the emotional labor of having to always be the expert.

It’s also an indication when you feel that emotional labor. That it might be time to hire. Maybe you need a somebody who’s better than you at something, right? So I’ve done that a lot, like as a software company where I can’t write code. So I work with developers who know how to write code, and by definition, because I can’t write code.

They’re all better than me, but that’s okay. We’re all on the train together, and I love this quote I heard from someone once, which is just because you’re on the train, it doesn’t mean you have to carry the luggage. So you can put some of that emotional weight down of always having to be, the expert or the top, and manage absolutely everything.

Another thing that contributes to this pain, that kind of seeds, burnout. Is when passion turns into pressure. If you’re really driven like me, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a lifelong learner and you put a lot of pressure on yourself to continuously improve, to grow your business, to be a creator, create content, courses, businesses, webpage, all this stuff around your passion.

So hopefully there is some element of passion to what you do. Making money is great and building a business is awesome, but if you have some passion about what you do that can definitely help. But then it’s a double-edged sword because we’ve all heard that quote that, don’t build a business around your passion or whatever you love, because you’re gonna end up hating it.

There’s some truth to that. There’s truth to both sides. One side is be sure to build a business and be a creator around something that you’re truly passionate about. But the other side is you don’t have to take everything you’re passionate about and turn it into a business. ’cause that can be very exhausting.

So I am, as an example, I’m really into learning. Just learning, becoming better, like self-guided learning. That’s why I love empowering course creators to send out these positive ripples of learning out into the world. It really lights me up. It’s how I live my life. It’s how I raise my kids. It’s how I approach everything of just enjoying the learning that makes us hu human and empowering others to have great learning experiences and design great learning experiences.

I’m super passionate about that. I’m also passionate about some other things like travel or being outside in nature or some fitness and health stuff that I get into. If I were to take, let’s say, my ultra running passion, I’m a long distance runner. I recently completed a hundred mile run.

If the thought crossed my mind is, oh, should I create a course about that too? I could and it might be a good idea, but I don’t need to put myself under the stress of always having to turn every passion into a business. And the other thing that’s really important to know about burnout is it’s really easy to confuse fatigue with failure.

You might just be tired and need a break. All of us. Creator types and entrepreneur types. I know you can relate of going on vacation and all you’re doing is like thinking about work or, popping the laptop open and doing stuff while you’re supposed to be relaxing. So developing the skill of vacation and breaks and, time away and downtime and empty space is very powerful and it’s counterintuitive.

It almost doesn’t make sense in society. Because there’s this mass message and also mass challenge where, you know, for many the, they have the opposite problem. It’s about, getting to work and getting things done. But if you’re here on this show, I bet you have the opposite problem, which is you are trying to do too much and you need to chill a little bit.

I, this is a skill that I’m still trying to get better at. The older I got, the better I got at it. It’s been about 16 years as an entrepreneur and I’m way better at chilling or taking a break than I ever have been before. One major way I’ve done that is actually taking a six week sabbatical, which I’ve done a couple times, and that’s hugely beneficial.

There’s that saying that it really takes two weeks on vacation to actually start to settle down and unplug. So by giving yourself this massive six weeks or even longer gap, you can really give yourself a chance to overcome the fatigue that has built up the chronic fatigue that you have just gotten used to and normalized.

And you don’t always have to take a sabbatical. You can do, many things during the day. Like sometimes I’ll cut out for a run or go do something with my kids. Just learn how to take breaks. That’s just because you’re tired doesn’t mean your business is failing. You might need to take a break, even if things are tight. Like financially or you have deadlines, taking a break, getting good night’s sleep getting your mind off work can actually accelerate you and make you more productive.

So in terms of time and capacity like that. Time is a weird thing. I personally love productivity and, being on, I set up my office to be super productive. But this constant pressure you put on yourself to produce, can lead to burnout. And one of the biggest insights I wanna leave with you on this note, which can really help with burnout.

Is to value the time that you’re not really taking a break, but you’re not actively doing something. So if you sit down, like I’ll sit down in a chair over there and I actually have a 30 minute time block on my calendar where I call it strategy time to think strategically about the business with no specific focus beyond the prompt.

How do I create more value than anybody else in the world for my audience or my customers? So I’ll just sit with that question, be quiet and listen to what comes up. And that’s hugely relieving from a burnout perspective. ’cause when you’re in the weeds as an entrepreneur, as a creator particularly if you’re a solopreneur or you have a small team you’re constantly zooming in and zooming out.

By zooming out, you’re in the big picture, you’re thinking strategically, doing some high level project ideas, and then there’s this kind of medium layer where you’re doing more like project management and setting things up for yourself or for others. And then down in the weeds there’s like actually doing the work, right?

So actually executing. And as you burn out, what happens is the first thing to go, in my experience. Is the strategy gets weak, and then in the middle layer then the project management gets weak. And then as you go down and you get more burned out, your execution of the details gets weak. So if you see yourself, if burning out at the detail level that’s definitely you’re getting close to the red line of burnout.

So when you feel yourself start to be able to do better project management, to think strategically without pressure, you’re on an upward spiral out of burnout. And the thing about burnout is it’s a downward spiral.

It doesn’t happen from one trauma.

One trauma can cause a serious impact in your life.

But for the most part, the kind of burnout I’m talking about is a, it’s a downward spiral that’s slow. It’s methodical. You start normalizing how you feel every day and your energy levels and your focus levels and your productivity, and it just feels normal, but you’re actually spiraling down and the goal is to get on the upward spiral and we’ll talk about some more tools to get on the upward spiral, but in terms of productivity.

I like to unload my brain, so if you haven’t read the book, getting Things Done by David Allen, you gotta read it. It’s super old. The book changed my life. Some of the tools and filing systems and things mentioned in the book are outdated from a technology standpoint, but all the principles are rock solid.

So I’m constantly trying to remove parallel processing outta my brain. And what I mean by that is. I don’t want to have to like, have a subconscious routine running, trying to remember when my next meeting is, or I gotta schedule this thing, or I gotta be here at this time, or I have a good idea, I need to put that somewhere.

Or all kinds of things come up. So I’m constantly unloading my brain into a Google calendar, into Google documents that serve different functions on a notepad, on a piece of paper. Anytime something’s getting in my brain, that’s not what my main focus is for this time. I capture that in a digital or even paper brain, and that really helps reduce burnout because what happens is your head is like a cup and once you get too much water in there and it’s overflowing, you’re just very unproductive and on the downward spiral of burnout.

The other thing. Just a pro tip with calendaring that I recommend is a lot of people think of the calendar as just commitments to other people. You could even say the same thing about an email inbox, and I’ll give you a tip about that too. But make meetings with yourself, with time blocks on your calendar, ideally on a recurring basis to prioritize certain things, like I mentioned that 30 minutes of strategic thinking time on Friday.

I also have a block for like HR related tasks in my company on Fridays. And that way if an HR idea pops up. I put it where I capture that. Then when I get to my HR block on my calendar. It’s already waiting for me and I know what I need to work on. Or I respect that calendar invite, the same way I respect a meeting with somebody else who’s showing up on a Zoom call or in person at an event or something like that.

So use your counter for yourself. I also email myself, so if I’m out running just like the whole thing where you have good business ideas in the shower and all that, it happens to me when I’m running or walking or out in nature. And I’ll pop open my phone when I have that idea. Do a voiced text memo to my inbox and just capture that.

Just get outta my head and then my brain can relax so I can get back to. Running or hiking or whatever I’m doing. But when you just let that stuff swirl around and you never capture it it feels like you’re being productive. But productivity is not so much something that happens in your brain, it’s something that happens through systems.

So I’m trying to give you a few systems here. And the most important thing is to unload your brain, reduce the amount of water carried in the cup. If you’re fortunate. I am to have the ability to be big picture, but also really down in the details. You gotta know which space you’re in and make time for those things.

So like for example, when I’m going deep on a project and I’m in execution mode, most of Wednesday is dedicated for just that and I push everything out outside of that. So my Wednesday workday from the outside, if you look at me like. Somebody who does work. I’m a founder of a company, but I also do a ton of work.

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And when I’m working on it, like a specific hard detailed, deep project, the best work I do on those is on Wednesdays. ’cause I make the space for that and I keep that commitment to myself. So the other thing is really just thinking about time in a different way. So like the big picture and the detailed work.

You can think about time in these different layers, right? There’s what, there’s, the moment you’re in right now, there’s like your day, there’s your week, there’s your month, there’s a quarter, there’s the year, there’s your three year and five year or even 10 year vision. These are all very different. Zoom in, zoom out levels on time.

And the key is. If you’re a creator, entrepreneur, you’re highly creative, you’re highly innovative, problems and opportunity everywhere, and what happens is you may be zoomed out thinking, seeing all these problems and opportunities and all these strategies and all these things you want to do, and you try to jam it all into your day or into your week or into your month, and you just overfill it.

So I’ve been through lots of iterations on this in terms of, annual planning systems, quarterly planning setting up the week on Sunday with priorities, doing my three most important things I need to get done today. I’ve tried a lot of these things and I still do a lot of those things, but the key is to have a system for each layer of time and know when.

Schedule time to be in those different layers of time. So that’s just a really powerful way to just change a relationship with time and not overfill yourself. And the cool thing with capturing an idea for later is once you, I also, we also do a process at LifterLMS called Shape Up.

There’s a book about it that the folks at 37 Signals wrote, which I highly recommend from a business planning and focus and prioritization and strategizing down to a plan system. I highly recommend Shape Up. It’s life changing, but whether you do shape up or something like quarterly planning or annual planning, the key to avoiding burnout.

Is to not plan what you want to get done in a year and then work on all those things simultaneously. You have to give yourself permission to put something important on the back burner and you can always front load and prioritize whatever you think is the most important, but give yourself permission to have things wait and not work on too many things simultaneously.

’cause when you work on too many things simultaneously. That’s where the burnout, downward spiral just starts kicking up a notch. The other thing is to think about as a creator and as an entrepreneur, the dance and the balance between quality and consistency. So they’re both important, but if I had to choose one, I would choose consistency in terms of preventing burnout.

Of course, we always wanna increase the quality. The work we do, the courses we make. The videos, we make the podcasts. And we make, the blogs, we write, all the our website. We just want to constantly improve quality. But what’s more important is showing up, every day, week, month, year, on a mission with vision, with values, and just consistently moving ahead.

And being okay with not everything being a hundred percent perfect. The other thing that I find really helpful to avoid burnout is to. When it comes to being a creator, whether you’re creating a course or creating content. Podcast episodes. YouTube videos, blog articles, website, landing pages, marketing emails.

The way I like to teach this or describe this, is to look at the act of writing as, excuse me, as three parts, three equal parts. So the first part is research. The second part is writing. The third part is editing. All right? And we’re not even talking about publishing and promotion. That’s a whole other thing.

But what happens as a creator if we look through the lens of writing, is if there’s a problem, I can almost guarantee that one of those three areas is getting missed entirely. Or you are way over index on one part and not the other two. So if you’re going to, let’s say, just to use a really specific example, if I was gonna write what I believe would be a pillar, SEO piece of content for my website, I might give myself three days to do that.

Three days of deep work. So instead of just jumping in and looking at the blank screen and being like, all right, let’s go, let’s see what I can get done in three days. I’m not gonna touch that. The writing part. On the first day, it’s all gonna be like research outlining just thinking and really structuring and looking at other similar pieces of content and doing research into the ideas I want to talk about and that sort of thing.

So I would put a day in the research, I would put a day into actually writing it, and then I would put another full day into rewriting, editing. Ideally making it shorter ’cause we tend to put too much in. So good editing often comes up with something that’s shorter and really spend equal times in the research, the writing and the editing.

And if you adopt that system, your quality’s gonna go up and your consistency will go up. If you value writing and you want to, if you were just writing as an example. I would have three days, or at least three solid blocks of time every week on a repeating recurring calendar reminder to gimme the system and the space to commit to what I wanted to do with my content creation.

So that’s how to think about it. If you spend too much time, like in research, you might build this giant list of keywords and all this content you want to create. And that’s good to do. But if you never actually write anything. That’s a problem. Or if you write a lot of stuff and never edit it and you just ship it and move on to the next thing, you’re leaving opportunity on the table.

So those are just some pro tips and it’ll feel you will start to burn out if all you’re doing is just one of those things. Like constantly just editing. Or constantly just researching or constantly writing without research or editing this, these, that’s the downward spiral to burnout. And in terms of just one more pro tip there, when it comes to content, whether that’s courses or videos or blogs, sometimes you don’t always need to create a new piece of content.

You just need to go back to one of your greatest hits. And either make it better or burn it down and start over knowing what you know now and just replace that content or that lesson video. So you, this idea that you’re on this infinite treadmill where you have to create content and it’s always gotta be new and it’s always gotta, you gotta do all this content creation across 15 different platforms.

That’s a recipe for burnout. So it’s more about focus systems and priorities. The other thing that really helps with burnout for entrepreneur creators is to work on the isolation issue. It’s funny because entrepreneurs are often perceived as, these extroverted people that are, famous or famous in their niche.

Or just hard chargers. Maybe they’re, you’re leading a team and you’re just out there, right? But the goal is to not be isolating. Even being in a leadership role can be isolating because as a leader you are oftentimes, you have your business relationship with your colleagues and your coworkers and your industry partners and stuff.

But, and some of those people you’ll be friends with, and that’s awesome. But also you need to take a break. Get out of the driver’s seat, maybe hang out with an entrepreneur buddy. Share a problem, share a win, ask for some advice, and just get outside of the go go. Always leading all, always. Just cranking out work product and take a little break. And just, you don’t have to do it alone. The weird like dichotomy of it all is that entrepreneur creators are some of the most productive people there. There are, but there they can be that act. And if you’re like me, you might. I’ve had this thought before.

I basically once I got into my entrepreneur creator flow, there is no end to what I could do. I will, I’m not bored. I will not. There’s all kinds of fun, interesting things to do, and that’s infinite. Taking a break is important, but also not being alone. Just as like a hyper-productive person is if you’re alone like that all the time.

It’s a recipe for burnout. And that includes things like, even if you’re not great at it, trying to turn off and spend time with your family, without your phone getting out outside, moving your body instead of your mind or your, fingers on the keyboard or whatever. Ideally, see some people in your town, even just going to the coffee shop or the grocery store could be a cathartic experience.

And also just realize that particularly among entrepreneur and creator communities, people help other people. But sometimes you have to be vulnerable and ask for help and reach out to somebody even if it’s a stranger and. Look for an opportunity to connect, and not everybody will say yes, and you can always reach out to people you already know or rekindle old friendships, old colleague relationships and things like that.

But that’s an important thing. That takes time, that really deserves a block on your calendar. If you have the resources to add people to your team. If you’re that solopreneur stage, there’s nothing more. Exciting and burnout reducing than getting help, whether that’s a virtual assistant, a designer, somebody to help with a piece or even take over more of a leadership role of a key aspect of the business.

So those are some pro tips on dealing with creator entrepreneur Burnout is really unfortunate. Because I see it everywhere. It’s happened to me many times. I’ve been through the fire. I get better at it, but I still struggle with it. And I want you to know that you’re not alone and you’re not broken.

And if you’re struggling with burnout, it really needs to be addressed. And this episode is not, medical or healthcare advice. Sometimes it makes sense to talk with a professional and just get, professional set of eyes on your situation to help you basically get out of your own way and get out of the mindset and the, thought patterns and behavior patterns that you have that can be really helpful.

So recommend doing that. But if you’re on burnout, be careful and just don’t mistake your fatigue for failure. You might just need to. Reset or just at least get back on the upward spiral instead of the downward spiral. ’cause it really does happen to everybody. And in the world that we live in with infinite content information and demands and all the world issues and everything, it can be very overwhelming.

All that stuff contributes to burnout. So keep going, but take a break. Work on your burnout. Build systems. If there’s anything I can ever do to help you. Please reach out and I hope you have a rest, great rest of your day and keep being a creator. Keep being an entrepreneur. These are very important parts of what we do in the world and what we’re called to do. It can be very fulfilling.

So just be ke, be careful with that fatigue. Don’t normalize it. ’cause there’s a better way to work on it. And it’s not like there’s a magic bullet. It’s more of a commitment you make to yourself to be open about burnout and getting on the upward spiral and surrounding yourself with people, tools, systems, and ideas that will help with that.

Have a great rest of your day.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast, Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliates shared, developing incentive affiliate systems that compensate affiliates, instructors, and content producers according on performance, engagement, and conversions is the secret to increasing the number of courses and memberships sold.

Instead of using a single one-size-fits-all approach, course authors may build up many tailored programs by using Siren Affiliates in conjunction with LifterLMS. In addition to offering beginner-friendly programs for new promoters, this enables you to provide bigger commissions to professional affiliates. With the help of the platform’s multi-instructor revenue sharing feature, instructors can earn royalties automatically based on lesson completion, course engagement, or subscription performance.

They can also choose to promote their courses as affiliates and receive additional commissions.

In order for numerous contributors affiliates, content producers, or instructors to concurrently get rewards for increasing traffic, generating leads, or closing deals, Alex highlights the need of stacking incentives. You may create incentive programs that drive frequent launches, transform cooperation into growth, and take advantage of seasonal events like Black Friday to increase sales by utilizing coupon-based monitoring, event-based triggers, and customizable payout criteria.

Additionally, Alex points out that this strategy is quite flexible for different business models. Like partnership income sharing, content platforms, and e-commerce royalties, making it an automatic and scalable method to expand your online business without depending only on advertisements.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Alex Standford. He’s from Siren Affiliates. You can find that@sirenaffiliates.com. By the way, if you’re watching this live there is a special Black Friday discount that Siren is doing.

It is 70% off. The coupon code is Lifter 25, so L-I-F-T-E-R two five. And you can get started with an incredible affiliate platform. But the great thing about Siren is it’s not just an affiliate platform. Alex has developed something that. Allows you to really create any kind of incentive program you can think of.

The more I learn about it and understand it, my mind is blown. It happens whenever somebody gets into siren. We’re gonna get into that today, but first, welcome back on the show, Alex.

Alex Standiford: Hey Chris. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here and it’s great to see you again.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s I love talking to you as a friend, but also the way that you think about incentive programs.

It is just fascinating and not only think about it, but you’ve literally solved it for learning management systems, sites, e-commerce, content creators. There’s all this stuff you can do. I know we talk about affiliates because that’s something that’s pretty well under. Understood. And we’re recording this in the middle of November, so this is Black Friday season.

Let’s just start with talking about. What people can do to set up an affiliate program and why Black Friday matters. Why event based sales like Black Friday. It’s not the only time of year you can run a sale. But how to work with affiliates to just get more traffic, sell more courses and memberships.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. Okay. I’m a big fan of Launch, launching frequently, launching often, launching early and I don’t necessarily mean just, your initial product launch. An initial launch, launching this podcast episode with you, or launching a cross promotion with other people doing an integration with another company or another plugin in my con in my case with Siren.

Obviously I’m using Siren myself, so obviously I’m thinking about it in that context. But the point is I’m very big on launching. And whenever I launch things, I love to launch them with somebody else so that I can borrow their microphone, I can borrow their email list, I can leverage the audience that they have worked hard to attract, to be able to grow my own business, and then also incentivize them to do so and give them something in return.

And that’s basically the fundamental. Value behind creating a really well thought out, really well designed, intentionally designed affiliate program. Because it lets you, not only are you able to grow your own business, but you’re able to also pay people who you like and trust and personally work with.

It makes me so happy to know whenever I’m working with you, for example, on affiliate program, doing affiliate links and things like that it makes me so happy to know. That whenever I get customers and I turn around and I’m paying for the traffic and the benefits that I received from these conversations that I’m paying you, I’m directly enriching your life instead of just paying Google for an ad or paying some faceless corporation.

So for me, affiliate marketing and creating affiliate programs and things like that. Yes, of course. It’s a great marketing strategy and there’s a lot of benefits to it, but for me it’s very much a personal thing too. It’s just awesome to me to think that I’m able to like help and enrich the lives of people around me at the same time.

Chris Badgett: You use Siren affiliates yourself. So at the beginning of this show, we mentioned the 70% off coupon code Lifter 25. Which you can use@sirenaffiliates.com. And. How does that work in the background? If somebody uses that coupon, and I know you also have like URLs that you can do that automatically apply that.

So if you’re watching or listening to this, if you go to the LMScast website, you’ll see a link and mention of the coupon code and stuff like that. But how does the affiliate system actually work?

Alex Standiford: Yeah. An affiliate, a typical affiliate program, works using a special link. Basically you have you, Chris, as an affiliate for Siren affiliates.com gets your own, get your own special affiliate link with a tag at the end of it.

And whenever somebody clicks on that link. I’m able to say, oh, hey, I know that came from Chris because it’s his special link. And then siren behind the scenes tracks, all of that, keeps track of that. And then if that person makes a purchase you then get credit for that sale. Now the coupon code works in very much the same way, whereas if somebody visits the site, even if they didn’t use your special link, if they just visit the site and they use the Lifter 25 coupon code.

It then knows, oh, hey, that’s Chris’s coupon, that’s lifter lm s’s coupon code. Let’s make sure that whenever this transaction’s complete that we give Chris credit for that. Or LifterLMS credit for that for that purchase.

Chris Badgett: Nice. What there’s I wanted to help people with a challenge I’ve had as somebody who does affiliate marketing.

I gladly pay affiliates for. Sending traffic that converts and all that stuff. There’s this challenge of, there’s, I see it as two types of affiliates. The first type is what I would call a professional affiliate marketer. They’ve been doing it, they for a long time, they know how it works.

They’re probably, promoting many different brands and things. But then there’s also a big opportunity to just get regular people that aren’t classically trained as affiliate marketers. To join your program. But they can’t, they don’t, they’re not going to do well with a lot of friction because they’re new to affiliate marketing.

They just wanna sign up and go. How do you, how does Siren serve the first time affiliate from their user experience standpoint?

Alex Standiford: Yeah the big thing about Siren is the, and one of the biggest reasons why I created Siren in the first place was because I recognized that, I was frustrated with one size fits all affiliate program solutions out there.

So basically the way they work is you create a single affiliate program and it just assumes that every program is gonna work in exactly the same way. And you end up with all these special cases where different people have different rates and they have different needs and stuff like that. Siren uses a multi-program approach.

So instead of having just one program, you can create as many incentive programs as you need. And I say incentive program, not just affiliate program, because there’s all kinds of different programs you can create with the system that goes way beyond just affiliate programs. But with with that, it allows you to create a program, different programs for different types of affiliates.

So maybe you have an affiliate program that is targeting those. Professionals. You could, it could be like a super affiliate program. I like to call ’em where, maybe they get a slightly higher commission rate or maybe their terms are a little bit different in some way. Then maybe you have a more basic affiliate program that most people go to that’s like public facing that you give to the people that aren’t professional affiliate marketers, but are people who would like to refer your business and hey, they would like to get a kickback whenever that opportunity comes.

So you can, it allows you to create multiple programs like that. And the thing that I love about that is it actually. Turns, it makes it a lot easier to treat your affiliate programs or any of your programs in general as a product in itself. So now all of a sudden you can create this program with its own rules, its own sets, settings, and have it as an offer that you then are able to offer as a product that you’re able to push out and sell and promote to affiliate marketers in a different way than you would promote it to the basic affiliate program to other people.

Chris Badgett: Let’s blow people’s minds a little bit with there’s the idea of the affiliate program, which is a, incentivized sales and tracking and system for that. But in the learning management system space, you solved a key problem, which is multi instructor platforms. And so if you’ve heard of a website like Udemy.

Where a course creator gets a cut of the revenue and there’s all these nuances of what if there’s one membership like masterclass? How do you, does everybody get paid the same or do they get paid based on course completion or popularity? Tell us about how you can use Siren to build a multi instructor rev share platform.

Alex Standiford: This is, this was actually one of the biggest reasons, one of the other biggest reasons why I created Siren in the way I did. Like I said, it’s an incentive program builder, not just affiliate program builder. It allows you to create these revenue shares like what you’re talking about. So for just to give you an example, Udemy the way that, that.

Company has historically ran. I’m not exactly sure how it runs today, but I know last time I checked about a year ago the way it basically worked was it has, you can sign up for a, as a customer, you can sign up as a, on a subscription model, so you can pay a monthly fee and have access to a large library of the courses that are available on Udemy.

And actually Kindle does this as well with their direct KDP publishing platforms. So you can opt into that and basically you get paid a share based on based on how many pages people read of your books compared to other people in the platform. And the same thing applies with Udemy, where they track based on the amount of time people spend consuming your content, consuming your courses.

With LifterLMS for example, you’re able to actually track things like whenever a lesson is completed or a course is completed. So because of that, we’re able to actually leverage that information to create our own revenue sharing platform with Siren that allows you to pay all of the multiple course creators on your platform based on how much traffic and how much.

How much the members of that program that site are consuming their content compared to each other. To put it in plain terms, let’s say you have a membership on your site for a hundred dollars a month, right? And you have all these different course creators on your site, and they all have.

Access and the people are consuming all these course creators content for free for the membership, you can set it up to where whoever had the most people complete courses and complete lessons in that last month will get the biggest share of the revenue. And then the person with the least gets the least amount.

So if you had a hundred dollars a month, maybe you’re creating a pool of 25%. So $25 per customer is available and it’s gonna be distributed among all of your course creators, right? And the top performer did the majority of the work. So maybe they get, of that 25%, they’re gonna get 10%, and then the rest of them get, 5%, 3%, 2%, 1%, whatever, based on how well they perform.

Chris Badgett: And this is where it becomes mind blowing is Alex has also figured out with Siren affiliates how to stack all these things on top of each other. So you can have rev share with your course creators. You could also have affiliate marketers sending traffic. You can even have content creators on your site.

Get like writing blog posts that if they click the link from their blog post or whatever, like all these people can be incentivized in different way. Yep. So it’s a, the ultimate pay for performance system. And there’s a lot of great content that Alex has created on how to actually set all this up and do all this, but he’s thought through everything.

For example, you don’t wanna. Accidentally give away set up a program that 150% of their revenue is owed to other people. But he’s thought through all this and teaches you how to do it. Yeah. Any pro tips there? ’cause like a beginner affiliate. Let’s just use a simple affiliate program. The first question you get is what percent commission should I pay?

Like, how do you coach somebody in terms of designing incentives and percentages?

Alex Standiford: Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind for me with that is, of course you have to know your profit margin. You have to know, you have to know your business numbers fundamentally. And the commission tends to reveal itself from that.

So that’s a factor. Another factor in that is also just looking at your competitors, seeing what they’re offering, seeing how much what, how much what percent they’re offering and things like that. And also considering the fact that. One of the great things about Siren, because you’re able to run multiple programs, you don’t have to give everybody one percentage rate.

You could give the most important, the ones who are gonna be the most impactful to your business. You can, as I say, I like to say, roll out the red carpet for them, right? You can give them the highest rates, the best rates, you can give them the rates that are more competitive than your competitors.

You can. Do whatever and then have a smaller rate for the general public or something like that, potentially. And that will make it to where your average, your average percentage rate goes down a little bit between the two of them. The way I think about it is usually, like I said, first off your profit margin, how much that you would be willing to let go in a worst case scenario.

I also like to look at what my competitors are doing, and then I and then I think about, what kind of people I’m trying to attract and how I would want to divide up the different programs that I’m going to offer. And then, and that kind of helps me figure out a baseline for what that percentage needs to be.

Then I take that number, I cut it in half, and I start there because you wanna have wiggle room. You don’t wanna start with your entire. The entire amount that you’re willing to give away if you stretch and reach out on your tiptoes. You wanna start smaller than that and work up from there. That way you have a little bit of wiggle room to work with and a little bit of opportunity to do that.

Especially if you have a bigger, a bigger program that’s gonna hit on higher percents. ’cause the best affiliates are probably gonna be the ones that are gonna be hitting that percentage the most anyway. So you gotta be a little thoughtful about all of those things.

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So this is a podcast and not like a screen share situation, but, and you do have lots of great videos on getting sirens set up and how to design these programs, but just talk us through the. If somebody’s interested and they’re like, yeah, I’d like to make more money through a, an affiliate program and get more traffic to my courses and memberships.

How simple is this to set up? What are the basic steps?

Alex Standiford: Yeah, so in Siren the process is literally going into the site in clicking on add new program, which then it gives you a field that basically a program creation screen. And inside of there’s a few different key things such as tracking events.

Basically all programs are broken down into a few things. You’re defining what events you’re tracking to give somebody credit for, such as clicking on an affiliate link or using a coupon code or a lesson was completed or a course was completed, right? For whatever your program is. You then also have to figure out what the rules are, how, what, how you’re going to distribute.

The earnings the reward, right? Even with a program. It can pay multiple affiliates. It can pay just one affiliate. It just depends on how you want, how do you determine which collaborators win whenever whenever the transaction is completed. Then the third piece of that is how much.

How much are you going to give? Is it a fixed amount? Is it a percentage of the transaction? And it’s, I think it’s basically those two. And it’s also like how many items in the transaction. So maybe if maybe you have a program just an off the wall idea that I always think about whenever I think about this.

We’re coming into winter, obviously, and if you were a clothing site. Store selling clothes, and you still have this batch of shorts that were in stock and you wanna get rid of them quickly before winter closes. You could obviously create a clearance sale on your site, but you could also create a program that’s temporary that you give to your affiliates that says, if you sell these shorts, I will give you a bonus of $5 for every pair you sell.

So you could use a fixed rate reward for that, for example. So there’s a few different ways to determine, how much money you pay out whenever the reward happens. And then the last but not least is what parts of the transaction are actually eligible for this. So this allows you to filter programs so that they only apply to certain products.

This allows you to. Exclude parts of a transaction. Maybe you don’t want to include fees, maybe you don’t want to account for discounts. Maybe you have some really weird thing that I can’t even consider, and you wanna include shipping costs into it. Who knows? You can break down and determine what those are as well.

What’s really cool about that is you could then have, if you had those shorts for that program I was talking about earlier, you could have a program that only applies to those shorts, but then you could also have an affiliate program that applies to all products and they would be able to stack on top of each other, so you would be able to pay that.

You know that. That one time flat fee because somebody was able to sell those shorts. And then you’re also able to pay the percentage to the affiliate who was actually able to do that transaction. And then even on top of all of that, one of the other things that comes to mind for me for this is you can actually associate ownership of a product or a course.

With a specific affiliate. And what’s really cool about that is that it allows you to create royalty programs. With a multi-course instructor example that we were talking about earlier, you can set up a program so that whenever a course creator’s program. Product. Our course is sold. They always get a cut of the sales.

I recently had a customer, I have a customer right now a client of mine actually, who I’m helping them build their website. They they’re using siren for a a really cool desk, this really awesome desk set up, and it has this custom mat that fits, is inlaid into the desk perfectly. And that mat can be printed with anything on it.

So what they’re doing is they are working with a bunch of artists and they’re finding artists to create art for this mat. And then that mat they’re selling the mat with those different art pieces. And if that artist’s art is selected for that print, they receive a royalty. Then also, of course, they also get an affiliate link at the same time because they’re gonna be motivated to promote, Hey, go check out this awesome art for this desk.

This is my art. You should go buy it and you should go buy this desk and here’s my link. You can support me through that. So it, it gives, it, it just allows you to create really interesting programs and things like that go way beyond just having. A basic affiliate program with a thousand affiliates and 995 of them are just in different people who, are never gonna actually do anything with it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. And Siren is a WordPress based solution, so all you have to do is install the plugin and start setting up your first program, which is a, which is amazing. It’s, we’re giving you some. Interesting use cases, but to actually get started it’s really not that complicated. And I like what you said too about the multi instructor platform.

Not only can an instructor earn a royalty because their course is getting consumed. But they can, they are also incentivized to promote their course on your platform as an affiliate. So if they go above and beyond just creating the content and getting a royalty, but also helping promote it on your platform, they can earn even more money by.

Basically joining the marketing team. Yeah. Which is awesome.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, it’s, yeah it’s great. And it’s, and that’s exactly what it was built for. So now it allows you to and the examples that we’ve done in the past, whenever, ’cause we actually did a video in the past about built literally built this exact Udemy coin that we’re talking about.

And in that example, we had set it up to where the course creator. Like I said, with a royalty program, they always receive 50% anytime that course or whatever, you can set it to whatever you want, but in our example, we did 50, I think and they can get, 50% of the sale every time.

That product is sold regardless of if they had an affiliate program or if they sold it or not. And then you can give them another, 40% and for the affiliate program on top of that. So now if they sell their own course, they earn 90% of that sale. And basically the platform gets a 10% commission or a 10% cut just for basically hosting it and maintaining it.

But what’s really cool is then you can on top of that, create a typical affiliate program, right? That isn’t for course creators. It’s just a regular program and you can have it like a 20% or something like that. That’s a lower amount. And whenever they close and they sell anything. They’re able to get a 20% commission.

And so at that point, 60% of the money is being consumed by the owner, but also the affiliate. But you still get a little bit more of that cut because they’re only getting 20% instead of 40%. So that’s what I mean about how, when you’re trying to figure out what your percentage is, it’s a little tricky.

You have to design the other pieces of the puzzle to understand how they all stack up whenever you’re using Siren, because it’s, it usually ends up being a more dynamic system than just a simple, dead simple, we have an affiliate program and this is what everybody gets.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. And the really, the most mind blowing part of all of this is you don’t have to do it alone, by developing, getting other people to help with sales and marketing, or creating course content. In this multi instructor example what Siren allows people to do is to work together and also be incentivized based on what, the performance of whatever effort it is, whether it’s content creation, course creation.

Affiliate marketing, sending traffic, whatever. It’s really a beautiful thing. And it unlocks growth. Yeah. And with proper incentives that all that stuff is set up and automated. So it is, the genius is in designing whatever your unique incentive program’s gonna be. It’s

Alex Standiford: yeah. Yeah, it is. And actually why, speaking of that, something else that comes to mind for me there that’s really interesting to me that I hadn’t actually fully considered when I originally built it, but this is, this has been what has come out of it.

If you create, you could create two programs. One that’s focused on generating leads and one that’s focused on generating conversions. And what’s really cool about that is it could be the lead focus program is for podcasters, bloggers, long tail keyword, longer term people who are, who take a little, who are earlier in the buyer’s journey.

And then you have somebody who’s focused on conversions. Maybe they’re focused on doing webinars and they’re doing the one-on-one things where there’s the, later in the journey and pushing people to actually make that purchase. You can create a program where it’s a split commission.

So the person who was in earlier in the journey will get a commission, and then the person who actually did the conversion also gets a commission. So they both get it. And what’s really cool about that is whether they know it or not, they’re collaborating, they’re working together instead of against each other.

And. If they happen to know each other or something like that, and they know that they’re both in the same system, the same program, they can actually create programs collaboratively together to create funnels together and build entire things in service of promoting your product. So there’s this entire idea where you’re able to create collaboration between your collaborators in a way that is really difficult to do.

In a monolithic single affiliate program solution, usually in those cases, they’re competitors, right? They’re always only one person ever wins in those solutions. But with Siren, since there’s multiple programs, there can be multiple winners and you can set it up to where they they’re able to actually work together and collaborate.

Actually, something that I’ve seen a lot of people do is they’re working with business partners. Who are owned a portion of the company and they’ll actually use Siren to track their revenue share with each other. So they’ll set it up to where they’ll say, I’m an owner this is the founder that it’s a 40, 60 or something like that, the revenue.

And they literally just build an incentive program that is just those two people and they just make it to where it’s a 40, 60 split and they set it up in siren and then they don’t have to worry about tracking how much everybody gets or anything like that. It’s just built directly into the system.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just one more pro tip before we go. It’s not necessarily just about making money, and this is why the incentive program is can be a lot more powerful than ads. For example if you wanna differentiate leads from sales, the simple way to think about that is you could have a free course on your site that you use to warm up your audience, introduce them to you, and stuff like that.

And then you have your paid program, but those people in your free thing are, I would consider leads and you could, I would rather pay these affiliates or partners, $5 for every free signup than do ad do an ad based funnel with Google or Facebook or whatever that’s, where I’m just rolling the dice and crossing my fingers and hoping it’s profitable.

So it’s, yeah it’s so cool what you’ve built.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. It’s awesome. Thank you. Yeah it’s been a lot of fun and there’s I’m honestly, and what’s crazy is I’m just, I feel like I’ve just like word vomited a lot of exciting, interesting things about siren here, but I feel like it just scratches the surface on a lot of the things that it can do.

So there’s some pretty cool solutions that I’ve seen where people are, have, created. Things that are similar. They’ve created programs more similar to DoorDash, but instead of delivery drivers, it’s vendors working on, fixing bugs or working on code for a website.

I’ve seen people, like you said, build Udemy clones. I’ve seen people build Netflix clones where there’s different, it doesn’t have to be educational content. It could also be it could just be video content, movies or special, some kind of niche entertainment. I’ve seen, obviously people create plenty of affiliate programs and things like that but the point is revenue share.

And royalty programs come to mind too. I’ve seen people create Etsy clones where they have a whole bunch of artists. There’s actually one customer I know who’s using this for 3D printing. So they have a site where people who do 3D printed models. They can share it on that site and sell those models to people who have 3D printers.

And when the product is sold, that 3D, the person who made that 3D model, gets a royalty. So there’s all kinds of different ways that this can be used. I see. I’ve seen local furniture shops use it for consignment deals to sell furniture in their. In their in their store. Because all they do is they associate those products with a specific collaborator, and then once that sells, they get com, they get their, their cut.

I’ve seen. All kinds of, just, there’s just so many the list just goes on and on. There’s just so many different ways car dealerships are using it to, create bonus programs on top of just selling for the regular affiliate deals. I use it in my own web agency.

I have a salesperson who sells things at my business at my web agency, and they, they’re using WooCommerce in that case to basically create quotes using an order. And if that order goes through, it just automatically gives, knows how much to give them for a commission. ’cause it’s just all handled directly through that system.

So the sky’s the limit. If you can figure out what to, how to make it work with, WooCommerce or lifter LMS and the program exists, I bet you can build it in siren and if you can’t. You should talk to me ’cause I would like to see what you figured out that you would wanna do that can’t be done.

’cause I bet it can be done.

Chris Badgett: Just for context, Udemy raised a total of $274 million. Over nine rounds to build this platform. Yeah. With LifterLMS and Siren, for less than 1% of far less than 1% of that, you can build the same thing. And you don’t have to spend $274 million. And this is the best time of year where you can get the best tools at the best price.

So head on over to siren affiliates.com. Use the coupon code Lifter 25. And that’s a great deal and get started. And if you want more leads and sales, start building your affiliate and partner programs. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. Alex, thanks so much for coming back on. Keep up the great work and at Siren and we’ll have to do this again sometime.

And if you’re listening to this and fascinated, go to YouTube and search for. LifterLMS, siren Affiliates, build a Udemy Clone, something like that. And you’ll find the in-depth tutorial where we showed you how to build a site like Udemy with the revenue share and everything. Just using Siren LifterLMS and WordPress, and you’re ready to roll.

But thanks for coming, Alex. We really appreciate it.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, thanks Chris. I’m glad to be here and I appreciate it. We will definitely do it again sometime soon.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast, Kimba Cooper-Martin, a gamification specialist from Kimba Digital, discuss how course designers can make learning more enjoyable and interesting in this podcast episode.

In addition to discussing the drawbacks of “over-gamification,” which can put strain or stress on certain students, Kimba explores the psychology behind well-known platforms like Duolingo and explains why its leaderboards, buddy hunts, streaks, and badges function. She presents the concept of many player types achievers, socializers, explorers, and killers and explains why it’s crucial to comprehend these characteristics before introducing any game elements.

Kimba also emphasizes the significance of ethical gamification, ensuring that users are aware of what they’re getting into and that the mechanics really help them achieve their objectives rather than controlling them.

She goes on to describe how Kimba Digital, her firm, assists course and membership owners in determining the motivation types of their audience, enhancing completion rates, boosting engagement, and including well-considered gamified components.

In order to increase attendance, keep viewers interested, and motivate them to do their assignments, Chris and Kimba conclude the session by going over real-world examples, such as utilizing badges in LifterLMS, including comedy or themes from your business, and utilizing Easter eggs or live challenges during Zoom trainings.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest from across the pond. Her name is Kimba Cooper Martin. You can find her@kimbadigital.com. While you’re over there, check out the freebies. You can find those on her menu of her oversight. But Kimba is an expert in gamification.

We’re gonna get into how to make learning fun. Again, and like all kinds of cool things you may not have thought about that you can do to make your courses and training programs more fun, more engaging. But first, welcome to the show, Kimba.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh, thank you for having me, Chris. I’m really glad to be here.

I’m excited to no doubt with you about gamification.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. We are definitely gonna do that. Let’s set the stage with an example instead of a high level, like what is gamification question. Let’s just provide an example that people would know. Potentially from Duolingo. I know that’s that’s really relatable.

Language learning is a, a niche within online education and a lot of people have tried it or seen people doing it. What makes Duolingo fun, addictive, and, compelling to continue with.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh, okay. Ang is a great example, but it’s also controversial. So I’m very excited to talk about this one.

And I love to use it as an example because they use lots of different game elements. They steal lots of things from the game world and put them into their learning platform. So things like streaks. Every day you log in, you keep a streak for a long time. I’m at 1050 days with my Spanish streak, which is I dunno if that just shows that I’ve addicted or whether they’re very good at what they do.

They do things like friends quests, where you work towards small challenges with a friend, a small mission, which is very similar to the games world. They do lots and lots of different things, badges, rewards, leaderboards, all sorts of different things. The controversial part though is that I have known people to stop using Duolingo because it’s over gamified.

Okay? They joined it because they wanted to learn a language, and what happens is they end up with this massive feeling of stress and I have to log in every day. I have to do X, Y, and Z. Or, I’m competing because I want to get up to the Pearl League, when actually what I want is to learn this language.

And I know that for some people it is over gamified, but that’s something really important to discuss as well, because, adding gamification into whatever it is that you’re doing, whether it’s a course or a launch or a community whatever it is that you are gamifying, it’s really important to think what is it that my users are hoping to get out of this experience?

Every time you’re gonna add something, because that will hopefully avoid you doing what some perceive GA Duolingo to have done, which is over gamifying. Now, this comes down to personality type as well. So for me, I just avoid the features that I’m not interested in. I don’t think about them, I don’t worry about them, but for some people, they can’t not think about those things.

It’s part of their nature that they want to tick all the boxes, they wanna achieve all the things. Even if that is at the detriment of what they actually wanted to be there for in the first place. So they are a really good example if you wanna go and have a look and see some kinds of different mechanics being used, game mechanics, and just see how they get you to take more action than you might have wanted to Anyway, just play for that a little bit longer.

Just do that one more lesson that you might not have done if you weren’t being gamified.

Chris Badgett: Let’s drop into the psychology a little bit because, gamification in many contexts is covered topically. It’s oh, you just want your people to have some dopamine and the therefore they’re gonna be addicted and they’ll keep coming back, or whatever.

But all of these things like streaks or leaderboards, they play different. They play on different psychology or. Just human desires, like what’s in this mix of the human mind that gamification taps into. And of course you could use it in a maybe not so ethical way, but done well. It’s a beautiful thing.

So there you always have to be ethical, but what are we triggering in people’s brains?

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh my gosh. Okay. So that’s two very big separate topics. So let’s cover one, and if I don’t remember to come back to it, we’ll cover the other one. Start with personality and psychology, and then we’ll come back to ethics, if that’s okay.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Personality and psychology, right? So gamification. I talk of it being a motivational tool and. It’s not one thing, it’s not as simple as, a mouse or a hammer or something where it’s one object and it does one thing. Gamification, steals things from learning and market learning, development, marketing management, and the idea is that it improves on existing systems and processes to get better results.

It is a tool and it is a tool set more than one tool, and those tools are best used for different personality types now. The way that I work and the way that my business works when we gamify things is we use Richard Bartel’s player types as a gentle called Richard Bartel. He wrote some player types in the eighties, I can’t remember exactly which of the eighties, but in the eighties, and it was designed around video game player types.

And he doesn’t really like the fact that we all use it for gamification, but we do so tough. So the four main player types that he talks about. Are achievers. They are people who like to achieve things. They are motivated by achieving things. So that could be the people who love to get a badge.

They’re the people who love to get to the top of a leaderboard that I, I’m one of these, if you give me a sticker, I’m gonna do more, gonna do more because I wanna achieve that sticker. They like it when you get a title, when you achieve something or a certificate. Next up is your socializers.

These people aren’t motivated by achieving. They don’t care about achieving. They’re there because they want to socialize with other human beings. They wanna help other human beings. In a game scenario, they’d be the ones who would help someone else to achieve what they wanna achieve because they’re more interested in socializing and networking.

Next one is explorer. These are your kinds of people who will spend time going all around the game world, looking for hidden things. They want to know. They want the hidden experiences, the Easter eggs. They want the things that are. Not the most obvious. They’re the ones who are gonna be finding the cheat codes.

They’re the ones who are finding their way around. They are what’s that phrase? They’re the grammar Nazis in your world. They’ll spot all of the little intricacies and they love that, and they’re motivated by that. And the final one doesn’t sound good, but it’s just a bad name.

It’s, there’s nothing actually wrong with this player type. They’re called killers. So they are the people that if you are playing a game, they would. Be the ones that wanna get to the top of the leaderboard, not because they wanna achieve like the achievers, but because they don’t want anyone else to get to the top of the leaderboard in a game scenario.

They might kill the other people on their team because they wanna get to the X, Y, and Z. And I’ve talked about this on podcasts before, and somebody said to me I’m not a killer because I’m, I don’t fit with any of the profiles, but I’m not a killer because I’m not killing. I’m not trying to achieve things in spite of all of the people.

It’s just one of the person. So I just, this and I said to them, you are a killer. Like my, I know so many people like that where they’ll play a game and they’re normally a le achiever personality. They wanna achieve. But when a specific person is playing, they want, I have to win this game. So this other person doesn’t win.

It’s the same thing. So when you are designing a, these are top like level player types. I think there’s 16 in total. Those are the kind of main ones. And like any personality framework, you’ll be a bit of all of them and you’ll be different ones in different scenarios, and you might feel like you don’t fit into any of them, and that’s okay.

But generally speaking, if you can create, gamification that fits the kind of people in your particular audience and figure out, are they achievers? Are they socializers? Socializers are gonna hate it if you put them up in competition against each other. But killers and achievers love that. So you need to figure out, like in your course launch, if you’ve got a community as part of your course, what kinds of personalities are in there?

And you need to design to motivate those kinds of people. Because if you put the wrong game elements in, you are gonna switch people off, which means they’re not gonna get. The most out of your course or whatever it is that you are doing, it’s the opposite of what you want. Now, built in with all of that is what everyone talks about, and I shouldn’t roll my eyes, but it’s the first thing people say is, I wanna make this more fun.

I wanna add more dopamine. I wanna do X, Y, and Z. But fun is different for everybody. Motivation is different for everybody, and not everybody needs dopamine. Dopamine to get things done. It’s different. People want different things. So that’s the kind of personality side of it and the kind of psychological side of it.

And there are lots of psychological different things depending on the. Game mechanic that you’re using, each one will have a different thing that it switches on in your brain. But anything with these things, a lot of it is test and learn and a lot of it is common sense as well. People have come to me and they’ve said, I don’t wanna add gamification into my membership or my course, or my.

Free challenge, whatever it is, because I don’t want, I, because I don’t wanna add a challenge in, for example, I know my audience hate that, and I think that’s the only gamification there is with leaderboards and streaks. And so we redesigned their, their whatever project that was to work for socializing explorers, because we surveyed their audience.

We found out that was the majority of the player types they had. You really need to think, actually, my gamification doesn’t need to look like Duolingo. My gamification. Needs to look right for the kinds of people that we’ve got. So that’s the personality, psychological kind of side of it. Ethical gamification.

This is my absolute bag. This is my, I love this. A while back I did a live video and it’s probably gone from Facebook now ’cause they deleted them where we played a game of evil or not evil, where I talked about some of the big brands and how they’d use gamification. And I simply told the scenario information that’s freely available on the internet, and I asked the audience, do you think that’s evil or not evil?

Fun game. The thing is that. In every scenario, it can be argued both ways. The big brand is doing what they think is right to motivate their staff. Or their team, or their students. And motivate themselves to achieve X, Y, and z. And you can’t guarantee when you put something into the world, how people are gonna react, how it’s gonna actually work in practice, and the length people will go to achieve X, Y, and Z.

And so in some of these scenarios and some of these bigger scenarios, it was causing, actual physical problems for staff. It was causing sickness and all sorts of different things. Wasn’t the intention, whether or not. The brand’s got consent of the people taking part beforehand would be my biggest question as to whether or not it’s actually evil.

I talk about gamification ethical, gamification all the time and I start with consent. Are people signing up to this, knowing what they’re getting into? And you don’t have to use the word gamification. Sometimes that puts people off. I have had people join my courses and my memberships and say, I’m not taking part in this gamification mark.

It’s not for me. Absolutely fine. Does not bother me. I’d rather that you get what you need to get out of this scenario. But having that buy-in, making sure you really understand why they’re there, what they wanna achieve, and making sure that it’s boundaried and that people can opt out of different things.

Is really crucial, especially if you’re gonna do things like putting people to compete against each other, if you’re gonna do those kinds of challenges, things where can people compete for prizes? Make sure that it’s opt in or give people a chance to opt out and that it won’t affect their final completion of their course or anything like that.

It’s beneficial to them. It will keep everybody happy and help them to achieve what they wanna achieve at the end of the day. But the ethical gamification thing, it’s so easy. Nobody sets out to be evil, as far as I’m aware. But it’s so easy to think I’m gonna do this thing. It’s gonna be so fun.

And then out of the end of it pops something that you weren’t anticipating and all of a sudden you look evil and you were just trying to help everybody out. So you’ve just gotta, I think the best way to avoid this really is always to do the minimum viable product thing. Trial things, test things, get people to have a go and be honest with people about the fact that you’re testing things, because if your intentions are good, that makes all the difference, I think a lot of the time.

Chris Badgett: Much to dig into there. Before we go deeper though, tell us more about Kimba Digital. What do you do, what do you offer at Kimba Digital?

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay. So yeah, gamification consultancy. We work with online course creators online membership owners, people who launch those kinds of things. So that might be someone who runs online summits or online affiliate launches.

Online challenges and social media. We do social media, gamified, social media templates as well. But we work with those people one-to-one to. Improve what they’ve got in a way that makes sense for their audience. So people might say, as I’ve already discussed, Kimba, can you make my online course more fun?

But fun isn’t a business objective, so we’d have to dig into what’s actually happening. Do you want. More people to complete the course. Do you want more people to engage with your online community? If you have a community as part of your course, do you want more people to si sign up or to convert from the end of it into upsells?

Are you looking for more of them to give you testimonials without your input? What is the thing you’re trying to achieve? And then we’ll gamify that. But first we’ll send them a survey, figure out who the player types are. Then we’ll do the consultation part, and then they’ll go away and implement that.

So that’s what we do. And we have, like I say, we have templates and things, and we have a free Facebook group, the big business game as well. But our main bread and butter is working with people. Hand in hand to get those marginal gains. Especially, if somebody’s been running a successful course for a while and they’re like, I’m at a point or an on, or an online membership.

We’re at a point where we really need to do something, but we’re not sure what we think the gamification might be the answer more than likely would be able to help them.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. I wanna talk to the person listening that’s new to all this. So just to use a basic example, like in LifterLMS, there’s achievement badges that can be triggered.

You can set ’em up to trigger off of certain things getting completed, like lessons or entire courses or passing a quiz and things like that. Nice. And I’ve always thought that achievement badging is underused. And. You can be serious. You can be extremely funny and playful with it. Like I remember in MailChimp, it’s not really a achievement badge, but right before you hit send on an email, there was like this nervous monkey thing that would happen.

And I always just thought that was fun, but that’s silly. So you can be serious or silly. If somebody’s I don’t know if achievement badges are for me. What’s another way for them to explore that avenue?

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Do you mean to encourage them to use badges or to look at a different just badges,

Chris Badgett: like to stay on badges

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay.

I think that there’s a natural it’s very natural for somebody to think gamification isn’t for me. Badges isn’t for me. I’m not fun, or my business isn’t fun, or my industry isn’t fun. What I would say is if your industry isn’t fun and you start being fun, you’re gonna stand out. And if you are, like I said earlier as well, everyone thinks different things are fun.

So you can make your badges thematic to what you do or who you are. So one organization that we worked with. The lady who ran the, it was a membership but the lady who ran it was really into Disney, and so the thing that she was selling was nothing to do with Disney, but all of her audience knew she was really into Disney.

So we themed everything in that membership, including things like badges and rewards. To be Disney focused, but it wasn’t just any Disney focused, it was things like, we made a little gif of her, like waving with like Mickey Mouses, make it fun and silly, but related to either the brand that’s running it and or inside jokes that’s inside.

Inside Jokes are great for the explorers. They love being part of an exclusive kind of community, and it also builds that. That sense of community as well makes it stronger. It doesn’t have to be all singing and dancing. It doesn’t have to be posh. It doesn’t have to be perfect. If you’ve got it already built into the LMS, then that’s even better because a lot of the work is done for you, and I think you can over badge.

So start out small if you are concerned. Then you can always try and then take it away if it didn’t work. And I would say a good place to start, absolute best place to start is reward them for starting. It sounds so obvious, but it’s. It’s the hardest thing to get started, especially with an online course.

And reward them for the most minute step at the beginning, creating their profile or watching the intro video or whatever that might be as a positive reinforcer. It’s great for the achievers, it’s great for those explorers who are looking for those kinds of little things as well.

It doesn’t have to be serious. It doesn’t have to be patronizing. That’s another thing I hear a lot is people saying, oh, it’s condescending. I’m an adult. Why would I want a badge? People like the most surprising people, love a badge. Absolutely love it. So if you don’t wanna make it condescending.

You don’t have to do that either. It don’t have to be a well done for doing it. It can be even a progress check-in. It can be you’ve created, you’ve done this. It can, you can still say, well done. You’ve done this first video, but it doesn’t have to be a, you get an award for doing something minor.

They don’t have to see it like that. There’s lots of ways that you can reframe it. So it’s still rewarding without being patronizing. But I would say. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve had lots of people come through my. I don’t have a membership open at the moment, but I have had two memberships for a long time and courses.

And of all of that time, I maybe count on one hand the amount of people who didn’t like it or weren’t interested in it Once they got on board, I would just say, give it a go. Honestly, it’s if it’s a tool that’s already there and people aren’t using it, Chris, I’m very surprised they should be getting on it because it’s an easy tick off box and it’s not something, it’s not it’s not like competitional, scarcity or FOMO that could be off-Putting a badge is just a badge.

It’s just a, it’s like somebody giving you a bunch of flowers. It’s not gonna, nobody’s gonna be annoyed by that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. The, the other context I wanted to talk to you about with courses, you mentioned gamifying events. So if somebody’s doing a cohort based course and they’re like delivering those sessions live on Zoom.

With slides and talking head or whatever. How do you gamify while you’re doing live delivery? What could you do. If you’re doing all right, in this week’s lesson we’re going to get into X, Y, and Z. How do I gamify that in Zoom?

Kimba Cooper-Martin: We always bring it back to what is it that you’re hoping to get ’em to achieve.

So I let’s say

Chris Badgett: the first thing we wanna achieve is we want the people that signed up to come to the live class. Like we, we want a high attendance rate, number one. Number two, we want them to stay to the end. Okay. And number three, we want them to do the worksheet or the action steps that come with the training for that week.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay. The easiest one to do, to get them to do all three of those things is to offer them, if they only people who attend live have a chance of winning X. That would be revealed at the end.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: And then at the end you say, this is the winner. We were gonna give another one of you something if you do the homework.

But the other thing that you can do, which I think we talked about when we met Chris, actually, is hiding Easter eggs. Yeah. So I love doing this in live training. It’s one of my favorite things to do to get people to pay attention all the way through. So if you are doing, I would never advise doing long training as part of courses.

Chunking is really important, doing things in small doses, but sometimes you do have to do it right. So if I was to do that, and I have done this before, I hide things in my background for people to find and if I can, I change those things throughout and I’ve done things before. I dunno if I’ve got a sign up here.

No, I think I’ve bend it, but like this wall is blank behind me for a reason because I like to put posters there that say things that I like. What is the word subconsciously? No, it’s where like they accidentally go into your brain when you’re not paying attention. So if there’s something that I’ve noticed that people in my course are all complaining about in terms of they don’t understand it or they don’t know I have to, they have to do it, or maybe they’re all struggling with something, I will try and put something up there that is to do with that and maybe the first person to mention it.

I will give them something. There are lots of things you can do with this. I went, I actually did I actually did a gamification course once where I was the student and every week they had a different letter in the background and they had the bookshelf rearranged every time. And at the end of the course you had to guess what it was that they were saying.

I never worked it out. I consider myself to be pretty smart and I never worked it out, but lots of people did and especially that’s gonna really. Keep the attention of your explorers and your achievers and possibly your killers. The people who aren’t gonna be brought on board by that as socializers, they’re not gonna care about that.

So it might be an idea to get them to buddy up with somebody to come to the call and say that you’ll be. They’ll have to do the homework together. So it’s almost a, in a nice way, a kind of guilt, trippy, you should come along ’cause your buddy’s gonna be there and you need to work on this together.

There’s lots of things you can play with, but I love an Easter egg. Absolutely. If you’re going to do the rewards, if you’re gonna do the incentivizing, stay to the end and you can win x, make sure it’s related to what they want to achieve. None of this iPad for the sake of an iPad Spa day, for the sake of spa day.

If you’re teaching it, make it, it related. If you’re doing. Knitting courses, making it knitting related, make it related to something that will help them get the outcome they wanna achieve. Does that make sense?

Chris Badgett: And it’s a big thing in this community is people often build an online community on all kinds of different platforms to accompany the training. How do you gamify an online community to make the socializers happy?

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh, that’s a big question. There’s lots of things you can do. There’s lots and lots of things you can do.

I would say the most simple thing would be building some networking events. Really give them opportunities to get to know each other because a forum or a Facebook group or wherever you are hosting that community is great, but there’s only so much actual connection you can get from a profile picture.

So set up networking events set up. And they can be online opportunities, a Friday coffee catch up, or opportunities for them to get together and chat through things. And I wouldn’t mix them up. So I’d have some that were purposeful. Somewhere you come in, there’s an agenda, they’re gonna learn something, and then they get to socialize, which is gonna attract your achievers, your killers, somewhere you’re gonna reveal some big thing you hadn’t talked about yet, which is gonna attract your explorers.

And then some that are just a coffee chat for the socializers. If they want to talk about the course, they can, but they don’t have to. And you could even. Yeah, that’s a good idea. You could even I’ve given myself part of the back, I haven’t even told you what it is yet, so you could even praise some of your, and reward some of your best students by giving the opportunities to host some of these sessions, which achievers, they get a title of being one of the best students and running a session.

Yes, please, socializers get the opportunity to run a session and have everybody know who they are. Yes, please. It’s gonna, it’s gonna be a great thing for a lot of people. That would be the first one, and I think that’s gonna help as well, because if any of those people post in the forum, post in the group, the people that have networked with them will recognize their name, will have an association with them, and will be more likely to interact with them in the group.

You might think that’s not gamification, that’s just setting up a networking event. Lots of people say that to me about lots of gamification. It’s like I say, it is a plethora of using the right tools to encourage the personality types to do the thing you want to do. And if you can get those people to be super happy in that community, they’re gonna share more.

They’re gonna learn more, they’re gonna help each other more and more of them will complete the course. So it’s a massive win-win, which I talk about quite a lot. I’m not sure if that’s the kind of thing you were looking for, Chris,

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that’s, that was exactly what I was looking for. And I think I’m gonna drop the hardest one on you here, but I’m probably wrong.

You’re probably gonna pat yourself on the back again, and with an answer for this one, which is, there’s courses and we talked about adding community. But let’s say there’s also like a private coaching aspect. So it’s like a expensive offer that has a course plus coaching. How do we gamify the actual coaching aspect, which is just, the expert and the client or the student.

Can we gamify coaching either to encourage, you’re probably gonna say what do, what job are we trying to accomplish here? It’s probably. The first level is they gotta schedule their first coaching session and get it on the calendar. And then they gotta show up and then they gotta take action on the coaching.

So it’s really similar, to the same thing with a live event. It’s just one on one.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: There’s a few different things that you could do, and it really comes down to understanding the person you’re coaching because some of these are risky. Yeah. So somebody I know. Once upon a Time, ran an event where all of the people who came along, it’s an online thing, needed to achieve something within a certain period of time, and so she said, this is the cost to come along.

If you do all the things and get to the end, you get half of it back.

Chris Badgett: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: If you don’t, I keep your money. So there is that as an option for the people who are, ’cause not everyone is rewards focused. Not everyone is going to, some people don’t care. I’ll give you a chocolate bar if you do this.

I can buy myself a chocolate bar. I don’t care. So some people are much more stick than carrot focused. So that’s a possibility. The other thing is a progress tracker. So these are the things you’ve gotta do. Tick box exercise, sending them a, congrats. Well done. It doesn’t even have to be a congrats.

Well done. You’ve done 10% of what you need to do to get through this series of six coaching sessions. The first four steps are onboarding. So those are things that you can do. It does really depend on who that person is, and I think. For a lot of people, the hard part is gonna be getting them not to turn up to the coaching.

They’re getting them to do the things they said they were gonna do. I think that’s the hardest part because people, they wanna turn up and have a chat with you and they come away with all these ideas and then they come off the call and then they’ve gotta deal with the kids and they’ve gotta make tea and they’ve gotta, they’ve got a they’ve got other responsibilities and all of a sudden these things come out of the.

They aren’t possible. So then you need to build in and I would do this in discussion with them, a system whereby either you add in accountability and you could do that based on, again, on their personality type. So you could build an accountability where they buddy up with someone else to get that work done.

You could build an accountability where if they do it by such and such date and submit it to you, you’ll review it for them. That could be for the achievers, or if they do it by this date, you will feature them in your email list. That’s a great one for Killers and Explorers, because the killers want to get it above everyone else.

If they get it in first and the Explorers want something that’s exclusive, there’s lots of little things you can do like that to motivate people. But at the end of the day, I think you also have to accept that not everyone is gonna do all the things. Life happens, things happen. Sometimes people can’t do the things, but it’s definitely worth having a conversation with those people and saying, look, we can try any of these things you want to try.

What do you think’s gonna be most motivating for you? Because I want you to get the most out of this as possible. I talk about feedback quite a bit, and feedback doesn’t isn’t just one way. Having the conversations, doing those surveys. Having group conversations with people, just figuring out what works for them and what isn’t working about what you are doing at the moment, because they might actually, I’m a, I’m an achiever and I don’t need any of those things that, that I’ve just suggested.

If I’ve signed up to do coaching with somebody, I’m gonna do the work because that’s my nature. I wanna get to the end of it, having achieved the thing. So yeah, it’s a conversation. And feedback. And then, there’s probably a billion other ideas that I could throw your way, but there’s a bunch just there.

Chris Badgett: I wanna go a little bit macro and just look at what about introducing an entire game as part of a learning experience? For example, we met at a conference and there I, it was like a kind of bingo and you had to find somebody who did, had a podcast, somebody who had a course about X, y and Z or whatever, and it filled out like a card.

Then there was a drawing from, for the people that actually completed the card. So it’s, it was like a full game that those who wanted to participate could win something. And, but more importantly, the job that it solved from my perspective was it helped people get the most out of being at a conference in terms of networking, talking to people, introduction to ideas, like maybe you should start a podcast or whatever.

All that stuff. It was like a whole game within an event.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Yep.

Chris Badgett: So tell us about like that, like creating a whole game that’s part of an exper a learning experience.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Yeah. I love this. So we do this quite a lot. We’ve done bingo as part of pretty much every course and launch that we’ve ever had.

And we’ve done snakes and ladders as well. And trying to think what other things we’ve done, like things that are like similar than that and pick cards that give you tasks to do automatic card, automated card pickers. The main thing to think of when you’re doing that is exactly what you said.

So when Mike put together that, that bingo, he thought, what do the conference people want to get out of this? They want to network with other people. What do I want from this? I want people to network with other people because then people get to know each other and it, they get what they want out of it, which means I’ll be able to sell more tickets in the end.

So when we build a bingo, if we’re building it for a course, say, and what I would do is I would look at where in the course people are struggling, where people tend to fall off. And I would look at the feedback. ’cause you’ve gotta be surveying your people all the time and figure out. What they’re struggling with, what they find boring at the moment.

And I would be adding those things into Bingo. So I’d be giving them a or the Snakes Matters, or whatever it is that you do. And giving them a square four onboarding and giving them a square four, completing task three, if that’s the one that’s really hard, giving them a square four, helping someone else.

What is it that what are the, it’s a behavioral change thing is gamification. So what is the behaviors that you want ’em to change? Do you want ’em to engage more in the community? If they have a community, do you want them to. Ask publicly for help because none of them are, and then they fall off.

What is it that you are hoping that they’ll achieve? Are you wanting them to share when they’ve learned something new? Are you wanting them to submit coursework? Can you include those into the Bingo card, but also include the things that they wanna achieve? And that is an, and this is something I say all the time.

People are, don’t all join your course to learn the thing that you’re teaching. Some people will join your course because they want to network with other people. They’re the socializers. But some people will join the course ’cause they wanna network with you. The person who’s running the course, they wanna be in a space and see how you run it.

Some people will join your course because they want to be in a room with other people who can afford a course of that cost. Because they think that might be their ideal customer. People will be there for all sorts of different reasons. It’s not always just, you are teaching me how to get leads from TikTok, so that’s what I wanna learn.

It’s, they could be just looking at how you run a course, how you interact with your customers. They could be looking at all these sorts of things. So what can you build in to help people achieve different things within a remit? You don’t wanna give everyone everything away. That will help them to achieve what they wanna achieve.

The socializers will it give an opportunity for them to network and get to know other people or help other people and also. Some of the boring stuff that they have to do no matter what. So have you read the rules? Have you done the, they’re quick, easy tick offs, but it means they’ve actually done it.

And you can pair those up as well. So you could pair that bingo board up with a quiz, so you could say, or a form. So you could say, oh, you’ve done your bingo. Amazing. Here’s the quiz for you to like, confirm your answers so that you can check that they’re not just saying they’ve done it all.

And then at the end. It can get, put them into a price draw. You can elongate it and add things. But always come back to the, what is the purpose of this? Don’t over gamify. Simplify it if you can. So if the bingo board on its own is enough, then just leave it at that.

Yeah there’s loads of things you can do. There’s lots of mini games you can do. Learning is really good match with gamification and games specifically. If you’re going, trying to get them to learn new terms, you can get I don’t know any off the top of my head, but there’s loads of websites where you can make matching games where you match words to each other.

They do that in Duolingo as well. There’s lots of. Little game software and apps online, which you can use to make your content more interactive, make it more fun. So it’s not just 70 videos and PDFs, how can you break it up? Especially if it’s a concept that they need to embed, repetition needs to retention, but that repetition doesn’t have to be, here’s another video saying the same thing.

It can be, can I now? We showed you this four videos ago. Now here’s a game for you to play to embed it, and then we’ll add in something else later to embed it away again in a different format. Repetition really does lead to retention, so if you can mix that up, if you can add some novelty it’s gonna work much better.

Chris Badgett: Question for you, I’m gonna ask it in the nerdy psychologist way first, and then I’ll ask it to you in plain language. So the nerdy way is. I see a big opportunity with helping transform courses where people have extrinsic motivation to intrinsic. Put simply, if somebody let’s say a nurse has to take, get 20 credit hours to keep their nursing license, they have to take it so they sign up for their continuing education credit courses.

How could one gamify that so that they no longer felt like they had to take it? They felt internally that they wanted to take it because it was fun or maybe they don’t even know why they like it now, but they’ve been captured by gamification in an ethical, positive way. And I think you’ve already covered a lot of the ways we could do that, but I just want to try to.

A way for people who design training for people that have to take it to maybe get the benefit of pushing them over to they, they’re motivated from the inside too.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay. This is a great question. The example that I love to give for the other way around. To play devil’s advocate for a second of adding gamification to something that somebody’s already intrinsically motivated to do, is I’m gonna eat chocolate.

Okay? I like chocolate. If somebody says that, if you eat chocolate every day for 30 days, at the end, I’ll give you a hundred grand. I’m gonna eat chocolate every day for 30 days, but then on day 31, there’s no longer a reward. They’re not gamifying it for me anymore. I’m probably not gonna eat chocolate.

I’ve eaten chocolate every day for the last 30 days, even though I like eating chocolate. So there is a, I would definitely not advise gamifying things that are intrinsically motivating, things that people are already naturally ga intrinsically motivated to do. The other way round is a question of why should they care?

And this is very individual,

Chris Badgett: I would say with a nursing example, that they should care because the training is supposed to make them better nurses so that they can provide better care to the patients.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: It’s more of a, that five, five why’s question framework where I’m sure everyone listening and watching this will have heard of it before where you say, but why do you care about that?

Why is that important to you? Why does it matter to you? And I think you might don’t think this is a gamification answer. I think that this one is a, for you personally, as the person doing this course. What will happen if you don’t take it? How will that affect your life? Like why? So I would probably put together, yeah, I think that’s what I’d do.

I’d probably put together a survey first to ask him the five, five Wises framework. Really get in with that. Or maybe have a conversation with them. One to one to, depends how many nurses you’ve gotta get through this course. And then I would build that into the program. So when they achieve the first lesson at the end of it, I’d be like, that’s amazing.

Remember you are doing this because your great-granddad really, you promised him you’d be a nurse before you died. You know you are doing an amazing job. He’d be so proud of you. You are gonna take that next video right when it’s, if it’s personal to you, you’re gonna do that next video. I would also say that if people who really want to do it.

I really wanna be. Nurses aren’t doing that course, even though they know it would be beneficial. There’s something wrong with the course. That means that gamification isn’t gonna help. You need to fix the problems with the course first. Maybe it’s too long, maybe it doesn’t explain things properly. Maybe they don’t have enough time to do it and you need to chunk it down much smaller than you originally thought.

Maybe it’s out of date. Maybe the software is glitchy. It could be a whole range of things. And as a gamification consultant, I shoot myself in the foot by saying this, but you sometimes need to fix the thing before you can gamify it. It needs to be working before it can be gamified. So if they’re not intrinsically motivated to do it, maybe it shouldn’t be an online course.

Maybe there’s an issue with the course. Maybe they need to be doing it in a different format. People learn in different ways. So it could be that nurses are hands on people, maybe they need to do. Hands-on training, maybe an online course isn’t gonna work for them. And recognize that’s not the answer you wanted, but unfortunately, sometimes that’s the truth.

Chris Badgett: That’s a really important point. ’cause it’s, don’t just start adding gamification. Like how people sometimes will just turn on a Facebook group and hope for the best. What’s the strategy? What’s the core issue? What’s, what are we doing? What jobs have to happen here? Yeah. That’s Kimba Digital.

Tell us again, like how people can work with you. I know you’ve got some freebies available for the course building community. Where can people go who are falling down the rabbit hole of gamification and getting excited here?

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay, thank you. Yeah, kimba digital com is our website. We have a bunch of freebies.

Go to the navigation bar and the freebies are there, but the one that’s specific for course creators is seven big mistakes. That I see when people are trying to increase course completion. Specifically, I know a lot of people struggle with that. They have low cost completion rates. It’s just a PDF but it’s got lots of interesting things.

So it’s got what I see, the issue is what you should do instead, and then a question you should be asking yourself. So it’s. Much more than just a down a list. Like it’s not a blog post, it’s quite interesting. We also have a quiz which you can find on there as well. And our free group, the business game on Facebook where we saw all things, gamification of business.

It’s not just course focus. There’s lots of different people in there using gamification for interesting things. So definitely worth checking that out. And we are committ everywhere. Like all the platforms, all the social places. Come and say hello and it’ll be lovely to see you there.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Kimba, thank you so much for coming on the show.

This has been an awesome conversation. You out there watching her listening, head on over to kimba digital.com, check it out, connect with Kimba. But thank you so much Kimba, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Thanks, Chris. It’s been loads of fun.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares details about the biggest sale of the year for course creators: LifterLMS’s all-November sale (Black Friday through Cyber Monday), which runs from November 1 through December 1 (Cyber Monday). It’s our biggest sale in 12 years, and it’s live now on Black Friday Deals page.

This year, LifterLMS is offering 60% off any bundle or add-on, plus $4,000 in bonuses. The event is intentionally spread over the entire month to reduce one-day pressure. Use coupon code BLACKFRIDAY25 to enjoy 60% off all LifterLMS products.

Chris emphasizes switching from closed, expensive SaaS platforms (Kajabi/Teachable/Thinkific) to open-source WordPress + LifterLMS, which is fully extensible and configurable so you control your site, data, pricing, and feature stack instead of building on “rented land.

Existing LifterLMS users can take advantage of the season to upgrade (for example, from the Universe Bundle to the Infinity Bundle) by emailing team@lifterlms.com for a special proration coupon that combines the sale discount with credit for their current license.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideHere’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we’re doing a solo episode called A Season For Course Creator Freedom. So it’s that time of year again, this is the Black Friday, all November sale that LifterLMS runs this time of year. We like to reduce the pressure of Black Friday sales, so we actually just open it up for the whole month of November.

This is our biggest sales event of the year, and it’s really a time for course creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, and the WordPress professionals and agencies that serve this industry to get the best learning management system for WordPress at the best price during our sale. On any new order, you’re gonna get a 60% discount, and you’re also going to get $4,000 worth of bonuses, which I’m gonna go over in detail on this episode.

So if you haven’t moved over to LifterLMS yet, perhaps you’re using a hosted course platform like Kajabi or Teachable or Thinkific or some kind of what we would call a. SaaS, LMS, it’s a software as a service. They have really expensive monthly fees and a very limited feature set that you cannot extend.

This is a great time to move over to WordPress, to open source software and a learning management system that’s both customizable, affordable, completely extendable, gives you full ownership of the platform so you’re not creating. Your online education business essentially on rented land, basically on somebody else’s website.

If you’ve been in the LifterLMS community already, perhaps you’re using the free LifterLMS Learning Management System plugin. That’s great. This is a great time of year to upgrade and get some of the advanced features that are available in our paid plans. So you get the 60% discount. Best time of year at the best price for the best tool.

And I want to go over a little bit about what’s new, this LifterLMS, black Friday, all November sale. It’s wild to think about. We’ve actually done a Black Friday sale for 12 years at LifterLMS, which is pretty incredible. But we always try to level up the. Value we create when we do our Black Friday all November sale.

So one of the ways we do that is by figuring out what we can do for bonuses and really over deliver on bonuses. So if you make a purchase of any new bundle during Black Friday, all November, so basically from November 1st through December 1st, which is technically Cyber Monday. You get a 60% discount and $4,000 worth of bonuses.

So let’s talk about the bonuses. If you’re here, you probably already know how awesome the LifterLMS software is and who doesn’t want a good deal and a great price. So there’s the discount, but let’s talk about the bonuses. The first bonus, which. Adds a ton of value, is a $2,000 course that we created called The Perfect Offer Playbook.

Now, this course was delivered live with a live audience several months ago, and we put a lot of work and effort into solving some of the biggest core foundational challenges that course creators and education entrepreneurs have. That makes or breaks the difference between a platform project, an education company being successful or not.

So at the core of every course or coaching program or internal training site or continuing education program, there’s a very specific offer that everything else is built on. So regardless of your what learning management system tool you are using. If you do not have the offer fully dialed in and the best offer, you can present it either.

In the worst case, it can just lead to a failed project. But as we go out the spectrum, you could be not charging what you could, so a lot less profit. Your students aren’t gonna be as happy with what you’re offering, so you’re going to have low conversion rates and things like that. So we really went into the art and science of Perfect Offer Construction.

That’s why it’s called the Perfect Offer Playbook. It’s 11 lessons. They’re very good. They’re very in depth, and it is the one primary thing holding back most course creators and coaches and community builders and online education providers. From creating something that works. So if you get the offer right, everything else gets a lot easier.

It’s more straightforward, it’s easier to sell, it’s easier to attract students. It’s easier for students to enjoy your program and get the results you promised in the marketing or in the learning objective. So the perfect offer playbook is a huge bonus. If you order a new order of lifter LMS today.

I would recommend you jump into the Perfect Offer Playbook today and get started on that. ’cause a lot of people get distracted into software tools and automation and video cameras and the website and all these things, but none of that matters unless you get the offer, that’s why we created the Perfect Offer Playbook, and you can get that as a bonus while getting LifterLMS at the 60% discount.

I also wanna mention if you are an existing LifterLMS customer, you can also take advantage of the sale and the offer. This is the best time to upgrade to a bigger bundle, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But if that’s you, if you’re already a customer and you’re like, this sounds great, I’m really ready for the Infinity bundle, which is all the software we make.

I want to get at a great discount and get all these bonuses. Just send an email to team@lifterlms.com and let us know what you’d like to upgrade to, and we’ll give you a special proration coupon that will give you an even bigger discount for the for the sale, but also pro rating the existing value of your license so that you can save even more money and move forward with an upgraded bundle and all the bonuses.

So bonus number two is the YouTube traffic system. So one of the best ways for course creators and education entrepreneurs to get leads to build a lead generation machine for their course or membership site is to make some very strategic videos. Now, here’s the thing. A lot of us may be good at video content creation because we’re used to doing that.

As course creators making videos, delivering live trainings on Zoom and so on. But we don’t really have the time or the desire to become a full-time YouTuber and create a YouTube channel with thousands of videos and all of that. But you don’t have to get the benefit of YouTube, we’ve actually distilled it down to three specific strategic videos that any education entrepreneur can make.

To create a YouTube lead and sales machine on I autopilot without spending money on advertisements, like promoting your YouTube videos and ads. So we’ve built this, we’ve built this system that you can use and all you have to do when you go through the training is learn how it works and then create the three specific types of videos, put them on YouTube.

Follow the processes in the video of how that translates from people watching your videos to enrolling in your courses in memberships. It’s a very valuable bonus. If you want more leads and sales and you want marketing that doesn’t cost much, but about one day’s worth of your time to make three specific videos, you’re gonna love the YouTube traffic system.

The next thing we offer, which is another reason. To get the Black Friday bonuses as soon as possible is the Black Friday Sales and Marketing 1 0 1 course. Now what that is it teaches you how to do event based marketing so that you can leverage existing buying behaviors that happen naturally in different niches and so on.

As an example. In the software world, a long time ago, we realized that the way people would shop for Christmas at a mall, say for Christmas presents on Black Friday we, a lot of these retail establishments will use that event and do some of the biggest sales of the year. Software industry figured that out.

WordPress product companies figured that out. That we could tap into this same desire to get discounts and good deals during the Black Friday season. So we, like I said, I’ve been doing this for 12 years because it works. But here’s the thing. With LifterLMS, we typically make three to five times the amount of money that we make in a normal month during the Black Friday season.

So how do we do that? This free co, this course, which normally costs $500 you can get at any time, comes as a bonus during our Black Friday all November sale. If you wanna learn how to do event-based marketing and even learn what we have to teach you and implement it fast, you can even get going this Black Friday season as of this recording.

That’s still like more than three weeks away. So you could learn, implement, and do event-based marketing. And instead of taking decades like we have to figure this out and how it works, you can do it in days by doing our compact training on how to do event-based marketing around holidays like Black Friday.

We give you all our secrets in the Black Friday Sales and Marketing Online 1 0 1 course. So the next bonus is the online education company startup checklist. This is super powerful going back again to the classic mistakes that course creators make. People building education companies, especially if you’re early on or even if you’re established, there are a few decisions and actions to take so that you can.

Set up your online business correctly. We go into business formation, how to think about the banking, how to think about all the key aspects that go into building an online education company. Me personally, I never went to business school. I never, I didn’t grow up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I had to figure all this stuff out and what the online education company startup checklist does for you.

Is it will give you the key items that you 100% need to check off the box. And even if you’re an established company, whether you have an education company or you are building LMS websites for clients, if you miss any one of these things, it causes a big headache and problem later. So again, with this bonus, we are condensing decades into days.

So you can. Get set up the right way. Avoid the classic mistakes, fix any, online education company, business essentials that you may be missing. The next thing we’re offering is a bonus live event with myself and our live team with, it’s a bonus office hours mastermind call. So this is a live call on Zoom if you have.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

The universe bundle or the LifterLMS infinity bundle. You have access to a call like this every single week. It’s one of the ways LifterLMS is different. We actually appreciate and like talking to our customers and users live and helping them. So that’s our bonus. One hour call. You can come with specific questions.

It’s also a mastermind. So what do I mean by a mastermind? It’s a mastermind because you’ll meet other people who are doing similar things to you that have challenges and are looking for strategy or technical support or help. So you can kind of network with other education entrepreneurs or LMS website building professionals just like you.

And sometimes even if you don’t have a specific question. This is one of the great things about a call like this. Just by coming and listening, you can learn a lot. You could learn about a problem you didn’t even know you had, or an opportunity that you didn’t even realize was there right in front of you.

So there’s a lot of learning and connection. People have even become business partners and work together after meeting on calls like this. So it is very valuable. So no matter what you get from LifterLMS, during Black Friday, all November, we’re hosting a special. Live office hours mastermind call. So that’s a great bonus.

And the next thing is a gamification resource for you, which is an achievement badge and certificate background set. So what do I mean by that? So achievement badges allow you to add little popup gamification, icons as students. Do certain actions on your site that you design. So maybe if they complete a certain section of a course, they get a certain achievement badge.

The certificate, background sets, LifterLMS has a full certification engine, so if you want to create a certification program. You can do that and it can be completely automated. The certificate generation system with LifterLMS. Before that, you want to have a nice looking certificate background, so when a student earns the certificate, they, it’s presented in a way where used to seeing in the offline world, similar to a graduation dis diploma.

Now the challenge with achievement badges and certificates. Is that it requires graphic design skills. So what we’ve done in this bonus is we’ve actually given you a collection of achievement badges that you can use to get started right away, as well as certificate background so that you can design the certificate logic in LifterLMS, like when somebody completes this course or this series of courses in a membership.

Or a course track, we call it, they can earn a certificate. But it’s, you need a good certificate background to go with that. And we’ve given you a set that you can just start using without having to pay a graphic designer or figure all that out yourself. If you haven’t thought about gamification or you haven’t thought about certificates, I would encourage you to just take a second look at those things, even if you’re not doing something like.

Er LMS continuing education where people have to, get a certain number of credit hours during a year to keep their job or, and things like that, or to keep their license. Certification is very powerful. So you may have a certification opportunity that may be more informal or just another way to motivate your learners.

Or give them a sense of accomplishment and so on. So check those out. And if you’re new to the LifterLMS pricing, we have three bundles. There’s the earth bundle, the Universe bundle, and the Infinity bundle. So the earth bundle is our cheapest bundle, and what that includes is all the automated e-commerce features.

If you want to be able to sell access to your courses or memberships, or create recurring revenue or one-time payments or any pricing model you can think of, you’re gonna want our Earth bundle, which integrates you with best in class payment processing through tools like Stripe and. PayPal as well as others like authorized.net, or you can integrate with the WooCommerce ecosystem through their shopping cart as well.

All that’s included in the Earth bundle, so the Universe Bundle gives you all of that. Plus it gives you our theme called Sky Pilot, which is the only modern. WordPress LMS theme with exclusive focus on creating beautiful learning sites that students find engaging and easy to use. So if you’re at a point where you want to use modern WordPress and you want to have as few tools from as few companies as possible, you’re gonna love our Sky Pilot theme.

The Universe Bundle also comes with some of our integrations, like with the form plugins, like Gravity Forms. It comes with integration with popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp or Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit. So that’s the universe bundle. And then our top bundle is called the Infinity Bundle, which includes everything that we’ve just talked about, but also a ton of advanced feature add-ons.

For example. If you want to do advanced quizzing with grading and more question types, you’d want our advanced quizzes add-on. If you want to add an online community to your website that’s similar to a Facebook group, but on your website you would like our social learning add-on, if you want to add coaching to a learning experience, like a course you would, like our private areas add-on.

We have. Many different add-ons to fulfill many different use cases like private site, which helps turn your LMS into a completely private internal company training portal type site. That’s LifterLMS private site. And the great thing is, and there’s many more, but the great thing about these add-ons is we launched new ones.

So for example, we’re getting ready to come out with a continuing education add-on that you’re gonna love. If you’re in the continuing education niche, some of our most successful users of LifterLMS offer continuing education in niche scenarios like for nurses or some kind of license they need to keep or for some kind of just continuing education or professional development.

In the medical field and all kinds of different niches. You’re gonna love that one. That one’s literally about to release. As we’re making this video, and I should also mention, one of our most popular add-ons is called Groups. And what groups allows you to do is offer training at scale into groups. So you can offer courses and memberships to individuals, but you can also offer them.

At scale to entire groups like companies, so a company could buy your a hundred seats in your course, and then it gets its own part of your LMS where that group buyer can invite in team members and managers, and it’s all front end reporting. The people never log into the back of WordPress. It’s a very popular advanced way to use LifterLMS so that you can make more money.

Or drive greater impact by offering training at scale in the groups like companies, schools nonprofits, or really any kind of organization or group that you can think of. So the Infinity Bundle has everything we make, all the e-commerce, all the integrations, our theme and all the advanced add-ons. And what typically happens this time of year.

Is a lot of new people will get the infinity bundle ’cause they want it at the best price and they want everything and they want all the bonuses. And existing LifterLMS customers take the opportunity to upgrade into the Infinity bundle from a lower bundle so that they can get, unlock all the features and capabilities of LifterLMS.

If you’re listening to this and this looks interesting to you, I would encourage you to go to lifter lms.com/black-friday. If you go to our website, you’re not gonna miss it. There’s a little banner where you can click through to the Black Friday landing page, and that goes over all the details.

Gives you the coupon code and the links to purchase LifterLMS during our biggest sale of the year. In terms of your bonuses, instantly after purchase, you’re gonna receive an email that has a link to either enroll in those paid courses that we talked about in the bonuses, but for free. And you’ll get download links to the resources that are downloadable.

So I would encourage you to go to lifter lms.com/black-friday. This is our biggest sales event of the year. These bonuses are great. We really tried to overdeliver and just add as much value and solve as many of your problems as we could, not just by providing the best software, but also giving you some great bonuses to help you on your journey.

So if you want the best LMS at the best price, go to LifterLMS today. Take advantage of the Black Friday all November sale. You’ll instantly get access to the bonuses. The sale is only valid through the end of November, basically the end of December one, and it will be gone. So if you like to save money and you want these bonuses, take action today.

It’s great to be with you on the journey. Thanks for listening to this episode, and we will catch you in the next one. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast, According to Matt Medeiros, The WP Minute is changing profoundly from being a WordPress news and community site to a resource for agencies and freelancers that is more value-driven and instructive.

At first, The WP Minute concentrated on reporting on upcoming WordCamps, community conversations, product releases, and WordPress-related information. Though such information is useful, Matt found that just a small percentage of people roughly 10,000 English-speaking WordPress aficionados worldwide are really interested in this kind of “inside baseball” news regarding Automattic, leadership changes, and local politics.

Matt made the decision to return his attention to the primary audience WordPress freelancers and agency owners with whom he had initially established a connection through his previous project, The Matt Report, after realizing the limits of that specialized audience. He wants to help these professionals navigate challenges in today’s landscape, especially as artificial intelligence and economic pressures change the way agencies and independent creators work.

The first course created using LifterLMS for The WP Minute, which focuses on assisting users in selecting the best WordPress hosting company, was released as a result of this development. By actively assisting individuals in learning and applying the knowledge he shares, online courses allow Matt to develop a deeper connection with his audience.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m a little rusty because I’ve been doing a lot of solo episodes, but he’s back on the show. I think this is appearance number six, seven, or eight. It’s Matt Maderis. He’s from Gravity. He’s from the WP Minute. Matt has a lot of projects and has been a big personality in the WordPress community and entrepreneur community for a long time.

Before we get into it, just first welcome back on the show, Matt.

Matt Medeiros: Thanks for having me, Chris. I was here on episode 500. I think we were talking about podcasting and the value of that. So excited to dig into a different topic today.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I noticed you launched a course with lifter LMS on the WP Minute.

I believe it’s the first course on the WP Minute. It’s about. Hosting and how to choose the right and best WordPress host. Before I summarize it, why don’t you tell us all about it? What’s the story? Why courses for the WP Minute, which has always been more of news newsletter kind of stuff, like where did this need for courses emerge?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, there’s a few challenges at play for my business at the WP Minute, and of course with WordPress content and with WordPress. And so I’m trying to tackle all of that with this slow, methodical shift with what’s happening at the WP Minute. But you’re right, it’s always been about more like that community focus, like what’s happening in WordPress.

A lot of it lent to news. A lot of it lent. To what the community’s up to what’s happening at Word Camps, product updates, et cetera. But WordPress News Media is a challenging space to say the least. The WP Minute was supposed to be a reprieve for me. When I got into back into the workforce page, Lee Casto and now gravity Forms, I was trying to dial down all of the overhead of running.

A bunch of content while having a day job and having kids. And it started off really small and then as I do with a lot of things, it just piled on the snowball effect of rolling down the hill and doing more content, doing more media started to expand. And the challenge with WordPress news and content is not a lot of people really care about it, right?

Not a lot of people really care about. The inside baseball of what’s happening with automatic and leadership and what’s happening to the community. Those of us that do care, really care. But I’ve always said there’s like this 10,000 English speaking people across the world who actually care about the type of content that I’ve been producing With the WP Minute for the last, I don’t know, three and a half-ish years, four years.

There’s been this shift halfway through the year of getting back to, or a little bit more than halfway through the year, getting back to the roots of what I was doing with the MAT report, which was like really focusing on. The WordPress freelancer and agency owner and diving back into that space because when I started the MAT report, the big thing that was happening and why I was really covering agency life and WordPress was massive financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, and a bunch of people started getting into services and WordPress.

And WordPress was really becoming this. Go-to CMS now. The, I don’t wanna say threat, but the big thing happening now is of course ai. And what does that mean, not only for the freelancers business or the agency’s business, what does that mean for WordPress? So I really want to turn my attention of content and effort back into number one, unapologetically supporting WordPress.

Like why we should all use WordPress at its core and its fundamental use case. Two how do we get back to talking to agencies and freelancers again to encourage them to use WordPress in the face of AI and in the face of continued economic challenges? So the course is a piece of that. My overall strategy, I’ve never been an, I think you and I have talked about this a lot.

I have never been really good or focused on SEO. Or paid ads or like any kind of gray area promotional sources. For my content, it’s always been I’m just gonna publish content and keep doing that and hope people come to engage with it and it’s worked, right? So it’s worked for, the last whatever, 12 years.

But now with. Content being so competitive and AI being able to serve up answers or even news updates really quickly, and so many WordPress content creators out there. My only thing to help the business forward is how do I even get clo? How do I get even closer to the audience, right?

This is why I do the blog, the newsletter, the podcast, the videos, and I have the community, the course to me. Is, how do I get closer to that person to actually help, educate them and they’ll just care a little bit more about the total offering that I’m putting out there. So I’m trying to lean into that real like human approach.

We have some more courses coming soon and some other ways to get education and stuff like that, that I have noodling around. But this is me saying. I want people to care more and I want to get closer to them and help educate them and solve their problems with the WP Minute and the community and the courses and such.

So that’s the quick overview of like how we’ve got there over the last four years.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And just a quick side question. You mentioned there’s about 10,000 people in the English speaking world that care about WordPress, community news and content. Do you have any sense on the size of the freelancer market that is somehow related to WordPress?

Like how much bigger of an opportunity do you think that is?

Matt Medeiros: On the freelancer side, the freelancer or agency side, in my opinion is far greater. Than than that number, but a lot of them, don’t really care about. They don’t really care about the automatic and WP engine lawsuit, right?

They often don’t care about the word camp event happening or who’s speaking and, what’s the interesting angle on that? Like a lot of people because they’re so busy or they’re not aware of it, they just want to use WordPress. They know and love the tool. They just might not be exposed to the community yet.

And WordPress is, again, it’s just that tool to get the job done. So I think that number is far greater. I think it’s the people like you and I who fall into the ca into my own category of the 10,000 people, and I work that number backwards from whatever the 50,000 people that are in wordpress.org, slack.

Then you work that back towards like how many people we see in the post status Slack, how many people go to Word camps and who’s showing up on podcasts and Listenerships like that, who really care about, what has Matt said today? And what’s automatic rolling out for a new like feature on wordpress.com?

There’s only so few people who care about that. But lots more people to your point, who care about, how does this affect my. Freelance business, or how do I launch this new website with lifter LMS or whatever.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So why is how to choose the best host for WordPress the first course you did and you also did it with Eric Kovac, did I say his name right?

Yeah. Yep. And you also chose to I mean you have an intro video and stuff, but it’s e mostly Eric’s content.

Matt Medeiros: Yep. Yep. So Eric is the instructor as lifter, LMS puts the title on. And I do the intro video of who this course is for. And I do the there’s a final video there that, like how you can apply this to your agency or freelance business.

I ran an agency for a decade worked at a, worked at Pagely for three and a half years, and I’m two and a half years into Gravity form. So I know the ecosystem really well, so I’m. And then Eric has 20 plus years of being a web designer and freelancer runs his own freelance agency. And this course is the business side of hosting Andrew Agency, not like the gigabytes and bandwidth side of hosting.

So we are looking at it from the perspective of how do you evaluate. Your WordPress project, just a tiny little five page site. Like where should you host this? That if all of a sudden you’ve got this, medium to large size business knocking on your door and they’ve got these real customer requirements, what, where should you host that type of customer?

If you have this big learn lifter at Learn Learning site, e-learning site with WooCommerce and Lifter, where should you host that kind of site? So we’re putting that into the perspective of the business owner. Because we really feel that the bad rap that a lot of clients have with WordPress is mostly rooted in hosting too Slow it, it got a security breach.

Too many popups like, every time I logged in, it just took forever for the screen to load. These are all rooted in hosting issues, and we wanna solve that. WordPress client experience with the boots on the ground who are deploying these sites, right? That’s how we see that. So we teach people how to level up their game, how to build these relationships with clients, and how hosting is very important to that whole paradigm.

So that’s why we started with this course first. And yeah, in terms of like how we do things at the WP Minute, Eric is my editor at the WP Minute he puts, does a lot of content for us. And he’s always wanted to teach and be like a coach deal. So yeah, it was his opportunity to build the course and be the instructor.

And I just come in as the guy that sells it on the front end and closes it out with like how I would apply this in my agency. But we both collaborate on it for sure.

Chris Badgett: I wanted to ask why you made it free, and if for those of you out there listening, particularly if you’re a freelancer or run an agency and help clients with websites, I recommend go going to the wp minute.com, find their courses and enroll.

But why free? Why not a paid course and try to monetize your brand or that the WP Minute audience?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I don’t know if I’m ready for so if I just look at like how I run. A content business with the asterisk that I do this on the side. This is a side hustle. It’s not full time right now.

The revenue stream for the WP Minute, and the best way for me to create content is through sponsorship. It just so happens that a lot of our sponsors are WordPress web hosts and I’m constantly pushing. Our, our own abilities to provide more value for our sponsors. So it’s not just the podcast ad read, it’s not just the logo in the newsletter.

Now we’re trying, like I said before, we’re trying to get closer to the WordPress user with education. So it’s a, so the course is free because sponsors. Appear in logos at the bottom of each lesson. This course, the hosting course, hosting Decoded is not we don’t point to any one of our sponsors.

We’re not showing any dashboards from our sponsors. We’re not saying use this coupon code for, pressable, GoDaddy Kinta, whatever. We’re just saying that this content is supported by these great hosts. Maybe you want to check them out. Maybe you go and find a host that fits, the needs for your projects.

Like we’ve taught you. It’s free because that’s like the model that I’ve been on so far with doing sponsored sponsored supported work. And it, that’s what’s working for now. We do have some ideas for paid courses, maybe some cohort learning in the future. And I’d rather focus my time on paying for those types of services versus me trying to sell, a $200 course, at least at this stage in the game.

Not, never say never but, that’s where we’re at right now.

Chris Badgett: So you mentioned you have a day job and. It’s interesting what I’ve seen you do with the WP Minute in terms of bringing in other personalities and personal brands and thinking about the WP Minute as not just Matt Madeiras tell us about that line of thinking and how you got to that place of having multiple people working on a project from abr personal branding standpoint.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so that’s always been a challenge. So as I mentioned before, and people that have. I’ve seen my work before. No, I started a podcast called Mat Report. I did that for 10, 12 years or whatever, and it just became at some point in my life right around COVID, I was like, I’m an artist and I like to just destroy my art.

I like to build it up and just say I’m done with that, and now I want something else. And that’s that like moment where I was, I really started to say, look I’m doing this thing called myPort. It’s got my name in it. It’s fun. I really enjoy it. It’s valuable, but it’s not a standalone like business asset.

Like no one wants to own MAT report. But if you do call me up and so I was just like, Hey, look I, if I’m gonna keep doing this content thing I want to, I wanna really see if I can do this as a sustainable business. So the brand ma the brand WP Minute took over those efforts.

And of course it was supposed to be much smaller but it expanded which was great. And the challenges has become, has. Has been like, how do I continue to produce this content? But also, like I said, providing value for sponsors and finding new sponsors. And finding, and like in thinking about the business and how to like, grow the revenue.

So you have the memberships, you have classified ads, you have sponsorships and stuff like that. But it just doesn’t sell itself. And at some point, like you start, like I bring on Eric. He’s my biggest expense, of course, and it’s, paying him to create the work and or create the content, and he helps me produce a lot of the podcasts and the newsletter and all this stuff.

He’s taking on more responsibility, he gets paid more, and I need to keep continuing to build that funnel, right? Or just build that support. So stuff like the Agency Action show that we just launched, which is with Kurt and Toby Kres, Kurt v Onan, and Toby Kres. That’s another step forward in saying.

I wanna serve agency owners again, but I haven’t sold a website to a client in, I don’t know, seven years, right? Like I haven’t run an agency in about seven years and I want to put out valuable content that people trust. So I brought those two guys on to talk to that audience. ’cause I trust their work with agency and freelance life.

They’re doing it day to day and they’re going to speak to that audience. So that’s like that. Sort of first expansion of, I don’t wanna call it a podcast network, but it’s a first expansion to address that audience. I don’t want I don’t want to talk about agency life right now ’cause I haven’t done it in seven years.

Do I talk to agency owners all the time? Yes, I do. Every week I talk to an agency owner and, or a freelancer, but I’m not writing contracts and doing deliverables anymore. So I don’t want to say that I’m the expert in that anymore. So it’s just how I, I’ve approached tho those topics.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned future courses. I don’t know if you want to get into some ideas you have, but I really admire in a given topic area, the best courses are built around pain. And there’s a lot of pain in like the hosting, like you mentioned, creating challenges for clients and straining the client agency relationship.

And as a former like yourself, agency owner, I remember a lot of pain. Like I could find a lot of different topics to maybe zero in on. Yeah. But can you speak to the future courses or even just some of the pain areas of agency life or freelancer entrepreneurship that you find particularly challenging and needs a fresh take and some training around?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, certainly. You know that was the reason why we started with hosting because I was a system ad administrator. 25 years ago, and I was, running cPanel servers when cPanel first came to the market. And then I took that knowledge and brought it to my agency and I was like, oh, I’m gonna, now that I run an agency, I’m just gonna run the hosting myself.

’cause I, I know what to do. And it was fine in the beginning. You have a dozen customers or 20 customers and you’re like, oh, look at this. I’m making, nearly a thousand dollars a month in hosting. And if I just. 10 x this or a hundred x this, like this is gonna be great. And then, as soon as you start having the first security breach on your VPS server or there’s you have to update MySQL and PHP and then you realize, oh wait, I’m the one holding the bag here.

And if. All of this fails, which it did a few times. Like now your customers are looking at you going, you told me, five nines of uptime. And I’m like, I’m just a, I’m just a WordPress agency. I’m not a web host. So I learned those lessons early on and I wanted to make sure that of course, technology’s different these days, but I wanted to make sure that folks.

Know that experience for your customer really makes or breaks a deal. You’ve already built the website fine, but if you want to, them coming back and, growing as you grow your agency, you gotta make sure that this whole experience is good. So that’s like the pain point that we’re trying to solve too with the hosting course.

The next course will be about running that agency. And much more from the pre-sales process. That’s always been a huge issue that I’ve heard with other freelancers and WordPress agency startups is how do you, like, how do you do pre-sales? How do negotiate with the customer?

How do you present to the customer? How do you qualify them as a lead? How do you follow up with them, like this whole pre-sales process? At least I haven’t found a lot of content around that. And that’s one thing that we want to help freelancers and agency owners understand when a lead comes in, what happens next is do you just sell it and you think that’s it?

Do you just give them one price? Do you give them multiple prices? So we’re gonna approach that topic and that probably won’t come until, after Thanksgiving. ‘Cause what we found with this hosting decoded course, it took about, I wanna say two and a half months from Hey Eric, we’re gonna do this together to, hitting publish on.

The courses page on the WP Minute site and then realizing oh my God, I don’t have a login link on the WP Minute. ’cause it was never meant to be, a membership site. So it was like, oh God, I gotta do all that now. I have to set up the emails, I gotta set up the login link, I gotta do all this stuff.

So what we’re finding, it’s, that first process was, two to three months and hopefully, based on what we know, maybe this one will take a month or so. So

Chris Badgett: I think that’s really smart. I like to think about a niche audience through time. And like the hosting challenge is at a certain point in time, a lot of a question I ask on this podcast all the time to serve, particularly the agent agency, the builder, the WordPress blue collar professional, as you call it, is how do you get clients?

And I think that lead generation. Is a topic that’s covered a lot. There’s all these different things, but as you were talking, I was listening to oh, the presale. We’ve got some leads, like what do we do here? And Matt also comes from a offline sales background. So you have you’re a great salesperson.

Matt sold lifter Old Mess on Pagely. We’re still there. That was like seven years ago. But helping agencies close is like a, that is underserved the more I think about it. Yeah. And you don’t need general sales closing, objection handling advice. That stuff’s important. And you can read about that in bookstores and articles, but let’s talk about the blue collar WordPress professionals specifically.

There’s some unique variables there. Yeah, so exciting.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I’m trying like again, like I’m, we’re always pushing for value. I won’t go on the soapbox of WordPress media and WordPress content businesses here, but we’re always trying to push for that higher level of value for our sponsors and our, and the members of our Slack community and, web hosts.

Love agencies naturally because they bring sticky customers and they bring big accounts. And multiple customers and mul and multiple customers. It’s not rocket science. Anybody who knows like the networking space in WordPress like web hosts have or tend to be the ones that sponsor a lot of outlets and we really appreciate ’cause they help us get the work done.

So if I can create content that helps them and their customers, like how to choose web hosts. ’cause remember, we’re only partnering I’m not partnering with every web host. Certainly. There’s a lot of web hosts that come to us that Hey, we wanna be on. And it’s no, I don’t. I don’t think you’ve, you meet the criteria for a lot of WordPress professionals that are looking for great hosting the WordPress way.

So we only partner with those types of hosts. And now if we can also bring in the agency owners and put them side by side and put them literally in the same virtual room, then like everyone wins because the hosts get to talk to these agency partners. Agency partners are always looking for more leads.

Hosts have leads, right? And then like somewhere in the middle, since we know a lot of people in the WordPress space now, the product people are also in the WP Minute, and all three of these parties are congregating in the WP Minute. And that’s the secret sauce right there.

Bring folks in get them talking to each other. Hopefully our work that we do at the WP Minute is raising value for all three of those parties.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

A question about your course. I noticed you added a certificate or certification at the end of the course. I feel like I’ve thought this for a long time in the LMS space certification is totally underused.

It’s not just about getting continuing education credits or doing some kind of micro credential like you can certify, you can gamify like a lot of different things. On a full level of a full spectrum of completely serious corporate business to, we’re just having fun here and this is like a game, but what, tell us about the decision to add a certification to the free hosting course.

Yeah. What’s your vision for the freelancer agency owner to be able to do with that? Like why do that?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. It’s weird ta talking to you about it since you’ve, you’re the mastermind behind the software. Yeah, but I’ll show you, I’ll tell you how I’m thinking about it. And actually we did two things two kind of like unique things, right?

So obviously the cert certification is there, and that’s like a built-in feature to your product, which is great. But on the checklist side. We don’t have to talk about this right now, and I, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about it. We have a, one of the lessons is a checklist in, I think resources, I forget what the title is.

‘Cause we were thinking like, how do we make the course tangible other than the certificate? So before you go through the whole thing, pass the quiz and get the certificate. What else can we provide as tooling or like utility around this education. So I built a. Hosting calculator using automatics, nut telex, ai, block builder. And a user can go in and put in the requirements for their particular WordPress project, and at the other end of the calculator, it’ll spit out which level of hosting is going to be the best fit for the requirements entered into the calculator. So that was really cool. But to answer your first question about the certification.

Yeah, right now it’s fun. Like Eric and I talked about it. We’re like, Hey, we should, at the end of this, you should, we should have a little little certificate that somebody earns by passing a quiz. I thought about it for a little bit. I was like, I don’t know if I want to do that.

’cause it just becomes fun. Just becomes a fun thing. But then the utility of that sort of dawned on me like, you know what, there’s a lot of WordPress companies. Specifically agencies and product companies. When you’re the size of like gravity forms at my day job where you have 50 plus people working for you, not everyone knows everything about WordPress, right?

These, a lot of like developers that you hire or project managers. It’s not like they’ve been in WordPress for 15 years. Wouldn’t that be great? But a lot of them don’t understand and they’re just coming from other parts of the technology world. Can the WP Minute. S certifications serve as a training tool for other agencies and other WordPress product companies, right?

Hosting again, is super important. If you’re a bigger agency or you hired somebody as like a project manager and they don’t know anything about WordPress hosting, but they’re talking to your clients and, potentially your clients are asking them like, where should I host this site?

Don’t you wanna make sure that your project manager or the face of your business understands. Some fundamental lay of the land in WordPress. So I’m hoping, I’ve already started talking to a handful of WordPress agencies to say, Hey, bring your staff in. It’s free, right? And have them pass the certification.

And if they show you this certification, maybe you buy them lunch or maybe the WP minutes, splits a lunch with you or whatever. We’ll buy them like a GrubHub card or whatever, like some way to bring, the company’s already in WordPress, leaning on the WP Minute as a resource for fundamental, WordPress training, which, you’d have to be in the space for 20 years to really understand.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I think that’s a great opportunity to explore for certification. Like I think about, I began with the end in mind, and I think about in your future course about pre-sales. If somebody is on a sales call with a prospective client and they’ve taken your course, they’ve printed it out, it’s in a frame in the background behind them on Zoom, and they’re certified in WordPress hosting, they’re certified in like customer experience, happiness or whatever.

And you know what other, what whatever other like tech or sector innovations that this agency does, could be marketing automation, could be. Graphic design could be a lot of different things that even though it’s not like an official accredited school, that certification is really valuable. And you’re literally helping your people close deals.

Yeah. And become better at what they do in the process. Who doesn’t want that?

Matt Medeiros: Yes. Yes. That’s the. That’s the hope anyway.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned wanting to go back to something about the checklist or Yeah. What were you thinking there? What’d you want to explore?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, just like the calculator.

So that was fun. That was, we’re just trying to find ways. Of course we have the slide deck which. PDF, whatever. It’s 90, 90 slides across the entire, course. But we were just trying to find ways of like, how can somebody, how can we tangibly get somebody to interact with this course so that they could.

Because I’m a visual learner, I’m a hands-on learner. That’s pretty much how I do it. So like how do I apply these concepts? And this is a very beginner level course. Like I think anyone who’s been in WordPress for more than five years might understand how to, pick the right host.

But if you’re brand new to this, like you might not know that, a customer may eventually ask you for. A specific SLA when they get to their host. I didn’t know, and I ran an agency for a decade, not until I got into Pagely, 15 years into my WordPress career that I ever hear. A web host customer say, yeah, and we’re gonna also need to modify your SLA and give you our terms on, like, how are you gonna support turnaround?

I was like, wow. It’s gonna come with a lot more zeros at the end of that hosting bill to do that kind of thing. But it’s certainly a thing that happens in bigger enterprise, more bespoke solutions. So yeah we came up with that calculator idea as something that was a tangible way to interact with the course.

Chris Badgett: Just to brainstorm on that, this is a beautiful thing. This is why I like to use the metaphor of putting your customer at the center of your business, not your product. So if your product, in this case is a free training course, there’s only so much you’re gonna think about, but when you put the customer at the center, they’re like they need training.

They need videos, and I love that you also have some text with your videos and stuff, but you did something really cool, which is provide a tool. A tool is not content, it’s not a video, whatever. It’s like its own type of thing to learn with and get results. You have a quiz, which is like a knowledge check and a certificate that’s like something else that helps them, but you could provide templates like in your future pre-sales course, like having call scripts.

Things like that. Those are templates that people could use. Yeah. Even things like perks, like discounts, like coupon codes that you negotiate with vendors that they’re likely to use. There’s so much you can do besides just course content. Coaching, you mentioned potentially some cohort based stuff.

That’s a whole other thing.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And if you really map it out, you could probably come up with 20 different types of things that could be helpful in addition to just content. Yeah. ’cause people are coming for transformation and learning and content isn’t really the only thing there. Plus you layer in the learning styles where.

Some people are more tactile learners, which means they want to get busy with their hands and like they some are visual and auditory and all that, but the tactile learners I’m sure they love the tool and like giving people an assignment like, go do this. Or if I was doing a marketing or outbound sales course would be like, before you go to the next lesson, do three cold outreach emails.

I don’t care how sloppy it is, just do it. So I’m like getting the learner taking action. Oh, and by the way, there’s a template here to make your first attempt like probably go a little smoother.

Matt Medeiros: Yep. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Those great ideas we’re definitely gonna apply some of that stuff in the future course.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Now you got my brain going, so I gotta turn it off. But invoicing stuff, invoicing templates, and milestone markers and common objection handling, cheat sheets, like all kinds of stuff there. Speaking of that, one of the things that I’ve always been impressed by you over the years, decade plus that I’ve known you is your versatile on your content types.

Podcaster YouTuber, course creator, blogger, newsletter writer. You’re a vibe coder. You’re an agency guy, and do you build sites, you do your own, you do great design. So you have like. All these different skill sets, and you’re putting it around your ideal customer and the niche and all that stuff.

And I think that’s truly unique because a lot of times people will lock on to, oh, I’m a course creator, I’m a newsletter entrepreneur. Or I’m a podcaster, I’m a YouTuber. I’m a coach. But you do all that. And I was just looking for some advice you would give somebody on. Maybe getting outta their comfort zone, but trying on these different channels for size.

What, how do you think about that? I think you do it naturally just ’cause you’re interested in a lot of things, but maybe one of those things feels harder to you than the other. Or you have more fun when you do video or something like that. I don’t know.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, it’s a great question. I was actually thinking about this, and I’ve thought about this in the past before, but I was definitely thinking about this yesterday because.

I did a video that I specifically, I only put on LinkedIn. This is a bit of a tangent, but hang with me. It’s a video that I put specifically on LinkedIn for Gravity Forums. We launched a new podcast called Crew Collective. It’s about storytelling and we interview a lot of people who are filmmakers, authors, musicians.

It has nothing to do with software and tech has everything to do about like space, but creators and how they made that piece of art, right? So I did this whole like behind the scenes video of how we came up with the cover art. How that cover art in branding transcends the rest of the website, right?

Like how it affects the episode images, how we use our guest images in that cover. Art, and Travis and team did a fantastic job with it, right? I’m not the designer behind it, but I wanted to tell that story of what it’s like to launch. A podcast that is virtually unknown and how to do it the right way.

’cause we were asking people that have like agents to be on the show. Like not AI agents, like media agents that we had to go through because they’re, they’re not a-list celebrities, but some of ’em are b’s, and a couple C’s. So we had to knock on the door of a publicist or an agent.

And we can’t just be like, we’re a software company with a podcast. Come on. Like we needed to show them. Our own artwork to say we’re a legitimate entity. Asking your customer, your client, to be on our podcast to talk about their stuff. So I went through this whole behind the scenes thing.

The point of that is, is I show people off how we did that and what our approach was, yada yada, as supplemental content to the podcast. And I just started thinking social media and algorithms has no idea where to place me. Which is my big, which I’ve, this is the point to your thing is I do so much that social media has no idea how to amplify my stuff.

Because on one day I’m talking strictly about WordPress. The next day I’m talking about how to do a branded podcast. The next day I’m talking, I’m like sharing my insights of whatever marketing at gravity forms, it becomes a challenge, but. I can tell you with certainty that being able to launch this course that we just did with Lifter, I have never felt the thing that I’ve always missed in a lot of these areas because I’m a utility player.

Let’s say I’m a, I don’t wanna say I’m a generalist, but I, okay, call me a generalist. The thing that I’ve always missed is the thing to, to say, here’s what I sell, here’s what I offer. And yeah, the podcast like, come and listen. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Join the newsletter to say stay subscribed to the WP Minute.

Okay. But the course has built so much confidence in my ability to clearly say we’re helping the WordPress professionals. Now my customer might be a web host for sponsorship, and I can use the course. With my sponsorship customers, like I feel way more confident now saying, please support the WP Minute.

Please sponsor the WP Minute because I have this course. And on the audience side, I feel more confident with a call to action to say, come on in. We’re helping educate you. It’s not just me saying, follow the podcast. Join our newsletter. Come on in. Take the course, join our community, which is also now free.

And let’s get better at WordPress together. So at least on the WP Minute side, launching this course has anchored me in a more confident way that I feel like I provide value to the sponsors and to the audience, if that makes sense.

Chris Badgett: That does make sense. And I think one of the cool things that course creation will force you to do is.

They’re bigger content items than like an episode or a newsletter or a single video. And then you have to, it forces you to be like, what’s the learning objective here? Who’s the ideal learner? What’s the shortest path to outcome without overwhelming them? I’ve been in this industry 20 years and I have this giant cup, but my student may be a newer freelancer and their cup is smaller in terms of what.

They can absorb and what they need to hear. So it just forces you to create something that’s, it’s more complex, but it’s also in some ways more complete than a one-off newsletter or video, even though those things may fit in a broader offer. The other thing I wanna mention here is I’m a huge fan and it’s totally underused of the free course lead magnet, right?

Yeah. You can do a PDF or a white paper. Or even like the tool you built, you could create like a calculator tool and somebody has to opt in to get the answer. But when you do a full training and just give that away for free. And if you’ve built a brand and an audience that already knows, likes, and trust you, and you have some longer form content, which tells you they have the attention span to invest in a course is so powerful.

A free course lead magnet shouldn’t be your only lead magnet. But, and it’s not just to get leads, but it’s very powerful when you have a tight audience tied off or a tight pain point problem you’re solving. Yeah. So I think that’s smart and always encourage people to give away more than they’re free for, free than they’re comfortable.

Also, somebody may not hire you, but could still work with you and get benefit from a free or paid training. I could go in a lot of directions here, but in my opinion, every company is a media company or sorry, an education company. They are a media company and they know that, that’s why they have blogs and podcasts and YouTube channels and whatnot.

But they’re also an education company. And making some of that education very free is super powerful. And in software specifically like hosting or. Any tool, like there’s training and we all used to unfold, like you get something and you unfold that little thin white instruction manual that sucks and you can’t read, like you have this huge opportunity with an online course to make something way better than that.

The digital version of that little paper thin instruction manual that doesn’t really do the job.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And immediately I was able to close deals. This is gonna sound like a testimonial for a lifter, but I have no problem giving you a testimonial. But I was immediately able to close deals with hosting sponsors when I launched the course.

Which I knew was, it was part of the strategy here. It, I was able to, people, I had two customers sign up, for the for our sponsorship spots that are hosts. Because I launched the course and they were like, they saw the, my existing sponsors alongside the course and they were like we wanna be there too, alongside these other hosting companies that you have.

How do we get that? And it’s just oh, okay, here’s, here’s the path to, to getting sponsorship, which was, fantastic. So when you do put out good. Great valuable content. When it’s free, it raise it depending on what your industry is, it raises some eyebrows and helped me close deals ’cause my model is sponsorship.

So people didn’t wanna miss out with that. And this is not my first rodeo. I launched academy.caos.com using Lifter. When I was at CAOs, I launched learn.gravity.com, which is lifter. When I first joined Gravity this is the first time that I, I did it under my own brand of stuff.

But I’ve been using Lifter a lot to do a lot of this stuff.

Chris Badgett: You’re exceptional in that, you’ve, you’re just such a great content creator and you’re doing it and you’ve done it before, like inside other companies like Gravity and Casto and so on. But in most of the case, most software companies, the best training on the software is made by some independent party.

So if I look at the hosting decoded course, if you ask the question, why hasn’t this been made by the hosting industry or a player in there? It is an interesting question. One, they’re biased to their own solution, so they, that’s just an issue. So they’re not really incentivized to do the bread basket of let’s look at all the options and stuff like that.

Some of that is a limited limiting belief, but for the entrepreneurs out there listening, there’s a huge opportunity to create training. On your favorite softwares and those companies, like you mentioned, getting sponsorship will help promote it, promote you. It’s needed. It’s needed. We all know as, particularly as agency and freelancer folks, sometimes when we talk to a company for support, we know more about the tool than the support rep we’re talking to.

Yeah. And if you’re, if you find yourself in that position, maybe you could create a training on your own for that. Yeah. Whether it’s free or paid or whatever.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And a lot of, the hosting companies to be fair, ’cause again, I worked at Pagely, so I totally know, like a lot of that marketing and advertising is spent on saying things like more gigabytes than the competition, or faster support time, because their buying cycle or their customers in that buying cycle moment okay, this is the one I want. Or it’s here, first. Year is 50% off and next year, the price goes up. We looked at it as, okay, that’s great. And certainly, look at the gigabytes and the disc space and the data centers and all that stuff.

But at the end of the day, how are they supporting WordPress? And through that, is that helping your agency and your customer? One, I don’t know what we have for time left, but I do have a bonus story on we had the course name and we launched it and I emailed it, and then I was contacted that I had to change the name.

Oh. And we had we had to change the name the next day of launching the course.

Chris Badgett: Because it included a name that there was already a course about or something, or what was the.

Matt Medeiros: No. I was contacted that from Automatic, or yes, I was contacted by Automatic that it infringed on the trademark because the course name was WordPress hosting Decoded.

Yeah. And that was clearly against the terms and conditions of the trademark. So for the course creators who are out there, who are watching, luckily. I definitely would’ve lost my mind if Eric wasn’t helping me put this whole course together, because there’s a lot, like you might just see free course, nine modules, a quiz, that’s it.

But there was just a lot of stuff that went into play, including all, like the copy, the slides, the featured images, and all the course I had to go through and change all those the next day. So all of that stuff that, went into launching a course, I had to like quickly redo it again over the, over a weekend.

And change all that stuff up, change that links and things like that. But yeah, so we couldn’t use that name WordPress hosting, so we had to change the whole name, which caused us to go through and change all of our assets. So definitely keep all of your course stuff and your assets organized and easily changeable.

I guess if anything like that happens to you,

Chris Badgett: First. Welcome to my world, Matt. So with with plugin names and things like and when you, a lot of plugins involve multiple brands for example, like a CRM brand but we’ve learned over time through automatic and other companies and other I don’t know if it’s a cease and desist letters or whatever, but if you’re gonna make a course about some other brand.

Putting for that brand at the end, like you have pivoted to here, you tend to be all right. Yeah. But if you start with the brand name, yes. You get you’re rolling on the dice. But I also want to admire you for something I noticed that all successful course creators have, which is forward and perfect action.

So you didn’t get hung up on the name forever and all that. You did it. Oops. You crossed a line you didn’t realize was there. You got a letter, you corrected it, you’re fine. But that’s how it goes. This is entrepreneurship, this is life.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. That, yeah, it was certainly something that I definitely wasn’t gonna battle use it as a training lesson.

And, it’s the part of the entrepreneurship stuff and it was to, it’s fine. And in fact maybe even the course name ends up being better in the long run for visibility and. Searchability and all that stuff, but definitely like when you’re you first launch, you send it out to your mailing list, you put it out on social, you’re hyped up, you do a podcast episode about it, and you’re like, you’re way up here.

Then all of a sudden it’s you gotta change the name and you’re like, like there goes all that energy, out of the room. But it’s fine. And I am feeling a lot better about it now.

Chris Badgett: Just to close it out with one final question, and it could be I’ll challenge you to. To put it down to one word, but if you need three or four sentence, it’s fine.

One of the things I notice with successful course creators and content and creator entrepreneurs is that there’s some kind of through line, yeah, you do a lot of things. You set, podcasting, YouTube, you work at these companies, you do all these projects and stuff. You collaborate with all these people.

What would you say is the through line? Because I see people come and go in different spaces and that’s fine. Maybe you enter a new season of life or your interests or focuses change. But what’s your through line? Because I’m really glad just to see you continuing on the journey and just being around and your different forms and evolution.

But what’s the through line for you?

Matt Medeiros: The through line is definitely WordPress, right? It’s the only thing that has kept me. Kept me going and in various firm forms, right? So it started as an agency, as an agency owner. Then it turned into like the podcast stuff. Then it turned into a more official career as I, transitioned from Pagely to Casto, which is a WordPress company as well to where I’m at with GRA gravity forms.

And that’s the thing that makes me continue to put out this content. If it was something where, had I been a agency coach 15 years ago, would that have lasted the stand of time for me? Probably not. Like the foundation for me is WordPress for what it stands for in open source and what it empowers people to do.

And that’s my foundation. Then I have these different art forms, on top of it, over the course of many years. So that’s what’s kept me, consistent and kept me going because I do love WordPress and what it can do for an individual. Right now.

Chris Badgett: That’s Matt Maderis. Go to the wp minute.com.

You’ll see the course on there. Hosting Decoded, how to Choose the Best Host for WordPress. Thanks for coming on the show, Matt. Really appreciate it. And I love what you’ve built here. I’d encourage anybody listening to go check out the course and can’t wait to see your future courses and how this evolves.

Matt Medeiros: Thanks, Chris. Thanks so much.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett speaks with Robert Lunte and Dana Sleeper from CourseCREEK, a full-service eLearning provider that assists people and businesses in making money out of their knowledge through excellent online courses, in this episode of LMScast.

According to Robert, CourseCREEK offers each customer a customized, high-touch experience by delivering everything from marketing and LMS creation to consultancy and instructional design. He tells the tale of a customer who constructs horse arenas and wishes to instruct others on how to make horse footing correctly.

The customer used CourseCREEK’s assistance to transform their specialized knowledge into a SCORM-compliant course that was posted on an LMS, creating new revenue streams and chances to expand their knowledge. According to Robert, every firm may turn into an educational enterprise since online courses not only produce semi-passive income but also establish credibility, establish client interactions, and leave a lasting impression.

Since the majority of their clients are subject matter experts without teaching experience, Dana continues, it is her responsibility as an instructional designer to turn their knowledge into interesting and useful learning opportunities.

Dana discusses their process from exploration and identifying learning objectives to storyboarding, generating multimedia material, assuring accessibility, and keeping the client’s distinctive brand voice. In order to create courses that both successfully teach and represent the creator’s personality, Dana says that the process of creating courses is collaborative and iterative, combining the client’s vision with instructional design principles.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m joined by two special guests from CourseCREEK. That’s course creek.com. We have Robert Luty and Dana Sleeper from CourseCREEK, which is a full stack e-learning, production, implementation, instructional design, all the things. And I’m really excited to dive into it with you guys.

But first, welcome to the show.

Robert Lunte: Thanks for having us. This is Looks fun. I like your setup. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

Robert Lunte: Great. Great to be here.

Chris Badgett: Let’s just start with the big question of what is Course Creek? What are you, what are your services? What do you guys do? When I saw you pop up on the radar, I’m like, oh yeah, these are guys that are big picture, but can also zoom out on the components.

But tell us about the offering at CourseCREEK.

Robert Lunte: That’s true. We’re not only guys, we wrestle get, we’re ladies as well. CourseCREEK is a full service e-learning firm. What we do is we help anybody that wants to monetize their expertise be it e-commerce executive coach types or large l and d departments that need to create content for their staff and their partners.

As we were talking before. The cameras went live. There’s really no project that we’ll say no to. So we’re gonna develop course content and e-learning programs for really anybody that needs a world class job. We’re a boutique company. We don’t have great gobs of people. When you come on board and after we have our needs analysis meetings, the people that you meet in those meetings, such as Dana, will be the people working on your project.

So it’s very high touch. We provide consulting. World class instructional design, which Dana will elaborate on a bit. Development on all the learning man, the learning the leading learning management systems such as LifterLMS, and marketing. So anything that you need, we can provide a full stack or we can do a la carte.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us a like a client story, just as an example.

Robert Lunte: Okay. Let’s see. How about, gosh, this, all of our clients are super happy. Which one would be really good, which would be a great story. Okay. How about the the horse arena folks? So the horse arena folks, so they came to us and they make, this is an example of how we won’t say no to anything.

They build large. Horse arenas for fluent folks that have horses. So that’s these big shelters. And when you’re doing these horse arenas, a big part of it is what they call the footing, right? So the footing is what the horses run on, all right? So that footing has to be done properly. It’s a science, it’s an art form.

And if it’s not done properly, then you’ll hurt these, very expensive animals. They came on board and knew absolutely were clueless on how to make a course. They just had a budget and they realized they wanted to scale and leverage their expertise and get a course out there, and they wanted to offer something for people that.

Can’t afford them to fly in and provide a hands-on consultation. They needed something that could take care of other folks on how to get the footing right. So off we went to build the, build those courses and we’re doing a really beautiful SCORM development program. And we’re putting them on a, one of these brilliant learning management systems.

So I guess the story is they didn’t know anything except horse arenas. And we took them on our wing and now they’re super happy. We got a five star review from them. That’s great.

Chris Badgett: I think that’s awesome. I have this belief that every company is a, could be an education company, and particularly what you said with Downselling, if you can’t afford our services, we’ll see, still teach you how to do what you know we do.

That’s much cheaper than hiring us. But it’s the do it yourself model and so many companies could be doing that. That’s awesome.

Robert Lunte: It’s so true. An online course opens up doors not only to some. Semi-passive revenue, which is a great thing. Maybe we’ll start there, but it opens up all kinds of opportunities.

It’s a, it’s an introduction before you go on a speaking tour. It’s a leave behind. After you do a public speaking tour. It opens up opportunities and the customer journey. It opens up opportunities for the customer to potentially, if they want more of you and more information, you could do like a VIP retreat.

So it sits in that, it sits in that purchase journey. Somewhere in the middle, which is super important. It it opens doors and it makes you an authority in the space. The other thing I like to mention is that people don’t mention very often is for a lot of folks, like the thought leader types, it also leaves a legacy.

All right? So when all is said and done your teachings go on and people can continue to learn from you. And it can do a lot for folks.

Chris Badgett: I love the legacy aspect. There’s a concept we talk about a lot on this show that you have to wear five hats to really make it in this industry. Whether you could be a unique unicorn that can do all these things, or you can hire a team or hire an organization like Course Creek to fill in the gaps.

But the five hats problem, as I describe it, is you have to be like a subject matter expertise. Whether that’s like. Horse running surface. That’s the expertise. You have to be able to teach effectively or coach or design instruction. You have to be an entrepreneur. Like you have to build a education company, you gotta do marketing, you gotta do sales, you gotta do operations.

You have to be a community builder. Who are all these people that have, horse tracks? Like how do we reach these people? How do we, I mesh in their community or. Find them to begin with. And then you gotta be a technologist. We’re talking video, cameras, websites marketing automation, CRMs, LMS, all these things.

And that’s a tall order for one person to be able to do. Yep. But since Dana is here, I want to really dig in on instructional design. ’cause this is such a huge problem because there are so many. People who have expertise, but they’re not trained as teachers. Even college professors, many of them did not go to teaching school or in private education.

So it’s a much needed thing that’s not very well understood of how to create engaging e-learning content and to pass along information without overwhelming people. But Dana, take us to school on some top tips of instructional design and how you think about it, particularly with a subject matter expert without a teaching background.

Dana Sleeper: Yeah, sure. Happy to. And I’d say that’s predominantly who we work with, right? Is me subject matter experts who don’t have teaching backgrounds, but they know something, whether it’s about horse arenas or it’s about. Running a restaurant or a youth mentorship program and anything and everything in between, they have some knowledge that would be beneficial for other folks to have.

And so what we do is we sit down with those knees and we try to better understand the content. That’s our first step, right? Is this discovery and analysis phase. We identify what knowledge they have. How it might be useful to other folks, what our objectives are to get that information across.

So essentially, what do we want the learners to walk away with? Once we understand what we want them to take away or what we want them to be able to do once they’ve completed a course then we can go into the design and storyboarding aspect. And that’s where we map the flow of the learning.

We think about interactions, engagement. Assessments to ensure that there’s instructional strategy alignment as well as brand voice integrated, because that’s also something that’s very important in this is making sure that whoever that creator is, whoever that me, is their voice and the unique way that they tell the story comes across.

And that can be something as simple as having their brand colors in there, but it could also be the tone of the course. Some folks really like to interject. Humor into their courses and be really playful Other folks, like more of a corporate serious tone. It just depends on who they are and who their audience is.

So we have a lot of conversations around that. We iterate a lot on different versions of content in order to ensure that we are ultimately developing something that reflects for them and for their audience. And then we go into that development and production phase. So we use tools like Articulate, rise, storyline Beyond and other tools in order to bring the courses to life.

So we integrate multimedia animation. We also think about accessibility best practices. So if we’re acknowledging that our audiences may need to use e-readers or things of that nature, we need to think about those aspects to ensure that they’re SCORM compliant ready for the learning management system.

And then there’s a whole review and iterations process where we share that draft with them, get their feedback. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes they’re like, this is exactly what I wanted. And other times they say oh no, this is so far from what we were expecting. And then we just. Keep going.

It is a creative process and I do think that’s something that a lot of me, the first time they go through this process, they don’t realize that they really need to lean in and be a partner, especially for that first course we developed together. There’s a lot of time investment on both sides to figure out.

What that brand voice is, what they like, what they don’t like, what resonates with them. Because as much as I can provide expertise on adult learning and, interactions and what I think will be most effective, ultimately they are also a client. And if their expectation isn’t met we’re not gonna end up with a product they’re happy with.

So we need to find a good balance to that before we reach the end of our development process.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about tools a little bit, and I’m really fascinated by this challenge of understanding between sort of instructional design and e-learning authoring tools versus using something like WordPress, which is a content management system.

And you can put all kinds of different things, not just videos and lessons. How do you think about the tools for the job, and let’s just leave the LMS off the table, but there’s so many, there’s 500 LMSs out there. There’s tons of different ways to make e-learning content. How do you choose without getting overwhelmed what your tech stack’s gonna be to create effective training?

Dana Sleeper: It’s a good question. So a lot of times when we’re thinking about that end audience in those ver very first phases, that’s what we will figure that out. Because if we ask them, Hey, are you yours? Yours gonna be on a mobile device, right? That is one item that’ll help us determine what software is gonna be best articulate.

Rise is mobile responsive. There’s a reason why folks use it for courses that they know folks are gonna be looking at on their phones. In contrast, storyline. Higher interactivity, but designing it for mobile use can be much more challenging, particularly for S who wanna put all the content on screen and folks don’t wanna see things in size eight font on their phones.

So we can think through what the right tool will be and then provide those recommendations. Oftentimes we do a compilation, so we’ll say, okay, we think the best option for you is articulate, rise with. Custom beyond animations and storyline blocks integrated for enhanced interactivity. So that way we’re actually using three tools to develop their course, but ultimately delivering something that’s best for say, mobile experience.

Other times, we need to take a look at their existing. Catalog of content. So they might say, we need to match our other courses, and maybe they work with a developer who did exclusive storyline work previously, and that would make more sense than to use Storyline. Or maybe they need a really complex branching scenario that would lead us to storyline as opposed to rise.

So it’s in those discovery conversations when we’re helping them map out their content that we can identify what tools you need to use

Chris Badgett: our instructional design. Question for you, Dana, when. Subject matter expert has the expert’s curse and they’re like, I have 40 years of experience, but I don’t, I’m trying to create this one course, and they’re just overwhelmed and they’ve lost touch with beginner’s mind.

Like, how would you help that person? Get focused and become an essentialist basically, and teach effectively. You mentioned storyboarding and like kind of milestones and stuff, but how does, how do you work with an expert who’s really lost in a sea of experience?

Dana Sleeper: Yeah, so a lot of times what I will default to in that case is talking to them about learner attention span.

How much time do we reasonably think someone can sit down? Go through their course and digest and then retain that information and maybe we’re looking at 15 minutes. So what fif, what can we teach in 15 minutes effectively that will really change what they do on a day-to-day basis, or help them accomplish those learning objectives we talked about earlier?

Another great visualization of this, which is helpful for some folks is to describe folks’ brains as buckets, right? And we say, you have this much water. In your barrel, right? This is all your expertise, but your learner’s bucket is only this big, so we can only pour in this much water. So what is it that’s essential needs to go in there.

The rest of it is just gonna overflow, and it’s not gonna stay in there. It’s not gonna stay in their cup or in their bucket. So I quite literally have drawn that during calls before, just on a PowerPoint slide to help them understand that. I also have an animation of it that sometimes I send to folks to remind them.

So there’s all sorts of little kind of tips and tools on how I help folks understand that. But generally speaking, thinking about learner attention span is really one important way too. Coalesce and limit the amount of content that we’re putting into that first course, acknowledging that they could have a whole series.

That’s a great opportunity. You have all that expertise. We won’t lose it, but we are gonna make it so the learners can actually digest and retain that information.

Robert Lunte: That’s Chris. Chris, I wanna add to that real quick, and this, she’s great. I told you we had great instructional designers.

From a management perspective, while Dana’s working all on all that, on my end I’m getting the tough job of, but I’ve been doing this for 40 years. Nobody knows this better than me. And how is Dana, I know she’s great and we enjoy working with her and our but how are they gonna get it?

How are they gonna know how to do this? And so the customers oftentimes as the reality of, oh, I invested in this. Oh, this is what’s really gonna happen. As that reality begins to seep in, they begin to, sometimes they begin to panic a little bit. I’m like, oh my God, what did I sign up for? How are they gonna ever get this done?

But one of the things that they need to know that I help with sometimes is it’s not about you. Really, it is, you’re the subject matter expert, but the course is about somebody else, a different ICP. We’re not making a course to sell to you. Okay? If we made a course to sell to you, the storyboard would be completely different.

It’d be more advanced and that sort of thing. We’re making a course to sell to who you may have been 20 years ago, so let’s get that straight. The other thing is this is what we do. We do this five days a week. Eight hours a day for 20 years, and I myself have nine courses and five languages in another life.

So we’ve done this before. Trust, trust me, trust Dana. Trust our platform people. We will give you everything that you need. We’ll capture everything that has to be said. And more. And if it’s one thing that these instructional designers are really good at is picking up on business models real quick and removing, that’s not necessary with, that’s necessary and they know what they’re doing.

So the customers have to be, the clients need to be managed sometimes in that regard. They need to let go and let I call. It’s a joke with my clients. I say, just let go. Let Uncle Bob take care of it. Uncle Bob and his superhero team will take care of it. And we get done.

That’s why this is a plug. We have nothing but a hundred percent, five star reviews on trusts pilot. So that’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Robert, you mentioned nine courses in some in different languages. I always find people’s path into the course space or the e-learning industry is always interesting.

Tell us about the genesis Of Course Creek. Where did it come from? How’d it start? Why’d you do it?

Robert Lunte: I’m gonna make a long story very short because I’m, because we wanna get back to instructional design in Course Creek, but in another life I’m a recognized voice coach, father-in-law, sing a song.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Robert Lunte: All right. So I’ve been doing that for 30 years. A company’s called the Vocalist Studio. We’re sitting on Kajabi, which is a great platform for that kind of teaching.

And, I wrote a book and have nine courses in five languages that teaches people a methodology for physically training the voice to build the motor skills and the strength and endurance of the voice so that you can sing amazing, and it tends to lean into rockers and heavy metal people so they can scream notes without hurting themselves and that sort of thing.

Lots of fun, really great. Still sell the courses. Don’t do the one-on-ones anymore because it’s not scalable. I took that business as far as I can possibly go, that industry can sustain. The industry just in itself doesn’t have a lot of money. So there’s not a lot to trip down, even if you’re one of the best in the business.

So I just, one day I went through a lot of misery for about six years as a voice coach thinking, what the hell am I gonna do when I grow up? What else can I do? And I realized the only other thing I can do is make courses and help people make courses. So off we went. We created Course Creek seven years ago.

And and and it’s really mostly about people like Dana. It’s about the talent that I surround myself with. Yeah, I just got tired of working with musicians. They don’t have any money. Awesome. And they’re flaky.

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I love our industry. We’ve talked about horse running surfaces and voice coaches.

Which is awesome. But in, in terms of the perfect customer for course Creek, like what are some of the qualities they have? Because you mentioned that thing where they have to be open and trust the process and some people just kinda wanna steamroll through and go alone. But how do you really identify or seek out a perfect fit client?

Robert Lunte: The client that does his homework and follows that lead that point that I made earlier, the client that signs up and says. I’m ready to go to work and joins the team and follows our lead and gets their stuff in on time. We do a Slack, a client Slack channel and Dana and the rest of the team will engage with them.

So that’s active, involved, removes their ego and just lets us lead and lets us get it done. That’s the best kind of client and, clients that are. When we execute and we always execute great. When they’re happy about that they share that with us and they share that with the world.

And so that’s big part of our payback is that we like to know that they’re happy and we like, and we want people to know about that. Dana probably has a, an instructional design perspective on that. No doubt Dana.

Dana Sleeper: I would say that clients who are communicative, so using the Slack channel and, making sure that they stay up to date with those communications as well as responding to us.

Probably the most important thing. Everything else we can work through if you at least talk to us, right? It’s really hard to make progress on a course if you can’t get client input or you can’t get them to review a course. So that engagement that Robert mentioned in the Slack channel is really key.

And it also streamlines things so that all of our communications are in one place. Shs, who works on the manages, all of the LMS platform work for clients on our end. He can see my communications. Client, I can tag him and let him know, Hey, there’s four courses that are gonna be coming your way soon to upload to the LMS.

Or, I had this conversation with the client and they mentioned gamification, and I wanna make sure you’re thinking about that when you do the LMS setup. So it keeps the entire team really engaged and informed throughout the process. Besides that, in terms of clientele, I think, I would say communication’s number one.

And number two is, like Robert said, doing your homework, right? Some folks show up and they have no content, like they haven’t actually written anything down. And so we then have to have the conversation about okay, you need to do your homework to take your expertise and put it on paper, or put it in PowerPoint slides or put it on something.

Or literally voice record yourself. I don’t care what format it is, but give me your knowledge. Yeah. And so that’s really important because if we. Don’t have that information, then all we can do is Google search, right? Or use AI to try to generate content and that’s not gonna result in the same end product as something that’s coming from a subject matter expert.

So those two things are really what I look for. Again, everything else I can work with

Chris Badgett: you guys also help with, or I’m sorry you guys and gals also help with marketing automation or marketing funnels. So like one of the main questions we wanna solve with this podcast. Is helping people get clients like we want their courses and membership sites and e-learning projects to be successful.

And of course there’s other kinds of courses, like internal trainings at companies, but if we think about the subject matter expert selling expertise. What kind of marketing funnels or marketing advice do you have? I know Robert, you had your own experience with being a voice coach and finding leads for that, but how do you, how did you do that and how do you help clients set up, a lead system or get their own clients?

Robert Lunte: So we have four phases in the client journey, consulting, instructional design LMS, working with your platform and marketing. So it’s like phase four in this journey. We have. An inbound director, an inbound marketing director, and an outbound marketing director. Inbound is paid media, social media, writing blogs, that sort of thing.

So the traditional stuff, and the outbound director does outreach sequencing on LinkedIn where it applies, and outreach sequencing on email, cold and warm email campaigns. Now, the cold and warm email campaigns is interesting in that. In order to do that properly, you have to have somebody who is an expert in commercial class.

Outbound email tech stack, which is stuff that I’m still learning about, and we happen to have a fellow like that. His name is Matt Armstrong. He’s a total geek. He just, he builds on clay and Apollo and instantly, and all these systems that are all designed to make sure you don’t go in the spam folders and don’t get in trouble, that sort of thing.

Personally, I prefer the outbound stuff because you get the most return for the investment. It’s a great value. Now, if I had more money than God and I don’t, I’d probably do paid media, right? So paid media can be very effective, but it’s a rich man’s luxury. All right? So if you’re not one of those folks, and we got a great guy that handled that for you, but if that’s not you, I lean towards outbound initially to try to get leads in.

Now, the other thing that you should do is go to work. That means get in front of a camera. So as far as the vocalist studio is concerned, it’s, it is 15, 20 years of YouTube. I think I was the very first voice coach to do a singing technique video on YouTube before Google even bought them.

So you gotta do that if you, if it’s relevant to your business. I understand that l and d departments at a hospital might not be doing that, but if you’re like, a thought leader Filipino kind of dude, you need to get in front of the camera. Then the underlying point in that is just because you have the beautiful product and we’ve delivered you beautiful product, that’s when the sounds cliche, but that’s when the work really starts.

You gotta get involved. You gotta make a little bit of investment in marketing. We’re talking about e-commerce people and you gotta get in front of a camera if you can make noise.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Robert Lunte: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Just

Robert Lunte: What you’re doing, Chris. You gotta do what you’re doing right now. You gotta make content.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. I think my first YouTube video was in 2007, something like that. But anyways I’m just guessing, but some, sometimes, like migrations are super important in this industry because, and I’m guessing that you guys deal with a lot of. Migrations, there’s this perfect client’s, open-minded subject matter expert, coachable, blank slate, canvas, and you just go with all the best practices.

But a lot of times you’ll probably get somebody they don’t like their LMS, their course isn’t working and it’s current form and you’re, they wanna move somewhere else on the tech stack side point or the content creations point and. They’re just, they need to migrate, they need to go to version two or version three or version four.

Robert Lunte: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: What’s your experience and advice for people that are in that migration or reset mindset? I.

Robert Lunte: I’m gonna, I wanna give Dana some airtime on this. I’ll start with that. And then Dana. I’d like to get the instructional designer’s perspective on that as well. I, compatibility and that sort of thing.

Early on at the agency, we recognized that migrations was heavy lifting, dirty, no fun work that no, that our competitors didn’t want do. All right. They waived those opportunities down the path, but we stepped up and embraced it and wrote SOPs for it. So in fact it’s a piece of work. It’s a kind of work that we do enough that it’s made our main nav bar to go out our websites is migrations is right at the top.

And we’re real good at it. Your question is, we typically are migrating to, to best class WordPress platforms. Okay. And SaaS platforms. The way we do it is we migrate content. We’re focusing on content and data, client data. This is a great question for Shaban. Chattery, our senior director of platforms, but it’s a lot about SOPs and being really super tight on those SOPs, bringing stuff over.

It’s gotta be really super organized. I’ll mention this, then we’ll pass it off to Dana. If you’re gonna migrate, you gotta get, you’ll get all of your content and your data in nicely, neatly titled folders and ready for us to migrate. Okay. One thing we can’t do is go in and go into a big, huge mess and figure out how to do it.

You gotta work with us and you, so you gotta prepare for it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. One quick question before Dana goes. In terms of migration, there’s a lot of noise in the space. And what I mean is like some LMS companies have slick good marketing, and the client may be saying, Hey, I really want to go to Brand X.

But you all, you guys also do LMS recommendations where you’re like, based on you, you might disagree, you might think oh, this person is a great fit for. Kajabi or a WordPress solution or talent, LMS or something else based on their unique needs. Indeed. So how do you let’s say you had a client who’s sold on brand y, but you really think Brand Z is a better fit for them?

Robert Lunte: We are the trusted advisors. So we’ll go back to the other point that I made. If you’re. Gonna hire us to do the business, let us do our work. So we’re gonna make sure you get on the right platform. And frankly the first most critical decision is that platform is that LMS. So we do work with a lot of LMS platforms, and they’re all brilliant.

They’re all brilliant. They all do something a little different, a little better than the next guy. And they got strengths and weaknesses, but they’re all pretty much mostly brilliant, including yours. It just, we take a look at their needs and we just align the needs to the platform and make a recommendation.

That’s pretty straightforward, but they have to trust us on that. Dana?

Dana Sleeper: Yeah. I would say on the content migration side, there can be a. There’s a whole slew of reasons why folks come to us and say, Hey, we did version one and we’re looking to make some changes. It could be that their content was developed internally by someone who maybe doesn’t have learning design expertise.

Maybe they don’t have software to make it interactive. So it could be something that’s pretty bland, like PowerPoint deck, or it could literally be PDFs with texts and image. And so they’re not seeing a lot of engagement in their content. Maybe if they’re selling it. They’re not selling a lot of courses because folks aren’t giving them rave reviews.

Whatever the reason might be. They wanna upgrade their content. And so in those instances, we’re often looking from converting from those base files into SCORM compliant content, in articulate, rise, or articulate storyline to increase engagement. I would also say that one of the other areas that we see some desire.

Is when we need to use squirm content because they’re looking to expand their reach. So having items packaged in as squirm files makes it easier for them to sell across multiple platforms, right? If that’s something they’re interested in doing, but their content is currently is set up in some format where they cannot do that easily and they would have to manually recreate the content in another system.

That can be another reason for folks coming and saying, Hey, we’ve decided we’re gonna go full S score so we can package our content and sell it. We need you to migrate it. We’ve had a lot of clients do that. And I would say, Robert thinking recently of Boss Academy, they actually set up all of their content in their LMS and it’s YouTube videos, text and images, and now we’re moving it into Squirm compliant content and articulate rise and storyline and using beyond animations and the video elements that they provided.

So that’s one where we’ve really repackaged it in a way that’s much more engaging. And frankly, like it looks prettier, right? So there’s the marketing element there. And other folks in similar cases, maybe they provide us a PowerPoint deck, something that they’ve been training folks with for, years in person.

And now they’re saying, okay, we need global reach to do this training. Let’s take this PowerPoint deck and turn it into something in the e-learning space. All sorts of reasons to migrate content from one format to another. And we’ve certainly found the gamut on doing that.

Chris Badgett: You folks have been in the industry for a long time.

It’s a funny industry because some things never change. Like the internet was literally invented in the seventies or whatever for college professors to communicate in military or whatever. But like online education has been around forever and some things don’t change, but sometimes things do change the market, the industry, the macroeconomics change.

What do you, when you two look into the future, what do you see as like emerging trends or opportunities or how to think about e-learning in an AI world? Or what do you see when you look into your crystal ball of what’s coming or what’s here and maybe not readily recognized? Dana,

Dana Sleeper: yeah. Happy to start on the content side there.

So I would say you mentioned ai, right? So that obviously has a big role, assuming that AI stays around and there’s not some like global worldwide crash like AWS services going out yesterday. Thank you very much for that, my friends. Yeah, my software not work. But using AI tools as a way to really make our processes more efficient.

So I think that a lot of learning designers are headed in this direction, and it’s only going to happen more where basically ai co-pilots are going to handle 70, 80% of the build work in e-learning, meaning that. They are going to develop the storyboards, they’re going to do the initial drafting of narration content.

And that really allows instructional designers to focus on strategy and pedagogy, creativity with the interactions, because that’s something that the AI can’t build, right? Those are individual triggers and JavaScripts and things that we’re doing on the backend. So AI definitely has a big role. I would also say that AI is going to help in terms of personalization.

So something we’re seeing, particularly for larger corporate clients is that adaptive learning paths or real-time feedback maybe some automated content generation is really gonna redefine how quickly training can be created and tailored to an individual learner based off of the assessment information we’re getting back from a course.

I would also say there’s a shift in general, we’ve seen this over time, but I think it’s still occurring from these larger courses that are hours long to continuous learning ecosystems. So moving away from one-off training to more of an integrated learning experience embedded in your daily workflows.

So let’s say on teams, you have an AI copilot who’s also reading your email, and they see that you are having. An issue with a coworker on one topic or you’re struggling in one area, they might suggest to you, Hey, take this five minute micro learning on X, Y, z, maybe very timely, very flexible, mobile compatible and really support the learner where they’re at in that moment of time.

So I see AI and those changes occurring in terms of how folks are structuring their learning content. I think most of the other. Shifts are not new items, right? We’re in a hybrid workforce environment, so we need more e-learning, more distributed learning. Up-skilling and re-skilling is important as generations age out in the workforce and retaining information.

That’s been a struggle for a long time. Storytelling scenario-based and experiential learning has for a long time been something that folks have focused on, but integrating that into e-learning format has obviously been more of a challenge and more possible as we advance our tools. So I’ll pause there ’cause I could talk about this for a long time.

Robert, what do you wanna add?

Robert Lunte: That’s brilliant. I’m not sure I can best that, but from my perspective where we’re recommending tech stacks, that sort of thing on the early on and say AI for the heavy lifting, micro learning, multi-tenancy, continuous gamification, adaptive learning, and copilots.

That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s I love what you said about, I’ve heard it called just in time learning versus just in case, and that AI can help. Hey, you might be ready right now for this one, micro training on this one topic. That’s really cool. Let’s talk about Course Creek. If somebody’s watching this or listening to this and they’re like, these guys and gals sound pretty awesome.

How like what’s it like to get started working with you? What should they do? Yeah, like how do they get in touch and how, what is the beginning of the process? Pretty simple.

Robert Lunte: Thanks for asking. Go to course creek.com course as an online course Creek as an little river one word, course creek.com.

Go to the top left, top right corner of our website. You see the happy button? It says Book a meeting and we will meet with you. And it won’t just be me, it’ll be me, Dana, shebang Chow, our platform expert. We, one of the things I’m really proud of and that I think is super helpful for clients is we team consult.

And so when the client comes in, it’s not just Robert it’s me with my. Talented specialists and they’re diving deep on answering, asking the questions they need to ask all the content we’ve talked about here today. And and we get it done. So after that, I then get scope documents from my team.

I put a bow on it, send it out to the client in about four eight hours. And we’ll go back and forth a little bit perhaps if we need to. And we bring ’em on board. And we’ll create a client channel or a Slack channel and we’ll get to work everybody.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to highlight some of the kind of niche specialties you mentioned LMS migration.

There’s healthcare is like an industry you’re interested in.

There’s all kinds of subject matter experts who do a million different things, which you guys have or have experience in any other just really sweet spots that you love. And really enjoy those clients in terms of niche or industry or type of platform or whatever

Robert Lunte: the migration work is a big strength for us.

And that includes the instructional design that goes into that as well. Taking a look at old content and doing an audit and improving with the instructional design, which is something that Dana had referred to verticals, healthcare, FinTech, executive coaches. And don’t be shy if it seems a little bit out of the box.

I think we’re probably the company for you as well on that as well. ’cause as I said, we’ll try anything from cowboy hat to horse arenas. If we can get it done and on demand support. I have a popular service called On Demand Support. It’s basically prepaid development, instructional design hours, every 30 days.

And it’s a way to chill out the cash flow if you’re kinda low on cash flow and don’t need to pay prepay for four to 70 hours every 30 days. We can work that way. So that is something that is been popular and and useful for the clients.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Robert and Dana, thank you for coming on the show.

We really appreciate it. Go check out Course Creek, that’s course creek.com. Reach out to these guys, book a meeting and thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for sharing what you do and the passion, the shared passion for this industry. We really appreciate it.

Robert Lunte: Thanks for the opportunity.

Chris Badgett: We look forward to sending clients your way.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett offers a very personal tale in this LMScast episode that relates endurance running to entrepreneurship and personal development.

He ran 100 miles from Vermont via New Hampshire to his home in Maine at the age of 47, completing a significant objective for which he had been preparing for more than two years. This self-sponsored ultra run. Which was encouraged by friends, his business partner Jason Coleman, and his wife, was more of a personal challenge than a competition. The fact that Chris had battled persistent back pain for the most of his adult life. Which was entirely resolved by regular fitness and strength training, adds even more significance to the accomplishment.

Chris worked with a running coach to progressively increase his endurance with strenuous runs, such as a 30-mile mountain run in New Hampshire and a 50-mile walk across the Grand Canyon. For Chris, the objective was to become the type of guy who could accomplish something amazing, not to get recognition or ego.

He highlights that success, like endurance, results from persistent work, resiliency, and a strong commitment to personal development by drawing a comparison between this experience and the path taken by course developers and education entrepreneurs.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett and this is gonna be a solo episode. This one’s gonna be a little bit different. This podcast is all about you, but I’m gonna talk a little bit about me and this one and tie it in to your journey as an education entrepreneur, as an LMS website building person.

So I just accomplished something last weekend. A big goal. I’ve been working on kind of for two years, so I’m 47 years old and I just completed a 100 mile run. I started on Saturday morning, and then I finished on Sunday, early afternoon. So I ran a hundred miles all the way from the state of Vermont across the entire state of New Hampshire.

To Maine where I live and it was a hundred miles. There was actually a kind of a route that people do that was 80 miles. From Vermont to Maine. I wanted to do a full 100. So I actually ran an extra 20 miles before I got to the starting of the journey that I did. From Vermont all the way to to Maine.

So that was a hundred mile run straight. I did take two 20 minute naps around mile 80 and mile 90, somewhere in there just because my body was giving out and I had to reset the brain and stuff. But it’s pretty much a straight run. This was not a race, it was self-supported. Which means there was no like official race event or anything.

It was just me and the trails and the back roads that I was on. I did have a couple of awesome people who supported me in the process who would meet me at road crossings for resupplying water and food and that sort of thing. So I was joined by my business partner at Lifter LMS, Jason Coleman. And a good friend Adam Silver.

And Adam actually ran a section of it with me near the end, but for the most part it was a, I was out there by myself in the woods on trails and on back roads running all the way through the night. And some of it is in a very remote part of Vermont. So this, any distance over a marathon is known as an ultra.

So this was definitely an ultra run. It was a hundred miles. And ultra is, it’s pretty much what I did is running four marathons back to back all in a row. Now I was, didn’t start training until about two years ago. I’ve always been active. I’ve always been an outdoors person. I started training and getting into shape.

But I was in a bad place because for most of my adult life, like from age 20 onwards, I’ve dealt with chronic back pain. So whenever I would wake up in the morning, the first conscious thing in my awareness is my back hurts. And I was still very active and I did physical jobs and things, but I always had.

Struggles with my back and it was very painful for a lot of my life and a lot of my waking time. And the crazy thing is through this run is that not just the ultra at the end, but about a year ago, my chronic back pain completely disappeared from all the training and just getting in the right shape with the right muscles and all of that.

That to me is the biggest win of all this process. The a hundred mile run was fantastic. I had a great experience. Really appreciated the support of Jason and Adam and my wife Samantha, who came out to support at various parts. But I also hired a running coach two years ago named Kevin, who had worked with me over the past two years to really design the.

Running training and strength training program that I did. So that is I consider it a great accomplishment. I’m really proud of what I accomplished. The first 80 miles of the a hundred mile run was actually pretty smooth, but the last 20 were brutal. I was moving very slow. I wasn’t feeling well.

My stomach was upset. And it was very challenging, but I was able to complete the a hundred miles so that’s the a hundred mile run just happened. I have no idea, what my next goal is gonna be. But like I said, I’ve been working on it for two years with the Running Coach. About eight months ago I had done a 50 mile run that was very challenging with my wife, where we.

Went down one side of the Grand Canyon, down the river, up the other side and back, which is a very hardcore 50 mile ultra run that we did. So that was a touch point in that training. I also did a 30 mile, very strenuous mountain run over the tops of six mountains in a mountain chain in the White mountains of New Hampshire.

That was also an ultra event that I did on my own, on this journey. But in all that, there was lots of training runs, walks, fast runs, strength training, all kinds of different training. And I want to tie this into you, the listener. I appreciate it if you’re celebrating with me and proud of the accomplishment, it means the world to me.

I wanted to share a lot of the things that I’ve learned just with developing endurance, setting big goals, doing training. And the first thing is really about the foundation and motivation. So why did I decide to do a hundred mile run at 47 years old? Really I’m not motivated by the. Kind of reputation or ego of having done that.

I’m happy that I’ve accomplished that, but mostly what I wanted to do is just become the person that could do that. So there was a transformation there. Yes, I’m getting older, but I believe I’d like to, age gracefully and becoming in the kind of shape that you could do something like a hundred mile run.

Was very appealing to me just because of the person that I would become in the process. You could call that an athlete and there’s lots of different types of athletes, like for you, maybe it’s some other sport or some kind of physical physique thing or whatever it is for you, but not just like an event, but the person that you become in the process is really the main motivation for me.

I also like to challenge myself and that was quite the challenge and to do that successfully. I’m proud of that, but also I like the example that sets for, particularly my children who saw their dad work really hard and train in training, but also accomplish something that sounds impossible at any age.

So that was a big part of that. And when I was training first starting out, I’ve always been active, would go on morning walks and little runs here and there, but usually not more than three or five miles. But in the early days of training, particularly with my back pain challenges, I would have a lot of setbacks.

When you first start training for something like that with a big goal, whether you’re trying to lose weight, get big muscles, or develop endurance or whatever, you’re not gonna see results like every day at all. It takes a while. So in the early days, I stayed motivated by trusting the process and just putting one foot in front of the oth other. It’s like I mentioned with the back pain where.

Eventually I woke up one morning and it just never returned. But over the, those two years, I could see the impact of the back pain getting less and less. But it is all like in the rear view mirror where you look back and you notice, oh wow I’ve made some significant change or transformation here.

And that’s motivating even when. Day to day you’re not really noticing any results or immediate, huge wins. I particularly like endurance because I feel like you get a lot more out of it. Particularly as an entrepreneur, I’ve been an entrepreneur for something like 15 years, building my own business.

Building a company doing all the things, hiring people, building a team, charting a vision doing a lot of the day-to-day work of running and implementing and growing a business. And that requires a lot of endurance. No matter who you are, where you are, there’s a lot of seduction with the idea of.

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Get rich quick or overnight success and that’s just not the reality. The whole passive income thing, it’s a lot of active, a lot of active work. And part of that is just staying mentally healthy. So one of the ways I do that, ’cause I spend a lot of time at the computer, is I like to get outside and exercise, spend time in nature, spend time with my family, be out, be around my house outdoors.

That’s helps create a lot of balance in my life. And in terms of like small incremental improvements, when I first started training, I was doing a lot of walk run combinations, very short distances, variety. So maybe one day there’s like a short run, another day there’s a longer walk and run combination.

Another day there’s some strength training. Another day. There’s some really short hill running uphill speed work, cardio things going on. And business is a lot like that because we have to wear a lot of hats. One day we’re doing marketing stuff, another day we’re doing sales stuff.

Another day we’re building product like our courses or our website another day we’re doing other technology stuff like. Doing marketing automation or more website stuff. Another day we might be doing research or talking to potential customers or reviewing competition and things like that.

And to do all those things. The trick is not just to do all things and wear all the hats, but also to do those things over time. So one of the ways I do that in business. Is I have a lot of time blocks on my calendar so that an essential function of business does not get left behind. So I have dedicated content creation time blocks on my calendar.

I have dedicated time blocks to work with my team and support them. I have dedicated time blocks to do management type activities. So those time blocking, that time blocking approach is really effective. And I like to work in systems and routines over projects. So instead of just being like, I’m all in and I’m focusing on this one and only thing right now, until it’s finished. I will have multiple projects going simultaneously and through my routines.

I am slowly working away at all those projects which work together with each other to grow the business or further whatever initiative or goal is in place. And when I can try to systematize those things so I’m not constantly trying to invent the way of doing things. Whatever it is we’re focused on.

It’s also important, when you run a hundred miles, you learn the value of patience and you have to be patient, right? So yes, you could create and launch a course in one day. You really could do that. I’ve done that, but. It’s better to be patient and build an education company, or if you’re an agency building a website. Building agency it’s something that’s built brick by brick over time and all those things compound and help each other.

Another part that comes up during. A long run or a long decade. Building a company is setbacks, so it could be pain or fatigue when you’re running. It could be injury, but there’s business equivalence of that. You could not like what you’re doing at the moment, and as an entrepreneur. It’s really easy to get distracted and just focus on the things that you want to do or you’re excited about doing.

I call it sweeping the floor. Sometimes you have to sweep the floor. Just do something that is either uncomfortable or that you’re not that excited about. That was one of the great things about working with a coach is. I used to think that I didn’t need accountability, and I also trusted maybe too much in my ability to, come up with a plan.

But when you work with an expert like a coach. That created a lot of accountability. I didn’t have to plan my workouts. They were in an app. I knew what I had to do. And knowing that, my watch, my GPS data and heart rate stuff and everything is gonna end up on my coach’s computer, it’s very motivated to get the work done.

So if it’s raining, if it’s snowing, if it’s cold, I’m still going, I’m still getting the work done, and businesses like that. Sometimes you just gotta keep going and just do it. And having that accountability and particularly that guidance from an expert can be very helpful and motivating. And I also just want to note on my a hundred mile run, I mentioned Jason and Adam and my wife Sam, who.

Supported me in the process. They didn’t run for me, but they were there. Smoothing over the gaps, making sure I had enough water, making sure my bag was resupplied, making sure I had enough batteries that were charged for my headlamps and stuff like that because I was running through the night.

So not doing it alone, even if most of what you do as a loan, but not entirely alone is really helpful. And having a coach, a mentor, or a guide of some kind to help you in the process, either for the whole big picture or maybe just a piece. Maybe you just need like a marketing coach, or maybe you just need an instructional design coach, or maybe you just need a business coach that’s gonna help you better manage a team.

Or maybe you need like a mindset coach or some kind of psychological assistance. To help you keep your head screwed on straight and have a solid mindset. The power of coaching is very powerful and it’s easy to look at like the successful course launch or the successful business. But really a lot of the coaching and the personal development that happens, it’s all about the process leading up to those milestone events like a course launch.

A hundred mile run, or a company that makes X amount of dollars a year or has been in business five, 10 years and those sort of things. Those are just blips of time where the whole journey is really what it’s all about, and getting support in that process is really important. Another interesting thing happened to me on my a hundred mile run as I got into it.

I normally, when I run, I listen to a lot of podcasts and audio books. It’s one of the things that motivates me to run because people laugh. I’m thinking of a guy named Nathan. I ran into at a conference in England and I was telling ’em about my upcoming run and I said. He said, you sound like you must really like to run.

And I said to him, I actually hate running. Which is true in the sense that it’s painful. A lot of times I’m doing it and not the best weather. Maybe it’s raining, maybe it’s super cold and windy, or the snow is blowing, or I have something else I’d rather be doing with that time. But what I love is the, the way I feel after and the mental health benefits and the person I’m becoming in the process. That’s something that’s interesting. And then the other thing I mentioned about the, not listening to podcasts or audio books on my a [00:20:00] hundred mile run, I normally do that, but in this case.

I did not, and it was just an intuitive sense I had. Once I got into it for one there was a lot of navigation. There were a lot of turns in the trail intersections, road crossings, and I just had to make sure not to get lost. Cause you can get lost easily on a hundred mile run through the woods and back roads and all this stuff.

But more importantly, I just had this intuitive sense that I should really stay grounded in the moment. So the run took me just over 30 hours, and that’s a long time. But also when you consume information, it actually burns calories. And I know that’s true because when you study professional chess players like Magnus Carlson or whoever, when they’re in a chess match, they will actually burn an insane amount of calories when they’re playing a game of chess just sitting in a chair.

So [00:21:00] energy conservation is really important, especially when you’re doing a Himalayan effort, and I just intuitively felt that I needed to let my brain only focus on the essentials of running survival navigation and that kind of thing. But businesses like that, particularly on the internet, because there are so many distractions.

You’re at your computer, there’s infinite content on YouTube or social media. You could have a movie playing a tv, going you could be having side conversations with people around you at a coffee shop or whatever. And focus is extremely important as an entrepreneur. Sometimes the key factor that limits the success of somebody.

Is there inability to focus or stay focused? So removing distractions is really important. That’s why I’m a big believer if you’re a work from home entrepreneur, that it’s really important to set up your home office or workstation environment so that it’s very productive. There’s not a lot of distractions.

So for example, right now I can just walk up to my computer and start recording or making a video at any time. Everything’s all set up. The microphone, the camera. I can just go. So it’s set up for productivity. That was just an interesting fact about limiting the mind. And I mentioned I took a couple of 20 minute naps.

And it was like I was at the point of exhaustion, but my muscles were doing pretty good. It was more mentally I needed a reset. So just laying down under a sleeping bag on the ground and, with my eyes closed, allowed my brain just to take a moment and reset and get ready for the next 5,10, 20 miles.

That was important. So there’s an ultra runner named David Goggins who says, when you think you’re at the end of your ability, like you’re outta gas, like there’s nothing more you can do physically. You’re actually only at 40%, which is, if you think about it, that’s what a lot of ultra is about.

It’s getting past barriers, a lot of which are mental. So if you do the training and you’re, you have the condition to be able to do something or you do your business and you’ve been doing, putting the reps in, learning marketing, doing marketing, learning sales, doing sales, creating content, learning about creating better content, making more content, making products like courses coaching people one-on-one, learning how to be a better coach and, practicing coaching.

With clients and so on. Building websites, you just keep going. And if you’ve put in the reps, you’re often capable of much more than where you think your limits are. So one of the biggest challenges is not that we aim to high with our goals, it’s actually that we aim too low. Think about that and really keep putting one foot in front of the other when it comes to your business and adopt the ultra mindset.

Even if you’re not like a hardcore athlete or anything like that you can develop, you can become mentally strong and mentally endure and mentally carry on and do the work of building a business. Helping people and becoming a better person in the process. So my biggest wall I hit was around around 80 miles and that’s when I knew I could finish, but it was gonna be very difficult.

So I felt great going to, to about mile 80, and then things started to fall apart. But I knew I could continue on. I would have to walk a bunch. I would have to slow down. I would have to take some stops. And even in those moments, that’s when my support team was the most there for me to help me carry on, to help me keep moving forward.

And that’s the power of having a vision, having a mission, having people with you on the journey. That’s what motivates me at Lifter LMS. You’ll often see me sign off in my emails. It’s great to be with you on the journey, and I mean that because I see myself, our team, the lifter LMS product, we are part of your journey and we’re here to support you.

We’re here for you at mile 80 when you have a question and or you have a challenge or you’re trying to launch and you’re trying to figure these things out. We have our live calls where we help people, not just with the software, but with other ideas and strategy and things like that. So we are part of your support crew at Lifter LMS on your business, ultra Endurance Marathon, and I would just encourage you to consider, if you’re not already there, adopting an ultra mindset, which means going far.

Putting in the reps expanding your limits, expanding your comfort zone expanding your goals, aim a little higher. Do some planning. Surround yourself with people and processes and systems that can support you, whether that’s team members or coaches or standard operating procedures, or documenting how you do what you do.

All of these things come together to create the ultra mindset and to build an education company and a website and an online business that can stand the test of time. Some of the, best lifter LMS sites I love have been around for over a decade, and I see those entrepreneurs continue to learn, take forward, imperfect actions, have setbacks or challenges, but carry on.

Grow their teams become better versions of themselves, help others on the journey. It’s really awesome to see. In, in hiking I’ve done a lot of hiking and backpacking and stuff, and there’s this, there’s something we all know for those of us that do long distance hiking, which is, it’s not very crowded.

One mile from the trailhead. And what that means is if you really get out there. There’s a lot of activity and buzz around the start, but when you get out far and you get up the mountain a little bit there’s just the people out there that are going the distance and then you get really out there and you barely see many people.

That’s the ultra people and businesses like that. Whether, you’re building an agency or you’re building a product, or you’re building courses, coaching program, education company. It is fun and energizing to get out there with the people that are really doing it, that are really going the distance.

And of course we want beginners and people with goals and dreams to get started and all of that, but strap on the ultra long-term distance mindset and it’s amazing what you can accomplish. So thank you for checking out this episode, letting me tell my story of my a hundred mile run from the state of Vermont to Maine in New Hampshire, and pulling out some lessons of that are related to entrepreneurship and education and building an online company because it definitely takes a lot of endurance and, going big and going far.

I’m in your corner. I’m a champion for you and champion your goals and dreams, and it’s great to be with you on the journey.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares about marketing automation. According to Chris Badgett, marketing automation is the foundation of a scalable online education company. Its role is to generate leads, cultivate relationships over time, and turn those leads into paying students for coaching, academies, memberships, or courses.

In order to automatically offer value and engage users in follow-up sequences, he suggests first creating an email list using straightforward registration forms or integrated platform code, followed by helpful automations like RSS-driven newsletters and lead-magnet distribution (PDFs, checklists, or free mini-courses). Chris recommends concentrating on three lists instead of dozens of them: prospects, free users, and paying customers. Then, using tags and custom fields, audiences can be segmented and focused nurturing sequences that mostly deliver value and occasionally present offers are sent.

He identifies the main conversion tools (webinars, one-on-one calls/trials, and sales pages) and describes how automations may promote various conversion channels to boost sales while scheduling calls, reminding participants, and rerouting signups to buy sites.

In order for automation to build connections rather than come off as spam, he emphasizes pace (drip/timed campaigns), reasonable segmentation (by course, use case, or behavior), and consistently favoring beneficial material.

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Episode TranscriptYou’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m back with another solo episode. I’m Chris Badgett, CEO, and co-founder of Lifter LMS. And in this episode, we’re gonna go over the fundamentals of marketing automation for course creators. So what is marketing automation? The purpose of marketing is to get and keep a customer basically, but primarily to create a lead and then send that lead down a path where that person eventually buys a course, a membership, a coaching program, access to your academy or your school.

So let’s talk about the fundamentals of marketing automation. What are the jobs to be done? With marketing that we can figure out how to automate. That’s what we’re gonna go over in this episode. At the very beginning of a lead or a prospect’s journey it, we want to capture the lead in our marketing automation system, also known as an email list, A CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management.

There are many great CRMs out there. There’s tools like MailChimp, which has a free plan. ConvertKit LifterLMS, by the way, integrates directly with both of those, but there’s literally 50, even a hundred out there, about 60 of the marketing automation platforms you can connect directly to your WordPress site that’s powered by things like LifterLMS or WooCommerce or other tools in the space using an awesome tool called WP Fusion.

So I’m gonna mention a lot of tools in this episode. If you wanna find the best software tools, the recommended list for course creators, just do a Google search for LifterLMS, recommended resources and you’ll find a page on our website, which has all the tools I’m gonna talk about so that you can easily find them.

But this episode mostly isn’t about talking about tools and saying you should get certain tools. But I will mention some tools as we get into it because there’s WordPress, the content management system, and then there’s tools like Lifter, LMS, which adds the learning management system. But then the whole CRM or marketing automation piece is a third leg of that stool to make an online education company.

I also wanna mention there are CRMs and marketing automation tools. That work directly inside WordPress that integrate with tools like LifterLMS, for example. Groundhog and Fluent CRM are really popular for that. But let’s go back to marketing automation. So if I was just getting started, what are some of the first things that I would automate in my marketing on my WordPress website?

One of the first things I would automate is building my email list. So the absolute most simple way to do this is to basically build a newsletter email list. So in order to do that, what I would do is I would put a form on my site to sign up for my newsletter. You can use one of the popular WordPress form tools like Gravity Forms or WSForm, or.

Ninja forms, WP forms, formidable forms, et cetera, and capture an email when someone signs up for your newsletter. And then one of the things you can do from there is it just automates the population of your email list. If you ever want to send out a newsletter your list is growing over time as people sign up by filling out the form that’s on your blog sidebar.

Or maybe you have a dedicated page on your site or a form like in the footer of your site to sign up for your newsletter. And by a form, I just mean like a headline sign up for my newsletter, a place for people to enter their name and email and a sign up button. That’s it. You can also embed the signup form code directly from your email marketing platform.

They, they can give you. Like a form code that you copy and paste on your website to create the form. Or you can use one of the WordPress form solutions that makes it easy to just build the form right there in WordPress. But just to get a little bit fancy, one of the things you can automate for your newsletter, let’s say you write regular blog posts or articles, you can do what’s called an RSS Driven campaign, which just means that, you can set that up directly inside your email list platform, where anytime you publish a new blog post, the content gets put into an email and automatically sent to your subscribers. So that is the easiest way to do an automated newsletter that automatically grows without your involvement.

Automatically sends new content that you put on your blog directly to your subscribers. And that might be the entire article content, or it could be an excerpt, like a little like the title in the first, 200 words or so that people then click on in the email, go to your website and read the full article.

So that’s the most basic form of marketing automation. And a way to help you grow your email list by creating an RSS driven campaign. As we expand from there, there’s a concept called lead magnets. So what a lead magnet is it’s something that you offer for free that somebody puts in their name and email and they get the lead magnet which we’ll talk about the different types in a second.

That gets emailed to them or downloadable or whatever it is at that time, they’re gonna get added to your email list and you can then do follow up campaigns based on that lead magnet. So the earliest been around for a long time version of a lead

magnet is called an ebook. So some people get fancy and call that a white paper.

Basically any kind of PDF resource you can create that helps your ideal learner for free that’s ideally not too big to consume. Like we’re not trying to send somebody a 150 page real book, but just something of value that they would appreciate and be happy to give you their email address for.

That is the basic ebook lead magnet. The concept of a white paper is basically just something that’s a little bit more formalized, in depth, scientific researched, but it’s still just an ebook or information. Essentially. It’s a PDF. There’s other things like cheat sheets or checklists. These are like templates or resources you can provide.

In PDF format that your audience would like. So for example, if I was doing a course or coaching program around health and fitness, I might do a lead magnet about a shopping list of what you need to get ready for the program. Could be a certain type of running shoes or certain type of workout gear.

So on. So that would be, my lead magnet, PDF, if you will, in a pro tip about PDFs. You can also put those inside of your WordPress media library on your website. So when somebody signs up, you create the marketing automation. I use a naming convention when I construct things like. Tags or automations.

In my CRMI call this stage lead magnet delivery. So if I was doing the shopping list for my workout program. I would make a tag or automation called lead magnet delivery shopping list. When somebody signed up through that form to get that lead magnet, it would. Send an email. Hey, thanks for signing up.

Here’s a link to download your free shopping list. Please let me know if you have any questions about that. And then the link, I would actually just link them to the media file in my WordPress media library so they could download it directly from that email. So that’s how I would actually deliver the PDF.

So that’s like a one step. Or two step marketing automation where somebody enters their name and email clicks, submit. That’s step one. Step two, they get an email with a link to download the resource. So that’s the, that’s like the basics of email marketing and how that works. There’s other type of lead magnets you can get fancy, like you can do free courses on your website if you’re using a learning management system like Lifter, LMS.

That is also a lead, lead magnet. A free course or a free mini course, in my opinion, is one of the best lead magnets, particularly if someone is already somewhat interested and they’re willing to invest a little more time. Then a one to five page PDF and wants to get some free information from you to make sure you’re a good fit for their goals.

So you can set all that up in LifterLMS also has. An email system built in so that when somebody enrolls in a certain course, lifter can send a certain email instantly, then again on day two, day four, day five, and so on. So you can create what’s known as a follow-up sequence. So the cool thing about marketing and marketing automation is that it allows you to time travel.

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And what I mean by that is. It’s important to think about your customer journey through time, so it’s not like everything is instant and everything happens all at once. It doesn’t. So one day they might sign up for your email newsletter and then a month later they might decide to get one of your lead magnets, and then a month later they may want to jump on a sales call with you about signing up for the membership.

So when you think about these things through time, when you set up these marketing automations, they can, trigger sequential sequentially at the right time, not all at once. Some people call that drip campaigns or, time delay campaigns. So it’s all about thinking about your customer journey from, when they first hit your website.

To where they might be in six months. There’s all kinds of opportunities to create automation to help communicate some of the communications that you would have to do manually if you don’t set up any marketing automation. And then, once somebody is on your email list, usually when people first get started with marketing.

They will over complicate it and build all these different lists. But in my opinion, in my experience, I would recommend only having three email lists. So everything else you can do with what’s known as tags in custom fields, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But the three email lists that I find most education companies need.

Is a prospect email list. So this is somebody who’s never signed up for any of your free things or been a customer. They’re literally prospective possible future users or customers. Then I like to do a, what I call the users list or free user. So most education companies have some free training available so that free training is valuable.

It’s they’re still a free user. They haven’t given you any money, and that’s okay. And maybe that’s all they’ll ever be. They won’t graduate to being a paying customer, and that’s okay, but they’re a little bit more invested than a prospect who maybe just signed up for your newsletter on a whim or downloaded a PDF report from you.

So the free user is like the second email list that I like to have. And then the third email list are your customers. These are your paying customers. Maybe they spent a little bit of money, maybe they spent a lot of money but these are your. Your customers. And in each of these email lists, you can set up what’s known as a nurture sequence.

So again, we’re gonna start thinking through time and the way I like to do it is when somebody joins, say the prospect email list if you get fancy, you can have I don’t know, like 30 emails that go out, spread out over an entire year. Or you could do less. You could only do let’s say three follow ups and if they don’t move from prospect to free user, you’re just done and you stop emailing them in an automatic automated fashion through your marketing automation, that is completely fine as well.

I like to nurture the email list. So what that means is I like to add value and not just pitch products or pitch becoming a free user or pitch my most expensive thing. I like to just add value Hey, I see you signed up for my newsletter. You might also like this specific free article I published five years ago.

That’s the most popular. Blog post on my website about X, Y, and Z. That could be an email. And then the next email I could just, go for a personal connection and say something like, Hey I helped this type of person achieve this type of result. Do me a favor and hit reply to this email with your biggest challenge, and I’ll see if I can just help you or point you to the right place on my website where we have some free content that will help with your particular challenge.

And then I might send ’em another email. Hey, by the way, did you know we have a YouTube channel or a podcast or this other thing that you might also like? I’m not trying to sell them at all. And then on the next email, I might actually try to pitch something. It could be a recommendation for the free course on our website, or one of our sales presentations or one of our paid products.

But when you’re nurturing somebody through email, it’s important not to just constantly hit them up with pitches to quote, buy my stuff. That’s the, that’s what you wanna avoid so that you’re actively developing a relationship where you’re giving way more value than what you’re asking from them, which is something you can do with marketing automation.

And I do recommend spacing those out when somebody first joins your email list. In my experience, it’s Ty typically okay to send them with a little more frequency, like day one, day two, day four, day six. But if somebody’s, if you have a long nurture sequence I recommend spreading things out so that you can as their excitement about first joining, maybe they’re turning into more of a long-term sales cycle, as we call it.

You’re not just like hitting ’em every single day with something new. So space, those out. And, free users, it’s the same thing. Nurture free users, add value. And then on, the fourth email, recommend one of your paid products. Then go back to adding value. Adding value, and so on.

And then when it comes to customer nurture sequences. I like to do the same thing Hey, you’re a customer. I’m not just gonna instantly start pitching you my next expensive thing, or to buy more quantity of X, Y, and Z. I’m gonna add value and be like, Hey, did you know you could get help in this way?

Reach out to us here if you’re stuck. Hey, did you know we have these five resources for customers only? I wanna make sure you saw that and so on. And then as you get through the. Add value. You get to the point where you can send a, an email about, Hey, you might wanna upgrade.

We have this other thing over here. Or you might, I also like this other product or program course or membership that we have. So those are nurture sequences. And important thing about nurture sequences is you set these up to create an automated follow up. Create touch points where you’re primarily adding value and building a strong, healthy relationship with the people that have entrusted you with their email address.

That’s what nurture sequences are. But around all that, you still have an email list and can do dedicated one-off broadcast email campaigns. So as an example, you may have nurture sequences running. You get to, let’s say the New Year’s holiday of the year and you’re doing a January 1st. It’s a brand new year sale.

You can still email your list, either just the prospects, just the free people, just the customers or all of them together about your January 1st New Year sale. So just because you do marketing automation, you can also do. Broadcast emails on top of that. And the key to email is that email gets a bad rap.

Oh, people are just gonna spam me and all this stuff. But if you’re genuinely care about your people and you’re genuinely adding value through your nurture sequences and your lead magnets, and when you do make an offer for something paid or to move a customer further along in the journey. It’s a good fit for them.

It could really help them in their life. That’s a really good thing. So just keep that in mind. And then the other great place for marketing automation is what I call conversion tools. So this is where you move from like you’ve generated the lead, you’re nurturing the lead, and now there’s this step before somebody becomes a customer where they can, go through a sales process basically. And I learned a framework here I’d like to share with you, which is there’s really only three conversion tools. So the first one is a sales call, also known as a demo, a trial, or a proof of concept as it’s also known. And a webinar, which is a group sales presentation.

Now, depending upon your price point, a different one of those conversion tools makes more sense for your offer. And I’ll just add that there is one more conversion tool, which is primary above all of this, which is the sales page for a course and membership. So even if you’re, you don’t have a conversion tool like the other three I mentioned previously.

You probably have a course description or a membership or a coaching program description or a page. That sales page is a type of conversion tool. So that’s this. This is one area where you can create marketing automation. You can create marketing automation around scheduling sales calls where people you know say, yes, I’d like to have a 30 minute strategy call.

You can go through a calendar booking link, and automatically. Set all that up there. There’ll be follow up emails out of the calendar system to capture those signups, and then send reminders about the future sales call. You can automate webinars as well, particularly if you do a prerecorded webinar.

So if somebody signs up and then they get redirected to a page that has a presentation, from there, there can be a call to action. To purchase your program. And the other important piece of marketing automation is to do what’s called segmentation. So segmentation is where when people are signing up, you’re creating, you’re adding tags or what’s known as custom fields to segment your audience so that later.

You can do marketing automation or broadcast emails based on the unique characteristics of this segment. So there’s different types of segments, like with Lifter, whether you’re using our MailChimp or ConvertKit integration, or you’re using WP Fusion to get to other tools like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot and Salesforce, you can segment based on which course they’re in.

So if you ever just need to do marketing automation or nurture sequence based on course. Membership specifically, you can do that. The other thing you can do is use cases. So maybe you have a couple different types of customers. Maybe you work with individuals and you also work with companies. That would be another way that you can segment and have different kind of micro campaigns for your different use cases.

And just a pro tip for you here, one of my favorite ways when you’re trying to increase sales, if you have multiple conversion tools, if somebody comes in through one of them, let’s say they sign up for a free course or they sign up for a sales call, or they watch your webinar and you have all these things available, if they sign up for one and they signed up for this one, but they haven’t seen these other two and they haven’t become a customer yet.

You can, send future resources to send them to your other conversion tools, which will help increase your sales and give them more time to consider your product, learn about it, and buy. And of course, with our existing customers, we can create expansion revenue by creating marketing automation that lets people know about other opportunities, future opportunities that you release.

How to upgrade and upsell through various offers. So that is a high level overview about how to do marketing automation for course creators. If you have any questions, comments, ideas, just let me know. I’m happy to hear what you’re doing for marketing automation. And if there’s any questions you have or you want me to go deeper on a specific topic, just let me know.

Thank you.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett argues that in-person interactions are a powerful tool for internet businesses. Get away of your computer and spend time with your consumers where they already congregate.

At Retain, a conference for membership-site owners (creators and instructors using technologies ranging from LifterLMS to Kajabi), he presents a new example from England. Instead of sponsoring or pitching, he just turned up to listen, which resulted in more in-depth discussions with devoted clients like Funk Roberts and KPC (Slick Business) as well as open discussions with potential clients who were fed up with inflexible, expensive systems.

He emphasizes that WordCamps contribute similarly to the WordPress ecosystem by providing insights on users, partners, and products. In addition to attending, he suggests including an offline component into your service, such as quarterly meetups or an annual user summit, and then recording the conversations to utilize in your membership library or course. He uses SaaS Academy as an example: a membership that includes group coaching, a community, and three annual in-person events in major cities (he names San Diego and Atlanta), where the conversations in the hallways, at the table, and over meals foster momentum, ideas, and trust that are impossible to duplicate online.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today we’re joined by a special guest today. It’s just me, it’s Chris. I’m here for another solo episode, and today we’re gonna talk about when and how to get offline for your online business. This is a topic that is often very overlooked in terms of getting away from your computer.

Going out into the world and meeting people, doing things, and how that can affect your online business. Now, the first and most important reason to get on offline is to actually go out and spend time around your customers or perspective customers. So me personally, I recently just got back from England.

I was at a conference called Retain, which was put on for membership site owners, and these are mostly course creators and coaches who run membership sites. Some of the folks at the conference we’re running LifterLMS. Other WordPress tools as well as hosted platforms like Kajabi and so on. But I went there because I wanted to hang out with some of my customers and, possibly future potential customers.

Though I wasn’t there like hard selling, I didn’t even sponsor the event or do any kinds of sales pitch or anything like that. I just wanted to go out and hang out with education entrepreneurs. Who are aspiring to or who already are creating and building an online business around a membership site.

Now at this conference, retain, I was lucky enough to hang out with a couple of my customers. Just to give a few examples KPC who runs Slick Business, which is a marketing automation education platform powered by LifterLMS. It was awesome. I’ve known Kay for eight years, but I have never shook her hand or had a meal together, and we did both those things and it was wonderful and had many conversations.

I also got to hang out with a customer named Funk Roberts, who does online fitness education for men over 40. I’ve known funk for a long time. It was awesome to finally shake his hand, have some conversation, and just be together in person. I also met like a lot of other people who, are maybe frustrated with other learning platforms and they want something more powerful, customizable, affordable, and all that.

So of course the conversation drifted towards LifterLMS, but this all comes from just getting outside of the building. And hanging out with your customers or prospective CU customers. And a great way to do that is at a conference that is on a topic that is either exactly about what your topic is or very related.

Another example of that just using LifterLMS is an example, is there’s these conferences called Word Camps, which is where WordPress agencies, product people, and users go. To spend time together to learn to hang out and just enjoy each other’s company and have conversations. I’ve been to many Word camps over the years and I’ve met a lot of customers there.

I’ve met a lot of industry partners and I’ve met many prospective customers who were, perhaps looking for an LMS. So regardless of what you do, whether it’s courses coaching. You build sites for clients, I can’t stress the value of getting out from behind your computer and going out into the world and, running in to humans, pressing the flesh as they say, like shaking hands, meeting people talking, breaking bread, sharing conversations.

Also getting out from behind the computer. One of the coolest things you can do is actually make your offer or your product, your online education opportunity to have an offline component. So that could be a live event, maybe once a year, three times a year, something like that, four times a year.

I was in a coaching program called SaaS Academy for software entrepreneurs, and it was a membership site. There was group coaching there was a bunch of resources in the membership site and so on. There was an online community, but there was also three live events at a major city every year. So I would travel to places like San Diego or Atlanta and go hang out at the.

The in-person, get together and there would be, several hundred people there who were just like me building the same kind of business. There would be presentations, which would also be recorded and put into the membership site, but there were also all these great conversations that all the tables, going out to meals with your.

Fellow people doing the same thing, and that was just a phenomenal experience. There’s a saying in membership sites or information products or online, learning programs that people come for the content, but they stay for the community. So my experience with SaaS Academy was the content was amazing, it was phenomenal.

But the relationships I developed, the partnerships, the co-promotion, the people who were running a different type of business but needed LMS, so they thought of lifter LMS. It was a very powerful formative experience. If you can and dream a little big, you can bring people from off their home computer and their phones and get them.

Part of your offer is actually an in-person community. Now there’s a concept called a popup event, so this is really cool. So for example, if you sell a membership site and it’s mostly full of passive online learning content like courses. You want to create some recurring value, even if you just run one event per year that creates recurring value.

And if your community is small, it could start as small as just like an Airbnb with five bedrooms and five people come. And then when more people sign up to your program, you need to expand and do maybe a block of hotel rooms, hotel has a conference room, maybe it expands more and you get a bigger and bigger venue.

That is a really powerful way to think about making your membership or your courses have recurring revenue by offering this recurring annual in-person get together. And the cool thing about online education companies and platforms. I’ll just say entrepreneurship in general is there is a lot of isolation, loneliness, feeling misunderstood.

Feeling like you haven’t found your tribe, if you will. You may be doing this like crazy online thing and nobody in your home community or family even has any idea what you’re really doing. They don’t understand it. They’re not that interested in it. But then you get out into the world at one of these events.

And you meet people just like you that are doing the similar thing and they’re like, oh my gosh, I feel so isolated. So nice to finally meet you and all that. That is a great experience. The other thing you can do to get offline is to go to an industry event. So for me, I’m in the WordPress space, so I go to Word camps.

These are agencies and product people. People there aren’t necessarily looking for what I offer because they’re they have their own products. But some of the agencies may be looking to develop LMS sites for clients and so on. But I act, I’ve actually been to some smaller events, smaller industry events, like independent events.

One of the favorite ones I went to that was really, in many ways life changing for me is called Cabo Press. So this was in Cabo, Mexico, and I remember when I first saw a blog post about it, it was an event put on by somebody named Chris Lima, who’s a awesome guy, and it was for WordPress product people and agency entrepreneurs.

You had to apply and go. And at the time when I did it, the sales page that I read for the event was just really speaking to me and I’m like, we gotta do this. We can’t really afford it. Our business is really new. I went and I hung out with other WordPress product people and agencies and it was so good.

I actually went, I think seven times. So I went year after year for I think seven years. And there are so many relationships that I developed from that conference. And it was a small pop-up conference at a hotel. It was usually somewhere around 30 people, maybe 35, maybe 40 at its biggest.

But I met all these amazing entrepreneurs trying to do similar stuff to me. I made affiliate partnerships. I created co-marketing opportunities. I’ve got agencies excited about Lifter, LMS, I got a lot of guests for my podcast. I did so many things and some of the most mind blowing part of the whole thing with the Cabo Press.

My current business partners I met at Cabo Press the current lead developer at Lifter LMS, I’m met at Cabo Press and these are very important relationships. In my business journey. But that all came from me getting out from behind my computer, going out into the world, and being somewhat uncomfortable, getting outta my shell and just going to this event where I don’t know anybody and start forming these relationships.

And what’s cool about it is when you find an online event like that, that you really love and resonate with. If you keep going back to the same event over time, it starts feeling more comfortable. People who are gonna be there, it gets easier. Ideally, your business is growing over time and you can share and help other people, not as far along in the journey and so on.

And those kind of industry events are very powerful for. Furthering your business, your career. But it’s all about relationships. And yes, you can form relationships online, in Facebook groups, over social media, by email and so on, but there is a place. To get out from behind the computer and actually go talk to people, strangers, and it’s a really powerful thing.

Another great thing, and I’m a huge fan of this in terms of getting out from behind your computer, is to do a concept that I call masterminding. So this is not a new idea. This came from a guy who named Napoleon Hill, who wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich. It’s a very old book. I highly recommend you read it because it’s very powerful in some of the core ideas, even though it’s old and dated our really true, and there’s this concept.

Of the Mastermind and the mastermind concept is essentially that when some people that are on a similar journey kind of put their heads together and share their challenges, give value, ask for help. When these mines come together, the sum of the mines is greater than. The individuals, or even if you were to add up the potential of the individuals individually, the mastermind of this group of minds is exponentially powerful.

I’ve been a big masterminder. I’m in three or four masterminds right now, which is a lot, and I’ve been that way for a long time. I’ve gone to popup masterminds like the Cabo Press event. And I went to one in Canada once with some entrepreneurs in the online education space, and I just get so much value out of that.

Now, there are online masterminds, right? You can create masterminds within your course or your membership site if you like, and pair people together to create their own masterminds. You can also form them informally. And that’s what I’ve done for the most part. I’ve gone to some official mastermind events, but the best masterminds I’ve been a part of have formed organically where, a group of people decides to meet on a regular basis, like monthly, as an example, and just share, ask for help, give value, potentially have a.

Asynchronous slack community or other way, other ways to connect asynchronous asynchronously. But masterminds are very powerful. And what’s really cool is I’m in a mastermind of people who run a similar business to mine and occasionally, usually a couple times a year. Some or all of us will meet up in person around some other conference somewhere in the world.

It’s been a far as far away for me as like Taiwan as an example, or Greece or in the United States. And we spend a lot of time masterminding online in formats like Zoom or, asynchronous, asynchronously through. Email or Slack, something like that. But actually getting together in person is so fantastic and you really build, not just lifelong friendships, but also business partnerships and relationships.

It’s super powerful and it’s hard to do that if you don’t get out from behind your computer. You can have a virtual mastermind, but, and those are great and I’m in many of those. Almost every mastermind I’ve ever been in there has been at some point, some in-person component to that. The other great thing to do to get out from behind your computer is to actually sponsor an event.

So this is an event that your customers would be at and some sponsorships are not that expensive. Now you can just attend the event and meet people. And I like doing that personally. The last event I went to, I did not sponsor. If they run it again, I would like to sponsor it. But if you do sponsor, you get your logo all over the place.

You potentially have a table where you can give away swag items, like t-shirts or. Notebooks or some kind of branded merchandise, and this is a great way to just get your brand out there. So getting out from behind your computer and sponsoring event can, put you in front of customers. Now the t-shirts and the branded swag are great.

But the real value of a sponsorship is all the conversations that you have while you’re at the event. And the cool thing about sponsoring an event, a lot of the times you will get a table where you can sit. Like when I sponsor a Word camp as an example, I’ll have a computer monitor up with a looping video showing lifter LMS.

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Ideally, there’s me and some team members there, and we’ll be at a table. And people are just shuffling through the sponsor area constantly throughout the event. And just stopping is friendly. We have conversations. Sometimes existing customers will walk up, people who are interested, people who are just curious, and you never know where all those conversations will go.

So there’s just a lot of opportunity. Sponsorships and it’s something that I recommend you try at some point. Now, the funny thing is

that people will often ask, what is the ROI or return on investment for a sponsorship? Most of the time when I’ve done sponsorships. You can’t track it. You can’t track the ROI. You could give out a business card that has a coupon code on it or a special promotion link or something like that, but it’s more of a long game strategy.

It’s humans talking to humans. Over time, relationships evolve. They may not use your coupon code. You may not be aware that someone said Hey, I met this person. At an event and refer your product to a friend or something like that. So I just encourage you, if you do go down the sponsorship route, don’t get all wrapped up in tracking the return on investment.

But what I will guarantee you is if you pick a good event to sponsor that has a lot of industry partners, and more importantly your customers and ideal customers, it will pay off. And if you do it again another year and another year. It really spreads your brand around, and you’d be surprised how many events are out there looking for sponsorship and sometimes these sponsorships are really not that expensive.

Now, another benefit of getting out from behind your computer is what I call the value of travel. So I don’t know if you’re anything like me. But when I travel, when I get outside of my daily, weekly kind of normal routine and I’m flying on planes or driving in my car somewhere, I normally don’t go and, meeting a bunch of strangers, it shakes up my brain and gets me outta my patterns and I will make new connections, new ideas.

I might be a little jet lagged or on a plane without wifi, just thinking. And it’s like those shower thoughts you have where an inside will just drop to you because when you’re just sitting behind a computer doing the same thing you do every day, your brain goes on autopilot and just start cycling the routine.

But traveling can really open up your mind. Your brain has to be more aware ’cause you’re in a novel environment and you’re just not on autopilot. ’cause this is all different. You’re trying to figure out where to go and logistics and talking to strangers and it just shakes up your brain and that just stimulates, in my experience, a lot of creativity.

The other great thing about traveling is that people. Will ask you if you’re meeting a lot of strangers Hey, what do you do? Or, what’s your business? It forces you to get really good at your elevator pitch. And for me, I like to do for an elevator pitch is I help X achieve Y without Z. I help course creators create, launch and scale online learning platforms without spending a ton of time or money.

That’s an example, really short elevator pitch for me. And then what happens when you give your elevator pitch is one of two things. One route or fork in the road is that’s awesome. And then you ask them what they do and they do something completely different. And it’s cool you made a nice friend or had a great conversation, but you guys are on different paths.

But sometimes when you give your elevator pitch, someone will double click on that and say, tell me more. What is that exactly? Or How do you do that? And then you give a more expanded elevator pitch and maybe it stops there or there’s another fork in the road like. You know what? I’ve always wanted to create an online course coaching program or membership site.

Tell me more, like how could I get started and stuff like that. So there’s all these opportunities where, you never know where it’s gonna go, and it’s fine if somebody’s cool. I do courses around organic gardening and another person’s oh I sell real estate. Cool. You met somebody, it’s awesome.

Great connection. They might know somebody who wants to get into gardening, but then you might also meet your perfect prospective customer who’s oh, that’s awesome. I’m awesome into gardening, or I’m into music and I want to figure out how to take my hobby and turn it into an online business, and so on.

And it can just evolve. So talking to people in person forces you to get good at describing what it is you do, and you’d be surprised how challenged a lot of people are at clearly articulating what they do. And particularly talking to strangers is a great way to refine that craft and also get good at.

Taking it a step further if somebody shows interest without being a pushy salesperson or anything like that. But those conversations are fantastic. The other great thing about getting out from behind your computer is it’s an opportunity to meet future team members in your organization. So I’ve met people who have become developers in my country, at my company.

I’ve met. People that became business partners, investors in my company, you never know who you’re gonna meet when you get out into the world, and it’s has a different feel than when you’re just meeting people online or discussing something on a LinkedIn direct message as an example, or over email when you actually shake hands and build relationships.

Even the people you meet may not be the best employee for you, but you might also meet somebody who’s not a great employee for you, but they could know somebody who would be a perfect fit. So a great example of this is if you’re looking for a virtual assistant and you meet somebody.

They’re like, they do something completely different, but they’re like, you know what? I hear you’re looking for a virtual assistant. My wife recently retired or is in a job transition, wants to work from home. She has this background in, X, Y, and z. I think she could be a perfect fit for what you’re looking for.

Would you like me to connect you? That kind of thing. There, there’s just a lot of magic and serendipity that happens through those offline connections. And the other great thing too, that this is more out of the box thinking by getting out from behind your computer and going to a conference or an industry event that is not directly related to your main business.

You’re still gonna learn things. So one of my favorite cheat codes in business is to learn something from a totally different industry and translate that over to mine. So for example, if you can probably relate, you probably are a lot like me. If you go to a restaurant and you’re an entrepreneur and great service or like a experiences that’s designed for some fun experience. And you see the gears behind the scenes of oh, this person’s doing this. They structured this. This is the user experience. Then you can take what you’ve learned and apply that to your business, even from a completely different industry.

And that’s just another kind of pro tip. Around getting out from behind your computer and getting out into the world and just learning. Maybe you have some hobby, it could be investing or gardening or robotics, anything, and go out into those industries and see what you could bring back to your own.

A lot of education entrepreneurs and technology professionals and website builders can get a little bit isolated, so I just wanted to encourage you to get out from behind your computer because some of the best things I’ve ever done in terms of attracting talent, recruiting great customers, deepening the relationships with existing customers or team members or industry partners.

All of that happened from getting out from behind my computer. So even if you’re an introvert just like me and you spend a lot of time solo, you like your privacy, make it a little fun, comfortable, and get uncomfortable. Go out into the world and meet a lot of strangers, and I guarantee you it will pay off.

And especially if you do that. Over an extended period of time, and I don’t mean like a lot, like maybe twice a year for five years, you’ll be really impressed at the results you get from that. It’s not just about clicks or online business, it’s also about bricks. So clicks and bricks. Bricks, clicks is the online world.

Buildings in the real world are made of bricks. People are inside. Online communities and have email and stuff like that’s all clicks, but people are also out in the world inside brick buildings and other types of buildings or outside. So it’s clicks and bricks, not just clicks. That’s it for this episode of LMScast.

I love to hear the value you’ve gotten. From getting out into the world, and I hope one day to meet you in person. If you’re listening to this podcast, take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett highlights how each model works for various kinds of entrepreneurs as he compares the benefits and drawbacks of membership sites against stand-alone online courses.

With a one-time payment structure, a standalone course usually provides students with access to a specific collection of learning resources, such as videos, tests, PDFs, and occasionally certifications. Recurring revenue is not automatically supported by it, despite the fact that it is simpler to build and maintain great for focused entrepreneurs that wish to improve one major service.

To maintain revenue, creators could have to rely on marketing campaigns, relaunches, or extras like community access and mentoring. A membership site, on the other hand, is more adaptable and sophisticated, frequently combining many courses with recurring advantages like private blogs, resource libraries, group coaching, or community access.

Although memberships enable ongoing value creation and support recurrent revenue, they also come with a higher workload and more regular content delivery requirements. Serial entrepreneurs that thrive on creating and overseeing a variety of offers would be more suited to this strategy. According to Harris, whether you want the concentration and simplicity of a single course or the scalability and continuous engagement of a membership site, success relies on your personal style and company strategy.

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Episode Transcript:Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and this is another solo episode, and today we’re gonna be discussing the pros and cons, the differences between membership sites and standalone courses. There’s a very important decision you need to make either in the beginning or as you’re getting started and figuring out how you’re gonna build an online education company.

As to which path you’re gonna take. Either I’m gonna build a membership site or a standalone course, or multiple standalone courses or potentially a hybrid model that is, I offer standalone courses and I offer memberships. So first, let’s talk about the difference and come to agreement on terms. So what is a standalone online course?

A standalone online course typically has a one-time payment. The student gets access to the training. Could be a series of videos, other resources, PDFs, maybe quizzes and assignments, perhaps get a certificate. Now it is possible to add recurring revenue to a standalone. Online course in a couple of ways.

One simple way, which isn’t real recurring revenue, is to actually add a payment plan. So if it’s expensive, let’s say it’s a $1,000 online course, you could have a price tag of $1,000 or four payments monthly for $250. That’s not necessarily a recurring revenue situation. It’s more of a payment plan. But you can add a recurring revenue to standalone online course by simply offering things like group coaching every month, or an online community so that they can cancel any time.

Say your goal is to still make $1,000 and you charge a hundred dollars a month for access to the course and the coaching and the community. Most people who join your program end up staying for approximately 10 months. So there you get your $1,000 as an example, through mostly really just a standalone online course that has that added benefit.

Now, what is a membership site? Memberships, the word is often used in many different ways, so I want to tell you how I think about it particularly at lifter LMS. And how membership sites can be different from online courses. So if you’re building an education company, you’re probably gonna have a courses aspect to your site.

But in a membership site, there’s probably gonna be a lot of other things going on outside of courses that people get access to by enrolling in your membership. So one way to think about a membership site. Is that it can grant access to an online course or multiple online courses or future online courses you have not even created yet, but plan on creating over time.

It can also include aspects, access to other parts of your website. Like private content that exists outside of courses. A simple example might be. A members only blog or newsletter or resource library of digital downloads. It could be parts of pages or expanded content beyond what’s freely available on your site.

With a tool like Lifter, LMS, you can control access. Outside of courses via memberships to other parts or pieces of your website or other benefits like access to a community calendar, which is, has access to coaching calls or community events and that sort of thing. So the most simple way to think about it is that a standalone course is just one course.

Usually those are sold for one-time payment. And a membership site is much more complex. It can be a bundle of courses and other benefits or access to other parts of your website. Now, a tool, a learning management system like Lifter, LMS is infinitely flexible. So however you want to do it, whether it’s a simple standalone online course.

Or a multi instructor online school with fancy membership benefits as well. Both are possible with lifter LMS. So just to get into the pros and cons, the benefits and drawbacks of either option, standalone online courses, if it’s particularly just access to the content, maybe a certification. There’s really no way to get.

Recurring revenue because it’s pretty straightforward. There’s a limited scope course. People go in, they take the course, they learn the knowledge, they create skills, maybe get a certificate, and they’re done.

That’s not really a recurring revenue situation. One of the benefits of a standalone online course is that it is a lot less work for the course creator.

So once you’ve created it. You’re done and it’s up there. But a drawback to that is you may have to do continuous marketing to get new people over and enrolling in your course. Now, there’s a lot of great education entrepreneurs out there that all they have ever done is they have one standalone online course and every year or every six months, they make it better and better.

They do a launch or a marketing launch of their course multiple times a year, and that’s the launch model and there’s nothing wrong with that. So one thing I’d like to highlight here is some of this depends on your personality. So in all my time as an entrepreneur and working with other entrepreneurs.

I found that there’s a spectrum, two ends to the spectrum of different kinds of entrepreneurs. One I call the focused entrepreneur and the other I call the serial entrepreneur. So a serial entrepreneur creates like many different businesses and many pro products or, they’re constantly creating and ideating and doing a lot of new things.

Now, there’s. Pros and cons to being a focused entrepreneur like I have my one thing, I’m actually more of a focused entrepreneur. I am super focused on lifter LMS. I’ve been doing it for over a decade. I am a focused entrepreneur, but a serial entrepreneur, would. Create many different software products and many other businesses and just have this portfolio, if you will, of businesses and neither is better or worse.

And a pro tip for you right here is it if a focused entrepreneur teams up with a serial entrepreneur and they have good chemistry and they can work together is really a beautiful thing. They’re just the different ways they see the world and operate when they’re in partnership. It is super powerful and unstoppable in that way.

So that’s just a pro tip. I know there’s a lot of like husband wife teams as an example, creating education companies or business partners and if one, if they’re different in that focused versus serial aspect. They can be really powerful. But a standalone online course is more of a focused approach.

But if you’re gonna be like, okay, I really want a membership site and I have ideas for 20 different courses and the coaching program and online community.

You can do. You’re more of a serial entrepreneur in that way, and that is very cool. But it is also a lot more work. Focus is more scattered, in my opinion. Success is less likely because focus is spread out. So it really depends on your approach and who you are and what your personality is.

The big benefit of a membership site is that you’re going to get multiple options for recurring revenue. You can keep adding new courses, you can add other resources to a digital library. You can keep creating a private blog, private newsletter. Keep delivering online coaching, keep developing your community.

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So the trade off between a standalone online course and a membership is the membership is a lot more work. The demand on you to create content and the surface area that you have to manage is a lot more with a membership site. Now I’m actually a big fan of what I call the hybrid model. So the most simple version of a hybrid model is to do a standalone online course and then just add a coaching or community aspect to it.

That allows you to get recurring revenue while also having a focus on one main course and a lifter LMS. You don’t even have to create a membership to do that. You can use. What we call access plans to, let’s say you have one plan that’s like just the course for $500 or another access plan in the pricing table that says you get the course plus these ongoing coaching and community benefits, and this plan costs a hundred dollars a month.

So you can literally offer both options. You’re opening up the world to recurring revenue. So that’s a very simple example of how to create a hybrid model. One of the ways to also do hybrid is to have a standalone course, but then also a membership that has way more stuff in it. So if you think about your Buyer’ss journey, let’s say.

Earlier in the journey, you have a $500 starter course that helps people get started and get going. That’s your standalone course, and it’s like your 1 0 1, like you have to start here. You have to start with the course to get oriented and really become a perfect fit for the membership, the 2 0 1, which is available later, so the.

The membership, then, let’s say it includes three advanced level courses. Also additional benefits like community or coaching as well. So in that way, if you look at your ideal learners journey, you’re asking them to, Hey, start here in the jv. Or the junior varsity, the level one, the freshmen using traditional university language.

And then if when you’re ready, you can jump into the bigger membership. Which is more exp, more expensive, more benefits and recurring there’s a recurring cost to that. So that’s a hybrid model. I’m also a big fan of free courses, so like free standalone courses. So maybe even before they’re ready to be a freshman or jv, you have a free course to get people ready to even be ready for the standalone course.

So free course, then standalone paid course, and then membership. And when it comes to offers, I like to only offer. Three, a maximum of three choices like that. ’cause once you get more complicated than that, you start to really confuse buyers. And there’s a saying that the confused mind doesn’t buy, which is very true.

So think about that and how you and how you construct your model. And just some examples of this, like KPC, who does. Slick Business is the name of her platform and she does active campaign and marketing automation training. And she’s very membership site focused. So I’m just pulling up KPCs website.

You can find that at slick business.co. And if I go to her active campaign academy. There’s basically two options. There is the Essential Academy, which is $97 per month at the time of this recording, and there’s the Advanced Academy. That’s $187 per month. And within this, she has training, she has office hours. She has community, she has, the entry level course for the first option, the Essential Academy. And then she has extra courses with, more information for the advanced people in the advanced Academy plan. And this is Kay is doing a classic. Membership site and that’s awesome. But Kay is going to have to deliver ongoing, office hours, what she does weekly, and continue to support her other member bonuses.

So that’s like a classic membership site. Kay’s done very well with her platform and she’s such a great. Example of building a membership site. But then if you think about a standalone course creator, we have people that have, let’s say they were a Udemy instructor and they had a course on this topic.

It sold for 50 bucks on you, Demi, and they want more ownership, power, control, and customizability over their course. I’m thinking of someone like Frank Kane who has made over $2 million in revenue with over 600,000 students in his standalone courses. So he does several standalone courses and Frank does a lot of education in the tech sector helping, engineers level up on certain things like how AWS, Amazon’s.

Platform works and so on. So that’s just a, another great example of a standalone membership, or sorry, a standalone online course, and Frank is a serial creator, so technology is constantly changing. So he’s creating new courses that help with a particular tech skill to help people get good jobs or do their job well.

That sort of thing. So that’s a example of a standalone online course and we talked about free courses. So one of lifter, LMS’s most popular course is a free course called the Official Quick Start Course for the lifter LMS community. That’s awesome. And that is free. It’s only about an hour of content and we’ve had something like 40,000 people enroll in that.

So it’s a very strong, like lead magnet and gets people ready for the software. Which technically is a membership, by the way, an annual recurring subscription unless you get a lifetime license. And the course, the free course gets people really ready for the ongoing. Membership to the software that learn how to use the tool, make sure it’s a good fit for them, and then it’ll also help them get started once they become a customer, to learn the essential 5% of the software so that they can launch their education company as quickly as possible.

So that’s an example of a standalone free course. So it’s really up to you which path. You choose to move forward with in terms of standalone courses versus memberships and you can just have a standalone course with no coaching and no community. One-time payment, lifetime access. These, this is the quote, least amount of work.

It’s still really hard to create like a great standalone online course, but when you commit to a membership site, you are committing to a much bigger ongoing commitment that’s gonna have a lot of demand on your time and your the need for you to create content. So if you’re gonna create. Recurring revenue, you have to create recurring value, which means you’re either going to have to continually be creating new courses and other content to drop into the membership or have ongoing benefits like office hours, group or private coaching, or a helpful, supportive online community.

So different ways to think about that. We also have a lot of continuing education or professional development creators using lifter LMS. So this is also a great niche. This is more like a standalone course approach. So if someone needs to get, let’s say, two hours of continuing EDU education credits to keep their license in the medical system or.

Some business niche or legal or real estate or whatever it is, they need to get their continuing education credits by taking standalone courses. Now you can introduce a membership using left or LMS where you get a bundle of courses so you can get all, say, 20 hours for the next year or two years for to keep your license and so on.

So there’s a lot of people doing. Hybrid approaches. But the main point is if you’re gonna do recurring revenue, you have to do, find a way to create recurring value. So I’d love to hear from you any questions or comments around the decision to do standalone courses or the membership site model.

I would encourage you just to do some soul searching. Really decide if you are a focused entrepreneur or a serial entrepreneur. Serial creatorand again, neither one of these is better than the other is super powerful. If you know within the same education company you can combine. Both the focus and the the serial creator aspect.

It’s a dynamic duo, if you will. So that’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. I hope you’d enjoyed that. I wish you all the best with your standalone online courses and or membership site or hybrid model.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett stresses in this LMScast solo episode that producing a successful online course involves more than simply developing a website, marketing strategies, or technology; it also involves effectively instructing the students.

Many instructors suffer from the “expert’s curse,” in which they possess important knowledge but find it difficult to communicate it effectively, leaving students feeling overloaded or disinterested. Chris explains the importance of using a teaching framework, a repeatable structure for each lesson that keeps students engaged, makes the content easier to create, and ensures clarity.

He describes how he utilizes mind mapping to generate ideas at the beginning of each lecture and then arranges them into an organized spreadsheet template. Course designers may provide lessons that are both powerful and simple to understand by shifting from abstract concepts to tangible examples and adjusting the framework to the requirements of students.

In the end, Chris emphasizes that although course designers have many responsibilities, honing teaching abilities through a framework is frequently the most important and disregarded phase in creating revolutionary online programs.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris, and today I’m joined by a special guest, and that’s me. This is another solo episode, and in this episode I’m gonna go over how to become a teacher without going to teaching school so that you can make a fortune, make impact in the world, and create freedom in your life.

So there’s a lot of talk about marketing online courses, selling online courses, the technology like Lifter, LMS, which people build use to build online courses. But in this episode, we’re actually gonna talk about actually teaching in the product, like delivering the online course and how to do that. I’m gonna give you one of the biggest unlocks.

To help you remove what’s known as the experts curse. See, the challenge that happens in our industry is that a lot of aspiring education entrepreneurs, course creators and coaches, they get all excited. They buy some software, they look for marketing tactics and strategies. They started thinking about ads.

They start building the website and, maybe starting some content marketing and putting all the LMS pieces together. But at the end of the day, let’s not forget about the actual product, the online course, which is comprised of lessons. So in this podcast episode, we’re gonna dive into how to remove all the chaos and craziness.

That comes with taking your expertise out of your head and actually packaging it and delivering that in an online course. So the solution here is to actually have a teaching framework and I figured this out on my own and watching other people teach and learning frameworks for business.

But in this episode. I want to really zero in on the lesson content, particularly on video content. Though this is bigger than just video content. It can expand to things like text and on the lesson and quizzes and assignments and things like that. But for the most part, I’m gonna be talking about the teaching framework that you can use to make lesson videos.

And not just to make them, but to make them high quality and effective. So the magic trick here is to go from the abstract to the concrete. And what I mean by that is as a subject matter expert you have all this experience and ideas and theories and tactics and things you want to talk about, stories you want to tell.

Examples, you want to give processes to lay out systems and structures and all these things to teach, but it’s so overwhelming if you’ve never learned how to actually be a teacher or a coach. So part of our whole thing at Lifter LMS is that you have to wear five hats simultaneously, either within yourself or at a team.

We call this the five hats problem of being an education entrepreneur. You have to be a subject matter expert. You have to be a teacher, which is what we’re gonna talk about today. You have to be a technologist. You have to be an entrepreneur, and you have to be a community builder. And the reality is, a lot of those skills and tactics are learnable, but teaching is also learnable, but often overlooked when it shouldn’t be.

What happens if you don’t develop a teaching framework? You’re gonna end up just creating some giant course. You’re gonna ramble. Your students are not going to stay engaged or complete the lesson content. They’re gonna get confused, they’re gonna have lots of questions. So let’s like slow down and back up and talk about it at a high level first, like what is a teaching framework?

It’s basically a structure or an outline of how you deliver your lessons. And this can work if you’re teaching business concepts or you’re teaching health and fitness workouts, or you’re teaching parenting strategies and advice or challenges in that niche anywhere. You can develop your own teaching framework.

And the cool thing is it’s not one size fits all. What you need to do is create your custom teaching framework that works for you and your niche, your market, your personality, your ideal learner style, and what happens when you have a systematic way that you teach each individual lesson. Is that it makes your students relax ’cause they know how to, how it rolls with you, what class is gonna be like, what the lesson is gonna be like.

They’re gonna know your flow, if you will. It also makes your life a million times easier when it comes to creating content. ’cause this is where you marry your expertise, subject matter expert brain with a system that’s designed to pull that out of you in a structured way that’s easy to make.

And in a way that your students will love. So at the highest level, the way I think about it is as a subject matter expert, you know you have your ideal learner, you have their challenge or their problem, and at the end you have the solution, the learning objective, the transformation that your course promises to create if they go through your course.

And we’re not gonna get into the high levels of curriculum design. That could be a whole other topic. If you want to hear about that, let me know. What we’re gonna talk about is, let’s assume you have a course outline and you figured out who your ideal learner is, and you have the sections and lesson names for your course, but you’re staring at your computer.

Now it’s time to create the lesson content. And this is where a lot of people get stuck. I’ve seen it a million times, and what’s missing in this scenario is a teaching framework. So enough of the buildup I’m gonna go into describing what it looks like and how it works, and how I make one and use one. So first thing I do is I’m a, visual thinker.

So I’ll just start mind mapping and drawing bubbles. If I have a lesson about a certain topic, I’ll start just throwing bubbles and making connections and just getting it outta my brain and getting it on paper in a very disorganized fashion. But the beauty happens when you go from brainstorm to.

Spreadsheet and I’ll explain what I mean in a second. And so I get my brainstorm going oh, stories, I want to tell an example, maybe a worksheet idea. Maybe some challenges people have when they’re in this part of the training and things like that. And I just get it all out there on paper. Even just short words that will jog my brain so I can quickly access that part.

Of what I was gonna talk about. But the teaching framework is essentially an outline for the lesson. It’s a template that you can use over and over again in every lesson. So that you’re efficient and effective. I personally like to do teaching frameworks in a spreadsheet. So I create a te a template for how I deliver my lessons, which we’re gonna talk about in a second.

Then every time I do a new lesson, I just add a tab to the spreadsheet. I copy the template and I do lesson one content. Then I do lesson two content. But before we get into that, what is the actual lesson template? And this is where the magic happens. Like before we get into actual creating content we need to come up with a teaching framework that works for you and your market.

I’m just looking at one I have over here. I’m recently actually as of this recording, tomorrow I’m recording the last lesson in a course I’ve been teaching live called the Perfect Offer Playbook, and I’m on lesson 11, which is the final lesson. And every single lesson I have the same teaching framework, but the content is very different.

So the teaching framework, it just starts with welcome. So this is where I just say hi. And welcome everybody in. I’m doing it live. But if I was doing a prerecorded course. I would do the same thing. Hey, welcome to this lesson on X, Y, and Z. We’re gonna get into this subject matter today.

Remind people of the support systems. If you have questions, feel free to reach out in this way and so on. Then I start with the problem. I get there pretty quick and some people call it a hook. The problem statement is really about getting people interested and also identifying what kind of mini problem within the greater problem of the course are we gonna solve today.

And the hook part of it is making it interesting. So I even did it in the title of this podcast episode. How to become a teacher without going to teaching school. That’s an example of a hook. And the problem we’re solving today is learning how to teach without being a teacher so that you and your students aren’t overwhelmed and everybody’s effective and having fun.

The next thing I like to do is drop into a story. Part of teaching is teaching through stories, examples, case studies. If you look at a famous business school like Harvard Business School, most of the coursework is looking at case studies of examples of things that happened before in big businesses and small businesses and things like that.

So story teaching through example is very powerful. So for you, it could look like this. Like I had this client named Jane. Jane had all this back pain from X, Y, and z. We implemented this protocol. Here’s what happened in week one, week two, week three, so on. I’m like providing an example that’s demonstrating the problem and outcome and the process.

The next thing I like to do is go into the challenge. So here’s the, and then I do three challenges and three promises. This is a challenge I know because I’ve recently overcome it, which was two decades of chronic back pain. So the challenge with chronic back pain is that challenge number one you’ve tried all these things like chiropractor, massage, going to the doctor, stretching, yoga, and nothing provides a permanent solution.

Challenge number two. The first thing you think about when you wake up is My back hurts. And that’s just really sad. And then the third challenge is, you’re willing to do the work, but you just need to know what actually works. So I’ve created my challenge problem statements, and now what I’m gonna do in my lesson is I’m gonna go into the promise and basically do the inverse of things.

I’m gonna show you what actually works to heal chronic back pain permanently and forever. I’m gonna show you how to wake up to get to a place where you wake up and the first thought in your brain is in your conscious mind is not my back hurts. And promise number three is I’m gonna show you what actually works.

And it’s even a lot. Think you is, it is even a lot easier than you think. It will be easier to commit to. You are gonna have to do ongoing work, but I promise you it will work. So as a recap, where we are right now in our lesson about chronic back pain relief is we did a welcome statement, a high level problem statement, a story three challenges, and then three promises in copywriting or marketing.

The challenge part is called agitating the pain in instructional design. This is called enrollment. We are enrolling people and getting them motivated. We want them to see, understand, feel the pain. But also see, feel, and understand the solution and the promise that we’re driving towards. Then the next part is the main meat of the lesson.

Which I call the learning or key principles. Now this is gonna vary wildly about what you call these things, depending upon what niche you’re in, but the key principles, and I like to do five and props to Dan Martel. I learned this trick from Dan. He called them hot principles, and I like Dan’s approach to this.

He essentially said that. The key principles are all about teaching people how to think, not necessarily exactly telling them what to do. However. I’m a big fan of actually telling people exactly what to do as well, which we’ll get to in a little bit. But part of learning is just helping people, change how they think about something or, discover a strategy or have a mindset shift.

So the key principles I like to do five, and then within each principle I get into like subpoints to reinforce it. And I’m not gonna do five principles about back pain relief. But we’ll do one here. So one key principle is that. You have to strengthen your back. So it’s not about stretching, it’s not about massage.

It’s not about cracking and popping. And chiropractic, you’ve been like your body. Connections are all messed up and you’ve been like favoring this back problem and you’ve really got a weak core. So we need to address the strength in your back and your core. And I would get into a bunch of sub principles about that and teaching about how strength and flexibility are different and how to build up strength slowly and so on.

And then my next principle might be around recovery. After exercise. My next principle might be about multi strength, endurance and flexibility and something else like multimodal exercise. My next one. Might be about dealing with setbacks and flare ups. So that would be like my fourth or fifth principle, and you can see how I’m getting my body of work together around how I cured for myself chronic back pain, and that those are, that creates my learning principles.

This is the main meat of teaching people how to think. And then I like to do something called expert story positioning, which is. Where you share your personal story. Like in the beginning, I like to share like a customer story or a client story like Jane and her chronic back pain, but then in the expert story positioning, I’m gonna go into a two to five minute story about my own journey with chronic back pain since I was 19 years old till finally solving it at age 46.

And I’m gonna tell that story, and the reason I’m doing that is, one, to provide another example, but two, I’m also just showing that I know what I’m talking about. This is part of my personal brand. This is part of who I am and a struggle I’ve had. And I’m just showing my leadership and authority in that. I’m not just regurg regurgitating about some topic that I thought would be very successful or.

Going after because it is trending. So this is my expert story positioning. And then the next part is myths. I love this part. So I usually do one to three myths. And a myth is where people go down the wrong rabbit holes. So to stick with our back pain example a myth I might do is that that curing that back pain, chronic back pain is uncurable.

That’s a myth, right? Another myth, which I’ve personally been told by chiropractors is you should really stop running. You should never run again. And I’m, I like running. I’m, and now with my cured back pain, I’m actually an ultra runner. I just ran. 30 miles on Saturday and eight miles on Sunday with zero back pain.

So the myth that the doctor is always right, ’cause sometimes you will get bad advice. So these are myths which is, this is also a part of teaching is uncovering a faulty view or taking a counter view on a topic or challenging common knowledge. The next section is one of my favorites. So after myths I go to pro tips.

So pro tips are like, let’s say somebody’s like really doing well in your course or they’re advanced, like maybe they’re already on the strength training journey or training smartly and so on for their back pain. I might drop a pro tip. Which would be, Hey, you need to go way lighter than you are capable of when, if you do any weight training, which is something I learned.

And I would get into how I had to learn how to train much with much lighter weights than what I was physically capable of picking up and particularly certain motions like bending over to pick something off the ground or anything with a arch back. I had to. Learn, and even still to this day, do those exercises, body weight only to avoid flaring up my back.

So that’s an example of a pro tip. Another pro tip is, Hey, I got back into running, but I got the thickest fattest cushions on my shoes to limit the pounding on my back and it, that’s worked for me. So those, these are examples of pro tips. The next part is probably my absolute favorite part of the teaching framework, which is the model.

So the model is, this is a unique to Chris thing and there’s other people that do it on the internet, but I actually go off video and share my iPad screen with an Apple pencil and actually create a visual model to teach some core ideas or concepts. Now, this is hard to explain in a podcast episode.

If you ever go check out the perfect offer playbook. I have a whole training on visual communication and how to do models and how they work and all the shapes and all the stuff to do. But think of it in the traditional classroom as a teacher’s aide. It depends how old you are. People. You used to see teachers draw a Venn diagram on the chalkboard or on the overhead projector.

Or you’d get a worksheet with an a diagram or a model, A visual representation of an idea or a concept. Models are really powerful teaching tools, especially for visual learners, of which I am, I’m particularly strong and visual learning and auditory learning. The other, by the way, from the.

The theory of multiple learning styles is kinesthetic, which we’re actually gonna get into in a second. So part of this teaching framework is to give all, make all learning styles happy because people are not robots and different people learn in different ways. So I do a visual model and I actually draw in front of the person.

One of the best people in the world of visual models is a guy in Australia named Simon Bowen. So go check that guy out. He’s where once I learned this visual communication and models from Simon Bowen, my brain just exploded. And the reason it exploded was because I learned how to take. Abstract concepts are just my head, swimming in information and data and put it into a visual model that makes sense.

And there’s a lot of cool things about visual communication, which we’re not gonna get into in this episode. But having a diagram, like if you think about it this way there’s a famous productivity book called Good to Great, but jim Allen, I believe his name is, and the whole thing is built on one Eisenhower Matrix or four box model where, on one line is importance and the other is urgency.

So there’s four boxes, like important, urgent, important, not urgent not important. Urgent not important. Not urgent. Anyways, he built a whole like empire off of one model. That’s how powerful these are. The next thing I personally like to do is a worksheet. So this is for the kinesthetic learners, the doers, and even if you’re teaching ideas like you’re not teaching worksheets, like if I was a fitness instructor, I would be this part.

We would go into the workout, like here is the workout. But I like to use worksheets to further deify everything I’ve been teaching in the lesson. And I love to create worksheets in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets. The reason I like to do this is because of the challenge of there’s no abstraction.

There’s like a label and a cell or a box or a checkbox or something to write in or fill out. And what this does is it takes the training like the key principles, the stories and everything, and helps the learner apply it to their life and their situation. In the perfect offer, playbook. I just actually before recording this, I completed the last worksheet, which was about how to launch a brand new offer and we talked about all kinds of like efficient early course marketing, launching and how to do it, and examples and stories and the whole framework I’ve just told you.

But then I created a worksheet. I’m like, this is exactly what to do. Like these, put in these three things here. Build this list of people right here. Contact them with this message. You need to write about X, Y, and Z. Here’s a checkbox to check when it’s done, and so on. So that’s worksheets are all about getting learners taking action.

So that’s a worksheet. And then the last part is a review. All that, all the review is I like to just go really quickly through the five key learning principles again, and that’s it. And then at the end of a lesson is your call to action. So this is where you can thank people for coming and spending their time with you today, but more importantly, you can tell them like, now go do the worksheet.

If you need help, use this support system to reach out. And it’s also an opportunity to drop in like what’s coming next. If you wanna keep the anticipation high, particularly in cohort-based courses where you need people or want people to show up next week so you can plant the seed for what’s coming next.

So that’s the call to action, close to a lesson. Now think about how awesome that template is. So when you go through your lessons, if you use the same template over and over again, as the learner is progressing through the learner journey, it gets very comfortable and efficient for you as the course creator.

It’s also very comfortable and efficient for the learner to they know what to expect. They know your flow. They’re like, okay, we’re gonna do the principles now. Okay, we’re gonna do the worksheet now. Okay, here’s the model. Let me pay attention. ’cause this is really important if the instructor created a model around this and it seers the model in your brain.

So that’s an example. Now not all teaching frameworks are need to be exactly the same, but that’s just an example of one I’ve just used to create an awesome 11 lesson course called the Perfect Offer Playbook. Which one of the benefits of all this here’s a pro tip for you is when you create a new online course project and you do the work and you figure out your offer and you get the course outlined together, but you haven’t created anything yet, you can pre-sell that.

Give it a start date one month from now and start selling it and people can look at it. They can see your well-written sales page and they can see the course outline. Okay, this looks interesting. I know where this guy’s going. But then you give yourself permission, if you create one lesson a week, with a live cohort that you deliver it to and record it, turn it into an evergreen course, that’s a really efficient, fun way of doing things.

When you are a subject matter expert on the topic, once you have a teaching framework, creating the content goes pretty fast. So for me, it probably takes at, for this course as an example it would take me about three hours to put together a, one of those lesson outlines that I would use to teach from on camera.

And also another pro tip for you is once you have the your template, you can also create a slide template that follows the flow. So in our case welcome problem story, challenge, promises, learning principles. Expert story myth, pro tips model worksheet review, and then the call to action. So you have a slide template.

So if you’re gonna teach from slides or talking head, you can structure all these and templatize all these things. And so anyways, like for me, it took about probably about four hours to prepare a lesson. One hour to deliver it, 30 minutes to turn it into evergreen asset, put it in lifter LMS in a course, the video link up the worksheet for download and so on.

And then it’s done. And just keep in mind, this is not new. Teachers have been doing this forever. So new teachers’ lives are harder because they don’t necessarily have the curriculum yet. Or they’re using some curriculum that they just obtained from somewhere else, but they haven’t really internalized it and taught it, so it’s harder.

But then what happens over time is a classroom teacher will deliver the same curriculum semester after semester, year after year, decade after decade and so on. Hopefully improving it some along the way. But the beauty of online courses is you can. You can evergreen it and automate everything with a online course and LMS website powered by lifter LMSI am a fan though of if you can like at least the first time teach it live, you don’t have to do that, but you can.

And I’m also another pro tip as I am a really big fan of revisiting your course, making it better over time. Maybe reshooting the videos, update the worksheets. Maybe insert some new, more relevant stories and so on. But that is how you keep, you create a teaching framework for your lessons. And I hope you found this helpful.

One final thing that I just want to tell you that’ll blow your mind, hopefully you can do this too with marketing content. You come up with a content template for the content marketing you do, it’s likely gonna be a slim down version of what you would do in an actual lesson. If you get really advanced, and I’ve done this before, you can actually structure your teaching template for your actual paid course in such a way that it’s perfectly set up, so that when you’re done with the recording video.

There’s a piece of it that you can cut out and move right over to your marketing. If you have a YouTube channel as an example where you’re not giving away everything, but let’s say you’re doing the problems, the challenges and the principles, but you’re not getting into like the model and the worksheet and the action steps and all the support and everything that’s offered in your paid training.

So you, you can actually double dip and do marketing and education at the same time. That’s next level pro stuff. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast on how to create your teaching framework. Smash the like button. Tell your friends, lemme know. If you like this video, drop a comment down below and I wish you all the best on creating impact, income, and freedom in your life with online courses.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett offers his advice on creating and running an email list that now has over 100,000 subscribers in this episode of LMScast.

He makes the case that, when compared to social media, email is the most reliable and efficient marketing medium since it is used by everyone and can be utilized for prospecting, nurturing, sales, and customer support. Chris emphasizes that although having a larger list frequently results in higher revenue, the caliber of members is significantly more significant than the number.

Chris emphasizes that if the proper individuals are on them, even tiny, focused lists may provide meaningful commercial outcomes. Additionally, he outlines the fundamental procedures for configuring email systems, selecting the best platform, and connecting LifterLMS with CRMs like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, or ConvertKit.

He also provides helpful advice on how to handle corporate email accounts, such as utilizing shared inbox systems like Help Scout to expedite communication and use role-based addresses (support@, ceo@) rather than personal ones.

In order to maintain professional, scalable, and well-organized message, he concludes by advising every company to set up a minimum of three email addresses: one for personal correspondence, one for marketing/sales, and one for customer service.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today I am not joined by a special guest. It’s just me, and we’re gonna be talking all about everything I’ve learned in building an email list over a hundred thousand people. Last time I checked, 115,000 people have. Join my email list and I’ve learned a lot about building an email list, email marketing.

I’m gonna share all of that with you today. So welcome. The first thing I just want to talk about is why I love email. Why email is, in my opinion, the most important channel for marketing, but also just supporting your customers. Email is an essential platform. For, doing prospecting sales, warming up an audience, making offers, adding value, delivering your product or service.

There’s so much you can do with email. And the neat thing about email is that everybody uses it. It’s not like social media where some people are on Twitter, some people are on Facebook, some people are on TikTok. Yeah, everybody on all those different social media accounts has a most likely a primary email address.

Maybe they have one or two, maybe a business email, maybe a personal email. But in terms of building an email list, like this is the most important thing for a course creator, a coach or education entrepreneur, to be doing, ideally, even before. They have launched their course or their membership site. And even if you’re an agency building LMS sites for clients, it’s really important to also do email marketing, to also build your email list.

So today I’m gonna go over. So several of the ways I think about email, and I know you’re gonna find some gems to help you create more income, impact and freedom in your life. An email list is a very important piece of your business. There’s an old saying that the quote money is in the list and it’s very true.

I’m trying to remember the exact formula, but there’s this equation. Where based on the size of your email list you probably make somewhere between three to $5 for every email subscriber you have in your business. And I’ve seen this across multiple businesses when I’m, hear about their revenue numbers and how big their email list is.

It’s very much a part. Of just the math or the physics of business. And that the bigger email list you have in general, the more money you’re gonna make. Now, of course, you want to have a high quality email list. Quality is more important than quantity. There’s plenty of people that have built great businesses with a very small email list, as a related example.

I forget the exact number, but the lifter, LMS YouTube channel is very small in terms of subscribers, but we actually do a lot of revenue with a very small subscriber base. Now, there’s YouTube channels with a million subscribers who make far less money than us. So the lesson there is that it’s all about quality, not necessarily quantity.

So don’t get too wrapped up, if you only have an email list of a hundred people. 50 people, if those are 50 or a hundred really awesome, qualified, perfect fit people. That’s great. So it’s not just about getting, a thousand subscribers, 10,000, a hundred thousand, a million, and so on. So the foundations, before you start building an email list, this is one of the, these are some key ideas that people don’t really think about.

The first thing I would say is you need to pick. A tool to gather all your emails into. So the CRM, the email marketing, the email broadcasting platform, there’s a lot of great ones out there. I’ve, and many of you may have used MailChimp over the years. That’s a great place. They have a free option.

I personally currently use something called ActiveCampaign. I’ve been on ActiveCampaign for probably about eight years. We switched at lifter LMS to ActiveCampaign from Infusionsoft eight years ago. And really I got my start in kind of the integration between WordPress and marketing automation with Infusionsoft.

That’s actually where I began as a agency owner and where we focused our agency. And later we ended up building lifter LMS and focusing on the education entrepreneurs. My technical expertise has always been around marketing automation, WordPress, website building email marketing and so on, and combining all those things.

But going back to platforms, there’s so many great email platforms out there. Like a lot of people are happy with Kit, formally known as ConvertKit. There’s a lot of great solutions in WordPress for email like fluid, CRM or groundhog. And there’s many other, email platforms. Some people love HubSpot and so on.

If you’re using Lifter LMS we have a native integration with MailChimp and Kit. Also, there’s a great tool called WP Fusion. There’s a WordPress plugin that can connect your WordPress website to 50 of the most popular CRMs. So definitely check out WP Fusion. It’s a great tool. Now, the simple way this works is that when you get a new user on your site, like in a learning management system or a membership site, you just take that person their name and their email address and pass it over to the email platform, so it creates a user over there as well.

If you’re not using one of the. WordPress solutions like fluent CRM or Groundhog that you could have on the exact same website. But if you’re using something like lifters integration with MailChimp or ConvertKit, you can do fancier things like add them to different lists based on which course they enrolled in, or which membership they enrolled in, rolled in.

You can add tags, trigger automations, and things like that. WP Fusion does that. As well. And again, it allows you to integrate with tons of other email marketing platforms besides MailChimp and ConvertKit. Another pro tip and just when you’re getting started with email, go easy on yourself.

I wish people knew how important this was to figure out the naming convention of your. Email accounts. So more than likely you’re gonna have multiple email addresses in your business. This kind of thing is a hard thing to change later. So it was probably 15 years ago where I was listening to a podcast about organization design, and it was a really smart thing this person said.

They said, when you build an org chart for your company, think instead of. Names or job titles, do email addresses. So an example of this would be ceo@lifterlms.com or cto@lifterlms.com, customer support@lifterlms.com. So that’s just a way to think about it. ’cause sometimes people create like way too many email addresses.

Or they attach something to a name like robert@lifterlms.com and then Robert leaves the company. But now all this stuff was set up with Robert’s email. Another pro tip like we do at lifter LMS, if you start getting at scale and you’re doing a lot of things like pre-sales and supporting existing customers, is we actually use one email inbox for the entire company.

It’s called Help Scout. It’s a great tool, and basically the way it works is the public is only interacting with one email address, but inside that help Scout, there’s multiple users who have their own unique email address, like their Google Company workspace, email address, and, they can be assigned to conversations and past conversations around and so on.

But that makes it really easy for the public to just have one email to communicate with. And then it also allows you to work as a team with multiple people just interacting in one inbox. So that’s just a pro tip there. But so there’s like your personal email, your business email, but then you’re gonna be sending email broadcasts.

Or maybe when students sign up for a course and they get a welcome email, it’s important to think about what email address we’re going to use for those services. As an example I, if I could wave a magic wand for you, I would just give you, for your entire company, three email addresses. And the first one is just for you.

So if your name is. Susan, it would be susan@mywebsite.com and create that inside of Google apps or whatever. That’s your primary one-on-one email address. But then what you wanna do is you want to set up two more email addresses that are gonna be used as scale for things like mass communications and stuff.

The first one is more sales oriented. Oh, and marketing oriented. The second one is for customer support. The sales one and the marketing one I do not recommend naming that email address something like marketing@mywebsite.com. Nobody get, gets excited when they see an email from marketing at something.

So for that email address I would do something like, hello, at. Your company name.com. So that’s an example. So that’s like the pre-sales one where you’re doing like mass marketing, you’re doing marketing automations, you’re doing newsletters, things of that nature. And then on the support side for your customers.

I recommend an email address support at your company, name.com, or help at your company. name.com. Now the reason this is important to have three email addresses, and I should just say you’re gonna have more as you add team members. Like they’ll each get their individual email at your company. But if you’re operating solo you need those three.

So sometimes people unsubscribe from emails that are, marketing related. It’s just the nature of doing business and sending emails. That’s why you don’t wanna put your personal email like chris@companyname.com as the email address. You’re gonna be sending, marketing communications from, because somebody out there may want to sign up for your newsletter, they’re loving it, but then they unsubscribe or even they get tired of your emails, your marketing emails, and they mark you as spam.

And then. You try to reach out to them one-on-one for something and your email never gets to them, or they try to reach out to you like, Hey I’m done with all these newsletter emails, but I still have a question for Chris. And but they’ve blocked your email. And the same is true for marketing and support.

So if you set up your email system correctly, people won’t be on two email lists at one time. If somebody’s, doesn’t want any more of your newsletters and they became a customer and they had you, they have nothing left to buy from you and they unsubscribe from your marketing, you still want them to be able to receive like your customer onboarding and nurture emails.

That’s for customers. So that’s why it’s important to have a wall between your prospects and your customers. So different email address. For those two. So that’s a really important piece of setting up your email architecture. And then also keep in mind that emails have a kind of reputation score.

So this is why you never want to buy an email list or spam people who don’t want to hear from you is because you’re just gonna get marked as spam a lot, and your reputation for your email is gonna get dinged, which means fewer and fewer of your emails will make it to their inboxes, and even your whole domain name can get tarnished.

So always hold email in high regard in terms of ethics. Don’t spam people, don’t add people that shouldn’t be added or didn’t give you permission to add consent is very important. So let’s move on from the foundations and talk about attracting subscribers or email addresses. Like how do we get emails?

There’s a lot of different ways to get emails, but. Some of the basics, and we do all of these things at Lifter LMS as an example. We’ve been doing this a long time, so we’ve created a lot of things that generate an email address or a subscriber in our system. So one thing we do is the newsletter, but if all you’re doing is a newsletter you’re just limiting yourself because back in the day, that used to be all you needed.

But now people’s inboxes are full. They just may want like one thing from you. They’re happy to give you your e email address, but they don’t want to be emailed every week or twice a week or every month. So give a menu of options for ways for people to join your mailing list. So I’m gonna try to rattle some of the ones we have for Lifter LMS.

We do have a newsletter, this podcast that you’re listening to right now. We have a. Subscribe by email and basically what that one does is if you go in, you, the person gives their email, there’s an automated system that adds ’em to the email list saying they’re interested in podcast episodes, and it will automatically email them a link to every new podcast episode and a little summary and even a little graphic.

Of the episode and it’s all automated. We set that up an active campaign that’s called an RSS Driven campaign. Now, my favorite ways to get emails are through what’s known as lead magnets, which you may have heard of. But if you go to the lifter LMS blog or the lifter LMS podcast, and you look in the sidebar beside individual posts or podcast episodes.

You’ll see about five different things that people can sign up for to that’s gonna give them something of value. And then we’re going to get the email address and permission to send them future communications. So you’ve probably heard of lead magnets, but I want to give you a pro tip about how to create them.

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And there’s this idea that oh, I just need one lead magnet. Maybe it’s a quiz of some kind or an ebook. But the reality is if you wanna gather the most email addresses possible, you have to think about your customer existing through time, and not just your customer, but like your ideal prospect as they find out about you, as they become interested in you and so on.

What that means is creating different lead magnets for different stages of the buyer’s journey. So I’m just looking at the Lit LMS podcast sidebar. You can go check that out out@podcast.lifterlms.com. And I’m just gonna walk through the lead magnets. The first one is a pricing calculator that helps people figure out the pricing for their course or membership.

And the way this lead magnet works is it’s earlier on in the customer journey, they’re just wondering how much could I money can I make if I create a course or a coaching program? And it’s just a calculator that we created using gravity forms and conditional logic. And there’s an option at the end of the calculator for people to give their email to get, a free course about pricing. But this, because we’re early in the journey, they may not trust us yet, so they can actually use the calculator, get the result, not give us our email and move on. And that’s great. So they’re just getting started. But if they want to go deeper, they can give us their email and get a full course on how to do pricing.

Then we have what’s called the Education Entrepreneur Playbook which is a much more substantial ebook. There’s a larger time investment. The person at this stage is committed to creating a course or coaching program. They can enter their email address, but they’re also gonna make a larger investment of time than just completing a pricing calculator through three questions.

So this is like a. 40 page ebook and most eBooks it’s recommended that they’re shorter than that. But this one is really in depth. And then we have something called the course organizer. Somebody’s, yeah, they’re definitely doing a course at this point, and now they got gonna get organized. So we created a workbook worksheet for people to fill out, to organize all the chaos in their mind and, organize their course on a simple one page document.

And then we have the WordPress LMS Buyers Guide. So this is where people are, what we would call solution aware, product aware stage of the buyer’s journey. They’re trying to decide between options. Okay, I’m gonna build a course, I’m gonna price it this way. I’ve learned everything from Chris and Jason in the masterclass.

I’m really ready to move forward with the software. There’s a handful of options. Which one should I choose? That’s where the WordPress LMS Buyers Guide comes in, which is a shorter, like eight page ebook that helps people figure out how to choose the best learning management system software for them.

And then the next lead magnet is actually free software. So you sign up and you get the free core lifter, LMS plugin, which is super powerful. Industry leading more powerful than most paid LMS solutions and WordPress and beyond. So that software, somebody enters their email address and then they get redirected on how to access the free software.

So now we’re using software as a lead magnet. Then we have a course. Okay, now that you’ve got the software, there’s another lead magnet, which is, hey, here’s the lifter LMS Quickstart course. It’s free to sign up for, and it’s gonna show you the 5% essential parts of the software to, so that you can be successful with the free software.

You just download it basically. So that is another lead magnet. Then the next lead magnet is the what we call the WordPress LMS Growth Engine. And what this these are is, these are actual kind of sales presentations, but they’re not just selling. It’s more like a a presentation depending upon your e-learning use case on, what lifter LMS can do for you.

Why it’s awesome and essentially go from that free stage to a paid customer. So that’s like another lead magnet or conversion tool. And then the final lead magnet we have here as our prospect is becoming a free user. Getting interested, looking at the sales presentation is a down sell, lead magnet or objection handling lead magnet, which is an opportunity to.

A demo site for just a dollar. So when someone buys that, they are added to our email list. So if you look at those lead magnets, there’s many of them, but they’re in boxes alongside our blog and podcast content and embedded within the blog and podcast content in some cases. Those are made for people at different stages of the journey.

So not everybody is always at the same place where they just want their ebook or they want your free thing, or they wanna learn how to use your thing, or they need to talk to sales or have a demo. All these stages of the journey are important and you can collect emails at every step at the stage and people will self-select.

Where they’re at. Not everybody gets all your lead magnets or comes in at the beginning and comes and takes everything you have. So having that portfolio or quiver of lead magnets is really important. So how else do we get email addresses? We get a ton from what I just showed you the quickstart course.

The Lifter, LMS Free Quickstart course is one of our top performing lead magnets. We get I think we’ve gotten about 40,000 people through that one, and that one’s really interesting because it’s both doing marketing and sales and customer success all on autopilot all the time, all day long. So in my opinion, everybody should have a free course lead magnet, which shows the five perc, the most essential 5% of.

How to use your thing or get the value out of your course or program because it’s gonna. It’s gonna help prospects get even more interested.

It’s gonna be people close to buying from you have the confidence to buy. And It’s gonna make new customers be more successful in getting started without necessarily ha necessarily having to contact you for support.

So there’s so much value that goes into that. Also within lifter LMS for your paid courses or memberships. Like in the lifter LMS Academy as an example, we have about 15 courses. Some paid, some free. Whenever somebody enrolls in any of those, all of those email addresses flow into our active campaign email platform.

People get tagged and segmented into the different, they bought this course so they’re gonna get this email. The same is true in our WooCommerce store where we sell our products, depending upon which bundle you buy or individual add-ons, the prospect ends up in our active campaign, or not prospect, actually, customer, and they get tagged okay, this person bought the infinity bundle.

Then there’s an automation inside our email platform that delivers the onboarding sequence of emails over time for that Infinity bundle customer. And and there’s so many different segments. I’ve been doing this so long, like our system is pretty complex now at this juncture. And you may be on, in this camp if you’re listening to this.

Sometimes it’s easy to get in place where you send too many emails, but what’s more dangerous is not sending enough emails. So always try to segment your emails well, your email list, so that people get stuff that they’re most likely relevant to them. And remember, they can unsubscribe at any time.

So it’s okay to put it out there. Maybe somebody has been through all your stuff. Maybe they were a customer, they’re happy, they’re good, they’re done, they unsubscribe. No harm, no foul. Maybe somebody comes into your email and realizes your solution is not a fit for them and they unsubscribe, that’s fine.

But the more you can segment and divide people up and only send relevant emails, the better. And also make sure that the emails you send are not just constant sales pitches like. Deliver value. Like this is podcast episode number 520 or whatever. So all of our podcast episodes, 99% of them we’re not trying to sell you anything, we’re just adding value.

Like I’m adding value to you right now, giving you some pro tips on growing your email list. So deliver value as much as you can. Another pro tip is we have a. Like a tag in our CRM where if somebody’s Hey, I appreciate it, but I’d really, I don’t wanna unsubscribe, but I really don’t want this much email.

We have a low volume email system to help get those people more so they don’t lose touch with what we’re up to, but they’re not getting as much of the other stuff. So you can always do that. You can get fancy and at the end of the day though. It’s probably more than likely that you’re not sending enough email, and if people are complaining that you’re sending too much email, you might be sending the wrong emails to the wrong people and you’re, or you’re not doing segmentation and so on.

And look, this is hard. Nobody’s perfect. It takes a while to figure it out. And e never forget email is two way street. People can reply to your emails. I can go from one second. Someone’s like replies and they’re like, oh, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much for this email, and open the next one.

And somebody’s oh my gosh, you send too many emails. And you know what I’ll do is I’ll let ’em know they can unsubscribe if they’d like. And also, offer to put them on the low volume email list if they would prefer that, things like that. So you gotta get thick skin, ’cause people will say all kinds of different things when you interact across like a large email list.

We talked about using lead magnets. We talked about using courses or memberships and lifter, LMS feeding our emails. We talked about WooCommerce products. Feeding your emails. We also do webinar registrations. So we do informational educational webinars that feeds our emails. And in terms of nurturing, I want to talk a little bit about that.

So what do you do once you have an email? I create email automations called lead magnet delivery automations. So if somebody opts in for the LMS Buyer’s guide, they’re only gonna get one email and it’s Hey, thanks for signing up. Click the link below to download the LMS Buyer’s Guide. And that’s it.

That automation is done. But then they get moved to the a prospect nurture sequence that goes on for a long time. And the pro tip here is when people are first show interest in you. They’re giving you permission to send a little more frequently. So whenever I’m adding somebody to a nurture sequence, I will give them more information faster in the beginning, but then the space between the emails gets longer and longer till they’re about like a month apart.

So I’m not trying to do like daily emails or anything like that forever. But think about it like this, if you’re doing a customer nurture sequence, okay, they just bought your product. They’re really excited about your course or membership. You can hit ’em with even multiple emails in the first day.

Awesome. Welcome. Here’s how to get started a little bit later in the day, even Hey you’re probably busy getting started, but here’s this awesome bonus for you to help you get even better results. Day two, Hey, we’re here to help support you. Just so you know, you can just reply to this email with any question and we’ll help you get going.

Day three, here’s how to join our community of other people just like you using the same product or service. And then maybe I’d start spacing him out, then a week apart, two weeks apart, and so on. I learned this idea from Gary Vaynerchuk. He calls it jab, right Hook, which just means don’t always pitch something.

So the jabs are value and the hook is a pitch or an offer, if you will. So always try to deliver way more value than trying to sell or upsell. Something. So think about that. And there’s all kinds of ways that you can just send in an email where you’re not trying to sell anything but just trying to help people and deliver value.

So space those out. There’s also like popups on our website. So you can use a tool like Popup Maker, which is has Lifter LMS integration. And as of the time you’re watching this, they’ve either just released or about to release major Lifter LMS integrations. So popup maker is awesome because you can put an opt-in form inside of the popup, but what triggers the popup?

Maybe they click a button on your site. Maybe they’re about to leave. Maybe they’re about to abandon checkout. Maybe they just landed on a confirmation page and you wanna do an upsell. There’s so many different ways you can use popups and collect email addresses in that way. And just a pro tip of around how this technology works is that, your email platform it’s gonna have contacts or users in it, subscribers, whatever your platform calls them.

But it’s also gonna have forms, like a form for you to put on your website to generate a subscriber for them to enter their name and email and so on. So you can embed those forms in your popups, on your webpage and so on. But you can also use tools like form plugins, like Gravity Forms, ninja Forms, WP Forms, WS form.

Kind of use the form that you’re used to building regular contact forms and things on your website, but to actually build a opt-in form that then passes the subscriber to your email marketing and CRM platform. And that’s so forms are super powerful and you can use ’em everywhere. And the more you think about forms.

You’ll realize how much of the internet is powered by form. So like a course enrollment form in lifter LMS is a form. And then you know that data can be automatically passed to the email marketing and CRM tool. A checkout form is a form, and when someone becomes a customer, that data can be passed to the CRM platform.

They can be moved from being a prospect to a customer. There’s not just contact forms and comment forms.

When you when students submit a quiz or an assignment. And those are forms. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Forms are really everywhere. But what I recommend when it comes to building your email list, it’s just figure out that technical piece of.

Making an offer, sticking a form on it. Then getting that data into your email marketing. CRM, whether that’s on your same WordPress website or on an external platform like active campaign. So building an email list is a long term game. Consistency is key. Keep doing the work, keep showing up and keep adding value and always remember.

That building an email list is, these aren’t just email addresses. These are real people. These are real human beings with hopes and dreams and pain points and trauma. So treat it with respect, like respect your community, your email subscribers, and when you have an engaged email list, like if you ask people to reply at the end of a newsletter or after receiving a lead magnet.

And they do. And then you reply and have a one-on-one conversation with ’em. That’s fantastic. And that kind of engagement is important to be, keep the humanity and all of this automation and emails and all this tech. If you create an engaged email list, you can build a thriving LMS business.

Staying in touch with people and caring about them is really what it’s all about. When you believe in your product, whether that’s a course, a membership site, or your an agency and your selling services to clients, keep in touch with your people. Just the very act of. Sending an email, whether it’s one-on-one or through a newsletter or other automation or nurture sequence you’re opening a door of opportunity for human connection and to build real relationships.

So that’s it for this conversation around email marketing, email automation, and how to build an email list. If you have any questions about email, drop a. Comment wherever you’re seeing this and feel free to ask. I’d be happy to help you with that. But that’s it for this LMSCast episode. I’m Chris from Lifter lms.

Go to podcast dot lifter lms.com and subscribe to the podcast by email, so you never miss another episode. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowZiv Raviv explained how he started his business ten years ago with a podcast, which paved the way for him to pursue coaching and online courses. After learning about LifterLMS, he expanded into creating over 300 courses in a variety of micro-niches, such as balloon art, the floral industry, children’s entertainers, relationships (Generous Marriage), and copywriting (Daily Cookie).

Ziv’s first course was just a Google Doc with unlisted YouTube videos. He clarified that by narrowing his focus so much, he was able to establish credibility and trust in close-knit groups, which produced unexpected outcomes, such as generating over $1 million from the balloon art specialty alone, which has just 3,000 members globally.

Additionally, he described how his earnings increased from $20k in his first year to $88k in his second, then to $277k, $377k, $430k (when he plateaued for a few years), $475k, and now to at least $540k in 2025. He eventually came to the realization that, although “niching sideways” into several businesses was effective, his greatest innovations came from discovering his area of expertise, which was instructing others.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a friend and one of my favorite people in the lifter LMS community. His name is Ziv Ravi. You can find him@zivravi.com and also K media.co. And we’re gonna get into some really cool stuff you haven’t heard before today, a concept called Super Coaching.

Ziv and I were just chatting about it and I’m blown away and fascinated. Ziv is also a master of micro nicheing, and good niching is a big challenge with so many education entrepreneurs, or just entrepreneurs in general. And Ziv is a master at it, but we’re gonna get into all that. But first, welcome back on the show, Ziv.

Ziv Raviv: Hello, Chris. It’s such a, an amazing pleasure to connect here and to share this journey of of online business and educational businesses and being a, like an entrepreneur in this space. With you again, like this is the third time I’m here. I’m excited to share some new concept with the listeners.

I hope this will bring a lot of value to everyone.

Chris Badgett: Before we get going, Ziv also has a podcast called Beyond Six Figures. So check that out. Add that to your next, listen after this one, let’s let’s just start high level Ziv. If somebody doesn’t know you you’ve done a lot of things and you’re, you’ve, you’re really focused on super coaching now and having a unified vision.

But what niches have you been in? What kinds of entrepreneurial activities have you done over, say, the past 10 years?

Ziv Raviv: It’s actually 10 years since I launched my first podcast, and that podcast turned me into a cost creator and into into a coach. I remember my first course that I launched was actually with a Google Doc and a few unlisted videos on YouTube.

Later on I found Lifter, LMS and started to create multiple online courses. So I, I remember the second year of operation. As a podcaster, we were launching eight different courses in a very small micro niche of balloon art. There’s are people that are serving as balloon artists, as balloon decorators, as balloon entertainers, and they needed some education about the craft and about their business.

And so I launched eight courses on the second year. Since then, we’ve launched through Lyft, LMS. Way over 300 courses in many niches, including in the floral industry, in the kids entertainer industry. We had a bit of work in the relationship niche with a platform called Generous Marriage. We had a round of activities in the niche of copywriting with daily cookie.co.

And all of that, like going each time to a different micro niche and serving clients there, serving the niche with with free online courses and paid online courses and later on with coaching. All of that was something I did year after year to get to a point where I start to realize I need to start focusing, I need to start removing some of the activities and understand what is my system, what is my.

Where is my zone of genius? Where can I actually bring the biggest transformations? And that’s when I realized just a little bit after chat, GPT was starting, like Che GPT-3 0.5 started to be a thing. Copywriting as a service became something that is not as needed as before because it was just too easy.

And I realized in parallel that I wanna focus and that’s where super coaching was born.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s quite the journey. And if you feel like it, maybe just share some revenue numbers of how you’ve grown over the years and also, yeah. Really what people wonder sometimes is, there, especially like if you go back to your early self with the Google Doc and the unlisted videos, you don’t really know you’re gonna make it and you have a lot of self-doubt.

And what happened or why do you think it worked out for you?

Ziv Raviv: So first of all I wanna say that. I wanna start with the numbers ’cause it’ll put everything in perspective. So the first year online as a content creator, we did 20, we did 20 k, that’s what we did, 20 2K. The second year we did something like 88 k.

Over the years we started to grow dramatically. I was interviewed on your show. The listeners can actually go and listen to it. When I was doing 277 K and then a year later or so, despite the Corona and everything, we were doing 377 K, which was already is a case study where people can listen to the different things we were doing.

We then go to 430 k. We got stuck at that for a couple of years and then we grew to 470 5K and this year we’re targeting and nothing can stop us now. Like we will probably do more than that, but at the very least we’re going to do 540 k. In 2025. So we grew over the years dramatically. We had to grow the team as well.

We had to change the way we do business. We had to let go of certain ideas like certain focus points that no longer served us to grow and to be impactful. So yeah that, that is like the context of the numbers. And, the idea that always led me in doing business, in attracting clients was the idea of microing.

And it’s the idea that people are so busy these days. They see so much content they don’t care about. Other things that are happening. They don’t wanna buy stuff that are not, that are, that is presented by strangers to them and so on and so forth. So it’s almost like the tribes, the different tribes of people are locked inside bubbles.

And the bubble is so thick that in order to pierce through the bubble, you need some, someone from within the bubble to introduce you to the tribe. In order to do that, you need to micro niche so that people will listen to you so that collaborations will make sense and people will agree to collaborate with you so that they will agree to be interviewed by you and so on.

So on our first micro niche, we just recently reached a total income of $1 million. All from people that are making a living, from taking balloons and putting some air into them and tying them and making, events look good. And we’ve managed to, and it’s such a small micro niche. These are like 3000 people throughout the world.

Those 3000 people have like I’m very humbled to say that they have paid us a million dollars, a little bit more than a million dollars over the years. For their education and for their services and for their coaching and so on. And and we are continuing to grow. But in, at the beginning it was micro nicheing sideways, so from one micro niche sideways to another micro niches that is similar.

And these days we’re starting to niche up.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And congrats on the success with the balloon artists. And if, correct me if I’m wrong. But it’s, I know you yourself are a balloon artist, and you also have a niche in florist. Do you, have you been a florist?

Ziv Raviv: Actually I did not I was never a florist.

The first few niches that I chose, micro niches that. I chose to do to produce a podcast. Salon online courses. In that micro niche. Those were things related to my passions. Over the years, I started to do this more professionally. I would choose a micro niche. I did this in nine different micro niches, right?

So I would choose a micro niche that I think I, I could provide some service to that. I think I have some passion in that condition. Sometimes I found out that I don’t, and I failed and I stopped. Like I turned off the shelters some say on that podcast because I just couldn’t really connect with the people in a way that would yield results fast enough.

But on others, I went in professionally, right? So with the floes industry I don’t have any experience with flowers. I actually I don’t know the names of the flowers. It’s really bad. I know marketing and I know business, so I You’re entrepreneurs,

Chris Badgett: right?

Ziv Raviv: Yes.

Chris Badgett: And you’re an entrepreneur and a lot of your current coaching clients are entrepreneurs.

Is that right?

Ziv Raviv: Yes. And you know what one client led to another client as, as often that happens. And I started to serve florist people. I had clients that were florist. And they were such cool people. They were really good in business. They didn’t need to kind apologize. When people ask a balloon decorate or What do you do?

And they say the in balloons they kind ask you, yeah, but what do you really do? But what? It’s like not a ho it’s a hobby. It’s a hustle. Even though there are people doing a million dollar a year from Baco, but. They always felt like they need to defend themselves.

Florists don’t need to defend themselves. They know what they’re doing. They’re running successful businesses with TE teams and with clients and with locations and multiple locations. And so I decided to go into it professionally. And I partnered with another coach that, that I started to serve his business and his school and I even turned his entire school into a lifter LMS school as a part of our work together.

And so over the years I had. Niches where I went in and I succeeded to bring myself to a point where I have coaching clients in them and on some I stride. I saw that I didn’t like what I’m seeing and I stepped back.

Chris Badgett: I love seeing your growth and just journey over the years and where you are now, like when somebody kind of compounds and keeps improving and being curious and.

Creating value in the world. That’s awesome to see. And now you’re at super coaching as a concept. Can you explain how you came to that and what it is and how you do it?

Ziv Raviv: Super coaching is the concept of coaching plus benefits, which means that you add some value to the client in some way, shape or form.

And over the years I have. Added a lot of value to my clients beyond education. I always included a lot of free education for my clients, but I’m talking about something even more than education, which is in the trenches working with the client in order to help them with other problems they have. So one of the first problems I solved for my coaching clients was.

Was through a company called Design Picker. They, or even these days, they offer unlimited designs for a flat feed. They’re amazing. I was coached personally by Rasper for a while, and I adore what they do. I, and I used their service to serve my clients, so my clients would get free designs.

For quite a while over the years, I started to hire my own graphic designers, and then I needed a lot of website fixes. So I would hire a website developer on WordPress to fix a lot of things. And then they started to fix things for my clients. And then they started to build, websites for my clients from scratch.

And then we created a copywriting company and a team. Once I decided I wanna go all in with super coaching the copywriting team became another resource of my coaching clients. So at some point, actually, we actually accidentally turned into a marketing agency where the clients come to me about eight 70% of them, they come to me when they look for a coach and they found out, they find out that they have.

Way more than like that. I give, I, I give them way more than just the coaching. So we do all of their designs. We control the websites, we build them, we create sales campaigns, advertising campaigns, everything. And some of them come to me because they heard about the transformations. They don’t care if I will call myself a coach, or I will call myself A-A-C-M-O-A fractional CMO, or if I, they don’t even care if I have a title.

All they care about. Is they know someone that I helped them grow by 20 to 50% in a year. And for seven figure business, that’s a lot of money to grow by 20 to 50%. So they heard about that, they came to me and then they received like this concept. So super coaching is. It’s a different type of a relationship, and it’s a very deep relationship.

It’s a very close relationship. Some of my clients, I meet them I kid you note, I meet them four to five times a week, so we have a one-on-one session, and then I make myself available for four times a week, sometimes five times a week on a group session level. So pretty much every day almost they have an opportunity to show up and ask a question.

And remind me about something they needed and ask me about some design they were waiting for, or some bug they need fixing or some campaign they need me to look at. And the result of it is that I am a little bit of a business coach and a little bit of an implementation coach, and a little bit of a marketing coach, and a little bit of.

Of of like a relationship coach and the holistic approach, coach, but I will be whatever the client needs in order to get them to where they wanna go.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That is so cool. What from on the coaching aspect what are some of the common challenges you help people work through to unlock growth?

And I, you mentioned a lot of things. It could be a relationship, it could be a marketing challenge, it could be a technical challenge. Do you see any patterns or themes that are common across your clients?

Ziv Raviv: We, the more we work with like over time with our clients, the more we see them get to the point where they have new problems to solve.

So I’m actually really interested in this idea where businesses actually have different stages in their in their growth. And a lot of time they struggle with they struggle with identifying what to focus on, right? So they think that they have many problems and many times the first problem that they think they have is we don’t have enough leads, or we don’t have enough sales.

That’s what almost all clients think. That is the main problem, but they actually, that the lead problem is not a problem that you need to solve. Like it’s actually a temporary problem. Believe it or not. Your lead problem is a temporary problem. Your growth as a business, that’s an infinite problem.

You will always want to worry about that. The difference between infinite problems and finite problems, is it infinite problems. You need to think about them. In an annual level, in a quarter level, you level, you need people responsible for that problem, right? And you need to monitor that problem forever.

But if like you have a Jessica and Jessica decided to resign and she’s a part of your team, that’s not an hiring problem. That’s Jessica problem. It’s a very temporary problem that you just need to fix. You just need to replace Jessica. So when you know that the problem is actually temporary, you just need to put in the efforts, you need to trust the process and put in the efforts and fix it.

So a lot of people, they will think they have a lead problem or a sales problem, but actually they just need to understand that it’s a fixable problem. And if they put in the efforts, they will be able to solve that problem.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wanna ask like, how you developed as with your coaching skills, and part of me knows that you’re just a natural, like you’ve been making people smile, laugh, reading the room, big picture, creative problem solving guy your whole life.

But how do you beco, how does one or anyone become a better coach?

Ziv Raviv: I think you. You there, there’s a lot of way to improve in coaching and in business and in, and it’s not. First you need to understand that it’s not an easy process. It’s, there’s a lot of skills involved and you need to work on them with the passion.

Of a violinist or pianist that, that really practice for hours. So one of the things that truly makes me better as a coach is just the fact that I work a lot. Yeah. I just, I’m putting in the reps, I’ve been doing I’ve been fully booked for many years. I talk about that in my book.

I, I’ve been doing this week. I’ve been doing 12 meetings with cl coaching clients, 12 meetings a day every day. It’s just something that I put in that’s a lot of hours of work and I didn’t always do that. I took a couple of years where I only worked for three days a week and I walked, I battled through burnout and I.

I’m glad to say I’m now on the other side and I have my energy now back to do like more meetings like that, but but one of the best ways to. Grow as a coach and become better a coach is just to put in the reps. There are many books to list to read about coaching that are amazing. There are many books about business and entrepreneurship that are amazing.

There are many podcasts like lifter LMSs, LMS Cast podcasts which is really a great way to, to be open for ideas that way. And to learn about different educational and entrepreneurs. So I think that I’ve done my share of listening to clients of helping them.

I’ve done my share of being in business myself and building businesses myself and launching things. I’ve done a lot of webinars and a lot of online courses and a lot of group programs. I launched four different mobile apps so when you put in a lot of work in wraps, you can get better quite fast.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned learning from books. You have a book, the Fully Booked Coach. Can you tell us what that’s about and what inspired you? To write it.

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Ziv Raviv: this is a work of love that took a good two years to fully work on and polish and edit and proof and launch. This year we’ve launched the book and it actually, shares my systems completely, openly how I coach, how I, what type of tools I actually use on, on, on a day-to-day basis. And what’s my philosophy in business in getting coaching clients that will stick around. So it’s all about microing, where you actually get people to listen to you, to hear you, to respect you, to trust you, to work with you.

And it’s and in order to do that. You choose a micro niche and you go in and you listen to what they need, and you create some online courses for them for free, and you create some online courses for them for that they can buy. And you do webinars like you do the whole thing and you can do it differently from one micro niche to another.

Based on where they congregate and this whole system is detailed in the book. And after doing that so many times it was, it just was clear to me that this is like a system. At some point I got into a new micro niche and I detailed everything. Like I, I did it with transparency with meetings online and whatnot, and within 90 days.

I was able to secure a coaching client in a totally new micro niche, right? So it’s actually if you know how to micro niche and you put in the work, you can find clients relatively fast as long as you’re bringing value and into that micro niche. The second concept that I talk about in the book is about super coaching, which is how to.

Basically, in order to be fully booked, you just need one thing. You don’t need to be a super coach. You don’t need to provide more than just coaching. They’re purists coaching coaches, and they’re amazing. They’re really good. They provide a lot of value. They solve problems on the call. They listen.

I accountability. It’s great to be a purist coach. I’m more in the trenches. Guy, type of a guy I want to be a more meaningful part of a relationship with my client. And I chose super coaching, but either way, the most important part is that they stay around long enough. Yeah. As soon as people stick around long enough with you, you will become fully booked at some point.

So the concept of how do you provide coaching services that are so fun? And meaningful and so impactful and so transformational. I wanted to document all of the ways to do that in the book based on my experience. And so the book gives you both of these tools, the microing and the super coaching in order to get you to the point where you’re fully booked.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. Go check out the fully Booked Coached book. I’m sure that’s on Amazon.

Ziv Raviv: It

Chris Badgett: is, yeah. Let’s double click again on Micro Nicheing. What do you say to somebody, particularly creative entrepreneur people? They tend to have a lot of different interests and maybe what they get paid for in their day job.

There’s some niche they’re in, there’s some hobby niche they love. There’s like maybe a fitness journey they’re on and a certain type of fitness or like they’re into some kind of. Diet nutrition thing or something. How does one choose a micro niche when they’re a polymath or have a lot of different interests and subject matter expertise?

Ziv Raviv: A lot of times saying no to some of those ideas is way more important than than which one you chose because you actually. It’s better for you if you start with one and and put in certain amount of work to assess if this is the right one for you. So I have these three tests that I ask myself in advance before I go into a micro niche.

I ask myself, how easy will it be to find people for for interviews on a podcast or for collaboration on YouTube or for collaboration of, on an ebook or on a blog? So my, so the first question I ask myself is, how easy will it be to find someone the second and get them to collaborate? The second question is, will they brag about it?

So I call this brag ability. And the third question is will they collaborate on helping me sell something? Or will they buy something for me? And they call this the sellability test. So Findability, breakability, and sellability, these three tests initially helped me realize if it’s a good micro niche or not.

I can give you an example of where I failed. So I chose to create a podcast called. Plumbing and money Life. Plumbing and money life, yeah. It’s a show for plumbers to help them with their money. And I did some research about how to help them with their Google ads.

I did some research about how to help them locally with Facebook ads. I was very proficient with both of these tools. I had a copyright opportunity.

Chris Badgett: I’m getting sold on it right now. There’s plumbers everywhere. They need help. There’s

Ziv Raviv: what they need help. What, so I went in all, all in, and I checked my numbers.

There were enough. There were enough plumbers to, there were more plumbers in the world than balloon artists. So good for me. I’m getting into bigger niches now, and I contacted 1000 people and one person agreed to be on the show and it was interviewed on the show. I realized that through the responses as they said no to me, many times, many of them just ignored.

But those that said no. Taught me that this is a very shy audience, of course I’m biased. I only talked with a thousand of them. I only was in touch with a thousand of them. I talked with a few of them. Obviously there’s a small number bias, but basically I realized it’s not a good match.

When I was under Facebook groups trying to connect, trying to let to get into the head, trying to meet more people, I could not. Ignore the fact that my nose is imagining the smell of what they’re doing because they were sharing pictures or look it, I fixed this and I fixed that, and they were so happy.

Yeah. And I started to realize I’m not a good fit for them. I’m not feeling comfortable in, in, in the in, in where they congregate, where they show me those pictures of tulips. So I decided to stop on that. I thought it was easy to find them. I realized they do not wanna be on a show and be featured, right?

And I stepped away and on other niches I was able to, get different results and grow. So those three tests are a good starting point. I’ll give you one more. Quick tip for anyone listening, go into sales Navigator on LinkedIn. It’s worth 80 bucks of your money just one month.

Do some research with the proper tool and or use the, other tools for research. It doesn’t matter, HPT, whatever, but find a micro niche where you can actually find people and be able to contact them through email or message. And you want a micro niche that has about three to 20,000 people.

If there’s more than 20,000 people, it’ll be harder to get them to to actually, respond to you because they’re too busy. Potentially, if there are less than 3000 people, it might be too small to actually make you a living and find enough people. But think about this way. You only need 50 of them to agree to collaborate in a year.

50 people. That’s all want that. 50 people are standing. Be that, that you collaborate with, that you wanna help them and provide them value for free with the podcast interview. That’s all that is standing between you and starting a business that is a serious coaching or educational business.

So you want to find a niche that people re, that you will be able to find those 50 people relatively efficiently.

Chris Badgett: What do you, what’s your perspective on like the education entrepreneur niche? I find it somewhat challenging. This is my niche in the sense that we make software in this niche, but yeah.

There’s a lot of different types of creators out there. There’s a lot of different types of online education. They’re spread out all over the world. They can’t they’re if you go to LinkedIn, there’s no education entrepreneur like group or as like a job byline. So like within the education entrepreneurs, the creators, like what do you see as a really cool micro niche?

Ziv Raviv: That’s a great question. I want, I wanna flip this question just to Yeah. To understand. It’s even better. Would you like to play a game where. We look into lifter LMS as a company that, that micro niches and consider micro niches for you, or would you like me to, would you like to play a game where I, as a coach, I’m thinking about how to find, educational cost creators.

Are specific enough that I can maybe go into a micro, like who do you want?

Chris Badgett: I, I think the first one. So if you look at lifter LMS, like as an example people like, yeah, let’s talk people like you who are subject matter experts, creators, content creators, coaches niche audience, is an awesome group of people.

In many ways, lifter was built like this has always been our core customer, but a lot of other people show up with like different types of e-learning situations and whatnot. And that’s fine. But I’ve always struggled with niching for E-learning or LMS or course creators and coaches and stuff.

’cause I think course creators and coaches is too big. I think I’m outside that 20,000. Guard.

Ziv Raviv: You are. You are, yeah. A lot of time. It’s okay to micro niche by solving one problem. Yeah. Even on a bigger group, right? So when I say three to 20,000, that’s for someone that. Doesn’t know yet, what are they going to solve necessarily.

They’re willing to listen and adapt and that’s lift LMS has a proven solution and it’s solves one specific problem. Unfortunately there’s also competition, right? And I think that ai, the AI era. Is forcing you to create a new strategy for Lifter lms? That’s what I think.

So it’s almost I don’t remember, was it some Altman said that at some point AI will get to such a level of efficiency of it. It’ll be embedded with so many things in our lives. And that it will be transparent. You will not feel the technology right. You will just experience that everything is easier for you.

And to some degree, I think that’s what Lifter LMS has done for me now in my business. We don’t treat lifter. LMS is something that we need to think about. It’s invisible. It’s a tool that we use when we need to train new people, when we need to train. My, our clients teams, when our clients are in the educational world and they need to sell online courses and to sell memberships, right?

So it’s a tool that we just assume it’s there for us and we go in and we use it. And it’s like driving a car. You don’t think about the engine, you don’t think about the wheels. You just go in and you drive it, right? So I think that, your approach to selling lifter LMS has to change as well to be to help people see that it’s actually getting more and more transparent.

And you see a lot of companies are doing this thing where, for example, Zael you go into Zael, there’s a bot. You tell it what you want to automate, it shows you, oh, so you mean this, and this is the steps of the automation. You go into active campaign. You write an email. You immediately have a chat bot that says, would you like to expand this, like campaign to additional things.

You can chat with it and it’ll literally create. Some follow up based on automation and triggers and tags for you. And there’s other platforms that give you like more and more of these feelings where the technology is managing itself to some degree. So obviously I would love it if lift LMSs wins the race and releases a lot of really cool.

Features like that and I think that’s very important for people. Back to the question about niching. I think I think that there’s a lot of opportunities, a lot of examples I would consider for for you Chris and for Lyft. The first one is actually business coaches. Yeah. So business coaches often.

Need lifting LMS as one of the tools in their tool belt. Some people need a wrench. We need a an LMS. We need it for our clients. We need it for our teams. We need it for our niches, right? For our micro niches. That I’ll give you an example from the Beyond six Figure Podcast.

This podcast. It is a podcast for business coaches, right? We contact business coaches, we contact book authors that write books about business and about coaching. We contact podcasters like Johnny Duma and Jo Jordan Harbinger. Were on the show. We contact Walker, right? Like the people that are in the trenches.

We were able to get. 45 people and by the end of next week it’ll be 52 people. It’s like very fast. 52 interviews all scheduled. For the most part, they’re already recorded in 12 weeks. Wow. So people are saying, yes, I want to be on your show very fast. And so we’re building relationships with new people.

Business coaches, for the most part, they have. Problems that they need to solve. They wanna be featured. And if you look at the numbers, like how many of them say Yes, I wanna be on the show in comparison to those palumbo be before such a completely different experience. Like back then I worked for three months, I got one, an interview, and now with this one in three months, I got a year of content that will be scheduled.

For me, and it’s like in the pipelines, and I don’t have to worry about it. And now I’m starting to think about how to collaborate with these people and how to help them. And help them and and ask for the help as well. So I think that if you with Lyft, MS would do something like a secondary podcast maybe, or just leveraging your existing platforms.

That could be an example where people are responding very fast. I can imagine a situation where at the end of an interview you tell people. Hey, you are qualified for this package. If you ever choose to try us out, or we have a service where we will migrate your course from this platform to this platform.

Some white label thing or whatever. Here’s 90% discount on the white label thing. We’ll move you into Lyft, LMS, literally for free or so on. So that’s just one example of of Microing that will be relatively easy based on my experience. Another way to look at it is to. Go into places where you didn’t go before.

So I think that you do need to be on LinkedIn. You need to be loud on LinkedIn. I think you need to even consider the younger generations gen Zs 20 to 27, a type of entrepreneurs. Educate them when they’re young, on TikTok and on vertical videos. So I would definitely put in some work on that type of a front.

What do you think how much of this is like stuff that you considered or,

Chris Badgett: I love it. I’ve always loved business coaching. It’s one of the ones that I think resonates the most with me simply because. I’m a business guy, I’m an entrepreneur, so I’m and I’ve been in it a long time and I’ve had business coaches and had amazing experiences and stuff.

When you think about the three mega niches like health, wealth, and relationships, so there’s business coaches, there’s life coaches, there’s health coaches, those are all more micro niche and, yeah you’ve triggered like a pa you’ve reminded me the passion I’ve always had for business coaching and I call it, our market, the education entrepreneurs, but the word entrepreneurs in there, which is like business, and a health coach can be an education entrepreneur of their own, but they’re not necessarily helping other entrepreneurs.

And I have always probably very similar to you, which is why we resonate, is I like hanging out with other entrepreneurs. We think differently. We’re a small percentage of the population, we’re in that we’re in our bubbles, different entrepreneur bubbles and yeah, it’s, yeah. I appreciate what you’re saying and I see how you’re a great coach.

’cause you’re like lasering in and just on a podcast episode, it’s awesome. Part ano, another question I would ask you where I think people get mixed up, and these are just a bunch of business terms, but there’s like niche. There’s your customer avatar, your ideal customer profile, your target market segments and all this stuff.

I think people get a little overwhelmed with all the slicing and dicing. I think you’ve done a good job with saying Hey, just focus on the micro niche, right? And Sure. Within that you probably have the ideal floris shop owner. That’s like a perfect fit. And that’s like your avatar.

And like for a lifter, one of the things that’s always a challenge not with you because you’re both, you’re also, you’re an educator, but you’re also an awesome WordPress website builder. But we have a split audience of agencies, I build sites for clients, or I’m building this site for me and my niche and my passion and stuff like that.

And some people are both like you. But I don’t know if you have any comments on that. Just like the, I see a lot of people get trapped in who is my customer avatar or what’s my niche? Or those just. The, either create a ational person or somebody you’ve actually worked with or earlier version of yourself.

There’s just so much here that I think it gets overwhelming sometimes.

Ziv Raviv: I think that Microing actually helps you make your avatar a, a group of real people. And I think it’s way more efficient. You’re

Chris Badgett: guessing, you’re not guessing. It’s like this is, yeah. Yeah.

Ziv Raviv: It’s a person you met.

It’s a person you talked to. Yeah. So instead of having this really fun and clever exercise where you answer questions based on a fix person. You have that perfect person guide you through every decision you make. That’s something I never really resonated with on a personal level. I wanted real people to talk to me.

And these days with ai, you get AI to answer the questions for you and then you are trying to convince like to you serve a client and your avatar, which is completely fictious. That was designed by a machine for you based on the stuff that it’s read. There’s zero soul in it.

PE people buy things from people. Yeah. From humans. And they buy it based on their own problems, based on things they want. And if you are fixing theoretical problems, you are, it’s going to be very hard to get people to notice you. It’s not going to come up. Authentic. It’s going to be really frustrating.

So I think that, I think it’s really important to, to talk with people. And when you micro niche and you start to collaborate with thought leaders in that micro niche you realize what are the problems. And you have to be curious to ask the questions and to find what they want to you to solve.

And that over time helps you. Realize what they need and if you really want in desire to serve, if you are in servitude of a group of people, of a tribe, of a micro niche, then you would try to solve all of their problems. Really? Yeah. As I’ll tell you what they

Chris Badgett: are, right? Like you don’t have to guess.

Ziv Raviv: Yeah. And then you will try to solve their small problems and you will try to solve their bigger problems and you’ll try to solve the biggest problems. At some point you’ll notice which of those problems actually. Is the most impactful, transformational problem that you are really good at solving, and that’s what you take into the Google ads or the Facebook ads on or to the scaling, bit of, let’s do this on other micro issues and so on.

I think if you ask yourself I will ask you instead of saying, who do you think is more influential in their ecosystem, the WordPress developer. That if they know lift LMS, so well then they could refer their clients to lift LMS or the business coaches that that guide clients through decisions including potentially the decision to.

Launch online courses or membership sites. So what do you think which one, the developer or the coach, which one do you think is like their world is respected a little bit higher than the other one?

Chris Badgett: That’s a tough question for me. And the reason why it is because it just happened organically where I was like.

Just another freelancer building websites for clients. But now, like the whole, like WordPress community and a lot of agencies and stuff, I’m like a, I’m known and like wherever I go, like on social media WordPress is with me, and and it’s like effortless. But for business coaches, I also have a lot of VA value to add and.

Just for whatever reason, I would say the website building folks, the technologists, whether they’re a developer or a person like me who just puts plugins and themes together to solve business problems, those type of people have always just resonated easily. But I see the opportunity with, the coaching industry and.

All of that as well. So it’s not the right answer, but I feel like both are good. I’m just saying for whatever reason the website builders, I call them WordPress professionals, that tribe I just naturally fit, or I grew up inside the bubble, so I’m like already there, in the micro niche.

Yeah, because I’ve been doing this since 2008 with WordPress. But I’ve also been an entrepreneur that whole time and interacting with other entrepreneurs and business coaches and getting help and going to masterminds and taking courses and all that stuff too.

Ziv Raviv: I think in both cases you have a lot of value that you bring to the table.

Like with the WordPress WordPress professionals. You speak the language, obviously you. It’s the easier solution in a way. But the business coaches, which is why it’s

Chris Badgett: Like you starting with the balloon artist. ’cause you Yeah, you did a lot of that and you were already in the bubble, right?

Yeah. Hey guys. Yeah.

Ziv Raviv: So that’s like the easy solution the low hanging foot in a way, which I think you already. Maybe even exhausted to some degree. ’cause it’s already there. You actually can manage the maintain your reputation with a couple of events a year with so some not.

It’s not a lot of efforts to just maintain it so your team can actually maintain that for you in a way. I think that business coaches, you have a lot of value to I’ve learned so much from just connecting with you. I did a strategy session with you a while back, and that strategy session made me a better coach.

It just opened me to the way you look at things and it inspired me to dramatically, I actually talk about it in, in the book. Awesome. So it’s really something that you can bring value to other business coaches and I think. I think these days they are, they’re very influential on their clients.

So I think that their ward is considered like they, they take their ward, they take the ward a lot they list. So both of them are mavens, right? Yeah. But I think that it’s time to maybe try a new group of mavens. To

Chris Badgett: leave the nest. Yeah, that’s yeah. That’s awesome, Ziv. That’s awesome.

I wanted to interview you, but I also got a coaching session.

Ziv Raviv: This was fun.

Chris Badgett: That’s Ziv, Ravi. Go get his book the Fully Booked coach. You can find that on Amazon. So check that out beyond Six Figures podcast. About how many episodes are out as of now?

Ziv Raviv: Right now it is 15. Okay. And they’re going live every week.

And and it’s been a tremendous opportunity to create this resource for the industry because if you are a business coach and you’re listening to this, you get. A lot of ideas about different business coaches in different niches and their different hurdles and their different ideas and modalities and the money that they make, the amount of clients like we’re such a group of privileged people.

We business coaches is such an amazing business model to be a business coach because you only need about 10 people, or 15 people, or 20 clients, that’s it, 20 clients and you are really doing well. In your life in, like in, in creating results for people in reputation and so on. And if you get there to your fully booked and then you only need to replace maybe three clients a year.

As a business owner, how many sales scores and sales you need to bring in every year, every month, every week. A business coach only needs to be active enough to replace three or five clients. If it’s, if they’re good, they’ll need to replace three or five clients a year, and that’s not so hard.

So you can actually get to become fully booked. Relatively fast in a year or in 18 months or so. If you follow the process in the book, and I think if you are listening to this and you are a a business coach or an educational entrepreneur that also want to do business coaching, and reach out to me on zero.com or say hi on beyond six figures and we’ll be happy to to interview you.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s ziv reiv ziv reiv.com. Go get the book. Thanks for coming back on the show, Ziv. We’re gonna have to do this again. Let’s not wait three years. We’re gonna have to increase the cadence maybe once a year. I would love that.

Ziv Raviv: Would love that.

Chris Badgett: But thank you for coming. We really appreciate it.

Ziv Raviv: Thank you, Chris.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn his LMScast solo episode, Chris Badgett discusses the new safeguards in LifterLMS 9.0 and delves further into the significance of WordPress LMS website security.

He describes how tools like Akismet spam detection, sophisticated CAPTCHA integrations with Cloudflare Turnstile and Google reCAPTCHA, and IP blocking for repeatedly unsuccessful checkouts help guard against bots and fraudulent activities. By implementing secured media, Chris also resolves a persistent WordPress problem with the Media Library, guaranteeing that only enrolled students can access course materials and downloads.

He highlights effective practices, including employing technologies like Vimeo’s domain limitation for video security, depending on safe hosting with backups, evaluating admin accounts, and enforcing strong passwords.

Chris emphasizes that LifterLMS has always placed a high priority on protecting course developers, their users, and their intellectual property going one step further with version 9.0 while understanding the necessity to strike a balance between security and user experience.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest and it’s just me. I haven’t done a solo episode in a while. My name’s Chris Badgett. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Lifter LMS and host of the LMS CAST Podcast. Today we’re gonna do an episode about. WordPress websites and security, particularly in the learning management system niche.

So recently Lifter LMS released a new version, a major version, which is called Lifter, LMS 9.0, and it has a lot of new security features in it. And I wanted to discuss security with you because it’s helpful to understand and get into the details. Security, what it is, how it works, what it’s preventing, and so on.

So some of the great things about Lifter LMS 9.0 there’s so many things security related, but just to go through them the first is that we now have a setting you can turn on to block IP addresses that have 10 failed checkouts in 15 minutes. And basically what that does. Is that prevents bots on the internet or scammers from essentially trying to create free accounts or use stolen credit cards or fraudulent credit cards to test them on your website to see if they can find one that works.

So the reality of the internet is there is a lot of. Scammers, bots that are trying to get access to your website. There’s probably actually a lot more of it going on all the time than you realize. But the truth is WordPress is actually a very secure platform. LifterLMS is known as the most secure learning management system because since day one. Which is over 12 years ago, we’ve always been focused on security.

And protecting the users of lifter LMS, but also your users. Users. So we’ve implemented from day one the best security practices and we have continuously improved as time goes on, making things more secure, adapting to new issues of the time. So on. When someone tries to, check out too many times in a row, it’s not a real transaction and lifter LMS will stop that and block their IP address temporarily.

So if somebody made a honest to goodness mistake and, entered 10 different credit cards of their own trying to make it work, they are gonna be able to get back in, but they’re gonna be locked out for a while. And most of the stuff that is gonna block is actual fraudulent activity.

And if you don’t know what a IP address is, it’s just a location on the internet where somebody is trying to access your website from. So your router, your wifi, has a specific IP address or a location that you are connecting from. So if a spammer is at home. Trying to test credit cards on your website, they’re gonna get blocked.

Anybody in that home is not going to be able to keep doing what they’re doing. And the reality is that most of that is actually bots or computer programs that are running and, trying to test hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of cards on a schedule. So it will shut those.

Fraudsters, scammers, and scammers down in their tracks. The other thing we implemented in lifter LMS 9.0 is the most advanced capture protection currently available. So there’s two types of the main tools that you can integrate with for free to create a kind of a login or checkout. Or registration blocker if somebody is not a legitimate human or real user of your site.

Those two integrations that we’ve added natively into the free version of LifterLMS one is called Recapture and the other is called Turnstile by CloudFlare. And basically what these technologies do, you basically sign up for free, you get an API key. You put it on your site and through the lifter LMS settings.

And what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna use the advanced capture technology that those companies have to essentially score your user’s behavior on your website. And if anything looks out of line like it’s a bot that’s like clicking on a million things at once. Or, too many like rapid actions all at once.

It’s not really a human activity and there’s a lot more that goes into scoring than just that. But just as an example it will stop those people from being able to register or log in or in some way get into your site when they’re not a legitimate user. And it’s likely, again, not a person, it is likely a computer program.

That a spammer or a scammer is using to try to get into your website. So LifterLMS is implemented the most advanced capture technology currently available for free to Protect You, and we have resources on our website that show you how to set it up. It’s really just a couple things you have to copy and paste and turn on, and you’re good to go and you have dramatically improved the security and protection of your website.

We also did a native deeper integration with Akismet, which is also an anti-spam solution that you can turn on to prevent spammers from registering and commenting and doing things on your website that you don’t want ’em. There to do. So Smit has been around WordPress for a really long time. I highly recommend it.

It’s a great tool. You can get started for free with that as well. Again, the integration of that is built for free into the core free version of Lifter LMS. Now, let’s talk about a different aspect of security. Let’s talk about your intellectual property, your content, your media. So lifter, LMS as if you’ve been using our learning management system, you know you have to enroll in a course or a membership, and maybe you have to pay to enroll or maybe it’s free.

But either way, you have to become a, a user of the site that is allowed or granted access to specific course content or other membership protected content on your website. That whole user system protects your intellectual property from just being public on the internet. And for a lot of people, they’re charging for access to their courses and memberships with Lyft or LMS, and it might not be lifetime access.

Maybe you have to pay a monthly fee or you sign up for an annual membership. There’s a million different pricing models you can implement, but in terms of protecting your intellectual property. WordPress has had a challenge for a long time where the way that it handles media, like in the WordPress Media Library, which you’ve probably heard of those media files are actually public on the internet, and a lot of people don’t realize that.

If you’re in a course, if you’re a course creator. And you’re adding a PDF or a PowerPoint presentation, or an audio file or a download of some kind to a lesson that’s actually publicly available in the media library, which ha, which means the way that it’s publicly available, unless you really get into the guts of WordPress.

You may not have realized that, but the WordPress Media Library, every file in there, every image. Every PDF, everything has a URL associated with it that is public to the whole internet. So LifterLMS has solved this problem so that if you add media inside of a course. Or membership protected areas you can select which course or membership someone needs to be actively enrolled in.

In order for that content to display on the screen. So basically we have solved the issue that WordPress has had for a very long time about the media library being public, and we don’t fault WordPress for that. It started as a blogging platform. So when people would add images to a blog post, there was no reason to protect that image file and it was just publicly available all over the internet.

So if you’ve ever used Google search and done an image search, a lot of times you’re just surfacing media files from the WordPress media Library, which is not protected by default. But Lifter, LMS has solved that with protected media. We have other innovations as well. Where, when you’re creating a course, let’s say you’re creating a quiz and you’re putting images into the quiz questions, all that stuff is automatically protected outside of the WordPress media library.

So the only the enrolled students in that specific course or membership can see that particular media. So we’ve given you both smart media protection that’s happening, where it should be at a global level. Also giving you the ability to restrict content anywhere on your website to specific courses and memberships.

And by content media files. So that’s something you should know about how the WordPress Media Library works, and it’s always been important to us to help course creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, school administrators. Protect their media assets. So we’ve locked that down to the maximum ability that you can, and there’s a lot more in lifter LMS 9.0, but I just wanted to highlight some of the top security innovations there.

And also just do a solo episode around security. Why it matters, what it is, how it works, why is it important, so for example. Lifter, LMS has a password strength setting that you can choose to make super strong, make it medium strength, or make it weak. Now, the, one of the most important things about website security is having particularly a site that has a lot of users on it, not just you as a WordPress administrator.

Or a couple people that work on the site. But if you have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users, every user account, ideally in a perfect world, would have a very strong random 16 character password that’s only ever used on that one website. It’s not also that person’s.

Bank account login or email account login or social media account login. Strong passwords are really important, and if you want to enforce that on your site, lifter, LMS, because people are creating accounts as they enroll in courses and memberships. They are, they’re essentially creating a user, a WordPress user on your website with a login.

So you can enforce that, Hey, you really need to have a strong password. Now, keep in mind that there’s also a concept of permissions. So in WordPress there’s a lot of different user roles, like the person who can do everything. The site owner is called the administrator, but there’s actually several other default roles like editors and authors and subscribers and so on.

In default, WordPress Lifter, LMS has roles too, the LMS manager, the student the instructor and these different levels have different per permissions. So all I’m trying to say here is even though your student has the lowest levels of permissions, ’cause they’re just a user that can log in and consume their course or membership content.

That doesn’t mean that if their pass, if their account got compromised, that somebody could come in and, start changing plugins or looking, doing, changing the website and stuff like that. The permissions are already way reduced to the necessary permissions for that user role. But even still a student is entitled to their, privacy and security. So even if you know your community of students or learners or clients are not security experts, you can still enforce a stronger level of security by using strong passwords. Now, if you’ve been on the internet for a while. Like myself, with over 15 years of being a power user, I probably have something like 3000 accounts in different apps and websites and logins and things, stores, whatever, on the internet.

Because of that, I use a password manager. I particularly like one password. And what that allows me to do is I don’t have to remember all my. Super strong, at least 16 character random passwords. My password manager, which has its own levels of security on it allows me to quickly create new logins that are always unique, always strong, and I can always log in from all my devices, from my phone, my laptop, my desktop, and so on.

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Chris Badgett: So if you’re old school, like we all were one day, you might’ve kept us. Spreadsheet, or even before that, you would write ’em down on a piece of paper, right? And then as you start getting more passwords, you start creating a spreadsheet, and then ultimately you graduate to using a password manager. And your whole world just gets so much easier, and you’re being a much more secure citizen of the internet by not reusing passwords, by always using strong passwords.

So I highly recommend that you start using a password manager. Like One Password or LastPass, and there’s some other ones out there. The other thing when it comes to security is you should always look at your users on your website. And particularly there’s a filter for who are all the administrator users on my website.

And when you look at that, you can see. Okay, there’s me, there’s a freelancer I work with, there’s my business partner and so on. But what happens over time with some people is, particularly if you are hiring out a lot of different people to work on your website, is you start handing out administrator passwords and they just exist on your site.

And maybe it wasn’t even. The business owner of who you were working with, it was a team member who worked there, maybe they’re not working there anymore, and so on. So it’s always good to review the administrators on your website. And if there’s anybody on there that you know is probably a great person but doesn’t need to be on there anymore go ahead and delete them, delete that user off the site.

Pro tip, when you delete a user, you can assign all their content to yourself or somebody else. You definitely want to do that. If that person was, creating content on your website and WordPress prompts you with how to do that. Another thing you can do is you can just reduce somebody’s role from being an administrator to being a subscriber.

So if somebody comes back, a freelancer you worked with, and they’re like, Hey. Let’s do another project together, and it’s been a year since we’ve worked together. You still have them as that lowest permission level as a subscriber, and you can just move ’em back up to administrator. Obviously, the most secure thing you could do is just delete that user and when you work with somebody, again, create a new admin user or whatever role user you need for them to work on your website.

Another part of security is having backups. So if something goes wrong, you need to be able to revert your site to basically restore your database and files. Now there are a lot of WordPress plugins that can help with things like backups, but the reality is, particularly in the WordPress learning management system, niches.

This is like table stakes for good hosting. So you should always have a good web host that is doing daily backups, even monitoring your site for anything that looks off or things not loading or the site is down. And you should also always have a web host that if there is an issue, even if you’re not a developer, all you have to do is call or send an email.

They can fix your site or restore it for you. So when you’re selecting web hosting, I highly recommend the middle to upper tier. Which does mean it’s more expensive. It’s gonna come with more of these security features built in. Blocking bad traffic for you so that you don’t have to do it as much on your own website.

And also. They have a quote, disaster recovery plan if something were to go wrong and you needed to restore your site. Another thing that lifter LMS does is it has a setting called copy protection. So if you turn that on, what that does is that allows you to. For your users not to be able to copy and paste stuff off of your website.

So if you have text content inside of a lesson or some members only content, they literally won’t be able to copy and paste. They get a little message if they try to do that. So that’s just another level of security. Now it’s important to note that. There’s only so much you can do. If somebody wants to pull out their phone and take a picture of what they see on your website while they’re a paying customer and logged in, there’s nothing you can do to stop that.

So security is a game of just do as much as you can, but people are people and if you have downloadable PDFs and you’re. Training, somebody may share that with a friend, and there’s only so much you can do about that. And another pro tip for you, a lot of course creators and membership site owners are using a tool called Vimeo for their videos.

I highly recommend Vimeo. It’s very popular among the course creator and membership site community. But there’s a feature that not everybody knows about. Vimeo Pro where you can set a website domain where the video is allowed to be playable. If you have a video, you put it inside your lesson and in Vimeo you say, Hey, this website is only, or this video is only playable on the website, my academy.com.

If somebody were to somehow find the link. To that video, they’re not gonna be able to play it through vimeo’s protection of that intellectual property through the domain level protection. So that’s just another layer of security that you can add to your WordPress LMS website. It’s one of the things that makes Vimeo great, and that’s super easy to set up and even set up as a preset.

So whenever you upload a video. To Vimeo, it will always have that protection on by default. So it can only be playable on your website. And if it’s only playable on your website and the video’s only published inside of an area like a lesson or a membership protected page, you’ll be protected in that way.

So Lifter LMS has long been known as the most secure. Learning management system for WordPress 9.0, which just released, has taken that to a whole new level to protect you, to protect your users, to protect your intellectual property, content, and media. So definitely check out lifter LMS 9.0. If you have any questions about that or about security in general feel free to reach out to the lifter LMS team.

I hope you enjoyed. This solo episode on security, I want to see you keep your WordPress LMS website secure follow best practices. It is okay to be human like. So let me give an example. If you enforce really strong passwords but your audience is particularly let’s say like older generation maybe not as good with passwords and they’re having trouble even just creating a strong password or knowing what that is.

’cause it needs special characters, numbers, capitalization, lowercase, and all this stuff. There are times when it’s okay to reduce your security stands to a medium strength password. Just to make sure your users can actually get into your site. But so it, you do wanna accommodate and not make things too hard.

But I always like to err on the side of being as secure as possible to make sure everyone’s protected, you, your users, your website, your content, and so on. Thank you for checking out this episode of LMS Cast and engaging in this conversation around security. If you have any questions on any of that, just reach out to us and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowVictor Julio Coupe reveals in his LMScast interview with Chris Badgett that his strategy for sales, particularly in the SEO space, differs much from the conventional, hard-pitch method.

According to him, the market is already weary of frequent outreach via email, LinkedIn, and other platforms, frequently from independent contractors or even artificial intelligence (AI)-generated profiles. He discovered that, regardless of language or location, cold pitching rarely succeeds as a result of this saturation.

Rather, Victor focused on connection and honesty to build his career. Instead of using forceful sales tactics, he spends time listening, building relationships, and asking prospects straightforward but insightful questions like “How are you doing?” This makes individuals feel at ease enough to talk about the true state of their companies, which inevitably sparks discussions about possibilities and requirements.

Additionally, he highlights that sales isn’t always about making a purchase; sometimes it’s about honoring current relationships, learning from others, and politely moving on when a fit isn’t found. Victor believes that his sincere, people-first approach sets him apart from the competition and fosters enduring trust in the sales process.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Victor Coupe. Victor is an expert in sales. He’s an expert in SEO. We’re gonna dive deep, particularly on sales today, what it is, how to do it, how to do it differently than you think you have to do it. But first, welcome to the show, Victor.

Victor Julio Coupe: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Badgett: How are you doing, my friend? Really great. I had so much fun with you when I was on an episode with you and I loved your energy and I thank you. I’m a talent scout. It is just something I do and I was like, this guy, is obviously great at sales, but just at a high level, for the agencies out there building LMS sites for clients or the course creators and coaches, they have a product or a service they need to sell.

What is sales like? How do you define it in a way that is probably different than what people are thinking? Perfect. I

Victor Julio Coupe: think especially in the SEO world sales is a very delicate talk and conversation overall, and I’m gonna give you a very quick rundown as to. Then I can come back to your question.

I decided to join the SEO world last year, so I’m not even a full you even presented me as a, as an expert. Thank you so much. Why? I’m not, I’m just a guy who likes to talk, likes to relate to people, likes to listen, and to really pay attention to what they’re saying. And as a bonus, I sell. That’s how it works for me.

That’s how it’s been working for almost, oh my God, I think seven years that since I started doing this, but. Again, the sales, talking to agencies, talking to people in SEO that might be listening to us right now, sales is very delicate because I don’t know exactly when this started, but when I got into the market it was already a thing.

You have a lot of freelancers, especially over on LinkedIn, connecting daily to a lot of people. And once you click accept, you’re gonna start being slapped all over your face with their pitches. So it’s very aggressive in a way that a lot of the market right now is exhausted. Really. They’re exhausted of going to LinkedIn and seeing those profiles that are, you see they have some common things in between them, usually.

It’s younger people, usually they don’t have a lot of information over on their LinkedIn account. Right now, you are able to find AI generated accounts, so AI faces, there is a human being behind it, but it’s not gonna be like Victor, it’s gonna be somebody else. So the SEO world, especially when we talk about selling SEO services, selling links, which is a huge product inside of the SEO market, is a very, as I said, delicate one, people are exhausted.

People receive emails, dms, even sometimes phone calls in a daily basis. So how I did it to. How can I say, separate myself from most of the noise. It looks counterintuitive, but I just stopped trying to sell. I stopped pitching. Of course, there is always a moment where you can, and you should, the elevator pitch, the thing where it’s okay, give me a 20 seconds pitch.

That’s a good thing for you to practice. And sometimes on elevators, that’s a good moment for you to literally pitch somebody. But I learned from my own use and my own time and efforts, spending hours and days outreaching people both on email and on LinkedIn to try and sell SEO. I noticed that it doesn’t work out.

You’re gonna find people on YouTube, on articles and blog saying that. Of course it doesn’t. Of course it must it must work for somebody out there. Otherwise this wouldn’t be a topic. But when I was trying it. Giving a little bit more, I think, detail so that people can either mimic or not. When I tried to do this, I tried over the uk, I tried in Portugal, I am living in Portugal, so same language I tried in Spanish, I speak the three languages by themselves, so Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

And I was teaching themselves those people with their own primary languages. And even so what I understood was most of them are never gonna reply back, never. They’re never gonna be bothered to reply back. And now with the information that I just shared, I understand why because it’s 10 new messages every day.

But not only that, SEO is has been around for such a long time. It’s not the hottest thing in the market right now. Whenever we think of the hottest thing, we think of AI something. We think of a software with ai. We think of FinTech, crypto. And go back to ai. That’s it. So even ads, I imagine SEO influencer, they have been around for a couple of years, so people know who they wanna work with.

If you wanna do SEO, some people already have in their top of mind, what’s the company that they’re gonna go after? Influencers, same thing. Paid ads, same thing. Of course you have new entries every day. You have new companies. There’s always gonna be somebody breaking from the masses. Still casing that sometimes you may be a different person and this may give you a different result.

But coming back to it, all selling SEO, from what I’ve learned from my time, so only talking about my opinion and my experience. Not saying that this is what everybody should be doing, but in my place it worked by being a nice guy, it worked. By genuinely asking, how are you doing in professional terms?

So let’s pretend I came across a case company in a conference, in an event, in a podcast. I wouldn’t be the one to ask them for their metrics or their priorities. I would just ask them, how are you doing right now? How is it going? Are you happy with who you’re talking to? Yes, Victor. I’m working with these agency.

They are amazing. Awesome. Who are they? Let me see what they’re doing. Not, I’m not gonna try and steal their customers because there’s also a lot of this in the market. No, I just wanna learn, I just wanna learn from who is doing it in a nice way. See if I can learn from their, not mistakes, but from the things that they got.

And apply it the same way. But again, Chris, if I. More than five times, Chris, more than 10 times. I promise you, I promise over camera. I don’t know exactly how to reply back to your question because people just like talking to me and I feel like just again, being there with your mind and your body and literally asking, looking at their eyes, how are you doing?

What’s going on? This makes so much of a difference in regards to sales. Because it makes them comfortable and they start sharing what what I usually said at my meetings was, open your heart. Let’s pretend we are in a cafe, or I’m a Tinder date. I’m a first Tinder date. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your traumas.

Tell me about the things that have happened. In the past, those that worked and those that did not work. And then I’m gonna tell you how I can see myself getting inside. Maybe I don’t. Maybe depending on the conversation, and this is something that a lot of salespeople don’t understand, sometimes the sale is not for you, is you can do whatever you want.

It’s not gonna work out. They already have a good supplier, a good provider, a good app, a good solution in house. That’s fine. Just say thank you. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for letting me know that this is working. Thank you for letting me know that this is how you’re behaving. Now I’m gonna collect myself.

I’m gonna drink a glass of cold water and I’m gonna think maybe I should do that as well. That’s how I feel. The SEO world is nowadays considering sales.

Chris Badgett: I have a background in anthropology and I love different cultures and cultural differences. Perfect. Tell us about selling in, let’s say, the United States, the uk, Europe, south America, Asia.

Perfect. Perfect. What are some of the differences that people may not think about when it comes to selling cross-culturally?

Victor Julio Coupe: It’s something that I never figured out that I would do. If I were to travel 10 years in the past and tell younger Victor that he was gonna be literally selling to all regions of the world, but Antarctica, because penguins still do not rank on websites, I would’ve left 10 years ago.

But now I am confident to say that yes, I did it all from all continents and it is different. Let’s talk first about the Americas because I think there is not much of a reason to separate the north from the south. Especially talking about Brazil, we Brazilians grow very much into how can I say this, but North America is like the golden standard for South America.

Brazilians want to be Americans. Brazilians wants to live like Americans. And you can even see this today, literally today in the politics version, you have Trump fighting against Brazilians Brazil’s President Lula. And you are gonna find people from Brazil defending the United States only because we grow by learning to love the United States.

So why am I saying this? Whenever I needed to sell to either Americans or Brazilians, FOMO would work wonderfully. The fear of missing out because it, the capital is mindset is way more stronger over on that region. Chris, why are you not doing SEO? Is it because, I don’t know, you are afraid or something, or you just don’t have the money?

Ah, Victor, I don’t like it. I don’t feel like that’s useful. I just, I’d rather pay ads and work with ads, sir. Nice to know. But do you also know that your main competitor is spending money on SEO? What? What is it that’s gonna change for you? Maybe you see, maybe it’s fomo, maybe you missing out on SEO will make sure that competitor that you hate will have the Porsche nine 11 that you don’t have, but that you don’t wanna have.

Resilience and again, I’m always gonna say this in my opinion, my experience, my time, Brazilians and Americans, they fear missing out very much so in a way where if you come to them. We have a good enough strategy and product and service and you know that the clo, the their closest competitors, sorry, are indeed utilizing the same service and product.

This by itself can turn like a light inside their head and say okay, maybe let’s pay closer attention to this. And then with that said, coming to Europe, whole different beast. As I said, in the Americas, there is more of a sense of urgency, way more of a sense of urgency. In Europe, Uhuh, it’s their timing.

If they want to, they’re gonna pick you up. If they want to, they’re gonna listen to you, but only if they want to, because if they have something else, even if it’s 1% more priority, they are gonna prioritize that other thing. Especially whenever we’re talking about sales. We talk about cold outreach because life would be beautiful. If it, we didn’t need to cold outreach to anybody, but since we do it is a huge part of a sales life.

So doing cold outreach in Europe, again with my experience with the companies that I worked for was also a different beast out together. In the Americas, the content could be more sales. As we say. We have a CTA about booking a demo. We have a CTA about get getting started. We have a CTA that would convert in Europe.

If you don’t give them a cold glass of beer first, you’re gonna have to work yourself very much hard to make sure that they even read you out. So how I did it in a way that it worked for me. To sell to European companies events. And conferences with Europeans, having beers and pizzas with them is a must for anybody who wants to literally grow themselves in the European market, they value the in-person communication way further than the Americans do.

The Americans are super great for cold calling. They are more open to the idea of getting a phone call. They are more open to the idea of talking to somebody unknown. Europeans are not like that. They are more closed. They are more in towards their own groups, so finding them in their natural habitat, just like an animal, usually works best.

Now coming to a close, we have the other side here of the world. We have the Asians and the Australians. Let’s put them together. This by itself, I feel is, I’m not gonna say it’s a mix, but if it’s a Chinese guy, maybe he’s gonna follow the American mindset a little bit closer because he’s more related to Americans.

If it’s somebody from Vietnam, if goes way more around the European side where you need to be nice, you need to. Go to the beach with them, have a dinner, have lunch talk. Just be fun. Be a nice person to be around. This is also what I found. Find the works in Asia, in Australia, since there is a. Sometimes there’s a lack of services in Australia, so they go with what they have.

I don’t think they have too much issues from, besides of huge spiders and kangaroos. So in Australia, if you’re also somebody with a reputation, with a credibility, high effort, and to understand that your good, they will go with it. And in Africa. Lastly, coming to Africa, it’s growing now. Which is great. I love the idea that Africa deserves so much to grow and it’s growing.

Now you have more companies investing money, buying from there, or even approaching Africans, and they are just lovely people. It’s so easy going, talking to any African whatsoever. They are, I think, because they have not been used to the idea of being freed good enough. They are just wonderful people to talk to.

They are way easier to understand what you’re trying to say, and if they don’t understand what you’re trying to say, they will let it go. So of course it always changes and an American can be shy and European can be an extrovert, so it will never be a formula, it will never be something that AI can replicate.

Which is good, but literally selling to these regions will make sure that you, by yourself as a salesperson, will have different personas of yourself depending on who you’re talking to. It is gonna change. It is always gonna change. And you need to understand, even with AI today, Chris if I were starting today and I knew already.

Or I listened to this podcast and I heard this guy named Victor talking to me about how different it is. I would go to JDPT and ask, okay, I’m selling SEO services for Americans and Europeans. What’s the difference? The AI will help for sure, but there is a difference and we must consider that.

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There’s also B2B versus B2C, B2C.

I know you got, I know you got your start in selling iPhones. Yes. Which business to consumer play and a business to business play is a different beast. There’s also like scale of business. There could be an enterprise client, lifter LMS is an example. We have big clients, but we also have.

What’s called A VSB, which is a very small business. It’s like a education entrepreneur, creator type person, but it’s still a business. It’s just a small one, especially in the beginning. How te what did you learn from selling iPhones and how are B2B versus B2C? The same and different?

Victor Julio Coupe: I think I got it very lucky by starting small.

Because it was yes, selling iPhones to ordinary people, okay? In city centers, in galleries, in small shopping centers. So we’re talking about your mom, we’re talking about your kid, we’re talking about your neighbor. Literally, we’re talking about any kind of people whatsoever. And what I learned, what it taught me can, instead of what I learned, but what it taught me was how to handle different egos.

Because when you’re talking B2C. You can’t, let’s that, let’s only pretend that we’re talking B2C. Even inside B2C, there’s gonna be an SMBA mito and an enterprise, meaning there’s gonna be the director who is wearing a tuxedo who is very successful. There’s gonna be that analyst. Victor here, normal guy, knows how to speak to people, knows how to behave, but doesn’t have infinite money.

And we’re gonna have intern Victor, who was me 15 years ago when I only had a minimum wage and I wanted an iPhone. So it’s always gonna depend what am I’m gonna sell? What are gonna be the benefits? What are gonna be the priorities for such people? So by understanding that a mother of two kids prefers battery over performance, but by also understand that the internal Victor prefers gaming over camera.

You start understanding that even though you’re selling the same product, I’m selling the same set of AirPods for the entire guy who is taking a bus and a train and leaves his home by eight in the morning and coming back at midnight. Battery is imported because he’s not gonna have a charger all the time.

But if I’m talking to Victor nowadays, who is mostly at home working remotely. Sure battery is important, but it’s not the best thing that I want because I have chargers all over my house, so I want quality. Now I’m looking for quality. I’m looking for something different. So why am I giving you all these examples?

When you take into consideration that B2C has different means and you apply to B2B, you’re gonna see that it’s all the same. It’s the same it’s people that you’re talking to. It’s becoming a cliche right now. People buy from people. Yeah, it’s true. But it’s a cliche, but it’s true. So when I was, let me give you a real example.

This I will never forget. Back in Brazil we have this company called XP Investments. One of the, one of the biggest ones, I think it’s the biggest one in regards to trading stocks. All of this FinTech world back in Brazil, and I had to sell to XP investments back in 2020, a little bit before COVID. And I was selling then an influencer platform that I worked at the time called Tagger.

And it, I never talked to XP about the cost of the product. I never talked to XP about onboarding. I never talked to them about, I don’t know, basic. Technology about the product itself? No. They wanted to know the ROI. Everybody wants to know the ROI, but it’s different when you’re talking to an enterprise and an S-M-B-R-O-I is a different thing for both of them.

For the enterprise level, they’re talking about millions and millions in more than a hundred percent in return over investment. That’s what makes them tick. When I’m talking to an SMB, if I give the guy 10% of return over investment, it’s already a good thing. It’s already 10%. So selling iPhones to entry level people and management level people taught me that it’s gonna be the same.

You need to ask the priority, and if you can’t ask the priorities, your job as a salesperson, to set the priority. To understand the priority. Because once you do, once you, you have that information. Doesn’t care. It doesn’t make, like it’s not gonna make a difference whatsoever if that person comes as a B2C or as a B2B lead.

Everybody has their ROIs and you need to understand, okay, how big of an ROI do, you need to talk to that people in relation to that other people. So you see again. And I wish there were formulas. I wish there were magic equations that I could just talk here on camera and say, if you are focusing on S and B, B2B, two B sales, you need to do X and Y and Z and enterprises A, B, and C.

But they’re all gonna be the same. What’s gonna changing between a small brand and a huge one is what they prioritize. Sure. But what you can give them back, if I can only give the enterprise company 10% of return over investment, that’s nothing for them. That’s literally nothing. For a small one, it is a lot of things.

Imagine you taking a huge ROI to a small company. Wow, that’s amazing. That’s even better. Sometimes life isn’t like that. So yeah, it’s. It’s different. Sure it is. You have tons of materials showcasing how different it is. How on B2C, you have to be more human on B2B, you have to be more about numbers. But if I can tell you this, Chris, I noticed, especially after COVID, that the companies that closed the deal with me, they closed the deal with me because of support, because of credibility and authority and because they liked having a good time around with me sometimes because they were friends.

Let’s not pretend that this doesn’t exist. Of course it does. Of course it does. Being well connected, being well networked, pays too much, but it’s always gonna be a case of you understanding first who you’re talking to. Then applying those settings to your mindset and going to market with that mindset filtered for that specific type.

Customer, no matter if B2C or B2B, you need to understand what moves them forward. As I said, is it better for somebody who stays out of home all day long or is it quality for somebody who’s always nearby a charger and wants to extract the maximum out of the investment? There you go.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Victor. I have a challenge I wanted to propose to you.

Oh, nice. It’s commonly known in like B2B software companies. There’s a challenge with moving from founder led sales to a sales team and getting perfect, developing a sales function within a business that isn’t necessarily founder led. It’s also true for an agency. I know a lot of agencies who feel like the agency owner always has to do the sales or do the closing.

For course creators and subject matter experts, they’re like it’s my brand, it’s my authority. I have to do sales. And of course, you have to do that in the beginning when you’re a one person show. And there are great salespeople and not so great salespeople. How do you help people that are stuck in this like founder led sales cage?

Nice. Get out and empower their sales team. Find good salespeople, give them what they need to be successful. Let’s look at this problem of founder led sales.

Victor Julio Coupe: I think we can even talk about King Show, the company that I’m working for right now. Yeah. S Show Media is a UK agency that has been working since 2008.

The founder has been the sales guy. Yeah. I am the first, I am the first step towards having a sales team. That came show is taking right now. So up until literally now, I’m still not selling. It’s very, it’s a very new venture for me. So I’m still learning. I’m still doing a lot of things behind the scenes, but I’m still not going to market to sell.

And what’s gonna change, because right now the customers that came show has, they were all acquired through the founders. The founders were there. The founders made sure that it worked, and they’re not gonna be there anymore because I was hired. Because the founders don’t wanna be salespeople. They don’t like to talk.

They’re not extroverts. So they are amazing technical guys, but they’re not the social type of people that are always there on stage. On conferences. On podcasts. They don’t like this. When I got into my first day, and I understood that as you said, so yourself, this company was founder led, the sales efforts were founder led.

I immediately asked them what is it that they managed to give in order to sell? Was it their expertise or was it just because they were at the right place at the right time? Was it because something else altogether and then I learned, yes, in their case, this is an SEO agency and an affiliates agency.

Having knowledge of what works and what doesn’t is very important here. It’s most of the services knowing what you’re doing, but I’m not selling my boss’s face or his name. No. What I did, what I am gonna be doing, and this is something that a lot of people can definitely mimic and copy and go and try themselves up, is I shared the knowledge itself without naming the knowledge.

So I shared that we have IGA experience since 2008, but I don’t share that the person that has the knowledge is the founder. At the end of the day, if I’m doing code outreach. The lead that doesn’t know who the founder is, nor who the sales team is, right? He doesn’t know anything at all. So instead of focusing on a person, on a face, on a history and a name, I took that person and I actually spread them to become this whole company, which is came true.

And when somebody asks me, Chris, when you ask me, Victor, what it is that you do? Oh, Chris, we are a company that has been doing SEO and affiliates for iga, casinos, battings, sometimes cryptos and fintechs since 2008. Therefore, we managed to update ourselves. A lot of times we had a lot of mistakes that are now fixed.

So if you’re starting now. You don’t know what’s yet to come. The chances of us already been through that thing are very high, so you’re gonna buy from me the security. The comfort of knowing that Key Show Media has been doing it since 2008. But let me tell you this, Ken Show has not been around since 2008.

The founders have, both of the founders. They have been working with casinos since 2008, and that’s proven. But the company itself has two to three years. So coming to your question and finalizing it. The challenge itself, moving from founder led to team, led to product led to service led, whatever. You don’t need to get a, you don’t need to remove the founder from the equation.

You don’t need to remove the knowledge, the expertise, the authority of the founder from the equation. But you can, and you should stop talking about the founder if you wanna scale, because otherwise we don’t want astronomer CEO type of problems here where, the CEO E is gonna be. Yeah, we don’t want that.

Let’s just take what the CEO has built. Let’s just take what the founder has built. He has built so many things. He was there for so many years. We take the history of the man, but we remove the man. We just talk and by men, human being can be a woman of course. And what I’m saying literally is.

Let’s not disregard the history, but let’s talk it in a different pitch. It’s not about Chris, it’s about Lifter. It’s not about the founders here, Alessandro Art Lummi. It’s about Kahu. So yeah, Kahu is Alessandra and Lummi Lifter is Chris and his team. So Alessandra and Lummi, they’re always gonna be around.

They’re always gonna be a point of the conversation whenever I’m selling, but I’m not gonna be selling their faces. I’m not gonna be selling. Their ideas. I’m selling their breakthroughs, their mistakes, their WANs, and of course, once this all came together, here’s K show media, let’s work together. The story itself is already very nice to be told.

You don’t need to be, you don’t need to be very you don’t need to change your mindset altogether. But, and this Alessandro, I think he, he knows very well. You do need somebody that. Can understand that very easily because one thing that I saw already happening, mostly in Brazil, were salespeople wanting to become bigger than the brand they were selling.

This happens, let’s talk about football again. You have players who sometimes feels like they’re bigger than the club and they start charging things on the club. You have em, mba, G, you have mass at Barcelona, Ronald Mad or Juventus, don’t turn into that guy. You’re not Christian or Ronald.

Another, you’re not El mess. They were enchanting millions of people all over the world. You’re only enchanting your mother, your spouse, and your kid. So what I would say is if you’re a founder, you are looking to scale, but you’re looking to also step away from the sales machine itself. You are gonna have to hire somebody who likes to talk.

Yes. And usually this comes. Easier in some regions. But you are also gonna have to share with that salesperson exactly how you made it happen so that person can take your stories and start sharing that same stories. But instead of, Chris did this, it’s lifter does this. This is a, I think that of course, I’m not giving here a full structure of how they can grow, but I think this by itself can be a good starting point.

Chris Badgett: This is awesome. Victor. As a side note, maybe you should do a course on sales one day just for your personal brand. That would be fun. But

Victor Julio Coupe: let me actually talk one minute about this, Chris. Yeah. I was this weekend here in the public parking Porto. It was nine. It was on Sunday. It was 9:00 PM The sun was setting, and we were literally about to leave.

Then two guys approached me. It was me, my wife, and my friend, a close friend of mine. The guy approached me and he was like, he was very high, but he was around his 40, 45. So he was like, you look like a very nice guy, and you look like you know about a technical pla, a technical club around your port. I was like, ah, I know.

Good for you. Random dude. I know. But then I just, we were ready to leave and I wanted to leave. Sometimes even though I like to talk too much, sometimes my battery dies very fast. And I, and they didn’t want us to leave. They started talking and they started talking. My wife jokes about this ever since again, it happened two days ago and she was like, honey, what is it that you’re always charming European man?

And they’re always talking how good you sound, how perfect your English is, and how extrovert you are. And that’s the point Chris. If I were to do a sales course or a course, whatever, it would be about teaching people to be Victor, and I don’t want them to, because I don’t know what makes me be me.

I just am. I just. Open my mouth without thinking. I just smile to everybody without considering that I should smile or not. I’ve been assaulted and robbed more than 10 times already in my life because I was too much of a nice guy. But sometimes a Robert came to me, he asked for the hours. I said it was 2:00 PM He was like, nice cell phone.

Give it to me. There is, I don’t know if this is something that I can put in the course, but I appreciate the comment. Of course. It’s nice to know that. People like how I behave, but if I could tell people what they should do, if I were to go back in time, or if I were to talk to somebody who’s young and is starting their own sales life right now, I think if you are gonna be doing sales, unfortunately being introvert might hold you back.

You need to like to talk. You need to like to be the center of attention. You need to like to have all eyes around you. You need to like to be a speaker because this plus a sales role equals success.

Chris Badgett: That’s it. Just to challenge you and push back that sense in that feeling you have is very similar to the founder led sales dilemma.

Just throwing that out there because a business has a product, but a business also is a product and a function like sales is a product. And so it is that founder led trap. And I, it’s that it’s a hundred percent. It’s Last question for you. Love your feedback on this. There’s common, somewhat common knowledge in the course creation space or really selling anything that there’s, I’m gonna talk in United States dollars.

But basically 500, below 500 or even a thousand dollars. There’s a concept of we can do all the sailing with a sales page. I’m not gonna, I don’t need to talk to somebody to buy a $20 course on Udemy or potentially a thousand dollars course from a influencer that I’ve been following for years.

I trust ’em. It’s fine. Once you get up into the, like the 2000 to 5,000. You could do a webinar and do like group sales so you can bring that sales process. And then above that it’s considered high ticket. There’s definitely needs to be a one-on-one conversation and so on.

Just what advice do you have somebody who’s trying to figure out how to sell at the different levels? IPhone as an example, is a thousand bucks or whatever. It’s it’s on the high side of low ticket, but you still talk to people and Apple has done a lot of marketing and, influencing and branding over the years, but at the different price points, what advice do you have?

Victor Julio Coupe: I, I think I can do a parallel with iPhone selling. Because you have $200 iPhones and you have a thousand dollars iPhones. Of course Apple does all the heavy lifting. You don’t need to explain why one sells over the other. But one thing that I notice in regards to the pricing gap between the 200 and a thousand is if somebody buys a 200 iPhone, which right now would be what?

An iPhone 12, and they don’t like it. Or battery doesn’t last that long, or the camera is not the best, it’s okay to let it go because you only spend $200, right? But if you are buying from the newest iPhone, the 16 chrome max, you want it to do everything. You want it to last longer than a day. You want the pictures to be crystal clear.

So if you were to put that into courses, what I would say is Apple. As we all know, huge company, one of the biggest, if not the biggest. They don’t need to showcase that their iPhone is good enough for people to buy, right? But here they are every single year doing huge multimillionaire events only to talk about the newest, most expensive iPhone.

So even Apple needs to separate months of their schedule to create an event to showcase the newest iPhone. I think you, as a course seller who is charging a thousand dollars for a course, should also take the time to put your face around the camera. Now with ai, we have AI avatars, right? You can.

Talk to the camera for three minutes within this AI avatar software, and then it’s gonna create a video of you talking. But it was never you. Why am I saying this? People are seeing how easy it is to pretend, to care, to pretend, to be around, to pretend, to put your face, to pretend to even go live.

Those that. Don’t follow the AI route and still put their human side content up on the internet. On Instagram, if you’re selling a product on LinkedIn, if you’re selling a service, I think this by itself. Can lead to more sales because you’re gonna be building what authority, and this is what SEO is all about right now.

Google wants all websites and all articles and all blogs to have authority. And what do they say by that? Is that they want Q real humans writing the content. They don’t want ai. There is this SEO expert, her name is Lily, and she taught me something that I will never forget about it. Google doesn’t want people from the Philippines writing about the top 10 best restaurants in New York.

They want New Yorkers who are living in New York for a set amount of dates. And times to talk about their experience, not Trip Advisor rankings. So what I, what if I am. And if I can tell that to anybody who is gonna be selling a thousand dollars course before it’s high ticket one bro. Si, put your face around.

Sew yourself. Create an Instagram. Be there. Go to events, take pictures, go to network round events. Shake hands, just, and the more you can do for yourself in regards to authority and to positioning. Not even talking about your course courses, not even talking about, it’s just showcasing the victory exists.

Because once you exist, you can, what term in English, but people can take you for accountability. Is that how you say? Yeah. We know where Victor is. We know that Victor is always in this white. Okay, I’m gonna buy it. It makes it easier. It makes it easier for people to buy from Victor knowing that he’s always in this living room, that he’s always talking on camera, that he’s, he was online in July of 2024, and he’s still online in July, 2025.

It’s a thing that pizza. Places back in Brazil, you should do a lot. Like since 1998, since 2005, cooking the best pizzas. Yeah. Great. Because this shows me, and it’s fine if it since 2025, but in 2027 it’s gonna be two years. So from day one, put your faces around from day one, start talking to the company.

Not to the company, sorry, to the audience. As both you human being and as the founder of the company, it might not give you quick results. It might not be, instant, but if you keep on doing it, just like SEO, if you keep on doing it, if you keep on placing links and articles and keywords, eventually Google’s gonna.

Showcase you more around the first page and that’s when money will come. I don’t see any reason as to why a course seller shouldn’t do anything, similar to this. So yeah, that’s it. Show your face, be around, go to podcasts, come to Crisis podcast. I think this by itself is a, is what everybody should start and try to do for sure.

Chris Badgett: Victor, this has been awesome. Thank you for dropping so much wisdom and knowledge around sales and. Just where can people find you if they want to connect? Perfect.

Victor Julio Coupe: They can find me on LinkedIn. I love being on LinkedIn, so this name by itself is the, is a unique name. You can find me over at Victor Kopay on LinkedIn.

You’re gonna find me@kingshowmedia.com as well. I’m working over there, as you can see by the subtitle here. But come on, let’s connect on LinkedIn. Send me a message, send me a dm. As long as you are Openheartedly wanting a conversation, I am gonna be there to reply back to it for sure. And of course, I think you can find me at a future episode at Lifters LMS podcast because I am more than open to being around here to talk more about sales.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. We’ll definitely have to do that. There’s so much more we could go into. We will have to do a Joe Rogan episode and go for two and a half hours or something like that. But I,

Victor Julio Coupe: I, I would be

Chris Badgett: open, I would be open. Thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris.

Victor Julio Coupe: Thank you,

Chris Badgett: Chris,

Victor Julio Coupe: and thank you.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast, Zachary Katz from GravityKit presents Gravity Board, a WordPress add-on for Kanban project management that integrates Trello-like features into your website.

Zachary Katz founded GravityKit, a business that creates robust Gravity Forms add-ons like GravityView, which gives customers extensive options for how to display and manipulate form data on their WordPress websites. Using customisable phases like to-do, in progress, and done, Gravity Board, which is built on top of Gravity Forms and GravityView, lets users graphically organize tasks.

Gravity Board’s primary benefit is that all data is self-hosted. Which is particularly advantageous for institutions who are unable to rely on external SaaS technologies. Such as government agencies or internal business websites. Onboarding, project tracking, and other internal procedures may be easily streamlined using Gravity Board’s capabilities. Which include task assignment, filters, and automation rules that transfer objects across columns depending on form submissions. All of this is possible while maintaining control over your data within WordPress.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend, he’s back on the show. It’s Zach Katz from Gravity Kit. We’re gonna be diving into Gravity Kit’s newest add-on, which is called Gravity Board. It’s really awesome in terms of project management. Creating a, Kanban, Trello style board in your site.

There’s lots of ways to use that as an agency or as a course creator. But first, welcome back on the show, Zach.

Zachary Katz: Hi Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it was fun to get into this I mentioned this. I think every time we talk on this episode. Somebody once told me that all the internet is and websites are, is a bunch of forms.

And once I like really understood that deeply, I’m like, oh my God, this is wild. Then Gravity Kit has this flagship product, gravity View, which allows you to display form data on your website site in interesting ways. We use it in many ways at Lifter LMS, but let’s drill in on Gravity Board. Why did you, what is it and why did you create it?

Zachary Katz: Yeah, so Gravity Board is a Kanban style board. Plugin that it replaces Trello. Essentially it can replace Trello if people have also used GitHub projects. It’s similar to that, where GitHub Projects has a way of seeing it in in a vertical columns mode where you can assign tasks by dragging them across columns and update the statuses.

By dragging each individual task through a ready for building all the way through completed. And each of the stages of that project are represented by a column on the board. Gravity Board, we built it because people were using Gravity View to do a lot of project management, where every time something needed to happen the form would a, they would submit a form that says, this is another task that needs to be done.

It would be shown in a gravity view table, for example, or it’d be shown in a gravity view custom layout that they built to try to mimic the behavior of Trello or of similar, functionality. And we realized that we could be doing this ourselves in a much better way than Gravity GravityView is able to do by having it be purpose built.

And we purpose built it to be really good at. At project management, but also at being able to visually see quickly all the different stages of your data no matter what kind of projects you’re trying to optimize.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And a Kanban board or is so powerful. I remember discovering this as the agency owner.

I think when you just start out, we all try to manage projects over email and then the complexity gets a little outta hand.

And then, let’s see. I’ve used Trello. I’ve used Basecamp, Asana GitHub and others. I’m trying to think of that other one. But Monday, yeah, monday, monday.com. But then one of the cool things about WordPress and all the innovation and entrepreneurs here is.

Like fluent CRM okay, we can have a CRM just on the WordPress website instead of this separate SaaS tool. And you were like, Hey, instead of paying for Trello or whatever else. Why not do it on your site?

Zachary Katz: Yeah. And it’s interesting, one of the most fervent customers of the users of the add-on is a government employee who said that their government contracts prevent them from using external services like Trello to manage their data.

But they can use Gravity board ’cause all of that information is on their own website. It’s not being sent externally. So that was a really good representation of the power of WordPress and the power of owning and hosting your own content.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and we get that a lot in the LMS space as well, particularly with internal company training portals that kind of want to have their own website.

We have add-on called Private Site that locks it down from the public internet. But instead of having to in parallel run some project management tool, like a lot of internal training. LMS sites are for, onboarding new employees,

Zachary Katz: right?

Chris Badgett: So part of onboarding new employees is like filling out a form that needs to go to HR or whatever.

And now you can do that. You can get the data through the gravity form, even have it viewable on the site with gravity view, and then also set up the HR team member to do whatever they need to do with that data, right? Manage like a big company. ’cause you can only keep track of so much of that stuff by email, right?

Zachary Katz: That’s true. And intranets are an excellent, and onboarding are excellent use cases where in combination with other add-ons currently. But we’re looking into adding this built into gravity board. You can update values using logical rules that you create so that let’s say you’re onboarding somebody and they submit a form that can automatically move the.

Did they submit this form from no to yes columns, for example or like maybe they completed a bunch of steps and that allows them to step to move into a new a new phase of their onboarding. We’re working on automation integration with automations tools that will allow that type of thing to happen.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And if you’re new to Kanban boards, and we’re gonna do a demo in a little bit just to show how this works. So if you’re listening in your earbuds or listening to the podcast audio only, this is also on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. Just do a search for Zach Katz or Gravity Board, and you’ll find this episode.

But the way, like when I’m teaching a new team member how to use our tr, our Kanban board. It’s the simplest way to think about it is to do, doing and done, right? These are the, there’s only three columns, right? So that’s the process. There’s a list, there’s a bunch of stuff to do. There’s a bunch of cards for each of those things when you’re working on it, actively move it to the in doing column.

And then when you’re done moving to the done column, but that’s the power of process. That’s a very simple process, like to-do list in progress. Done. But there’s all kinds of more complex processes. Like I know when I’ve used Kanban boards, some of them have 15 columns. And the, and multiple team members working on different columns or collaborating on different cards or whatever.

Zachary Katz: Yeah. They were created, the concept was created, I believe, by Toyota to track the progress of building a car on the factory floor to see. What has been done already and what hasn’t been done. So they had a bunch of different stages of the development process. And I might be wrong about this, but you could look up the history.

But it’s cool that it started in a manufacturing world. And now if you have, if you are a website builder, there are a lot of steps that you need to keep track of when you’re building a website. Okay, do we have the design? Yeah. Has it been coded? Is the code reviewed by, code? People. Has it been accessibility checked?

Has it been staged on the staging site and tested there? It been merged into live and has it been tested again, like all of these, everything that I just said represents a stage that you can move the. Each project through on visually on your ban board and ban Kanban. I never know what to say. Chris and I currently say Apple like banana and banana.

But that’s fine. You could say that however you want. And so what we were doing while building Gravity Board was using Gravity Board. To track the process of building Gravity Board. So we were dogfooding it and saying okay, here are some features that need to be built. And then I moved them into, currently being built.

And one of the cool things about Gravity Board is you can assign these different tasks to different people. So you can filter the tasks that are assigned to you that are due in the next week. You can set up all these filters and see only the most important tasks that are needing to be done right away all visually.

And a really nice user interface. So task management is important, and Gravity Board, I think is a great task manager.

Chris Badgett: Another thing that’s great for agencies and course creators is the sales process, like the handoff from marketing to sales. And this is why it’s so awesome. It’s integrated with.

Gravity forms. ’cause you can start at like the top of a marketing funnel. Yep. You could have somebody opt in to get a lead magnet and WP Fusion or whatever pipes that data to whatever your CRM is. But it also creates a card perhaps on that opt-in form. You ask for other information like team size or budget or.

Niche or something like that, that you use as a scoring mechanism for who are the best leads, and then that can go into a follow-up process and based on how, what they filled out, certain leads are priority over others. And then maybe there’s like a attempt to schedule a one-on-one sales call, if you’re doing high-end coaching or selling an expensive website.

Where we’re talking thousands of dollars. A lot of those things require a human interaction on a call of some sort. And then you get the call scheduled stage and then you get, then you move into the closing process of like closed and in sales there’s this concept of win loss at the end. But like that would be perfect with Gravity Board to.

To manage lead flow for agencies and course creators and coaches.

Zachary Katz: Absolutely. And when I got started doing doing web stuff, I would cold call the Yellow pages one person at a time, and I would and I would, check them off if if I had done it. If you have, cold leads, warm leads, hot leads tracking their progress using a K Ben board is perfect.

I don’t like to look at a table all the time, and I don’t like to look at a CSV, like a spreadsheet. That makes me sad. I don’t like spreadsheets. But I like to look at things in a Canada board. It just makes sense to me more so you can re-visualize the same content in different layouts in gravity forms admin on the entries table in a table on Gravity view.

You can see it in a table and, but you can also manage the same content. And when you update it in Gravity board, it also updates in gravity forms and on gravity view. So it’s nicely integrated with the rest of the ecosystem.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I think the other big unlock with a Kanban board is when it’s more than just one person working on a project.

Yeah. You have teams. So if we use our sales thing, you may have somebody that works in marketing, somebody who does the sales calls maybe somebody else who does the closing call, the like final sales call, and then maybe. A customer success manager or something to manage, or a coach to manage the project after it’s sold.

And those are like five different people. And maybe there’s teams of people within each of those divisions. How do you think about like how does Gravity board work with like assignees or teams?

Zachary Katz: Yeah. So one of the ways that you could do that during, in like this leads example, is that somebody would assign somebody else when a lead comes in that they receive the lead.

Okay, I know this person is the person who should be assigned, so they assign them. That person does the first call and confirms that they’re a viable lead, then they assign to somebody else. And that can happen with inside the card itself. You can choose different assignees at that time. You can also at each stage leave a note.

So let’s say you call somebody and they weren’t there, you add a note to the lead, and you say, I tried contacting them and it didn’t work. I’m gonna call back later. So then you update the due date and it shows up in the Kanban board as due on a certain day. And as it approaches it, it changes color to show you that it’s ready to be, acted upon.

And so let’s say you follow up and you contact them and they’re ready to go. They need to be moved to a different stage with a customer success manager. You update the assignee, you add a note so that everybody’s on the same page regarding the lead and what you talked about. All of this is inside your WordPress website using Gravity Forms on your own, with your own data.

And you can at mention people and they get emails. You can have all sorts of notifications set up so that everybody’s informed all the time with what the project status is.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s amazing with teams like as an entrepreneur, you can come in and look at absolutely everything, but also in, when you’re in execution mode, you can look at which are my cards?

And simplify the right and stuff like that. If you would spin up a demo and if you’re listening just head on over to the lifter LMS YouTube channel and do a search for Gravity board, and you’ll find this. If you wanna see this in action, but we’re gonna take a look at this awesome innovation.

Zachary Katz: Alright by the way, if you want to sign up for your own Gravity Board demo site, you can go to. Site dot try dot gravity kit.com and sign up for a demo there, or go to the Gravity kit website and and go to the Gravity board page and there will be a button that says, try a live demo. And you can get the exact same content that I’m gonna show you on this demonstration.

It, I’m just using a stock demo right here. So what we’re looking at is the gravity kit all board screen where if you’ve created a CanBan board that it shows up there. But let’s take a step back and go start with a gravity forms form. We have a form here called tasks, and the form has the task name a priority, like a medium, low, high, critical, the description of the task due date and the status.

The statuses that we have set up currently are backlog. I don’t know why it’s not showing up, but backlog in progress, et cetera. So we have a bunch of entries that have come in from this form with each task represented as an entry in gravity forms. So a task called update website copy, low priority has a due date assigned to it, status backlog.

Each one of these entries is going to become a card and a Kanban board. And what do I mean by that? I’m gonna click into the existing board that we have where we can configure the gravity Board to be connected to the gravity forms form that we were just looking at. So the lane field and the lane is the column.

I’ll show you this on the front end. So each one of these columns is a lane. So backlog, active, ready for review, complete in future. Each one of those is a lane, and you have the option to choose what field from the form you want to be the columns. So here we’ve chosen status, but you can also choose, okay, let’s say the priority is a lane and you can move between.

When you move a card between lanes, it changes the priority from high to low priority. So you can configure the fields, that you want to be mapped to the cards. The due date is the due date of a form field, for example. You can enable and disable different functionality including entry notes and assignees and really cool stuff.

You can enable card checklists and this is a nice thing where you can have subtasks and I wanna show you this, so I just enabled checklists and I’m gonna refresh the front end here and open up Update website copy. Now this is assigned to a user called John James. If I wanted to assign it to somebody else as well, I could add assignees by clicking their user profile images here and remove them as by clicking them as well.

So this is an example of, okay, I wanna assign this to Matthew Markon, and I wanna set the priority to. High. Okay. High priority. And then describe the the task. So this task is critical to meet our launch goals for updating website copy. But what does update website copy mean? That’s where checklists come in and you can have multiple items that are associated with updating website Copy change the header text to.

Cool. And when you add a checkbox here. You can add multiple items and you can see that the checklist is marked off. It shows zero out of two are completed. And when you check off the checkbox, it updates the progress bar to say one out of three completed. And that is also visible on the front end where you can see one outta three has been completed on the front end of the card.

So you can get a good summary on. From the Kanban board view, or on the entry details modal. And you can filter then by saying, okay, I only wanna see tasks that have incomplete checklists. And that allows you to quickly drill down on these are tasks that still have items that are remaining for me to do.

I also wanna see ones that are overdue or due in the next day. And you can really quickly identify, oh shoot, I need to do. All of this stuff or let’s say you’ve update website copy is no longer backlog, but it’s actively being worked on. You simply drag it from backlog to active, drop it, and then updates the card status in the backend on gravity forms.

So that update website copy now is active in Gravity forms itself. If you look in the backend here, and you can see in the columns of the Gravity Forms entry table. The status has been updated to backlog or to active, and when it’s done, you move it to ready to review. And that’s been updated in gravity forms as well.

So it’s a different way to visualize gravity forms data, but because of the functionality that we’ve added with checklists and things like attachments where the cards can have items attached to ’em.

It makes it okay, so you wanna update website copy. You might need some assets. So let’s add a, let’s add an LMS text file to make sure that’s get us gets updated on your new website. And once you’re done you can say, Hey John James, this has been completed. And when you at somebody using the at mention functionality, they’ll get an email if they for each mention that you give.

So John James, this has been completed. They’ll get an email if you decide you need to change this to have more information ’cause that’s not very helpful. Ready for your review and you can update the note as well. And then John James will be able to see, Hey, it’s assigned to John James as well. Save the card and and that’s all

Chris Badgett: set.

Wow. That’s awesome. And while Zach was doing that awesome demo, I just looked up and on January 9th in 2017, Atlassian, a tech company acquired Trello for $425 million. And this kind of innovation here, like what I’m seeing is it does what. Trello does, but now you can do it on your website. It’s literally a multi-hundred million dollar of value that’s sitting inside of gravity kit all access pass or in the you can get the individual add-on if you just want Gravity Board.

But this is really cool. And unlike Trello as an example because it’s WordPress base, and correct me if I’m wrong here. You’re not, you don’t get charged more based on the number of users,

Zachary Katz: right? Number of users, unlimited number of entries, unlimited number of forms, unlimited. And you can have multiple boards that are set up to be filtered for different users.

So you, you might want one board, let’s say a roadmap, a public roadmap, and you have each feature in work in on a roadmap on your website, like planned on doing in progress and done. You could have a public version of that people are not able to update and they’re only able to see and browse, but, and search, but they’re not able to change.

But then you could have the same form that’s powering a different board for internal users where internal users are able to update the statuses and leave notes and actually communicate about the status of things. It’s all, we designed it all to be very secure so that all the data is going through one, one endpoint that is able to be monitored closely in terms of the the data that’s going out.

So we have lots of security guards to make sure that only the people who are supposed to see the data do see the data, and you can manage these missions using, a very in depth board permissions page for who can add checklists, who can view them, who can add attachments, who can view them. Entry notes, assignees lanes.

You can lock it down or open it up as much as you want, including the ability for this to be the source of your feature request form. You can have feature request forms that are completely powered by Gravity Forms and gravity Board where people can add. A new feature to by just clicking add card and they can add a new feature request.

And that’s easy to do. And you can only filter, you can filter to only include the ones that have been reviewed if you want to have a review status so that the administrator could decide whether or not to show it on the public page.

Chris Badgett: Wow, this is this is really cool. I think I’m gonna get off this call and go cancel my Trello subscription because this is this is really awesome.

And just to clarify what you were saying on front end versus back end,

Zachary Katz: right?

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Like you said, the public, you could have a public board, like a feature roadmap for a software company, say, so that’s like on the front end or, and so where does the, where do these boards live? Are they sure? Is it all front end and it’s based on user permissions?

Who sees it? Or is it backend or both? Or what is it?

Zachary Katz: So you can have, you can view gravity board boards inside the backend as of the WordPress dashboard. And that’s what I’m doing here. You can see it works just as well in the backend as well as it does on the front end. You don’t need to embed this on the front end of your site at all if you don’t want to.

It can be fully internal, but we do offer blocks. And let’s say you wanted to have a page called, future requests.

You can add a Gutenberg block that says Gravity Board, and then you choose the board you wanna display and you publish. And just like that you have the board embedded in a page. One of the cool things about Gravity Board is we’ve added full keyboard integration. So if you wanted to know what keyboard shortcuts there are, you can press shift question mark and you can browse completely using your keyboard.

So let’s say you wanted to. Navigate around using up and down. You can’t necessarily see what I’m doing, but I’m pressing the side to side keys. It’s selecting the other selecting different cards, and if you hit enter, it opens the card and you can tab through the forms, add items as you want, and then hit escape to close it slash opens the filters, and you can search for something like SEO, for example, to only show cards that are related to SEO.

You can hit escape to close that hit f to go full screen. And full screen mode is the way I like to use it. ’cause I don’t like to have my content be limited by the size of my windows.

Chris Badgett: I love this. It’s so powerful. You can use a Kanban board as an individual, just like setting your daily goals and stuff.

You can use it, if you’re building a site for a client, maybe the client’s gonna use it to manage a coaching process, onboarding process, learning objective. There’s so many different ways you can use these boards and it make brain not hurt as bad trying to keep track of everything.

Zachary Katz: That’s true. Apple Notes recently added canman board layout to their actually Apple reminders. That is, you can say okay, I use reminders on my phone, apple reminders for stuff I need to do around the house, refill the bird feeder, take it, take the trash to the transfer station, like all sorts of things I need to do, mow the lawn, et cetera.

And I like to go move the item from, not done to done. And I like to see those visually sometimes in a canman boards layout. I’ve been using Gravity Board for Gravity board development, and we are just getting started. We’re going to be moving from user voice for feature requests. We’re going to be using gravity Board instead.

And the feature request board is not just a hypothetical. We’re gonna be doing this soon ourselves.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And if that’s it for the demo, I might pull this off and

Zachary Katz: yeah,

Chris Badgett: We do have a question from a live podcast watcher, so I’ll pull it up on the screen. I’ll I’ll start with it and give you time, Zach, to wrap your head around it.

But Jennifer says that she owns a micro school. Would I be able to utilize this tool to create learning objectives or specific skills by subject? Each student needs to master throughout the year. My first reaction to this is if you particularly have some manual grading and feedback processes in your courses or coaching programs or schooling where you need to keep track of students and they’re submitting some things and you’re grading and making sure they’re getting the concepts and obtaining the learning objectives.

It’s a little chaotic the way you run it. Now, this might be a great way to just transfer your process of how you think about achieving a learning objective to two stages and like how that fits with your course or lesson flow. And you can manage that with gravity board. ’cause there’s, there’s quizzes, assignments, grading, progress tracking.

But when you add something like. Kanban board on top, you’re just making your learning platform and process even more effective, easier to manage. And particularly if there’s a group of people working on it, everybody can collaborate much easier. But I’ll pass it over to you. Zach, what thoughts do you have on this one?

Zachary Katz: Yeah I’m trying to imagine how this would, it would be set up using a gravity board and the lanes might be stages of learning. And so let’s say you visualize the progress of learning arithmetic from. If you learn plus and minus, then you finally get to division and multiplication.

You might wanna drag the user, like the student from plus this person’s mastered subtraction. Let’s let’s move them over to working on division at this point. So maybe that’s that’s a way to see it. It’s helpful to identify. The, Chris was saying, like trying to figure out the stages of the process.

So if I don’t have the stages right that you’re talking about, Jennifer, then please get in touch with me and support@gravitykit.com, and we’re happy to help you figure out what a good fit would be. But surely with lifter LMS and with Gravity View or Gravity Board, something would be helpful for tracking that type of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and just as a lifter, LMS feature reminder, if you’re in Jennifer’s case, as an example, if you’re wanting to get input from the student, there’s this, there’s a Gravity Forms integration in lifter LMS that where you can require the student before they can complete the lesson that they have to submit whatever information you want to collect, which can then feed into the gravity board and really use those things seamlessly together.

Make sure your people use them if you want them to be submitting data, or it could just be a back, back office process that you use just to keep track of learners and getting those completion rates and compet competency rates up.

Zachary Katz: Gravity View integrates with lifter LMS so that each student on their student dashboard can have a tab that shows the forms that they’ve submitted.

Which is really cool. Yeah, it’s a great integration. So that might be another way that you could do that, Jennifer, is to help visualize the courses that they’ve completed on their own dashboard using the form data they submitted, not necessarily the courses that they’ve completed, if that

Chris Badgett: makes sense.

Since you mentioned that, and we do have past episodes on Gravity View. But could you just give us a quick rundown of like how, what Gravity View is, how it’s different from what we’re talking about here, which is also part of the Gravity Kit suite of products@gravitykit.com.

Zachary Katz: Yeah, so Gravity View is more of an app builder.

Gravity Board is a specific app functionality to display in a CAM member board, and we’re actually going to be doing different layouts as well. But gravity view allows you to do more, creating a custom application for exactly the type of flow that you need using point and click. Let’s say you have more complex needs where each student submits multiple forms and has each student creates multiple entries using a form, like homework assignments.

But then you have multiple teachers maybe grading those assignments and each of those requires a new form submission to say, this assignment’s an A, this assignment’s a b. And then those need to be visualized and exportable and added to a calendar, like all of this stuff that we just talked to somebody who was about to be charged one and a half million dollars a year for this application that they built using gravity views, point and click solutions.

If you’re paying, if your school is paying, if you’re paying for these systems that track performance and fill out forms online, fill out the forms on your own website. Use GravityView to build custom applications to do whatever you wanna do. And we do so many things, it’s really hard to summarize, but like we know that there, you’re being charged too much elsewhere.

We know that it’s pretty easy to set up with Gravity view and that users love using it. And it just integrates with your existing flows. So if you’re running a camp like a an in-person summer camp. We have people that track all the students, all the parents, all the activities, all the extracurriculars. All of that using Forms and Gravity view, and they build a camp dashboard that saves them thousands of dollars a year.

Anytime you, you look at your budget and you say we’re paying a lot for X, there’s a good chance that gravity forms and gravity view can replace that and gravity board now as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You’ve made it Zach, to the advanced segment of the interview, so we’re going back to the idea that forms and app building, it’s just mind blowing how, what forms and moving data around and displaying it can do.

If you would just pull up for your own, use Gravity kit.com/products. Okay. And either go through all of ’em or just, give a quick summary of, you mentioned Gravity Calendar in the, in your last answer there. We haven’t mentioned Gravity charts yet, or Gravity Math. What are some of these other things included in the All Access Pass at Gravity Kit?

Zachary Katz: Yeah. Gravity Revisions let’s say you edit these entries using Gravity Board and gravity view, but you want a way to undo entries undo these changes, like track changes. That’s what Gravity revisions does. Gravity export. So many people use. You fill out a form and then. What do you do with that data?

I don’t know. I have my client log into the website and go to the Gravity Forms, export screen, export entries, and then download it. Choose the columns that they want, and then download the CSV and then they have to download the CSV. That’s how they do it. Gravity Export makes that, so it’s a single URL that the same client can access to download a pre-filtered set of entries in different formats, including C-S-V-P-D-F, Excel.

So you don’t have to, if you’re trying to walk your client through using a website and using, accessing their own data on gravity forms gravity Export makes that real easy. Gravity Math, you can say let’s say you have a tasks form that has a custom, that has a field for the number of hours that you estimate a task would take.

And gravity Math can be able to sum each of those entries into, okay, all of our tasks are going to take this number of hours. So it’s the ability to do math with Gravity Forms data. And that same goes with when you sell products using Gravity forms, it can calculate all sorts of good metrics for your product sales.

Gravity charts, you can chart that same data. Gravity forms data. And Gravity Calendar. We use Gravity Calendar as a team vacation calendar on Gravity Kit. So we have a form for vacation requests. They submit a vacation request. When it’s approved, it shows up on the team calendar. Now that team calendar, it’s an ICS feed, which means that you can connect it to your Apple Calendar.

You can view it in Google Calendar. I love being able to see my team availability on a calendar in, on my computer, on my phone, wherever I am. That’s powered by Gravity Calendar. Gravity, import imports, gravity forms, entries, and forms. Gravity gravity migrate is really cool. So let’s say you have this incredible application that you’ve built for your needs and you know that this is going to be helpful for somebody else who has very similar needs.

You don’t wanna have to download and export and reconfigure all this stuff. Well with Gravity Migrate, you export your entire Gravity Forms configuration, and that includes Gravity Kit, that includes third party add-ons, that includes all the stuff you need. So you go to your other website and then you import it into Gravity Migrate as well.

And all of your pages that have forms embedded on them, all of the forms themselves, all the entries, all everything, all the attachments, if you selected, that will be automatically uploaded and migrated from one site to another. That makes migration super easy. Instead of migrating a database, which there are a lot of database migration tools. We wanted to really drill down on the needs of the Gravity Forms community.

So that’s why we created Gravity Migrate. There are other tools out there that we have. But yeah I check out Gravity Kit and if you have any questions about this, if you’re listening I am available for consultation call. I will talk to you about your needs or your, what you want to accomplish.

And if you’re not sure how to do it, I will help you. If it’s not the right fit for Gravity Kit or Gravity Forms. I will tell you, you should probably use something else. I don’t wanna sell you on a software that you don’t need, like any good software entrepreneur, that is our goal is your success.

And I know that’s the same approach that list LMS has.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. Gravity kit is awesome, and once you see the power of forms and doing stuff with data it really blows your mind in terms of building what you want. And the learning management system is a web application.

Zachary Katz: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And you can customize your.

Learning management system, web application even further with Gravity Forms and Gravity kit. You mentioned demos. The Gravity Board has a demo. Do all of your add-ons have demos or how did the demos?

Zachary Katz: All of our add-ons have demos? If you go to site dot, try dot gravity kit.com, that’s where our demos live.

The default demos Gravity View. But if you go to the top under More Gravity Kit plugin demos, you can see. Each of them have demonstrations and each of those is live. So you can click a button. Have your own working version of that demo site so you can go in there and see how it’s set up and change it to your needs.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Zach, I was looking forward to this episode ’cause whenever you drop a new add-on, I’m like, this is gonna be really cool. And as a project management guy who’s dealt with Kanban for a long time, it’s really great to see this. Available in WordPress. And so flexible for so many different ways, not to mention all the other great stuff that comes with Gravity Kit.

What’s the best way for. You out there watching or listening to get started? They could take the demo. These add-ons are individually sold or you can get them in bundles. Is that right?

Zachary Katz: That’s right. Gravity Board is available standalone and all access is actually also includes all of our add-ons, including future add-ons.

Yeah, go to gravity kit.com. We’re actually having a 40% off sale right now for the next three days. We have, we’re celebrating our 11th birthday of Gravity View and Gravity Kit. 40% off ends July 31st. So check out our sale and you can snag a license at a big discount.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Zach, thank you for coming back on the show. Really appreciate it. I can’t recommend Gravity Kit, Zach and his team enough. Go check that out. Any other ways people can connect with you?

Zachary Katz: I am on Mastodon at Zach Katz and Mastodon Social slash Zach Katz. And I am on LinkedIn add me to your professional network.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Zach. We really appreciate it.

Zachary Katz: Thank you so much, Chris. I really had a good time. Thanks.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen disclosed that John C. is the source of one of his fundamental ideas on leadership. According to Maxwell, “Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.” He thinks that everyone has an innate ability to lead, whether it be in the form of managing a team, a small group, or even just one other individual.

But a lot of people think they are better suited as a “number two” or support person, so they avoid taking on that job. Like in physics, when that occurs, a leadership void is created, and it will always be filled often by the wrong individuals, which will result in bad choices and unfavorable outcomes. Kurt used a tale from his business background to demonstrate this point, in which a sophisticated bonus scheme for merchants was implemented without first determining whether or not they wanted it.

Kurt was the only person in a boardroom full of international executives who had ever worked at the retail level. Based on his personal experience, he cautioned that the program would fail despite making him the “protruding nail” a Japanese term for an individual who deviates from the group.

The scheme ultimately failed as he had feared, but his bravery in speaking up gained him a say in subsequent initiatives. Kurt believes that being a leader frequently entails stating the truth, going into awkward situations, and stepping in before someone less qualified does.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a repeat GA guest. His name is Kurt Van Ahnen. He’s from Manana, NOMAS, and Kurt and I are gonna be talking about leadership today. But first, welcome to the show, Kurt. Hey, man, it’s always good to see you. Yeah. I know you’ve written books on leadership.

What’s the name of your book again? My book is Action Leadership from the Edge. Awesome. Let’s just start super high level. Like when you, somebody asks you like, what is leadership? How would you answer that question?

Kurt Von Ahnen: I actually steal that answer from someone I consider a mentor. That’s John C.

Maxwell. He is if you don’t know, he is like an unbelievably prolific author on leadership, but he is quoted multiple times as saying leadership has influenced nothing more, nothing less, and that’s that alone has helped guide me on my pathway to continuous learning in this space.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a, it is an interesting question and it’s such a broad topic. I feel like everybody’s a leader in the sense that once you grow up from being a baby. You have to influence yourself and make decisions and move throughout the world. And then you have friend groups and you make decisions and so on, and it just keeps going out.

Not everybody goes all the way to becoming a transformational leader that LE leads a country or a religious movement or something like that, but there’s like leadership potential in everybody.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You’re touching on. The actual purpose of the book I wrote, and that was for me and I saw this through the pandemic and stuff, so I really got amped up through that space.

But I personally believe everybody, every single human on the planet has some natural calling to some leadership position, whatever that is. You’re called to have influence on somebody or a group of people. And personally, I feel a lot of people bypass or abstain from that calling, right? So a lot of people go, oh, I’m not really a leader.

I’m more of a good number two, I’m a good support person. I’m not, and when you see people pull back or restrict themselves from fulfilling that natural call, I believe it just leaves a gap in leadership. And and I think the universe. All the energies of the universe. I think it hates the idea that there’s a gap in things, and so it allows that gap to be filled, but then it’s filled unnaturally and that’s how we see things where.

Normal people like us can look up, people running things and go, how did that moron get in that position? And you go, oh, that’s how, because the people that were meant to fill that position never stepped up. They never stepped into their natural call of leadership. And it allowed poor fits to fill those gaps.

And then they land and expand and it propagates nonsense instead of what’s meant to be.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a huge deal. A leadership vacuum, I call it. Yeah. Like it’s missing and like you said, it’s like physics. Something will fill that space. Yeah. And it’s not always the best thing, but it will, that’s, that vacuum will always get filled.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah it’s crazy to watch. I have a ton of corporate experience and I, and so many times the most visually striking one was I wa I was in a boardroom and it was packed. We had to bring in extra chairs, giant table, extra chairs, people from different countries, vice presidents, and there was this giant new initiative, it was a distributorship that was going to.

Implement a new program for all of the retailers. You must do this to earn this bonus. And they were gonna put this giant program out and it was immensely complicated. And and they were acting like it was a bonus for the retailers, and I had worked retail before in that field and I kept thinking, this is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

And I said, Hey I raised my hand and I said, Hey I wanna recognize my position in the room as not the leader, right? Because I’m president and vice president. Everybody’s in this room. I said, but I’m just really curious, who, who has a team or who reached out to the base to find out if this is a program they actually desire?

Who wants to participate in this program? And they were like, oh, Kurt, that’s not a. That wasn’t a consideration. We’re gonna launch this thing. This is what we need to see happen, and this is the bonus structure we put in place and this is the way it’s gonna be. And then I was like buy a show of hands.

How many people in this room have actually worked at that level of retail? So you know how to absorb. The program that’s being promoted. And it was me and one other dude that put up their hand and I was like I can tell you firsthand, this ain’t gonna fly. Yeah. Like the half million dollars you’ve already spent on salaries and all the junket took to, to build this program up.

We’re in this meeting and I’m like, I can tell you right now, this ain’t gonna fly. It doesn’t go over real well. When you’re the contrarian in the room sometimes there’s a saying in Japan the protruding nail always gets hammered, right? And so I was the protruding nail in that situation.

But I’m also a fortune teller. It didn’t go over well, and then that kind of catapults that natural fit for leadership for the next. Project to, to then be considered and consulted and hey, Kurt, what would you do in this situation? But sometimes that step to leadership comes through a contrarian or uncomfortable moment.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And there’s a bunch of words wrapped up in here that overlap with leadership. One of them is power. Another one is politics, which you ran into in the boardroom. And then there’s like leadership and then there’s management and all these things overlap and relate to each other.

I’d like to keep this focused on leadership particularly, but just let’s talk about the difference between leadership and management. So I see leadership as. More of the influence, the vision, the setting, the culture kind of stuff. Management is actually like the mission and getting the work done and having a great experience for employees and customers and all that kind of stuff.

So they’re different. And keeping this this conversation on leadership, but let’s take a sidetrack for a moment. Bring in management. How do you think about the difference between. What a manager does and what a leader does. And it may be the same person or it could be two different roles or whatever.

How do you d differentiate? Because I, I see confusion in the space, like where a manager is not necessarily a great leader or a leader may have really poor management skills.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I don’t know that you and I have ever been this transparent before and I don’t know that you’ve seen my other content, part of my draw to the leadership space.

Was that I was a horrible leader. I was disgustingly bad at it. I was such a driven, a type personality coming, like before high school, like coming outta mid school. I was crazy competitive. Like when I had a paper route in the seventh grade. I didn’t just have a paper route as kids quit their paper routes.

Adopted their paper routes. And next thing I had seven seven paper routes. And the guy that ran, the guy ran a bunch of kids for paper routes, so he obviously he’s not, wasn’t the top of the list. He was totally confused, like, how is Kurt delivering? Hundreds of papers every day on these paper routes.

You didn’t realize I’d subcontracted to younger kids to go deliver the newspapers, and I just went around, knocked on doors, collected money, and went and bought Mountain Dews. And that was kinda like my first but I drove people hard and I did it even then. And so when I got outta school and started picking up these management jobs, like I managed the tuxedo store, I managed a furniture store, I ran a pizza shop.

I did these things before getting outta high school, but I did it like with this iron fist we are gonna produce, we are gonna, we’re gonna be productive, we’re gonna be on time and on budget. I was like, rah. And I was barking at people, push harder, push faster. I was a where it really came to a head.

I was a training supervisor at UPS, at one of the hubs in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. And for a long time I held the load record there. I’m just I was always a really hard worker, even physically, just a really hard worker. And so they said, oh, Kurt, you’re really good at this. We’re gonna put you in charge of a team.

I had this poor kid crying in the truck, like literally sobbing because he couldn’t load the truck fast enough. He is I feel like I’m gonna throw up. And I’m like, suck it up buttercup. Let’s get in there, throw those boxes, and that’s not a leader, right? That’s a manager. The manager is like, what are the spreadsheets?

What are the results? How hard can I push my people? And I was very much like that. Work harder. Work faster. We’ll see the results. And I had to really do a lot of studying and a lot of what would you call it? Self humility or something, right? Like I had to realize I got this wrong. And I gotta figure out what’s right.

And trying to be more empathetic and figure out how do you get performance out of people without making ’em crumble and cry in the back of a truck. Like how do you do that? And it’s a real arc form. So leadership is completely different, but the results can be very similar.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And let’s talk about power and influence.

You mentioned a leader creates influence. Influence can have or, it can also mean like exercising power and making, willing something to happen that can have positive and negative connotations. But what, what, in your view is like a great example of wielding influence in a leadership capacity to get great results in a very win kind of way.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You might be embarrassed, but you’re a really great example of it. You built a plugin by your own admission, you felt like you were late to the party when you launched lifter LMS. You weren’t late to the party. It had space to grow. And then think about it like, you have me on the team, I’ve been with the team.

I think we’re five or six years or something crazy like we’ve been doing stuff together. Emily’s been on the team for a long time. You brought Nadia to the team and she has just really blossomed and she’s knocking like every task outta the park. And the Colemans have joined the team, from an ownership perspective.

So then you have that 360 degree leadership, right? Like where you’re expanding at the peer level too, right? Not just downstream, cross stream. And so when someone takes a look at an overall picture and goes, oh, wait a minute. He’s leading down, he’s leading across, he’s leading up.

And when I say leading up, you have the LMS cast. You have influence at the different, like I’ve seen you at Word Camp, I’ve seen you interact with other people in the space. So that’s leading up, that’s leading across, that’s leading down that is like a full bubble of. Influence. And then it sounds manipulative.

I don’t mean it to sound manipulative, but when you have that full bubble atmosphere of influence, yeah. You get to say, this is the direction I want this to go. Or I’m thinking, Hey, you know what, I’m being led to think this is a good thing. And then people come along with that. And so that’s part of that power, that’s part of that, the influence, the power that the thing that people talk about.

But it’s. If you do it well and you do it with the right heart and the right intention, it’s organic. It’s not pushy, and people want to come along. It’s not like that. You’re pushing them along. And so there’s a big difference in, in how it’s subtle but it’s a huge difference in how it really occurs.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate you saying that. I think one of the, if I’m ever evaluating a company as an example and I’m asking myself the question, how good is the leadership here? One of the things I look for is how long have the team members been there? Because people and sometimes people move on and that’s fine.

But if, particularly when people move on, they were there for a very long time and then they did something different or whatever, that’s a good sign. But if you have all this churn in your organization for employees, to me that’s like a flag that, oh, is there a leadership issue here? And it can be a lot of things.

It’s complicated.

Kurt Von Ahnen: But you, I gotta jump in. You’re reminding me of a consulting call I did two weeks ago. Yeah. A motorcycle dealership. I do some training in the power sports field for those that are listening and don’t know. I do some training in the power sports field and we had a dealer owner on a call and I said, so tell me about some of the problems of your dealership.

What are you trying to fix with this training? And he goes our technicians are flaky. We got one guy comes in a half hour late, takes two hours for lunch. Half the time you don’t know if he’s gonna show up or not. We’ve had, technicians turn in, turn out like like a bunch of people quit and leave.

‘Cause you can’t trust technicians. And then, our parts guys are, really struggling with back orders from the OEMs and the suppliers and. But for the most part, our sales team is strong, right? And then so he goes to this thing and I said okay. I said, you’ve done a really good job of outlining some symptoms, in this training we really need to talk about root causes.

And he was like, what do you mean root causes? I just told you what the problems were with the dealership. And I said, no, you told me what the symptoms were with the dealership. I said people don’t leave positions. They leave leadership. So if you have a revolving door with technicians leaving your service department, that’s not a sign that technicians in general are flaky and undependable.

That’s a sign that something’s broken. Broken in your leadership, tree, right? You’ve got a broken branch in the leadership tree that’s causing these guys to realize, hey, this place isn’t being run well. I can’t make enough money working under this leadership. I’m gonna have to go find something else.

You can imagine that probably didn’t go over very well, but piece by piece. Every problem he brought up, I was like, that’s another symptom. Let’s talk about how that root cause works. And then we got into process development talks and things like that. But it’s really interesting to see how people.

The perspective what’s the perspective of something that’s not working? And when you talk to somebody, especially if they’re really close to the problem, chances are they miss they start talking in terms of symptoms instead of what’s the root cause, how do you get, how do you establish relationship with people so that they will perform or will come to work on time or will not take a two and a half hour lunch.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s a heavy load to carry. But I think about that a lot. If there’s a problem in a bus in the business, I’m like my first thought is how am I responsible for this? And I think that’s uncommon yeah it’s easier to point the finger and of course multiple parties are participating in whatever the issue is, but ultimately it’s a leadership or management issue.

I’ve watched you take personal leadership and. In short order, move your family from California to Kansas. And like part of what a leader does is they hold space or they provide safety, security through hard things. And so I watch you like, move the family to Kansas and then I’ve watched you lead into developing your network and.

Your influence locally in Kansas and get involved in lots of projects and community and stuff like that. How do you think about that transition just from a leadership, like what kind of wisdom for others? Because one thing a leader will do typically is they will make dramatic change if they need to.

And you did it, you can get stuck and just keep doing what you’ve always done and cross your fingers. But there’s times when you have to burn the boats and try something else. So what tips do you have around that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: When I talk to people in general about the switch from California to Kansas, the paradigm shift in our quality of life is, it’s darn near immeasurable, Chris.

It really is.

Chris Badgett: That didn’t, it felt risky in a big bet at the time, right? It is lot of

Kurt Von Ahnen: resistance. It is risky in a big bet, but. Here’s like where I’m going to, I’m just gonna get to brass tacks with it. If you’re a leader, if you’re in charge of stuff and you feel external pressure to say yes to projects that you know you normally wouldn’t want to do, or you think are a bad idea, but you know that you have to say yes because you gotta create the revenue.

That to me is, that’s the sign. Like something. Something’s gotta change. So then you have to start really doing, again, go back to root cause analysis, right? Why am I in this position? Why am I saying yes to projects that my team shouldn’t have to work on? Why am I taking on these liabilities?

And stressing myself out about stuff that I, that normally I wouldn’t say yes to. And any business owner or a project manager is gonna have those moments, but when it becomes a consistent thing, you have to like go, wait a minute, I gotta really take stock of what’s happening here. And when we were in the Southern California economy post pandemic.

I had to say yes to so many projects that I knew I normally wouldn’t do. Either the money wasn’t right or the project was poor or something was, it just wasn’t right. And I was under a lot of stress to do a lot of things that I normally wouldn’t have done. And so I knew we had to change the economic makeup of what we were doing, but I really.

This is gonna sound, weird. I didn’t really fully understand what I was opening up when I moved away from California. So when we got to Kansas, we lowered our overhead by 65%. I’ve always been really on point I don’t need a bunch of car payments. I don’t need so if you think about the basic cost of living.

We lowered our expenses by 65% moving to Kansas. And what that did was it immediately freed me up to not have to say yes to certain projects. So by being able to pass on certain things that were not, high margin items or high, good fit items, I was able to say yes to things that were a good fit or higher margin items.

And that allowed us to grow and scale at a much quicker rate. And then you look at. What’s the population density and the expectations of one region could be anywhere. Right? And then you look at, we live in a fairly small community in Kansas now, and so all of a sudden I’m big fish little pond.

I show up and I’m like, I have all this enterprise web building experience. I’m connected to plugin developers. I’m connected to, different WordPress hosts. And so when I go to local entrepreneur meetups. And have conversations with people. I’m able to communicate in a way to them that lends confidence that I don’t think they’ve really seen before in this space.

And it’s give, and they’ve just adopted us. Everyone’s opened up their arms and let us in. The community college, the high school, the city the entrepreneur development organization in town everybody’s just been super open, super, super friendly, and they want to be, they want. They want to be in our space, but they also are inviting us into their space.

It’s very much a, it’s very much a co-mingling and it’s working out really so far.

Chris Badgett: One of the things that interests me is the difference between a founder, entrepreneur and a CEO. And from your story you had to. Make a sacrifice, make a move, step into the unknown. And that’s what founder entrepreneurs do. And there’s like a lot of sacrifice. So there’s particularly if you’re bootstrapped, self-funded, just starting from nothing. If later you’re doing well, it looks that you’ve, it’s like unfair maybe, or it happened overnight, but there was actually like this trail of sacrifice and stuff in the past.

And part of what leaders do, it takes courage, right? Because sometimes those sacrifices don’t work out. And it was a test, it was an experiment, but it was a failed experiment. And then the more times you come back, in my experience. The more things you try, eventually it starts looking like luck, but you just, you’re actually really good at failing fast and then trying something else.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, it’s such a weird thing because I actually used to say, failing forward and then all of a sudden John Maxwell came out with a book called Failing Forward, and I felt cheated. I was like, is he reading my emails? I completely believe in taking a lot of swings. I take a lot of swings and it’s okay if something doesn’t work.

Some things I get emotionally tied to and and I share this all the time, like my Power Sport Academy project. I put that together. I’m super passionate about power sports. I know I’m gonna help hundreds, if not thousands of families find, financial freedom or at least, financial de, consistency.

Through this training. And I’m really proud of it, but it wasn’t selling. It just wasn’t selling and it was years and years. And you even helped me with it. You were like this headline sucks. ’cause you’re really good at that kind of communication, right? So you were like change this headline, change this.

And I kept trying different things to try and promote that product and it wasn’t working. And then to your point. I was gonna turn it off. I was gonna say, you know what, I’m done. It’s too much of a distraction. I’m gonna go in another direction. And, but it was five years, like I’d let the thing sit there for five years trying to promote this thing and then all of a sudden guy calls up, he’s got a hundred dealerships that need trained and that.

Instantly turned that project into, 55, $60,000 a year of revenue. And so then people see that, like last year I went to the AM expo and I was a speaker at the AM Expo, which is a power sports thing. And people are like, Hey, you’re back. ‘Cause I used to work for Ducati and Suzuki and so they’re like, Hey, you’re back.

And they’re like, oh man, it’s so cool. It’s like you’re an overnight success. And it like, they’re acting like, it’s like some immediate. Gift and it’s no, this was five, this is the result of five years of work that I almost gave up on, and now it’s actually starting to come true, which is a cool thing.

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One of my favorite things is to develop other leaders and and the reason why is because when I was younger in my leadership career. I had some people develop me, so at the place I worked in Alaska, there was an opening for a manager and I felt like I, I was probably less Type A than you. Like I was a all star employee.

Worked really hard, pulled more than my load was always helpful. It was, I’m a good employee and then. One of the other managers at the time brought me aside. He is you really should apply for that manager position. And then I got a lot of mentor from my boss and other managers and stuff like that, and really developed and also just naturally found that I liked also to develop other leaders and stuff like that.

But what advice would you have for somebody and let me just say, I see this at lifter, LMS, like the entrepreneurs that use our tools are some of them, if I’m looking for case studies, some of the best ones are like super humble and they’re like, oh, I’m not ready yet. And they’re like, but they’re actually like doing great and making great progress.

But they’re underselling themselves on their. What they’ve accomplished and the influence and power that they have, and there’s different leadership styles. But for someone who’s maybe not realizing how much of a leader they already are, what advice would you have to like, discover that or encourage that, that, that

Kurt Von Ahnen: seed to grow?

I almost don’t wanna encourage it and spoil it to be honest with you. True leadership to me, like people that are organically great leaders. One of the, one of the things, one of the traits of that is a sense of humility, right? Is like they’re still approachable. They’re still normal people.

They’re, I can go and I don’t really like, like domestic beer but I can still go to the neighborhood pub, grab something that tastes decent and and get along with everybody in the room, and there’s just a certain. That’s a certain sense of humility, right?

I’m not above any of these people. Farmers, tow truck drivers, whatever. It doesn’t matter. You’re in, you work hard, let’s crack a cold one and have a good time. There’s a certain like that trait, that humility is so attractive to people that you don’t wanna spoil that.

You don’t wanna put people on a pedestal and be like, man, you’re slaying it. You’re awesome. You are kicking butt. Because then you run the risk of leveling down the humility, which is the attractive part of leadership. And then they start to get, inflated. There’s gotta be a certain balance to things.

So for me it’s like I really like to focus on accomplishment or direction or, apparent potential of somebody, but not so much you’re slaying it, you’re the bomb, you’re the this. It’s more I wanna say, Hey, you’re in a really good space. You’re in a really good, this is a really good moment.

Momentum. Momentum moment, can’t speak. This is a really good momentum moment. We want to capitalize on the momentum, right? But I want to use that kind of talk instead of break them out of their shell, because that shell is part of the attractiveness that’s making them successful.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And one of the, my favorite quotes from the DA by Lao Sue is he says, the people will say, we did it ourselves. So great leaders, in my opinion, are almost invisible, and they’re empowering others and they send out, influence and positive change through others and don’t even necessarily care or need to take the credit for it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: When I tell people, like when I first started coming outta my shell as I’m gonna be purposeful about this leadership thing, I took over as a service manager of a Pep Boy store. And this place was, I’m not gonna say it was in the ghetto, but it wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods. It was a little bit rundown.

The shop was filthy. The cars were junk in the lot, it was a pep boys service center. And I walked in there. In regular clothes. I didn’t have a uniform yet. I walked in and it was like a day or two before I was actually supposed to start the job, and nobody stopped me. Like it was one of those stores, like no security.

Nobody gave a credit about nothing, right? So I walked through the shop, nobody said anything. So I picked up a broom and I started sweeping. And then I, so I cleaned the back room where the oil disposal place was, and then I started cleaning the shop and I literally started pushing like toolboxes around and scrubbing the floor and.

Usually if you touch a technician’s toolbox, you’re fixing to get, some hands, right? Nobody said a word. They all treated me like I was some kind of paid labor to come in and clean the shop, which to me was fine. I went into the restroom and it was just coated and grease and hand prints.

So I basically pressure washed the bathroom, slapped on some gloves, cleaned the bathroom. It took me two days to clean this shop, clean the whole shop. On the third day, I walked in with my service manager uniform shirt on, and I said, Hey, gather everybody up. We’re gonna have a quick meeting, and they were like.

Oh no. And I just said, Hey, does the shop look good? Oh yeah, the shop looks great. I said, great. Now you guys already know I’ll never ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself first. Now we just need to maintain it, and they were like, oh. But it was like instant buy-in that way.

There wasn’t any there wasn’t any question about whether Kurt was gonna come in and work hard at this job, and then. I gotta admit, I’m pretty good at running a service department. So everyone started to make more money as soon as the sh like the shop was already clean. But once they started to make more money, these technicians were like, what can we do next?

Like that influence starts to take over. And then we ended up having one of the number one stores in the district for profit. But it’s, to me it is the way that you come into leadership. When I started at Suzuki, it was the opposite. They had, Suzuki had promised my job to people that were on staff, and then they hired me from the outside, right?

And then I show up and it’s this is Kurt. He’s the new manager of publications and training. Everyone that was promised that job instantly hated me. And then I had to overcome all this negativity that I didn’t create. I had to overcome all, it took two months to get people to have any buy-in with anything I wanted to do.

Because that’s the difference of how you enter the space, right? And the difference is like 15 years between Pep Boys and Suzuki. So at the beginning of my leadership journey, I had this great success. And then near the end, recently in my employment career, I have this giant failure I gotta overcome.

But I guess that overcoming is part of the success.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Leading by example I find is really powerful. And I see some entrepreneurs not do it in the sense that like for me it wasn’t a surprise when you were two minutes early to this meeting. I’m timely to my meetings, right?

And if I’m late, something crazy happened or if I like, it rarely happens. But if I completely missed something, something came up that was outside of my control. So I demonstrate the behavior that I like to see, which is respecting each other’s time. Being ready and prepared. A funny story from Alaska is we would have our team meeting in a tent in the morning with about 20 people, right?

And outside of the tent, it’s about a 50 yard walk to a dog yard that has a couple hundred sled dogs in it. On the corner of the dog yard is a porta-potty, right? And it was interesting like how. 25% of people would use the porta-potty before the meeting and 25% or and, or 75% before the meeting, 25% on the clock out to start their shift.

And I just, it’s, part of leadership is to pick and choose your battles. Is that really a battle I want to have or do I care more about this other thing over here? Yeah. But. Leading by example. Like being prepared to work and ready for go time is a very important signal. And if a manager or a boss or a leader doesn’t do that themselves, they’re literally setting the bar like really low and then they act surprised when performances, basically similar to what they’re doing.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, that do as I do not as I say, or do as I say, not as I do nonsense. That’s there’s a couple of different ways to look at that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s an interesting one. Let’s talk about leadership styles, because there’s not just one leadership template, there’s like the humble leader, there’s like the command and control leader, and a lot of it depends on context.

Are we going to war? Are we doing life coaching? Are we doing like fam, like some kind of major decision as a family? There’s all kinds of context, but there’s so many different leadership styles, yeah, the, the humble one, the command and control one. Another one is I position myself probably more as like a servant leader.

I’m the opposite of command and control, but I’m still effective and I’m, I care more about unblocking my team, making sure their goals fit inside the goals of the business, adapting and, lifting people up. I’m not trying to push ’em down and push ’em out and deploy. That happens like through the work and stuff, but it’s just, I have my own style.

It’s soft. It’s not hard, but you can also be a hard leader too, and be effective and respected and respectful. So tell us some thoughts on style and finding your own style.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, if anyone is like thinking, let’s say that someone listens to this and they go this is a different message today. This is cool.

I’m inspired. Maybe I should do something. One of the first steps is to figure out how are you internally wired? Yeah. So take an assessment and there’s. Half a dozen right off the top of our heads that we could go through, right? Whe whether it’s A-A-A-A-A-C-V-I or a Briggs and whatever, and or a disc or, but find out like how are you internally wired and then how do you actually naturally communicate or naturally work within systems.

And then Chris mentioned a couple of things. Is this a process driven leadership example, right? Is this something that is really dependent upon process, organization, and conformance? Like you have to conform to a certain process to find success as a team? In this arena, whatever that is. Could be war, could be making cars on an assembly line, could be like all kinds of things.

Certain things are very process driven, whereas if you get into like the coaching space, you are more like, like a really great coach never teaches the subject anything. A really great coach asks phenomenal questions that allows the subject to teach themselves. And so that’s like a form of leadership where you’re extracting it out of somebody else, but you’re leading and you’re having influence because of your method of extraction.

But the success is really coming from the person. So it’s completely different. And some people are wired for different ways. For instance, sometimes I’m really good at asking these questions and being this coach kind of person. But if I’m honest with myself and how I’m really wired. Sometimes I just don’t have the patience internally.

I just don’t have, ’cause it, it could be like a tattoo on somebody’s forehead. Like you’ve got this issue and you are skirting around it. Someone needs to bring it to your attention. And so I’m the kind of person that’s a little more direct and I’ll bring something to someone’s attention and then I’ll say, now let’s do some root cause analysis and figure out how to erase this tattoo issue.

So that’s not really great coaching. That’s more like. Great consulting and that’s like a different thing. So I really thrive in the consultant space. I thrive really good on seeing things that most people don’t see from their own environment. Maybe they’re in too deep to really see the details.

And so I’m really good at saying here’s our existing structure, here’s our existing process. Here’s our existing, results. Data set that we’re looking at. Where is this coming from? If we take a snapshot of this right now, what’s actually causing this snapshot to be reality? And then where do we want it to be?

And then I’m really good at so what would be the next steps to get to where we want to be? So that’s more of a consulting leadership mindset. And that seems to be like where my real strengths are. The coaching side, like I said, I don’t know that I have enough patience for it. And when it comes time to crack the whip and really get something moving like a soccer team that needs to win the big game. That’s one of those that’s process driven, right? Defense is defense. Offense is offense, the triangulated play, and the art of the sport, like all of that. So when you’re yelling from the sidelines, yeah, it’s maybe, it seems like you’re being really hard in the moment.

To me, successful leaders that are in those environments, they are hard in the moment and the team looks for them to be hard in the moment. They’re looking for that discipline in the moment, but you have to have the cognizance the self-awareness to realize that when the moment’s over you, you can gear back and be more relational.

Then it’s that relationship that allows you to gear up in the moment. It’s that emotional bank account. If you make enough positive deposits in the emotional bank account, when you’re not in those moments, then in those moments you are fully qualified and fully deposited so that you can make that emotional withdrawal, and be demanding in the moment.

Chris Badgett: Let’s leave people with an actionable leadership superpower or something to work on. It can be anything. I’ll do mine first, which is realizing that people are not robots and realizing that we, there’s something called the superior worth hypothesis, which means this is from my anthropology background that, you perceive a culture, another culture through the context of your own. And I think it was Margaret Mead that said we see the world as we are, not as it is. And so once you realize that not everybody else is neither a robot, nor are they wired, just like UNC, have the same mindsets and viewpoints and everything, you start realizing how different people are.

If you can empathize with people and really take their perspective, you can be a much more effective leader. And the human brain likes to take shortcuts like you may see yourself like, oh, I’m a b plus leader. I’m pretty good at what I do. But the reality is, if you have followers this person over here sees you as an a plus.

This person over here sees you as an F. This person sees you as a c. Like, and you can’t control that, like respect is earned and stuff like that. And maybe your style doesn’t match their style. So what I learned is if you can really take the perspective of the other person and adapt, particularly in a one-on-one situ situation, like if you have a global challenge at your work and the te the whole team is involved and you go to people, maybe you have a team meeting about the challenge.

But then you go to people one-on-one. I might approach this person who, and you can use things like personality type assessments and things to figure out how people are different, but I’m like, this person over here needs a lot of autonomy in the work they do. And what they need from me is to just clearly paint a picture of where we need to go and then give them a hundred percent freedom on how to get there.

This other person over here is more of a process person. And they’re gonna, if I give them like, here’s what I would do, and maybe structure like a flow chart of changes and activities and time boxing and calendaring and chart the path they’re set up for success. But those are two completely different approaches that achieve the same outcome.

When you’re leading first be okay with lots of people having different perceptions of you within and with and outside of your organization. Also treat your team, your customers, your industry partners, your colleagues. Everybody’s different. And if you can meet them where more, where they are, it, you become a lot more influential as a leader.

Yeah. That’s good stuff. What about you? What’s a superpower or insight you had that you would hope other leaders could unlock or explore further?

Kurt Von Ahnen: One of the things I think really needs explored by most leaders is a lot of leaders don’t give themselves the space to be able to find success. They allow themselves to get into too many obligations or putting out too many fires or, not having that clarity of thought in the moment where they really would perform well.

They didn’t set themselves up for success in advance, so they don’t perform as well as they could. So one of the things I recommend to people is, and you’ll hear this with a lot of people, right? But it, but I’ll say, Hey, just get up a little bit earlier, right? Have some quiet time. Do some kind of inspirational reading, whatever that is, a chapter of the Bible some book that you like, whatever.

And then for me, I use a digital planner and I actually write down my schedule every day. Even though I have a digital schedule, I have, nine calendars for all these different projects I do, and everybody’s trying to book time on that calendar. And but I have everything set up so that they can only book an appointment.

24 hours away, right? So when I get up in the morning, there’s not gonna be any more appointments booked on my day when I get up. So I get up and I physically write down my calendar every day. And what that does, Chris, it sounds stupid, but it like. Plugs me into the day, it aligns me with what are my requirements for the day, and then what am I able to fit into the other spaces of the day?

And then that’s my time blocking, like when you say time block, right? And if a customer needs to meet with me, they’re gonna if it’s today’s Thursday and they need to meet with me, they’re gonna go to my link and they’re gonna pick an appointment. The next available one’s Friday. Not a problem.

So when I get up tomorrow, I’ll see that appointment. I’ll put that, I’ll write that into my schedule. So if that appointment’s at 11, I know that I’ve got from nine to 11 to knock something out of the park, and I’ve got from 12 to five to knock other things out of the park. And I think that a lot of leaders don’t have the clarity of their day, so they’re constantly jumping from one.

Distraction to the other, and they never really get the time to succeed at any one element. And I think if you build that as a habit, you’re able to have influence on others to build similar habits. And then if you have a team of people seem to be more organized, more, more together in their space, more clarity of thought.

And I think you start to see a lot of great things happen.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just in closing, leadership is it’s a whole other job and you have to make time for it. Like I have a, yeah. I have a block in my calendar and I learned this trick from somebody else. So leaders are supposed to be visionaries, right?

And a lot of leaders and entrepreneurs are, they have a vision for the future. But I have a block of time on Fridays where for 30 minutes I have everything off, every device off. And I just sit with one question, which is, how can I create more value for. My, my users, my customers, the person I’m serving than anybody else in the world.

And that’s a, that’s like literally an exercise or a workout around vision. But if I don’t make the space for that and I’m just in reaction mode like you’re saying and oh, that time block just went away, but make time, like you said, get up early, read a book on leadership, pick one area of leadership and try to just work on that over a month.

And if you do that for 12 months, you’re gonna be a much better leader at the end.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, the time blocking thing is huge. Personal development is huge. Part of that personal development, and I know that you’re strong on this one, Chris, some kind of physical activity. Oh yeah. Our talk today has been mostly about, mental stuff, mental gymnastics and relationships and emotions and all that.

But I think there’s a lot more clarity in that space when you’re physically fit or when you. Exert energy. When I’m working on the computer and I feel like nothing’s happening. Like I get that, just that weird I’m not being very productive right now. I don’t force myself to work through it.

That’s, to me, I’ve learned over the years, that’s not gonna work for me. I’m just gonna get more and more frustrated and work slower and slower. What I do is I go jump on a bicycle, knock out 10 or 20 miles, come back, take a shower, sit down on the computer and knock out three days worth of work in an evening.

Like it, it’s so if you’re a physical person. Don’t let this other, don’t let the stuff that Chris and I are talking about distract you from that physicality. Make sure you still center yourself with, the exertion that you need.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Burnout is real for everybody, but particularly leaders. You have to have, it is a balancing act and you have to unplug and do other things and just be a human and just like you getting outside, exercising is a definitely a superpower that.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Is, I really opened the door for you to say you bike 15 to 20 miles. Heck, I run that far almost every day. Hey, I’m a humble leader, Kurt. I’m a humble leader. They say that they say that bicycling they, how is it? It’s four times the distance for running, isn’t it? That what it is.

I don’t know. So so a marathon is like 23 miles? Yeah. But a century ride on a bicycle of course is a hundred miles. Yeah. So running is four times harder than bicycling. I just wanna be super clear on this show running is four times harder than bicycling. So if I’m biking 10 miles and you’re running three or four a day you’re slaying me.

You’re absolutely slaying me.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s it for this episode on leadership. Hope you enjoyed it and continue to develop as a leader. It’s a lifelong thing that never ends, but it’s one of the most rewarding things in life, both in business or work, but also in your personal life, like personal development is personal leadership.

Thank you Kurt, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, and we will do another episode down the road. Take care. Nice.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Casts. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is Greg Zow. He’s from Omnis Send. You can find Omnis send@omnissend.com. Greg is an e-commerce and retail advisor at Omnis Send. We’re gonna go deep on marketing for LMS websites and the creators of those websites.

We’re gonna talk about marketing automation, multi-channel marketing. Changes in buying behavior and what’s going on at the macro level. But first, welcome to the show, Greg. Thanks, Chris. Super excited to be here and looking forward to a good conversation. Yeah, I’m really loving Omnis. Send Omnis send has done a lot of great things in the WordPress space, both with WooCommerce, LMS plugins, membership plugins, and the digital commerce side of things.

Let’s start at the macro. What are you seeing in terms of how spending behavior or cons, consumer behavior is changing in ways that might be relevant to course creators and coaches out there?

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a good question ’cause we’ve been seeing it for the past 18 months and it’s finally coming to a head now.

So I’ll start from the product level and we’ll back over. Because that’s where a lot of that consumer behavior changes data comes from. We all know we live in a relatively uncertain economic time right now. Every day seems to ebb and flow a little bit here and there. But the changes have been coming, like inflation’s been around for years, so we’ve been dealing with it ever since the pandemic.

And really it’s, while they say it’s come down, it’s come down over the previous level, which was high, right? So I feel at the grocery store when I go. Buying product. So about 18 plus months ago, we started to see a shift to value focus. Private labels, right? Customer or consumers, would trade down when the value of the private labels matched, product quality or whatever it is, stores now.

Costco, target, Walmart, they’ve all expanded their private label offerings. And that’s just an example. So we were starting to see like this value focused mindset, which was groceries, it was products, it was sneakers, it was clothing, whatever. And then you had stores like Teo and stuff like that and Shane, which are facing their own problems now, at least for the US audience.

But they were contributing to that. So yeah, I can get a. Desk clamp for four bucks, why not? If it breaks in 12 months, I’m out four bucks and I’ll just buy another one. So that was the shift, and over the last probably six months, we started to see that accelerate a little bit more. So spending was still up, but what we were starting to see was the number of orders were down.

So what you would have is consumers focusing on value. So Walmart’s a good example here. If I. Start to buy a couple things at Walmart and my dollar, I need to stretch further and I get the value here. Now what I do is I start to consolidate my purchases. So spending was up, but the number of orders across the board were down.

So what we were doing is consolidating purchases. But what that tells me as. A brand as a course creator, as an agency, every sale really matters at that point because there are fewer sales to go around. You wanna capture those dollars. So average order value would go up. And then last month the report came out, came out last week, but last month we started to see consumer spending slow for the first time in almost 10 years.

So those tariffs and stuff and kind of that hesitation and concern is caught up with us. So ffr. If you’re a course creator, you’re not selling, widgets per se, where you need to worry about consolidating value, but the shopping behaviors have changed. Consumers are in this value focused mindset that’s gonna translate to everything.

Whether you’re buying a car, you’re buying gas, you’re buying a service, you’re buying you. HVAC services, right? You start to evaluate those purchases a little bit differently. And if you’re a course grader, you now need to look at, okay, this is a lens which consumers and my customers are going to order through.

Do my offerings, do my value props. All these things match that lens and can I filter that a little bit more? And that’s I know we’ll talk about this a little bit more, but that’s really what course creators and agencies should be looking at. It might not. Directly apply to them from a product standpoint.

But that lens at which those same consumers that are buying those things and have shifted their mindset, that’s the lens they’re looking through and that’s what we need to talk about and flesh out a little bit more.

Chris Badgett: Does that make sense? It does. And and I guess it’s somewhat of a controversial issue, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the cost of higher education.

I’m a fan of university and liberal arts education as an example. I’m an anthropologist, but I’m a business guy now. And I got a lot of value in university. But when you think about that value lens and the uncertainty of the world I just have this sense that course creator, subject matter experts.

Can put together offers that kind of help fulfill the promise of the quote, American dream of get good education and get a good job, or chart your course in life. It seems like there’s a lot of opportunity for course creators and as an example this was several years ago I think in 2 20 19, I was like thinking I could spend two years and get a MBA.

Or I could, work with a business coach that really understands software entrepreneurship for a quarter of the cost and it’s more focused and targeted on my domain. And I did that and it was an amazing two years. But what are some thoughts about that in terms of. Creators who want to help people get jobs or grow skills, like in a more decentralized, non-traditional higher ed fashion.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a real we could probably spend two hours talking about this, over a cup of coffee or something, but I’m like you, I went to college, loved my experience. Learned a lot, right? There’s a lot of growth that goes in there, especially at those ages. I’m also saving for my kids’ college now, which you talk about the cost increasing.

Holy cow. But I work in marketing, like you talk to a marketer, did you go to school for marketing? And it’s 95% of ’em did not. And I did marketing was my minor communications guy. I went to radio broadcasting, right? That was my focus. And I transitioned to marketing. I look at this and go, okay, do you need a marketing degree to work in marketing?

Absolutely not. Do you need a X, Y, Z degree to work in a different field? Some cases, yes, doctors, stuff like that. In some cases, a lot of cases, no, you don’t. Now we live in an era where YouTube is probably the best educational platform. Think about it out there, right? I replaced a fuse in the back of my dryer a couple weeks ago, which normally would have to pay a guy to come out.

And I just looked at a two minute video and bought a three minute $3 part on Amazon. I’m like, boom. Done. So we talk about courses and stuff like this and upleveling and learning new skills, and I think the, for me, we live in a, that age where, yeah, these things make sense. The more you can, the more you can learn about a specific topic industry.

Having a mentor. And then sometimes these things are important for just connecting who’s the instructor on this thing? Can I connect with them on LinkedIn and learn more and ask them questions and things like that without having to pay $20,000 a year or $40,000 a year? Do. So I think it’s great.

I think what we talk about courses. We should be like, this is a value add to me. We talked offline about this before about promoting value add, and I think this is one of those value adds. Yeah. Cost of education’s increasing, cost of everything’s increasing, and we have these less costly courses that you can still learn the same skills that will get you ahead and whether you’re full-time in your career.

Omni Send, we still do training courses and we take classes and we do stuff like that. You never stop learning. And that’s the thing. And I think that’s the one thing where people, I say this probably more so young people, and I was definitely one of these, one of those where, you get outta college and you’re like, all right.

I’ve done it, and now I just need to learn that specific role of my next job. And once I do that, and really the learning never ends. And I think that’s where chorus creators are looking at this going, okay, we have a value here that fits with what people need in a very competitive but really expensive world, and we don’t, we’re not that expensive and we still get you the same value.

It’s the one thing people never look at is, okay, I’ve got an instructor here in college that is charging me 45 grand a year to go to, and I’ve got an instructor here that maybe has the same qualifications, has charging me 400 bucks or 300 bucks or 200 bucks to do, right? I might have a little more interaction here maybe not, right?

I might have more direct access here, but. Does this person over here have so much more knowledge in this person? A lot of times, no. There’s a lot of people out there that have more knowledge than me on certain topics, and that’s fine. And it doesn’t mean that I’m not valuable. It doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.

So I think this is the one benefit that course creators have now is that. People are seeking upleveling, they’re seeking cheaper ways to do things. And it doesn’t mean those cheaper ways are any less effective or any less better. So I don’t know if that answers the initial question, Chris. I might have just skipped over the whole thing, but I went on this diatribe about education, but I think course creators sit in a really unique position now where maybe they did in 20 years ago because it was harder and even 10 years ago.

It is, you get these online universities that. You get the bad terminology when the student loan thing was happening a few years ago about these, the fake colleges and stuff like that. But I think people are smart enough to realize, hey, there’s a skill, there’s a class there.

That skill will help me. That class is good. It’s got good reviews, let me do it right.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. You nailed it. Let’s talk about email marketing or email automation through the lens. I think Omnis send one of the things that makes Omnis send great. Is, it was born out of the Shopify retail space.

And what can course creators and coaches learn from more of the traditional online retail email marketing and automation space. Like what tips and tricks, what transfers over quite well that course creators may not be thinking about? Yeah. This is, so this is

Greg Zakowicz: fun because 20 years ago, your B2B.

Marketing approaches and D two C were fairly different, right? You had different mediums and stuff like that, and strategies were different. And really those things are like this now, right? You might have a fringe here and there, but for the most part, those strategies are the same. You have the same consumers buying products, running organizations, making organizational decisions that are also buying a pair of shoes on the weekends.

What we’ve seen over, I would say the last 10 years, but notably in the last five years specifically was just the convergence of these. So whether I’m looking at a B2B company, their email program, or a D two C company, I’m still seeing the same things. Be more effective than others. Value of email is a first party channel, right?

And I don’t discount paid ads on paid social or paid search. I think they’re all part and necessary parts of the journey. But email is a first party channel, so you can. We get this later, but there’s ways to reduce retargeting costs using email and cutting your costs on social platforms and stuff like that.

But email is a first part. Channel SMS is the same thing. Someone willingly gives you a piece of information saying, yeah, I want to hear from you. That is gold in itself, whether it be two B or D two C, it’s perfect. The things within that we’re seeing to be most effective, we’ve been saying it for years.

I’ve been saying it, everyone’s probably sick of hearing it, but it’s still true. It doesn’t make it less true. It’s automations and. We put out these stats reported on me. Send, we have, excuse me last year, 26, almost 26 billion emails going around for a variety of customers. So we’re looking at the data.

It holds true every year. Automated messages are driving 37% of all email orders. They’re accounting for 2% of sends. Reason is they’re timely and they’re relevant, they’re naturally then sending individually. So I take an action, I get an email based on an action. That email is customized and it sends automatically, you don’t have to be awake, you don’t have to schedule it, you just need to set it up one time.

So those things are disproportionate from a revenue and it’s a send standpoint, but it doesn’t mean all automations are created equal. So this is like you’ll hear oh, send the birthday message or do this write in engages, and those. Sure they’ll engage. You’ll get high opens, but they don’t necessarily drive conversion.

So yeah, you could have, you could create a course, you can try to retarget a customer, maybe you asked their birthday ’cause you’re trying to create a connection. You send ’em and they’re like, okay, great. I got a birthday message. So what three messages that drive more than anything. And this is related to products, it related to course creators, it related, it relates to agencies selling services, welcome messages.

Browse abandonment or product abandonment, however you wanna do it, and card abandonment. So check out abandonment. Those three, whether you’re selling something, a service, those things, three things apply to you. Those will make up more than they’re roughly around 87% of all automated orders come from those three messages.

So you talk about out weight performance here. Those are the things. So if I’m a course creator I’m gonna have a popup on my website that I probably got you to my website through a paid social ad or a paid search ad. Something. So I’ve already invested money in that. So I get you to my website.

I’ve got a popup. I wanna capture that email address. ’cause now I can retarget you, right? I don’t have to spend tons. My email costs what? An email costs which is not much. So I captured that information. Now I can send you that welcome message. That’s one of ’em. That welcome message I can introduce, right?

The offerings, the value add, really promote that value on there. If I don’t get you to buy. To put something in your cart, go to the checkout page. I know at that point what you’re viewing. I know what products you’re, your pages you’re going to, so I know a level of interest there. I also have an email that welcome email where I might have links in there where I can look at and say, okay, I clicked on upleveling on marketing.

The marketing cores versus the admin course, or HR course, or whatever it is. So I can now do any sort of automation retargeting based on what you clicked or based on the pages you viewed, which is your browser abandonment, right? Viewed. So now we’re sending these things off and we can do email or SMS or both at those things.

And if I can get you to a checkout page, conference con conferences, were doing this 15 years ago. I get to the checkout page, I don’t register for the conference. I get the abandoned cart one. It’s really just a checkout abandonment one. And that’s still, that applies to, it could be agencies and it could be course graders.

So you’ve got these things that are transferrable over. But a lot of times what I find is either B2B companies, course graders, agencies, they neglect them ’cause they automatically think, ’cause they go through ’em on their personal lives, they think. Oh, this is for products. This isn’t for me. A service or I’m an offering or I’m an online product.

So it doesn’t matter. The fact is, it does, and they still work. They’re timely, relevant, and they’re based on intent. I’m on your website ’cause there’s some sort of intent there. I might not be ready to buy today, but I’m interested and that is the intent you need to follow with that stuff. It’s a long answer for you Chris, but we can dig into any one of those strategies you want.

We can dig into. Whatever you want but those are the three I hit. Welcome messages. Browse abandonment. Checkout abandonment.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

Wow, I think you nailed that. 87% of automation orders coming through those three and. Just to put it out there, if you’re watching or listening this, you can do this easily with Lifter LMS or WooCommerce, or paid memberships Pro with Omnis Send, which integrates directly.

And you guys have like templates and all kinds of stuff to make setting this up easy.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, everything’s pre-built. You can customize anything you want, but we pre-built segments. We pre-built workflows based on what you want. You select it and you can. Even though it’s templatized, you can then customize the template if you want.

But the whole thing is designed to get you to build it in literally a matter of seconds to maybe a minute a couple minutes to create a message, but we even templatize the message for you so you can just customize a couple things and super easy to do. And then you can get more advanced and sophisticated as you want and slowly add and optimize it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s riff on Black Friday, cyber Monday a little bit. I noticed, the software industry was looking at the retail industry and like what happened at malls and shopping centers and stuff with this craze to buy on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all these things. And the software industry got on this bus, and particularly in WordPress, where with a very value focused buyer, black Friday typically has substantial discounts.

Lifter. LMS is an example. We make five to 10 times a normal month’s revenue during this kind of November, end of November period. And I see a lot of course creators and coaches not leveraging Black Friday or at least trying. Another thing I see, which is interesting is some people do a Black Friday campaign once and then they stop because they’re like.

They get bored of it, but I heard this quote that you’re, you may be tired of your marketing, but your market never is. Black Friday will come around like clockwork every year. But stepping back, what could course creators and coaches do, or, and even agency professionals around Black Friday to, get those massive increases in sales or perhaps tie into another event that has.

Shopping behavior kind of baked into the psyche and the cultural landscape?

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a good question. So I love the analogy kind of you gave there, there was an old saying in radio boss told me it was like, play what you want at home. Play what they want at work. So it’s the same, like your marketing thing was always spot on with it.

It’s the exact same thing. Here’s the thing about Black Friday, cyber Monday or whatever. Keep your right if you’re back to school season, which we’re currently in right now, right? Whatever your big sales period is. We talked earlier about the lens of value focused shopping.

Nothing screams value focused shopping more than Black Friday, cyber Monday. Those, that, how those holiday deals. So whether you like offering ’em or not is one thing. You can offer ’em. People are expecting it, right? It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing in the world. And I’ll give you an example. I have a couple pieces of exercise equipment at home.

I have an iFit membership to check my workouts on and they run Black Friday deals and yearly memberships are not inexpensive. I’m a value focused shopper and they run ’em and. Every Black Friday, I go look to see what the discounts are, look at the previous year, and I will renew my membership at that point.

But it’s the subscription, but I’m looking for value on it. I don’t need to do it in June when it expires in December, and I just start stacking ’em. So the one thing I will look at is one, people are expecting some sort of value. So be in the conversation, right? It doesn’t have to be the biggest discount, but be in the conversation.

Reinforce to your audience, yes, I’m in the trend. I see you. I can offer this to you. And if you can’t offer, if everyone else is doing 40% and you’re like, you know what? I could do 10% off. That’s what we do here, right? Add onto it with focusing on value. What makes your course different and really promote 10% off for Black Friday.

So let ’em know it’s a deal. Let ’em know 10% off. Let a limited time window on there. For four days, only, five days only, whatever it might be. You can use SMS as a flash sale, two hours, maybe get 15% off, but then focus on the other values, direct access to course or have your questions answered by course creators or whatever your value props are.

And that’s how you wanna build that whole thing together. So don’t have to give away the farm. You don’t have to do 70% off. Again, you don’t have to, but you need to be in the conversation. If I’m looking at this is just consumer mentality here and the marketing psychology, but I’m looking at two courses.

One is, 50 bucks more, but they were giving me 10% off and this one is flat fee. And at the end of the day, they’re at the same price. I’m gonna look at this and go, okay, I’m gonna take the 10% off ’cause it’s priced more here and I’m getting a better deal. So inherently I think we have better value over here.

Might not be true, but if they’re not, they’re just promoting 10% off this course and I’ve got. Hey, flat fee, but we get this, and this. Now I’m looking, okay, where is that value? I’m looking through that lens. Where am I getting the best bang for the buck? And it might be on these value props here, so we need to be in the conversation with it, if nothing else.

And I think that’s the one thing to look at is, look at margins. Obviously you should have fairly decent margins, I would think if you’re a course greater because you’re not manufacturing products per se. But you need to be in the conversation. But I would promote it. I would try to do, find ways that work with your brand, work with your product, your discounting philosophy as a organization and kind of move from there for it.

But I gotta be in the conversation for it, in my opinion.

Chris Badgett: Let’s learn from retail again, and I’m hoping you can do the same thing for SMS that you did with. Email automation. Three emails welcome, email browse abandonment and card abandonment. SMS is underutilized by course creators and coaches.

Omnis send makes it easy, but at a international level ’cause a lot of course creators have people all over the world. I think a lot, there’s a misconception that. Email’s easy ’cause everybody has an email. But how do I do all this international text messaging? Omnis Send actually does, it makes it easy to the tech part and the infrastructure part of that.

But what kinds of SMS campaigns could course creators do?

Greg Zakowicz: I think give you the same answer. It’s gonna be the same messages. So what we see from SMS, just put it in perspective conversion rates, click rates on automated SMS more than double. Just scheduled messages so effective there it’s not 37 to 2%, but it’s, I think the number was 18% of all or SMS orders came from automated SMS 9% of sent, so still two to one ratio.

Again, the reason is simple. It’s relevant, it’s timely, and it’s personal to ’em. So what I would do from an SMS standpoint is look at the same ones, right? I talk, I talked a little bit about focusing on high intent messages, birthday messages, great. They can engage, but they’re not high intent. I’m not opening the email because planning on shopping, maybe I am, but.

I’m opening ’cause you’re wishing a birthday. And people like their birthdays generally, and they wanna feel good. It’s the intent, the welcome message has an intent. So send an automated SMS message. Just get in their inbox, get in their messages, slide in their dms browse abandonment.

Again, there’s a high intent there. What am I checking out? So that’s an easy place where you can just slide an SMS in there and be like, Hey, we noticed you checking out X, Y, Z. Or don’t forget, all. All new subscribers get X, Y, Z, and just have a link there, getting it back. So if they decide, 12 hours from now, they’ve got an easy place to link.

And then again, abandonment, check out abandonment. You’re so close, don’t you know? And you just promote Hey, get ahead, get that promotion, whatever that value add for taking that course is right. It’s the same three messages that I would start with, and then you can expand from there. But I don’t think you need to expand a whole lot.

Maybe. A re-engagement message if they stop logging into the course or whatever lapse purchase, stuff like that. But I don’t think you need birthday messages on SMS for a course creator. I don’t think you need, back in stock messages. You don’t only have back in stock. So really what I tell people is look at the intent of a, the customer, consumer, whoever it is, what’s their intent, and that’s where you wanna follow your messages.

So that’s the second lens that put it through. I’m sure you’ll probably ask me about it. Like we were chatting offline about this is like people are scared to jump in S mess. They either don’t know how to do it, they don’t think, for course creators, it makes sense, or agencies it makes sense. They think, oh, it’s too intimate, it’s too personal, and I’m not a fun brand, right?

I’m trying to, I’m trying to educate someone. I would say it, it’s hogwash. So the best thing to do. Is test it and how do you test it? You put ask for mobile. Ask for mobile numbers at signup. On the popup. Leave it an optional field. Do not make it required. Do not make it seem like if they get an incentive, whether it’s an ebook or a discount on the first course or whatever it is for setting up for an email address, you then go to a second step that makes it sound like they need to sign up for mobile to get that.

A lot of times they’ll say it, but they still do it. Sometimes they require it. It’s okay to have two steps. Just make that second step optional. If people sign up for your SMS, it’s an indication that yeah, they’re okay getting an SMS from you. If they don’t sign up, it’s your indication that, yeah, maybe my audience for this particular product or course it’s not their jam and that’s okay.

But that’s a simple way to figure it out. And then if you need to start, if you start to see those, estimate, those mobile numbers come in, the simple way to start is just put an SMS message in those automations we talked about. Let the automated SMS do the work, and you don’t have to schedule messages every week or every two weeks to those people until you’re ready.

Let ’em see if it works. Like my kids say, let it cook, right? That’s the simple way to start. You let the automation do it, you let it test out. If it’s not gonna work on a really high intent, ones that are proven to convert, maybe it’s your indication that yeah, they want SMS, but we don’t really have the formula for what they want from that SMS.

And you could slowly refine your automated ones until they start working, and then that gives you an indication of how to build your scheduled messages out.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. You mentioned fund brand and maybe we could use potentially the university professor versus an independent subject matter expert as an example.

This is so from like a marketing angle. How do we build, a fun brand office, authenticity, trust, and authority? Because I see a lot of people get hung up in this imposter syndrome stuff. Yeah. And in our marketing, just how can we be more authentic and authoritative and really at the end of the day, build that trust.

Greg Zakowicz: I, I think you, the word you used is authentic, right? Like I look at it from a couple, couple different ways. I’ve been in this, I’ve been in email for almost 20 years now, I think 19 plus years. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve been in SMS for over a decade. I’ve been through B2B, I’ve done D two C.

I’ve done kind of all roles in it. I still suffer from imposter syndrome. I’m like, I know my stuff, but I still suffer from it, right? I think it’s natural for people. We also live in an era where the industry changes a lot, right? You think about e-commerce five years ago, it was pretty well fleshed out, but it’s so different now.

Right now we got a agent tech AI for shopping and browsing and doing all these things and it’s continually changing, and I think that’s where kind of imposter syndrome comes in. But then I look at, okay, if I’m a professor and not knocking professors here at universities, but if I’m a professor and I’m not in the actual field, I’m.

Doing coursebook and studying, lecturing off that versus here’s Greg over here who’s living in this day by day and looking at numbers and, talking to brands. Which one might be better for me, from a practical skill standpoint. And it’s probably gonna be the subject matter expert.

So it’s not really answering your question yet, Chris, but I think there’s a lot of value to being in the field day to day and figuring out, hey, this is working, this isn’t working. But it used to. And it’s less theory, it’s more practical. And I think the practical skills sell how to build it. I’m really bad at building things like this.

Just personally it takes a lot of time and I’m not a course creator, but YouTube, we talked about being I mentioned as the greatest educational tool out there. Right now. You got other ones like Khan Academy and other courses. But collectively, YouTube is awesome. So you have the ability to build.

Short videos and things that kind of reinforce it there. You can be more fun on YouTube. You don’t have to be stuffy. TikTok, Instagram, whatever social channels you wanna use, you can be a lot more fun and build the authenticity there. You can write bylines for, industry articles, whatever you want.

So I think it’s just a collective effort. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of, it’s a collective effort there to, but you have the ability where. People don’t care if you’re, suit and tie professional anymore. For the most part. They care that whether you know your stuff and you can relate that content transferable and they trust you.

And I think that’s the biggest thing. And you build trust by, say say what you’re gonna do and then do what you say it’s the same thing, right? If I’m telling you that automation is awesome and everyone’s automation stinks, they’re gonna be like, this guy doesn’t know what he is talk about, but we see the automation work and now.

We can see which ones work or whatever. So it’s all about just building trust and having fun and smiling and, self-deprecating when it matters. You know your audience best and what type of course you’re building, but be relatable. And that’s really the biggest thing.

Chris Badgett: Question about Omnis.

Send email marketing platforms and multichannel marketing platforms. They’re a little sticky. But I’ve noticed every two to three years people start, getting frustrated with their current setup. And maybe they’re starting to shop around and looking to switch.

If somebody’s looking to start or switch with, switch to Omnis, send particularly around this idea of, welcome automation, browse, abandonment, automation, card abandonment automation. What’s the best way to get started and why should they take a hard look at Omnis Send.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. Best way to get started, I think for anyone, regardless of the type of platform, is to understand what else is out there.

So you look at your own capabilities okay, what are we lacking that we need? Why do we think we need that? So you gotta figure out what you’re missing, right? And it could be the platform is not advancing. We got ai, but the platform doesn’t have any AI in it. And now I’m using three tools to get one thing done.

So you gotta figure out what you’re lacking, why you’re lacking, and then. What you want on the next platform. That’s the easiest thing to do. It’s not always easy, but that’s the simplest place to get started. And then when you start looking at what else is out there, you have to look at the platforms.

Do they have these things? And what else did the platform offer beyond these core things? So I think every platform in the world has features that most people aren’t going to use. You get the 80 20 rule, or, 90 10, whatever they want, where, 20% of the features used by 80% of the people.

But do they have the ability to have the features? Should you grow into ’em as you scale? Can they meet your scaling needs? And when you look at that, I point you back to Omnis sound, but the platform is just good. I’ve been in, in the email email marketing and SMS platform space for 13, 14 years now.

The platform’s good. We have AI built into things you can. Generally talk about segments you wanna build and they’ll build a segment for you, right? So it’s small things like that. We talked about automation. Do they have automation? Is it customizable and is it gated? Now, that’s an important thing too, because you’ll have email providers that say, Hey, we have all these things.

You go on there and you get this cheap plan. It’s oh, you gotta get the enterprise plan to get these things. So look to see what’s gated and what’s not. And that’s gonna be an important thing. Our automations, you could be at our free plan, you can use the automations. You gotta figure out that stuff out.

Does it integrate with your platform? So WooCommerce WordPress, do you have an integration that syncs the data? ’cause that’s gonna be important then what other tools? Right? Popups. Okay. Popups built in. I can use ’em, I can choose not to use ’em, but it’s there for me if I want to. Do they have testing with the popups?

Do they have segment builders? Do they have, like what’s the email builder like what I, when we talk about like why should you use Omnis send, we just check the boxes, we follow the industry trends, we build it into the platform. We integrate very quickly on these things. We take customer feedback and that’s the one thing I will say about Omnis Send versus others.

We’re organically funded, so if we don’t have investors to report to, we have our customers to report to. And if we’re not providing a value to our customers, they’re not gonna choose us. They choose us, get 125,000 happy customers. It’s just a really solid platform. When you’re looking, go talk to someone there.

You can sign up for Omnis, send for free. You don’t have to put a credit card down. So if you wanna just play around with it, go sign up, play around with it, integrate it, do what you wanna do and see if it works for you and see if those customizations. Reaching out to the company a lot of times will give you a sense of.

Are they business oriented? Are they customer oriented? Are they fun to talk to? Are they very stuffy? A lot of times just having a conversation with someone’s easiest way word, approachable team over here.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Greg Zow, e-commerce and retail advisor at Omnis Send. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you online?

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, usual places. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m on Blue Sky more than Twitter now. Not many people are on Blue Sky, but I’m over there. If you go to my Twitter, you can link over, but LinkedIn’s probably the best place you can find me. Anyone else on Omnis Sun there? Omnis Sun as well. They’re pretty active on social too, so just feel free to pop over.

We’re friendly.

Chris Badgett: Awesome Greg. Thanks for coming on the show. I could have talked for hours with you on marketing, but it’s been a great conversation. Really appreciate it.

Greg Zakowicz: I appreciate the invite and thanks for having me Chris. I enjoyed as well.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn the episode, Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder SEO delves at the ways artificial intelligence is changing search behavior and the implications for website owners, particularly those creating online training programs or e-learning platforms.

She explains that with the rise of AI-generated search results such as Google’s AI Overviews and conversational modes users often get direct answers without clicking through to a website. Because of this change, websites find it more difficult to become visible using traditional SEO alone. However, Lindsay emphasizes that this is merely a new challenge and not the end for content providers.

She highlights the ongoing importance of human connection, pointing out that when people wish to learn a lot or make an investment in something worthwhile, they still look for reliable professionals. Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords.

Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest, she’s back on the show. It’s Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder, SEO. You can find her and pathfinder@pathfinderseo.com. We’re gonna get into all topics, SEO, and AI, and getting found on the internet. But first, welcome to the show, Lindsay.

Lindsay Halsey: Thanks so much, Chris. I’m excited to be here.

Chris Badgett: Let’s just jump right in and the big question I know a lot of people have, if you’re building a website or an e-learning website is how is [00:01:00] AI changing the behavior of people that are, going to their laptop or their phone or their computer to search for stuff Like what’s happened in the past four years?

Lindsay Halsey: A lot’s happening and things are evolving reasonably quickly. And really AI is starting to reshape the way we think about search and search engine optimization and and some of the kind of behavior changes. And we can dig into a few of these in more detail. The first is that there is the opportunity for essentially like generative responses directly on, on Google, Yahoo, Bing, right?

So when you go on Google and you type in your search query, you get a new row called AI overviews, and in there you get a generated response that has sites or citations and some links to the websites that sort of trained up the ai. But that you may, in this case, one of the things changing is you may decide as a, as the end user not to click through to a website for information, but rather to just receive the response directly from Google.

And [00:02:00] then as Google often sees do another Google search and and you can have that more conversational nature. If you’re in the US right now there’s AI mode which allows you to take that that conversation further and have and continue on almost like you would with chat GPT.

So that’s just one of the things that we’re seeing happen right now is in some ways people feel like the search engines continue to make it harder to get traffic to your website. Because Google is answering things directly in the search results. So it’s the people also ask boxes that used to pop up where you could just see the results or you put in something like movie Showtimes near me and it just tells you the showtimes.

You never go to a website. You can think of AI overviews and AI mode as being in that similar vein of changing user behavior. But on the flip side, the more optimistic piece of this all is that it really is an opportunity for your brand, for your business, for your training, for your expertise to get [00:03:00] shown directly on Google to build brand awareness and to educate, which I know a lot of your audience is all about education and training and, and so I, I see the positive side of these changes. But in the short run, one of the things a lot of businesses are experiencing is a decrease in sessions or traffic from organic search

Chris Badgett: before we zoom in, like on a macro level. At what point, like we often still want to get the visitor to our website to buy the movie tickets or take our paid course or read our, the full article.

For the content creator, how do we, where does the wall stop where AI isn’t enough? Even if you think about teaching a course online, there’s pressure from people just learning a skill or knowledge directly from AI without needing a course. Do you have any thoughts on like, where does the creator still hold territory in terms of, getting that traffic all the way over and out of the chat [00:04:00] interface?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, definitely. So like the biggest thing I think about, because we’re in the same situation as we’re, in the field of SEO education and and so when somebody searches for something like how to learn SEO they’re unlikely to click through to our course about intro to SEO, right?

That would’ve been the old user experience. Somebody would’ve made. But now you’re more likely to either put that query into chat, GPT, Gemini Perplexity or Claude, something like that, and get some structured response on how to actually learn this tool or this, the skillset. Or you might put it in a Google and see the AI mode or the AI overview and not click through to a website.

I still see the role of the human expert is essentially that we are still human and so we wanna connect with other humans. And so we only go so deep with where the AI response will take us. And the way you can create value in this space is to have contrast. So have an [00:05:00] opinion, take a corner, have an opinion about, what’s happening in your space, share something unique.

Tell stories that are like basically founded in real world experience so that your content on your website is different from all of the AI generated response that’s just average out there. And that you, as an expert really shines through because at the end of the day. There is a trust issue with ai and when you’re gonna invest time in learning, you wanna know who you’re learning from and that they’re a genuine expert.

And I personally think a lot of user behavior will basically touch on the high level of Hey, it’s nice to get a structured response about how to learn SEO but at the end of the day, if you’re really gonna dig in and get hands on you’re likely gonna benefit from learning from a human and not from the ai.

Chris Badgett: Question. And first I just wanna say I got a ton of value out of working with you and your team at Pathfinder. On leveling up our SEO game, even though we’d been at it for a long time. But just to give a real specific example we wanna rank at lifter LMS for the best WordPress LMS plugins and.

We had an article on that, it was like rank 23. Now we’re regularly at one or two. Awesome. I give Pathfinder a lot of credit from working with you guys on like really going deep on SEO and throwing every tactic in the book at that. And it worked and it sticks. It’s not like it’s moving. It stays there and we are constantly refreshing it.

Awesome. But to get to my beginner question, I think it sometimes when I saw AI come on. I’m like, wow, that’s great. We’ve been in the space for over a decade. So the AI and the language model already knows a lot about us and I’m really glad we’re not new is the thought I have. So what would you say to somebody who’s new in a competitive space to get.

At least into that AI [00:07:00] conversation as a source or a personality or whatever, because if you’re not established, that seems even harder than it’s ever been.

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, definitely. So a couple of tips there. The first one is go very specific. It’s really hard to rank for something general, right?

Take your expertise and create a piece of content and rank for the big keywords. But one of the things that’s shifting here is people are putting a lot of information in their queries in more detail. They’re putting like the who, how they’re trying to get from point A to point B, what those points might be.

All sorts of different scenarios are shifting in how we search online. And so when you start to think about the kind of content you create, instead of playing in the like general competitive keyword space. If you go hyper-specific, you’re gonna find the right audience and likely get more visibility more quickly.

And so this is that concept that’s been around in SEO forever, which is that concept of the long tail of SEO, that you don’t just go for like the mothership. Two word, [00:08:00] keyword phrase that everybody else is optimizing towards and has thousands or millions of searches a month. But rather you create more specifically shaped pieces of content and that goes further faster.

And so you see a shift in people’s content marketing, for example, away from the definitive guide to whatever the subject is into really specific pieces. And so that’d be my biggest tip is invest in content marketing that really showcases a specific topic. Then layers in who it’s for because that’s what Google is getting better and the rest of the search engines.

And really AI is getting better at connecting those dots between the individual behind the search. So that’s the first piece of the puzzle. The other piece of the puzzle is when you’re new you also need to go out and think about how do I build a little like authority and trust out there in this space?

And that’s one of the things that established brands get to rely and relax a little bit on is having a domain. And a brand that has a lot of [00:09:00] mentions and backlinks and things like that to it. When you’re just getting started, you don’t have those things. But you can go out and find the low hanging fruit.

And so what I mean by that is if you’re just getting started, consider creating a Google Maps listing, even if you don’t consider yourself a local business. And the reason is because it’s a place where you can get some reviews online and it really is training up the AI quite a bit. Reviews on anything go a long ways.

So showcasing reviews on your own website, getting them on Google Maps anywhere you can get a review is helpful. One of the things you’ll notice in a lot of the AI generated responses is things when they start to actually talk about businesses in a space is that there’s, they put in like reviewers or people often say things like that, so they are able to very quickly process all of the reviews out there about, say, lifter, LMS.

And smush them into a, one to two sentence phrase. That’s a synopsis. And then if there’s a list of like best, whatever [00:10:00] plugins in this space, et cetera, then they’re gonna be able to do the same for your competitors. So just starting out right out of the gate and going and trying to pick up a couple of reviews, whether it’s Google Maps, Facebook reviews, directly reviews you put on your own website that’ll build a little credibility.

Then trying to get those back links which is one of the ways you can do it, is just sharing your expertise. So if you invest in writing a blog post on a topic, try to get out there and be a guest on somebody else’s podcast, for instance. Try to get out there and share your knowledge and your experience and do that on as a webinar guest, a podcast guest.

All of the, those things go a long ways in building a little bit of brand recognition and authority.

Chris Badgett: It seems like for both AI and SEO or just the search engine results pages, there’s a lot more emphasis on things like Reddit conversations. Yeah. Why is that? It’s Google’s [00:11:00] prioritizing, like real people having a discussion, not some listicle about the best, whatever.

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, the Reddit thing has been surprising to me as somebody that like doesn’t tend to go to a lot of forums for answers and things like that, and I thought it was a fad and that Google would play around with it and then back off.

And we’ve seen that before, but it does not appear to be a fad. Reddit really does appear to be, it gets strong placement and visibility on Google in and of itself. So being there and it’s training up the AI and and it’s seemingly not going anywhere. Yeah, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s because like you said, it’s real people and and now it can really take all of the information about a topic or a brand or whatever, all of the conversation on Reddit and create a structured sort of understanding of that.

And yeah, Reddit’s kind of crushing it right now in the SEO world, and it’s in a lot of those kind of best of queries, et cetera.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about AI for content creation. For SEO as, [00:12:00]yeah when I’ve tried, I’ve. I tried to write a whole article with AI and I’m like, it’s just not there.

But for research or like building on what I already have, it’s great. Yeah. But and also related to this, do you get penalized if you just publish some AI generated content that’s totally AI generated?

Lindsay Halsey: Good question. So the first you do not get penalized by publishing AI generated content. There’s not like a flag that says, created by ai, don’t show in the search results.

Or even worse penalize the brand for it. Instead it’s just that AI generated content doesn’t really add new value. It doesn’t have contrast, doesn’t feel as powered by genuine experience and authority, so it’s unlikely to perform well. So I really think about basically this human centered approach to content ma marketing that’s AI supported.

Yes, I think AI tools are amazing. I haven’t published a blog post in the last year without relying on some component of ai. To help me create the content, refine the content, et cetera. That being said there’s always a human involved and so I find that sometimes it creates a better final product.

In the ai it takes our weaknesses and can fill in some gaps depending on how you’re using it. It also speeds the process up, but and that content is doing, we’ve done some experiments, like fully human powered content, didn’t touch ai, fully AI powered content in that sort of middle ground that human centered AI supported and we’re not finding that the totally AI created content doesn’t do anything.

We’re doing just as well in our performance, in our rankings and making it quicker when we go with that kind of combo approach versus when we just go a hundred percent human powered with no ai, if that makes sense. So you gotta figure out kind of the workflow that works well for you. I think the research piece or just creating structure and a frame can be really helpful sometimes.

We are so close to our love our area of expertise. One of the [00:14:00] things we struggle with is seeing the big picture and teaching it, whether it’s in a blog post, a YouTube video, or behind a course paywall or wherever the teaching is. Sometimes, like we’re so zoomed in and narrowed in, we skip the beginning or we miss a step or something like that.

And I personally find AI to be really helpful for, Hey, here’s this topic I’m thinking about writing about. Here’s who I’m trying to reach with it. Help me create an outline, et cetera. And then I’ll do some writing, and then I’ll have it reshape it. I’ve used it in so many different ways to help support support our content marketing.

Chris Badgett: One of the challenges of LMS websites is there’s a lot of content that’s not visible to the search engine,

Lindsay Halsey: right?

Chris Badgett: So what, because it’s behind the login and that kind of thing. What? Should a, how should a course creator structure their website today to, with SEO and AI discoverability in mind?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. And that is to say you need to give away some of that expertise and content [00:15:00] for free not being behind a paywall so that you are part of the conversation, whether it is the conversation on Google or chat, GPT, et cetera. You wanna contribute to training the AI in your subject matter, and you wanna get known as an authority in that space.

And and so to do that, you have to strategically decide what content, is free and on the blog, and what content is paid and behind a paywall. And there’s no one solution to that in my mind’s eye. But one of the biggest things I like to do is think about if I do give this content away for free, right?

Like it’s on a blog post and it starts to get traction. What’s the bridge between getting them, if you’re selling a course or a membership or whatever the purchase now is, what’s the little intermediate step? That’s more of a call to action in the middle, where I’m gonna also get a little something in return.

So a lot of times if I publish a blog post that’s educational, et cetera, I’ll embed a YouTube video in it. Like I’ll really try to make it great, right? Add value, share, teach, et [00:16:00] cetera. But then the in content CTA won’t just be the buy the thing, buy the course, or buy the membership. It’ll be the next step in something for free where it can still trade that email address and trade for a download or an email series or whatever it is tied to the topic at hand.

So if I’m gonna give something away in the blog post, I wanna make sure that my conversion rate on that blog post to picking up an email address is somewhere in the 5% range. I find if I tie the call to action directly to the topic at hand, so it’s like the next thing you would want on this, and I’m willing to give away just like one ounce more for free then I get a lot of value out of that.

And if I just stick a call to action on their sign up for a newsletter, it gets less than a 1% conversion rate. And then you start to say was creating that traffic and giving it away that content away for free worthwhile. It’s harder to measure.

Chris Badgett: I learned this from you all that like original research [00:17:00]is really valuable.

Lindsay Halsey: Really valuable.

Chris Badgett: What are, expand on that, let’s say we’re we have a subject matter expertise in X, Y, z. How do we do that original research or publish it in a way that it’s beneficial to AI and SEO?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. So that’s always been something that’s been beneficial to SEO. ’cause one it shows your expertise, right?

You did original research and you’re publishing it, in a scientific type format, in a blog post, sharing that research it gets quoted, it gets linked to more often. Other people might come back and look at that original research and then wanna link to it. So it does a lot of high value work.

In this era, it’s even more valuable because it is that original type research that the AI would like to be trained on and then is more likely to cite you, et cetera. And to showcase your expertise. Anywhere where you can publish that original research it’s tricky. Like in the field of SEO it’s really hard.

Most of the kind of big original research is [00:18:00] coming out of big SEO software companies that have access to massive amounts of data, et cetera. So you have to think about like where is your place? But that being said, even if you can’t get like original research in your space, one of the things you may be able to do is genuine storytelling, et cetera.

And so weaving that in is something that I know we did in our, some of our blog posts last year, and it really made a big difference. Basically taking the whole intro and starting with a story in the first person and making it relatable and talking about something that happened. And so it’s not research like a comp, compilation of lots of data, but it’s this like singular point in time.

And that’s helped our content resonate more with sort of Google’s helpful content algorithms that are really looking at that sort of expertise, authority, and trust behind a post.

Chris Badgett: Related to research is doing like charts and graphs and tables and gifs and all that stuff like, [00:19:00] like visualizing data. And that’s so easy to do now and even in Canva you can, it’s give it some numbers and it gives you a nice looking. Chart branded to your brand.

Lindsay Halsey: Exactly. And so you can put that together with so much more ease now.

And that also makes it easier to create downloads and things like that where somebody might be willing to like, Hey, I read through it, but download the. The paper version or the PDF version and you’re going to email it to a colleague or something like that. So it is a lot easier to create that high value and to just push yourself to take your content a little further.

And so one thing I. Often think about that I think really applies to the folks listening to this podcast is that a lot of times we take our expertise, right? And you go and you create something with it, like a course or training module or whatever it might be, but you have an area of expertise and you create this thing and then you’re like, okay, the next thing I’m gonna do is a blog post.

And then what we tend to do if you’re anything like me, is like move to the next topic, right? You’re like, I did the [00:20:00] blog posts, I did the thing, right? That was the marketing piece and the creation of whatever, the training material that was like the sales piece or the product piece. But really I try to make myself.

Fit in that space for a lot longer than I ever wanted to. So a while back, Google Analytics launched GA four, right? And it was a topic I really didn’t wanna be an expert in, but became one. And I just decided to sit in that space for three months. And that meant I wrote a blog post. I created a YouTube video.

I created social posts. We added paid social behind the paid social posts. I reached out to six. Podcast, webinars, things beyond like our brand. And I was a guest on them talking about GA four, what’s changing, how to handle it. Then I self-hosted a couple of webinars. By the time those three months were over, I was totally exhausted.

But the value is that I built up a cloud of expertise and authority in that space that Google could pick up on it. So all the content I created and that’s. Space was performing really [00:21:00] well at the time because I was doing all these other things. And so that’s one area that I think once you decide, hey, this is something I’m gonna, be an expert, this is like a little facet of my expertise that I’m gonna go down a rabbit hole in, make yourself stay in that for a little bit longer so that you really exhaust like all avenues.

And to me, that’s. It’s not just SEO, but it is all of those actions were things that helped us build domain authority, trust all these other signals that then help our other content, and it’s the snowball effect, if that makes sense.

Chris Badgett: I didn’t entirely get off the content treadmill, but I started going back and instead of doing a new post, make an old one better.

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Like the really important pillar posts like. Coming back to him week after week, and that’s how. Really able to move up to top ranking. It wasn’t about like continually pumping out new content.

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, exactly. So a content revision with something new, like an infographic or [00:22:00] some kind of new visual. And one of the, other areas of SEO that we know that Google’s looking at is when you do win the click and traffic comes to your website from Google, Google is looking to signals around things like engagement.

Rate engagement time. If people are like hitting the buy now button, going to other web pages, etc. They’re looking at that user experience because what Google wants to see is oh, this is, this query led to this click, and then they had a really great experience over here that has a positive reflection on Google.

So that those are dwell signals in like SEO terms. And so when you take an existing blog post and you add a YouTube and embed video in it, or you add a cool image or you update the intro so it’s a little catchier, or you add some kind of a call to action that maps to the topic, any of those things is gonna be a rising tide because it’s gonna lead to a little bit better.

Like incrementally better user experience, which then trains up Google’s algorithms and its machine learning to send more [00:23:00] traffic your way. And that was one of the things that we’ve really seen over the last year or two is like a certain number of posts are just taking off because they get that self-fulfilling prophecy.

Whereas other posts that we think are really great, totally fall flat. And I look at it a little bit like baseball, even the best hitters train a ton and they think they are gonna get to the plate and they’re gonna be able to hit a home run. When it comes to content marketing, you just have to keep your at bats going and know that you’re gonna hit a couple of singles and a couple of doubles, and then a home run from time to time.

And it’s even for experts, it can be a little hard to predict which ones are really gonna go the farthest, but it’s all about getting back up to the plate and getting a new piece of content or trying again, revising something, et cetera.

Chris Badgett: Question if you do a major rewrite or revision first, is it okay to change the publish date to today. Or should you not do that or does that even matter?

Lindsay Halsey: I do change it, [00:24:00] and recency really does matter in SEO and all of the AI getting found in ai. So yeah, recency matters. I do change the published state as long as I actually add new value to the post. If I fix a typo, that doesn’t count.

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Related to that, like it I see a lot of people, and I’m guilting myself of doing this, if you have a best of X, Y, Z in 2023, but it’s [00:26:00] 2025 now if all you’re gonna do is just change the date, it’s, that, does that help or not really?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, so those posts can be really at least they were really hard to write. Like I remember years ago writing best SEO plugins for WordPress and like how much time and resource our team put into we already used all the plugins, but figuring out who had what feature, what price point, all this stuff, like creating charts and diagrams, it was a massive amount of work.

To create a post like that. And so then, yeah, before you know it, 2023 becomes 2025 in this case, and it is okay to put the new publish date. I think as a end user, I wouldn’t respond very well to the best whatever of 2025 and then see a 2023 publish date. I’d probably hit the back button and be like, that doesn’t align.

There’s just a quick like cork in the system. But in terms of refining that content, it’d be a great thing to be able to just drop in the chat GPT and say, here’s this post I wrote, like on the best of what should I consider updating what’s out [00:27:00] of date, et cetera. And and go through some prompts to try to help you modernize the content enough so that you feel good about putting the new date stamp on.

Chris Badgett: Same question I get. And I’m sure a lot of people get like all these emails requesting back links that aren’t very good besides creating great content and being a guest on somebody else’s platforms. Is there any other way to think about getting back links that if you want to put some effort into it and just come off well in your efforts?

Lindsay Halsey: Good question. So yeah, you still like SEO in some ways has evolved a lot and hasn’t evolved at all in other ways, right? So there’s still people sending you these random emails. Will you link to me da, hit delete on all of those. There’s still people trying to sell you link building at scale, et cetera.

Or even link building, not at scale, right? So paid link placement. You can go and buy a backlink in like blogger outreach [00:28:00] and things like that. But at the end of the day, what I always like to do back is take a step back from my overall like online presence and think about my real world.

Like how your business does business, right? Who do you do business with? Not necessarily who are your customers? ’cause it’s pretty unusual for customers to link back to your website. But more like who are your partners in an ecosystem, et cetera. So as an example, if you were an interior designer, you would probably get referrals from other architects, general contractors, et cetera, and you would probably also refer business to them, right?

You work in an ecosystem and there’s all these adjacent people that anyone who’s building a house needs more than just an interior designer. They probably have five to 10 other professionals like working in their ecosystem space. So most interior designers have all these relationships in the real world, but almost none of them are actually modeling that for Google, right?

So if I were to chat with you over coffee, you could tell me about all [00:29:00]these pals and people that you do business with and refer. But if I looked on your website and if I looked on their websites, I’d never know that there was any kind of real world integration. And so in the spaces that we’re all in, we can think of those types of counterparts, like who’s in your ecosystem.

And you don’t always have to do a webinar or a podcast, which takes a lot of time and effort to be able to leverage those relationships in a positive way. So it still works to have get links from people in more static ways. If you have a, our partners page and they have an our partners page, you might link to those types of things.

You can also give a testimonial away, right? So we have a web, like an agency that helps us with our marketing and our web design. We could give that agency a testimonial of what it’s been like to be a client of theirs and they could put that on their website and then link back from where it says my name to my website, right?

So I can do smaller ways of showing like the ways that we do business. You could do something like that for your accountant or a tax advisor like [00:30:00]anybody where you have like real world professional relationship. You can go out and come up with creative ways to show Google and model for Google what’s going on there.

Other businesses, like a really generous, or maybe you’re on a board of director you could be generous in your community by supporting nonprofits. You could be a board on a member of a board of directors, et cetera, like related or not related to your business, but part of you who you are, right?

So things that we do beyond it. I know my business partner, she’s on the board of the skating club for her daughter. So she has a little bio on the Skating Club website and somewhere in the bio it mentions our businesses and it links to them, right? That’s pretty low hanging fruit. You’re just already doing those things.

But sometimes you just need a little bit of follow up to go pick up those links. So there’s not one way to build a backlink network. And I think the biggest way to be successful is to weave it into your real world marketing. So it’s not something you do because I’m sitting down to do link building.

It’s something I do. Cause I’m thinking about marketing and partnerships. And trying to add value on the internet and and all of these ways and showcase partners, et cetera,

Chris Badgett: related to authority. I feel like the author page, like on a WordPress site. Or a social media bio or the about page on a business website.

Like what can we do just to best practice, explain who we are, what we do, what our expertise is, because that stuff really matters. I think

Lindsay Halsey: it matters a ton. It’s actually one of the things I’m working on our own website right now is like making sure the who shines through behind your content.

I think a lot of times as marketers, our initial inclination is I’m building a business website, so I need to look like a business, right? And so you almost take the human out of it. Now you wanna be putting the human back into everything, right? So if you have a blog post, under the blog post, it should have the publish date.

Who the author was. And then that little like part where it says your name, it should link to your authorship page. And ideally you have a great authorship page. That could be you talking in the first person, hi, I am so and and then there could be a section there like also seen as, or here’s some blog posts I’ve written.

So we invest a lot of time into creating both the individuals. Then also the about page could be depending on how your team is structured.

Could be more about the business, but it could also just be about you. If you are a one person business then you need one killer page all about you, which always feels a little uncomfortable, but once you start putting it together, it’s not so bad.

And if you have a team, then you wanna try to create something similar for each team member and really make sure you’re connecting the dots and showcasing the humans behind the business.

Chris Badgett: How does social media impact SEO and ai discoverability?

Lindsay Halsey: Good question. In general, I’ve always said social media has overlap. But not nearly as powerful as like backlinks or Google Maps, reviews, etc. Because a lot of that is behind a paywall and Google struggles to get trained up on all of those social conversations. Social has so much paid space right now too it’s just, it’s very complicated.

The search engines never really wove social very well into its algorithm directly. So that’s still the case. Like social still only plays some overlap, but I think now we’re in this like massive period of change in evolution and technology has gotten obviously so much smarter and so I think we’re gonna see a little bit more change there.

I think of social as standing on its own two legs. It’s its own marketing channel, but it helps me with SEO. Because if you put, say a social post out about a blog post you wrote and then it gets picked up and seen by your colleagues, your friends, the people that follow your business.

It gets more likely to then pick up a back link because someone’s oh, you remember I saw like Chris wrote this cool thing on this topic, and then I remember it and I drop it in a blog post, or I drop it in an email. I send like news from the web and things like that. So yeah, social is weaving in more and more.

I haven’t spent a lot of time studying how well AI like chat, GPT itself is able to like pull from the social sphere. But right now there’s a big push for making sure your website content is training up the AI as effectively as possible. And that rests a little more on things like technical SEO.

And there’s a new-ish file called an L-L-M-S-T-X-T, which is a file that gives directions on how to crawl the website and index it for a learning language models. So there are so many parallels right now between getting found and included in conversations on Google and then chat GPT Gemini Perplexity.

It’s not really like a comparison of are you gonna invest in SEO or invest in some of these emerging marketing? Areas, but more of a convergence that the fundamentals work across the board [00:35:00]

Chris Badgett: related to the lls dot txt file. Yeah. Some of the SEO plugins now just create this for you. I’ve I’ve looked at it and what I realize is it’s pretty good and it’s probably my own fault for having an old site and what it’s pulling from.

It’s, I, it’s not the best. So I realize I need to create my own LLMs txt file, but use that structure.

Lindsay Halsey: Yep.

Chris Badgett: But related to that you’ve got that TXT file let’s say at the end of a blog post, you put FAQ questions that either Google instant answers or AI mode. I forget what overview mode or whatever.

Like how’s it, how. How exact does it, does the keyword phrase have to match? And is the AI just gonna spit out exactly what you said or is it gonna modify it or quote it? Or how do we think about that? Because it, you can get lost in the details of the wording and.

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, you really can.

You can go. So at the end of the day, I [00:36:00] think whether you’re thinking about the AI or thinking about Google, you really should be thinking about the end user, right? So if you add an FAQ, you should be thinking about like, how do I resonate with the actual human audience that is reading this content? And then when you do that, you will.

As a default, be playing well into these like marketing channels you’re caring about and getting found in those places. And so that being said, sometimes we get too comfortable and we don’t say who the audience is or put the keyword in, et cetera. So I do sometimes like just look at my content through both lenses.

Like on the one hand I can overdo it and shove keywords everywhere, and then it doesn’t read well, it screams SEO, or and answer engine optimization now and things like that. And on the other side of it, I can give like no context, right? So you can’t even tell like a business I am.

And so that also doesn’t work. So you wanna make sure, if you add an F, A Q, you don’t have to overdo the questions like crazy, who do you think the best, WordPress, like plug, you don’t have to go crazy, but [00:37:00] you do wanna make sure there’s context behind, your FAQ questions, your headers and things like that.

So that if you were to take I like a tool called Detailed. It’s like a Chrome extension and you can play around with it where you can just look at like the headers on your page and you don’t see the content behind it. So you see the outline, and I should be able to get like the concept of your entire webpage from that outline.

Meaning I should know who you are, what you do. Like I, I should get the meet, whether it’s a blog post or whatever the topic is of the page. That’s for me, a gut check of if I can’t get the meat of the topic, I probably didn’t use those keywords enough in those pertinent places. And if I just see the keyword weaving down the whole list of all the headers, then I probably overdid it.

Right.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Speaking of headers, I feel like this is something that writers for SEO learn gradually in terms of heading structure. So yeah. What’s, this also gets [00:38:00] into the word count question. If, how long does a post need to be, but also like H twos and h threes and all this stuff, like what’s a good average if we’re gonna do an authoritative piece about something what would an example post look like?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. So even though it’s a little bit like still old school SEO to think in terms of word count, I still do when I create content on my site, on client sites, et cetera, and I typically in this kind of era, am aiming around a thousand words. And I know that I’ve picked a topic that is specific enough when I can cover it in a thousand words.

So if I need way more words to cover the topic than a thousand, then I probably pick something too much like a definitive guide. And it’s gonna come out being too generic, right? And not go deep enough into that subject matter expertise. And if I can’t write about a thousand words about it, I probably went too specific or I glossed over something, et cetera.

So that somewhere 800 to 1200 words thousand-ish words [00:39:00] tends to, in my minds, I be like a good amount of content. Then within that you’ve gotta break it up. ’cause a thousand words is still a lot for people to read. And so you wanna break it up into sections with headers. And it depends on what the format of the post is.

If it’s five best whatever you’ll probably have a header above, the list. And then each item in the list will be like an H three. So the title of your post is the H one, some title or header above the list. And then you’re gonna hit on h threes down below it. But again, you see all sorts of exceptions.

You wanna keep the structure, but if you decide to use h fours instead of h threes, ’cause it looks a little bit better on the, in the blog post formatting, it’s probably not gonna be a, the deal breaker. Like it’ll still have its form. It’ll just violate some smaller SEO principles.

Chris Badgett: Our SEO checklist is probably about 50 items long.

Is there anything we can stop doing in SEO or, oh,

Lindsay Halsey: good [00:40:00] question.

Chris Badgett: Or long, it’s not as relevant as it used to be thing.

Lindsay Halsey: Good question. Without looking at the checklist it’s hard for me to like necessarily answer what’s less relevant? I’d say one area people debate about how important it is customizing the page title and meta description.

Because Google so often creates its own text there, I’m still like a big fan of customizing it. ’cause it’s just to put your best foot forward and market the page how you would wanna market it by customizing those fields knowing that Google may choose to do its own thing. So that’s one area where some people I think are putting less emphasis.

But I still I still like to have that sort of. Control knowing I have no control with what they do. I’m trying to think of some other ones. Alt text I would say is more important. Web accessibility and good image naming, et cetera. I would add like extra time and attention to, I still see a lot of people just skip over things related to images, whether it’s file name, the alternative [00:41:00] text, the file size, et cetera.

Yeah, those are the big ones that people tend to either skip or kind of debate. Its fa their value.

Chris Badgett: Is there any SEO AI tools that you recommend? For example, sometimes I get frustrated with chat GBT when I’m like, Hey, here’s the whole article. I need a meta description. This is the phrase I’m targeting.

These are, this is the content brief, this is everything, and it still gives me something that’s way too long and generic and doesn’t fit in the box.

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or or if there’s other tools that are just more A or SEO friendly for it for.

Lindsay Halsey: So I think there, there are so many tools out there right now.

You could just do nothing but play with these ai, SEO overlapping tools, et cetera. And so I like to keep things pretty simple. So I find myself using chat g PT the most, but then relying on the built-in AI functionality of things I already use [00:42:00] in a WordPress site for an example. So Yost with the premium version, you get some AI based.

Tooling right directly in there. And so I, I personally am a fan of if you’re writing a page title in meta description and you’re like copying and pasting and then not really liking the output from the ai, you can turn to you can turn to the AI built into WordPress in that plugin. And rely on it.

And it is accelerating things like, there are plugins that can help you generate that alternative text on images and help you keep that up to date, et cetera. So there are a lot of tools, I think in the words press space that have been really helpful in terms of, and then you don’t have to go and pay for some other third party SEO, powered or AI powered SEO tool.

Yeah that’s what’s been working best for me.

Chris Badgett: Niche, SEO question. I see some people and myself included sometimes struggle with keyword research in the sense of okay, now we have all these [00:43:00] keywords and we have these clusters of keywords around this keyword and all this stuff. What’s, how do you think about keywords these days?

Lindsay Halsey: So I think about keywords every time in the same way and use the same framework when I’m getting started.

And it’s the customer acquisition funnel. So I think about basically this funnel where at the bottom I have the conversion, right? So it’s people generally speaking for like searching for keywords that are your brand name, your name, et cetera. So that’s at the bottom of the funnel. And then in the middle of the funnel, you’re talking about the consideration phase.

Those are like those best of right, or just they’re looking for your product. They’re looking for your offering. They’re looking for course, could be in their keyword search or something like that, right? So they’re in like a, in a shopping state of mind, but they’re looking for the thing that you sell.

That’s the middle of the funnel that usually maps on a website to pages or collection pages, [00:44:00] taxonomy pages, things that are like at, in your main navigation. And then at the top of your funnel you have the awareness building and that’s where you’re like thinking about how do I get out there and share that expertise?

Or how do I get out there and get in front of somebody? One or two steps before they’re ready for the thing I do. So if you were that interior designer and you wrote a blog post of like best architects in your city, that would be an example of reaching that upper funnel because you’re getting in front of the right audience.

Just like they’re not quite ready for what you do, but they will be in a little bit. So you’re building brand awareness. So whenever I do keyword research, I think in this like real world model. And then I think about where am I today and what’s realistic? So I don’t have to go and do a ton of research for my upper funnel, like audience building campaign.

If I’m just building my first website and getting started, I should just start with the bottom of the funnel and showing up for my own name, my brand, et cetera. And then start to build from there. On the other hand. If you play in a really [00:45:00] competitive space, you might just put your best foot forward in that middle section of the funnel.

But realistically, it might be like, lifter does well in the best queries and has a lot of trust and authority and reviews and has put a lot of effort in if you were just entering that space. There’s not reason really to play very aggressively there. You should probably just skip to the upper funnel.

So when it comes to keyword research, I instantly start to think about like how my keywords map into these different parts of the funnel, and then just instantly start thinking along the lines of what’s realistic? And if I were to spend one hour doing something, in which section of the funnel would I have the most impact right now?

And that helps me from. Getting overly exhausted with an endless amount of keyword research. The other thing is that you can turn to tools like chat GPT to help you with your keyword research and like export data from the Google search console and help it organize the keywords into a funnel.

Pull data from multiple data sources like search console. And if you have like rank tracking software, we use win for example. You can like. Have it do some of this organization and thought process for you which has been a nice accelerator too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Lindsay, this is like a masterclass in SEO and ai.

One quick question, is there the, what is the proper. SEO for ai. Does that have an acronym yet?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah we just actually published a blog post. ’cause people are starting to do search queries, like SEO versus yeah, we think it’s like SEO and ’cause it’s like all getting pushed under one umbrella.

But you’re gonna, you’re gonna see the phrase generative engine optimization, so GEO and then you also see answer engine optimization. It starts to get a lot of acronyms. Like most of the people I talk to, like just keeping PPC from SEO separate. And so the good news is though, again, there’s this convergence, the fundamentals of what you work on in like a holistic SEO.

Project are the same things as investing in those other in those other kind of initiatives. There’s just like little extras like the L-L-M-S-T-X-T, et cetera. Yeah. But some of those things don’t really matter till you’re a little bit further down the line anyways. Like lifter is where you have a lot of content, you have a lot of training material out there.

And so yeah, just starting with the fundamentals and making sure you have a solid base is really the name of the game. Whether it’s S-E-O-G-E-O or a EO yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna be getting it mixed up myself. And so I try not to use any of those, like when I’m in kind of agency mode talking to clients.

We talk about getting found on Google, getting found on chat, GPT, things that we can all relate to.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about Pathfinder. If someone wants to go deeper with SEO what do you offer at Pathfinder?

Lindsay Halsey: We call it a guided approach to SEO. And within our guided approach, we have community coaching and [00:48:00] courses all designed to help you take a step-by-step approach that’s backed with with coaching and accountability.

So you can come to group office hours as one of our members get your questions answered, get feedback on your work. You can go through our checklists and in our courses to take a step by step approach that’ll help you get from point A to point B. There are discussion threads in there and and a whole lot more.

We have a 14 day free trial if you wanna check it out with kind of no risk. And and learn a little bit more about SEO, but more importantly, learn while doing. And that’s a lot of what we try to help people do is. A lot of people will go invest like 10 hours trying to learn SEO, but not do anything that moves the needle forward.

We wanna change that around where if you do invest 10 hours in SEO, like an hour is the learning and nine hours is the doing so that you actually see a result.

Chris Badgett: Results working with Pathfinder is we had actual hosts we were working on and [00:49:00] getting, feedback and doing training, like looking at a specific project is, it’s a, it’s applied, it’s project-based learning that makes a lot of sense.

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, it’s a lot more fun. And then there’s a community and and so that’s always just nice to be around others, trying to do the same thing you are and realize it doesn’t have to be confusing, overwhelming, time consuming, expensive that SEO really is real world marketing and and there’s a lot of value in the short and long run when you get going with it.

Chris Badgett: This has been great Lindsay. Thank you so much. Go check out pathfinder seo.com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or find out more?

Lindsay Halsey: I’m also on some social channels like Facebook and Instagram but yes, our website is the best place and you can always shoot me an email if you have any questions, Lindsay, at Pathfinder seo and and that’s my quickest response.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Lindsay. We really appreciate it.

Lindsay Halsey: Thanks so much, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that [00:50:00] episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Andy Jack from Candle Digital explores the revolutionary potential of artificial intelligence in e-learning in the LMSCast episode.

He specializes in assisting subject matter experts in transforming their expertise into effective virtual learning environments. He highlights that we are in a new era with opportunities for personalization, virtual tutors, and reflection-driven learning by drawing a connection between the early internet and the current generative AI explosion.

AI-driven interview simulations that prepare users for real-life situations and scaffolded reflections that assist learners in articulating complicated ideas are just two examples of the useful use cases that Andy mentions that are now in place. For course developers, he presents the idea of creating a “Second Brain” a personalized AI driven by the voice and resources of an instructor.

He urges creators to use AI as a tool to expand their knowledge rather than as a replacement for it, emphasizing the value of concentrating on learner transformation rather than merely content delivery. Non-technical instructors may effectively incorporate AI with the use of tools like Google’s NotebookLM, custom GPTs, and the AI e-Learning Power Pack for WordPress. In the end, Andy promotes beginning small, getting to know your audience well, and utilizing AI to enhance high-impact, human-centered learning opportunities.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is Andy Jack. He’s from Candle Digital and Training Spark. We’re gonna be talking about artificial intelligence and E-Learning Candle. Digital is an agency, but they also have. Some WordPress tools over at training Spark, and one of the ones that really caught my eye was the AI e-Learning Power Pack.

We’ll get into all that, but first, welcome to the show, Andy. Thanks. Really

Andy Jack: excited to talk through the conversation, you know, see what we’ve got to talk about. I think, um, just some really good topics to dig into today.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a deep one. Tell us about the opportunity with artificial intelligence.

E-learning at a high level, like what’s going on? What’s the state of play and where are we going with all this?

Andy Jack: Yeah. Well, I think back to when I started in All Things Web, so this was the late nineties and I dunno if it was the same in, uh, in the States as it was in the uk, but used to get these magazines.

They used to have the CDs, the CD ROMs on the front with like comper or a OL. I remember that first time when we got the, I think it was a 14 4K mode and plugged it into my 4 86 pc. And, and I got this, got this um, CD rom I installed, I think it was the CompuServe, um, browser system. I remember logging on for the first time, heard the, heard the mode were in a away, you know, that sound that, younger generations might not have a clue what is, and I just remember.

Being presented with the World Wide Web for the first time. It felt messy, but it felt new and it felt full of potential. I am, I think of where we are now in terms of the internet and, and AI and Gen AI specifically. And I feel like it’s, it’s a very similar vibe to me. It feels like there is a huge amount of opportunity to.

Learning terms to, to craft some of the opportunities that we’ve always wanted to, but never really had the chance to, or never had the tools to. So I’m really excited about things like personalization and for, um, scaffolded conversations and virtual tutors.

I just think we’ve finally been presented with a tool now, which we can do some really exciting stuff and actually create very high impactful experience led, master classes and courses and educational experiences. So I’m really excited by it. I think, I, I dunno if sometimes I’m in a bit of a bubble, so I’m a bit of a LinkedIn feed and if you, you look at my feed these days, it’s nothing but ai. So I wonder if I’m in a little bit of a bubble. Although the, the way I’m getting it at the moment is you could think about the, the, the Gartner height cycle.

I think over the last six months we’ve had this wow, this excitement. This is a really exciting place. I am starting to feel that. We’re starting to hit that, what was it called? The Tropper disillusionment, I think it’s called. We’re starting to hit that as some of the novelties wor off, some of the excitement’s wor off.

It’s actually, Hey, how can we, what are the actual use cases we need to drive out of this now to actually make this thing useful and work for us rather than it work for AI itself. So, yeah, I think really exciting times, but I think now it’s starting to really. Tease out where it actually adds value in educational experiences.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. It does feel like we’re kind of exiting the toddler years and we’re starting to grow up a little bit and, uh, well, which, which use case are you most excited about when it comes to e-learning and ai?

Andy Jack: Yeah, there’s some really practical ones now that I, I’d say, I say in production and we can use straight away.

So I really like what we call scaffolded reflections. So some of the things that we believe are really important to an educational experience are practice feedback and reflection. Those are really important and we try and get away from knowledge acquisition. It’s all about transformation and practice.

Feedback and reflections are really, really important of that. I think the challenge with reflections is if you’re not from, if you’re not particularly academic or maybe education wasn’t your thing or maybe it’s just a new skill you’re trying to learn. So reflect on something can actually be quite hard, so if I know one of our clients is a, um, personal brand expert and she really wants her customers to really dig into their value set. Because that underpins what the, the personal brand that they’re gonna display. And if you ask people what their values are, you know, and you present them with a, with a, a blank screen, you know, it’s, it’s really hard to dig into that.

I really like the way that AI can prompt and cajole and provide a draft that can then be shaped. So it’s almost like, at the potter, at his wheel, it’s throwing the clay on the table. AI can throw that clay on the table and you can shape and mold it. For example, with the personal, the personal brand expert that we work with, Deborah Ogden, she asks several questions.

The way we’ve worked with her masterclass is it gets to understand that person and you know, their background, what their story is and it starts to squeeze out, well, given what you’ve already told us, here’s what we think your values may be. And then what they do is they take that, say, well, I don’t agree with this one.

I don’t agree with that one. Well actually this one’s really on point, and they can start to refine it. So that’s a very immediate, practical use of AI that we’re. We are baking with our client projects straight away and we’re just finding that it’s having a great impact. The other one as well for me that works very well is simulations of kind of virtual conversations.

So we work with a client who does a lot around, career development, and particularly around getting the job that you want. And a scary part of getting a job is the interview process. So we’ve created a tool that sits within her course that allows someone to knock the edges of that interview experience.

For example, we’re using chat GPT and well open AI specifically as a way of creating personas. The personas are almost sitting in and it’s just a chat interface at this stage. It’s not that it’s not using voice or anything like that, but each persona plays a different role in that interview context.

So one might be the interviewer, one might be the, you know, the head of hr. One of them might be the MD or the fd, something like that. And what it starts to do is it starts to pose questions and start to react based on what they’re. The user fires back now, it’s not perfect, it’s a little clunky, but it gets them to the goal a little bit.

It gets a little bit closer. It knocks off some of those edges. So I already think we’re starting to see some practical use cases that we can bake into our programs.

Chris Badgett: I think that’s wonderful. I. Like, uh, the AI space, I feel like the course creator space is also growing up a little bit because you have these subject matter experts who have a lot of knowledge, but they’re not trained as teachers or instructional designers.

So like even something like the Socratic method in a, you know, asking questions and not just delivering videos or PDFs or slideshows, but getting people thinking and taking action is just as much a part of learning as the content,

Andy Jack: right? Absolutely. It is something we fair, we rail against quite a bit, I think.

I think unfortunately you know, I’m a huge fan, you know, given what we do about online courses. But I think a lot of people and course creators fall into the trap of thinking an online course is just gated content.

And actually it’s not really, you know, a user wants to take. A person wants to take that online course because they’re looking for a shortcut to an outcome.

They’re in place, A, they want to be in place B and there’s something stopping them getting to place B and your online course should help them with that. And that’s often not just a case of firing content at people. It’s about. Taking ’em on the journey. Journey, you know, giving them opportunities to practice, reflect, and, and get feedback.

And I think that’s a, those are almost the, that’s the essence, that’s the experience that make, creates transformation. Not the content. The content is a key part of that, but it’s not at the center of it. It’s the experience that’s at the center of it.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah. I, I love, uh, explaining to people that, you know, there’s that website masterclass.

And it’s like $20 a month or something, and you have these, the best experts in the world. And if somebody asks like, well, why is that only $20? It’s like, well, if you learn how to become a comedian from Steve Martin, he’s not gonna help you tell your jokes. It’s just, yeah, that’s not like a $2,000 coaching program or something else.

Right?

Andy Jack: Yeah. Yeah. I mean the, the only cost. Place is interesting as well. ’cause we found that we’ve moved as a digital studio to, to developing more cohort based courses, which has been a really interesting move. And I think it’s because it brings certain characteristics to a learning experience that perhaps on demand, struggles with, but I think, you know, on demand still has its place, you know, and I think for those that want to get somewhere fast and perhaps don’t need a community experience, it’s great. But we’re finding that cohort-based courses bring aspects such as accountability, you know, particularly where you’ve got, you’re part of a group or perhaps you have live workshops as well.

It brings that community aspect as well. So it’s, yeah, it’s, I think the online world, the online course world or online education world is, is ever changing. It’s a really kind of fluid dynamic and AI is a. Can I say a new grenade that’s been thrown into the mix? Yeah. And it’s, it’s shaking things up and I, I love that because I think there’s so much potential in online learning to transform people’s lives and to transform communities in the world.

But it’s not about gated content, it’s about transformative experiences and those need Designing well and delivering well.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Well, what are, what are some of the benefits of AI or the opportunity with. You know, a course creator that wants to design a more robust learning experience in addition to content.

Obviously we have scale, like it’s gonna automate and scale, but what else, what’s the other benefits of using AI for reflections and tutoring and things like that?

Andy Jack: Yeah, I think a lot of experts get into the online course game because they wanna scale themselves up. That’s, you know, so a lot of our clients are typically delivering their experiences, their, their training in person on virtual, and they, they hit a ceiling, you know, there’s only so much of them they can give.

And I think what online learning allows them to, sorry. What AI allows them to do is there’s new opportunities now to scale that up and bring the essence of them into it. So, we love the idea of, I dunno if you’ve read, um, Tia Forty’s Second Brain. It’s a, it’s a wonderful concept. It’s about.

Taking everything that’s in the brain and basically put it into notion. But I like the idea of that from an online learning perspective. And the challenge I always think about, can we do that from an online learning perspective? Can we ca, can we take this expert? Can we take their insights their knowledge, their stories, their scars and their spiky points of view?

And try and capture this into one brain, you know, a virtual brain that perhaps AI could power. This is something we’re trying to play around with and tease out with the work that we do at Campbell Digital. Um, I don’t think we’re there yet with it, but I, I love that as a concept of, so, um, almost bring, turn that and bring that into different forms.

So it could be a virtual tutor, so someone that accompanies or guides a person through the course without actually having to be there. Now I think there’s always the, there’s always. Importance of having some kind of human connection, whether with that, with peers or with the, the tutor or the course leader themselves.

But I love the idea of being able to use AI to distill the essence of that person and all their insights and use that in an online learning environment to, to scale it up. So I don’t think we’re there yet. We’re playing with a lot of tools. I dunno if you’ve come across the model context protocol, that’s a.

It’s a really interesting concept around, um, I think someone to told said it was the USBC of ai. So it, it sits in the middle, it allows it to interface with different things and I can just see that being part of this, this amazing second brain that allows it to, um, to scale someone up. So yeah, I think that’s the opportunity we’re looking at.

Again, I don’t think we’re there yet, but it’s exciting times for that.

Chris Badgett: Help us understand, just like technically I think, um. Some people have this idea that, you know, maybe you’re gonna use chat GPT, but you can also train, you can put your own source material into that second brain. Tell us about that.

Like, ’cause maybe the, uh, you know, the branding expert might want both, some general branding help from the large language model of chat, GBT or open ai, but they also wanna load in like their unique secret sauce and take. So how do we. Should we do both? Should we really just focus on our unique Second Brain or like, how do we think about that?

Andy Jack: Yeah, I think what I would say at the moment is there isn’t really a playbook for AI for course creators yet. Yeah, I think, I think we’re still writing it as we go. You know, it’s almost like we’re, you know, the trains on the tracks and we’re putting the tracks on as actually, as the train is speed in the head.

So we’re still trying to figure it out. So I don’t think there’s any kind of reset path yet for this. But yeah, I’ve heard it called a rag corpus. So is it retrieval? Augmented generation. So it’s not just where it’s pulling from the LLM itself, it’s actually using source material to, to pull that in.

And we use that a lot within our own internal workflow at Candle Digital. So we have a, a custom GPT and that, that’s always something I would recommend any course creator to create, in tax three PT as an example, as a way of. We’ve got one at Came Digital called the Strategic Brand Partner.

And in that we’ve got, it’s pulling from the, um, the large corpus of chat gpt, but in there it’s got our mission and purpose and values. It’s got our tone of voice, it’s got our branding documents, and I, I live in this custom GPT, so I’m using it every day to test new business ideas, to help me write blog posts, all this kind of stuff.

And I think. Once we have this model context protocol in place, which, which can be done to a NA 10 and there are a few other things I think make.com as well has a a model context, protocol tool in it. You can start to pull in all these resources, whether that be sat within the tool itself or whether it’s pulling from Google and start to start to use this to overlay.

But I don’t think yet, I could be wrong that there’s actually a way to use that and present that back to an audience just yet, but I don’t think we’re far off at all.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I think subject matter experts, I mean, a lot of ’em have like books slide presentations, maybe a history of podcasting, a YouTube channel, a blog like creators are being set up to win super big here, I think.

Absolutely.

Andy Jack: Absolutely. I mean, if you take yourself as an example, Chris, and your plethora of videos on Lifter LMS, I’m sure if I could turn, you know, use a transcription tool. Take all of those. I could probably create, quite a good version of Chris and, it, it’s, I’m sure it wouldn’t, you know, it might be 90% there.

You might have some of your quirks and some of your spiky points of view, but I’m sure it’d be a, a pretty good representation of what you’re all about. And I think that’s, you know, we talk about our subject experts are often sat on a mountain of value that they’re not making the most out of. So there’ll be so much of there.

Expertise setting. You know, as you said, PowerPoints, workbooks toolkits, books, they’ve written slides, they’ve designed all this kind of stuff, and they’ve got all this. And actually they’re not making the most out it. And that’s, those are often the clients that come to us if they say, I want to have more impact.

I wanna leave a legacy. And I want to reach more people. I know there’s a huge amount of potential in what I have. How do I scale this up? And I think online learning so far has helped us do that. But I think AI is, fuel on the fire too. To make that go in further.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I just wanna throw out another tool recommendation.

You mentioned building a custom GPT. Everybody should try that. But what’s also cool is Google’s notebook, lm. Oh yeah. Which allows you to add like multiple sources, videos, documents, all kinds of stuff. So if you’re working on a, the problem with Chad GBT in my experience is like if you’re working on a big project.

You kind of get lost in the threads and you know, it just gets a little crazy. But you can also like create that corpus inside of a Google LM and stuff, which is, or notebook lm, which is super cool.

Andy Jack: Absolutely. And you get the novelty of the podcast feature as well, which, you know, when everyone talks about, notebook, LLM, it’s, uh, it’s always the, the, the podcast feature agent.

And I’ve used that quite a lot. I remember taking, um, I think you can come across Mr. Beasts. Oh yeah. How we does production. I just looked at it and thought that’s quite a lot to consume. So what I’ll do is I’ll stick it through, you know, a notebook. I’ll take that podcast and when I’m out for a walk in the park, I’ll digest it that way.

So I love that It gives us lots of tools like that to, to see things in different ways.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about, um, course creation like may maybe more on the content side. Like I see some people trying to take a shortcut and have like, chat, ask chat GBT to make me an outline and then make me the content for this.

And they’re not really adding any of their own stuff to it. And you can create some good stuff that way. But there’s also. I, I find it much easier. I just did a course on that, how to use chat GPT to create an online course. And I know that the, um, I have a section in there where you have to dump in your own human knowledge dump, I call it, to add your unique takes, sources, ideas.

But what, what’s your advice to creators like when they’re trying to flush out a like sort of an outline and an approach on a topic? How to leverage AI without just being like, here, chat, GBT, do it all for me.

Andy Jack: Yeah. I, I think that’s coming at it from the wrong angle, isn’t it? It’s about what could you teach rather than what, who is your audience and what is the transformation they’re looking to achieve?

So, um. Yeah, lots. Un pick there. So we, we use a technique called, um, action mapping quite heavily by Kathy Moore. It’s a brilliant, it’s a brilliant book and it, but the, the, the key part of it is it focuses on the audience. You know, it’s, it’s all about who are you trying to serve, what are, what’s their desired outcome?

What are the challenges that getting away from achieving it themselves? So always starting with that point, because I think that’s the key. And it’s all about having a real understanding of your audience, but not only from a content or from a course creation perspective, but also from a marketing perspective.

You know, you need to be, you need to be, create experiences that resonate, that connect. That only not only needs to be reflected in the actual products, but in your positioning and in your marketing as well. And I think that’s, so I, I’d always start with that. So the way I would be using AI in that perspective is actually helping me to, before I even think about course structures and course over using course format is helping me get under the skin of my audience.

I’d actually be using it to scaffold that. Use it as your sparring partner to help you suss out the best approach to tackle that problem of understanding your users. So, which I do all the time. You know, ask, ask, ask it. You know, what’s the best way to do this if you’re unsure and it, you know, or come back with, the perfect places with interviews.

So get hold of you, you know, interview, like we’re having a chat now, transcribe it, get AI to distill it. What are the key themes through all of that and through, and, and get chat to. Provide a series of questions to scaffold those conversations as well. It can be our, it can be our partner throughout this whole this whole piece.

But only when you’ve got a strong understanding of the audience, that’s when you use it to dig into structures and overviews and outcomes. Because ultimately otherwise, it’s just gonna be based on what the rest of the world already has. You know, vanilla content, which isn’t gonna land from a product perspective.

It isn’t gonna have the transformative aspects you have you, or for transformative outcome you’re looking for. And it’s not gonna have any kind of marketing nuance or resonance that’s gonna capture anyone to actually purchase or enroll in it. So I think that’s the, that’s the key of it. I always think about it’s, I think subject experts are really in a really interesting place at the moment.

And depending on what day you wear up, it’s either AI is the, the greatest opportunity we’ve ever had. The dystopian, it’s gonna, you know, wipe my business out overnight. And it sometimes for me, when I wake up in the morning, it depends how I’ve got out of bed on which side I sit. But I think there’s a real opportunity for subject experts to stand out from that.

And that comes down to making sure that whatever you produce has the essence of you in it. It has your spiky points of view, it has your. And It has your context so you know how to marry the theory with the context of the audience. It has all lots of different aspects around tone of voice, how you deliver something.

It has all those kind of personality traits that AI being. The vanilla homogenous blurb of content, it just can’t provide. So I think that’s the place. I think that’s the a way to go. The only thing I would also add. To answer this and what you’ve been a prime example of Chris, is you’ve been prolific in your asset creation over the last, five to 10 years.

And you can tell by the YouTube and. All the blogs and all the interviews that you have, that corpus and material as a subject expert is absolutely invi and valuable because it takes forever to create. So if you’re not already doing that, start it today. ’cause that’s gonna form the foundation of whatever you want to create in 3, 6, 12 months time.

Just make that sure, that stuff cap. You know, as, much as possible captures the essence of you. ’cause that’s gonna be invaluable to that content creation process when you’re feeding it through ai.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m working on, uh, a framework right now. I call it well, the, the three, the Venn diagram is who?

You and then how, okay. So like how is like. The content and the, whatever the, the content of the course is. But the you is like, who is this? Or, sorry, the who is this for? And I think this question gets skipped all the time by subject matter experts. And then like you said, you what, what are your values?

Like, why are you doing this? What’s your unique point of views and stuff like, that’s where great courses come from. And uh, and if you make yourself available. I call it a, a support mechanism. So like group coaching calls, email support, one-on-one coaching online community that you participate in. That’s where the value comes from and the conversations, you know?

Andy Jack: Absolutely. I say I think, I mean there’s a couple of things there. I think subjects experts forward this rapid. They want to almost download their brain and Yeah, feed it to their eyes. It’s actually, they only need a fifth of that and they only need it in a certain context. And so that’s often that’s the education trap.

But I think there’s something around. What you said around designing that in a certain, certain way and delivering it. It makes sure it has the essence of you throughout it as well. Um, and again, I think all the AI can only support that process.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And like you, I, you said, um. We’re not sure where we’re at on the timeline, but just start doing it.

Like, when I created my course on how to create an online course with chat, GBTI, I just went full in, used the tools as best I can. It has like tons of prompts, but I also built like a digital version of myself on Hey Jam. Okay. And I was 90% happy with it. And, uh. So like in my course, I actually created a real course that we give away for free just to show people what’s possible, but it’s not perfect like AI just get moving.

You know? Like don’t, don’t wait. Right. Just like you said, don’t wait to start creating public free content and sharpen your thoughts and build a audience and SEO and all that stuff.

Andy Jack: Just create motion. I think just take one step forward. And I think I, you know, I don’t think anyone has the, as I said, no one has the path yet, but there’s, we’d like to think we’re two steps in front and at the moment that’s okay.

You know, as long as we’re two steps in front, we can lead people that want to follow us. I think there’s an interesting thing about, there’s a lot of procrastination and perhaps a lot of head in the sand about, I don’t really wanna get involved this AI thing. I’m scared of it, or I just, I’m just nervous about it.

I do believe that you’re either gonna be, well, there’s a, there’s a chap in the UK called Daniel Priestland. He talks about you’re either gonna be, as with ai, you’re either gonna be a super consumer or you’re gonna be a super creator. Ah, I like, and that’s, that’s a chasm. That’s a chasm. So, and the longer it goes, the wider that chasm is getting.

So if you’re not, we, I mean, you know, in terms of our business, when ai, when Gen AI came along, it’s very much. Where do we fit in with this? This is quite interesting and, and, you know, in a good way. And we’re, we’re open to the challenge. We’re quite excited by that. But we are, we, let’s think about, we’re surfing in the shallows at the moment.

That’s the place to be because we know this big wave is coming. And again, ’cause we’re in this bubble, I suspect it might be a bit later than we think. But if we need to make sure that as a business we’re surfing in the shallows and playing with this stuff, because when that wave comes, we need to be able to ride it rather than get drowned by it.

So is there, you know, I think making sure that you are committing some time every week to have. Practical use, you know, just have a practical play with this stuff. And I always recommend to the people that aren’t really, perhaps just have to play around with chat GPT and you know that that’s the extent to many people’s experiences, or they’ve created a video avatar or done some stuff in free Pick, create that custom GPT as a starting point.

Just ’cause it get, it’s that I, I’ve just seen so many people do that and the light bulbs go, you go, oh, okay, this changes things. And I think once you’ve had that, then it’s like you can’t help but playing it.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think the human brain has a really hard time. Like we know this from, uh, like investing as an example of understanding exponential curves.

’cause we live in our brain is kind of linear. But I love that concept you said about the widening gap between the super consumers and super producers. Like our brain can’t even comprehend. Like I don’t even, I’ve done 500 podcast episodes.

I’ve been doing it for over 10 years and. I don’t remember every single episode, every word, but chatGPT can. Yeah, so you can like, get somebody’s 10 years worth of work.

And ask it a specific question based on all these experts and everything.

Then you can even go exponential off that. You’re like, well. I wanna ask Chris. GPT, Andy, GPT somebody else. Somebody else. And you can build like a tribe of mentors. I mean, that’s just like an exponential thing based on like hundreds of years of content that’s like, we can’t even fathom that.

Andy Jack: And I think the key to that is to be, is to be prolific in your output.

You know, be, I dunno if it’s Gary, but be prolific not perfect.

Chris Badgett: I think that’s

Andy Jack: what he says. And I like that ’cause it’s. I think so many people have looked into ship, whether it be content or courses or, you know, different products. But I think now the half life of content, particularly social content, is so short.

You’ve just gotta get it out there because the more you know, we’re having this conversation now that can be used and recycled and repurposed and used to form these tone and essence of me that I can then use in loads of different products as that process to. Almost the world, you know, the creating digital products now is becoming almost permissionless.

There’s very little we can do, but we need to have that corpus and that understanding of ourselves and that, and to be fair, personal brand as well to be able to build from.

Chris Badgett: I have a, a question for you that I see hangs up a lot, of course creators, educators, which is sometimes. And I would put myself in this category.

Like I have some expertise, but I am, have a skill in curating. I’m a voracious, lifelong learner, right? And I consume a lot of content. But I see some course creators perhaps like they’re really good at curating. They have all a lot of knowledge, but maybe they’re newer on their own personal expert journey, and they get into this trap of feeling like.

Well, it’s not my original content. Like the problem with AI and all this is like you can source all these awesome material. But then I see people get hung up and thinking about like plagiarism.

Or it’s not my original idea. But I mean, if you look at a book. It has an index full of sources and you can always give credit where credit is due.

But any thoughts there? And for as an instructional design perspective on how to get past like. The value of being a curator, it’s not like you’re stealing, you’re just good at learning yourself and you have a lot of sources.

Andy Jack: So I

Chris Badgett: see that a lot.

Andy Jack: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lots, a lots there. I mean, the first one is, is there anything, any, is there anything original anymore with my, and the world has, you could almost argue there’s enough content in the world, do we need anymore?

But I think it’s, it’s, there’s that one, there’s also the fact that there’s that. You don’t have to be the expert, you just have to be two steps in front. Yeah. Because there’s people following in your footstep. They want to be where you are now that are just, two steps, six months, two years.

However, when you frame it just behind you, so provide them with the footsteps to get to where you are. And that’s not about in the sage or this, you know, the, the big thinker on this thing is actually just being, and actually that can be a benefit sometimes if it’s really big thoughts. It can be quite, it can feel quite inaccessible.

Remember, it’s all about transformation. People are looking for a roadmap to get to somewhere new, whether that be a new career or a change in themselves or and so you can provide those dots. I just think, I dunno, I think you know what they say, ideas are, ideas are worthless, execution is everything.

And I think that’s so important. Just, just get on with it and just shape. And I think we advocate curation. But I think to under, to do curation really well. And it comes back to one of the furthest. Earliest points is you have to understand the audience.

So if you can take all this stuff, this corpus and material and repurpose it to a, a niche that is perhaps underserved, isn’t having their problem, isn’t having their problem solved, then that’s the way to organize it.

So I, I believe there’s, I believe, with ai. Coming in and, uh, providing so much information and, making access to information. So, democratized is that I can see course creators going a lot more micro niche, almost drilling down. I just think it’s gonna be hard to market itself as the best in a certain field, but it’s a lot easier to market itself as the only.

So much. If you can define yourself as the only person in your go-to field, whatever that might be, and it can be so micro niche, that’s the way to start to build it. ’cause you know, it’s about, you know, it’s the power law or the explanation. It’s all about being number one now, I think, and being the only, so I think it’s, if you are going down the curation route again, just lasering on your audience and test it and speak to them and have conversations.

It’s amazing how much, how much can, how much value can just come from. Conversations with the target audience, and so many people want to skip that because it feels uncomfortable. And it might, it might list the lid on this thing, oh, that’s not what I was expecting. I didn’t wanna teach that, or I didn’t want to provide content on that.

So it’s having really good, solid conversations that are either going to reaffirm the path you’re on or they’re gonna change the path that you’re on. But the best about having conversations with that audience is you’re priming an audience to buy your product later on. So it’s, it’s, it’s just a no brainer.

So I always say to our, the people that come into us. Say, I’ve got this idea for X. Have you spoken to potential clients about this? And what have they said? And you go, oh, I don’t want to, I don’t want anyone stealing my ideas. It’s not about the ideas, it’s about execution. And you are in a prime position to deliver on that.

So go and speak to your audience and start to build demand for what you do and interest in what you’re doing, and frame it so that when you create the product, you’ve got an audience there ready and waiting.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I love that. And also, I just want to add another tip is like, and if you’re out there listening or watching and you’re worried about you know, what makes you unique, draw a Venn diagram, three circles and just combine three things.

And so like for example, if I was teaching some kind of entrepreneurship, I, okay, I’m not gonna make a general course about entrepreneurship. What if I’m gonna also talk about like personal development and how that fits into entrepreneurship and then what if I’m gonna talk about being a one person company Now that’s, that creates a unique kind of thing.

And when you do that, you don’t necessarily have to be the best at all three of those, but you may very well be the best at combining all three of those.

Andy Jack: Absolutely. And that message will land and doesn’t it, if you can get that out there. People you, we always think with learning experiences, one of our kind of key things that, or one of our metrics is that someone does it and says, this feels like it was designed for me.

If you can get that at the essence of your course or your masterclass, then that’s the gold dust. ’cause then you can, you can market it on that and you know that the impact it’s gonna have, it’s just gonna have a, such a big ripple effect on them and their audience and their clients. And it’s all gonna feed upwards if they’re in an organization.

So that’s the, you know, design it as if it was built so they feel as if it was built for them.

Chris Badgett: I had, I’ve experienced that personally. I was in a, um, software entrepreneur coaching program with Dan Martel, who’s kind of famous on YouTube now. He was, uh, it was called SAS Academy, and I got inside there and there were a bunch of weirdos just like me in this giant community.

Actually, it wasn’t that giant. I mean, it was, it was big, but it wasn’t like tons and tons of people, and it was almost like the content and Dan’s coaching and everything. It was like psychic, like, oh my God, I didn’t even know how to vocalize that problem I had. He just did and he gave me a solution. It was like I couldn’t get enough of it.

It was, uh, I was in there for two years just getting into all that. But it was definitely, that I know what that feels like on the other side and that’s what you want to create. Yeah,

Andy Jack: absolutely.

Chris Badgett: And you mentioned, I forget what aspect you were talking about, but, I like to think of writing as three things.

It’s research, writing and editing. And we’re not even talking about marketing and promotion or course creation or anything, but don’t skip the research and then don’t skip the editing. So like, creating a course isn’t just like course creation. There’s, I would spend equal time in all of that. Let’s say I spent two months on research, two months on building the program.

Two months on editing it. Ideally after I’ve gone through it over it with like a pilot group or something like that. Yeah. I feel like people get that wrong in social media too. It’s social media. It’s not just content. IE media. You gotta talk to people, get in the comments, be social.

Andy Jack: Yeah. Research out loud.

Yeah, because if you’re research, you know, there’ll be other people that have perhaps researching similar things or are looking for the answers to similar things. And if you can provide them. If you can do your research and create your product, then you, you know, you served an audience there. I think, yeah, I think social media’s become, LinkedIn has changed quite dramatically for me in the last, well, ever since. Twitter became X there was a big exodus, people moved onto LinkedIn and it’s all, seems much more of a broadcast medium than it ever did, rather than networking medium.

But there’s still ripe opportunities there for it. But I think, yeah, to go back to your thing, I, the one thing that makes me nervous about AI is. Sometimes it takes out some of the writing process as well. Yeah. The writing process is so critical in terms of shaping your ideas and getting things wrong and framing it in different ways.

I guess my advice would be you could use the AI on all three of those research, writing and editing, but don’t let it do too much of it because I think it’s as much about that critical thinking and honing your craft and shaping it in the right way. And I think that’s the key part of it too.

Chris Badgett: I’ve trained myself, I, I can feel the pull to just be lazy and just, Hey, write this thing for me. Like yesterday I was doing some copywriting in an email. I was like, I’m just gonna ask ChatGPT to, to write this thing. And I’m like, no, do the first draft and then get it to look at it. So I’ve trained myself to always like, input first.

Like it’s, don’t be lazy with a prompt.

Andy Jack: But you can see, you can see it as well. You can see the output. I mean, I, you know. I’ve not really published anything on that front. But when you do create it, you can just tell, you know.

You can see below it that it’s, you know, it’s, it’s vanilla homogenous kind of LLM slop, I think they call it, don’t they?

Slop. And I think that’s, uh, something that’s really important to push against.

Chris Badgett: I wanna get your take on another issue that course creators face which is, especially in the AI world, where you can kind of create big content. There’s sort of two paths that course creators could take and maybe your branding expert might be a good example, but I could create like a signature course, a big course on like a, some kind of branding system.

Or I could create like mini courses and kind of have a membership of like logo design, values, definition, color schemes, whatever. And. kind of have like these little more bite-sized pieces. I know, uh, at least there’s a lot of claim that attention span is shrinking. So maybe the shorter ones make more sense, but at the same time, I will listen to a three hour podcast if I’m really into topic.

So what do you advise from an instructional design perspective? Like when to do like the mega course versus a membership side of like. Many problems and solutions.

Andy Jack: Yeah, I mean, I mean it’s kind of, it’s kind of a boring answer, but it’s to go back to the user, and I know I keep on, I keep on hammering the same point, but just it’s all about creating products that resonate for the users that help ’em with their outcomes.

And it’s, I appreciate it’s a well trotted kind of answer, but that’s the place to start. ’cause ultimately, you know, there are so many courses out there in the world that are collecting digital dust. And that’s not because they’re terrible courses. They’re probably really fantastic. But they just don’t land.

Some reason, and it might not, it might be the product itself, it might be the marketing it might be the, um, productization of, you know, the container, how it’s wrapped up. So it kind of, I, it always starts with the user and it, and, but I think to add to that, um, we talk about something called a value ladder.

Start small. Like, like this is the lifter ML LMS experience or product. But it’s given away for free. So you’ve got something where people can allow you to, uh, engage with you in a very, um, passive distance led way. Um, understand what you are all about, Chris, what I’m about at Campbell Digital and work their way up the ladder.

So I almost think of it as that. To be fair. So think about the value that you can add any increments rather than don’t get hung up on the labels. So we find that sometimes. Clients come to us and say, but I really want a program. But the problem with I nailing it at that early stage is that becomes with assumptions about what a program is.

It comes with labels and checklists that you have to achieve to make it a program is actually, well, is actually that what people want. So I’d always find a way to. Try new stuff around. Designing out loud, I would create wait lists for stuff. I would just, again, have conversations with potential users and see what the challenges are and figure out what kind of products our experience is gonna help ’em overcome that challenge.

And it might be completely different to what you think, so I guess it’s kind of a boring answer, but it’s, talk to your audience and start with them and start with them and work backwards.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, at Candle Digital, you guys also have training Spark. Tell us about the AI e-Learning Power Pack.

Why’d you create it? What is it and how do people get it? Yeah,

Andy Jack: absolutely. So,training Spark is a spinoff of Candle Digital. What we found is that we were creating, plugins for WordPress that fill some of the gaps that, um, weren’t being fulfilled elsewhere. So we, have this mantra internally within, uh, candle Digital to sell you sawdust.

And that’s, uh, you know, anything that we create, can we kind of commercialize and productize it in other ways? So with training Spark what we did is we started experimenting with AI very early on. It was about maybe about 18 months. 18 months ago. You know, being candid, when we launched it, it was right to crickets.

And I think that was because we were just so early with it that people couldn’t grasp their head. I think to be fair, a lot of people in the WordPress space, there may be cost creators, but they’re also agencies. The demand to, to involve AI in their projects you know, needs to come from the client rather than the agency.

So there’s something we learned a lot there. But what a, what the Ai e-Learning Power Pack, it works with any WordPress based. LMS like lifter, but it allows you to create AI based experiences and new shortcuts to insert them into, into pages or in various parts of your, um, your learning platform. So there are three things that it has.

The first one is conversations. So I mentioned this earlier. This was a way of creating almost like simulations. So if you want to create a persona, you can do that within this one interface, uh, within one screen. You can get that persona to play a different role. And what you can do is you can bring it in so that the user can, uh, interact with it in different ways.

So, um, it’s primarily a chat-based interface right now, we’re looking to voice quite soon. But it’s, it’s in essence what the AI Power Pack does is it breaches the gap for technical, for non-technical. WordPress people. So it allows them to bring AI using open ai, but without having to do all the, the APIs and all the recordings.

So the first one is, uh, conversations. The second one is the scaffold of reflections, which I, you know, referenced the example in the personal brand. So it’s where you basically, in essence, you click create generate suggestion, and based on the prompts in the background, it will create a response which they can then shape and mold and use in different ways.

And the final one is also virtual tutors. So virtual tutors, you can choose where it appears on the learning platform. But it’s based on large language model, but it also uses this from rag corpus, so your own materials, so to tailor it in a certain way. So it’s just in essence, the AI learning Power Pack is that bridge between bringing AI into your learning platform without having to go through all the complexities of manually, you know, getting knee deep in the code with, uh, open ai.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I’ve played around with AI Power Pack, ai, e Learning Power Pack, and it is awesome. I’m super excited about it. When I saw that and started playing with it, I’m like, oh, wow, this is, this is really good. Tell us more about Candle Digital. Who’s your ideal client if somebody’s watching this or listening?

Who’s the best fit for Kendall Digital?

Andy Jack: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, we work with subject experts and expert businesses. So they are subject experts are usually authors, consultants, trainers, uh, speakers. We also work with training providers and we also work with some quite large organizations, which basically those that have really valuable knowledge and skills that they think they aren’t getting the most from.

Typically they will be delivering in person or on virtual, but they just know they’ve hit a ceiling. They know that if they create some fantastic high impact digital products, then they’ll be able to scale what they do. And so we take them through that whole process of helping them identify, tease out their ideas, keep the tires on that and make sure that what they’re creating is strategically sound.

Then we help them design, build, launch, and scale it all that way through. So we’re the, we’re the thread. So we want to work with people that are. Ambitious. They know their craft. And they have all the stories and stuff that they go with it. They have a, an audience already and what, but what they’ve done is they’ve hit a ceiling and they want to level up their game.

And we can help ’em through that whole process.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. We’re gonna have to do this a year from now. Andy, when and ’cause I know a lot’s gonna talk about the exponential curve. We’re gonna be in a different place, but also the same place, like some of the stuff we’re talking about here. It is just even easier to do.

People understand better. It’s gonna be interesting times you out there watching and listening. I would encourage you to go get the AI e-learning power pack and also check out Candle Digital. That’s candle Do Digital. You said you’re big on LinkedIn. Where else can people connect with you or is, is there anything else you want people to check out?

Andy Jack: LinkedIn is the best way to find me. Andy, Jack, Kendall Digital LinkedIn. I have a very, a fledgling YouTube channel, but I’m following in your footsteps, Chris. I need to be more prolific and less worried about being perfect, but that’s a, that’s a journey I’m going on myself, Chris. Awesome,

Chris Badgett: Andy. Well, thank you cope for coming on the show.

Really appreciate it. That was a fun conversation and uh, man, it’s, it’s just an interesting world and uh, just get out there and take action and start playing with the tools and put your customer at the C center of your business, not your product and the world changes. But thank you for coming, Andy.

I really appreciate it.

Andy Jack: Thanks, Chris.

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In this LMScast, Founder Karen Wisch of Graphics by Design talks about how she transitioned from traditional graphic design to web development. She began her profession in design when computers were widely used, and once a customer requested a website, she progressively moved into web programming.

Karen finally started using WordPress after learning it on her own. She talks about an exceptional effort with the Missouri Credentialing Board, which certifies practitioners in Missouri who treat drug use disorders. About seven years ago, the Board was managing license renewals and continuing education (like the MARS course) entirely on paper.

The Board was handling continuing education (such as the MARS course) and license renewals all on paper around seven years ago. The Board selected Karen over larger organizations that wanted a share of their revenue because she suggested digitizing these processes. Karen replaced their traditional, mail-based continuing education and grading method with an online system using LifterLMS.

This change made it possible for classes like the MARS course to be fully automated and offered on-demand, transforming a time-consuming, biennial program into a scalable, effective, and adaptable educational experience. She stresses that the Board is quite pleased with the project’s success and that LifterLMS played a key role in it.

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And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Karen Wish. She’s at karen wish.com. That’s W-I-S-C-H, and her agency is called Graphics by Design. Karen caught my eye. She built a really cool continuing education project. Called the Missouri Credentialing Board.

We’re gonna talk about that. But first, welcome to the show, Karen.

Karen Wisch: Hi. Thanks Chris.

Chris Badgett: It’s awesome to have you here. And we were catching up before the, we went live here and you’ve been around for a while. You got the lifter LMS shirt in the background. Awesome.

Karen Wisch: Swag from you guys, right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we do a lot of strategic swag, it’s not, there’s no merch store. If you have an item you’re on the good list and doing awesome stuff. But tell us a little bit about you, graphics by design. How did you get into this space of helping businesses with technology and marketing and sales and modernizing their tech?

Karen Wisch: Yeah. I’ve been around forever, so I graduated with a degree in graphic design before there were computers. Seriously I took a. Basic coding class while I was in college, but there was nothing in my field as far as computers. We went through a lab one time and the professor goes, these are computers.

We think they’re a fad. He walked on through he was wrong. Over time, I did a lot of graphics for people, a lot of publications and stuff. And then one of the people I did. Graphic design for, they needed a website. And so I started with, oh gosh. What did Word have that they used? Microsoft had publisher what?

Not publisher. That was, they had something for websites. And I did that and then I did some HCML forum. And then eventually somebody contacted me through a referral and they said, our site’s been hacked. Can you fix it? I said I don’t know, but I’ll see if I can. And I was able to, and it was a WordPress site.

So I got intrigued by that and pretty soon they were coming to me for all of their website needs. It escalated from that is how I got into designing WordPress website. So it was basically there was a need and so I filled it. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the Missouri credentialing board that’s at Missouri cb.com.

Yeah. What [00:03:00] what do they do and how’d they find you and what’d you build?

Karen Wisch: They do credentialing for the state of Missouri for people who are substance use disorder professionals. So people in that sector need counselors and people to help with recovery. And I was asked to come and make a bid.

They were looking for someone to help them with their renewals. They, their licenses for their counselors for the state of the Missouri need to be renewed and they wanted to put that online ’cause it was a paper document at the time. And this was probably seven years ago. And so I went to a meeting with a couple other people and the other companies were larger.

But they wanted a percentage of each of the renewals. The credentialing board wasn’t super happy about that. And I said I think I can do it. Let me see what I can figure out. And I gave them a bid. At the time they also were doing a lot of continuing ed, and one of the things they did was a course that was called the Mars course.

And the assistant director was in charge of grading all that. So everything was done by mail. Again, this was seven years ago. So they would send out a program, like a document and a quiz, and then the people would mail that back in. He would grade it manually and then he would mail back the results in the next course.

There’s probably 11 different sections to the Mars course and I. He had to manually grade all 40 or 50 of them each time. So while I was there I said I think that we can set this up so this is all automated. That really sealed the deal for them because this was a lot of time for him.

And obviously using Lifter, it’s, once it’s automated, it’s all set up. It worked great. It [00:05:00] was a huge success for them. And. As I was telling you beforehand, that’s now, it used to be a class offered twice a year. Now anyone can go on at any time and start the course because it’s self-paced and they can finish it when they want.

And it’s all, because it’s all set up with Lifter. It’s a great solution for them. They’re really happy with it.

Chris Badgett: So what were the what are the key parts of Lifter? I noticed they’re selling these continuing education units. And there’s continuing a continuing education credits.

Are you, did you set up certificates or how

Karen Wisch: Oh yeah.

Chris Badgett: So what are all the nuts and bolts of it?

Karen Wisch: Okay I’ve got the Infinity bundle and I bought the lifetime access to it, which has been awesome, but then I can use the advanced videos we have videos for a lot of our courses where.

So we have it set up, so they have to watch the entire video. They can’t turn it, they can’t speed through it. They have to watch the video. And [00:06:00] I kind of love if you open a different window, you can’t still listen to the video. It’s it’s really cruel. You’re like, oh rats, this isn’t gonna work.

But I love it for our people because it’s so easy to get distracted. So they. They watch the video and then they have the, they can then take the quiz, it grades itself, and if they pass it, they’re, they automatically are sent a certificate that I’ve set up. I use something that’s very personal to the credentialing board and looks very official because it is, and it has their director’s signature and everything on it.

But that’s all set up ahead of time. Super easy to do and then. They, if they pass they get their certificate automatically. If they don’t pass our, the office gets a notification that they didn’t pass. Their supervisor has to contact and get a voucher for the [00:07:00] second exam because we don’t do the same exam for each effort.

So if you. Fail the first effort, you get a second chance, but your supervisor has to get the voucher code for that because we set ’em up so that they have voucher codes, which I am, I’m probably going ahead of where we are, so we have voucher codes. I use Lifter and Gravity Farms forms, together a lot.

And they work, they play nicely together. So that works out really well for our people.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I, when I checked, I looked at their site and I think I counted 59 courses. How much?

Karen Wisch: There’s 64.

Chris Badgett: Okay. You go?

Karen Wisch: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Did you set all those up or show them how to do it, or it’s Oh, no, I do

Karen Wisch: all of them.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Karen Wisch: They go ahead and they schedule. They set up the videos themselves and they give me the quizzes that they want and then I set everything up for them. They’re very busy doing the other half of the stuff. They don’t wanna mess with this. And I think I could show them how fairly easily, it’s not a hard process, but there’s some, there’s little caveats that we use that maybe not everybody does.

It’s a win-win. I take care of it. They don’t worry about it and it works for them

Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s awesome. And it sounds like a great, relationship. Like they’re busy, they just want somebody to handle the website and make sure everything’s good and that’s a great long-term client for you.

Karen Wisch: It is it’s a really good situation for me and I have a couple other. Agencies. ’cause I am in the middle of the state. I’m, our city is the capital of Missouri and there are a lot of state associations and a lot of them need CU set up. So I do a couple of different ones beside that. Prior to this, they had used services that cost several hundred thousand dollars to, do you know what I mean?

And it’s. We’re not talking tens of thousands even here, we’re, it’s way more reasonable, and again, if I could get the hundreds of thousands, I’d probably do it but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. So

Chris Badgett: you can do a lot for what people used to pay 10 times that amount for and stuff like that, without limits, either, like without. Caps on number of students or courses, right? Or teachers or whatever.

Karen Wisch: Yeah. And again, for them, I, before they were having to do the same process every time, and now it I think COVID has streamlined a lot of stuff for people.

Like I know we talked before, before COVID, they did a lot of trainings in different areas of the state, and now most of those are done. [00:10:00] On Zoom or whatever, just because it’s easier, it’s less expensive for an employer to give somebody eight hours off during the day and not pay for their travel, and things like that.

And we see huge success with that as far as having the Zoom calls with the education, and then following up with the training afterwards or with the. And information afterwards

Chris Badgett: forms you use. I noticed on the Missouri credentialing board, there was like a order form for something that had some e-commerce in it.

How do you use Gravity and alongside the LMS and then what other plugins and things do you find super useful when you’re building this type of site?

Karen Wisch: I, my, theme I use is generate press. And then I started with them. I, we talked a little offline and I would say WP Crafter with Adam Preser when I first started learning about what lifter, which LMSS.

Software I wanted to use, he recommended you guys and he had some valid reasons at the time. Again, that was seven years ago and I hopped in. I was like, this is a way to go for us. But I use gravity forms occasionally. They’re so blended for me that like sometimes there’ll be something in the course that I use a gravity form for instead, and.

Occasionally, I’m trying to, I’m stumped right now as to what, because they’re merged together. But we’re going to have a peer conference in October, and so there’s a registration out there right now that we’re using Gravity forms for, that people just sign up and tell you, give their information.

And that doesn’t require a learning management system. But all of our trainings. Do you know, they all end with a quiz to make sure that they’re proficient in the information, if not several quizzes with a series of different trainings within it. I don’t know if that answers your question.

Chris Badgett: People are always using forms in interesting ways alongside lifter LMS, and it’s cool to see what folks are doing.

I have to ask you, because you have an agency, the number one question we get for agent from agency folks is how to get clients. It sounds like you have a lot in the Missouri area, like you, there’s a lot of local word of mouth perhaps, but what would your advice be on getting and retaining clients for the long term?

Karen Wisch: I would say retention just means you’ve gotta pay attention to your clients. I’m a one person agency, if they call, they’re getting me. I think it, that’s part of why they have me, right. I, it is I tend to respond quickly, which sometimes is like probably the bane of my existence. But I’ve had a lot of referrals.

I, I seem to be in the education and prevention and recovery area. Is because that’s where I started. And so by word of mouth, that’s what I’ve gotten. I have some other outta state things, but they were all at one point there was a, an association, a national association, and they I found out.

Through the Missouri one that they were no longer going to host everybody’s website, that they all were going to have their own website. So I contacted the head of the National Association and said, I do websites for people and I’m going to contact everybody. If someone contacts you and you need someone to refer them to here’s my information.

Here’s some samples of my work. And I ended up with six different websites that way, which was nice. It because they all wanted to be very similar to each other, so they were easy to make. Does that make sense? So I would say I have been lucky with getting information and then. Going after it after that.

But most of it, I would say, is referrals from other people.

Chris Badgett: And clients like it when you’re easy to reach and return calls quickly and prove your just your reliability and track record and it’s, you’re always there for them. It’s not that complicated, right?

Karen Wisch: It isn’t. I, one of my clients said before they ought to submit a requisition order and then.

In five to seven days, they would get a response and then they, the change would be made. [00:15:00] But, part of it’s price. I’m not charging $200 for 10 minutes of, for a change. Maybe I should, but that’s with a bigger agency you have a lot more overhead too. So I’m sure prices is part of it.

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For the Missouri Cred Credentialing board is there anything you can [00:17:00]say as to the impact that platform is having on the world or people like, do you know anything? Even just roughly, like in terms of, we mentioned I think you said 64 courses. That means that a lot of people are flowing through this thing.

What impact is that organization having with these online learning programs?

Karen Wisch: One of their programs, which is the, they have a crisis peer, and these are people who are, you have to be in recovery to actually get that certification and. These are peers, mentoring peers, right? So it, it’s awesome.

These are people who maybe if they didn’t have someone else to help, they’d still need recovery, but they’re able to go back after they’ve gone through the process and they can help other people who. Are in the middle of a drug crisis. And I don’t know how much you know about the opioid crisis in the United States right now, but it’s, more people die of overdoses than right in 1 7 47 a day.

But nobody says anything about it. And I, if a 7 47 crashed every day, there’d be people paying attention. I, that’s part of why I love what they do. They’re saving lives.

Chris Badgett: It’s a great impact. Tell us more about your learning curve with, learning how to use all this stuff and WordPress.

You mentioned following WP Craft or videos and you’re you’re self-taught, it sounds like

Karen Wisch: I am.

Chris Badgett: Besides the graphic design, which you went to school for, which is awesome. But but,

Yeah.

Karen Wisch: Yeah. I I would say you guys, your help is awesome. I, when I first started, I needed a lot of handholding and you guys were great.

It, I would send you something and it’s like you would, sometimes it was a very obvious thing, sometimes it wasn’t. But between watching the videos and doing that. And now I, now that I have the Infinity bundle, I go to office hours every Thursday with Emily and Kurt, and that’s been very helpful and it’s great to have other people there with problems because sometimes I don’t know I have a problem until somebody else’s problem gets fixed right there.

There’s extra information that I’m getting that I wouldn’t get if I wasn’t part of that group. I really appreciate that you guys are very good at documenting things and explaining it, and I would say ease of use is part of why I am still with you guys and why I bought the Infinity Bundle.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. We always feel like support is like a feature of the product. It’s not like a cost that we have to minimize something we invest in and, like you said, your clients like the fact that they can talk to you and call you like, we wanted to make ourselves as available as much as we can and be real humans and help people.

Karen Wisch: I don’t know. Yeah, I would say you guys are,

Chris Badgett: I don’t know where I heard it on a podcast like this is 10 years ago. Somebody dropped an idea in my head that. Caused what you’re talking about, which is that the support documentation, it’s part of your marketing content. You should invest just as much time in supporting your customers with content as you do trying to, do sales pages and marketing stuff.

And that really clicked for me, and we even for a while. We would have a, everybody came to a Zoom call and would write documentation together for an hour on Thursdays or something. And a learning management system is not an easy marketing website with a homepage and about page and a contact page.

It’s got a lot going on. So there’s a lot

Karen Wisch: of bells and whistles, right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Karen Wisch: Yeah I would say that most of the time, whatever my problem was. There was a way to resolve it very easily, and if there wasn’t, you guys are like, okay, if I can have access to your site so I can see what’s going on.

Because sometimes, the websites act a little swirly. But I would say in general, you are able to fix it or give me a suggestion of something else I. When I first started, I did not have a good host. I didn’t realize that was gonna be an issue, but I didn’t realize how many people were going to be coming to the website, and I think that’s increased in I use Cloud ways now and I’m very happy with it.

And that was one of your all’s suggestions at the time. I don’t know if that’s still one of your go-tos, but, yeah. They, because I’m able to scale with them, which is very helpful. As the site’s grown in popularity, we’ve been able to scale the size and manage the workload that we’ve got.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Yeah. Sometimes, you can start on like a cheap shared hosting account, but if something like Missouri credentialing board starts getting a ton of traffic and a ton of users, you gotta get on something a little. A little goofy.

Karen Wisch: And it is if people are required to have a certain amount of continuing education hours, and we’re one of the places that can provide them for them and we do it very reasonably, most of the courses are five or $10 it draws more people to them.

But it’s also a nice. Side source of revenue for them. It’s stuff they don’t do anything about. And it continues, they don’t, the selling point for LMS, I think is the fact that once it’s in place, people pay their money. They review the materials, they take the quiz, they receive their certification, and no one in the office has to deal with any of it.

They get an email that says, John Smith. Passed his Mars course and gets three units of continuing ed, and a lot has gone on in the background, but they’ve, they don’t have to mess with it. It’s a hands-free thing for them, and yet people are getting what they need and they’re getting. They’re getting all their, the bells and whistles that you guys implement.

So you pass quiz one, the, it lights up and it goes, congratulations. You’re through with quiz one. You did it. And you go on to the next place. All that stuff is wonderful and it’s not stuff I even have to think about. It’s stuff you guys thought about you. It’s great. I’m sorry, my desk is wiggling.

Chris Badgett: Hearing from this story with this client, I. Is the time saving, like you came in and you were able to automate and time save, like to a level that is exponential in terms to what they were doing before.

Karen Wisch: I would say they have grown exponentially, partially because of that. Their staff is much larger.

They’re doing a lot more than what they were before. They have several programs that they do now for the state of Missouri and before they couldn’t do it because they’re. It was so much, I wouldn’t say not important stuff, but it was stuff that they had to do, but they couldn’t get it done.

Because, they’re grading quizzes instead of working on helping people save people, and now that’s all taken care of for them. They don’t have to worry about it. They can deal with the peers and with the crisis that’s going on. Rather than going, yes, they, they passed this test or not.

It’s it’s crazy how automating just this one part has allowed them to grow in other ways. Be, ’cause they have the time to think about it, okay.

Chris Badgett: Buying back your time with automation. It’s what you can do with that time. Once you have it back, you can make more programs, you can help more people, you can scale in other ways.

That’s a really beautiful project there.

Karen Wisch: And that’s exactly what they’ve done. They’ve taken that time and they’ve moved on with it, which is awesome. It’s, just having time that they’ve never had before. ’cause they could never get ahead of these quizzes and stuff, which sounds silly, but again, we’re seven years later.

The world has changed a lot in the last seven years and I’m sure it’ll change another a ton in the next seven. You just, I, and back to the original reason they wanted me to, they hired me, was so that they could get their renewals done. The people were not ready for online renewals at the time.

It just was a epic fail. It just couldn’t do it. And now, seven years later they’re doing it, no problem. It’s just the change in comfortable being comfortable with being online, that pe And again, I hate to give COVID any credit for anything good, but I would say that people had to learn how to do things online in that time period,

Chris Badgett: like you said Hey, maybe we should do this by Zoom instead of airplane tickets in multiple days.

Karen Wisch: And I, it’s like I have a physician friend and she was like, oh yeah, we used to go to Orlando and sit in a very cold hotel. I never got out of the hotel. I’d much rather sit on my couch and watch the Zoom meeting there and be in the comfort of my own home.

It’s a lot easier when I’m not freezing, and have spent the money and shows. It’s not like I ever saw anything in Orlando, but the inside of the hotel.

Chris Badgett: Karen Wish. That’s karen wish.com. KAER or sorry, K-A-R-E-N-W-I-S-C h.com. We were talking about the Missouri credentialing board. Thank you Karen, for coming on the show. Thank you for being a shining example of an education entrepreneur, somebody who empowers others to lift up others through education.

It sends out a ripple of positive impact in the world. And thank you for sharing your story with us today. Is there anywhere people can go to connect with you besides your website or just karen wish.com?

Karen Wisch: Just my website. That’s all I.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Karen for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Karen Wisch: Oh, thank you Chris. And thank you so much for getting Lifter LMS together ’cause it’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: You bet.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Lassiter of LearnAINow joins Chris Badgett in this episode of LMSCast to demonstrate how AI is revolutionizing web development.

Chris is now developing online courses that show individuals how to create websites completely with AI without using conventional coding. One of his initial classes covers making a website with a new tool called Bolt.new, buying a domain through Route 53, and utilizing AWS to host a website. Chris provides a live demonstration of Bolt.new during the show, which creates full-stack websites using React and JavaScript utilizing AI agents that are probably driven by Anthropic’s models.

The front-end and back-end are automatically built and deployed by the platform, which also has component-based design, light/dark settings, and seamless navigation. In addition to supporting database and payment connections like Supabase and Stripe, it even interacts with GitHub for version control.

Chris demonstrates how to instruct the AI to build all the required code and add features like an admin panel or payment site. Additionally, he draws attention to Bolt.new’s next hackathon, which offers a $100,000 grand prize and $1 million in prizes. He encourages developers of all skill levels to take part, including “vibe coders” like himself who use AI rather than conventional coding.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Chris Lasseter. You can find chris@learnainow.ai. Chris does a lot with artificial intelligence. It’s always fun to see what he is been up to. He’s working with agents. He is building entire courses with ai.

We’re gonna do some screen sharing in this episode. So if you’re listening on the podcast and you wanna see what Chris is demoing and talking about, go to the lifter LMS YouTube channel [00:01:00] and do a search for Chris Lasseter, and you’ll find it. Make sure you get the most recent episode or the most recent video so that you can see those screen shares, or you can go to the LMSCast website.

Which has the podcast on it, that’s lms cast.com. It has both the audio and the video version of the podcast. But first, welcome back to the show, Chris. Yeah, thanks Chris. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Well, you’ve been busy. You’re, uh, going deep in the AI tools and, uh, you’ve been doing a lot of development.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to at Learn AI now. Yeah, so basically we have, uh, been working on courses on the site to teach others on how to use ai. One of our first courses that we’re about to release here in the next week or two is on how to build a website by using just ai. I know you and I, we mainly use WordPress to build our websites.

Chris Lassiter: But the way that I’m doing it for this course is I. To show people on how to use AWS to host your website, how to buy a domain through Route 53. And then we use, uh, a new program called, bolt new to uh, build the website. And that’s what we’ll be showing you today. Awesome. Well, what is Bolt new?

Chris Badgett: What does it do?

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so, uh, bolt on new. Basically, uh, allows you to use AI to, to build, uh, a full stack front end, back end of a website, uh, using mainly React and JavaScript. And then you can take, build that project up, and then put it on, uh, like an S3 server for AWS and then bam, you have a front end and a back end of a website.

It does it all for you. Wow. That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: Well, I’m excited to jump into the demo if you wanna show us. And again, if you’re listening, come on over to the video version of the podcast on the YouTube channel or lmscast.com.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, absolutely. So let me go ahead and click on share screen here.

All right, so you should be seeing my screen here in a second, and it should be the bolt new website. Yep. That’s up. All right. Perfect. So right here, it’s really simple. So let’s say we want to build me a portfolio.

I am a let’s say full stack developer with a w. Certifications.

We’ll just keep it as simple as that. And what we’ll do is we’ll hit go. And so what it’s gonna start doing is it’s gonna start designing you know, the front end and building all the code. And it’s really fantastic. And, you know, something that I’d also, uh, like to point out also if Bolt new right now, they.

Here on May 30th, uh, they’re actually gonna be launching a hackathon with prizes up to, uh, a million dollars worth of prizes, and the main prize is a hundred thousand dollars. And I’ve actually signed up for it. So, you know, if they go to hackathon.dev. They’ll be able to register and it’s gonna be amazing.

I mean, a million dollars in prizes with a hundred thousand dollars as the main prize you know, they’re not sponsoring me, uh, to say that in this video. I just think it’s something that’s just fantastic and people can really, uh, to do it. And it’s for anybody vi a vibe coder like me. ’cause I, I’m not a coder, I’m a vibe coder, you know, I use AI and, you know, I try to understand what’s going on and, you know, I learn as I go.

But this event is for anyone from a beginner to advance. That’s awesome. And as that’s building AI I find a little overwhelming ’cause there’s all these new tools and stuff’s happening really fast. How, how do you

keep up with it all? So actually I have a routine, uh, throughout my day. So I try to stay focused on my projects during the day.

And then in the evenings you know, while I’m sitting in bed, that’s when I’m actually going through, uh, YouTube and notifications, uh, you know, from, you know, lifter LMSs notifications on Facebook, you know, or, there’s some people I follow on YouTube and I just start going through, you know, all the new ai, uh, that’s being released.

And I just try to, to try to stay ahead of everyone and, and try to remember what’s going on. ’cause you know, if you, if you don’t, if you don’t. Stay ahead. You know, you’re gonna fall behind.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great point. And it’s amazing watching what Bull New is doing here. This would take a developer, weeks, months to do what you’re doing and like a podcast episode, and then not even the whole episode.

It’s awesome.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so right here, what you see right now, um, is it’s installing all the dependencies on the server. After it, it kind of broke down on what it’s doing. Uh, it kind of tells you how, you know, for the navigation it’s gonna be smooth scrolling badges for AWS uh, it’s talking about the design elements.

And then what it’s doing is it’s creating every single component that it needs for this React website. And then once it’s done, it’s gonna show you a preview of it. And that’s where you can actually start, uh, modifying anything that you want changed. And what’s really cool is recently they actually just added a selection, a selector on here.

So you can actually select components or elements on the site and actually say specifically, Hey, change this. So that’s really cool. And another thing that they just added is GitHub connection. So once you have this saved, you can actually save it to your GitHub, and then you can take it to another IDE like, uh, you know, cursor and, you know, make changes to it.

And then. Push it back to your GitHub and then you could come back to Bolt and then pull it back from GitHub and then continue working on it for the design aspect, if you want. Um, it’s, it’s really powerful. It’s a really, it’s really amazing. I’m excited to, to show you what this is gonna look like here in a few minutes.

Chris Badgett: So after the initial build, like if somebody just wants to update some text on the about page, how would they, what would the simplest way to do that be?

Chris Lassiter: No. Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the simplest thing is, is connecting it, uh, to A-C-I-D-I, uh, pipeline. So, for example connecting it to your GitHub, and then when you’re over here, you could say, Hey, make this change to this, push it, and then it’ll push it to your GitHub.

And then once you accept that, then in your GitHub. When you have the, deployment, uh, YML that sends it to AWS, um, once, once you accept it into GitHub, it’ll push only those changes to your S3, if that’s how you’re doing it. Oh, I got people coming the house and and it’ll make those changes. So, yeah, great question.

Um, you know, we can use, uh, GitHub to control that. So if you see right here, I’m gonna go full screen on this. This is. All built by ai. And so, you know, you got your call to actions right here where it says Get in touch and it works perfectly fine. Um, you know, you got view projects, takes you down here, and it kind of just puts in pretend, uh, view projects here.

The live demo, of course, is, is not gonna work right there. But you can, uh, fill that in with your information. But what I wanna do is kind of just scroll down. So if you see here it says, like about me, it talks about, you know, what a, a full stack developer does, and then, you know, you have a call to action here for download resume.

But I personally don’t like having those on my website.”

So I would actually change those. I, you know, I, I think that’s just, um, you know, whatever someone says, I really don’t like those. Right here, uh, kind of talks about the technologies that, that a, you know, a full stack developer, you know, what would be able to build with and, and what they know about.

Of course we talked about the projects here. Then right here we got the AWS certifications. What’s really cool here is you could actually click on this and say, you know, use this badge and, you know, give it a link and it’ll put that picture in there. But right here it’s talking about, you know, the certifications that are available.

And then you got your get in touch right here and then, send message. So what’s really cool about this, now that we’re at the bottom. Is, let’s say we wanted this to actually, uh, work, be a hundred percent functional. All we would have to do is, is go back to it. It’s also got dark mode and light mode.

See how it already built that in? Nice. Nice. And that’s one of the hardest things too, especially with like, if you’re building on a WordPress, uh, trying to get that to do it without installing like a hundred plugins. Um, you know, it did, it did all of this, uh, instantly for me. But what I wanna show you is take this outta full screen is for example, let’s say we, you know, we wanted to actually send an email.

So what we could do is you see the integrations, uh, it can integrate to Stripe, superb base, and GitHub right now. We could say, Hey, uh, we want to connect to super base and be able to, you know, send emails. Um, and it will connect that to the super base, which is, which will hold your database. You can also connect it to, uh, to Google and use their fire base, which I’ve done a lot, especially for the email services.

So that’s really cool. But the stripe, uh, this one’s fun. Watch this. So let’s say we want a payment. Portal on here. Okay. So I want people to be able to purchase my resume for $5. Please add Stripe to my website. Make me a backend for admin. And so what it’s gonna do here is it’s gonna go ahead and start integrating the stripe CLI into it.

We don’t need to add the stripe key right now, so we’ll go ahead and, and, uh, not do that real quick. Hold up before we, oh yeah, it does need to add a stripe key to it. Actually I wanna show this to you. So let me, let me get a strike key real quick. It’ll be a test one so we don’t have to worry about anyone, you know, using it.

So what questions do you have about this so far?

Chris Badgett: I’m impressed at how fast that comes together. So for people watching, this is an AI agent, right? Putting it together or, I mean, it’s a chat interface like chat GPT, but it’s doing multiple things. So does that make this an AI agent?

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so it is an agent and I believe they have it connected to Anthropic for their ai.

I’m not a hundred percent sure on that, so don’t quote me on that. But it is an AI agent, uh, that it’s connected to a Pacific model and, and it’s, and it’s doing all this for you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s that’s amazing. What, um. What, uh, explain how the stripe works. ’cause normally you, like you, you have your own Stripe account, right?

And you’re getting a test API key, so you can show it working. But I mean, like at lifter LMS as an example, we have a Stripe plugin that allows people to be able to connect Stripe. But this is just doing all that is basically writing the code for the Stripe connection and putting it in your website, which is pretty cool.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I’ve looked in the backend, I’ve looked at your guys’, uh, Stripe code and saw all the hard work that, uh, your developers have done on it. And it, it does all that. It automatically just integrates it, uh, into it. It makes you kinda like a little e-commerce. That’s really, really cool.

Okay, here you go. I got a strike key. Let’s see here. We’re gonna

Chris Badgett: create one. When you said create me an admin, a backend for admin, explain what that means.

Chris Lassiter: Uh, so basically, um, I can have like a backend to, to be able to see like, you know, who ordered history, uh, things like that. All right, so we’re gonna add the stripe key.

That’s fine. Oh, I forgot to add the product. Of course I did. Oh, one second. Let me cancel that real quick. You know what? I actually forgot to put it onto staging mode. So that’s one important, uh, to remember. For those who, uh, are doing this, you always wanna make sure that you are in test mode before you add the strike key because or you’ll have to use a real credit card.

So we’re just gonna call this a, I know you guys can’t see it right now but basically I’m just building a product real fast on, on here. So let me bring this over so you can see it. So I’m gonna say a resume, and we’re gonna call this, we’re gonna say it’s $5, it’s a one-off, and we’re just gonna add this product real quick.

All right? And then, so now what we need to do is we need to be able to get an API key. And so we will go ahead and grab this. I think it’s gonna want, huh? And this will all change. I’ll, I’ll delete all this afterwards.

Okay.

Integration for people to buy my resume and that’s wonderful. Spell check.

Chris Badgett: How do you do with bolt new, like domain mapping?

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So, right now, uh, when you’re ready to deploy this, it actually deploys it to a temporary site. So you can view it and then you can domain map from that temporary site by using their service. Or you can actually, uh, you know, download it to, uh, a server already that already has a domain, uh, map to that server.

So if you look right here, it’ll say, it’ll say that, Hey, we need to be able to save all this information, uh, into a database. So we need to connect to superb base database. Uh, so what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go ahead and, uh, connect. And so we’re gonna create a new project. We’re just gonna call it a resume, and then we’ll just have it, choose its own password.

And then of course, we’ll, you know, change all this at the end and delete this. And so what’s really cool about this is you don’t, you don’t necessarily have to use this database. You can actually use any database that you want to use, you know, you can use, um, you know, AWS, Mongo, you know, what have you.

Cause it’s a lot easier ’cause it automatically already fully integrates.

All right, so now what we wanna do is.

See, I want to change my strike key as I was using a live ’cause. We don’t want to do that. ’cause right now it’s connected to the live side of the strike configuration. So let’s go here. We’ll get a copy of that.

All right. Uh, we’ll go to code here and let’s see here. Go to ENV. There’s the super base. Where is the stripe A go.

All right. Come on. Should have done that in the beginning. I think I, uh. I think I made it mad.

All right, so this is what we’re gonna do then. We’re just going to, since I messed that up, we’re just gonna send it back. So I, I should have given it the right key, uh, in the beginning. So what we’re gonna do is we’re just going to, uh, switch it back, uh, outta the test mode and then a product catalog.

Then I’ll create a product real quick. We’ll call it a resume, uh, one off $5, add the product,

and then let’s see here. There we go. All right. All right. So right now it’s gonna go ahead and it’s going to, uh, be able to create that, uh, stripe checkout session. Uh, so people can securely purchase it. And then it’s building, those functions within the database. And of course, it’s gonna create those components.

Now I’m really happy that this happened. Uh, this will happen a lot when you’re vibe coding. Vibe coding is basically, uh, you know, people who don’t know how to code and they’re just using ai, uh, to create and you’re just vibing along trying to figure it out. And so what I’m gonna do is I’ll apply this, uh, super base migration and then I’m gonna say right here, I need you to go ahead and fix this component.

Like I said, happens a lot when you’re, uh, building because sometimes it may add like component that’s not connected to another component. And so you’ll just have to click on it to fix it. So not a big deal. And then normally what I’ll do is I’ll click it like twice. Uh, and if it doesn’t change, uh, what the issue is, I’ll say, discuss problem.

And it’ll kind of talk it out. And then you can say, fix the error and it should fix this problem. So, let’s see here. It’s talking about the, about component.

There you go. Perfect. All. So we got out of that. So right now we’re in a different one. Discuss problem. So have you used any, uh, you know, vibe, coding tools, Chris? Not yet, but I’m close. You’re getting me pumped

Chris Badgett: to try it.

I was talking to my friend Matt Madero, and he was doing a bunch of custom podcasting apps and stuff. Getting me excited about it.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, I have a friend, uh, right now he does a podcast and is 100% all ai. He types it all out and he used his voice and it does it all for him. And I think, you know, it’s fantastic.

Uh, it saves him a lot of time.

All right, it should have it on there. So now, um, I don’t see the links or anything like that, so let me see on here. I saw it. Download

Chris Badgett: resume. It’s just lower on the page.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, it said download resume. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna say okay. Create me a, uh, stripe portal to purchase the resume.

Uh, give me a backend to see histories and also a customer portal.

All right, so it’s gonna go ahead and update the package, uh, Jason o to add any, uh, necessary dependencies. And now it’s gonna start updating, uh, the React app to, to add, uh, you know, those components that we need, those pages that we need for React. So I’m actually learning a lot about React right now.

You know, I’ve been using WordPress for 15 years and there’s so much to learn when it comes to coding. The coding is the part that I, uh, don’t understand at all. ’cause I’m a vibe coder, but I’m just really trying to understand, you know, the difference between pages and components and, you know, JS or TX files and just, all the different types of you know, the different types of coding that you can do with React.

Uh, but I think that’s what’s, that’s what’s nice about being a vibe coder, you know, even though AI is doing it all for you. I’m learning all of it, you know, while I was doing it, I’m asking the questions.

Chris Badgett: It sounds like, uh, WordPress in a way, like I’m not a developer myself, but WordPress allowed me to like basically vibe code websites like the tools, I’ve heard it called the layers of abstraction.

Like we don’t necessarily know. How the machine works at like a mechanical level at the server, but we, we use it to create websites and that’s okay.

Chris Lassiter: All right. Let’s see here. Did it add it?

Okay, so I don’t see it on there yet, so, uh, I don’t see a way for me to purchase the resume on the landing page. Please update.

So it’s taking me, uh, a little bit longer to get through this process because I didn’t, I didn’t actually tell it from the beginning that, you know, we were going to integrate Stripe and super base into it. So I. Normally, uh, last time I built an example it took me like five minutes and I had everything there.

So let’s see if it works now. All right, so the purchase resume is there, there’s, there’s some kind of issue. So let’s, let’s see what the issue is.

So for your, for yourself, uh, what are you exploring for ai to help you, to assist you with like the podcast?

Chris Badgett: I. As an avid podcast listener, my friend Matt, had built something that helps you like kind of gather podcasts. Like podcast Discovery is actually a big problem, like podcast search, like finding, you know, how like Amazon suggests movies you would like once they really, or, uh, Netflix gets to know you and, and it like shows you, hey, you might also like this other dystopian future movie.

Like finding good podcasts and not just like the six that, um, Spotify recommends based on your, what you follow and all that stuff. That’s an area. Um, I like, as a podcaster, I like using AI to do research on guests, and that’s just, chat GPT land. And, coming up with good questions and stuff like that.

One thing I’ve been interested in that I haven’t done is sometimes I like to be a guest. I wanna be a guest on my own podcast. I. But I don’t necessarily like to just sit there and talk for an hour, but if I could create some kind of AI interviewer, uh, I think that would be really cool to prepare a show, like a vision for a show.

And even if like, not all the questions were, you know, just say exactly this, but if you could have some kind of podcast interviewer that could interview yourself or even other people, I think that’s really interesting. And ideally that would, it would be able to also be a video version and stuff like that.

Chris Lassiter: I think we’re close. Yeah, I think we are so close to being, uh, there like that.

Chris Badgett: I mean, you could probably do it now just with chat GPT and the voice mode and, you know, just say, Hey, I wanna record a 45 minute podcast of myself. I’d like to touch on these topics. Interview me and, and then just record that.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

I like Google LM too. Have you played around with that or, uh, notebook, lm

Chris Lassiter: I actually, I have not. It’s on my list. I have a little, uh, green book here that I keep on my desk of all the AI stuff that I’m working on or doing, and it’s actually, uh, in there to, to go take a look at it.

Chris Badgett: What I love about Notebook LM is.

You know, you can get lost in chat threads and stuff, but, uh, with Notebook, lm I think you can upload up to 50 or a hundred different sources. That could be videos, it could be like a PDF of a book. It could be a URL and all kinds of stuff. And so it’s like you’re consolidating your research and then, um, you can tell it when you prompt it to look at all of it or just these three things and so on, to guide the output.

Then it also has a feature where once you’re done with the output, it will, you can ask it to create a 20 minute podcast where two people, two fake AI people talk about whatever the thing is. And it’s actually a really cool way to learn. So I, I, I just find it fascinating.

Chris Lassiter: Oh, that’s really cool. Yeah. I’ve actually, I actually, uh, saw something like that the other day on a, on a YouTube channel.

I thought it was pretty funny. How, how people are doing that. So while we were talking, um, like I was saying in the beginning, it’s kind of nice to go ahead and give that prompt in the beginning on what you wanna do with connecting to like, a database and using Stripe integration. Uh, so I went ahead and restarted the project and you know, that’s the fun part about it being a vibe code or sometimes you just gotta stop what you’re doing and start over again.

Um. Could I have gotten it to work through the other, uh, way I could have. Um, but we just don’t have time in this, uh, podcast to do that today. So we’re gonna try to do it, uh, here in, in like under 10 minutes, try to get this connected to Stripe in a database, which, any, if we were doing this back in the day, I mean, it would’ve taken probably a week to do this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Easily. Easily. I think that’s a good point. Too about not getting frustrated, like that’s part of vibe coding. You gotta just reset. And just go with the flow. And sometimes you gotta burn your ships and start over because when you have this kind of speed, it doesn’t matter if you, okay, well, I, I took, it took me 10 minutes to learn a mistake, so now I’m just gonna start over and not make that mistake.

And you’re literally doing like weeks or months of work and 10 minutes. So it gives you a lot of time.

Chris Lassiter: So what I’m doing, uh, right now is I just reset all my keys on Stripe since they were publicly, uh, on the video. So that’s, they’re all replaced now. So it’s very important, uh, that when you are filming with other people, if, if you accidentally show your Dov file or your, or your secret keys or tokens, make sure you always change ’em right away

or logins. Yeah, that too. Have you done that before, uh, on a podcast? Have you accidentally like, uh, accidentally showed, uh, like a login or a password or anything like that?

Chris Badgett: I mean, the password managers make it, they kind of know, expect that, so they hide it when you do it. So I haven’t had that problem in a long time.

But yeah, there’s plenty of times where I’ve had to edit a video and, blur out a license key or something like that.

Chris Lassiter: So as you see here, um, it’s actually doing a really good job. It, it’s showing the, the super base, the stripe integrations. It’s showing the login page, the, the checkin, the checkout. So, um, I think we may get this on the first try, uh, when it’s done here in a few minutes. But, uh, while we’re waiting, I would like to show you, uh, that project I was talking to you earlier about before the podcast, uh, about how I’m using, uh, AI agents to actually build a course for you. Yeah. Uh, inside of WordPress. Uh, can we switch to that real quick? Yeah, let’s, let’s switch over. The agent’s busy.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So we’re gonna go do something else.

This is another cool thing about pipe coding.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So, this right here. NAN and what’s really cool, uh, about it is it’s basically just a complete workflow, uh, automation system to connect to like so many different APIs And what I’ve been working on, I’ll zoom in on this so you can kind of see it is.

You receive a chat message from someone to say, Hey, build me a course on how to be a lifeguard. What it’ll do is, is it’ll store that into a memory right here, and then it’ll go up to another, uh, agent to understand exactly the course details and what’s going on. And then it’ll have like an if and factor.

So like, Hey, did they answer it correctly? Did they not answer it correctly? And then if not, uh, then you know what they’ll do is it’ll go back to the user and say, Hey, I need more answers on this. And then once the chat has everything it needs, what it’ll do is it will it will post it to your site, uh, create the course, create the lessons.

Then send a chat back, uh, to the user saying that it’s created. And I actually got it to work yesterday on simple mode. It created, uh, a course on how to be a lifeguard. It created the four lessons that I asked them to create. The only problem was, is I didn’t connect the lessons to the course. Uh, that was my fault on the coding side.

Uh, so this morning I fixed that and everything worked out great. But what I’m trying to do right now is, uh, an advanced version of this. And so I added some storage memory for ai. Uh, so it can like, remember. What the AI and what the conversation between the user and AI is, and I changed, uh, a bunch of code responses in here.

And so basically at the end, what I wanted to do is to be able to build a web app that users can come in and, they already have their WordPress site up. They have their lifter LMS installed, and they want to be like, okay, hey, I wanna build a course on how to build an airplane. And they can go into my web app online and go to, okay, hey, build me electro MS course on how to build an airplane.

I want, 10 lessons within this course. And then just hit send. I. Then, it’ll do all of that. And then it’ll, of course, you’ll have to put in your log informations to your WordPress, you know, like maybe a custom user. And it will connect to securely to your site, and it’ll use this automation and it will build everything out for you.

So all you have to do is then go into lifter LMS and go into the course builder. And see that these courses and lessons have all been built and then just start modifying it. Uh, so instead of going one by one and adding everything in there. It’s already there for you. Of course, you’ll have to modify it, add the pictures, videos, or what have you.

Uh, but eventually once I get my vibe coding done, ideally it would be great. Uh, for it to say, okay, hey, you know, what quizzes do you want? What assignments do you want are, do you want a video? Okay, what’s the link to the video? And then you put all that in there and it’s done. And then now you’re, now you have a less, a course with a bunch of lessons and everything’s there for you.

Chris Badgett: That is super cool. That is super cool. Tell us more about what N eight N is like, what it does.

Chris Lassiter: So it’s an open source workflow which you can, uh, use NAN uh, dot io or you can actually download it onto your computer. And it basically lets you like, build automated processes without writing, uh, a ton of code.

It’s just click and go. Uh, it’s really freaking fascinating. It’s kind of like, um, like Zapier but. For me, it’s got like a lot more, uh, connections, and I. I really love it a lot and there’s really a ton of videos out there on how to use it. But what I’ve been doing is I’ve been using chat, CPT and anthropic, and I’ve been going back and forth between the two.

Uh, like if I’m working on like, hey, I kind of need step by steps, I’ll use chat, CPT ’cause chat, CCP t is really good at walking you through stuff. But then if you go to Andro, Andro is really good at coding, so I’m working on, for example. Let’s see here. If I go to, was it prepare section data? So right, right here, if you look at this, this is the code saying once it’s created the course, it needs to make sure that the, that the courses, uh, and the lessons, um, are mapped together.

I use philanthropic to do that. Um, and that was the problem before. I didn’t have that code in there and so I didn’t connect the lessons to the course id, but now it does. Um, nice. And so and so that’s what

Chris Badgett: I’m using. It’s really cool. This looks like, um, you know, like if you’re building marketing automation and active campaign or something, you can build these workflows and automations that happen through time.

So the, the interface looks familiar in that way, and I personally like the visual style so that I can see how it all fits together and not try to hold that in my head.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. And I’m telling you, if you go online and look at NAN workflows, I mean there are just some crazy workflows. Uh, I could build right now.

It would probably take me maybe about an hour. I could build a workflow that connects to my chat TPT account, and when I’m on my phone, I can go, Hey, read me all my emails that I received today, and in the workflow it connects to my, uh, my Gmail account, and then it’ll send it back to chat GPT and then it’ll read me all my emails or I can say, Hey, send an email to, to Chris.

Hey, I’d like to be booked onto your podcast today, and it will send you an email on my behalf. It’s fantastic. That’s cool. All right, I think any other questions about this? If not, we’re gonna go back over to the bolt and see the next steps. Let’s switch back to Bolt. All right. All right. It says, uh, we need a new super base connection, which makes sense, uh, because we started a new project.

So we’re gonna click on superb base. Uh, we’re gonna call this, uh, resume two, create new project, sorry, resume two. Let it fill its own. Some password in create new project.

All right, we’re gonna go apply those changes to the database schema.

Okay. And now we need to, uh, be able to. Add the stripe payments into it.

While it’s doing that, look, see how it, like, how I like that little animation.

Chris Badgett: That’s cute. Yeah. I like subtle animation like that. It’s good.

Chris Lassiter: Last time I built this, it did like the glass animation where like it lit up in glass mode. It was kind of cool. I could actually add that on there pretty quick. And then there’s your resume right here.

There it is. There’s the resume purchase, secure payment stripe processing. So I asked it here to, to add the stripe integration. So I’m going to hit apply.

Was it not done yet at there? Let’s try that fix real quick.

Chris Badgett: So what is, um, when you’re looking with, working with [00:41:00] tools like NAN eight N and, um, bold new, like how should people think about cost in terms of, uh, you know, AI has a cost, but these absolutely. So how you know, but it is probably not as much as you think, right? But somebody has to pay for the agents and this, the energy required to run all this.

Right.

Chris Lassiter: You know, I’m glad you asked that. Let me give you an example. If you take the entire Harry Potter’s series of books, all those words, and you throw ’em in a chat, GPT. It’s about a million tokens. Well, right now for chat, GPT, depending on what model you use, it could be anywhere between, you know, a couple of pennies to 25 cents per million tokens.

That’s a whole novel. That’s so much so many characters that you can use. And so yeah, it costs money. I would say I probably spend. I like to pay annually because you save more when you do it that way. But if, if I had to say monthly costs, I pay $20 a month for the chat CPT Pro. Um, and then for Bolt, I paid their, for their annual.

So I would say, let’s say annually. So I probably pay about 200, maybe two 50 a year to use all these tools. Which is not

Chris Badgett: much for writing code. That would take no, you know, a month to do, like manually so

Chris Lassiter: I once paid a coder to build something for me. It took him two weeks and it almost cost me a thousand dollars.

And that was years, years ago. And now I can do pretty much all of that and it cost me a few cents. Yeah, if you think about it, so right here I clicked on the button to, to purchase the, uh, the email, or I’m sorry, to purchase the, the resume. And so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go ahead and fill this out real quick, uh, on a different screen.

So none of my stuff pops up.

Oops, let’s bring this back over here.

All right, let’s apply the changes. So sometimes when you are trying to register on a site, uh, with the database, uh, there are, uh, security policies, uh, that are in effect. Um, and so I had to update that. So what I did was, is I registered and let’s see if I click on dashboard, uh, here’s like the purchase history.

There’s nothing that’s been purchased yet. Now it hasn’t a asked me yet to connect, to drive. Let’s see what happens when I click on this purchase resume. $5. You know, obviously we’d have to, you know, fix all of, you know, the text, make it a little darker or what have you.

Okay. Yeah. So as I thought it, it aired out right there because it hasn’t even asked me for my secret key. Uh, so let me, let me do that.

So it’s gonna, first, it’s gonna take care of this issue. Let’s see what it was, uh, JSON issue, uh, with credentials.

So while it’s doing that, let’s take a look at, see how we’re in the backend, how it’s making all those changes. Pretty cool.

Go to the ENV.

And then we’re gonna click purchase, resume, proceed to payment. Why do we keep on doing this? All right. We need to connect the stripe.

Chris Badgett: my Stripe

Chris Lassiter: account.

You gotta love that word integration, right? Always spell it wrong. So, yeah, so basically here, uh, it, it’s having a path issue with a superb based database, but I don’t, it didn’t ask me for my secret key. Normally it’s gonna ask right here to integrate with Stripe. I think I might have missed a step there.

So, let’s see here. Let’s see what it says.

Oh, okay. So it wants me to go to the super based dashboard and then add that under there. Okay. All right. Not a problem.

So I’m just gonna bring it over here real quick in a different window. ’cause I don’t know. What it’s gonna wanna show. All right, so let’s see here. So navigate to settings API. Yep.

All right. And then click on.

Click on environment variables.

You know, it’s funny when you go, uh, to a different, uh, website. Here I’ll show, let’s see here. You know, it’s like, oh, you’re following the steps, but it’s like, where’s that at? So project settings and then. Variables. I don’t see it. I’ve been, I, you know, I’ve been in here a a a few times but sometimes I just get lost.

Bring this over here. So, let’s see here. So I went to project settings, and then it says, I wanted me to go to variables, but I don’t see where the variables would be.

This is making me nuts.

So what are your thoughts so far?

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool, man. Like it’s amazing. It makes me wanna roll up my sleeves and commit some time to vibe coding and learning the tech, like you said. If you don’t learn this stuff, it’s changing the world. So like it’s good to do it. What advice would you have for somebody who wants to try their first vibe coding project?

I know like, it’s really common for people to do, like a to-do list app is like their first project. So like, go try to build a to-do list app without being a developer and see how far you can get. So what. Would you recommend Bolt New for that?

Chris Lassiter: Oh, absolutely. I think, uh, bolt New would be, uh, one of the first things to start with, especially when you are creating you know, your first website.

Yeah, I really do that that, that was a great question. I,

okay, so it, we, it should just be in here. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna say. Add the following into my env,

and then what I’m gonna do is give my developer information to that. So it should update you see right here. It should update my ENV with all that information. There we go. I saw it happening. Okay, cool. All right, so we’re gonna go ahead and give this information to it. Like I said, these will be reset afterwards.

Oh,

is it done now? Can I go back in there? Let’s get out of it. Go back in there. All, there you go. I was trying to make changes before, uh, before it was done, and then we’ll take a copy of the secret key.

And then we’ll take a copy of this.

We should, technically we can get away without wet, get away without doing that. So let’s just save real quick.

All right. So let’s go down here and try this.

Yeah. ’cause I think it’s storing it in my, my super base. I think it’s actually storing the information there, but it shouldn’t be. It should be storing it, uh, here in my B. So let’s see what it says right here for the checkout page.

But, uh, but normally, uh, when you’re using it in the beginning, it’ll ask you just to, uh, connect to your stripe and then you give your secret key. I don’t wanna keep on boring you guys with this, but I did wanna show you something like really cool. So, for example, you see how this like animates right here?

Yeah. Let’s say, you know, you want these panels right here to like, to glow. You know what I can do is I can click on this inspector. And then click right here. And I can say, make these panels animate and glow with a glassy effect when you know the mouse goes over it

All right. So right here, it’s gonna make a beautiful, glossy, uh, hover effect. So it’s updating, uh, those components.

All right, so now it’s done it. So we’ll scroll down and see. Look at that. Yeah. That’s cool. Very cool. That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so it’s really cool. So Bold News, it’s one of my, uh, favorite websites, especially when I’m vibe coding. Uh, I really like using them to start an idea. I. And then, take it outside of it and go to, you know, like an IDE like cursor and, you know, just do more, uh, advanced stuff on it.

But I have built websites for customers who didn’t want to use WordPress. And we specifically, you know, just I built it here and, sent it to ’em and they were so happy about it. And it was a static, so they didn’t need any changes. And yeah, it does a lot, you know, people are worried about, oh, is AI gonna replace, coders, um, or designers?

And, and I’ll go, no, I, I think it, I don’t think it will. I, I think what it’ll it do is it’ll just be able to allow them to work faster, make, you know, make smoother projects and, you know, make futuristic projects

Chris Badgett: and get more people just who aren’t developers getting involved in the space, which is a good thing.

Exactly. Chris, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for taking us to school on Vibe coding. I love your style too about like, Hey, it’s, we’re vibe coding, we gotta roll with it. We gotta learn. Let’s fix these errors, let’s reset. It’s something that just like we all started playing around with chat GPT two years ago or whenever it was like, this is the next evolution of that.

Start playing around with. Vibe coding and this, these Ag agentic workflows, which is really cool. ’cause automate, it’s all about saving time and extending your capabilities, which is the whole purpose of technology.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. And you know what I wanna say is, um, you know, if you come to learn AI now.ai and sign up for our first course, we partnered up with Bolt New and you know, they’re giving our customers three months free of their pro account, which is $20 a month. So you get three months free of using Bolt Bolt new by just signing up for our first course, uh, when it’s available here soon. So we’re, we’re excited to do that.

That’s

Chris Badgett: awesome. That’s Learn AI now.ai. Chris, thank you for coming back on the show. Keep up the good work. You’re gonna have to come back on again. And we’re gonna see the, um, you know, the, the lifter course builder workflow and how that evolves. That’s gonna be fun. But, uh, keep up the amazing work.

Keep innovating and thanks for coming on the show.

Chris Lassiter: Thank you for having me. And you know, I’ll be using, uh, bold new to create the front end of that, so I’m excited to show it to you and, um, I’ll see you next time on the podcast.

Sounds great.

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In this LMScast, Taco Verdonschot presents Progress Planner, a proactive solution for website optimization and maintenance made just for WordPress users, including developers, agencies, and site owners.

Taco makes a compelling analogy when he says that creating a beautiful website is only the first step, much like growing a garden. To remain healthy and functional over time, both require frequent care updates, cleanups, and continuous enhancements. This is the role of Progress Planner, which functions as an omnipresent and persistent setup wizard that keeps helping users even after the initial site creation is finished.

Progress Planner helps users properly optimize their tools by integrating with plugins like Yoast SEO to reveal hidden or overlooked options. Through the use of badges and points, Progress Planner gamifies the experience, motivating users to do activities they may otherwise put off. Progress Planner guarantees that websites continue to expand and function smoothly long after launch, whether it is by resolving minor SEO problems or finishing onboarding chores that developers overlooked during initial setup.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Taco Vendor Shot. That’s the best I can do with a Dutch last name. We’re gonna get into how to make your website progress better, get the tasks you need to get done to, to help builders also set their clients up for success.

It’s a really cool project. You can check that out@progressplanner.com. But first. Welcome to Show Taco.

Taco Verdonschot: Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. We were chatting at a WordPress event and you were telling me about Progress Planner. I’m like, oh, this is cool. I build complex sites. Our users build complex sites, and there’s a lot of things that need to happen, even with just regular playing WordPress to get going.

But tell us in a nutshell, what is Progress Planner?

Taco Verdonschot: I. So I like to use an analogy and that is where I compare your website to a garden. If you have a new plot of land and you want to build a beautiful garden out of it, you need to spend a lot of time and energy getting it ready, putting in the plans, designing everything.

It’s very similar with your website. You need to spend a lot of time and energy to get it up and running. But just like a garden, you can only sit back and relax and enjoy it for so long before little wheat start popping up. And you need to mow the lawn at some point. And with your websites, it’s the same.

You can only leave it alone for so long until you need to start doing little maintenance tasks. Maybe update the plugin, revise some content write a new piece of content. It’s those tasks that people oftentimes forget or really don’t like doing. It’s pretty much like me and gardening. I like having a nice garden.

I swear I hate gardening, so I need some extra motivation to do those tasks. And that’s where we build Progress Planner to be your little motivator to help you do those little maintenance tasks that weeding on your website.

Chris Badgett: I think it’s really cool. I was thinking about it in terms of the user journey.

I. There’s a lot of stuff around like getting people to your site, getting traffic or getting a sale, a conversion. And then but the other half of the funnel is what happens after that. It’s about onboarding, activation. I. Retention, giving them coming back, staying around, telling their friends.

There’s like this whole other journey after the beginning of getting the traffic, which you know a lot about from Yost, SEO. Yeah, for sure. And we have these setup wizards as an example, like some WordPress plugins. All right, you got one shot to proactively give somebody some advice. And a lot of times if you’re in a hurry or you’ve been building sites for a while or something, you just close that thing.

Yeah,

Taco Verdonschot: whatever. Yeah, exactly. And then later you’re

Chris Badgett: like, wait, what was that thing I had to set up for this thing to work? And you, and then this is like a, it is like a setup wizard that never stops being proactive and working for your best interests. And I find that really cool.

Taco Verdonschot: That’s yeah, exactly that.

And so right now we started fairly recently August last year, and we’re still billing new things and new checks and new tools and new tasks for you to do. But one of the cool things that we recently introduced is an integration with another plugin. And you. Probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that Yost as yo it’s a plugin that we know quite well since the majority of our team used to work at Yost.

So what we now do is we look at those settings in Yost as yo that were really hard to surface from within the plugin, and we help Yost users to make the most out of their SEO plugin. And that’s definitely something that we want to expand to other plugins as well. We’re looking for next integrations to see which plugins have a need to nudge their users into some of the settings, into workflows that they have in the plugin that their users tend to skip and will happily help them get their users activated to do all of those.

That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: I know as a guy who’s been trying to figure out SEO for a long time, I think I’m pretty decent at it. But it, it took me a while and I remember getting into the Yost tool and you had the workouts and there was some progress bars of Hey, don’t forget about this thing over here.

I just found it super helpful. Like you said, there’s buried. Components and pieces that if you miss it, you may be really hurting the success of your project.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And those exist in plugins, but also in WordPress core. Yeah. One of the things that we see a lot with sites that have been around for years, that they still have the tagline, just another WordPress site.

Yeah. And if your theme doesn’t expose it on the front end. There’s no way you’re gonna see that unless you either dive into that menu and then it doesn’t stand out as being a problem. Or if you look at the source code, because WordPress does output your tagline on every single page, and it’s quite annoying if.

You are just one of those, just another web workforce website websites according to search engines, because they do see that output. So that’s one of the checks that we have in Progress Planner where we really find problems that oftentimes have existed on sites for years.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it makes total sense.

I think I just got it naturally ’cause I’m in the LMS space and progress tracking is a big part of what our software does. Yeah. And for most courses you can, you don’t complete it in one sitting, so you need to come back, figure out where you left off. Some people may jump around to different lessons out of order.

And need to know what’s done, what’s not done. And if that didn’t, that’s literally the whole point of the LMS and a lot of building a website is just like that.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Absolutely. And so the interesting thing is you just talked about onboarding experience in your plugins, what we, and that works perfectly if the person setting up the website has all the information about the end result.

But especially if your website’s built by an agency, we oftentimes see that a more technical person is doing the initial setup and installing a set of plugins and all of that, and then later on a content team is filling the website. But if your plugin has shown its onboarding wizards to this developer who has no clue about the.

Eventual name of the site about social images, about users, what have you. They’re going to close all of those onboarding wizards. And then typically they don’t pop any pop up anymore because they’ve already been closed. And so you completely missed the opportunity to bring your onboarding wizard to the user who actually should be going through that onboarding wizard, but as a plugin, I think it’s an urban legend that everyone is tired of notifications.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot: Probably beyond an urban legend because it’s true. It’s highly annoying if every plugin’s throwing constant stream of notifications at you. So there’s only so much you can do as a plugin to nut your users into the wanted behavior.

Now, if you gamify that. And you make people get points when they resolve notifications, all of a sudden they start asking for more notifications. I. And that’s exactly what our users are doing. They’re emailing us saying, Hey, I’ve completed all my tasks. What am I going to do next? I want to get my batch for this month and I need another three or four points.

Give me more things to do so we can send unlimited notifications because people are rewarded and are actually asking for them. And that’s also where we can. Be a nice partner for plugins to help get users. Yeah. Reminded about some of the tasks.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And also in the LMS space, like we have gamification and notification, so I get it.

Like it, it works. It definitely gamifies, you know what needs to be done and you get the little dopamine hit. And another example I wanted to point out to what you said earlier to. The site builder closing all the setup wizards and then handing it off to the content team. Another one I’ve seen more and more over time is people are building these websites as a service where it is like it’s bundling all these different plugins and themes and stuff together, and the user just gets a site.

And what those folks do when they build those setups. Is they often like skip the notification ’cause the notification or the the setup wizard. The setup wizard is waiting for you to activate a plugin one at a time. But in these cases where a website activates all these plugins at once, you can’t run.

10 setup wizards at the same time. Oh, yeah. So I could see progress planner really coming in handy for those kind of setups as well.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And it’s not just agencies doing this because for example, if you look at what hosting companies are offering nowadays, so even at the lower end of the market where people built their own websites, back in the day, you would get a hosting package.

Download WordPress. Install WordPress. You had to manually create a database, enter details. That doesn’t happen a whole lot anymore. A lot of people are using prebuilt packages. For example, blue Host as a whole AI onboarding wizard. WordPress.com has their new AI onboarding wizard. So you don’t touch those first steps anymore, but you start with.

Sort of a prebuilt site where you only have to change some content on the site. So more and more people never even touch plugins and don’t know how to install them because they’ve never done it. So that’s definitely a change compared to when I first started in, in WordPress,

Chris Badgett: beyond the the setup in the early month or two of a website.

Tell us about like the ongoing challenges, like for copywriting challenge or broken links challenge. How does this stuff work? Yeah,

Taco Verdonschot: In the plugin there’s a lot of recommendations and there are on a more technical level, which is the ones that we talked about before, and there’s a set of content recommendations.

One of my. Pet peeves is when I go to someone’s website because I’m interested in their business or buying a product off of them, and I go to the about page and it lists one or two people, even though I know that it’s a bigger company. By now and they’ve never updated it. It’s been sitting there for six years and no one cared to tell, Hey, we’re now a 40 people team instead of just the two of us.

So little checks like that when if you last updated the page, is it time to do something new? That’s what we also have in the plugin. But some of the things that you need to do on your website, things that you need to improve are bigger than a five minute task. And that’s where we currently have the challenges.

Right now we’re in a side speed challenge. So we had a webinar last week to tell people about, Hey, this is what site speed means. This is what it does for your site, why it’s important and now they have some time to work on it themselves. And we give some extra reading material, extra handholding to help them take on a larger task.

Then just the five minute checks that you find in the plugin. And we’ve done the same for broken links a couple months ago. We’ve done the same for copywriting, so how do I write a decent page? How do I write a blog post? How do I write in about page? So that’s what we do about six times a year at the moment as well.

Is those sort of focused topics that take a little bit longer than just a few minutes to to do.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m gonna get this thing on my main lifter LMS website. ’cause for example just recently we did, I did a broken links scan. I just, it popped in my head like, oh man, I should really do that.

It’s been a couple years. And oh my gosh, were there a lot of broken links and we should have been doing that all along. And yeah, like you, you can’t hold it all in your head, even if you’ve been doing it for a while.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And I would say, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while, because then your side grows, you have a lot of content, a lot of posts, and it becomes really hard to.

Continue to realize, oh wait, maybe I should go through this and click all the links that I have in my posts and my pages and everything. So yeah, I think everyone. Who looks at their site and throws a broken link scanner at it will come to the same realization. Oops, there’s a couple hundred links that I need to fix.

It was more than that. What,

Chris Badgett: You’ve been around for a while, so I have been around for a while and I’m not the only one making content on the site, so there’s a lot of content. What about, in terms of the, you have a free version and a paid version. How should people think about that?

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so right now we’re heavily focusing on the free version. And to the point where in a couple weeks we’re going to work in Europe and we’re going to not even mention the pro version. So it’s all about, hey. Use this tool, make your site better experience that it works. And from there we’ll see.

But for now, full focus on the free version.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

That’s awesome. And you said you’re going to Word Camp Europe. Tell us about first of all, you’ve been around WordPress for a long time, and I wonder this question sometimes, like I didn’t. I just fell in love with the open web and being able to build a website and, display a message that anybody anywhere in the world could see and just magically, I just woke up inside the WordPress world and I felt wow, this software is built for people like me.

And I joined the community and did a bunch of stuff and but what was your doorway into WordPress and falling in love with this ecosystem?

Taco Verdonschot: So it’s quite an interesting story. Back in the day and we’re talking early 2013 I was studying computer science as a part-time studies next to a job.

I. And one of my classmates for a project that we had to do suggested using WordPress. And I had heard of WordPress before as a blogging tool, but he said no, we can really do this project. It can serve it can, we can create an API with in a and we can do all cool stuff. We started using WordPress, he was quite convincing.

Worked on that project for about three months. Got a decent grade and that was was the end of it. Then something changed at the job where I was at the time and. On a morning while commuting to that job, I saw a retweet by the classmate. He retweeted a guy named Joe DeVol who was looking for a developer and said we’re looking for someone to, to train junior developer.

They said, hire for talent and attitude, train for skill. I was pretty sure that I did not have any skill. So that was a match attitude I know was fine. That’s not gonna be a problem. And talent. God, if I know. I decided to apply on this train at six 30 in the morning, and to my own surprise, I got a phone call a day or two later inviting me to an interview.

And I joined Yosef Falk at his company called Yost owner of Yost as yo, this is also why you should never name your company after yourself. By the way. It’s highly confusing. But I joined the company at first as a developer. Then very quickly we learned about the talents, or lack thereof in my case for being a developer.

And I switched roles within the company to to customer support. But in the meantime, there was this event organized in Leiden, in the Netherlands. And it was called WordCamp Europe. It was the first time someone ever organized something like it apparently. And yos yos. Devo was like, okay, you know what?

You go and go have fun, go learn things. There’s interesting speakers. You’ll make, you’ll probably meet some people. It’s a nice community. I did meet a lot of people and some of them I still con consider friends today. One of them you had on the show a couple weeks back, Brad Williams had the most amazing event.

Ended up with people that I had never heard of, but apparently were known names in the community. Mark Jaqui NAS, I had no idea who these people were but everyone welcomed me and it was one friendly bunch and I decided to stick around and. Here we are 12 years later still in WordPress and still love to travel to conferences and yeah, meet my people around the world.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. What’s the future vision for progress Planner? Like where are you guys going with it? Because it’s newer. I know it has a vision behind it. So what’s big vision?

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Our ultimate goal is to make the web better. There, the web is an ever expanding collection of information and it should be useful and it should be usable.

And having old still websites. Doesn’t help anyone. It uses unnecessary power. It doesn’t add value for anyone. It doesn’t add value for SEO for search. It doesn’t it’s just, it’s bad. So if we can help keep the web better up to date through Pro Progress Planner, through helping people be more active on their website, then that’s what we’re aiming for.

And I am convinced that we can do it, that we can integrate with more plugins, that we can have more checks in WordPress, that we can be even more engaging to help people come back to their site, write more content, keep the site online, and then when they decide it’s tight time to retire the website that they.

Do so because they are making a decision and not because it’s just lingering somewhere on the web polluting it.

Chris Badgett: I

Taco Verdonschot: love that.

Chris Badgett: I think this idea is as big as the idea of documentation where documentation. Is a reactive, oh, I have a problem. Let me search the knowledge base, see what I can find.

And this is like the proactive, it’s like proactive documentation and that’s anticipating what the user needs next is like really cool. That’s how products should be.

Taco Verdonschot: It’s also challenging because for people

Chris Badgett: to you to be a psychic, you have to be a mind reader.

Taco Verdonschot: Absolutely. And there’s another component to it.

We’re super upfront. We help you do those tedious tasks that you’re forgetting about, but that means that people first have to admit that they might not be as on top of their website as they. Want to think they are.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot: So in order to get those installs for progress planner, we have to convince people, look, there, there really is a need on your website to install this so we can help you.

And that is an interesting challenge that we’re currently facing. And yeah. I hope that all of your listeners now go, oh, wait a second. Maybe there’s some things that I. Haven’t done in the last six months. Let me check. Let me see what progress planner comes up with. And I’m pretty sure when they do, they’ll fall in love.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It almost seems like the kind of idea that like this is a good thing that web hosting companies should install by default on all WordPress sites, just to,

Taco Verdonschot: yeah,

Chris Badgett: just to be of help.

Taco Verdonschot: If there’s a host that wants to talk about that tackle@progressplanner.com, send me an email.

Happy to,

Chris Badgett: let’s go back into Yos history a little bit with what you were saying about what people may have missed. What are some common things when it comes to SEO for a site that, that things progress Planner as an example, would pick up and be like, Hey, be sure you do X. What’s x?

Taco Verdonschot: Oh. One of the worst problems that we have in WordPress is a feature called tags, because that sounds like the hashtags that we use on social media.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot: And people use them in WordPress as if they are hashtags in social media. Now, the problem with that is that for every tag you create, WordPress creates a page.

And actually a couple of versions of that page. So for every tag, there’s several URLs that are created on your site, but if you create a tag for a single post, then that tag page does not have any value for your website. Now, if you add eight different tags to every post. You get a mass inflation of URLs on your domain, that which adds absolutely nothing to your site.

They’re all thin content pages. There’s, they’re absolutely useless. But they exist. And so the perceived quality of your website is much lower because a search engine is going to see that only one in every eight URLs has any meaningful content. That’s not a sign of a quality website. So one of the things that Progress Planner does is compare the number of tags that you have to the number of posts.

To see if that is a healthy balance. And if not, it will recommend you what to do or even to install one of our plugins called Fewer tags which was built by Yos a while back. And that will help you slim down on those those useless tags. But. In the long run obviously what we hope to achieve is that people understand that the tags in WordPress are not the same as hashtags on Twitter or Instagram or what have you.

And that they start using them responsibly so we don’t have to solve the problem afterwards.

Chris Badgett: Just for general education, for blog posts, what’s the difference between a category and a tag? Like how should tags actually be used? If at all.

Taco Verdonschot: If at all is the first one for most sites, you don’t need them.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Categories can organize

Taco Verdonschot: your stuff. If you want to organize stuff, usually categories which are, and this is a word I hate in English. Hierarchical. Hierarchical. That’s pretty good though. Yeah, I just so that’s the main difference between categories and tax categories have that hierarchy and they you can structure them a little bit.

Deeper. Tags are just a, hey, this is related to this, and that could be across categories could even be across custom post types in some cases. And so I. For example, if you have a recipe website and you have them categorized in this is Italian recipes, this is Mexican dishes. I like that example.

And this is Polish dishes across those categories, there might be recipes that take 15 minutes. That’s where you could use a tag that says, this is ready in 15 minutes. Now if you then go to that tag page, you will get recipes across categories that are done in 15 minutes. So that could be a valuable use of tags in WordPress.

Chris Badgett: Another thing I thought of is that, we all know if we’ve been in WordPress for a while to check, but the disabled, there’s one checkbox that says disable indexing from search engines. Yes. And so a lot of times when people are building sites, they have that checked so they can build in private and then they forget or they hand it off to the client and forget to turn it off. That’s a bad one.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. I think that if you have any SEO plugin installed, it should already scream in your face like, Hey, you forgot something. But just to be sure, we’ve also added that to progress bladder.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. What’s another SEO? Area that progress planner would pick up on.

Taco Verdonschot: So an another interesting one is the tagline that you have in WordPress.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot: It, by default it says just another WordPress site, and if you don’t have a theme that outputs the tagline in the front end, it’s hard to spot. You’ll actually have to go into the admin to see that this tagline is set.

But it is outputted on every single page in the source code. So a search engine will see that description of your website on every single page. If you search Google for just another WordPress site, you’ll be amazed how many sites show up because they still have that set on their site. So that’s one of the things where progress planner also helps you.

Hey, don’t forget about this little thing. And the surprising thing is we saw it a lot on sites that have been a lot online for a long time. So it’s not just post-launch. But years and years in.

Chris Badgett: Since you’re a SEO expert, I have to ask what are your thoughts on AI’s influence on SEO or an emerging new field of artificial intelligence optimization or whatever?

Like what? What’s happening right now? What should we be worried about? Not worried about? What are some things we can do as we enter the intelligence age?

Taco Verdonschot: I feel that you are asking the Wright brothers just after they had their first successful flights. How big is a jumbo jets going to be in 80 years?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot: I have no clue where it’s going. And that is despite me studying artificial intelligence for a couple of years at university. I don’t know where this is going. What I do know is that for SEO what we’ve always been trying to solve is a user’s problem. Someone has a problem and needs a solution to their problem.

And in order to show up. You need to have that information in a clearly written accessible way available for them. And that doesn’t change. LLMs consume your website as well. From what I’ve seen so far, they are. A lot worse at processing JavaScript and stuff like that. So all the complex sites make it harder for LMS to understand your site and its content.

So basically we’re back to the early days of 10 blue links in Google where you need to be specific, you need to build an authority in order to show up. In search results and whether that’s an LLM or a search engine doesn’t really matter.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The human and the LLM and the search engine, they still need high quality content that you made from your original website.

Taco Verdonschot: Yes. Anyone can generate anything using ai but the original idea to create something valuable. For now at least needs to come from human input. There’s no LLM that’s going. Haha. I have the next fantastic idea that no one’s ever thought of before. Because the whole way the model works is it just it’s a chance calculation on what is probably going to be the next word after the one I just printed.

That’s not generating new ideas yet.

Chris Badgett: I’m curious, and at Yost, how many sites did you say are approximately

Taco Verdonschot: using it? So right now there’s about 13 million websites running Yost as yo. So how do you do

Chris Badgett: support for that many websites?

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so me, not anymore.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot: But the interesting thing is that the support team at Jost at the time I left last year was about 40 people.

So how do you do support? You build a product that’s good enough that most of your users run without needing support. There’s no way to, to answer 13 million questions with whatever size team you can imagine.

Chris Badgett: I’ve been using Yost for, I don’t know, over a decade probably, and. I don’t think I’ve ever submitted a support ticket,

Taco Verdonschot: but, and yeah, that’s as it should be.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And that’s that’s where a progress planner comes in too, is that’s only gonna help too with just helping people figure out how to use the tools they just read about in an article, got excited about and put on their website. Yep. Be proactive. It’ll actually reduce support for plugin companies, theme companies, WordPress core, all of it.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re aiming for. It should be beneficial for any plugin that we’ve integrated with to say to the users, Hey, install progress planner. It will help you get to that next level using our product. There’s a lot of complicated plugins out there. Setting up an LMS is something it’s not rocket science.

It will require some time and there’s some finesses that we probably can help you with by giving the right nudges at the right time. So that’s one of the things that we can do with with progress Planner is help you get those nudges. So maybe we should do integration.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that sounds

Taco Verdonschot: like a plan.

Chris Badgett: It sounds like a plan. And my last question for you, Tako, is. Like who, and there’s a couple characters here. We’ve got the do it yourself website builder, business owner, passion project person. We’ve got the freelancers and agencies. We’ve got we talked about how hosting companies could benefit from this, but who is this for and how and tell how can they get the most value out of it?

Depending upon which type of character they are.

Taco Verdonschot: I. Yeah. So I think for the end user, it’s the feedback that no one’s giving them. So the things, Hey, have you thought about updating this content? Have you updated plugins? Now, if someone’s working with an agency, I. That agency might want to receive those notifications and be proactive towards their customer and go, Hey did you know that it’s been six months since you last updated this page?

Has anything changed? I. You could package it as an agency. Talking about that, about page again, for example Hey we’ve been working together for a year. Have there been any changes in your team? Is there something that we can update for you? So it helps you ask the right questions to your to your client.

And it will make you look good because you’re so on top of what they’re doing on their website. It will also give you some of the nudges on the more technical level. That’s how an agency could benefit from installing the plugin on their client’s websites. Or if an agency goes, what, if I can offload updating some of the content.

To the end user and have them do that reminder, then I can use some of the budget that’s remaining to want to work on the fun tasks, because typically updating content is not the most fun to work on. So that’s an agency play. And then as you said, for hosting companies if they install it for all of their clients and this helps their client keep their website more active it means you’re extending your customer lifetime with.

I don’t know how much yet, but I’m hoping that will be significant. And knowing the hosting industry, even a couple of months is significant at the scale that they’re at. So that’s definitely the hosting play right there. Awesome. So a lot of things, and there’s something for everyone.

Chris Badgett: Awesome Taco. Amazing work. I’m excited to see Progress Planner and where it goes. What’s the best way for those out there watching and listening to get started with it?

Taco Verdonschot: Go to your WordPress website, add a plugin, search for progress planner, and if you see a happy rooster. That’s our friend Ravi, right here.

That’s the plugin you’re looking for. That’s where you get started. Install it. It will already run a lot of checks on your site. So probably you get your first badge. Almost immediately. And then there will be a lot of useful checks that you can do so you can keep busy for the next couple of months.

And for those who are listening and coming to work in Europe, make sure you have progress planner installed on your site. Come show it to us and there will be a nice raffle just for progress planner users. Nice. Nice.

Chris Badgett: That’s Paco. Vander shot, I got you on hierarchical. You got me on your last name, but that’s Taco from WordPress.

Thanks for coming on the show, really appreciate it. Go check out progress planner.com and look for Taco at WordCamp and around the internet. But thanks for coming on Taco. We really appreciate it.

Taco Verdonschot: Thank you so much for having me. A lot of fun here.

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If you spend any time in WordPress circles you’ve probably noticed Kinsta’s name surfacing whenever developers talk about stress‑free performance, stellar support, and content that actually solves problems.

In this week’s LMS Cast episode, host and LifterLMS CEO Chris Badgett sits down with Roger Williams.

Roger Williams is the Community & Partner Manager at Kinsta. He’s been in the WordPress community for many years. He unpacks the culture, tech stack, and relationship‑first mindset that make Kinsta stand out. Roger is an expert community builder and loves sharing his best tips with the opensource community.

Here are the biggest takeaways from their conversation.

Obsess over useful content, not clicks.Roger’s Kinsta journey started long before he joined the team. While troubleshooting database errors at a previous job, he kept landing on Kinsta tutorials that explained why an issue happened and exactly how to fix it. That “give‑it‑all‑away” approach to knowledge still drives their marketing strategy, turning blog readers into brand advocates before they ever become customers. Ask yourself: Does our content raise the bar for the whole community, or just chase keywords?
Architect for scale from day one.Kinsta deploys WordPress sites in isolated Linux containers, which lets them move workloads or spin up dedicated machines in minutes. That early bet on containerization—not retrofitted later—means they can iterate fast, roll out new features safely, and protect every customer’s resources. Course creators can apply the same principle: choose infrastructure that won’t box you in when enrollment surges.
Feedback loops create product velocity.Inside Kinsta, team members at every level are encouraged to suggest improvements. Roger recalls submitting migration‑workflow tweaks and seeing them live in production weeks later. When your engineering, support, and community teams share a single backlog, customers notice. Consider building a lightweight process (a public roadmap, a Discord channel, a monthly call) that turns learner frustration into feature ideas.
Own your stack—especially your data.Roger is an unabashed open‑source evangelist. Closed SaaS course platforms may feel frictionless now, but they can lock you out of raw data exports and custom functionality later. With WordPress + LifterLMS you control both the code and the learner records, making it easier to train private AI models or migrate hosts without losing course history. Total cost of ownership beats lowest sticker price every time.
Treat community like a marathon, not a funnel.Kinsta’s support engineers aren’t measured on ticket speed alone; they’re empowered to dig into “out‑of‑scope” plugin conflicts so customers leave each chat with a clear next step. Roger applies the same philosophy to outreach. On LinkedIn he spends more time leaving thoughtful comments than publishing viral posts, because comments spark real conversation and social proof. For in‑person relationship building, start small: attend niche meetups before springing for the 20‑foot expo booth.
Leverage video where your audience already hangs out.Roger repackages his Kinsta Talks interviews as short vertical clips on LinkedIn and full‑length episodes on YouTube. The platform‑native format keeps algorithms happy while driving cross‑traffic via links in the comments (LinkedIn penalizes external URLs in the post body). If video feels daunting, begin with 60‑second insights recorded on your phone; consistency matters more than studio lighting.

Whether you’re shipping your first online course or running a mature membership site, Kinsta’s story is a blueprint for blending technical excellence with genuine human connection. Listen to the full episode to hear Roger’s unfiltered thoughts on AI, the hidden costs of closed systems, and why handing out value for free is the surest way to earn lifelong customers.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. Today we have Roger Williams, who I just met at a conference in Arizona. Roger is the community manager and partner manager at Kenta hosting one of the top hosts we recommend at Lifter LMS. He also has done a lot of things in the tech space. Uh, he’s got a fun, interesting lifestyle.

We’re gonna get into that. But first, welcome to the show, Roger.

Roger Williams: Hey Chris. Thanks for having me on the show. I’m excited to be here.

Chris Badgett: Well, tell us about Kinta. I can. The, one of the things I love about Kinta is I see people use it, and I never see anybody complain about it. So something is going on there. You guys are doing something right, people are happy.

But what is the kinta difference? What do you love about it? What, uh, you know, what makes it different in the space?

Roger Williams: Yeah, man. Thanks for the great question and, and teeing me up here. But, uh, yeah, so Kinta, you know, I, I’ve gotta say it’s one of the most unique working experiences, uh, I’ve ever had. Um, I found a company when I was working at another hosting company in tech support, and the, what happened was, is that every time I would Google, like, you know, some sort of database issue, right?

Would be the most common problem. I’m, I’m trying to help a customer. They got this weird error. So I go to Google it. And time and time again, this blog kept coming up with the perfect answer, right? It wasn’t just like, oh yeah, here’s the problem. It was like, here’s the problem, here’s why it’s happening, here’s the steps to resolve it.

And that blog was considered.com. Um, and, and it just, it was again, and, and again and again for all these different problems. And so. I was like, man, this is a really interesting company, right? They’re, they’re willing to put all of this knowledge out into the universe for anybody to use it. They don’t have to be against a customer.

And it was just really helpful stuff. And so I, I applied to go work there. And they actually didn’t hire me, uh, for tech support. I wasn’t, I wasn’t good enough. I, there was a specific question about file permissions that I just totally messed up. And so, uh, but they were looking for migrations engineers and so I, I got hired doing migrations.

And, you know, I quickly like realized this is a very different company for a few reasons. Um, the, the big one for me was feedback. I, I’ve worked at a lot of companies and I’ve had ideas for like small improvements and some bigger improvements, but definitely like smaller ones that specific to like the task that I’m doing.

And in migrations, right, you’re. You’re interfacing with different hosts and all these, you know, there’s just a lot of stuff that changes all the time and I was able to like, give feedback to my manager and the stuff got implemented. That just maybe I haven’t worked at really good companies, uh, that much.

But, um, that was really unique, uh, for me to experience where I could give feedback, whether it was to my boss or straight to the engineering team, right. About the product, about the dashboard and, and stuff. And they would actually, you know, if it was a good idea, they would actually implement it. And so, you know, just all these things kept happening like that, that just made me really realize like.

We really talk, we’re walking the talk, right? A lot of companies say that they’re really interested in taking care of their customers and their employees. Um, but at, at Kinta, like I really do see that difference. And, and you know, you pointed out, you said some nice things there about you’ve never heard anybody I.

Complaining about Kinta, and I think that there’s a few reasons for that. Um, the first one is we’ve built our dashboard from the ground up, um, around people managing WordPress websites. And so, you know, we’ve taken, our engineers have taken from their own experience of doing this and then also feedback from different developers and, and people that are using the service and they’ve built this dashboard that we’re able to iterate on.

And so since we’re not using somebody else’s dashboard, if there’s a change that needs to be made, we can just make that change. And I see this happen again and again. I mean, since I’ve been here for just over five years, I. We’ve done a complete revamp of the dashboard in that time, not only from a look and feel, but also from the code base behind running it.

And, and they did that to help anticipate the things that we would be doing in the future. And so they’re able to iterate really quickly on things. So, so there’s, the service is really good. Um, but then on top of that. The support is really amazing. Um, we have a really good team of leaders that understand how support works.

Like they’ve been in the trenches, they’ve been on the chats and, and dealing with customers so they know what a support engineer goes through. And they’ve created a really good system where, you know, the engineers get amazing training and then they’re really encouraged to. Work with the customer and get to know the customer and help them and understand their problems and realize that even, even if it’s an outta scope support issue, right?

Like for instance, like code, like we’re not developers, we’re not gonna go in and touch your code. We want to get as close as possible to some sort of resolution for you so that when you get off the chat, you’re able to go, okay, hey. You know, either this plugin or this specific line of code is causing some sort of an issue.

And I can either as a developer, work on it or I can get a developer to work on that. And I think, I think that is a really big difference from how a lot of other companies run support, where you know, hey, it’s not our problem. Uh, you know, go figure it out. We really don’t want to say it’s not our problem, even when it isn’t our problem.

And I, I think that that makes a really big difference for customers. So, uh, long-winded answer there. Um, but, and I can keep going on for days, but, um, yeah, it, it really is definitely a unique place.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. But I mean, you can just tell the brand the feel like in the market it’s, and that comes from somewhere.

Roger Williams: Yeah. And,

Chris Badgett: uh. I often hear also a lot about kin’s content, like you’re saying, lots of helpful content. It’s what you found. And, um, I know, uh, I remember listening to an interview, I think with Brian Jackson a long time ago, who did a lot of great content work there and, you know, and he’s a big leader in good content and SEO and all of that.

It’s, um,

Roger Williams: yeah,

Chris Badgett: yeah, it’s off.

Roger Williams: Brian. Brian, Brian was with us for a long time. You know, he’s still a big supporter with us. Um, he needed to step back from the marketing role, but, um, yeah, he really pioneered, uh, for our teams, you know, this approach of creating really useful content that, that the marketplace is looking for.

And so really trying to solve a need there. Um, but you know, it goes all the way back to the founders when they were in their apartment getting it started. Um. Just, you know, realizing like, Hey, we’re going to build a really amazing product. And part of that was, you know, starting to use Linux containers for every site to really help make ’em more bombproof, um, and scalable as well.

Right? We, we can easily move those containers around if we need to, if you need to go to a dedicated machine. It takes very little time for us to provision and get you moved around. And so I think there’s some of these fundamental aspects of our technology and the decisions made early on that have really paved the way for the, the, you know, the great product and service that we’re offering today.

Chris Badgett: I know you’re a big open source fan, so somebody out there is watching or listening and you know, they, they wanna make a course, they haven’t really decided where they’re gonna put it. Yeah. Um, you know, there’s hosted solutions like Kajabi or Teachable or Thinkific. But then there’s options to have the website yourself and use WordPress and tools like Lifter, LMS and the other ones.

Roger Williams: Hmm.

Chris Badgett: What? Why are you such a big open source advocate, and how do you feel about it?

Roger Williams: Yeah, man. Great question again, and, and a big question. Uh, I think that open source software is one of these, uh, inventions, revolutions, what have you, that not enough of society really understands how fundamentally different and important this is.

Um, you know, with open source software, you, you can see all of it and everybody can see all of it. And so. If there’s a huge network effect, um, with that, it, you know, with, when you have closed source software such as like Microsoft or Apple, nobody can see that code and so they can’t see when there’s a problem in the code and point that out.

To Microsoft or Apple of, Hey, you know, here’s the, here’s a problem I found and here’s a solution. And with open source, anybody can come along and do that. And you know, for a lot of people, the quick reaction’s gonna be, well, if the code’s exposed, then all these bad actors are gonna be able to identify that and take advantage of it.

And, you know, that’s not an incorrect statement that that is accurate. But the, you know, my, my belief is that humans are at. Full nature or regular nature, just good people. And so the majority of people are gonna point out, Hey, there’s an issue here. You should fix it. Um, and if you flip that on its head and you say, Hey, with Microsoft product, if there’s a security exploit and somebody discovers that.

There’s no place really. It’s not an easy way for them to disclose that to Microsoft. And so you’ll have just as many bad actors taking advantage of things, uh, in that case as well. And I think the open nature to it, uh, you know, trying to get back on track here, the open nature to it tends itself towards people being able to help.

I think that’s, that’s the exciting part about open source software is the community part. Um, you know, there’s, there’s a whole group of people coming together to, you know, there’s a smaller group that actually works on the software. Usually. Sometimes it’s just one person, but then you have a community of users around it and they’re giving feedback and they’re testing and, you know, all of, all of this stuff that helps the developers.

Continue to work on the project. So kind of, you know, short cutting a little bit here and talking about, you know, when you’re going to go and build a learning management program. Um, why open source is a, is a, a better way to go. I. You know, there, there might be more cost on the front end, um, either in terms of time of setting it up or you need to hire a developer to help set things up.

Um, you know, with open source software, that is a reality. And, and you know, it’s good that we don’t hide from that, but you fully own the solution. You have, you have complete access to that code. So if you’re a developer, you can get in there and mess with it. You can hire developers. To do anything you want to it.

Um, and so you own the code, but you also own all the data and, you know, there’s, it’s all about the data anymore, you know, in terms of your customer’s information, the actual, uh, course that you’re building and sharing, and. When you’re using a closed solution, you don’t have access to hardly any of that. Um, you know, there’s a lot of times I’ve seen with these closed source solutions, you can’t even really export the data out at all.

So if you wanted to at least get something out of it and move somewhere else. You’re gonna have to build everything again from scratch. Um, and so that little bit of savings you had up front for the convenience of just clicking a button and getting started, you know, down the road when you’re five, 10 years down the road and you’re making serious money because you’ve made a really great course, you’re very successful.

Um, now you’re, you’re hitting the, you know, the, the restrictions of whatever that. Software is that you were using or worse yet, the business that was building that software was mismanaged or they get sold to Adobe for, you know, worst case scenario is that when Adobe buys your software, ’cause it’s probably gonna go away and you have no control, you have no recourse over any of that.

And with open source software, something like WordPress using L Lifter, LMS. You have full control because it’s your code and you know, if you’re not happy with the host that you’re at, you can move on over to Kinta and, you know, have all those options to find better service. So, you know, I can keep going for days about, um, you know, the philosophy behind why open source software is better than closed source.

Um, but I think, you know, really thinking in terms of ownership and total cost of ownership is a great place for people to start.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And one of the things that gets me excited is, and I don’t know exactly where we’re going with open source and artificial intelligence, but like you mentioned, because it’s open, um, anybody could leverage AI tools and create all kinds of innovations, modify the code with ai, even if you’re not a developer.

Like this is the world we’re coming to, you know, web hosts as an example. I could, like, I, I’m also, I like free open source as well, and we have free and premium Sure add-ons. But the, if something’s open source and it’s free and it’s just sitting up here on the entire internet for AI to take a look at and do whatever they want to do with it, it’s really powerful concept.

Whereas like closed source software. People who work in that company are probably using AI tools to help write code and stuff, but it’s not open to the world. Mm-hmm. And that’s such a, a big idea. Any, any artificial intelligence thoughts in open source overlap for you?

Roger Williams: Yeah, no. 100%. Uh, big shout out to Victor Ramirez.

Uh, he’s a really awesome, uh, developer. Does a lot of work with WordPress and stuff, and I saw him at Word Camp Phoenix, uh, 2024, and he had a really great talk about. Why WordPress is perfectly positioned for large language models and these AI tools because again, you have total ownership of the data. So if you want to give this data to a large language model or you want to grab something like llama, right, the, the open source, um, LLM from um, uh, Facebook, you know, you can now create your own private LLM.

With your data in it, and you have full control over what it says and what it shares and what it doesn’t share, whereas, you know, if you’re going out to use open AI or, or you know, some of these different, uh, closed source LLMs, you don’t have as much say in terms of what data they’re collecting. And as we evolve into using these tools more and more and as companies realize the benefits of bringing these tools in, I think there’s going to be a big wake up call, um, where people realize if they don’t own their data, I.

They’re, again, they just don’t have the control over what’s being shared into these systems, how it’s being used in these systems. And, you know, with a, with an open source tool like WordPress, you do have all of that control. And so I think, I don’t have a great exact answer for all this stuff yet. I would definitely follow Victor.

Um, he, he’s putting out really great content. There’s a lot of people talking about this stuff that are a lot smarter than me. Um, but we’re seeing it happen and it’s, it’s very exciting. Rich Tabor had a really great presentation at Press Comp. Talking about how he’s using AI and how he’s using it in WordPress.

And again, because you have the ability to go in and and work with the code within WordPress and adapt it to what you want to use these tools for, you just have so much more freedom.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Exciting times. And it’ll be an interesting by or decade from here.

Roger Williams: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Um, one of the things we talk about on this podcast a lot for course creators and education entrepreneurs is build the power of building community.

You’re a community guy in your job title at Kinta is community manager. Yeah. What’s some advice you have for people who are trying to get out from behind the computer in their niche and participate, but also maybe intentionally build community like. How do we do that?

Roger Williams: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a great question.

I, I wish I had, uh, all of the answers for you. Um, you know, it’s in my title, so obviously I must be an expert, uh, is not accurate. Um, I, I think having a beginner’s mind and realizing, uh, community is, it can be challenging, but, you know, take small bites. So for example, I think getting onto social media. Is, is a great first step for building community.

Um, there’s already people out there talking about, maybe not your exact course, but they’re talking about something related to your course and you can start interacting with them. Um, I think, you know, tools like Reddit. Are pretty amazing also because of how much they’re getting pulled into Google search results and also these LLM tools.

So you can kind of get some little double dipping there where you’re getting community plus some SEO um, you know, if you’re doing a a B2B course, you know LinkedIn, um, there’s, there’s all these different social media platforms out there you should be using and, and you can get the two-way feedback going.

And so I think that that’s really great. I think interviewing people that have re something related to what you’re trying to teach, uh, is a great way to get started with that because now you’re bouncing off of somebody else’s ideas. You’re, you’re gaining from their experience and you’re sharing that with your community, and I think there’s a huge benefit to that.

I get approached all the time on the interviews that I’m doing. Uh, with people, uh, when I go to events and, and people are like, Hey, I, I’ve been watching your podcast. It’s really great and, you know, thank you for, you know, the, the great interviews and. And so that, you know, that always catches me off guard just a little bit.

But it is really powerful and, and, and interesting. So then the second stage is talking about like going to actual in-person events and interacting with people. And I think starting small again is really important here. Don’t think that you need to go and buy the biggest booth or even a booth at all.

Like just start going to the events that have. Some sort of relation to the course that you’re doing, uh, whether it’s an industry event or just a, a general get together of, of people around that topic and start interacting with people and, and connecting with them and connecting with them on social media and taking those relationships and, and extending them beyond.

Just meeting in person, but it, it’s, you know, getting that salesman, it’s a sales mentality too, as well. Right. Or even a marketing mentality in that you really need to be putting yourself out there. You need to be not afraid to make a mistake and sound stupid. Um, because first of all. Most people aren’t paying attention that close.

Um, and, and like people are focused on themselves. Uh, so, so don’t, don’t get too hung up on making a mistake and, and sounding or looking stupid. Uh, it might, it, it’ll happen. I mean, it’s inevitable. It’s gonna happen. We don’t. We don’t all know, uh, everything that we’re talking about, especially when we’re first starting.

Um, and also that’s gonna be a great way for you to learn is when somebody corrects you and, and now you’ve, you’ve learned something new and maybe you won’t do that mistake again. Um, you know, just. Really enjoying it and then learning really to enjoy talking to people and listening to people. So I think, you know, the sales and marketing, we’ve, we’ve talked about this in, in other conversations, uh, I think sales and marketing is, is really integral, uh, especially for a business.

Um, obviously you need to sell your product, but really, you know, going beyond just the. You know, I need to close this deal right now and realizing you’re building relationships. Uh, and not everybody’s gonna be a customer right now, but they might be in six months, they might be in a year. And just seeing every opportunity, every relationship as an opportunity to just connect with somebody.

And maybe down the road something will come of it, but at least in the meantime, you’ve made a new connection with someone, uh, learned their perspective on the world. And maybe you can take that, uh, into your business.

Chris Badgett: I love that. That was, that was a masterclass and it’s, I love what you said about just get out there, start with social media.

We can all do that. We’re probably already doing that, but do it with maybe a little more focus. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. You know, your net worth is your network kind of thing. Like you can’t always measure everything. Yeah. Like it’s almost a meme in our space, as with like WordPress companies, product companies, hosting companies.

If you get asked a question, what’s the ROI of sponsoring or attending a Word camp or conference? Like, I don’t know man, but I’ve, I’ve met some great people and you know, things evolve and we’ll see. Uh,

Roger Williams: yeah, no, it’s a really great point. You know, and, and, and it’s something I need to get better at is the whole measurement.

I need to get better at making sure I’m putting my UTMs into my links and I, I know I need to work on that. But my, my suggestion in going with what you’re kind of talking about here is be careful with how much you’re focused on ROI in relationships and with community because, uh, it, it’s very, it’s much more organic.

It’s very transparent, right? Like, people will know when you’re trying to sell them. And, and so you need to, you need to take like a slower approach with that. Um. And, but you know, you can still use those sales tools in the back of your mind, like, you know, try and leading conversations in different directions and whatnot.

But you know, for the most part, you’re really just trying to connect with people and I. You know, learn more about what their challenges are, you know, and, and you know, and you might not be able to actually help them with that, but you might know somebody else who can. And so making sure that you’re building referrals up and just showing people that you’re there to actually try and help them and not just make a, a buck off of ’em, that goes a long way as well.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

Yeah, that’s awesome. You mentioned getting on social media and um. You’re active on LinkedIn and other places. I feel like many of us, sometimes we have our primary, like I’m a primarily a Twitter person and my company’s more primarily YouTube when it comes to, which is kind of like social media with the comments.

But uh, and we have like a big Facebook group or whatever. But the funny thing about social media is. People often say, oh, like Facebook’s dead, or LinkedIn, there’s too much DM, spam, or whatever. Like, Twitter’s dead, but they’re not. You just gotta learn how to drive it. So what? Take us to school on LinkedIn, how you use it, what you like about it, and just advice for people looking to grow, influence, and just participate in a social network like LinkedIn.

Roger Williams: No, absolutely. Uh, you know, I’ve been on social media off and on for a long time. I think I signed up for my Twitter account in like 2007 or something silly, and I used to really be big on Twitter and then I got burned outta that. I was big on Facebook and I got burned outta that. And I think one of the big reasons that I like LinkedIn is it’s about business.

And so. There’s a lot of times on like Twitter and Facebook, these other social media networks where you’ll start wanting to do a business type of thing and people will get really upset and, and you’re like, okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t, I didn’t know. Whereas on, on LinkedIn, it’s like everybody is there for the purpose of doing business and so like, you know.

It’s just expected that you’re going to be talking about your product and you’re going to be talking about, you know, maybe a business idea or a methodology or sales technique and things like that. And so I really like that because I’m at the point now in my life where I don’t really need social media to like fulfill.

Personal things. Um, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got my wife, I’ve got, you know, friends and all family and all that type of stuff, and, and I really try and disconnect as much as I can. But when I’m working, LinkedIn is where I’m at because I can connect with all the people that I, either I’m doing business with or I’m partnered with or I’m in a community with.

Um, and so it, I think it helps from that standpoint. Um, you know, if you’re, if you’re looking to do B B2B stuff, especially LinkedIn’s huge as far as actually using LinkedIn, there’s a few different things that I would highly recommend. So the first one is understanding the power of comments. On LinkedIn comments are possibly more powerful than actually posting.

Chris Badgett: It’s funny, as you say that, I’m looking at one of your LinkedIn posts that has 27 comments, which is a lot. And, uh, and, and you were doing a community thing. I think it was around. So something you did with Nat, Nat, ick. Yeah. Um, and, uh, and like. For example, if I do a LinkedIn post, I don’t often get as many comments, but I’m also not participating that much in comments everywhere.

So tell us more about why the comment is, could be superior to the post.

Roger Williams: Yeah. So you know, it’s, it’s on any social media when you get a comment, right? Like you get really excited, you get this feel good. Oh, somebody left a comment. You know, I remember on Twitter back in the day, it was all about the star.

If somebody starred your. Tweet like you, you’re, oh, this is amazing. So on LinkedIn you get that same feeling right? Every time somebody leaves a comment on a post for me, I am like over the moon, so excited. Um, but one thing to keep in mind is when you leave a comment on somebody’s post, LinkedIn now shows that post in your follower’s feed.

Highlighting your comment, but it also highlights the post. And so every time you’re commenting, you’re creating more network effect inside of LinkedIn. And so you’re helping to spread other people’s posts. Um, so there’s the first reason. The second reason, and from a, this is from a sales perspective, right?

If I’ve got somebody who I’m trying to sell to, right? I want to, I want to talk to them. There’s a lot of ways to do that, right? You can cold call, you can email, you can send them flowers or whatever. If they’re active on LinkedIn, you can comment on their posts. And I can tell you that when somebody leaves a comment on my post, and I don’t normally get 20 seven’s, a lot of comments.

Um, so it’s not normally that much, but every time somebody leaves a comment on my post, I, I see who they are and I’m immediately like, okay, you know, this person, especially if they leave a good comment and it’s like. You know, they’ve obviously read the post and they’re, they’re trying to build a conversation with it.

I’ll remember who you are. And so then if that person sends me a dm, it’s not a cold, it’s not a cold DM anymore. Right? Or if they cold call me or they email me, I’m, I know who that is already a little bit. And there’s also this verification because on LinkedIn you can verify your company email. Show, Hey, I actually do work at Kinta, right?

Um, I’m not, I’m not just, you know, some random scammer who’s reaching out to you, and so you get this social verification. Also, if I’m connected to people in their network, LinkedIn immediately shows that. And so there’s all of this social contract stuff that you know immediately is coming through your mind.

But all you did was leave a comment on somebody’s post. Um, and so, so commenting is really big, and it’s also a great way for people to start looking at you and your profile and what you’re posting and getting more interested in that. So start with commenting. Um, and then after that, after you’re doing that and you’re starting to get a feel for.

You know who, who’s on LinkedIn that you’re interested in following. You know, not, not just because it’s fun, like they post like, oh, these cool cat memes, or, you know, they post a big takedown on ai. No, they’re actually talking about your industry. They’re talking about a topic that you are interested in, either because it’s directly tied to your business, or maybe that’s a course you want to work on.

Um, and so you start building out this network. Then you start looking at posting. And so posting, there’s a lot of, uh, strategies to take with this. Um, I personally like posting videos. Uh, LinkedIn has been making a big push to get more video onto their platform, and so just by posting videos on there, you’re immediately going to be shown in their algorithm.

Poten, you know, more often than not, um, especially more often than just a text post. Um, but also adding images can help Carousels is another thing that they were trying to push. I don’t keep up with these things as well. Here’s what I know though, Chris. Video is what it’s all about. You know this, I mean, here we are right now, right?

We’re on video talking. TikTok is the biggest social media platform in the world right now. Facebook has changed everything over to reels. YouTube has shorts. Um, and so LinkedIn has their videos and they’re pushing that really hard. And so at first I was doing videos where it was just a selfie type of thing.

Hey, look at me, I’m talking, I’m, you know, doing something. And I quickly realized, or my boss actually quickly realized that. You know, I’m, I’m pretty okay at talking to people. And, and so she was like, you should start interviewing people and putting that onto LinkedIn. And so that’s where I got started.

And um, and that’s something that, you know, I, I think Matt Madero calls me the king of vertical video or something like that. Okay. It’s not my intent, right. It’s just, it’s just when I post stuff onto LinkedIn, LinkedIn wants to show those video posts, and then I’ve. I’ve done a good job, I think, of having great guests on.

Like, it’s always good to have somebody who’s very interesting on and people want to hear from and, and things like that. Um, and then, you know, and then also just like posting pretty regularly a couple of times a week is a, is a pretty good cadence. Um, and then finally, uh, you know, I can talk about LinkedIn a lot, but there is a tool that I do recommend people if they’re really serious about LinkedIn.

It’s called Aware. The domain is use aware.co. And this is a really great tool for working on LinkedIn. It’s kind of like a Hootsuite, but it’s only for LinkedIn. And I think the reason that it’s really important to have this tool as opposed to like a Hootsuite, is that with Hootsuite, your scheduling posts, right, like that’s the primary purpose of that.

And you have that in Aware, like it has the ability to send a post in there. It creates a nice little preview, so you see like where the See more button’s gonna be and you know how it’s gonna show up, but that’s like 10% of what Aware does for you. The bigger part of it is the commenting, and so it helps.

It helps you find your replies. It organizes those into a reply. It has a community tab, so people who are in your network as they’re posting. It makes it really easy to find their posts and leave comments or reshare. And then it also creates, um, you can create custom lists. So if you’ve got like 30 or a hundred people that you’re trying to prospect, you can throw them into aware, and then now you’ll see all of their posts and you can leave comments there.

Um, so it’s a really neat tool. Um, if you’re, if you’re at all serious about using LinkedIn for business, especially for social selling. Aware is a indispensable tool to, to have.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That was a masterclass on LinkedIn. It’s, that’s awesome. I’m checking out use aware.co right now. It’s really cool. We’re coming up on the hour.

Roger, um, tell us about the podcast. It’s, is it Kinta Talks? Is that what it’s called?

Roger Williams: Yeah, no. Great. Great question here as always. Uh, so Kinta Talks is the name of the show. We don’t actually, it’s not actually a podcast at this point. I need to take that extra step and start posting. I need to get a podcast set up and, and send it there.

Chris Badgett: So LinkedIn is where people should check it out, the Kinta talks or,

Roger Williams: so even that’s evolving. So YouTube is really the main place. So on the Kinta YouTube channel, there’s a playlist called Kinta Talks. And I’ve, I’ve been posting there, I’m now it’s like, okay, the full length episodes go onto YouTube. ’cause that’s where people wanna watch anything that’s more than five minutes long.

And then usually I’ll put like a 30 to 32nd to three minute clip on LinkedIn. And so like a teaser a little bit. Then people can click and, and go on over to YouTube. Uh, quick caveat, with LinkedIn, they do not like external links in the posts. Uh, you, you will not show up as well in the feed. So what you want to do is put the links into the comments.

So, you know, it’s a little, little bit of a, a hack around there. But, uh, yeah, be careful with the external links on LinkedIn. But yeah, so the show’s on YouTube and then hopefully I’ll get my act together and actually have a podcast so people can just get it in their, their feed and have coffee and listen to me talk.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Roger. I, I appreciate the conversation. Keep up the amazing work at Kins. Um, go check out kinsa.com. Go find Roger on LinkedIn. It is Roger Williams. I feel like you look, um, your profile and you, you always like look the same. So like, I find you easy to find on social media or even at a conference.

I’m like, there’s Roger. He he is, he is. Uh, you’re consistent man. And you got the orange kenta shirt on. That’s awesome. A, b,

Roger Williams: b always be branding.

Chris Badgett: There you go. Uh, any other final words for the people or any other, uh, place you’d like people to connect with you?

Roger Williams: Yeah, absolutely. Just to clarify on LinkedIn, my, the URL slug is Roger Williams Media.

There’s a lot of Roger Williams is out there. Uh, one guy even decided to found a state. Crazy. Um, but, uh, I’m also, I’ve got a personal blog, Roger Williams media.com. Uh, I’ve just kind of kicked that off again, so come and check it out. I have different musings. I talk about some of my interviews. Um, have, have a look, gimme some feedback.

Let me know what I’m doing well, what I’m not doing so well. And, and, uh, and yeah, if please connect with me. Uh, if you see me in an event, come and say hi. I, I love talking to everybody.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Roger, really appreciate it.

Roger Williams: You’re welcome, Chris. Thank you.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this episode of LMSCast, David Risley from Blog Marketing Academy talks about how his online business has changed over time.

In 1998, he started a tech blog called PCMech, which eventually attracted over 100,000 readers. He switched to internet marketing in 2008 and used his blogging background to instruct people on how to launch and expand online enterprises. He first concentrated on marketing training courses and programs for bloggers, but as the industry grew crowded and saturated, he progressively shifted away from that strategy.

David switched to a service-based business after realizing the difficulties of growing his company only via content and courses. Through the recurring subscription service Concierge, which he founded, his team offers WordPress site owners continuous technical and webmaster help, addressing difficulties with plugins, performance optimization, and upgrades. He was able to create more steady, predictable monthly earnings instead of pursuing particular jobs thanks to this technique.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest, David Risley. He’s from Blog Marketing Academy. Blog marketing academy.com. I’ve seen David on the internet for probably over a decade, and I finally gotta meet him in person at a conference. We’re gonna get into internet marketing, David’s journey, what he does now.

But first, welcome to the show.

David Risley: Thanks for having me. Good to talk to you again.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the birth of Blog Marketing Academy. What year was it and what drove you to do this thing? I.

David Risley: It’s been a while, so it, it starts even before that. I, before Blog Marketing Academy, I had a technology blog talking about computers and like building computers, PCs, back when people still built them.

And, that space changed a lot. It was becoming something where I was getting tired of it. That started by the way, in around 98, I think it was like way the heck back there before WordPress, all that. And so by the time 2008 came around, 10 years later, I was like, I wanna do something else. I was starting to, research the internet marketing space and all that.

And so I started what. It was not Blog Marking Academy then, but it became that started in 2008 and I ran both for a little bit of time. Eventually sold off that tech site. And and then Blog Marking Academy is pretty much what I do now. And what was that? So it’s, I guess it’s been 17 years.

Wow. Time flies.

Chris Badgett: That was a fun, that’s when I got into the whole internet thing too, around 2007, 2008. Yeah. I feel like internet marketing kind of had a golden age of around that 2008 to 12. Yeah, it was like early days and there wasn’t that many influencers and people, you could get into the space and get big pretty quick.

It seemed but what was your experience?

David Risley: It was, I never was one of the big guys, but it’s funny, the, at that time in the heyday of it, you had the celebrities of that space. Frank Kern, Jeff Walker you mentioned Evan Pegan earlier. Those guys, they were like, they became like.

The guy, and those spaces. And I don’t know if that happened so much anymore, just because the space is so much noisier and things have matured quite a bit. But yeah, and I know I went to some other conferences and all that and bought the courses and the whole thing.

Nice back when you could still sell a course. I don’t know how well it is now. I’m a little outside the space now, but I remember the what, 1997. That was like the, I always sold the courses. I always ended with a seven, which I thought was funny.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s really fun looking back at that time period.

And people still do sell courses for that amount, but it’s gotta come, I’m sure they do coaching and a lot more support. It’s not just the videos. That’s the

David Risley: thing. Back then, you could primarily rely on content, not so much. Now,

Chris Badgett: what does Blog Marketing Academy do today? What do you guys offer?

David Risley: The reason it’s called Blog Marketing Academy is because it started off doing online courses and and some of which are not even there anymore.

But I, it was, but it was more toward the new media, like the blogger type, traditional blogger type, but trying to teach them some online marketing skills and it was trying to bridge that gap a little bit. So that’s how black marketing got start. Black Marketing Academy got started.

I’ve never changed the name of it. I still have those courses. It’s just that they’re under a membership now that is really super cheap because that’s not really the how I make money now. Now even though I have a service aspect to the business, which is the majority of it, I just haven’t changed the name just ’cause I didn’t want to go through all the work to do it.

And it’s got some traction obviously.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the transition from content and courses to services. It seems like some people are trying to go the other way. Yeah. And you’re going this way. So what, how does, how’d that play out and what, tell us the story.

David Risley: Yeah. Some people do go the other way, but it’s, it’s one of those things to where there’s always been this thing about the time for money idea, and people will try to avoid it, and and but so they try to avoid service work. They don’t wanna work with clients. And then there’s this almost attitude out there with some of the grooves and ah, you don’t want to get into that kind of stuff.

And so for a long time, that was the mindset that I have. I didn’t want to get into that kind of stuff. I didn’t wanna work with clients as the online course space, especially in my niche specifically, was just getting more and more noisy. I was like the friction is there. I could either sit there and fight it.

Or I could listen to what my students were telling me for years, and I was avoiding because they would go through some videos that I did and go that’s really cool. Now how do I execute? How do I build it? I didn’t really get into the techie part of it so much at the time. But eventually I just started listening to them.

I’m good at, I come from a background where I know how to do that stuff really good. And they, and then even just looking internally with me, I realized I really liked working on my own website. I enjoy getting in there and working on it. I’m like, I need to listen to this. And so it’s, it turned into a pivot.

It was. Maybe four years ago, and it was much more official about three years ago where I was like, I’m just, I’m going into client services and downplayed the courses and haven’t looked back and I leaned into recurring revenue really early on. And so it’s been a good thing.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the recurring revenue aspect. ’cause a lot of service work, you think of one-off projects and things like that.

David Risley: Yeah. So I didn’t first for one, I didn’t want to get into the whole, Hey, contact me for an estimate. And it, I, it’s just a pain in the butt. Most people end up really overestimating how long things are gonna take.

So what I did, I, and I also didn’t want to always be project chasing. It’s just why would I leave what I was doing in order to get into chasing project work? And I had a recurring membership program before, but it was just more content driven. So obviously I knew the beauties of recurring revenue, I knew how it re removes a lot of the stress out of things.

And so with the service work, I opened up what I call concierge now, which is basically, you could call it a maintenance thing, but it’s actually a lot more than that. It’s basically. I’m gonna hand, I’ll be the, their webmaster for all things that come up. And it starts off with a recurring program right off the bat.

And and then just over time, that grows to the point where, yeah, I’m ba at a point where I don’t worry about where the money’s gonna come from every month and the project works still happens. It’s just instead of doing the estimate type stuff, I have a credit system on the side. It’s a unique way of doing it.

And but almost everybody who’s doing that. Is also on retainer through the concierge. So it works out pretty well.

Chris Badgett: Think back to the internet marketing. I can tell you are a good copywriter. Like the headline on your homepage is be on a first name basis with your web guy, which is like a really good headline that speaks to what people want.

They want, like somebody who has their back, who ha has a face and a name that they can talk to and stuff like that. Tell. Tell us how your experience with copywriting and maybe some pro tips, and I think a lot of good internet marketers, like it just becomes second nature and you forget about it and you just do it well.

But what’s been your journey with

David Risley: copywriting? To be clear, other than some of those online marketing courses I went through in the past, it isn’t as if I’ve done professional copy. I would not consider myself a copywriter. I will say that I do have a lot of experience in writing, ’cause I’ve been doing it for so long.

And so with time and practice you get decent at it. But the other thing too is. N knowing, developing a skill of being able to get inside their head of the, of your target market and knowing what they really want. And one of the things I’ve always found important in any business is the importance of survey now but not survey, which is I’ll fill out this form is really impersonal.

’cause the survey can come in a lot of different forms. And that includes talking to people in person, which is one of the things that so many people try to avoid is they’re like, eh, it’s awkward to talk to somebody. But I, even now, I do what’s called roadmap calls where people can book a short call with me and they don’t pay anything, and I.

A lot of it’s, a lot of it is to look, see if we’re a fit and see if they wanna work with me. But sometimes I’ll do those calls and they don’t convert and I don’t view that as a waste of time because I’m still learning what they’re looking for. And so the more you do that, the more writing you do in general, you get to where you can write and you’re envisioning that person you’re talking to as you’re doing it and you’re just trying to, to.

Know, make your message meet where they’re thinking already. That’s that’s the 1 0 1 level thing with copy. I don’t have any, courses on that topic or anything.

Chris Badgett: Some markets like it becomes an echo chamber so internet marketing with internet marketers or tech with tech people.

But some of the most successful agencies, their target audience is very different from them. Who’s. Yeah. If you were to like, tell us about the avatar or the type of people that are a perfect fit for Blog Marketing Academy Services, who’s, who is this client? ’cause you obviously have a feel for what this person is.

David Risley: Yeah, my clients come from all kinds of different niches, but the base, but at the core, they are solopreneurs. And some of ’em are in the very early stages, so I don’t even know if they would call themselves a solopreneur yet. They’re trying to become one, and so I’ve got that too. But most of ’em are, they’re working for themselves.

They might have one or two other people working for them. They’re basically in that idea. They’re using WordPress to run the business. And so that’s mainly who I’m speaking to. And I also know that a lot of them are, they’re tackling WordPress and they deal with the frustrations we all deal with.

They’re not they have some light level tech skill, but enough to get themselves in trouble, and I also know with me, because of the content with YouTube and all that and the content that I’ve been putting out there a long time I have built up a level of trust. With a lot of these people.

So that was part of the genesis for that headline to be on a first name basis with your web guy. And but yeah, that’s who they are mainly. They’re small time solopreneurs businesses of different scales, but they don’t have large teams, frankly. You have to know who you work with the best.

And if some big company was coming at me, I probably would straight tell ’em, I don’t think I’m the right fit. I don’t think I would want to do it. So how do you get these clients? Most of them are coming to me. I really don’t do any overt promotion outside of content. It’s the site. I would say in terms of lead sources right now, YouTube is probably the top one of people finding me on YouTube, but a lot of people were on my list.

For quite some time to begin with. I do have a weekly newsletter that I send out, so even people who are not doing business with me now I’m I stay top of mind and when they’re ready, they sign up or they book a call.

Chris Badgett: I’m a big fan of YouTube for content marketing. What’s your approach to making videos or deciding what kind of content to make?

On YouTube specifically,

David Risley: some of it’s just gut feeling. Some of it’s frankly, what I’m in the mood to make. If anything, I need to become more regular about it. Ideally I’d be putting out something every week but sometimes that’s the balance. When you’re doing client work, sometimes you get so busy with stuff you forget to do it.

But it it’s really. I guess it’s the same mentality that would come up when I’m writing my copy. I think about my target market and what they’re looking for. I know people on YouTube are looking for how to do stuff, how to fix problems. They the typical listicle style stuff does work on YouTube.

You also look for reviews. I’ve talked, I’ve had a video about. Buddy boss hosting, how what’s, because that can be a little bit of a demanding platform, and so I get people on that or talking about Buddy Boss talking about the fluent line of products. People are looking for that stuff.

So I just go and I make it. And I and also my videos are pretty informal. How I’m talking to you right now is how I record a YouTube video. I don’t script them out. I don’t do double takes on anything. I just let it rip.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And going back to your services. Sometimes it’s, when you’re helping a solopreneur, like you have to set up a scope of work, like there’s the website, but then maybe there’s an email list tool and hosting and other things.

Like what’s in your scope of service that you do for these business owners?

David Risley: For the most part, I will go where they need to go. That being said, I do have my limits for one thing. With my service work, I tend to stick with the same tools. Most of the time. I can work with other ones, but if I have any say in the matter, I’ll try to get them into the same ones because I’m so quick with them.

When it comes to email, I’m a big proponent of fluent CRM myself. I love using that product, and I, on my site, some people they know me because I talk about what I call digital sovereignty. I like the idea of having things in house and not relying on an army of third party services all over the place.

And so a lot of, some people, they do join with me because. That’s my philosophy and I’ll work, I’ve got some clients using Active Campaign and stuff like that, but most of my clients are using fluent CRM and we put it all inhouse and I just provide, I, my idea with concierge is to provide the platform so they don’t have to worry about all that stuff.

For example, fluent crm. But you need to tap into a, an email service for that.

I have one. It’s that type of thing. And then they don’t have to think about it. That’s how I’m approaching it. If they get too far out of my wheelhouse or if they’re, they want something completely and totally custom coded, I’ll probably be like, yeah, that’s not me.

Chris Badgett: Your let’s talk first is like a primary call to action on your homepage. Some people, a lot, some agencies like it’s gotta go through a contact form and there’s all this stuff. You go straight to book a 30 minute call. What’s your structure for those calls for talking to clients and figuring out if it’s a fit?

And what do you guys talk about on a 30 minute call?

David Risley: So there, so there’s not a lot of stress. It’s not like I go in there with a, an outline or anything. It’s definitely not. A salesy thing at all. It’s really we’re just having a conversation. I, when they go, excuse me, when they book, I do have some questions on the form that makes it clear that it is a thing where we’re exploring working together.

So there is that intention when they book, I forgot the questions that I have there, but it’s, these are not people, they’re just gonna come ask me random questions to get a free consultation. They know why they’re there. Once they’re there we’re just having a free flowing conversation. I, it’s not like I’m running the show.

I, I, they we both know why they’re there to begin with. I have the summary of what they’ve typed and then we just go to it. Sometimes they don’t even take 30 minutes. Sometimes they go a little longer than that. I don’t worry about it that much.

Chris Badgett: Is, are a lot of people starting with an existing site or they’re starting fresh, or what do you prefer?

David Risley: Most are have an existing one and when when they’re talking to me about concierge, most of them have an existing one and they’re probably just tired of dealing with it with. With it. That’s pretty much what it comes down to. But I do have some who come in and they’re, they have a new concept and we’re starting from scratch.

And usually with concierge, I’ll make it clear to them right off the bat, Hey, look, you’re getting into concierge, but it’s early and there’s no traffic. So there’s a little overkill there at the beginning, but they think it’s going to. Put light of fire under their butt, so to speak. I was like, I’m, paying every month.

I really want to utilize it. And so we go at it. Plus they get a discount on the credits with me if they’re in concierge. So some people do it for that. But most of them, they came in with an existing site like buddy boss element, mentor setups, things that have a little bit more complexity and they’re just tired of squashing little tech gremlins and that type of thing.

Chris Badgett: How do you manage the relationship? Like particularly with a recurring plan? Are they, like you said, they wanna get the most out of it. Are you also following up with clients every month or making suggestions or how do you get, how do you keep the recurring situation healthy?

David Risley: It really hasn’t been any issue at all. I, we have a communication area in Basecamp. We use Basecamp for project management super user friendly. And it, and then of course there’s the core services that they’re getting, whether they’re. I have a lot of requests or not. There’s the hosting, I use postmark for email delivery.

There’s, the malware stuff, all the standard stuff. And then there’s all the plugins. I have agency licensing to the plugins that I put on their site. So there, that is one of the things too, is that they don’t have to go and buy all those things. I’ve already done it. And so all those things are part of the core services.

I have a few clients that don’t contact me that much, honestly. Others are more active, and that’s fine. You just balance it out over time.

Chris Badgett: And the ones that are more active, they’re also in addition to the monthly, they’re buying credits. Is that right?

For actual project work on top of the monthly?

David Risley: They

Chris Badgett: are,

David Risley: yeah. If for, if I’m just answering messages for them I don’t bill for that. It’s part of concierge, but if we’re getting there and we’re, getting more. If I’m having to go on there and do something on their site more regularly, that’s where we do use the credits.

The concierge, I have a higher level of concierge called platinum, which does include time. And then we don’t have to use the credits unless we really start using a lot of time. But for the core people, we’re using credits a lot more frequently.

Chris Badgett: How do you stay organized with all this? It’s been a growth

David Risley: curve

Chris Badgett: for

David Risley: sure.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned Basecamp for getting the projects in Basecamp, which helps.

David Risley: That helps a lot. It keeps it out of my email. I. Which is important. When I first started, everybody was emailing me and it I dealt with it for a while. I thought about having a traditional support desk on my thing, but it felt a little impersonal.

And so I didn’t go that route. And so Basecamp, for me has worked really well. I used it a long time ago, and then I, so I came back and revisited it. It’s just super user friendly. It doesn’t have a really overwhelming interface. They if they don’t want to go into base that often and they just reply to an email, they can still do it.

It’ll still show up base. So it’s just really easy to use. As far as managing clients, I’ve done a lot of stuff inside of WordPress admin to be able to manage them from in there. I’ve customized my dashboard quite a bit so I can see my client list and pop into different parts of their profile really quick.

So there’s a lot of time saving. And I have for passwords and all that, I don’t keep that in WordPress. That wouldn’t be a good idea. I’ve got a one password for all that type of stuff, but, over. I don’t know, I guess I’ve adapted to that system and when I find that there’s little hitches and I’m wasting time on, on stupid little things, I’ll try to think up some solution to iron out the constraint.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

What about work-life balance? What’s your approach there? ’cause we all struggle with it, when you’ve been in the industry for a long time, you figure something out that works for you. What works for you?

David Risley: So far it hasn’t been a problem. Mean, so for one, I like what I do, so it’s not like I’m feeling like I have to escape from it.

But but people know I, I go out and in an RV sometimes I’ve got a family, I work through stuff on the house, so I. A, a lot of it comes down to setting proper expectations when people come in. I I think because a lot of people who work with me have been on my list for a while or what have you they already know little things because I’ll mention at the top of my newsletter, I always mention just little things that are not related to business, so people know about the RV and all those types of things.

I have never had anybody, if I go on a little trip, I’ve never had anybody. Freak out about it, and they’re like, have fun. They, they literally try not to be as needy while I’m gone, which is really cool. And and if something happens I’m still monitoring things. It’s just that it’s more if a site goes down, I, no matter where I am, I will try to get it fixed.

It’s just. I work with rocket hosting sites, just don’t go down. I, and so it’s it, you’re paying for security with those types of things. But so far I just enforce the balance that I want. And clients don’t raise a ruckus about it. And frankly, if they did, if I had somebody who was getting, who, weird about it, I would look at that as we weren’t the right fit anymore.

I’d probably cut them loose. Do you run all this solo right now? I do. I I had I had a developer it was through an agency, so it wasn’t like he was working for me. It was like a separate thing, but it was interesting. I found that I. Wasn’t using him as much as I thought I would. And so that’s probably my fault, honestly.

Outsourcing has always been a thing that I can’t say that I’m great at it. It’s I don’t, it’s probably something I need to get better at. I do realize that with the level of what the work that I have, it’s coming whether I like it or not. There are things that. I have a lot of systems in place that allow me to get a lot done, but if I have so many ongoing projects at the same time, people end up waiting.

And I’m aware of that, so I’ll have to deal with it. But so far it’s just me.

Chris Badgett: Let’s imagine you got a client who doesn’t have a website yet, and I know this changes with time and there’s multiple options, but what are some of your favorite tools that you like to work with? You mentioned fluent CRM.

What else is like a go-to for you?

David Risley: I use fluent most of the, I don’t use all their tools, but fluent CRMs. My favorite fluent forms is where I go to for forms for community stuff. I’ve been definitely looking into fluent community. I it’s true they’re developing that one’s fast. So it’s doing pretty well and I’m.

Even though I know Buddy Boss is such a powerful platform, it just comes with so much overhead. I don’t like working with Buddy Boss that much anymore. Yeah, as far as building it out I’m a big fan of the Cadence theme and cadence blocks myself. So that tends to be my go-to. I do have some people who are using Elementor and those types of things, and or Astra and Spectra.

If they really like their platform, I’m not gonna try to drag ’em over. But if I’m involved, I’ll usually go with Cadence. What are, I don’t know. I’ve got a bunch of, different ones that I use. I’m looking at my own list here, but those are probably the ones I use most often. Press player for videos, I got some performance stuff. I use WooCommerce, WP Fusion, Jax plugin. Use that one quite a bit.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned what was it? It’ll come back to me, but what was it?

You, you said rocket, you meant rocket.net, is that right? rocket.net. Yeah. And I remember what I was gonna ask. You mentioned you, you like to get lifetime licenses, I think, or unlimited, so there’s always this question with the agent when they’re available. When they’re available, yeah. There’s always this question with the agency of do I get the license or does my client get it, or whatever. What’s, it seems like you’ve figured it out. Like how do you think about that?

David Risley: So I think about it in terms for one, it’s one of the value adds of concierge is that they don’t have to go and buy all these plug Yeah. They don’t have to go shopping.

And the shopping is not just a matter of expense, it’s also all the time of evaluating, trying to figure out which ones worked, so I’m trying to save them all that hassle. So I acquired the support licenses. If an unlimited is available, that’s usually a good idea. There’s a few that I’ve got on Lifetime that’s even great, but but some of ’em are not, and I just pay for them and, my thinking too is that if I’m gonna call myself concierge, it’s one of those things to where sometimes I have to contact the support people. Like I’ve done it with cart flow several times. I’ve had to do it with Presto. Sometimes I can’t figure something out. I’ll just go to the support people.

That’s what I’m paying for, worth the license. And so it’s really, I, the way I look at it, I wouldn’t really be able to provide the. Full level of service needed for concierge. If I couldn’t deal with the support people, if I I was hanging out with Jack at the conference, but for WP Fusion, but if I didn’t have those relationships with these people, I how I’m a little bit stuck on how far I can go with the support.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And that’s a huge value add to just to have all those relationships and be able to, basically get the best support on behalf of the client. That’s awesome. Yeah. You mentioned you worked with a lot of different clients but is there like a main kind, are they kind of content people or are they main street businesses or like what’s the.

80 20 of who is the majority of the clients? Are they doing digital, most digital

David Risley: products, retail? What? What is it? Mostly digital, mostly in the content business. Most of them have membership sites. That’s probably majority of my clients are running a membership site and, if it was just a standard blog, they probably wouldn’t even need concierge.

But, mo, most of what I do with concierge is for WordPress sites that actually do work. They’re selling things, they’re, they got plumbing involved and so that’s the average. I do have a few that sell physical product. And let’s see, I’m trying, do I have any, I. Yeah, actually I do have a few locals I’ve got a chiropractor over in the uk.

I’m managing three sites for him, and so his sites are actually pretty, no, he is got one that actually is a content driven membership site. Then he is got two first his practices, so there’s all over the board, but definitely the large majority of them are selling like membership content.

Chris Badgett: What’s the.

I’ve been obsessed with membership sites. As long as you have yeah, whatever, 17 years or whatever, and it’s changed. It’s evolved. There’s never been more options like now, and like you mentioned, it’s also much more crowded than it used to be. But. What’s working in membership sites with your clients now?

There’s courses, there’s community, there’s premium content or digital files, like what is, what does SU successful membership sites have going on these days?

David Risley: Most of mine are selling courses. I do have a few that have communities. Buddy Boss, I think there’s one. She’s launch getting ready to launch up on fluent community.

But most are selling courses. But the interesting thing is they’re not in the most crowded niches in the world. Most of ’em. I’ve got one who she literally does handcrafted toys and the membership site is about how to. Craft these toys. I, it’s not something I would know anything about, but that’s there I got somebody who’s selling training on how to play the saxophone, I guess so it’s markets where there might be noise.

Honestly, I don’t know that much about the markets, but it’s probably nothing like internet marketing or anything like that either. These are niches where. They tend to be pretty niche, actually. I’ve got one who’s in the doula space, working with family members who are, or somebody’s, on their deathbed.

I have those types of people who are running membership sites. I don’t think I’ve got anybody trying to think off the top of my, I don’t think I’ve got anybody in the really big niches. Weight loss or internet marketing, they tend to be in these smaller ones and they’re still doing pretty well, actually.

They are definitely making money. When I log into the site, I can see their income figures and it’s working. So

Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s awesome and inspiring and honestly, that’s what excites me. Like I love finding these niches and I see a lifter lms, just like you mentioned, arts and crafts.

I can think of 20 different like art and craft things that I never even knew about. That there’s whole, this person has a whole following on. Yeah. Ear. Earlier you mentioned like the. 200 or 100 9990 $7 course or whatever. Sorry. A membership site. You said courses like the the art and craft hobby toys or whatever.

Are these membership sites doing like mini courses, like lots of little courses or what?

David Risley: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: How do they get, how do they get the recurring revenue to keep happening in the membership? Or is it not always recurring revenue?

David Risley: Most of ’em have recurring or if, or they were. Or they’re gearing up to do recurring.

There are some who were selling things one by one, but they’re like I want to have a cash all membership for recurring, which is a pretty common model. You can get a, it’s like the Netflix model, recurring or you could buy the one on one and it just costs more. So a lot of them do that type of a thing.

Most of them have several smaller courses, not so much one, massive one. And, personally I think that model works better mainly because of the amount of noise we’re all dealing with online. I don’t know if people have the attention span to go through some big multi-module washing hours of video anymore.

The people want the TLDR all the time and so I think shorter actually is a superpower these days. If you can get them from point A to point B and do it in the least amount of time, that’s ultimately what people want. Of the.

They’re just one pagers. It’s just, it’s literally we just set up a custom post type. It’s just, we just set up a one pager because they don’t even need all the structure. And and that was actually something with my site that I started doing a few years back, was getting rid of some, or restructuring them so that I could go more towards short form stuff just because.

People, even in the past people would buy these big courses and the rate of completion was pathetic. ’cause it’s like people just, they buy the promise and then they’re like, I’m tired of this. It’s too much work. You, so you try as a creator to create stuff that’s A, it’s easier for you to make, but B, it’s easier for them to consume.

And that’s the point.

Chris Badgett: As a web guy on a first name basis, and if, first somebody who’s been in the industry for a long time, I imagine you don’t just get tech questions. People will ask you for business advice around, yeah. Things like pricing or marketing strategies and tactics and things.

What are you seeing with your folks? What are they coming to you for business advice?

David Risley: Sometimes it’s just for a, somebody to bounce ideas off of. But yeah, sometimes we do talk about pricing. That, that type of one is always interesting to discuss. ’cause every, as I just was going over, I got people in so many different markets and I don’t know anything about those markets.

So how am I supposed to tell them pricing information? But we just we talk it out. And what I find for a lot of people is just talking with somebody else. Helps. It’s not oh, it’s like going to the, it’s definitely not that. It’s just more because I have been in the in business for a long time.

I’ve seen so many other types of businesses that I’ve had my hands on them. When people talk to me, I don’t think they’re looking for me to talk top down and give them the answers. I think they realize it’s a two-way conversation and things can come out of that. And I will give them my experience on certain things if I have any.

If I don’t, I’ll tell them that too. Like these people who are running, my clients who are running physical products, where they’re shipping things, frankly, I’ve never done that. I sold a few physical products back in my tech days, but I used an outsourcer thing and it just wasn’t the majority of what I did.

And I could give you what makes sense, but that’s all it would be. And I’m always p upfront with people about what my experience would be if I don’t have it.

Chris Badgett: If your client asks you to help them get more clients, what do you tell ’em?

David Risley: That type of thing. I don’t get into, I’m very, I know where my superpower is and that is the working I say working with the tech stuff, but working with the tech stuff, with a business background.

I’m the, I’m one of those kind of guys who can marry the two things together and create a site that’s actually gonna serve your purposes. But that’s where, what I like to do. I don’t wanna do people’s marketing. I don’t wanna run their social media. I don’t want to do SEO. I know enough where I probably could help them with that stuff.

I just don’t want to do it. And I, so when people ask, I’ll just tell them I, I don’t do that. I probably need to come up with a list of people that I can refer them to. I haven’t done that yet, but yeah. I just don’t wanna do it.

Chris Badgett: What are you seeing with the membership sites in terms of. Outside of content supporting their members, like with coaching or group coaching calls or email support or community, like what are people doing from the support side for a membership site to support their members in addition to content these days?

David Risley: Yeah, community is definitely one. But. I’m also a fan. As you can see, I basically 100% pivoted into it, but I am a fan of the idea of offering services on top of a membership anyway, because, if you’re looking at it at terms of a funnel, you want to have some higher ticket stuff. And I, selling, from what I’m seeing I’m sure that there’s definitely niches where you could sell high ticket content, but for the majority of my clients.

It’s not high ticket, the content part of it. And so to, to develop the funnel out, you need higher ticket stuff. That’s where the services, the done for you, those types of things. And you can build them into your membership to where they, maybe some things are included, but then there’s upsells and and I think that.

Will increase revenue quite a bit for a majority of memberships because most, even the client in the toy making space, I don’t know off the top of my head if she’s offering a service, but she could almost anything. There’s room for that type of stuff. You just gotta get creative with it, even if it’s just a simple phone call.

Chris Badgett: Do you see like any common pricing, and I know it’s a range and it depends, but $30 a month, a hundred dollars a month, $500 a month, what range are people doing these recurring membership sites? What are they charging their clients?

David Risley: I’m trying to remember, I’m looking at my list of client sites right now, trying to remember what they charge.

I, but it’s all over the board. I will say it. Overall I’m thinking that recurring prices tend to be lower now than they were a few years back, but that’s just a broad level overview. I don’t have any numbers to back it up. And It’s just what I seem to be seeing. We’re not talking like. Single digit numbers.

We’re talking about, still respectable numbers, but the idea of charging several hundred dollars a month, you gotta be in the right business for that type of thing. It’s almost always under a hundred, usually, down to, 10, 20, 30 range. But again, it just, it depends so much on market.

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for nerding out with me, David, on membership sites. It’s it’s always fun to run into somebody who’s been into membership sites, into marketing, into WordPress and serving clients and helping.

David Risley: I love membership sites. I’ve been a fan of it for even back in my tech niche days.

I was, I probably had one of the first membership sites in that space. It was a little harder space to do because it was so focused on reviews and all that kind of stuff, but. I went for it and I just, I’m a fan of the model. I’m a fan of recurring. It makes for a much more predictable business,

Makes

Chris Badgett: life easier.

And there’s so many great tools out there now to, oh, it’s so easy. That I get what you mean by I have fun building sites. Like it is fun. Yeah. And the tools just get better and better. It’s pretty cool.

David Risley: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, David. Blog marketing academy.com. What’s the best way for people to get into your world?

Your YouTube channel book a call. What, where would you highlight people to go

David Risley: check you out more? My home base is blog market academy.com. You could book a call if you’d like. That’s more if you want to possibly engage me for I. Some work on the site or look at concierge services.

The best way to, if you wanna just keep in touch, is to get onto my newsletter which is the WP Edge it sends out every Monday, and it’s basically the type of stuff we were just talking about. That’s the kind of stuff that’s in my newsletter. It is a, it’s, it is discussing WordPress of course, but with a business slant to it.

It’s not, we’re not talking about blogging with pet pictures. These are sites that do things and and that’s what I talk about. That’s probably your best bet. And then if the time is right for somebody, they wanted to come in on the other stuff, they always know where to find me.

Chris Badgett: Awesome David, thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it and keep up the great work. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowRemkus de Vries, a WordPress performance specialist and strongman athlete, combines technical know-how with a holistic outlook on life and health in this episode of LMScast.

He talks about his curatorial WordPress weekly, Within WP, and his work on performance tools like as Scanfully. Remkus highlights the need to be genuine online in order to encourage feedback and personal development, in addition to fostering connection in a remote work environment that is frequently isolated.

He emphasizes the psychological and physical advantages of strength training and points out that long-lasting habits are formed by constant discipline rather than incentive. He suggests that those who are new to fitness endure whatever discomfort they may experience at first and concentrate on long-term outcomes rather than immediate gratification.

At almost 52, he is still dedicated to strength and health as a means of securing longevity and quality of life, serving as a potent reminder that making an investment in one’s own well-being also entails making an investment in the well-being of people we care about.

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2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend I’ve known around the internet for a long time. I don’t know how long, maybe eight years, something like that. I remember I first shook Rimkus Dev RISE’s hand in, st. Louis, that’s when I first met you in person, I think.

Remkus Devries: Yeah. I could be wrong,

Chris Badgett: Yeah. But Rimkus is a WordPress performance expert. He is working on some training, a course about that. He also has a tool to help with that called Scan Fully. So go check out scan fully.com. Also, MKU has one of the few news letters that I moved to my primary inbox.

It’s called Within WordPress within wp.com. If you want to keep tabs on what’s going on in WordPress, it’s a great newsletter. We’re gonna get into all that. But first, welcome to show mku. And I pronounce it wrong, it’s D freeze, so it’s you could feel free to correct me if I mess up again, but welcome to the show.

Remkus Devries: Thank you, man. Happy to be here. Yeah. I think the first time is probably more than a decade ago.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Remkus Devries: For 2025. And in 2015 I was aware of you already. I know that for a fact.

Chris Badgett: One of the things about that I remember at that word camp, I took my brother with me and it was the first time that I noticed, like when I first started going to some events.

I didn’t really know a lot of people, and then all of a sudden I started realizing that creating content, social media, getting out there there’s people watching and listening, and you it’s just a pro tip to get out from behind the computer, get out in the world, share yourself publicly.

But maybe let’s start there. You share your personal life. For example, rems, and correct me if I’m using the wrong term here. I know it’s not bodybuilding. He’s a strong man. Yep. So one of the things I like about REMS is, you can check out social media, you’ll find stuff about performance and WordPress, but you’ll also see him lifting and throwing and carrying heavy things.

So you put your whole self out there. Tell us about your approach to like just being you on the internet.

Remkus Devries: So I try not to overshare. Let’s start there. But I don’t know, it’s I think there’s I think there’s value for me as well as for whoever tunes, tunes into me. Understanding what the sort of mindset is behind a few of my choices, the things that I do.

Strongman lifting is one of them. But also performance, right? So there’s, for me, it’s not necessarily that I am like thinking about what am I going to share and what’s my story going to be and how am my angles and all that sort of stuff. But I also have realized that if you share, people will listen and people will re will respond and.

Since we are sitting in our offices online Sure. But, very isolated. It’s just my home office now again, my, my, my wife is sitting in front of me for most of the time. Not that alone, but you don’t have any colleagues around you, right? If you want to have some sort of connection and.

I appreciate connections. Then you have to show that you are there, that you’re available, that you have ideas and thoughts, and the more you share, the more feedback you get. And ultimately that leads to growth. And I like growth. I think I. Personal growth, whether that’s done on the professional side of things or the strength side of things, or the mental side of things, all of these things.

I put an effort in. I think they’re important and thus being online for me is a, is essentially a method, a way to do that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. And since we’re talking about the strength stuff I’m similar in a way that, I do a lot of hiking and running and getting out in nature and it keeps me sane.

And when I see somebody else like you who’s like outside throwing really heavy things over these high bars, I know it helps keep you sane. But tell us about mental health and just the value of exercise and getting outdoors and how you balance life.

Remkus Devries: The, there, there’s a saying where where the outcome is the more healthy you are in your body, the more healthy you are in your mind.

I think it’s, I think in Latin we say men in corporate Asana, something like that. But the, it’s a symbiotic thing. So the more you are in fact living in your body, less in your mind, the more benefit you’ll see in your mind and vice versa. So it doesn’t matter where you start really. ’cause if you start educating yourself on exercise, you’ll realize that is the one thing to do for longevity, for a better life, for quality, for better sleep, for all of these things.

I discovered this decades ago ’cause I can say that I’m past 50. One of the things I realized that I like going beyond limits that I see or feel and lifting heavy weights. Or carrying heavy weights or doing anything heavy for me is one of those things that absolutely forces me out of my mind.

’cause I can’t be thinking about how many plate. If you want me to see me at my dumbest, like my absolute dumbest, come join me in my strongman gym. I can’t even count what plates I should put on. That’s. It’s just too heavy. So I’ll be slow in 1, 2, 3, 4 times 25 kilos is what now? That’s 200. The bar is 200, so that’s two 20.

Okay, so then I need two more. Like I can’t do that fast. Like I need to do one or the other. The more I started doing that, the better I started feeling. So I was like, this is pretty straightforward, so why don’t I invest in this? And as it so happens, I am genetically predisposed to be stupid strong.

They turned out to be very heavy at the, in the end.

Chris Badgett: What how many days do you. Workout or get exercise. For me, it’s every day. I’m, it’s all varied. Some days of strength running fast, slow hills flat, but for me, I to do it every

Remkus Devries: day, yeah, I’ll walk every day. But working out, I have a minimum of three days a week.

But ideally I’m four, maybe five if it depends on the whole bunch of things. I have a home gym, so I have always room to do something. There’s a gym at two kilometers, which is what, a mile and a half away. So I also, I always have a way to do something and I’m of the opinion that even if I am cramped for time 20 minutes spent is 20 minutes well spent.

So I’ll prioritize that. I’ll focus on that. And, the. The easy part that comes with it is the more you keep doing it, the less it’s about discipline. It’s just habit. ‘Cause for, let me be very forward and straight on with this. It’s not about motivation, it is about discipline.

But if you do discipline often enough, it becomes just a habit. And I think that’s the power of, forcing yourself in your body, finding boundaries and going beyond them. Finding ways, and obviously I’m, I’m also hitting limits. There are certain things I can’t weigh.

I can’t lift heavier than what I currently can, and I probably never will. That’s also fine. I chose not to use any form of enhancements. So I am at my natural limits for some of the stuff that I do, but that’s fine. I can play around with the thing, how I do it or how often I do it, but doing it means I feel better.

Period.

Chris Badgett: I know for while we’re on this topic, for some people maybe they’ve just haven’t moved in a long time. They’re pretty sedentary and they get the bug, and I know once you get into it, it becomes part of your life. That’s the way I feel about it. But that period between making a change and installing that discipline and habit, what advice do you have to help people get over the initial resistance?

Remkus Devries: So accept that you’re going to be in discomfort for about three to four months. That’s a given. That’s a fact. So your body just needs to understand pain, understands recovery, all of those things. And that’s annoying, but it’s how it works. So if you can mentally on motivation or just sheer will power yourself through the first four months, let’s call it that then the benefits start becoming quite real.

And the rest is making sure you form a habit. Logging, getting a buddy there’s different ways of using something that helps you keep momentum. So I would primarily focus on finding that thing, that will motivate you. Some people will say, lifting weights or fitness or whatever version you pick it’s boring.

It’s just doing the same thing over and over again. What I don’t enjoy that. I don’t think it’s about the enjoyment of the exercise. I don’t think it’s about the reps. You do, I don’t think it’s about any of this stuff. What it, for me, what it’s about is the result. So what does it give me? I’m close to 52 and I can sprint and run and do all the things of guys half my age.

Now that’s worth something to me. I saw a very interesting I don’t know if it was an ad or just a, an interesting TikTok, but the gist of it was you say you die for your family, you do anything for your family, right? And then it showed some some family picks and then it said, but would you actually start investing time in feeling healthy and better because that is helping your family?

Would you put in, put the time in for that? And I was like, that. That’s pretty much that sums it up. I’d like to have the highest quality of life, not just now, but for the next 50 years. So what’s the best way to do that? And what modern science tells us what the data sells. That tells us.

That essentially means you need to be the strongest version you can be. And running is great, walking is great, but strength is where longevity lives. So I focus on strength.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Speaking of consistency and discipline what got you obsessed with WordPress and specifically performance and speeding up sites?

Remkus Devries: So the, what got me into WordPress is basically I wanted to share some stuff that I was learning at the time and I needed a platform and I rolled into it quickly, was asked for friends and family. Can you build that for me? And that turned into a career. But the thing that pulled me into performance I think the, I come from an enterprise background.

Like I, I used to work at a large insurance company here in the Netherlands. And that gives you a different mindset. And with that mindset, I looked at WebPress and as well as the projects that I was doing, and I quickly, I. Rolled into sort of the more complicated types of sites. So when custom post types and custom taxonomies came around, that was heaven for me.

’cause now I can build anything on WordPress. And the first couple of sites that I’ve built had, some of them had 12, 13 custom post types and about double of that in custom taxonomies and everything needed to work together. And I quickly learned that a lot of optimizations we’ve seen in the last two, three years were not available then.

So you needed to work in an optimized version. So the more data, the more complexity, the more. Limits your hitting. So I was forced into looking what are ways that I can do this smarter, faster from the ground up and not after the fact, because building something and having it work great, but as soon as five, six people are on the site and it crashes, you go that’s not really motivating.

So I started Interesting. The, if. Being interested in the concept of if you wanna solve a problem, you need to start at the root. And that brings you to interesting discoveries, not just in WordPress or performance, but in life, I’d say. But for WordPress, that meant I needed to figure out how to build smarter.

And yeah, once you jump in that road, there’s no way out of it anymore. There’s just a smarter way to build.

Chris Badgett: So what does Scan fully and where did that come from and what does it do?

Remkus Devries: So Scan Fully is a WordPress site, health monitoring and performance monitoring tool. So our goal, and I’m doing this together with Barry Coy, who’s also from the Netherlands.

And the problem we want solve is. We want to be the tool that essentially monitors anything and everything that has to do with the performance and the health of your site. And so that’s things like op time and certificate monitors. Sure. There’s we pull in site health, that is present in your WebPress site.

We pull that into our dashboard so it’s easier to access, certainly if you have a bunch of sites in there. It’s just easier to navigate in our dashboard than it is to hop from, 30 different WebPress sites let alone hundreds. And, the thing we’ll be adding this year that’s going to make the biggest impact is we’re going to be monitoring for content health as well.

And that’s a very wide concept. So that basically means your broken links, your broken embeds images CSS files, JavaScripts, all the logical stuff. But we also include form validation e-commerce optimization and checking. Can somebody add to cart? Can they check out? And does everything work after an update?

All of these things we’re going to scan for quite regularly and fully.

Chris Badgett: Nice. You have a course coming too about performance and I know you mentioned getting into the foundations and helping people understand it and all the layers. What are some of the. The first three things people should look at with performance if they want, I want my fa my site to be faster.

I know that’s a hard question for an expert ’cause you’re like, it’s a lot of things and it depends, right? Yeah. But I’m going to cheat a little ’cause I’m gonna add step zero.

Okay?

Remkus Devries: So it’s gonna be four things. Step zero is building for performance. Meaning you don’t fix it at the end. ’cause caching is what most people think is the thing that solves performance or produces performance.

But caching doesn’t solve your performance. Caching makes an optimized version of your site. And the optimization can be that it’s a static version of the site, meaning full ht ML caching. You can move that to the edge CloudFlare or many of the other solutions, but you still haven’t solved performance.

’cause what does solving performance mean? That means there’s a cash hit ratio of a hundred percent. That’s never gonna happen and in some cases you may be lucky to get 50%. So depending on your type of sites, especially when you are logged in, for instance, with an LMS. Or e-commerce. You are by definition never looking at cache.

You may have elements that are cached. For instance, your menu, but your site is onc because you, if you are caching your site for a course, then whatever you just did, Chris will be seen by the next person trying to log in and they’ll see your version of the course, which is obviously a no-no. Step zero means you, you starting building for performance now.

I think the key there is, depending on the type of site, you need to be on the right hosting and there’s there’s. There’s a wide range of hosting plans out there for, at different hosting companies. I’m not gonna give you my my preference here, but I am going to say there’s ways of figuring out what per, what hosting company has good and great performance.

And spoiler alert, performance has nothing to do with support. You can have wonderful support, but a mediocre product, which is then looks like it’s fantastic. Not in the edge cases, not in really busy sites which I’m sure you’ve seen happen with your your product in many different ways. So that’s step one.

Your hosting needs to be perfect. Then step two means you need a theme that is a singular purposed theme. Meaning a theme needs to, he needs to have the base principle of wanting to do only one thing and do it well. That automatically means I don’t like themes that wanna be everything. A lot of the themes, for instance, on theme forest, that’s never gonna scale because there’s no optimization happening in the entire code of that theme anywhere, and they just wanna fix the output and cache, which again, back to step zero, that doesn’t solve performance.

And the third would be you have to have the desire to run and lean and mean sight. You have to force yourself to be. Wary of everything you introduce to your site that potentially may slow it down. That doesn’t mean you can’t have 70 plugins. And this may sound weird, but it’s not about the plugin amount, it’s about what they do.

I have clients running sites in less than 500 milliseconds, cached and uncashed that are running more than a hundred plugins. So the size, the number of the plugins isn’t the problem, what they do. Is the problem. So a plugin needs to be built in a fashion where it understands that if it’s not supposed to do anything, certainly not on every page load, it’s not doing anything so lean and mean.

And how can you stay lean and mean? Make sure you use a scanning tool that does it fully

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us like who’s the perfect fit for Scan Fully, which is@scanfully.com, and who is a perfect fit for your upcoming course and where can they find that or get on the email list to know what.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

Chris Badgett: When it comes out, if you go to mku d.com/courses, you can sign up for, I have a few courses listed, but my site’s currently in the, in, in rebuild, so I’ll have a better landing page there. But there’s a form there where you can sign up to be notified when the courses go live. But the, the ideal customer is essentially boils down to one or two words.

Remkus Devries: That’s a WordPress professional, and I know that’s a vague word, but it essentially means anyone that wants to treat WordPress professional. So that’s agencies that, site owners that have sites that make money where you rely on it. Working perfectly or understanding the principle. And the performance course probably is focused a little less on the beginner, but I am covering every single layer.

And I’ll explain to you what that layer is. So you have an understanding of what that layer actually in, in, in in its full intent does. So that means. I’ll be throwing things at you like this is your DNS layer, and this is what happens on the DNS layer. This is what your certificate does.

And yes, there are a few cases where you get a wrong version of a certificate, your site will become slower and this is why. So you be are better equipped with the knowledge of, making the right decisions essentially. So I probably less about less super beginner. Anyone who regularly builds web sites or works with them, they’ll have a good understanding from both the course as well as using scan fully.

And then, and I should mention, the best features of Scan fully are up and coming for this year. But I urge you to get in now ’cause the price is as low as it ever it’s ever going to be.

Yeah, I was looking at that and it’s very reasonable. Speaking of WordPress professionals, one of the things creators.

My opinion really need to do is build their audience ideally in advance as soon as possible. The best day is 10 years ago. The next best is today. Yep. You started a newsletter and like I mentioned, it’s one of the few I follow. I just find it really value packed to the point and writing a newsletter. It really, you’re serving your community.

You’re also building an email list. I know you have. Pretty high open rates on your newsletter, but what’s the story of that? Why did you start it and what would you advise somebody who hasn’t built a newsletter for their community yet?

The answer to the second question, just start. I. Yeah, don’t wait it out.

Don’t think there will be a better time or I’m better well prepared. It’s the same with kids. There is never going to be a perfect time to have kids. Just have kids. If that’s what you want, ultimately go for it. Same for the newsletter. Just make that choice of where to host it. And you can go fancy and go straight to kit, but you can go, you can do beehive, you can do substack.

It really doesn’t matter. Just start. And in terms of the first answer. It’s, so I have the natural ability to process a lot of information and deduce from that what the thing is to remember here. Whether that’s a multitude of separate items or bringing back something complex to this is what it is about.

And I started sharing this on and off over the last, almost four years ago, five years ago now. And I enjoyed it, but I didn’t have a routine in it. Mostly because it was published on a site and I got less feedback. And at a certain point I realized, oh, people actually like what I digest ’cause it’s essentially my digest of the week.

With the focus of performance, security, and just fun tools, like stuff that you can build. Even cooler stuff on top of what Chris with. And I realized I should bring this to a newsletter I did and, what I essentially do is share stuff I think is interesting or has an a, a different angle from all the other newsletters you see out there.

So I want to have a particular voice and I work at having that voice. Sometimes a newsletter has a few commentaries on my end, and sometimes I basically have something to say about every single item I add. I’ll tell you why I am adding it or if I think it’s a really good one, then I will say that it’s less of a.

There’s a few more newsletters out there that just share. They just post the links and send it out. And I’m less about that. I’m more about quality. And I made a decision to not share specific stuff related to community stuff or drama or any of that sort of stuff.

There’s others that do that wonderfully. I don’t need to have that particular type of audience. I’d like to stay positive. I’d like to build. Stuff I’d like to help people understand what they can do with the platform that drives me, that motivates me, and I try to make that quite visible in my in my newsletter.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned you process a lot of information. I relate to that. I do that as well. I know there’s like a strength and personality type tool. I can’t remember which one called Input. And you can take a lot of input. Yeah. Of information,

Remkus Devries: I’m an info. Shorter is the best description I’ve had thrown at me at one point.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think a lot of course creators and kind of content people, but also a lot of people in the WordPress professionals, they take a lot of input. They’re researching technology, they’re talking to clients, they’re just input people. Given all that input. What’s your process from going, from your research of listening to podcasts or RSS feeds or the newsletters you’re subscribed to and blogs and stuff?

How do you translate that volume of input into a newsletter format?

Remkus Devries: Diligently. ’cause I have a few systems in place, so it depends on where I see the thing that I find interesting. Yeah. If it’s shared on X or blue sky, I turn it into a bookmark. If it’s A-U-R-L-I see somewhere I have.

I prepare all my newsletters in obsidian. So I have a template that is my newsletter, and I essentially copy and paste all the things that I see as I see them. And I, and on Friday I sit down and I take a, an, it’s about an hour, and I process all the bookmarks, all the links that I had in a fashion that it is digestible for someone else as well.

Oh and obviously the I’m subscribed to probably 50 plus newsletters, about 150 sites on RSS. And I’ve always done this, I’ve done this since 2007, so I, for me, it’s just normal to check my systems for information and translate that. What I find interesting into obsidian. So I can then copy and paste it from obsidian into kit and it’s marked down in obsidian and Kit when I paste it just accepts that.

So it’s very little work. It’s basically just me processing the things that I’ve seen. And sometimes I add something during the week that I, on Friday, go yeah, nevermind. And sometimes even on the Friday, I see stuff being talked about left and right and go oh, interesting. I should add that quick.

So it’s yeah it’s a continuous process,

Chris Badgett: so it’s really just you living your life, getting the information you want. And then about an hour on Friday and you have a newsletter.

Remkus Devries: Yep.

Chris Badgett: What about consistency? Do you ever feel like, oh gosh, I have to write the newsletter today, or it’s become a labor of love, or you just enjoy it?

Remkus Devries: I enjoy it, but there’s Fridays where it just doesn’t work because so last Friday I was in in Munich and I was busy all day. So that means no time for this, and I don’t prepare them on, like during the week. I don’t prepare, write them. I process it on Friday. So I have my links, I have my bookmarks, but I’m not complete.

The next morning, on the Saturday morning, I sent out the newsletter. So I’m okay with being flexible like that. And I’m also okay with skipping a week if it just doesn’t work for whatever reason. And I’ve, I have done that in the last couple of months twice I think. And it’s just what it is.

I’m human. I have things popping up on my priority list and there is, there’s companies sponsoring me and I let them know this is the schedule and unless it’s like super important, it goes absolutely out on this day because the campaign is related to it. I’m general as flexible as I can be.

That said, for. I don’t know the per year. I missed maybe three, maybe four top. So it’s it yeah it’s more about I don’t want it to be that I feel that I’m forced to do it, so that means I need to have that flexibility to let one go if if need be.

Chris Badgett: So that’s it within wp.com, I highly recommend it.

It’s an awesome newsletter. Thank you. And you mentioned sponsorship. I think that’s really cool for a course creator as an example. Sometimes it takes time, as to build a course. Yep. And so if you’re building your email list and maybe generating a little revenue through newsletter sponsorship, how do you get sponsors and what’s your approach to that?

Remkus Devries: I don’t approach it.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Remkus Devries: It just happens. They approach you. They approach me. At a certain point people started asking me can you share some promotional stuff in your newsletter? Yeah, sure. So I sat down and wrote out what I think I’m worth. That’s not right.

And I think I’m worth more, but what the newsletter’s worth. Wrote out a sponsor within WordPress page.

It interesting to share with my public, then I’ll add you to it. And If you ask me to share something, I will point you to the.

Sponsor list. So that means sometimes something commercial is being shared and it’s not sponsored, but it could, that’s my choice. If you ask me, then I choose to ask a compensation for it. Maybe a weird model, but that works in my head. That means I stay true to my integrity and, don’t muddy the water with half type of messages in here.

You’ll see me, mentioned plenty of commercial solutions and I’m okay with that. It’s it’s a little bit it makes sense, right? So there’s there’s, there is advertisers or sponsorships where I say no. This is no match for me. Yeah. But we really want to get in front.

Yeah I get it. But for me, no, it doesn’t work. So I’m selective. I need to like the product I. I need to like the people even. It’s, yeah. I’m weird like that.

Chris Badgett: I don’t think that’s weird. That sounds awesome. Going back to the personal side i’ve noticed on social media that you like to drive.

So when you go to conferences, as an example, I will watch you fly into a town and then drive across the country. I see you driving around Europe and going through, border crossings. I see you, I think you did one with your son. Yep. And you guys had an adventure. What’s the pull of driving? And I just, I relate to it because I always say if I wasn’t in tech, I’d probably be a long distance truck driver and just listen to podcasts all day.

Oh yeah. Why do you like it?

Remkus Devries: I’m born and raised inside a family business that had, anything from a gas station to a garage, to a body shop taxi company, car rentals. We did the whole thing. So from the age of three, I know cars and I enjoy a car for what it is. Sure. Transporting from A to B, but I also enjoy the beauty of the car and the, I don’t know the freedom that comes with it.

When it comes to road tripping.

So I like the idea of, so for instance, last, what was October, November I drove to the Black Sea, and if you look up the Netherlands the north of the Netherlands, and you look then at the Black Sea go, that’s a ridiculous distance. Who does that? But I looked at it and went that’s a stupid thing to do.

I should do that. And I enjoyed it. So driving all the way through Bulgaria, ending up at the Black Sea, that’s the largest body of water that I’ve seen. I think. No. May, no. I, no, possibly. Anyway it’s a stupid distance. I was like, that’s cool. Let’s do that. And we, camp Sophia was an option and I was in I applied to speak and I, and they said yes. Good match for Workcamp Europe. The last three editions I drove with my son, so he’s he’s on the photography team. So I drove to Porto with him. I drove to Athens, which also a three day drive and I drove to Torino and we’ll be driving to basel in Switzerland in about yeah. About two weeks. And for me, you can fly. Sure. But I enjoy seeing the roads, the countryside process, the travel and having the freedom to stop wherever I want. So especially in in Switzerland, there’s mountain passes, which I thoroughly enjoy. I’ll drive around.

It’s not that I hate flying, but I just like driving more. When we met last at Press Con, I flew to Miami. Got in the car in Miami, went to Key West first, and then back up all the way through New Orleans. Up to Graceland, went down to Texas, saw Dallas Deley Plaza drove down through New Mexico.

I. Saw the largest pistachio in the world. Super weird but fun. Ended in tombstone for a night and then drove up to Tempe, Arizona. And that was like five days. So it’s long, but I also enjoy it and I enjoy the alone time as much as I enjoy the the, driving with my son.

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

That makes sense. Being a strong man, working out and also just getting out in the world driving, going to conferences, and what keeps, I think this is, these are all important parts of mental health, so

Remkus Devries: Totally get it the alone time forces you to. So I just I just got back this weekend from Minchin Munich. It’s a good day to drive. I can do those long hours driving. And I think I’m used to it. That’s one. But it’s also fine if I drive for blocks of three, four hours. That works for me, but I enjoy the alone time. That’s a dedicated time to think about things. I don’t have to force myself to think about it. But I know it’s gonna happen anyway.

You can turn the music on, sure. That’s gonna make it even more pleasurable, but at some point you start thinking about things and that it’s a good way to process thoughts. I do that less in an airplane, for instance. That doesn’t, I’m more like, that’s a lot of noise around me. It’s people way too close.

If I can have the comforts of my own car, yes, please. That’s awesome. If I could drive to the United States, I would.

Chris Badgett: You might be able to if you go through bearing Strand.

Remkus Devries: Yeah. I don’t think that is there a bridge or have they talked about a bridge? I think they’ve only talked about it.

Chris Badgett: As far as I know, there’s just like a certain part of the winter, there’s a ice road. Yeah,

Remkus Devries: we’re not doing that. There is limits.

Chris Badgett: That’s Rimkus DeVries. You can find them@scanfully.com. Go check that out to speed up your website. Monitor it improve your performance. Also the within wp.com, the newsletter.

Thanks for co coming on the showroom. ’cause any final words for the WordPress professionals out there?

Remkus Devries: Final words, I don’t know. Stay fresh. Stay fresh. Start thinking about what your foundation of a fast and perform at WordPress site should look like before you need to build it.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the showroom kiss.

Remkus Devries: Happy to. Thanks for having me.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn “The Future of Online Education in an Artificial Intelligence World,” Bud Kraus examines how the field of digital learning is changing as a result of artificial intelligence. Bud Kraus, who has worked as a WordPress specialist and educator for decades, emphasizes AI as a potent tool that may improve student engagement, automate repetitive activities, and customize instruction rather than as a substitute for instructors.

Bud Kraus is a seasoned instructor and content developer in the WordPress community, having taught WordPress and web design in person and virtually for more than 14 years. In this LMScast episode, he highlights how AI may be used to develop learning environments that are tailored to the requirements of each individual student while simultaneously posing significant ethical, data privacy, and digital equity concerns. He also has a podcast channel.

Kraus emphasizes the necessity for educators to embrace lifelong learning and responsibly incorporate AI as educational institutions come under increasing demand to modernize in order to maintain online education’s effectiveness, accessibility, and human-centeredness.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Bud Kraus. He has a podcast over@seriouslybud.com. You can also find him over@joyofwp.com. I met Bud recently at a conference. He’s a course creator. He’s a WordPress professional, he’s a teacher. We’re gonna mine as many tips, tricks, and strategies as we can out of bud.

First bud, welcome to the show. Hey, Chris, what a pleasure to be here. Now I have a question for you, which I should have asked before. [00:01:00] Yeah. I know you’re recording this, but video two. Video two and we’re live streaming right now While we’re recording. Oh no. All right. Turn this off. No. Just kidding. All right.

Bud Kraus: And I should have asked before, but what the heck now I know. Alright so thank you for having me on too. This is really nice.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Absolutely. Take us into your past like you were a teacher and I think one of the things, particularly in the LMS space, sometimes entrepreneurs get excited about information products, building courses, selling courses, and a lot of people pull it off with no teaching background.

But teaching and instructional design is like a fundamental skill. Tell us your history as a teacher, some pro teaching tips, and then how you’ve used that when you’ve created courses in your life.

Bud Kraus: Boy, that’s such a great question, and I think that’s one of the fundamental things about before you ever start doing a course, if you can get some [00:02:00] real live in class, that’s a rare thing these days.

I know in class teaching experience, I think you’re gonna be. Better off in the sense that when you teach a course, at least my experiences, it’s so important to be prepared that you have a beginning and a middle and an end for the entire course and for each lesson. And that you do this a number of times, meaning semesters or years teaching the same material, tweaking it as you go forward.

So that. There is a method to your, the way you do things and that you understand it and that you’ve tried it out on people and you’ve gauged a reaction as to whether or not they’re learning. And once you have all that kind of experience, then I think it’s a good time to do an online course. Now that’s.

That’s not how the real world works. I understand that. But that’s how my journey went with online teaching, which is I did things live in class first, and [00:03:00] by doing it, then you really become an expert and authority on the subject. It makes it so much easier to create the content for the course.

It really is because basically you already have it and then it’s just a matter of putting it together in however you do this, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But so I was, I felt very fortunate that I went that way. It wasn’t planned, but lucky that it did.

Chris Badgett: We call that the experts curse, where you got this knowledge, but you need to figure out how to teach it or coach a student and get feedback and improve stuff over time.

What was the subject matter you would teach on?

Bud Kraus: The only things I really ever taught was H-T-M-L-C-S-S and WordPress. I never, I taught a little bit of Dreamweaver, but if you can remember what that is, I’m sure you might, but I, I taught a little bit of that, but for the most part it was just good old fashioned coding back in the 2000 OTTs, because that’s really the way people made websites.

[00:04:00] And most of my, I was teaching in New York City, most of the students were coming from graphic arts background, so I had to deal with. A group of people who were not believing what the web, what the nature of the medium was, which is not, it’s a text-based medium and it’s really not a graphic medium.

I know there’s pictures and I get it, all that stuff, but at the end of the day, when you’re looking at the source code, you’re not looking at pictures, you’re looking at text. So I had to convince a lot of people, Hey, this is really the way to do it. Don’t just insert a flash video here. Let’s do it. Let’s play to the strengths of the medium.

I know that, people don’t always, at least in those days, they didn’t really like that. But, I had to convince them. A lot of ’em really were not believers. I was talking about resizing and this and that and, and not pixel. I, not setting things by pixels. And it took a little bit of doing to tell people, no, this is the way to do it.

And it, ’cause they just weren’t believers. They didn’t [00:05:00] see, they didn’t understand the medium. And it took a long time for people to. Understand the nature of responsive design is really what I’m getting at. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I guess

Chris Badgett: on the other side of teaching is learning and I’ve been around WordPress, I think about 17 years.

It’s been a long time and the, it’s changed a lot. And I’m not a developer. I can’t write ht ML and CSS like you can.

Bud Kraus: I felt

Chris Badgett: like when I found WordPress, I was like, oh, this is something for me. I know you can customize it with code, but

Bud Kraus: Right.

Chris Badgett: I could build websites without knowing a line of code and I just fell in love with it.

How do you think WordPress is different now in terms of if you’re, if you were teaching somebody how to use it, what would your approach be?

Bud Kraus: That’s a great question. I certainly could go on for a long time, so I’ll try to truncate my my answer here. I think overall, since I’ve been teaching WordPress since let’s say 2012, [00:06:00] 13, I think it was easier to learn then than it is now.

Yeah. It’s just become more complex. I know it’s not supposed to be, the idea was make. Complex things simple, and I think they made complex things complex. It just seemed a lot easier to stick a word processor into a CMS, which is what WordPress was in those days. And. Let the user, the creators, decide how to extend and modify their experience.

Now it’s, no, we’ll basically give you the experience and you’ll just have to adjust. And that with the block editor, and I understand the philosophy behind all the stuff. So like I said, I can go on for hours talking about this, but as a practical matter, as somebody who’s taught all this through the years, it’s harder for people to learn WordPress today in general than it is.

10 years ago. It just is. And I regret saying that because I don’t think that was the intent, [00:07:00] but as somebody who has seen in the field how this works I think it’s just true. It’s actually harder for me sometimes to work with word WordPress and I forget how things are supposed to work or how they work or they don’t work or, yeah.

There, I know this is the year of. Taking thing, no more major releases. And I’m hoping that there’ll be a lot of that polishing, they keep talking about fixing things that need to be fixed before moving on. So hopefully, this will be the pause that refreshes kind of year.

’cause we need it.

Chris Badgett: You’re also a writer. I think writing is a super skill like. It. Communication and writing is everywhere. It’s not just writing books or blogs. Everything’s writing from emails to figuring out a plan, to making a video, it’s all writing. Tell us about your, write your journey as a writer.

Bud Kraus: As you say that, I’m thinking like, yeah, but, and here’s the, what the Yeah. But’s gonna [00:08:00] be. I think, up until recently, I would say writing is the number one skill of today in this era of in the age, in the digital age. But now I’m not so sure anymore because of ai and it’s still important.

But boy, I use AI all the time for different things, and I’m starting to wonder, where is my future now? I’m not 25 years old, so I don’t have to think about it. A long runway here, but I do write, I write for web hosts like Kinta and hosting, and I’ve written for GoDaddy and others, and we’ll continue to write until they say, we don’t need you anymore.

However, I learned recently, they still seem to think they need me, which is really nice. Which, because right now I still think the human touch of writing, you can still read the difference. Okay. I can pretty much tell AI from human and I love it as an assistant. I think as an assistant [00:09:00] it’s tremendous giving me ideas, fixing this better that answering questions, but I can’t.

YI, I just don’t want, we’re gonna come to a day where, you’re just gonna you gonna write a blog post. I guess we’re already there. You write a blog post, write a blog post about Bud Kraus and done, I, I don’t know what’s what is the value of that?

We, are we gonna lose that too, on the other hand? Who, where is all this ai? Where are they learning all this stuff from people who re, who write. So it’s a, I teach chat, GPT it teaches me. It’s like that we’re in that phase right now. And I am discovering all kinds of different ais, not just chat GPT, I’ve used cursor ai.

I am using this video animation AI now. These tools are great, but I fear that they are going to replace us. I’m sorry, I just do [00:10:00] you know, what do you think? Can I ask questions on the show? Is that okay? Yes,

Chris Badgett: you can. This is what happens when you interview another podcaster. They come back around, which is great.

Great. Yeah, I’m definitely with you on where’s the source material, as a person who’s been podcasting for a long time, I. There’s 500 hours of transcripts of this podcast alone that wow. An AI could just Sure. Probably already has scanned and put into the language model.

I think at least for the medium term writing is still important for communicating to the ai. And I think about the difference between writing a. Prompt that says something like, Hey, make me an online course about x versus going into detail like, Hey, this is my avatar.

This is what I already know already want to teach. What are the gaps? And then having an iterative back and forth. You still need to be able to communicate, but I [00:11:00] think it, it does create it does give me concern, but it also, I find myself as a writer. Not being lazy, but there’s like a pool of laziness in the sense of even when prompting, like not correcting spelling errors and just

Bud Kraus: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: The desire or the tendency or the inclination for shortcuts is there. Yes. And I think that’s dangerous territory. And like you said, polish, even if AI is helping, like the human polish on top really makes it awesome. But where we’re gonna be in six years? I don’t know. No, I that I’m not even so sure.

Bud Kraus: I really can’t tell you in in two years. It’s just I, it’s such a it is, I think to me, and, it is the biggest shift, change, whatever, however you wanna describe it important. Revolution. I don’t know. In my life. And the funny thing is I’ve lived long enough. You could have said television, radio, [00:12:00] no cell telephones.

No. I’m not that old. But all these technologies which come faster and faster, and they’re more and more important. We felt like the web was like, oh my God. What could ever be more important than this? Wrong. What’s gonna be more important than a, I don’t know.

This sort of seems like the end of the road here, but No, I don’t know. I think, there’ll be human teleportation one day. Okay. That’s big, if that’s possible. Everybody’s, so I’ve heard it’s impossible possible. I think it’s possible, but we don’t know how to do it now, obviously, but, so wouldn’t that be a groundbreaking thing?

Yeah, I think so. So you don’t, techno, we don’t reach the end with technology. We’re just, there is no end, but this certainly is like any, and the stakes here get bigger and bigger. Like the web that’s really good. It, but it also could be dangerous.

Look at AI really good, but boy, could this thing be dangerous? It seems yeah. You, as these technologies get more pervasive, important, predominant in our lives. [00:13:00] You can easily see that we the good is really good and the bad is God only knows, I mean with ai, cancer, this, that, and then who knows with the bad.

So I don’t even wanna think about it. Anyway, where were we? So can we, let’s talk about creating courses. That’s, ’cause we were talking a little bit before and I wanna talk about that.

Chris Badgett: Is that okay? And just dovetailing into ai. Yeah. One of our company values at Lifter LMS is learner results first.

So like we build software for people, building sites and stuff, but we always think about the student and their experience. It’s like our primary concern and related to ai yeah. How do people learn? Like I myself find myself using Google less and going to AI to learn something. Particularly if it’s something custom.

I think a great example is instead of going to a recipe blog like, Hey, I [00:14:00] wanna make cur curry chicken tonight. And I can go to the AI and be like. I have this much chicken, these are the vegetables I have, make me an awesome recipe. And it’s so custom and customized. I think that the AI tutor is gonna be helpful, but I have hope that the human in the loop will always add value.

But our job description might change as course creators or becoming more like coaches, but what are your thoughts?

Bud Kraus: Here’s the

Chris Badgett: thing,

Bud Kraus: and I’m thinking as you’re bringing this up, which is. I like to learn new stuff too. Would I take an online course to learn JavaScript or would I just have, she GBT, teach me whatever I wanna know about JavaScript?

The answer is probably the latter. Now, do I need to know JavaScript like a programmer? No. But can I like, just like parachute into part of JavaScript, learn that and pull it out and use it? Yes. So I think that course creation and the kind of things that you do, [00:15:00] that’s. I could see that’s a real problem.

If I was creating a course today, you know what the answer is, I wouldn’t probably be creating a course today. Now that’s pr. Now I say this because number one. Everything I could create has been done 10,000 times already. So why do I need to make something that’s been done? The last course I made was on using the Gutenberg block editor.

This was about 20, 21 or so, maybe 2020, I don’t know. And I went around to everybody in WordPress. What do you think of this idea? I went around to course creator. Oh, that’s a great idea. We need it. Blah, blah, blah. Nobody needed it. Nobody needed it. It wasn’t, yeah, I didn’t market it very well, but nobody really needed it because they could already Google stuff and they already, before ai, and it was just, and there was, there were also fundamental flaws to what I was doing that really doomed this thing.

But as far as creating a course today. I think when I write an article on, let’s say an in-depth look at theme JSO, I think that’s a way, [00:16:00] that’s a form of teaching. So that’s the way I teach today, is I write like a long article for let’s say Kinta, and you’re reaching God knows how many people and hopefully they, they think it’s valuable to their customers.

And that’s teaching. It’s different. And you’re probably teaching and you’re definitely teaching. The ais, that’s a really good point you brought up. Made me think are we writing for humans or are we writing to teach or enter, the LMS, the LM ls, right?

Learning, is it large? What is it? LLMs large language models. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah are we teaching that or are we teaching humans or we’re doing both, or what? So it’s really a time of such change in the world of education, which is, the broader sense of what we’re talking about. And I just don’t know, i, I, there’s, like I said, for the example I gave is perfect for just a little piece of something, but how about becoming an expert in [00:17:00] something? Would that work? When you have a course, you have guidance, you have somebody who’s thought through the beginning, the middle, and an end. If you’re just using chat GPT. It’s a hit and miss.

If you’re trying to learn something big for. I’ll give you a, for example. If you were learning CSS, where would you start? I don’t know. And I give that as an example ’cause in 1998 or nine when I was just first learning it, I dive, I didn’t know where to start, and I dived into the deep end of the pool and I got confused.

I got turned off. Of course, the browsers weren’t supporting CSS very well, and I just didn’t look at CSS for another two or three years because. It because I started out at the wrong place. A course online that’s well thought out will guide a user in a way that, a student, in a way that I don’t think AI can do it now and give you the whole picture of what it is that you need to know.

So there’s still value, yes, in courses [00:18:00] when I, just thinking out loud here, but as time goes on, I think it’s gonna be tougher and tougher for course creators. It just is. I’ve said to my wife, I don’t even know if I need to have a tea. What’s gonna happen to education? Are we gonna need teachers anymore?

When you can just learn a lot of stuff by just learning how to use the learning, how to work with prompts. That’s like ridiculous, again, good and bad.

Chris Badgett: I’m

Bud Kraus: optimistic. It’s extreme. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I’m optimistic. Because at least in the past, disruptive technology usually opens up new opportunity, but an evolution is required, and this is a very confusing one.

I remember when I fell in love with WordPress, just this idea that I could build a website. I’m not a developer, and I could anybody anywhere in the world with the internet connection could see it.

Bud Kraus: Yeah. I fell in

Chris Badgett: love with that idea, but I didn’t at the time know. Oh you can extend this platform and turn it into web applications and all the stuff that happened after that.

We can’t always see where we’re going, [00:19:00] but I’m optimistic that new opportunities will be there, but we have to evolve. And the other thing you mentioned, you talked about parachuting in to JavaScript or whatever, right? There’s a framework I, a friend of mine said there’s just in case education and then just in time and.

Sort of, there’s an argument. The traditional education is a lot of just in case here’s the library of stuff for you to put in your head. And then there’s just in time, which AI is really good at is Hey, I need to know how to fix this plumbing problem right now. Or it’s like right now, right in the moment.

Bud Kraus: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But also believe there is a benefit to. What some would call liberal arts education with, where you’re like studying broad topics that like, don’t, they might not help you get a job per se, but they’re helping shape your mind. And this goes back to the laziness thing I was talking about.

If we, if everything just becomes just in time [00:20:00] prompts stuff and ai, like what does that do to brain for brain development? I. Yeah, if the AI is smarter than us and we get super general, super intelligence and all that stuff, how are we humans gonna feel? And we should still probably develop our minds,

Bud Kraus: that’s the scary part of the, of our, it’s one of the scary parts of the future of this is that we just don’t know. Nobody knows. I don’t care who you talk to. They don’t know nobody. How could you know? Some people seem to know, I. Probably have a better insight than I do, that’s for sure.

But with certainty, I know it’s very hard to rethink in a profound, fundamental, complete way. I. The nature of, let’s say, learning and education going forward? It’s, we have, what’s really cool to me is that, your brain can only hold so much data, right? So most of the data we now use and hold is external.

It’s outside of us. [00:21:00] It’s like the thin client concept, right? It really is. Do you remember that term thin client where you know you didn’t need a hard drive basically? I don’t hard drive in there. Can you explain thin client? Thin client. Really. I think the first time I heard of the term was I, micro Sun Microsystems was using it in like the 1990s.

Okay. And I couldn’t quite figure out what, maybe that was a skinny person or something, but thin client, it refers to the fact that this was really early thinking is that all the data would be online or in the cloud, or however you wanna put it. And not stored in your local computer. Okay. And your local computer is, thin would be just a very small, hard drive.

And essentially that’s what we have today. So your brain is like the thin client because you can’t store that much in there relative to what is out there. And knowing that means. I’m conscious of that, so why do I have to learn this stuff? Why do I have [00:22:00] to learn like almost anything now?

I could write what’s really cool or maybe not, is that I can get an assignment and I do. I take on writing assignments and I look at this and go, I don’t know how to do, I don’t know how to use multi, I don’t know how to use W-P-C-L-I for multi-site. And then I start getting into it and I say, oh yeah, you do here.

Ask check GPT how this works. So I have enough of a foundation, a vocabulary to build to the next step. But what happens if I don’t have any foundation? I don’t know the answers to those questions. If somebody just threw me in and said I don’t know, react, okay, here, do something with react.

I don’t know if I could navigate my way through that with ai. I should try that to see I. Can you, can I come up with something useful in a, with a, some kind of programming language that I do not know anything about? I. Huh, I probably could, which is like, why do we need developers?

And developers aren’t losing, he, Hey, a really smart guy. Now I give this credit to Marcus [00:23:00] Burnett, but he’s not a really smart guy. So then Marcus and I are very good friends. But said to me, Marcus said quite a while ago, he said, it’s. It’s not, it’s like you’re not gonna lose your job to ai, but you are gonna lose your job to the person who knows how to use ai.

Yeah. And then, and Marcus didn’t say that. He said a smart person. I always, and that’s true. I find that right now, if you’re a dev develop, if you’re almost anything in some kind of information world like we are, if you know how to use ai, you’re about to become obsolete right now. If you’re not already.

Me going into AI is just a natural evolution, and it’s funny, people my age, they come up to me and they say, Hey bud, you know anything about this AI stuff? What do you think it’s gonna last? Or what? So I just roll my eyes and go, huh, okay. But that’s, I know, but retired people and stuff like that, they don’t need to know.

They don’t want to know any of this stuff. I’m just the opposite. I just wanna know [00:24:00] all can me. ’cause I’ve always been into science fiction and technology and I’m not going anywhere anyway. Oh, can I get back to something I was thinking of about, yeah. When we started in the beginning about creating courses and stuff, at least having the experience of teaching and writing, because the first courses I ever created were.

There were no videos. Okay. It was all text and you had to write out everything. So it was like making a simple website, and I had to create the entire. Every chapter built on the next chapter and got harder and heard all that kind of stuff. Then there was a project and, but you weren’t there to explain it, so you had to write everything out, which was really an interesting experience and very time consuming.

My first course that I taught online was called, I believe it was called Intro to HTML. It was, there was no CMS, it was all whatever I could make by hand. And students would upload their files. They would upload their files in a system that I reviewed the files manually. I would look at the code and say it’s good or not good or whatever, and I got paid.

Now that was a tho that course was marketed through adult education systems around mostly New Jersey, New York, Connecticut. ’cause they didn’t have anything else and they wanted to offer this stuff. To their, adult education program. So that was, that lasted a little while. It wasn’t gonna last forever, but the time it took to create that, today it’s just a lot faster to create stuff because we have lifter LMS and stuff like that.

So we have a lot of choices now, but before, I’m just, my word of advice to anybody who’s thinking of it. Creating a course is to plan all this stuff out in advance. Don’t start the course first. Come up with your title. Come up with your chapter heading, subheads everything. Just do a huge outline [00:26:00]and then start filling in and know we’re gonna start here and end up over here.

What is the goal? What do you want people to be doing during the course? After the course? What’s the takeaway? What are your expectations of a teacher? For what the students should know, not just what their expectations are, what do you expect them to know? And then you can build a course around that.

Chris Badgett: whatever I think about writing, let’s say writing a book or a blog post or something, right? Yeah. I like to use the framework writing is three parts and ideally equal parts of research, writing and editing. So course creation is the same, slow down, don’t just tell the AI to make me a course about x.

Bud Kraus: Right.

Chris Badgett: Do a ton of research. You’ve been doing it your life, if it’s your subject matter expertise, but Right. Dig a deep, see what else is out there. And then creating it, polishing it. And then editing is also, I. Come back and improve it. I’m sure you improved your HT ML course over time, right?

Yes and no.

Bud Kraus: And the reason why I say yes [00:27:00] and no is because it didn’t change all that much. Like a tag is a tag and attributes and values, they’re pretty much, after a while, they got pretty well settled out. With this HTML, then we had X-H-T-M-L, back, H TM L. It wasn’t terribly changing. But here’s what’s different now than back in the day, is that we have different ways now to communicate that we really didn’t have.

In 2001, 2, 3, 5, 10, whatever. You’ve got video. You’ve got better ways to do screenshots and animation and AI animation. And God, you could do avatars, you could do all kinds of engaging things. Now that I just, I couldn’t do, I would’ve thought about it, but, I didn’t know Camtasia then.

I didn’t know. So there’s so many different tools that we have to communicate. To make and I, and it’s it’s now here, here’s the other thing too. If you’re creating a course, you know what I just said might be just totally bewildering, right? What? I have to learn all this stuff. Number one, no, you [00:28:00] don’t learn only what you need to know, but trying to learn something that’s gonna have broad application.

So you don’t wanna spend a lot of time learning something that you’re just gonna use a small bit of time that will only do a very small little thing for you. Okay, that doesn’t make any sense. So I always look at something like, Hey, once I master this thing, like I know Camtasia pretty well. What else can I use it for?

If I need to do blah, blah, blah, whatever. It’s, oh, I could use Camtasia for that. So you’re building, so don’t try to think of I need to learn everything ’cause you don’t, but choose wisely and stick with industry tools like Camtasia, snag it, stuff that people are using.

Don’t try to do like one of these little knockoff things that aren’t really as popular. They’re popular for a reason ’cause they’re really good. Yeah, you don’t, like you don’t have to learn Final Cut Pro and Premier and Camtasia just Camtasia really is as far as screen capture video goes, it’s probably, what do you think?

The gold [00:29:00] standard here?

Chris Badgett: Probably. Yeah. Camtasia, the script is coming up with its AI tools. Yeah. I’m a screen flow guy with a Mac oh, yeah.

Bud Kraus: There you go. Screen flow. Yeah. I don’t know it, but it’s certainly well known. Yeah, but the thing is like if you are new, you want to, explore these tools and then settle on one and get a license or whatever. I’m doing that right now with this animated AI stuff, which is I look at a whole bunch and I go, that’s the one I wanna use. And it’s not is it, are other people using it? But it doesn’t, I don’t know.

It’s just that you don’t have, don’t worry. You don’t have to master everything. It’s just not, it’s not important. What you do have to master is a really good outline of your course. I think that is so important, and that either you. Here’s another thing, and Chris how many, how does your system work?

Do you have anything built in for feedback? That is, is it easy for students to [00:30:00] tell the course creator, Hey, this was good, or I didn’t understand this, or like a whole feedback loop. Is that built in by any chance?

Chris Badgett: We do. We have a lot of ways We do that with like a. Like a private coaching thing where there can be a private conversation we have.

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Okay. Comments and forums and, okay. We also do a lot of education showing people how to [00:32:00] use form plugins and things to create feedback loops. We have assignments and quizzes that have remarks and things like that. But yeah, feedback is, I think, such an important part of learning and that’s something that humans.

Can do, AI can give feedback, you can have an AI tutor or whatever. But that real, I think that’s the sign of a true master teacher is like realizing that not all students are exactly the same. They have challenges. You gotta adapt.

Bud Kraus: Yeah. And the other thing is it’s great to get feedback that says, Hey bud, this course is really great.

All right. Everybody loved everybody. Testimonial. That’s a testimony. That’s right. But it’s the ones that dropped out after the first lesson or second lesson. What happened? Maybe it may it may have nothing to do with you. I, my father died. This, that, whatever. But if it is something that, Hey, I got stuck, I didn’t understand.

Okay. Was it just, did we market it incorrectly? A lot of times, people say, oh, [00:33:00] I didn’t know you were gonna do the, that’s very important in the marketing is that it’s clear what it is that the person is going to learn. Because I’ve seen where either I took a course or somebody took a course from me and said this is not what I was expecting.

Yeah, the marketing is really not just imp not just in terms of getting the information out, but in being very accurate as to what it is, that you’re selling and you are selling, so how do you think I could ask you a million questions? How, if I’m a course creator, I was a course creator, what is the, what’s a good way, do you do anything, does your system have anything built into concerns like social media and marketing, or is that just something that’s totally outside out of the bounds of what you’re, what you offer?

Chris Badgett: We have like viral loops built in where somebody could share like a certificate to social media.

Okay. We do a lot of [00:34:00] education around marketing. So like in, in my view one of the best content marketing things you can do as a course creator is help people for free with a free mini course around some topic that really sets ’em up to be a perfect fit for your paid program or whatever.

Yeah. And

Bud Kraus: can you do like a, can a course creator do a try before you buy kind of thing? Or not.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we have a integrated e-commerce system. We also integrate with Woo, but we have our own Stripe and PayPal, but you can do like free trials and set up all kinds of access rules for how long and when and what the payment’s gonna be and stuff like that.

And do you,

Bud Kraus: Now I wasn’t expecting, I don’t care. This is the way it goes with me. But do you is this available in the WordPress repository and obviously there’s a pro version or it’s just, pay version?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we’ve always been big fan. Our company mission is to lift up others through education and to democratize learning in the digital classroom.

[00:35:00] So our

Bud Kraus: That’s good for you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Our free core plugin is extremely powerful and 80% of our people are just using the free LMS which helps people get started and get moving and Sure. And it’s very powerful. Every time we do a release of updates, we’re always adding stuff to the core and then focusing on some of our paid add-ons and things.

Now

Bud Kraus: is there, do you guys have a course. I think you do. Maybe I misunderstood about how to market your course.

Chris Badgett: Yes. We have lots of courses. So we have we have a quick start course, which is how to like it covers like what you’re saying. Don’t teach ’em everything. Like we show the 5% of okay, this is how you set up the site, this is how the system works and all that.

We did a web, like a, we brought in some guest experts and did a. And did some content ourselves to help people, [00:36:00] show people how to go from zero to 10 enrollments, because when we looked at the data, we realized that if people had at least 10 enrollments, their platform was gonna stick and they were gonna stay around.

So that includes a lot of like marketing help and showing people like what works to get students and stuff like that. Yeah.

Bud Kraus: Because your success is based on their success in the sense that you want them to renew their licenses. Exactly. So obviously and that’s like the way that this works.

So you want them to be successful.

Chris Badgett: The, yeah. I think one of the most important questions a course creator can ask is who? Who is this for? ‘Cause we have our subject matter expertise, right? And this goes by many names, like the ideal learner, customer avatar, things like that.

But that who question if anybody is either struggling or has a modest win or a runaway success, I think that who [00:37:00] question is fundamental.

Absolutely. So learning about that. I wanted to tie that who question into something you said earlier.

Bud Kraus: Before you do it, let me just stick something

Chris Badgett: in

Bud Kraus: and hold on to that for one second. Okay. That is the who question is the fundamental question, and if you teach it in class, you’ll find out who the who is because you’re, you’ll be talking.

Yeah. Like

Chris Badgett: when you were telling me, my course creator, brain’s going okay, he got graphic designers in, they didn’t understand the web. They’re inserting the flash videos like. I just naturally do it. I like form the avatar that Bo was dealing with, but that’s easy to do in a classroom.

Bud Kraus: It’s

Chris Badgett: much harder on the worldwide web.

Bud Kraus: Absolutely. And because, I knew it was graphic artist and then eventually it turned into some more writers and then it turned into people who were working in offices. They needed to manage their websites for their boss. And after a while I knew exactly who the, who was that I was creating.

Of course. And when you’re sitting writing it, you’ll say does Susie so and so under, she can understand what [00:38:00] you’re talking about here. So you know your audience. Yeah. Okay. What were, what I sidetracked you so I’m sorry.

Chris Badgett: No, you’re good. This is the magic of two podcasters talking to each other.

We the danger you mentioned, I think there’s some hope here in terms of what’s AI gonna do, and what I mean is we’ve been through technological revolutions before and history doesn’t always repeat, but it rhymes. And if you think about the industrial revolution, right? A lot of people left the farm and went to big cities with the emerging, industrial jobs and also the beginning of the white collar kind of knowledge economy worker.

And when somebody comes off the farm and they show up by you over in New York City, what do they say? They say, oh wow, the world’s moving really fast. It’s really busy. I don’t know how these subways and all this public transport.

Yeah. [00:39:00] And it’s like overwhelming. I think that’s where we are with ai. And it’s, it is really busy. Things are changing really fast. But a new economy emerged through industrialization and the rising middle class and the white collar and all that. But here’s the scary part, but also the opportunity, which is junior level job positions are the first things replaced by ai.

So we would often use, let’s say a junior web developer at a software company to get on board, learn the ropes and stuff. But a lot of that stuff’s going to ai.

Bud Kraus: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So what has to happen, if we go back to the who question, like what’s a high school graduate to do these days? They needed a way to figure out how to leapfrog and like.

You mentioned you like science fiction when Neo plugs into the matrix and gets the download [00:40:00] about combat. Like you, and also what you said earlier, I’m just tying this all together about, oh, I can, I actually do know how to do multi-site from the command line. I just had to get in here and tinker.

And this is a particular learning style. Called kinesthetic where we right now with ai, the people that have a kinesthetic learning style and just kinda learn by doing, they have an unfair advantage to like that.

Bud Kraus: Good to hear.

Chris Badgett: It’s just an observation because that’s what people are doing.

They’re just figuring it out. But the point being and this is the challenge. There’s a giant class of education like. Young adults and whatnot that are scared the entry level jobs are being automated. But then I tie it back to history and look at what did the young people do when they came off the farm?

In many ways, they adapted a little, maybe easier and quicker to the city than the [00:41:00] older person who lost the job and then had to go figure out how to hang in the big time. But there’s gotta be something with. In education by helping kids just adapt to the new world and and because there can also be, just like with industrial machines, there can be much greater output, but that’s scary and you gotta learn how to.

Leverage all these machines and technologies and stuff like that. But you

Bud Kraus: know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, all of these changes that came about from farm industrial, from agriculture to industrial to information, the pace just gets fast as we know. And these disruptive events, technologies.

Whatever be become faster, closer, and closer together, more disruptive. I thought we just disrupted everything with e-commerce. Now what? I’m shaking my head. I can’t, I, and now I have kids that [00:42:00] are, they should, they, it’s no wonder we are.

As a society, as a world where we are today with a lot of confusion. Yeah. Because it’s just, this is, a long time ago and there was a book called The Third Wave written by a guy named Alvin Toffler. This is 50 years ago or so, and it’s really funny. My wife isn’t really into this kind of stuff, but when I met her, we were both reading that book and that’s not the kind of book she reads.

It’s the kind of book I read and. It was all about where we are today, the inability of human beings to process and understand rapid change. This is what he was talking about 50 years ago. Wow. And 50 years ago or 40 years ago, we didn’t even have fax machines. These things come and go in the blink of an eye.

When fax machines came in, oh, this is great. You know this is, could be here forever. It was here for 10 minutes. When you live as long as I have, things come and go [00:43:00] so fast. Now that, you think okay, digital has to be the end here, right? Yes, but I don’t know.

When I used to have records and albums and CDs and tapes and all that kind of stuff, I don’t have, and I’m moving, I don’t need any of that stuff anymore. Who I used to collect and who. Who knew we were gonna have digital, you don’t need it. You don’t need any of this junk anymore.

So whatever. I think that’s the fundamental. What I’m saying is it’s very hard for people in general and including me, to a adapt to such rapid change and understand your place in the world and how you can be effective. It’s very hard.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I heard something funny on a podcast the other day.

You don’t know much of my background stuff, but I used to run sled dogs in Alaska and I managed a tour business that you could only get to by helicopter on a glacier. Yeah. I was listening to a podcast where somebody was having a [00:44:00] discussion similar to what we’re having about ai and they were talking about what’s the future opportunity.

And they’re basically saying human experiences where people go outdoors and, be in nature and remember what it’s like to be human. I’m like, I just, that’s where I came from. We’re going back there and it’s it’s just interesting though. So but there’s gotta be, the human will still need things, but the needs are gonna change.

We just gotta figure out what that is. And sometimes it’s analog, like getting back to the great outdoors. Other things might be like psychologists to help people deal with, exponential technology and overwhelm and stuff like that. Yeah, but you’re right. It’s interesting because it think you’re correct.

The crux of the issue is the rate of change, not just the change.

Bud Kraus: Right.

Chris Badgett: And what is

Bud Kraus: things is the rate of change, right?

Chris Badgett: And the human processor up here, you can’t upgrade it. Like [00:45:00] it only, it hasn’t, it doesn’t change like technology changes. So let’s just say it this

Bud Kraus: way. The shit stays in the queue,

Chris Badgett: okay?

Yeah.

Bud Kraus: Can you swear on the show? I just did. Okay. But yeah, but that’s it. It’s just it’s like a, it’s like a printer, it’s just in the queue and it gets backed up and stuff. Just, you just go on overload and that’s where things are. And it’s, I don’t think we as species can.

Comprehend any of this stuff right now. Really. I think we’re all, I’m having trouble just thinking about it maybe it’s just me, but I think we all have, we’re all struggling with this, not just, I know, because I talk to a lot of people and I see that everybody struggling with this Hey, can we talk about my podcast?

Is that okay? Yeah,

Chris Badgett: let’s

Bud Kraus: do it.

Chris Badgett: Talks about Seriously, bud. Oh, okay.

Bud Kraus: All right. And you’re gonna be on it. ‘Cause you got some good stuff already with the dogs in Alaska and all that. So seriously, bud is a podcast I’ve launched February 29th, 2000 and [00:46:00] I. 1424, I’m sorry, 2024. And every Friday I drop an episode featuring an unexpected conversation with somebody in the WordPress community.

So we don’t talk shop, we don’t talk WordPress, we don’t generally talk about any, it’s really a show about nothing. So we just talk about the guest life, their story, where were they born, what did they d where did they live? What was it like to do so and whatever. And it’s just. It came from when I left Word Camp US 2023.

Were you there? You were probably there, right?

Chris Badgett: Which one was that? Where were you? Yeah, I was there. I was there.

Bud Kraus: The freezer bowl. It was really freezing in there. Yeah. Yeah. And the vendors were like, 30, miles away from the Yeah, we know. Anyway when I left that I was thinking, I was in an Uber and I was thinking like, boy, wouldn’t it be great if I could just speak with.

Chris badge it a little longer, ’cause I just waved to him and I just saw for a second I thought, that guy’s kind of [00:47:00] interesting, and, but there’s just no time because you’re like in a, you’re like a pinball. You’re just like bouncing from one person to the next, and you’re having a great time.

But it’s just like I, and so I thought yeah, why don’t you do a podcast and just talk to them about their life story and not like. Something that they’re marketing and developing. Now that stuff gets in there a little bit, but I just try to keep it out because I, because there’s lots of podcasts that talk about product and marketing and community and stuff.

I just wanted to focus on the person that I was talking to, like a real conversation about their life really. That’s what I was looking for. So turns out, I was thinking about it and I said, oh, I don’t think there’s anybody that’s doing anything like this, and turned out there wasn’t anybody that doing exactly this.

Maybe something similar, but not exactly. And I never, I, let’s just say this, I never thought I would be a podcaster. The podcast came looking for me, so it [00:48:00] wasn’t like I was sitting around gee. I should have a podcast. No, it didn’t go that way. And I’m sitting in the car thinking like, I don’t even care if I ever get any sponsors.

I don’t care if anybody listens to it. I just wanna do this. And then after a while I said, yes, I do care if people listen. Yes, I do care if I get sponsors ’cause it takes a lot of time to do this. And even though I love doing it. I wanna get paid to do it too. And and so there I am. So I’ve to, tomorrow will be episode 58 and I use the script, which is something I had to learn.

I didn’t know the script, but a lot of other things I basically already knew because I’d been on podcast before. And the fact though, that I am doing a podcast, go ask Bob WP. Bob Dunn. ’cause for years I would say to him, why would you do a this? I would go up to him all the time and go, pop, why are you doing a podcast?

This is crazy. This is I don’t understand why you, why people do this. And then you know, [00:49:00] now you know, I understand why. And once you start doing it, and if you love doing it, it’s just really hard. It becomes your life, and look at how many show, how many shows have you done? Just crossed 500.

And Rob Karens, I did his 400th show. And, but it turns out there’s a lot of podcasters in the WordPress base. I’m not. Do you have any idea why?

Chris Badgett: My theory is that WordPress people are above average in terms of creativity content creation. We also work remotely, so like we get a lot out of online media, but also just connecting with humans and we also look beyond.

A company, which is what I love about the angle of your podcast. Who are the humans here? What’s the backstory here? I think that’s a wonderful angle.

Bud Kraus: Yeah. That’s what I like. I’m addicted to stories, yeah, we

Chris Badgett: all are. That’s how it makes us human. I have a background in anthropology and storytelling.

Is as human as it gets, right? [00:50:00] Yeah.

Bud Kraus: And I had no idea about this stuff. If you told me like what happened in 2018, I’ll tell you a real quick story. I took a trip, a train trip on Amtrak around the United States. I circumnavigated the United States on Amtrak, and I stopped a different cities and. And I was never, I never fell alone because I was constantly interviewing people wherever I went.

Now, I didn’t, it was, they were conversations, but I would sit with somebody on a train all night long and talk about their childhood. I. And the stories I heard were on one person to the next were just mindboggling. And I started realizing like, oh my God, these are just regular people. This is nothing like, and they all have these incredible stories.

So I didn’t leave the, that experience thing like, okay, I’ll do a podcast. No, it just stayed in my head. And then eventually it met up with this. 2023 thing and I said, oh, do a podcast. You’re ready to do this. So you’re like [00:51:00] made to do this. And it turned out I, yeah, I was made to do this.

It’s really funny that at a later stage in life you can find something that is your calling, that you just did not know.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, sometimes it finds you right.

Bud Kraus: Yeah, it, this absolutely found me. ’cause I, like I said, I wasn’t exactly sitting around wondering should I do a podcast? Because if I had done that, I said, no way.

So it’s a big surprise, you know that it is. And you’ll be on the show for sure. I can’t tell you what year, but you’ll be on the show.

Chris Badgett: Alright. That’s seriously bud. You can find him@seriouslybud.com. It’s Bud Kraus and also Joy of wp. Any final words? Yeah, any final words for the folks or any other way to connect?

Bud Kraus: Joy WP is the business side of me, although the podcast is it’s business too. Yeah. But Joy WP is the easiest way to [00:52:00] reach me, and I hope you will because always like really cool to, meet people this way. And, the really cool thing about what we do is we actually do meet people online.

We’re all experts at, I can name tons of people that are friends of mine today that I met online first before I ever saw them in, in person. Which is really extraordinary when you think about it. I think it is,

Chris Badgett: whatever, and that’s just to close it out. And that’s one of those unforeseen things where this disruptive technology actually increased human connectivity in a way, which is

Bud Kraus: amazing.

Good point, because I tend to think of social media as not social media. It’s not really social, but when you use it to make strong connections and friendships and business connections and whatever, and then you meet them and stuff, that is that’s the ultimate, or reconnecting with people, that’s the, like all this stuff has such big trade offs, good and bad.

So that’s it.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, bud. We really appreciate it.

Bud Kraus: Chris, thank you so much for even asking me. It was a real, it was a real pleasure.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn the latest LMSCast episode, Chris Badgett reintroduces Mark Westguard, the creator of WS Form a robust and adaptable form-building WordPress plugin.

Mark Westguard, the creator and principal developer of WS Form, a robust and developer-friendly form-building plugin for WordPress, founded it. Mark and Chris explore advanced applications of forms beyond the typical contact form, emphasizing their potential to improve learning websites and streamline intricate workflows. With over 150 customizable templates and more than 90 integrations, WS Form allows users to connect with platforms such as Mailchimp, CRMs, Make, Zapier, and others.

No matter if you’re gathering leads, organizing quizzes, carrying out surveys, developing calculators, or generating WordPress posts from form entries, WS Form offers dynamic features that streamline configuration and enhance flexibility. No matter if you’re gathering leads, organizing quizzes, carrying out surveys, developing calculators, or generating WordPress posts from form entries, WS Form offers dynamic features that streamline configuration and enhance flexibility.

Additionally, Mark describes how WS Form can create forms dynamically depending on third-party connections, such as importing Mailchimp lists and automatically creating mapped fields, making the process very user-friendly. This episode is jam-packed with tips for WordPress experts, site builders, and course developers who want to improve the way they utilize forms to engage people and optimize workflows.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a return guest. His name is Mark West Guard. He’s from WS Form. You can find that@wsform.com. It’s an incredible form building system for WordPress. It has a free version, which is awesome, and we’re gonna dive deep into forms and blow your mind about all the things you can do.

But first, welcome to the show, mark. Hey Chris.

Mark Westguard: Thank you for having me again. Good to be back. It’s been a while.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it has been a while. I see. I saw you in person recently, but it’s been a while since you’ve been on the show. That’s

Mark Westguard: right.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Mark Westguard: We usually

Chris Badgett: see each other at a work camp. Yeah. Seems like a once a year or twice a year.

That’s right. Let’s expand the minds of what’s possible with forms. People know there’s contact forms, there’s a email newsletter or lead magnet sign up form, but what are some other, just at a high level, like what, just rattle off some other ways people can use forms on their website, particularly for.

Learning sites, but really any site.

Mark Westguard: Yeah. You’ve got your user contact us form, like we just discussed, which is super easy to set up. We’ve got templates for that. But other things like newsletter sign up and what’s quite important is obviously getting that data stored somewhere so you can use it.

So if you’ve got an email marketing platform that you’re using or a CRM platform. That’s certainly something that we can cater to. We have 90 plus integrations now. And a few of those integrations are things like Make or Zapier where you can actually connect to hundreds of other different platforms.

So we’re integrated in with those as well. And then you’ve got things like. Creating custom posts in WordPress is possible. Calculators, quizzes, all kinds of stuff. So the list is pretty much endless. I think we now, we’ve got a hundred, 150 plus templates. Some of those are static, so those would be like, it’ll just create like a qui, a quiz for you or a survey.

But some of them are dynamic. So some of our templates are dynamic and such that you would, to give you an example, like if you were connected to MailChimp, for example it’ll show you your MailChimp lists in the templates. And then you can choose one of those lists. Click on one of those and it’ll actually build the form for you.

So you’d. Really don’t have to do a huge amount of work. It’ll just put all the fields in, map those to MailChimp, and then you just have to add that to a page on your on your site. So yeah lots of different use cases.

Chris Badgett: I think one of the biggest questions that we try to answer on this podcast for course graders and also the web professionals that build sites for the e-learning industry

Is how do I get clients. One of the ways you get clients is by having lead magnets. So something that somebody opts into. Yep. But there’s, you can get creative with it. Like in the early days it was, it’s like an ebook or sign up for a newsletter.

Some digital thing. But I think the calculators are really interesting. I’ve seen people do things, particularly if they’re teaching business

Where they have some kind of business niche and they have people like type in some variables. Hey, if you go through my program.

And how much do you think your thing would sell for? And yeah. How many people on your email list right now and I’m like a business coach.

Mark Westguard: It

Chris Badgett: can calculate like your potential ROI from joining the program or something like that. Tell us a little, and you have AI to help non-professional form builders like. Get a start on building the form. So tell us more about calculators.

Mark Westguard: Yeah. We have what are called calculated fields. So you can basically add any number of inputs to the form. So this could be number inputs, they could be maybe a range slider. If you wanna make it like a nice user interface for it you can put prices in there and then use the calculated fields to combine those different values and come out with an output.

And that output could be. As simple as a number form, or it could be even just some nice HTML. So if you want to use your skills and design skills to make something look really pretty, we can actually inject the output into HTML. And then you can make it a really nice looking calculator. Like you said, you could have a, maybe someone that’s got a course that will save somebody, X amount of dollars per unit you could be able to calculate it around that.

And then just on the point on the ai. We have AI built into WS form where you can actually type the type of form that you want, so you can literally talk to it as a human. Almost a five-year-old child tends to work better. But just type in what you want, so you type in the type of calculator that you want, and it will then build that form for you with the calculations ready, and then you can use that as a basis for your form and edit it and make it responsive and make it look any way that you want.

So yeah the calculator thing can be a really good way to entice people into purchasing your product. ’cause they can see instantly the kind of savings or how much money they’re gonna make as a result of using that course. We have a lot of people doing that actually.

Chris Badgett: Can you do it in a way where they have to submit their email address before the calculation reveals?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, you can do that. So we have. A thing called email validation in WS form. So they can type their email address in. That could be step one. You can then send them an email and say, click here to, check out the calculator or download the free guide, or whatever you’re offering as part of step two.

We’ve also got tabs as well, so if you wanna do a tabulated. Experience for the user. You could have step one, be the email. Step two could be the actual calculator itself. You can even hide those tabs. So it’s, they’re not expecting that. Step two one of the things that we try to educate people on is.

Try not to make the form too long or appear too long, right? So by breaking that up into steps that can really improve conversion rates on the forms and on those forms as well. We have a lot of tracking features as well, so if you wanna know where people are coming from, you can do UTM tracking.

You can even do iP geo lookup on stuff so you can see what country they’re coming from, al almost down to, the town of where they are. And all that data can be stored alongside the email address that you’ve captured. You can even push that data through to what, whatever, CRM or whatever email system you are using.

So obviously you’ve gotta put that in your privacy policy if you’re capturing that type of data. But that’s all possible too.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and just a super advanced pro tip out there, lifter, LMS, as an example, has geotargeting coupons. Oh, cool. So that, yeah. If you’re doing a price localization strategy where, in certain parts of the world where their purchasing power is. Much lower than where you are. You can figure out where they are in the world, just with the form and then later give ’em a special offer. Yeah. Geography. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great idea. Tell us about quizzes and stuff. ’cause one of the ways quizzes can be in courses and things, but they can also be lead magnets, like

What’s an example of quiz that you could do where you could capture an email? As well and provide some kind of value through the quiz.

Mark Westguard: Yeah, quit is come in so many different flavors. Some can be just, ask, asking questions and seeing whether they get the questions right is a challenge.

Others can be recommending some kind of output based upon parameters that you’ve put in. So you could ask a series of 10 questions and then work out which of those has the majority. And then almost like a knowledge based system where, you’re asking questions and it’s giving back a recommended answer based upon what you’ve put in.

And a lot of that in WS form is done with our conditional logic. Also calculated fields, but we have conditional logic in there. So you can say, if this, and this has been answered, then show this message or show this HTML block that has some information on it. Our conditional logic is.

Incredibly powerful. A lot of form plugins will have, if this value equals this, then show this field. And that’s pretty much as far as it goes. But with ours you can do, calculations, you can work on ranges, you can check multiple, like radio buttons or check boxes to show certain things.

Really the sky’s the limit with it in terms of what you can do with it. But we have some example quizzes in our templates, but I’ve seen some really cool stuff done. Like Kyle from the admin bar if people are familiar with him he’s done. All the quizzes and stuff that he does now with Ws form.

So he does things like like the survey that he gives out to web developers, and then he then publishes the results from that elsewhere. I’m trying to think of some of the other stuff that he’s done. He’s done so many and I usually end up helping him with them. ‘Cause I’m the nerd that knows all the buttons to press yeah.

But that’s, it’s a great way of enticing people to your product or whatever you’re selling by having some kind of. It could be a fun quiz or it could be something that gives value add.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you could even do lead scoring,

I know as a copywriter the number one question a website should answer is, will it work for me?

The prospect is wondering, will it work for me? So if you had a form that was like a quiz to help see if you’re a good fit for what’s on offer here. You could have the conditional logic and potentially scoring and stuff, and based on their inputs it could recommend and also notify you like, Hey dude, you have a really hot lead right here.

This person’s a perfect fit.

Mark Westguard: Yeah. And that score, again, can be pushed through to your email marketing or CRM, so you can score them and use that to determine who you’re gonna target first.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. How does surveys work? I’m asking because. There’s a little bit of not confusion, but it really takes your a while to wrap your head around the differences between things like a review, a testimonial, a survey.

Like how do you think about surveys of WS form? What do they do?

Mark Westguard: Usually you’re just gonna have a series of questions that will be presented either with like radio buttons or check boxes. It’s important for people to realize the difference between check boxes and radios as well. Yeah, we often get people using ’em in the wrong place.

But checkbox, essentially you can choose more than one. Radio, you’re gonna choose one option. And a survey you would probably use, gonna use a series of radio buttons on there with different questions and answers. And then behind the scenes you could. Score those give them different scales and you could even add those values together.

So maybe you’ve got a question with three answers and you know that this answer is gonna be. The best weight, you might give that a score of three, and then the least one will be one. And then you can just add up all those values and then using our calculator fields. And then you can then use that as a indicator for that lead in whatever platform you’re using for, for who to target.

Again, it’s entirely up to you how you wanna lay that survey out. You can use things like the radio buttons. You can even use images. So if you wanna have images that people click on, that’s possible. You could have a rain slider. All kinds of different user interfaces that you can use to survey people.

And if you want to get just general feedback as well on that survey, maybe just wanna ask a general question at the bottom. You can put just a text area filled so you can capture some content from that user as well. So you can use a combination, any combination of fields that you want.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And all those field types and everything.

It starts opening the mind of how powerful WS forum can be for just data. That’s what I realized The power forms is it’s an opportunity to collect data and there’s all kinds of data and what you do with it. Tell us about,

Chris Badgett: Go ahead.

Mark Westguard: No, sorry. It’s interesting how sometimes forms get forgotten about on a website and how important they are, because really they’re.

Your main channel for capturing data about a user. Whether it’s a potential user or someone asking a question on your site it’s important to get those forms right. They’re often overlooked.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

Yeah. And you can use ’em for almost anything like

An example I’ve seen a lot in the e-learning community.

Lifter, as an example, has its own e-commerce system. But we also integrate with WooCommerce and one of the reasons we recommend WooCommerce. Is when somebody is selling other products besides courses and memberships.

But a lot of times people will say, oh, I’ve used WooCommerce. It’s complicated.

I don’t want all that. I just need a way to sell my t-shirt.

My swag store for my brand or whatever. Yeah. That goes along with my courses. You can use a form for that. Can you walk us through how to set up like a simple payment form?

Mark Westguard: Super easy. So obviously decide what you wanna sell. Maybe it’s a, let’s say a t-shirt.

You can add options on there for choosing a t-shirt size. You maybe you’ve got different prices based upon a particular attribute on a product. So you can actually use what’s called, we have a price check checkbox. We have a price radio, we even have a price rain slider. So you can adjust the price of the product.

Yeah. You can adjust the price of the product with user interface elements like that, that ultimately is gonna give you a price, right? It’s really as simple as dragging a stripe field onto the form wherever you want. And that’s gonna be where they enter their credit card details. And then you put a stripe checkout button on there where again, wherever you want on the form.

So you can drag and drop these components where you want them. Put your. Stripe key in you’ll have two keys. There’s a test key and a production key, or a live key. So when you’re testing, you use the the test key and you can use test credit cards to, to make sure everything’s working okay.

And that stripe. Field basically becomes a gateway for that form. So nothing’s gonna run on that form unless the payment goes through. And as long as the form is validated, IE, they put their email address incorrectly, they filled out their name and all the other required information that you need.

So it’s really a case that’s building a form. Add the strike button and then just set up whatever actions you want to occur when the payment goes through. So that would be things like showing a message to the users to say thank you for the order. Sending them an email as a confirmation, sending you an email confirmation so you know the orders come through and saving that submission as well.

And it’s important to know that if you use our payment methods, we don’t store any credit card information at all. That’s all handled by a third party for security. So yeah, it’s quite straightforward. It saves you having to, install WooCommerce for such a simple sale. But if you’re looking at things like, product variations and order tracking and all that kind of stuff, then you’d probably want to look at WooCommerce.

But for a simple sale online maybe given a donation or buying an event ticket or where, whatever it may be, then you can certainly do that with WS form.

Chris Badgett: I’ve seen it too in the LMS space for people want to put an application in front of the course. And application form is something that. A lot of us are familiar with in the offline world.

And sometimes there’s an application fee, like 30 bucks or 50, a hundred, whatever it is.

So you can do that too. You can put a wall up. So not just anybody can apply. Apply. You wanna make sure they’re a good fit.

Mark Westguard: Yep.

Chris Badgett: Yep.

Mark Westguard: And you can also tie in a user registration with that as well. So once they’ve, if you had maybe a payment gateway, you could say, if the payment goes through, then register the user. Make sure we’ve captured their name maybe any other fields that lifter LMS requires as part of that information. And then you’ve got the user registered and then you can redirect them to lifter LMS to carry on the process. Yeah, you could use that as a gateway if you need a larger application form.

Chris Badgett: And sometimes those forms. There are some privacy issues or terms in the agreement. I remember my mind first being blown with the whole like, oh my gosh, I can sign a signature on a website.

But tell us about the signature and then, privacy confirmation, agree to terms yeah. Stuff. What’s possible?

Mark Westguard: Yeah. So you can add a signature, fill to a form. That signature fill can actually be any size that you want on the page. So obviously you wanna make it big enough they can put their signature in there. And that’s actually touch compatible as well. So if you’re using a mobile device, they can, I feel like that’s easier to use your finger than using a mouse.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Mark Westguard: And you obviously for accessibility, that can be a problem. So you usually wanna offer a text field input as well, where people can just type in their name. So you can offer that as an alternative. And the next level with that is there are now services which do consent certificates. And what that does is as somebody is filling the form out.

It’s actually recording what’s going on that screen. It’s big daddy, right? But yeah. As you are filling the form out and you do the signature, it’s recording the cursor position, it’s recording what they’re typing in, and when they hit submit, you’ve then got actually a visual recording.

Of that consent that they’ve given. And in some cases, certain laws require that type of consent now so we’ve integrated in with a company called Trusted Form that does that, and that’s built into Ws form now. So there’s no add-on or anything that you need for it. So if you are a trusted form customer, you can just drag the trusted form element onto the form.

That’s pretty much it. I think as long as you’ve got trusted form installed on your site, we’ve actually made it fully automated. It’ll even work with multiple forms on the same page as well, which a lot of them don’t. So that’s, it’s it’s quite a cool new feature. We’re trying to keep up with all the regulations.

That are going on behind all this stuff and all the laws that are involved. And as these new products come out, we try to integrate with ’em and make them available. And we try to make it available as part of the core product. So the signature field is included. You don’t have to purchase an additional add-on for that.

That’s actually WordPress core sorry, WS form core. And so is the trusted form functionality as well. So that’s all included in the product.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Open our mind to post management and how forms and posts can interact. That’s

Mark Westguard: a big part of what we do. So you’ll be familiar or maybe not familiar with.

Custom field plugins in WordPress. So those basically enable you to add custom fields to a post in WordPress. So you might want to build a post and let’s just, I’m trying to think what it might be. Maybe a recipe and you want to add some fields to that recipe post, such as, here are my ingredients. Here’s the methods, and maybe here’s a picture of what it looks like in the end.

So with Ws form, what you can do is once you’ve got those custom fields created, and you might want to use something like a CF, it’s a CPT, there’s pods, there’s the there’s jet engine, the six that we support. So what happens is if you go into our template library and you click add, you go to post management, and then you choose your custom post type, we’ll actually automatically detect that you have custom fills installed.

When you hit that form template, it’s gonna build the whole form for you. So it’s actually gonna add an ingredient field, it’s gonna add a method field. And it’s gonna add a file upload field for the recipe image. And when you preview that form, you can fill the data out. On the form, hit submit and it will then automatically create that recipe post in WordPress for you.

You can even make an edit form as well. So if you want to give people the ability to edit that recipe, they can click, edit, go to the form change anything they want, and then Ws form will update that post for you. So we have one of the things that we’ve really focused on is we’re focused on kind of the developer community quite a bit in terms of.

Reducing the time that it takes to build forms. Traditionally that whole process would’ve been fairly cumbersome. ’cause you would have to create all the fields for the custom fields you’ve created. You’d have to do the mapping manually. And then we also have, and I think you may remember this, Chris, we have that populate feature in our debug console where you can, if you’ve got a field with, sorry, a form with say, 20 fields on it, having to fill that out every time.

So then submit. Yeah, when you’re testing it’s cumbersome. So that was one of the first things we ever developed for WS form was the populate feature. You hit populate, it fills out all the fields for you, even signature fields, and it’s one click to test the form. So that makes things a lot quicker. So yeah, we’ve done a lot to cut down that development time for sure.

Chris Badgett: I see you have a PDFs ad on PDFs are popular in LMS sites for all kinds of reasons. But how do you see people, how does that work and what’s an example of how people use that?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, some people want to send maybe a PDF receipt with a submission, or they just wanna create a PDF document where you inserting different fields within that PDF document.

So [00:23:00] by default. You can attach a PDF to a form submission, and we just have a, like a basic template for that, which is like filled value, field value. But you can fully customize that PDF if you want to. So you can use an HTML template. You can add images to it, logos, lay it out however you want, and then use our, so we have a.

Hundreds of variables that you can use in WS form to insert fill content or your blog name or date and time and things like that. So you can make that PDF template dynamic. That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: And just from an example we used earlier, so you could do like a PDF receipt for the t-shirt and the Exactly.

And and just to put you on the spot, ’cause I’ve had this support request many times a lot of courses. Help people come up with a plan of some sort. Okay. It could be like a business plan.

It could be a like a customized fitness plan or something like that. Is it possible with WS form to.

Kind of work on a form, but not complete it all at once and then at the end create a PDF of the finished product.

Mark Westguard: Yeah, so there’s two parts to that. You could create a form that they can save and continue and come back to. So yeah, that’s. So we have two ways of doing that. You can either do it cookie based, so if they’re sitting at home on their computer, they can hit save and then go away and then come back and continue.

And we also have an email method as well, so you can send ’em an email with a link and they can come back to their form any time. And then at the end of it, when they’re ready to submit, so we, I’ll save and submit are two separate actions, so you can do whatever you want when they hit save. You could even send ’em a PDF when they save.

But then usually you probably send a PDF on submit when they’ve actually completed the whole process. You can even add a progress. Field to your form that shows how far they’ve got. That’s calculated in several different ways, but the most popular is how many required fields they’ve completed.

But you can also do it based upon how many tabs they’ve got through. So they’ve got an idea of, how much further they’ve got to go with that form. So yeah, you could do, say we continue, even in the PDF itself, you can actually put we have, if. End if variables in there. So you can actually switch parts of that PDF on and off based upon what they’ve answered in that form too.

So you can make that fully dynamic.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Right after we get off this call, I’m gonna email the guy who’s been hitting me up about this for a long time, because I’ve found it. We’ve, you found the man. I have in my notes, but I don’t remember what it was in reference to. I wrote down Google, dude does that.

Oh yeah,

Mark Westguard: yeah. So we have, we’ve got integrations with a lot of different Google APIs, so for example, Google mapping. So if you wanted to show a map on a form, you can do that. That map can also be made interactive so people could click on it to show maybe where they live or where they want something delivered.

So that’s possible. And then we also have a Google address field, which enables that. The Google address field’s actually really useful if you’ve got an address field. On your form so people can start to type their address out and then choose their address from a dropdown. You’ve probably seen that on forms before, and then you just click your address and that will then fill out the relevant fields on the form.

Ours is quite cool because you can map any of those address elements to any number of fields on the form. So if you have maybe a billing address and a shipping address, you could have it fill out both at the same time. So you don’t have to fill things out twice. And then we have Google routing as well, which is our newer one.

That’s pretty cool. You can put a start address and an end address in there. The end address could be your business and it could be hidden. So they just type in where they live. And what they can do is use that routing to calculate the distance between those two addresses, and then that can be tied in with e-commerce fields to then work out a cost for that distance.

And that can then be tied in with the stripes. You see how you see where we’re going with this? You can tie all these fields together to do cool stuff, and then you can charge people for. Whatever you wanna do with that. So the route, it basically gives you distance time. It even plots it on a map if you want to show you the actual route that will be taken between those two, two locations.

So we actually have some, like delivery firms that, that use that type of stuff. But yeah. And then what else have we got on Google? There’s the Google map. Feel. We’ve discovered that. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much everything. Obviously we have Google recapture and stuff for spam. And that’s a whole another part to this.

Making sure that your form doesn’t get, spammed too much by the unreasonable is out there. So

Chris Badgett: I see you have fresh desk. I think like with coaches and course creators, if they’re providing support you can have a contact form, but you can get a little fancier. What’s,

Mark Westguard: yeah.

Chris Badgett: What can somebody do to create a sort of a support area on their website that’s a little more than passing to email handoff?

Mark Westguard: Yeah. So if you’re using a support system such as like Zendesk or Freshdesk. You can use our integration with those platforms to actually get the ticket put directly into that system so you’re not having to take the email copy and paste it and put it in as a ticket.

The other nice thing with that is you can also tie in with fields such as the priority. You can also do file uploads too, so you can attach file attachments to the ticket. So if somebody wants to send you a screenshot or an export of some kind, they can attach that to the. Ticket itself, and it’s all done in one click when they hit submit on that form.

So that’s, I think any way you can cut down steps, any way you can make support easier and making that form easy. The other nice thing you can do is once they’re logged in, say they’re logged into lifter LMS. You’ve already got their username, you’ve got their email address, you’ve got their first name, their last name.

You can inject that into the form so that they don’t have to fill the information out. They can change it if they want to, but most of that support ticket can be completed for them. All they’ve gotta do is type in what they need, hit submit, and off it goes.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. This is super cool. I think we’ve done our job of getting people excited about forms.

I find it, whenever I talk to someone like Mark and I get deep into forms, I’m like, oh my God, there’s so much you can do. And like it’s the, you can just be as creative as you want to be. It’s really amazing.

Mark Westguard: Yeah, and it’s the challenge with the product is to make it. Broad enough that it can handle a lot of different use cases, and that’s basically what our job is as a form developer, is to make sure that functionality is there for you.

And then we also have, WordPress hooks, filter hooks, actions. The ability to run WordPress hooks when the form is saved or submitted, or even, we actually have the ability, like you could have a button on the form that when you click it, it goes off and does. An action via PHP if you want. So it is, there’s a lot of, more complicated methods that you can use behind the scenes to make the form, do whatever you want.

But we’ve tried to make the vast majority of the functionality that you need. Super simple. So it’s, a few clicks to, to make it do what you need to do. And we’ve got a lot of functionality built in, such as select two on a select field, which enables you to like partially type in what you want from a long list, and then it’ll give you suggestions that traditionally would require some custom Java script which a lot of people can’t do.

It’s it takes a bit of research to do that. So in Ws form it’s a checkbox and you just check it and it does the work for you.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And if you wanna play around with this, ws form.com has a demo. So tell us what they experience in the demo.

Mark Westguard: So it’s it’s actually run using Insta wp, which is a really cool service.

That spin basically spins up an entire server for you virtual server, which has WS form pre-installed on it. And you’ve got like the post management add-on that we spoke about. There’s a few other add-ons in there that you can play around with. WooCommerce is actually installed on there as well.

’cause we have the ability to put our forms on products so you can customize products. So yeah, there’s a lot of functionality built into there. I think it’s a 14 day trial so you can play around with it. Any forms that you build, you can export and then put into your own server when you’re ready. So anything that you play around with, you can actually migrate that across very easily.

Yeah, give it a go.

Chris Badgett: And you’ve got the the pricing on your site. So there’s different options to choose from. Where do you recommend people to get started

Mark Westguard: if they, so there’s three different levels. There’s a personal one, which is a single site license, and with that one you can buy the add-ons all cart.

So whatever you need. You’d have to buy them all at once. Then we have a freelance license, which is a fire site license, and that includes some of the most common add-ons that people use. And then we have the agency. So if you’re an agency user and you have a lot of sites, you can use our agency edition on unlimited sites, and that includes all of our add-ons as well.

So that one’s the real value add package. But if you just start it out, we actually have a light edition as well, so if you just wanna try it for a contact us form or building. Like a basic questionnaire and things like that. The light edition is pretty cool. We’re one of the few freeform plugins as well that actually stores all the submissions and enables you to export them.

Yeah, some of the freeform plugins don’t actually enable, you have to pay to, to get that feature unlocked, which is crazy. And all of our. Anti-spam measures like the recapture, the H capture, the CloudFare turnstile, the honey pot, all the usual stuff you expect to see. That’s all included in the light edition as well.

But if you want the more powerful features like the conditional logic, the signature fields, the, all the other fun fields that we have, the e-commerce the ability to create posts and integrating with third parties, that’s in the pro edition. So that’s where you wanna look.

Chris Badgett: Every website needs a form solution.

WS form is awesome. Check it out. Mark, thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. And now my mind’s spinning about, oh my God, I want to go build something in WS form and I’m thinking of my afternoon projects. But thank you for coming back on and appreciate all you do at WS form. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you besides ws form.com?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, so there’s contact form on there, but if you can check me out on Twitter, I’m on there at West Guard, W-E-S-T-G-U-A-R-D. Ws form is at WS form. And then we’ve also got a Facebook group as well. So if you wanna join in the conversation there, we’re on Facebook too. Awesome. Thanks for coming on, mark.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Chris.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Matt Medeiros shares all the tips about podcasting WordPress. Matt Medeiros highlights that the success and longevity of a podcast come from genuine interest and care, not just from treating it as a marketing tactic.

With a history of involvement in the tech and open-source communities, Matt Medeiros is a veteran podcaster, WordPress expert, and digital media strategist. Matt highlights the difference between this and hosts such as Chris Badgett, who truly appreciate human connection and see each episode as a chance to learn, develop, and interact in a significant way with others in the WordPress, online learning, and entrepreneurial communities.

Matt additionally notes that this authentic approach causes the work to seem less like work and more like a creative endeavor. When podcasters focus on their curiosity and the desire to serve their audience instead of solely measuring downloads or ROI, they naturally expand their “luck surface area”—the potential for unexpected opportunities such as partnerships, new ideas, and customer connections.

Podcasting then becomes more than just content; it becomes a platform for personal branding, business development, and long-term impact. According to Matt, those who focus on the art of conversation and consistency, rather than just results, are the ones who truly succeed in the podcasting space.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. We’ve got Matt Medeiros, he’s back on the show. I think this is number three. This is a special episode. This is episode number 500 LMS cast, started in 2013. Here we are 16, or what? I’m doing the math wrong. I can’t do math either. What’s that? 13 years later, which is amazing.

Matt’s been podcasting longer than that. We’re gonna talk about the power of podcasting, celebrate this milestone, talk about personal branding benefits of [00:01:00] podcast. But first, Matt, welcome back on the show.

Matt Medeiros: Chris. I’m glad you haven’t got sick of me yet. I’m happy to be here on this milestone episode of yours.

Big round of applause. Is folks like you that. I actually really look up to for that dedication and also for numbering your episodes. Oh, because that’s something that I’ve just never done. But we can talk about the why in, in a little while.

Chris Badgett: Let’s start there with dedication.

To me, I feel like podcasting is quote, easy. I tend to do commitment well, like I do things over a long time. But when I discovered the medium, it just works. And I get a lot of value out of talking to people. I become a better communicator. I’m doing marketing, I’m creating content, building my network.

But mostly it’s the personal connection and being able to connect with people all over the world who have similar interests. And we’re trying to serve, course creators, WordPress professionals, coaches, and these folks. And to me, it’s just fun. I don’t wanna say it’s. Quote, easy, but it just, it’s not that hard.

And just to get one done a week it’s not that bad. But What are your thoughts on commitment and consistency and just the podcaster DNA? Because I almost feel like I discovered oh, this is, for me, I actually, it’s easier for me to podcast than it is to write and make YouTube videos, even though I’ve done bo a lot of both.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. So I think. That’s the secret sauce right there is that you care about like the human connections that you’re making, you care about, like this conversation that we’re having right now. You care about meeting new people, you care about hearing new ideas and how people are tackling things in their business or their course creation.

And that’s something that for a lot of podcasts and now I, a few years ago, so I work at full-time at Gravity Forms now. A few years ago I worked in the audio space proper. [00:03:00] Where I consulted a lot of folks to start their podcasts, and there’s nothing wrong with it. A lot of people start their podcasts because they go, oh, that’s a thing to do.

A podcast is a thing to do in this marketing content marketing wheel that I’m told I should be rolling down the hill. And oftentimes people will say Podcasting is a lot of hard work because it is. But the 50% of the hard work is. If you don’t enjoy it if you don’t enjoy meeting people and having those conversations and being curious about like different aspects, and you simply look at it as a task and you’re like, how do I measure the ROI on this podcast thing?

How am I getting customers? Why am I downloads only a hundred downloads per episode? I’m looking at YouTube and I’m seeing tens of thousands on these celebrity podcasts. What, why, what’s, what am I missing? And I think that. When you care about these conversations and you’re looking at it as a learning experience, it’s enjoyable.

Number one, you, number two, you increase that surface luck area of things that can happen because of it, you have another creative idea. You meet somebody else that could be a business partner, you create a friendship, whatever it is or somebody listens to you and they buy your product.

Like you’re increasing all of this luck surface area when you’re doing this work. And then you think of that like business side afterwards, okay, I’m gonna brand the show differently. I’m gonna have different segments. And you kinda work on it and it becomes like this art as I like to refer to it as, so when you actually care about this stuff, it is easy. And I think the particular challenge is when people just look at it as, I gotta fill in the dots of this thing and ship it to my newsletter, or just post it on social media and God, I gotta get to the next one. That’s when it becomes, the particular challenge for somebody who says ah, I burned out from this podcast thing.

So you’re in a good spot by like actually caring number first and foremost.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk a little deeper about ROI. In marketing there’s always this goal to like, what’s the return on investment of time and capital? I feel like podcasting is literally the hardest thing to track ROI on.

A lot of people listen, they’re not on the show notes. They hear about a brand or a person. They Google it. You have no idea how this person actually, or the ROI you got from that. There’s all kinds of intangibles from the network to becoming a better communicator. We all say it like, I can’t go back and listen to my early episodes ’cause I’ll just be like, man, I was, I’ve become a better public speaker.

There’s the personal brand thing. You’re, I know when you went to Gravity Forms and you were looking for new opportunities, I saw a tweet, but like everybody in the WordPress community. Knows who Matt Maderis is, but that’s because you’ve put yourself out there, you’ve added tons of value for people.

I remember when I was new to WordPress, riding around Montana, listening to the Matt Report and just like falling in [00:06:00] love with this industry. But you were the guide. You were like, let me introduce you to some interesting people. And there’s all kinds of ROI that comes from that, but

Matt Medeiros: yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Riff on ROIA little more.

Yeah.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Particularly in, in particularly in this space. In the WordPress space, and I would probably say like in different silos of the tech web development, and probably from your listeners here who are doing courses and in industries I have no idea about. It’s like finding those pockets of community that you can, associate yourself within.

And podcasting is fantastic for that, right? Whatever that little silo of the community is. And I would say in the greater community of WordPress, the silo that we are in is. We’re bus, we’re building businesses, right? We’re building brands or, working for brands. Like we care about the economy of WordPress, and that’s our, our thing.

I would also say that there’s a hidden gem in podcasting for the business side of it. Is local podcasts still a very untapped. Market. But I [00:07:00] will tell you now as of, early May, 2025, that’s gonna change because at the top things are so saturated with celebrity podcasts and all this other stuff, I.

That the industry is going to buckle to that pressure a little bit, and people are gonna be so sick of the next celebrity podcast or the next news anchor who starts his or her own YouTube show, where they’re like, but now this is all the same. It’s like when everyone said cut the chord for cable and here we are, 15 years later.

We’re all paying micro fees to all these streaming services to, to go like 50% more than what we were spending on cable, 10, 15 years ago. And it’s this same like flip o of this of the industry. And I think local is gonna be a big thing, which could, for those who are listening, maybe your courses and courseware are in could affect a local market.

So that could be a benefit, but. Measuring that ROI is super difficult. So you’re either doing this thing to build your brand sentiment, takes time, build [00:08:00] that resume, get your name out there. That’s all cool. And if that’s what you’re in for, which I’m largely in it for that, then continue with what you’re doing.

There’s no need to try to pixel your podcast and try to convert at the end of the day. It’s gonna be very difficult to measure that in the audio space. But what it also does, connections, networking, we already mentioned that. The sort of the third thing is I look at this as.

Speaking of like comedians, comedians have a podcast and like I, I listen to Bill Burr very often, his podcast. Hilarious. But what he’s doing in that podcast is he’s practicing his standup. He’s using that as his stage. So if you study comedians and it’s just like you gotta do a hundred shows to get 15 minutes of content, right?

And do that four more times, 400 shows to build your hour special, right? These are like, the comedian in my opinion is like the true, oh, this is a broad term, but the true [00:09:00] essence of an entrepreneur, you go up on stage, you fail countless times year after year, and then suddenly you figured it out.

You figured out your process, you figured out who you should be speaking to. You start figuring out what your craft and your angle is in your content, and at, if you’re podcasting and you’re, having these meetings, think of it as that. Maybe brainstorm session for your business, work out different topics and ideas.

That’s what I did when I started the MAT report. I didn’t know how the WordPress community worked. I didn’t know how to run an agency. You and I were both at Press Conf and I just interviewed Jake Goldman at Press Conf on, on stage, and he was a huge part of me like figuring things out. Getting my business down.

I was like, okay, now how can I like 10 x this experience with Jake and asking him questions on how to run an agency, how can I 10 x this? It was, at first it was gonna be start a blog, but then I was like, I’ll start a podcast and see where it lands. And it was a massive education process, so don’t undervalue that.

Oftentimes people can just throw that away. But in your early days, like really use that as. As you are expensive as you’re learning, try not to look for did I get a customer outta this? But look at it as like your investment in, understanding how to run your business, if that makes sense.

Chris Badgett: That does. And let’s, you mentioned pockets of community. What advice would you have for somebody who’s getting trapped in the compare game? So LMS cast as an example. Doesn’t get big numbers on the downloads, but the people that do is a pocket of community that care about things like WordPress, entrepreneurship online education.

It’s very tight focus. But if I look at something like the All In Podcast or My First Million, or Joe Rogan or whoever. I’m like, am I failing? I don’t really feel that way ’cause I’ve already figured it out that yeah, hey, small is good. And like you said, there’s a million streaming services.

Pick the ones that work for you. Pick the podcasts that work for [00:11:00] you. There’s like like mainstream podcasts, but there’s also these tight niche podcasts. How do you, what advice do you have about not getting wrapped up in the download counts or having a small, a quote, small audience compared to the mainstream ones?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I think especially. It is hard for me to answer this because I analyze the podcast industry as much as I analyze the WordPress space. And COVID was, I know I hate bringing up Covid ’cause it’s man, this is like five, six years ago. Like how long are we gonna talk about that?

But what Covid did, I guess also maybe for your audience too, is it accelerated the adoption of podcasts. People were listening more and people wanted to start more podcasts. So we. We got this insane boom. This is probably, this is why I joined that CAOs because there’s an insane boom, a lot of money into it.

And it was just like, oh man, audio’s here to stay. Like this is the thing. And people got conditioned to inflated numbers on the audio side. And we felt shouldn’t we all have like big numbers? ’cause everyone’s doesn’t everyone [00:12:00] listen to this? And what we’re getting, just like maybe your Google search traffic, it starts now.

It’s worth coming back down. It’s starting to plateau like AI’s com combating against your organic search. Now video’s competing with audio. So it’s plateauing. I don’t look at that as a negative. I look at that as I’m correcting the amount the size of my audience, right? When I, look at.

Whatever, the 2000 subscribers on my email list for the WP Minute, back when I was doing the MAT report, it was like almost 10,000 back then. But hey it’s been corrected. Now. There’s a lot of people who have just simply left WordPress. I don’t, I realize that. I understand it. And I course correct for that.

And it’s a more intimate audience, right? People are engaged more. And you can craft content that’s gonna be more compelling for that audience. This is something that I was actually thinking I was telling you before we hit record. I was out on a walk. ’cause that’s what I do now instead of running.

And I was thinking about this, is if you do feel [00:13:00] like you’re on that hamster wheel of, okay, I’m doing an episode every single week. And this is getting to be a little bit of a slog. I am feeling a little drained from not feeling like the numbers are oh so big. This is a perfect time to have a little bit of reflection point and make sure that you understand who your audience is by literally polling them, telling them to take a quick little survey.

Tweeting this stuff out, do a single podcast episode that begs, literally begs for people to tell me what you do so I can make sure I am making the content for you. And have a little strategy to, to reinvest in understanding who that audience is. If you’re feeling burned out, cut the content in half your production in half and take the information that you just learned from your audience.

Double down on super valuable content for that audience [00:14:00] and make sure that content is going to be a must listen, right? Like it’s a must listen. Like Chris, I want to go back and start creating content that you wanna listen to again, just like you did, 10 years ago. And that’s what I’m doing.

In these coming months and then cut it in half and spend more time promoting it and breaking it down. And making sure that you can bring that wisdom in chunks on social media or short clips on YouTube and making sure that you are giving yourself a fair shot at promoting, because half the battle is making the content.

The other battle is making sure people tune in and see it ’cause everyone’s busy. And there is so much competition. So cut it in half if you have to, which is what I’ve done, and spend more time breaking it down and making sure people are seeing the big takeaways through social platforms and things like YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and all this other stuff.

That was a long answer. I apologize. [00:15:00]

Chris Badgett: And a pro tip, I used a script for editing and they have AI confined viral clips and all this stuff. It’s never been easier. It’s still a lot of work, but Sure. Yeah, it’s

Matt Medeiros: a lot of work. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Let’s address stage fright. We’re so far from it that we we’ve dealt with that issue.

But I think you just gotta do it and then over time you get, you just get used to. Just having a conversation. And I really love, I heard Lex Friedman once say when he does a podcast, it’s like the whole world exploded and it’s just him and the guest and that’s it. And it’s just a deep conversation and that’s how I feel.

I do always in the back of my mind have the audience in mind like, let’s create value. What can we talk about that’s not just makes a great conversation but like really helps people and a lot of people ideally, but for me, it’s like I just get absorbed in this one-on-one conversation and the stage fright that just doesn’t exist because of that.

How about you? Yeah.

Matt Medeiros: Yes. This is something [00:16:00] that it you work through it. It’s like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the more you strengthen it, et cetera, et cetera. I would say though that the, the only strategic piece of advice that I have for that is to. This sounds super cliche, but it’s just be your authentic self.

It’s just don’t talk about shit you don’t know. Yeah. And that is the biggest, that is the biggest advantage. Early on in, when I was in like high school I forget what the name of the program was, but it was, something career, I forget what it was, but it was like kids that had particular skills, there was a program that you could join and like you could teach other people, like how you do these skills and ob obviously mine was like computers back then. And I remember the teacher was fantastic because she was making me break down. The most simplistic things that I just took for advantage.

Took advantage of. Now you gotta remember, this is this is late nineties, right? So computers, people still struggle with [00:17:00] computers today, nevermind, like back in the nineties. And I remember her telling me to like. Set this computer up. ‘Cause this is when they were just like getting computers in the office for like, all these teachers.

And she was like, can you set my computer up for me? I was like, yeah. So I, I started doing it and then I just put the whole thing together in five minutes, monitor, desktop, keyboard, mouse, printer, all this stuff. And she’s whoa. So what did you do? Oh, I just plugged in the stuff.

I don’t know what’s a, like I just, how’d you get the printer to work? I just plugged in the printer cable. What’s a printer? Cable. And she made me break down the most basic fundamental steps that I was just taking advantage of. You don’t know what a printer cable is? And she’s no, I’ve never seen a printer cable in my life.

People listening to this today might be like, printer, what the hell’s a printer? But she made me like really break down those like real basics. And I’m sure you teach us in like courses. Don’t take. It, don’t forget like the most basic fundamental things people don’t know, and this is a perfect learning [00:18:00]moment.

So I use that to my advantage, like growing up, like understanding, like I have something to offer as basic as it might be. I just have to find the people who need this information, right? I’m not talking like this is something that’s infamous in the WordPress space. A lot of like course creators and stuff like that or content creators.

We all want to like create courses and things like that, but we’re talking to other WordPress people who are doing the same thing. It’s this is not your audience. These people know how to do this stuff. They tune in and they like you and they engage with you on social because they’re, you’re friends with them, but you’ll never sell them how to make a website with Elementor because they already know how to do that.

They’re already doing it. You have to go find the people who are not here on Twitter and sell that course to them and get them engaged in it. So finding the audience and never taking the most simplistic things that, you know for advantage. And it’s another lesson that Gary Vaynerchuk, whom I haven’t followed in quite some time, but that was the thing he always [00:19:00] said.

He is I would just never, I just never talk about anything. I don’t know, like. When I know something, you’re gonna hear everything and every opinion that I have on that topic. But if you started talking to me about like financial tech industry, I’m not touching it with a 10 foot pole ’cause I don’t know anything about it.

Pass I got, I’ve got no opinion. And that’s, I also grew up in car sales, so that was a getting rejected in a cold November afternoon on a dreary car lot in New England. I. We’ll teach you a lot on confidence and being able to talk to folks.

Chris Badgett: I think one of the things that really stands out in the AI world and where podcasts can help is having a personal human brand.

And I want to get your thoughts on branding. In my opinion, branding is easy when you just be yourself and stay in your lane like you’re saying. If you meet me at a conference, same hat, same shirt, talking about the same stuff, I’m [00:20:00] probably a little shyer than you think because you’ve seen me on the internet, but I’m actually a reserved guy.

But other than that, what is what you get. How do you think about brand and why it’s important and the way podcasting fits into that?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so for years I always thought that the output of my work. Was defining my brand right? Was like, oh, if I do this podcast episode and I put out this conductor plugin or something like that.

That was the brand, right? And I’ve slowly over time started to realize that I. I’m trying to detach myself from the work and bring people on more of I hate the word journey, but this is the experience that I’m going down and here’s, here are all the things I’m learning while I’m doing this stuff.

See the stuff I’m doing over here? It’s the MAT report. And it’s the WP Minute. It’s South coast fm. And it’s breaking content. It’s, we are Here podcast. It is our Beloved Medium podcast. It’s the Breakdown podcast. It’s the Crew Collective podcast. Coming soon, like there’s all these things that I do, but I want people to understand, like for me.

My brand is that you, you trust and trust me, right? The typ, the typical like marketing sales kind of thing. And trust me, this is all the stuff that I do over here and I will be as transparent as possible. Along the way, you know that the content that I’m creating or the product that I’m recommending is.

Tested by me, Matt approved to a degree, but I don’t want that to define me. I want you to understand that the way that I morally evaluate this stuff and like how I find it valuable and share that with you, like bringing people on that ride is I hope what the.

What the brand for me is, not saying that’s for everybody, but that is for me because I feel [00:22:00] like I do a lot of things and experiment with a lot of things. And maybe that’s another part of it that shines through. So I try to look at that personal brand. Yes, super important. You’re without a doubt, especially in the face of ai, the digital handshake, is this what we’re doing right now?

It’s these conversations, it’s this human interaction. But I try to look at it as the output of my work is not my brand, it’s about me and how hopefully I build that relationship with the viewer, listener, or reader.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, great points. I think there’s two brands. There’s like the personal brand and then the corporate brand.

So like for example, gravity Forms brought you in to help with the brand in a way, and, yeah, and by the way, I just wanna mention, you should go check out crafted by matt.com and you’ll see all of Matt’s projects and brands and so on. But yeah, you’re almost all of them. At least the ones he has the Yeah,

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: He remembered to put on there.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But if you just focus on the corporate brand, without the [00:23:00] human element, it’s like it’s, everything’s a sales pitch. There’s always a human in the machine, so you’re, yeah. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I. Brand is everywhere, and it’s not just the founder and CEO or whoever works at the company is part of the brand.

The community has a brand to it, and the I think of it as the way people feel after, in hearing from you, engaging with you, consuming your content or interacting with company X, Y, Z. It’s like the brand.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

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Brand feeling and it’s gonna happen no matter what.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And listen I’m also, like I said earlier I’m trying to take a step back.

This is brand adjacent here, but I have, I still have imposter syndrome, like we just talked about stage fright. I’m not afraid to talk, but I also have a lot of imposter syndrome and. There’s also like this like level of nothing I do is perfect. Like we’re recording right now. I’m in my basement.

I’m not happy about this. In the back of my head this whole time as we’re recording this, I’m like, I can’t believe I’m doing this in my basement. Even when I’m in my studio. I’m never happy about things in the studio that happen. Sounds reverb, people next door. Things drive me nuts. Studio’s not in my house.

It’s in a coworking space. And part of the. Of like [00:26:00] this evolution of the WP Minute is promoting the content more and trying to be more engaging on social media, whatever that means. I’m still trying to figure that out. But then also yes, I’m about to literally install Lifter LMS on WP Minute so that I can use it and create courses for my audience.

And by the way, I’ve used Lifter LMS countless times at. Gravity forms for learn.gravity.com is powered by lifter LMS and and my old job at CAOs, but I’m back to like building courses and I’m like, ugh. Like I, I feel like I’m jumping into a pool that I don’t want to go into where it’s just I’m, right now I’m making a podcasting.

It’s not even like a full course. It’s just here’s a quick little guide. ’cause so many people ask me about podcasting and I have this imposter syndrome like. Are people just gonna look at this and be like, oh God, you’re a course guy now. Yeah, and I’m having these issues like with that [00:27:00] mentally, and then I talk to all these other people no, we want that.

I wanna take it so I know how to like, do this thing. So it’s always a challenge, the whole brand thing, both from competing with, your competition and then as a solo person, you’re just always just like in your own head and that’s, that is a particular challenge.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think imposter syndrome, I have it too.

I think the only people that honestly do not have it are psychopaths. So just get used to it. It’s just part of the journey. You just get better at managing it. Yes. Yes. Let’s talk about podcasts. I’m gonna use

Matt Medeiros: that on a t-shirt only psychopaths don’t have.

Chris Badgett: Yeah it’s always with you. One of the things I’ve, that I’ve admired about you is, and I’m similar in the sense I consume a lot of podcasts, but you have a very like you keep tabs on an industry via podcasts.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So what’s some advice there? ’cause not only is making a podcast great to do, but you can [00:28:00] also leverage ’em to just master your craft, find possible guests get niche news. Like how do you, what’s your method to your podcasting consumption?

Matt Medeiros: Oh, this is where AI comes in, Chris. There’s always two x, right?

So speaking of psychopaths, I do listen to a lot of podcasts on two x because it’s part of my, what I call part of my job, right? I need to be informed with what’s happening in WordPress because that’s largely how I. Evaluate things at the WP Minute, and it’s largely part of my job at Gravity Forms.

Like to know things that are happening, to take that information and do something with it. Either here’s a feature I see a lot of people asking about, or here’s where the WordPress market is going. We should be aware of that. So there’s a lot of podcast consumption. There’s a lot of two x there’s a lot of podcasts listening around the house sometimes when the family’s home.

And my wife is are you listening to another podcast on speaker phone? We’re all sick of [00:29:00] it. So there’s a lot of that jamming a lot of content in, but recently even before like consumer AI software building with bolt and rep lit I was downloading a lot of podcasts just individually the MP threes and then running them through D script and like taking that.

Find the hot clips or whatever they call it, the clips, AI clips. And I was just doing that on podcasts that I needed to listen to and long form podcasts that I’m not gonna listen to the whole thing. I was getting the text and finding those moments and like leveraging that as like a reverse engineer.

But now with ai, I’ve built my own tooling. I built this one site called Pulse, wp.cc. Anyone can look at it. And basically it’s a over, it’s just a RSS aggregator of all these top WordPress sites that I listen to or that I read. On the back end of it, I have it. You can click through and see all the articles.

AI summarizes it. You can go [00:30:00] through it right now and see a summary of all those articles. And I have it shooting me messages in my Slack that. Give me that information so I don’t even have to view the site. So I am constantly like building that infrastructure out including podcasts. So either transcribing podcasts that don’t have transcripts or podcasts that do have transcripts.

Thanks to the podcasting 2.0 transcript tag. Downloading those podcast transcripts and summarizing those for me. So I’m starting to use AI a little bit more to help feed me that information on a swath of shows that I need to be informed on. And I do that in the WordPress space and in the podcasting space.

’cause I also follow that space quite closely. It’s not a very sexy answer, but that’s how I do it.

Chris Badgett: Pro tips in there. I love that idea of letting AI find the viral moments in long form content.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. DS script. I’ve always used Ds script for that and as a content creator, especially when I [00:31:00] was like doing a lot of WordPress news summary and writing out more of like my thoughts around the new stuff That was that was key DSCR for that stuff.

Chris Badgett: I’m gonna flip the script on you and, going back to your printer example of chunking it down and somebody learning, I’m so close to podcasting and been doing it for a long time, as are you, but what are some questions you might have for me about 500 episode milestone and just where we’re at.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I, so in my world or my world, but in my podcasting journey, I want things to end. Yeah. I save nothing. Like I don’t, YouTube videos gone. And I save zero which is actually yeah, gravity Forms says we wanted to like, revisit another video and I was like, I deleted that thing. I don’t have it on my hard drive anymore.

I save nothing, I want things to end. I’ve never numbered my podcasts [00:32:00] because I feel like I’m on like this artistic journey and I just want it to stop. And start a new album, and I never wanna look at that album again. I’m curious, 500 episodes in, do you get that itch to be like, you know what, gonna chop the show down to 15 minutes, I’m gonna reorganize the sentiment or the premise of the show.

Do you have that sort of desire to just throw the whole thing away and start fresh or are you happy with I’m 500 episodes in. And this is still the same like format and process. I like.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s a great question. I have two answers for that. One is a personality type thing. Having been around entrepreneurship for a while, I’ve identified two characters that show up to this party.

One of ’em is the serial entrepreneur that does like a lot of things, right? And then there’s this person who’s just obsessed and. Is does the one thing and neither is better or worse. And I actually think [00:33:00] it’s amazing when those kinds of people can work together. But I’m definitely in the obsessive camp and just like tunnel vision guy.

The deeper answer to that question, which I lucked into, but also, made a lot of decisions. I feel lucky that my life, mission, and company mission are aligned. Lifting up others through education is something I care deeply about as a father, as an individual in society, but that’s what the company does it.

It helps democratize education, empower education entrepreneurs, and send out a ripple of, positivity and improvement in the world through people’s courses that end students do and then move on. So it creates like this exponential value. The, I just feel like there’s no end and it doesn’t feel like a treadmill to me, and it’s an ever renewing market.

There’s always, people are getting older, new people, younger people are getting older and start getting into [00:34:00] this education thing. So it’s like never ending opportunity. Technology keeps changing, WordPress is changing. Video cameras and tech and all the rest keep changing.

There’s just like infinite. It is just, it feels infinite to me. So yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever stop, but maybe one day there will be a reason to do it and change. And also by doing an interview show I’m on the train, I don’t have to carry the luggage in the sense that I get smart people like yourself who bring insight and so it’s, and I just get so much value out of it personally and professionally.

Like, why stop? So that’s, yeah. That’s not where I ended up.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Have you started to you do this, I think maybe with like your live streams but have you thought about replacing yourself as the face of the podcast and or starting a podcast or a media channel that is for lifter for the company, [00:35:00] but just not hosted by you, like getting another talent personality in there?

Chris Badgett: I have done that to a degree with, like Kurt and Emily do a lot of our live calls, right? And I used to do all those solo, then they came on and now they do almost entirely them themselves. So I’m a big fan when you build a business and we’re talking about like a business brand, if you can, and if you have the right amount of scale to give multiple faces out there.

For the podcast, I’ve thought about it, but I need to meet somebody who has the same. Obsession.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, that’s the tough one.

Chris Badgett: And like that same focus. So that’s I know there’s people out there and there’s a lot of great people out there, but I’d want to be really certain that they could share that.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And I also want to add I do get the itch because I have other interests also outside of online education and all kinds of topics. So I do get the itch to start another show about something like. [00:36:00] Ultra endurance stuff or some other kind of more general entrepreneurship stuff.

But I just can’t this always pulls me back to the focus.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. One of the folks that I think you align pretty closely with in terms of whatever, like your. Your, the way you operate the business similar markets is Nathan Barry, right from Kit. Yeah. They just convert from Convert Kit to kit.com.

Great show. By

Chris Badgett: the way, I love the Nathan Barry show when he interviews his customer, like it’s really good.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. So that’s where I was going with that. He’s heavily invested, like you, you both probably have very similar on the Venn diagram of customers. Pretty similar. Yeah. I’d imagine. Yeah, not directly competing with each other, but similar. I’m curious if those, if that thought process of a higher production has entered your mind? I can definitely see, like you and I both live in New England and there’s a lot of [00:37:00] like mill space that can be converted fairly cheap. He just opened up Kit Studios, I think, which is in Ohio or something like that.

Don’t quote me on it. Probably fairly affordable versus if he did it in New York or Boston directly or la big hubs of content creators, but probably very expensive. So I’m curious has it ever come across your mind to maybe invest in something really unique for the brand where course creators can go and create their own courses in a higher production studio, just like he has kit creators, doing it in his own production shops.

Has that crossed your mind?

Chris Badgett: You actually are getting me really excited about that. I’ve thought about it. I’ve always been challenged because I’m a, I live in a rural area of Maine, right?

Matt Medeiros: Sure.

Chris Badgett: I believe Nathan Barry’s in Boise, Idaho, which is not Idaho, which is a it’s a big city in Idaho.

It’s not in California. It’s not New York, but and he’s done a lot with like in person stuff, has the conference that kit puts on and stuff like that. [00:38:00]But yeah, I do get jealous. Like I. I’m sure you’ve listened to the diary of a CEO podcast.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Yep.

Chris Badgett: Great interview show, always in person. Same with Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan and many others.

They’re in person and you can’t beat that kind of fidelity and it takes both production value, but also I think the. Interaction and the content is just even better. So it is a goal out there. I just figure need to figure out how to make that happen, where to make that happen, how to do it.

And definitely the idea of creating hubs for course creators to just remove friction. That’s what I do as a software entrepreneur. It’s all about friction removal. So if I can make it easier to create courses and create high production value content. I’d love to do it. The challenge is lifter, LMS has customers in 180 countries, so where do I put it?

You know what I mean?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And this ski, [00:39:00] there’s certain parts of the world that have more than others, but even like in the United States, they’re all over the place. Yeah. But I love the idea and I do get quote, jealous of the Lex Freeman and the diary of a CEO and that like just awesome setup.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, it could be something. This is so totally brainstorming, slightly off topic, but you could travel down to Portland, right? Yeah. And do like a weekend or a week session, maybe rent out a coworking space, bring lifter, LMS creators in do in-person workshop, that kind of thing where it’s like, Hey, I’ve got the studio set up.

Hire a videographer, probably fairly affordable these days to set up a space, and maybe try to pre-sell something like that where people come in and, you do the whole half a day of recording with their mini session or whatever, and then you can scale it out from there.

But I can definitely see you doing stuff like that because I think the brand, I think your brand is already like at that level, right? [00:40:00] Where it’s trusted. It’s a higher pedigree. It’s not just something that you stumble upon in wordpress.org anymore as oh yeah your free plugin is fantastic.

I’m gonna turn this into a commercial for you. The free plugin is great because I leverage it just for that. Like I, I leverage it for that course creation, for brand awareness and everything is. Very well done and well thought out. So I think that’s, when I look at you and I look at Lifter, I’m like, oh, that’s the natural, like next step for like brand sentiment, just like what Nathan has done.

I love that. And I just checked it’s kit.com/studios and he has Boise, Idaho, not Ohio Chicago, Illinois, and New York coming soon. Both coming soon. So pretty cool. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Building community. It’s another thing in the AI world, like creating those kind of workshop pop-up events and things is, has a lot of opportunity for the future.

Matt Medeiros: [00:41:00] He’s thinking, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re listening to the audio, I can see the wheels turning. You got it on Chris badge.

Chris Badgett: Hey, this is why I’m talking about why serial entrepreneur type entrepreneurs and like tunnel vision entrepreneurs should get together. ’cause then the magic happens and that’s yeah.

Yeah.

Matt Medeiros: And you look at what’s the place that Chris Lema really likes? It’s not Airbnb Cross.

Chris Badgett: You mean the no. So he has Oh wander. Yeah. You

Matt Medeiros: know, so why not? You could always centralize around something like that. It’s rent a nice, great place. Wandered, bring the studio there.

People come, they stay, whatever. I think there’s many ways to do that, but I, but that’s where I see Lifter as the next, again, I think that’s like the next, for your brand, for increasing brand sentiment and stuff like that. That’s where it goes for you, in my opinion.

Chris Badgett: Like you, I come from a marketing and sales bent angle.

So if you’re listening to this and you are interested in this kind of event, workshop on location deal send me an [00:42:00] email team@lifterlms.com and let us know what you’re excited about, where you want it to be, what you would want included in the format. Love to hear about that ’cause it’s great to get people together and.

Conferences are great, content is great, but I think there’s a lack of workshops, like hands-on. Yes. Outcome driven, project driven. There’s a lot of that in the world, but I think in this space we could have a lot more of that. Nathan Barry’s doing a great job leading the way with that kind of stuff.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, and if you do one in Maine, I will come up for it. All right. And I will attend the workshop and meet the fe. The folks listening to this now meet and greet and I’ll hold the workshop on podcasting or whatever you want me to,

Chris Badgett: dang, Matt, you’ve ruined my afternoon. Now my, my brain is gonna be like, okay.

Awesome. Matt, I want to thank you for coming on the show and celebrating 500 episodes together. It’s quite the milestone and I. You [00:43:00] out there listening or watching? I’d encourage you to do what we’re talking about here. Get into podcasting, try it out. You don’t have to do a solo show. You can talk to people interview style like we’re doing right here.

And you can see like the chemistry and the we’re creating value and bouncing off each other and it’s, you just get a ton out of it. So I’d encourage you to do that. He’s at Crafted by matt.com. Go check out gravity forms. We use gravity forms at lifter LMS. I’m actually right now building something with gravity forms to help people figure out which lifter LMS plan they need.

Like conditional logic help me pick my plan thing. I’ve been using gravity for I don’t know, 10 plus years. It’s been a long time. It’s awesome. The WP Minute. Check it out. Anywhere else people can connect with you, Matt? And any final words for the people?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Again, super excited for you to hit 500.

It’s an honor to be celebrating this with you. I look up [00:44:00] to a lot of the work in critical thinking that you do in the space, and I really appreciate it. So congrats on 500 the WP Minute. Dot com. That’s where you can find me in my WordPress stuff. And two podcasts. The WP Minute and the WP Minute Plus, you can search for them in your favorite podcast app and or YouTube if that’s where you prefer to listen and watch things.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Matt.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next [00:45:00] episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMSCast episode, Brad Williams from ThemeSwitcher Pro talks about the motivation for and workings of ThemeSwitcher Pro, a WordPress plugin created by his agency WebDevStudios.

Brad Williams is a seasoned WordPress expert and the co-founder of WebDevStudios, a leading WordPress development agency that has been building high-quality websites for over 17 years. The plugin tackles a frequent difficulty encountered by numerous website proprietors: the shift from traditional, classic WordPress themes to contemporary, block-based themes utilizing the Gutenberg editor.

This sort of upgrade usually meant that the whole site had to be redesigned, which is a lengthy process and incurs considerable expense. Theme Switcher Pro removes that obstacle by enabling the operation of several themes on one WordPress installation.

This allows certain pages or sections of a website to adopt a new block-based theme, while the remainder of the site continues to operate with the existing legacy theme. With this incremental approach, it becomes simpler for teams to adopt new technology, uphold visual consistency through shared headers and footers, and manage budgets with greater flexibility.

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Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.This allows certain pages or sections of a website to adopt a new block-based theme, while the remainder of the site continues to operate with the existing legacy theme.

You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show he was on maybe five years ago or something like that. We’ve got Brad Williams. He’s from Theme Switcher Pro, which you can find on theme switcher.com. He’s also a founder of Web Dev Studios, which is an awesome agency.

The Lifter LMS website was actually designed by web dev studios. They’re an awesome company, but first, welcome to show Brad. Yeah, thanks for having me Chris. It’s funny, I forgot I was on this show. I guess that means it has been a while, so you and Lisa were on. I wonder what number that was.

Brad Williams: You and Lisa were on together. It was a tag team show five years ago. Yeah, that was, it was like the before times, so I don’t, it’s a little fuzzy back then.

Chris Badgett: It was a while ago. I’m back. You’re back and you’ve got a new project theme switcher, which once you told me about that at a conference.

I was like, oh, that’s cool and let me do my high level of why I got excited about it. Yeah. So what theme Switcher Pro does is it allows you to use different WordPress themes on different parts of your website. And in the learning management system space one of the early questions we get from people is should I do a subdomain or not?

And one of the main reasons we advise people to do a subdomain for the LMS is because they already have this massive website. But they really want to use all our tech, including our full site editing theme, sky Pilot, but they can’t get their head around switching, redoing the whole site. So we’re just like, put it on a subdomain.

And there’s other reasons to put it on a subdomain, but this idea that you can, do web design more one piece at a time, in the live environment and maybe you want elementary and Astra over here and you want something else over here. It’s awesome. But tell us the genesis of Yeah.

Theme Switcher Pro and why you guys decided to build it over at web dev studios.

Brad Williams: Yeah. Thanks Chris. So theme Switcher Pro. So at Web Dev Studios, we’re an agency that’s been working with WordPress for, we’re in our 17th year, so we’ve been doing this for a long time focused on the WordPress platform, building WordPress for kind of mid-tier to enterprise level organizations, larger companies, more complex challenges, more content, bigger traffic.

So very experienced in the WordPress face, and we’ve had a number of products over the years, and we still do that really we built some, we just built for fun. Some we felt like were, really important utilities for cu for a WordPress like custom post type UI is our most popular one, which allows anyone to register custom post types through the dashboard, through the ui, WordPress.

Very much a utility. It’s a free plugin that we found out there for a long time. But the genesis of Theme Switcher Pro really came from our clients, right? So we have a lot of clients that are on the, a classic legacy WordPress setup, right? They have a theme that was built a number of years ago, before Gutenberg, before the block editor, or when the block editor was early and new, and, they weren’t comfortable going down that road.

But now the block editor is very refined. It’s a very powerful tool. It’s a great tool. And companies wanna leverage the block editor. The challenge is how do they get from classic legacy WordPress to the block editor? Traditionally it is rebuild the whole website, right? Redesign, rebuild the whole website launch.

What we’ve seen in the past few years is it’s harder to get, budgets approved at a higher, a larger amount. So it’s, so the idea of let’s rebuild our whole website so we can use this new block editor is a very tough sell to executives, up the chain of command. ‘Cause they don’t care, right?

The website looks fine; I don’t care how the content is made.

Content creators. And website admins who truly understand the block editor know the power it offers.

It enables them to efficiently create new pages, landing pages, and other content in a really beautiful way

We started thinking about that. If we can’t get. I Larger budgets approved. Is there some way we can chip away at a transition some way we can iteratively, as you said, replace sections of the website with a new block-based theme while other sections continue to do what they’re doing?

Using the classic setup and that’s where Theme Switcher Pro was born, we started building out this technology for some clients. Started integrating it and using it with some clients and had a lot of success and they were really enjoying how quickly we were able to get them to the point where they could produce block content.

On their production website, which is generally within a month, maybe two months max, they’re already producing content versus a full blown redesign that might take six months, eight months, 12 months before they can start creating block content. So we knew we had something, right? And then we started showing off to some friends in the industry, some hosting company partners, and they said, look, you gotta productize this.

This is a, there’s a need for this. There are so many sites out there stuck on classic, they don’t know how to get to the block editor. And a rebuild is not an option. So theme Switcher Pro we built it into a plugin, and now very easily you can run, multiple themes across a single WordPress install.

So what we’re doing with a lot of our clients is we’re building them a block-based theme. We’re mimicking their header and footer from their classic site, so it looks exactly the same. And then that is, and then we’re styling up all the blocks through theme json and other methods. So that. It all fits their branding it all as part of their website.

And then at that point they can deploy that theme and start using that theme for new content. So if they create a new page, a new post, a new feature section, whatever they use, the new theme, the header footer looks the same, but all the content in between is all block based. So it allows ’em to start really rapidly using patterns, blocks, and all the power of Gutenberg and the block editor.

Again, the rest of their website is locked into that classic state. It’s not gonna touch that. It’s only touching where you tell it’s a switch. So really opens up some, a lot of options, a lot of use case scenarios. We can talk about a lot of different ideas and how we’re seeing people use it. But in my mind it’s a bit of a game changer.

’cause it gives not only website administrators and owners, but also freelancers, agencies, anyone building sites. It gives them a tool in their tool belt that they can go to their client and say, Hey, we have a way we can start to transition you. And it isn’t writing a six figure check. Maybe it’s writing, giving me 5,000 a month for 12 months or something while we slowly integrate this or chip away at it.

This is very much a tool that anybody can use. Freelancers, agencies. We hope and expect that other builders, implementers will wanna take a look at team switchers and see if it’s a good tool for their clients, as well as just website administrators. It gives ’em an option to your point, LMS, if I wanna launch Lifter on my site, traditionally I would have to either switch the theme, to your theme that works really well.

Lifter or update my theme. So it makes sure it works really well with Lifter. Now you could just use your lifter theme just on the MMS sections of your website and everything else stays exactly the same. So products, I think there’s a very interesting angle here for people like you, Chris, where you’re selling a product and our product now can help.

I. You sell more of your product, right? Because it gives them an option to use your theme and have a really nice experience with the LMS without blowing up their entire website. So really excited about it. The feedback’s been great, really enjoying talking to people like you and sharing the story.

’cause this is an educational I. Piece to this so people understand what it does. But I’ve been talking a lot. I just dumped a ton of information there. So that’s where we’re at. It’s exciting.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s fantastic. And I’ve the best products, in my opinion, like the customers pull it out of you.

And I’ve literally had that question probably a hundred times in 10 years. Hey, can I use two themes on my website? And I’m like, no, you can’t use a subdomain or use creative or whatever. Multi-site was always an option too. And that’s, and we love multi-site. A lot of our clients use multi-site, so this is not to replace multi-site.

Brad Williams: There are definitely a lot of great use cases for multi-site LMS even is a good use case where maybe the second site in the network, slash LMS is your, is lifter. But not every site necessarily needs that. So this gives them some options. They don’t have to go the multi-site route, but they can still get lifter in its own containerized section of your site running, your theme.

So yeah it’s pretty cool when you start to think about the possibilities of what you could do with this.

Chris Badgett: And for the agencies, like you’re saying. I’m always a big fan of in service work, agency, work, the land and expand. If I’m hitting you with this giant project, it’s harder to sell that, but if you’re like, let’s just get started and incrementally improve, focus on priorities.

Yeah. One at a time. Like it, it totally makes sense. The agencies are gonna love this. It’s gonna help ’em sell.

Brad Williams: Yeah. I mean it’s, I like to, I always tell our clients, and especially new leads we’re working with I want to, we want to bring, show you the value as quickly as possible, that you’ve picked the right agency, you’re working with the right people, and we are moving the needle.

With your, initiatives online as quickly as we can. You made the right choice. The higher ups are seeing movement, they’re seeing things happening. This helps with that, right? Like I said, do you want to go through a six or eight month redesign, rebuild when all they really want to, they like their site.

They like the overall look and feel, but they hate the editor and they have struggle making good content. It’s a perfect use case for that. Let’s chip away at it. We have a client that’s using it just for landing pages. They don’t wanna swap out their theme, so they don’t plan to remove this over time.

They plan to leave it there forever, and they’re using it within two weeks. They were producing really powerful landing pages. And once you make one and the pa, the power of patterns, you make that landing page pattern. Then within a couple clicks, you’ve just drafted a new landing page. And then you can swap out content, click tracking scripts, whatever.

But very quick they’re launching landing pages within a matter of hours now and before it took weeks because they had to have developers come in and say, okay, I got all the content, but now we need you to tighten it up with CSS, get the alignment right on these images. Make it look good.

’cause it’s really hard to do that in the WY wig editor, the classic editor, just putting two images side by side. Is what feels like an impossible task unless you know how to code and the old editor. But in Gutenberg, it literally is a couple clicks put in a container. Two columns boom, two images, and you’re done.

Once you really buy into it and really experience it, and especially see it, it’s certainly on the patterns. I feel like you see this light bulb moment when people see how powerful patterns are and how quickly they can reuse those patterns throughout their website. You just see their eyes get really wide and it’s a game changer.

So the more people we can get on Gutenberg, the more people we can get building blocks and utilizing those. The power patterns, the less people are gonna be looking for alternatives to WordPress. If they’re still stuck on classic editor, probably are very frustrated with WordPress. it’s WordPress’s fault?

Tools that we’ve spent years building within the open source community.The better for the project and hopefully this is a tool that, that people can use to, to do just that.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk more about use cases. You mentioned the the marketer who wants to do some campaigns and landing pages. Maybe somebody wants to just redo only the homepage and start there.

Where do you see people and what would you advise agencies and brainstorm with them about where are the most high value places in the WordPress site that I could focus on first with. Block-based theme.

Brad Williams: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it always is gonna pin on the business and what’s, their business and what’s important to them on their website.

The big question I would say to ask is, do we want to start with a very impactful I. Section of the website, like the homepage or maybe the single article page. If you’re a media site that just gets a ton of traffic. Or do you wanna start somewhere that’s a little less impactful? Maybe your about page, maybe your FAQ something that is important but not, not the most important thing on your website.

That’s the number one question we like to ask. And generally speaking, the answer is they wanted to go with the more impactful. Which is surprising, right? I feel like most people would wanna dip their toe in a little bit. They’re like, Nope, let’s replace the homepage. Great, let’s do that. So we had a client we worked on where 95% of their traffic goes right to the single articles.

It’s a media site. People, it’s very discoverable on search engines, very shareable on social. So mo all their traffic goes to their articles, their homepage is a sliver of their traffic. So guess what? We replaced a single article page. That’s the first page we did. And then we let it ride for a while just to let the dust settle.

But not only did it work well it’s now they’re able to produce with blocks. It’s really given their content creators a lot more power in what they’re doing. But, it’s also really increased the performance of the website. ’cause in, I haven’t even touched on this, but as blocks and the way blocks work and the way it’s built are just way more performant than classic WordPress.

Immediately their core web vitals and their page speed insight scores, got much, much better and got all the way up into the green, which for a site that had a ton of ads and legacy is very hard to get to. Ads are the really, the challenge there. But very quickly, not only we’re seeing better traffic, people stay on the site longer, but also it’s just way more performance, so it’s taking less resources off the server.

Or using less resources through the server. So it just has this kind of domino effect of good things when you start rolling out blocks. Again, it’s different ways you can chip away at it. We also had another, right after we did that, we went in, started working on the homepage, but obviously the single article was the most important for them, right?

So it’s questions you wanna ask your clients. What’s the most important section of your website? If you’re selling products, your product pages are gonna be the most important, right? If it’s a service, it’s gonna be your features, your services pages, your pricing pages, people, what they’re reading to determine if they wanna make, make that purchase.

So you wanna think about that, but honestly, people like to see results. I. Companies, clients like to see results. So honestly push for the more impactful push to replace their homepage because you know how much better it’s gonna be when you get into blocks and patterns. And hell, you don’t even have to build your own theme, right?

All the demos I’m putting down on YouTube, I’m using Ollie, I’m using Astra. I’m using these really powerful free themes out.org. And they have premium versions, but the free themes are really good to start producing pages. So you could say, you know what? You could download our plugin. Download free Ali.

Activate on your site and within literally 60 seconds start producing block-based content on your legacy website using Ali or Astra or whatever you want. It’s a huge game changer. And I think it’s just understanding how flexible it is that it gives not only the users agencies, freelance, but also website owners, a lot of options and how they wanna use it

Chris Badgett: for the technical people out there.

How does it at a high level work? Because I went, I remember when you reached out to me to test, I’m like, we’ll see, let me see how this works. And lifter LMS is complex, like WooCommerce is a platform. There’s all these custom post types and everything, and I just turned it on and all the settings for lifter components at a global level showed up.

Brad Williams: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And I like how on individual pages you can make a specific decision and everything, but it just worked. Like, how does this thing technically work?

Brad Williams: It’s magic. It’s all pie in the sky. There’s fairies and pixie dust and no, it’s it is very technical because I think on the surface it’s okay, you’re probably just running a function or two on the back end to say, run this theme instead.

That theme. Way more technical than that. And what it really gets done to it when you load Gutenberg. Imagine I’m on a classic WordPress site. I want to use Ollie, right? So as soon as I flip a page over or whatever over to Ollie, not only does Ollie have to power the front end, Ollie has to fully load in the backend and the block editor because all the patterns have to be loaded in all the styles.

Everything that Ollie gives you, all that has to be loaded into the editor. Which I don’t think a lot of people realize, right? They think, oh, it’s just blank. Gutenberg, there’s nothing. It had to load all the theme assets as soon as you go create, add new page or add new posts, or add new whatever. That was the large technical challenge because even in the way that WordPress loads themes, it’s not early enough.

I. To, to bring in all that stuff and just switch it. It’s too late in the load process. I’m not the right person to get all the technicalities of it, but I can promise you not only have we built this in a way that just works, like you said, but it’s massively performant. The site I mentioned that does single article page, that’s a WordPress VIP site.

This is running on WordPress, VIP, and that site gets a significant amount of traffic. This has really been tested at scale. With our clients, which gives us a lot of confidence that if it works at that level, at the really kind of enterprise, big media level, it will work for 99.9, the PE percent of the people out there running WordPress, right?

‘Cause performance was such a big thing for us, we can’t roll out a tool and recommend it to our clients if it’s gonna be a massive performance hit or really any performance hit. Like it can’t. You can’t do that. Performance is so important on the web. The site has to be fast or you’re gonna drop search engine ranking.

People are gonna bounce quickly on your site ’cause it’s slow loading. We don’t have attention spans online. I want what I want right now. So we prioritize performance at the forefront of everything to make sure is lightning fast. And of course you always need good caching layers and all that stuff, but it’s built to perform so.

It does work really well. It uses all core WordPress. If you have custom post types registered, they’re automatically gonna show up on the dashboard and you can say, yep, I have my movies section. I wanna replace movies with this other theme. Ollie, it’ll start Every, every movie page will start running Ollie.

Also, since we’re talking the technical side, the one thing I do wanna mention too is, this is really built by developers for developers. So there is an admin ui that allows you to do certain things, but it’s also fully controlled through code. So you can write, we have all sorts of hooks and filters.

And you can type, you can tap into almost any WordPress conditional and do a theme switching. Case conditional. So you could say, Hey, if user Brad logs in, we’re gonna run the brad theme. Or if it’s after 5:00 PM local time, we’re gonna run the evening theme. So like you can just imagine how crazy and flexible this could be, and being able to control it by code is gonna, is really gonna be a requirement, especially at the higher level development, because everything needs to go through.

A code repository. There needs to be accountability around what’s happening, where the code’s committed. You don’t want to a client that doesn’t really understand what they’re doing to go in there and start checking features and saving it and, all of a sudden your theme switch and you didn’t realize what was happening.

So you can control this whole thing by code which is what I would expect most developers would probably want to do.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. I. Tell us about the like page builders. As an example, elementary’s really popular. I think probably 30% of lifter LMS users use Elementor. They’re on the, either using elementary’s, hello theme or something like ASRA or Cadence or something underneath it.

Page builders are plugins, so how should people think about it if they’re, full site editing. Curious, but they’re really wrapped into this page building world.

Brad Williams: Yeah. It does fully work with page builders, so we wanna make sure again, a number of the clients that we’ve worked as, or we’re in process of transitioning are on page builders.

Elementor generally the one we see the most. So we wanna make sure it works with all the. Top page builders, Elementor Divvy, beaver Builder cadence those type of those type of builders. But it works, right? So if your whole site’s built with Elementor, you can still go in there and say, all right, I wanna switch my homepage to Astra, or I wanna switch my single post template to.

And then when you hit those pages, it just essentially, it no longer is gonna run Elementor ’cause of the theme switching layer. It knows, hey, we’re switching off Elementor over to this. And so it’ll load all those Ollie assets or ASRA assets instead of Elementor. So you can absolutely use this with those.

And many of the clients we’re recommending to our on page builders ’cause. Look, page builders are great. There’s definitely a there is a market for page builders are a good fit for a lot of people. But what we’re seeing is a lot of companies, marketing companies, agencies, people that don’t really specialize on WordPress, but they build sites right.

Leaning almost too heavily on page builders. So we’re, there’s a lot of clients walk in the door that have this massively complex website. That was built in Elementor and it’s I, it was a wrong decision, right? A really complex website like that in my mind, should not be built using a page builder.

It just gets too hairy and too complicated. So we’ve unpacking that using Stream steam switcher to get ’em back to the block editor, remove that extra layer of complexity, right? Especially we talked for performance. Page builders, they add that, that really strong layer of complexity.

And then all those decisions you’re making on designs and layouts, that’s all stored in your database, right? So it has to be retrieved on page load. Of course it can be cash, but it’s just extra overhead that’s happening to load that page. You can get rid of all that. You can get rid of that and just go with Gutenberg.

No extra page load. It’s what’s already loading. So again it’s an option. People are on page builders and looking to transition or to use it as a a tool alongside your page builder. Like I mentioned, this isn’t a tool that you have to have a plan to remove. I. Certainly if your plan is to transition to a block theme over time, once you actually transition every section of your website, you could remove the plugin and just activate your new theme, and you’re done, right?

The plugin’s gone, and your new theme is fully active, your new block theme, or it could just be a secondary tool that you plan to use forever, right? You keep it on your website. You have your site built with Elementor, which is great, but you wanna launch an lms, right? You wanna launch Lifter? And you know what, I don’t wanna figure out how to do that in Elementor, so I wanna use your theme, Chris.

So boom slash lms and all those pages can all be, on your theme. So again, a lot of tools a lot of options, a lot of use cases, but page builders are a big part of it. ’cause there’s they’re so dominant, there’s so many sites running. Page builders wanna make sure that this fully supports them.

And it’s a tool that people could use if they’re on, if they’re using one. We talked a little bit about patterns and full site editing. I’m not a engineer, and once I realized the power of Gutenberg with, like you said, building landing page pattern template, I could reuse and. Like the copying.

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I can go to a part of my site and just copy a group of stuff or a whole page and just paste it somewhere else. Yeah. It’s so cool. I remember the old world where everything was like, all right, contact a developer. We got need a custom template. It’s not very flexible. Yeah. I couldn’t go make changes to the template when I found some kind of upgrade or something.

That’s what really sold me on full site editing, but what else do you love about it?

Brad Williams: Yeah, and just to be clear, there’s and people listening probably know the distinction between it, but you have the block editor, which is Gutenberg, the block editor. That’s your content area, right? And then full site editing is essentially expanding that.

So you can use that editor throughout your whole site layout, header, footer, sidebars, whatever. You can use essentially blocks. To build out your site. To be clear, right now, theme Switcher Pro does not support full site editing fully. We baked in some support, but started going down a few rabbit holes, and since it’s still evolving, we’re like, let’s just focus on the block editor.

At least for the launch, it’s definitely on the roadmap as things evolve and that feature gets more tightened up. But I do see there is a use case, right? ’cause it’s the idea of a page builder, but built right into WordPress core. It still has a ways to go, I don’t know if you’ve used it on any of your production websites, like full site editing.

In fact, theme switcher.com is a full FSE enabled theme that we built. It’s, it works. It’s okay. I think it has a little ways to go. I really struggled with the menu and just adding things to the menu was a bit challenging, which was surprising. I see the direction they’re going, but it, it feels Gutenberg back when it was like the first couple releases, right?

Kind of works, but definitely needs polished. And that’s waiting for more of that polish before we bake in that full support for the full site editor.

Chris Badgett: What those studios you mentioned like you help Medium to like enterprise and you’ve got some big brands on your site, like the NBA Campbell Soup, Starbucks.

Microsoft. Tell us. What’s a really big site? Like how many pages? Because just this problem of hey, if you land a big client, it’s hard to convince ’em to do the whole thing all at once. Yeah. And this is where a theme switcher comes in, but how big are some of these sites you’ve worked on?

Brad Williams: There are millions and millions of pieces of content. Now, to be fair on the theme switcher side, it hasn’t been at the that extreme level. These media sites we’re talking, tens of thousands of posts articles if not more. They’re producing 5, 10, 15 unique articles a day.

They have editorial teams that are writing. And that’s some of the sites we’ve integrated it with.

But in terms of just sheer size. We’ve worked on some massive things and WordPress can scale and basically do anything. I remember one of the largest projects we ever did. You mentioned Microsoft was the old MSDN developer network, if you remember.

It was really important 20 years ago ’cause it was just, it was a, it was essentially a blog network of Microsoft employees, but they were sharing a lot of information that helped a lot of us learn how to do things back in the day. Especially when T Net was new and, things like that.

So we helped them migrate from this proprietary platform over to WordPress, multi-site network, and they were, I think 90 or 95,000 when we were done sites in the network, blogs in the network for the whole MSDN. And it was, tens of millions of. Articles and content that we had to migrate into WordPress into multi-site.

It was a massive migration, as you can imagine. And it took days to even run. At scale we’ve done a lot. WordPress can do it. We’ve seen a lot of sites out there that are, just running massive amounts of traffic. And it works, it works well.

Chris Badgett: I gotta ask you the number one question for the agencies and the site builders out there.

How do you get those medium and even big enterprise clients? Let’s say there’s an agency and they’re wanting to. Move outside a small business a little bit and get a little bit bigger client, what advice would you have for them to try to develop those clients?

Brad Williams: Yeah, it’s a good question.

And honestly I think it’s certainly luck as part of it. We landed our first kind of, well-known client name years ago on a flight to Word Camp San Francisco, sitting next to a lady that was flying out to find developers. It was Time Magazine, so it was like our first real big brand.

And it, opened a door, gave us the opportunity and we landed it. And then once you get one it certainly becomes a little easier. ’cause you can have the logo. You can say, yeah, we did this for time, we can do this for you. But I think, aside from that I think a lot of it is projecting that you work on those type of clients, making sure your website aligns with that.

Like you hit our website and you can tell there’s some big brands on there that are recognizable. So it gives you a sense of the type of projects, the size of projects, although you’d be surprised people reach out. Have a very small budget. And I’m like, what about our logo?

These logos gave you that idea. But you wanna project that. If you’re talking to a big brand and they go look at their website, what are they gonna think? Are they gonna say this looks pretty amateur, or are they gonna think, yeah, this looks like this looks legit. Who we wanna work with?

They do good work. And just put yourself out there I, when Web Dev first started, nobody knew who we were. And we were just da getting into WordPress and we started getting involved in the community and contributing to open source. And that led to some speaking opportunities at Word Camps in there, just getting started and very quickly we grew our name for ourselves just by this kind of gorilla marketing of showing up.

Contributing. And next thing you know, our name was out there a lot. We’re speaking a lot of events and then more and more things started to show up. There’s not as many events these days, but I think even doing what you’re doing right here, Chris, this is getting yourself out there, getting me out there, getting your guests on the show out there.

So even just getting on people’s podcast, talking shop, making people aware that, what you’re talking about is helpful. So it’s, there’s no right answer, but I think one, making sure you’re presenting that you are that type of company that works with larger brands and you have those capabilities and someone, it doesn’t mean you have to have a staff of a hundred people, but project that on your website that you have not a staff of a hundred people, but you have a very solid company, work with larger.

Companies, you have support, you have what they need. And then, things will happen at this, there’s a lot of opportunities ’cause it’s right now, people are looking to save money. Even large corporations, they’re not spending what they were a year ago. So there’s good opportunities for people to come in and make some, makes some things happen.

A potentially a lower price point that gives them that opportunity that maybe they wouldn’t have had a year or two ago.

Chris Badgett: You have some insight into that, who WordPress is for, and where it fits?

I know this is a big question and you could do a whole talk on it. Whether it’s a small business, a medium-sized business, or even an enterprise, there are so many site-building solutions like Webflow and others. When does WordPress really stand out as the perfect fit for a client? Yeah.

Brad Williams: That’s the big question, right? I think that is, and that is one of the challenges of WordPress because we’re trying to be everything to everybody, and it’s no different than running an agency and saying, we do WordPress work. What type of projects? Whatever. That could be anything. It could be a $500 blog or a $500 million, website. It’s a tough question, man. ’cause it is so flexible, it can be used for everything.

So how do you focus in on what that means? I’ve always really gone to the fact that I feel like WordPress, one of the reasons WordPress has gotten so popular over the years is it’s intuitive. It’s, and it’s, there’s been a lot of focus on the ui, ux doesn’t mean there’s not more we can do, certainly, but if you just log someone into a WordPress website that’s never seen it before and say, see if you can figure out how to publish a post.

They’ll probably be able to figure out how to publish a post. It may not look great. It may just be the title and they don’t realize they need to add blocks, but they’ll probably figure out how to add the title and hit publish, right? So I feel like the intuitiveness of it has always really helped.

So I think, people looking for a system that’s, easy to use, obviously has a huge ecosystem. That’s another big, huge benefit to WordPress is the ecosystem, the products that are out there, the services, how long it’s been around, big teams behind these products or teams that you know, you can trust and support.

Intuitiveness, flexibility, ui, ux stuff, and just the ease of content. Like as long as WordPress doesn’t lose focus of its core, which is creating content, it’s content management system, it’s all about the content, then I think we’ll be okay. We’re never gonna dominate, we’re never gonna be a hundred percent usage.

We’re never gonna be, everyone’s oh no, it’s shrinking. I’m like, it’s not shrinking. It’s plateaued a bit in the last year. That’s true. But 43% even is pretty good. The end of the world. Yeah. 43.5% right now. That’s it. It’s an insane number. That’s hard to wrap your head around, like that’s a lot of sites.

A lot of sites, and that’s just the known internet, right? Forget all the local installs and all the things that people doing behind firewalls that block, tracking and. So it’s just a staggering number. So I think people may remember that even if it goes down a percent or two, it’s a staggering number, but yeah it’s a tough question.

I think it’s more about showcasing what it can do in different verticals, different angles. There’s talk about, rebranding WordPress or getting some marketing held, blah, blah, blah, like WordPress for e-commerce, WordPress for publishers, WordPress for small business, like really having these focused landing pages, sections that explain why WordPress is good for a small business, right?

Why it’s. Easy. It’s generally the costs are gonna be cheaper once you get set up, ongoing things like that. So just, there’s so many niches and verticals it’s great for, but the message of it’s everything to everybody is not a good message. It needs to be more focused. In some areas, so I don’t have good answers there.

I’m sure there’s smarter people out there, hopefully can figure it out, but it’s a challenge with any business. I always dealt with people like, oh, I want to get Should, should I get start building websites with WordPress? A lot of people say no, it’s too saturated. I’m like, do it, but just try to find a niche.

It’ll make it easier to market. Like maybe it’s Woo Commerce, maybe it’s lifter like find a niche and that way your marketing is so targeted on not just WordPress, but WordPress and you’re gonna start to stand out. You’re gonna start to stand out from the pack. Versus me. Our challenge is we do WordPress, right?

It’s not, and it’s like we do WordPress, so that makes it, that makes our marketing harder, which is why we get people to walk in the door with the $500 budget and a $500,000 budget. ’cause it’s tough to us to market just to that higher level.

Chris Badgett: In terms of the kind of land and expand approach, which theme Switcher Pro really helps with?

What advice do you have for somebody to develop a client relationship and keep it going? Like when I worked with web dev studios. It was professional all the way through, through the sales process, the communication, the weekly calls. Yeah, the scheduling, the team that came for different parts. It was like super professional.

Brad Williams: Thanks Chris. And if

Chris Badgett: I had unlimited budget, I would just keep going. And, how do you do that? What’s some of the pro tips you have for land and expand and good? Yeah. Land expand is

Brad Williams: a good way to describe it. And that’s really our goal, right? And we tell clients, I, I get very honest when I say clients leads walk in the door, I get very honest with them.

Look, we’re I. We’re all about partnerships and relationships. Yes, we wanna rebuild your website. Yes, we wanna help you with your online goals, but we also wanna be there for the long haul. And I always, I really appreciate my team. If we can help our clients be successful, if they’re successful, we will inherently be successful because why would they go anywhere else?

If we’re helping them succeed online, if we’re helping, increase their sales or their conversion or their bounce rates are getting better whatever their goals are, if we’re helping them meet or exceed those goals, they’re never gonna go anywhere else, right? That’s always our goal is if we’re doing a website rebuild, we want to rebuild a site, but then we also want to be an ongoing partnership.

So we’ll set up something like an ongoing retainer, a monthly retainer, maybe we have set number of hours every month that we’re dedicated to them and then we can schedule it out. And then we just work through their initiatives. I always like to also preach that we’re not task takers, we’re gonna bring our recommendations and we want to, I say, let’s sit at the table.

The client knows their business inside and out. We know word pressing the web inside and out. We all sit at the same table together. We’re gonna make the best decisions for your online goals and initiatives, right? And then we can help execute on those. So always be thinking, yes, there’s gonna be that initial project.

It might be a build, it might just be some one-off tasks they need help with. But you always wanna be thinking, how do I establish a, an a longer ongoing relationship? ’cause to be very honest, getting more retainers and recurrent revenue really helped us, especially through, the past four or five years with the uncertainty and the ups and downs and, lockdown all of that when new projects weren’t always walking the door.

We still had our monthly retainers that were keeping us going, like keeping us busy. We’re still doing that stuff. So think about that. ’cause it is, you don’t wanna just be a one and done, you jump to the next one. You wanna cultivate relationships, build those relationships, and over time you start to build a kind of a Rolodex of clients you’ve had for years that are giving you, bringing in money month in a month out, right?

And that’s how you really start to grow and to really, solid and viable business in this space. I think

Chris Badgett: one of the key things you said is we’re gonna make recommendations, like what are some examples of like proactive recommendations that lead to more work?

Brad Williams: A lot of it’s around performance.

Think about things that clients care about, right? And it’s ranking search engines, which is directly related to performance in a big way. That’s a huge one for us. We’re always running page speed insight tests. We’re always running speed tests and looking for opportunities that we can go to the client and say, Hey.

You just uploaded an image that’s 10 megs. We need to, let’s, we could either convert that for you, or better yet, let’s integrate a system that does that automatically, right? You upload whatever image you want and it will make a nice web p format for you. Those type of opportunities, you can always bring a client and you really will stand out as you’ll look like a thought leader.

’cause you are, you’re being proactive, right? Look at things like security, every client we engage with, I go through a checklist and we handed them and say, Hey. Here’s the things we could do to help enhance your security. Two factor authentication. We’re happy to integrate that. Maybe a single sign on, strong password policies, whatever that is.

Most sites are not doing any of that, right? That’s some quick wins. You can, and they’re thinking, oh, he’s, they’re really thinking about security. That’s great. Like you wanna be proactive and thinking about the things they’re not thinking about. But supports the goals that they are thinking about, right?

So performance and speed are gonna help them rank better, and search engines are gonna help people stay on the website longer. That’s a goal for them, right? So get that site as fast as you can. You need to be perfect if you can on core web vitals or as close as you can. Security is another one.

Accessibility is another one. It’s not only important, it’s the right thing to do. Like I preach this to my team and our clients like. We make the web as accessible as we can. I don’t care if it’s a client requirement, we’re making it accessible, and the only time we won’t is if it’s literally a client is telling us it has to be this color scheme.

We inform them that is whatever, it doesn’t pass the test. And then we would do it if they, tell us to. But generally speaking, the clients wanna be accessible too, because it could open ’em up to legal situations, right? Yes, it, generally speaking, they want. Accessible web, but what’s their goal not to get sued, right?

So let’s make your website accessible. Let’s integrate things that can help automate that. AI is a great use case for automating alt texts, the things that people just never do or forget to do. Automate it. If there’s a 15 check step checklist to publish something, they’re never gonna do all 15 unless it’s required.

How can you make that three or four things and then all those other things are automated, right? Oh, I upload an image. I forgot to fill in the alt text. AI fills in, Hey, it’s a picture of a dog on a park bench. Boom. That’s perfect. It’s accessible. It’s what it needs to say. So look for those opportunities that you can bring.

’cause those are the biggie. Speed, performance, security, accessibility. Those are some big ones that there’s almost always things you can do there. Look for new versions of WordPress. 6.8 just came out great opportunity to sit down. What new features should my clients care about in this fe in this release?

There is that pre-loading of pages and content stuff that’s interesting, right? From a performance standpoint. So that’s something you wanna research. Always look at new versions and say, what can my clients choose that are in here? And then you come to ’em and say, Hey, new versions out. Lemme walk through some features.

I think you’ll care about. Now you’re a partner. Now it’s not just client agency, you’re a partner. You’re thinking about them, you’re thinking about their success, and that stuff goes a long way towards building those relationships and getting them to trust that you’re trying to help you’re helping them make the best decisions for their online goals.

Some of the, and I’ll end it on this point, but some of the hardest challenge, toughest clients are the ones that don’t go with your. Recommendations. And I’m not saying they should always just blindly say yes to everything we recommend. But if it’s constant pushback and they hired you ’cause you’re the expert, but they’re constantly pushing back on what you’re recommending, that’s a big red flag that you might want to take a step back and say, wait a minute.

I’m like, why you hired me? I’m the expert, but you were literally doing everything I tell you, you should not be doing, it’s not gonna end well for either side. They’re not gonna be happy with the results ’cause they’re not listening to you. And you’re not gonna be happy ’cause you’re gonna feel like you’re getting blamed for things that shouldn’t be your fault, right?

So look out for that. But generally speaking, most people do want, they want your advice, they want your help. They hired you for a reason. Sometimes it’s good to remind yourself that they hired you ’cause you’re the expert. So show ’em that.

Chris Badgett: So that’s Brad Williams from Web Dev Studios. Go check out web dev studios.com, put theme Switcher Pro in your toolkit.

It’s awesome. We’re gonna be doing some content at Lifter on how to use it and why to use it and where to use it and all that. That’s at theme switcher.com. Any anywhere else for people to go or connect with you? Brad?

Brad Williams: Yeah, I’m on all the socials, Twitter and Blue Sky at Williams ba or Blue Sky and Brad Williams just search me.

I like linked my domain. It’s not really easy to say. And then we’ve putting out some cool YouTube videos too. So if you search web dev studios on YouTube, we’ve got a couple of teams switcher videos. I’ve tweeted them, they’re on socials too. But within a couple minutes you can see this in action.

We got, examples of from block to block theme, we got example and a one I just posted of classic editor to block and just click in that save draft button. Classic editor and seeing the whole thing flip. It is just like a whoa, this is cool moment. But do reach out if you have any questions, any thoughts?

It’s new, so really trying to get feedback. I’m doing a demo with an agency owner right after this. If anybody would like a demo or just have questions, whatever, feel free to reach out to brad@webdiffstudios.com. But yeah, I really appreciate it, Chris. I’ve always enjoyed our friendship, our partnership you putting your trust in our company to, to help your company.

And I think this is just the next evolution of us helping each other through our products. Super excited to get this out there and really excited to know this is one that, that I know your clients are gonna be very interested in. So thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: Awesome, Brad. Thanks for coming on and we’ll have to do it again sometime.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this episode of LMSCast, Chris Badgett interviews Raquel Karina, the founder of Wonderland Curious and the creator of PressConf, a new WordPress conference aimed at businesses that seeks to replace PressNomics. She shared how to build a community.

Raquel recounts how the concept for PressConf was ignited during a 2023 hike in Taipei, where she and a friend identified a significant need for an event in the WordPress ecosystem that would focus more on founders and be more personal. Raquel leveraged her experience in organizing a variety of events, including school functions, weddings, WordCamps, and tech community meetups, to assemble a streamlined and dedicated team that made PressConf happen in Tempe, Arizona.

She talks about how stepping outside the official WordCamp structure enabled her to move more quickly, bypass bureaucratic obstacles, and foster an environment centered on genuine connections, learning, and business transactions. Raquel shares her experiences of the emotional highs and lows involved in launching the event against a backdrop of tension and division within the WordPress community. She underscores her commitment to ensuring that PressConf is a safe, inviting space for founders, product creators, and service providers.

This episode tells a compelling tale of leadership and community-building, while also highlighting the importance of remaining faithful to one’s values in the process of creating something new and necessary in the WordPress world.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Raquel, who I’ve known for a decade. We first met in Mexico. Raquel just put on an awesome event for the WordPress community, the business community. Called Press Conf, and I wanted to interview Raquel about, her journey with that ideas around creating events and building community, which she’s exceptional at.

But first, welcome to the show, Raquel.

Raquel Karina: Thank you Chris. Really happy to be here.

Chris Badgett: I. I have to say I I made a faux pa at your event. We were going out to dinner and I looked around and I said, Hey, everybody here has been on the podcast. It’s wild. And you’re like, I haven’t been on the podcast yet.

I’m like, oh my God, I’ve known you for so long. I feel like we’ve done it. I’m like, I can’t believe we haven’t done it yet. So here we are

Raquel Karina: making an honest man outta you now.

Chris Badgett: Thank you. Thank you. I. So your business is called Wonderland. Curious. Yes. You can look for that on LinkedIn, social media.

You’ve got a website coming soon@wonderlandcurious.com. But first dive in and let’s start it today. What was the event that you just ran and why’d you do it?

Raquel Karina: Oh man. Okay. Buckle up. I the event is press comp. We’ve been seeing the spiritual successor of Pressonomics, so a conference specifically for the business of WordPress.

Those who drive the WordPress economy. Essentially. You make money on WordPress, you’re invited. If you want to make money on WordPress, you were invited. But yeah, [00:02:00] we. There’s a some origin, big time origin story. But to keep it not too long, I have just really found a niche of what I’m really good at, and that’s bringing people together.

I. In real life humans, and I’ve loved volunteering and putting on events, not even for WordPress, but even my kids’ schools and other community events in the startup space in the valley in Phoenix, where I live, or even in the design space. And when there was such a need in for a business of WordPress conference to come back, I really just.

Decided. I’m like, if anyone could do it, I can do it. And I had a lot of people encouraging me and saying, yes, Raquel, we believe in you. And just took a step and another step, and. We could go into all sorts of specifics if you want, if you have any other specific questions. But it happened last week and it blew my mind every step [00:03:00] of the way and seeing everyone there, it was just so incredible and so needed for our community at this time.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And I do have more questions, but I just wanna say at a high level, one of the frameworks I use for, helping education entrepreneurs and those that build the tech to support those industries is a challenge they have for wearing five hats at the same time. And that’s the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder.

And I think the community builder hat is the least understood with the most lacking of skills and experience out there. It’s like truly a, a unique gift to build community online in person. Just for your industry before the sale as part of the product. It can be a lot of different things, but first question about press comp is how long did it time elapsed from?

I’m gonna do this to the 140 50 people [00:04:00] or however many that showed up at the event. What was the timeframe from idea to launch for that?

Raquel Karina: I guess technically. The moment it was happening. And there was no doubt in my mind a year. But again, and I’ve said the story, Chris, you were with me and Jason, several others, and we were hiking a mountain in Taipei.

And the conversation came up and. You know there somebody referring to Cloud Fest as the new Pronos lit a fire in me. I was like legitimately offended and not at Robert. Robert. Robert Windish is the one who said it. I’ve shouted out his name so many times. It wasn’t that I was mad at him at it at all.

It was just like, this is what we’ve resorted to. ’cause we don’t have prost stomachs anymore and. And then that was the first huge catalyst. And then shortly after I got on a mastermind, community mastermind call with other WordPresses, and the conversation came up around having a. Word Camp that was business centric.

And I know from being a long time, decade long plus word camp organizer that Word Camp serve a purpose. And the purpose they serve is wonderful and needed, and they don’t need to be all for all. And I just knew, I was like, no, this burden isn’t for Word camps to carry. I’m gonna do it. And I immediately hung up and reached out to Josh and Sally.

Immediately and that was, gosh, yeah, it was either late March or April of last year, 2024. And then having, figuring out with them going forward, will it be press stomachs, will it not? Because GoDaddy owns the trademark. And then my baby, I have adult children. My baby graduated from high school and letting the kind of summer simmer.

For me and get my act together. Doing, having conversations, playing the sort of beginning game of knowing this conference is coming and working on pr. Having lots of conversations with key people in the industry. And then came last August, I had my first meeting, started building a small team.

And really between August and November before we started selling tickets. It still wasn’t a terrible amount of time other than like setting up a quick site. But really the momentum really started in November once we started selling tickets. So yeah, here we

Chris Badgett: are. So in summary, like what the event was, it was at a hotel in Tempeh, Arizona.

Really nice hotel. Great pool and hot tub and it had a nice courtyard in the center. It had a con, I guess you would call it a conference room. You had two days of talks. All the talks were great. You had parties on the front end and on the back end, and then an extra bonus day if people wanted it to do organized golfing or activities. I’m sure there’s more than I mentioned, but. What was easier than you thought? And what was harder than you thought? Because from my perspective, I’m like this thing felt like it had just, this wasn’t your first rodeo. And I didn’t, there was no big mistake or mix up.

Everything was fine. Everything just worked. But what was harder than you thought and easier than you thought?

Raquel Karina: Everything was easier, but I thought it, I knew it was gonna be easier. Especially from somebody who’s run a lot of volunteer based events. When it’s volunteer based you’re volunteering for another entity. And here’s all sorts of red tape and steps that you need to take.

And I knew from the beginning I just knew that it was gonna be easier and it’s hard to say what I, what was easier that I didn’t expect it to be easier because I expected all of it to be easier other than maybe. When it really was easier, I was like, oh, okay. I was right. Because there’s that little bit of is it though, is it gonna be easier?

I just remember signing the contract for the venue, which Tempe Mission Palms. I just could, I was like, that was easy. I was literally like, just toured the space, gave them a pretty small down payment, and that was it. We’re off to the races as opposed to, I’ve done so much of that for Word camps. It’s reaching out to Word Camp, reaching out to the venue, having everybody talk to each other.

It’s seven steps before you get that contract signed and this time around. It was just, yeah, and like you don’t have to deal with things like business insurance because the hotel carries a business insurance for an event like that. So it just. It was just, that part was really amazing.

The team was so easy. So maybe that I guess I never put too much effort into it. But the team built itself when I started having conversations with others like Brian Richards. Matt Madero several from my work Camp Phoenix team were like, I’m in. And I didn’t even get to ask. I was like, oh, okay.

Yeah. Thank you. And it was like really, that part was just so easy. Carol, standby. I always joke I didn’t give her a choice. I was like, okay, so you’re helping me. And that was that. And then we continued and then. Dave Ryan was like, I was like, ’cause he’s had a lot of health issues and I was like, do you have time because I really need you.

And he was like, yeah. So the team was really easy and just and they were small, but high performers. I’m a big fan of the lean team, a lean organizing team because then you just get so much done and the, it’s less, I guess cooks the kitchen. And you basically have hired like the top chef for what they do and then things that were harder than expected.

I think I honestly ex I dealing with the drama that hit WordPress made it harder. Yeah. Because my, this event predated the drama and we announced Monday. September, or right before Word Camp US happened, and Friday at the keynote is when everything blew up and then blew up and more, and just bigger and bigger explosions.

And so that was not expected and that did make it harder but different, right? Like looking back I’m so grateful because it really changed the dynamic and the trajectory in a good way, and I was so convinced that. This is an opportunity for press comp to be a breath of fresh air that our community needs so badly right now.

And a neutral space where automatic could come, WP Engine can come and everyone else can come and have a safe space for everybody and that was harder. I loved it. I honestly feel honored. I felt like out of all the things that Raquel loves and I’m a big firm believer in, in second chances and grace and forgiveness and not cannibalizing each other.

And so it was just the perfect opportunity for an event by Raquel to happen in a time where we wanna cannibalize each other and we wanna unfor we, yeah, not forgive each other. So that was harder, but it was a good harder, I.

Chris Badgett: It sounds like we’re already here with the why, like what is your why and both in your person that kind of goes into this project and also what made it quote easy?

’cause you’re in alignment, so what is that?

Raquel Karina: Yeah. I haven’t done that full Simon Sinek where you have like the sentence like structured and then you could just stay it. But I know with everything that it’s in me that it’s to cultivate. Human connection. Everywhere I go, wherever my feet are, is an opportunity to cultivate human connection.

And I, it just all comes down to that whether that’s a smile to a stranger on the street, whether that’s a conference that you plan for, an industry that you love, and to do it in person. And especially in such a time as we are in, with AI and everything, virtual and even you and I can have this, virtually, and I’m so forever grateful and I’m, I embrace it and I look forward to using it as a tool.

We will always forever as creatures on this earth need each other. And so it just made so much sense, and especially with the outcry, with word word camps, almost not existing in North America. And we post pandemic and then now people are recognizing how we’re creatures meant for each other.

We’re not meant to be insular and separated. We’re meant to interact with each other. Physically in person. So for me it was simple bringing this event. But, and it’s not just that when I, whenever I travel, if I just happen to be, are you still in Maine?

Chris Badgett: I am in Maine.

Raquel Karina: So if I happen to go there, you better believe I’m gonna hit you up and harass you and be like, Chris, let’s have coffee.

’cause I’m near you. And

Chris Badgett: I tell, I appreciate that. I’ve gone to Arizona on other trips and you see a picture of a cactus or something and you’re like, Hey, let me know if you want to hang out or do anything. Like it’s, I always felt like warmly welcomed whenever I’m around you.

Raquel Karina: Yeah. That’s awesome because I definitely have that’s my thing is if you come to Arizona or Phoenix, like you better hit me up.

’cause I wanna say hi because that is just, we need it more than ever in this world. And even as we become more and more online I don’t wanna ever stop helping cultivate human connection.

Chris Badgett: How do you think about the online versus in-person? Community building, like especially in, WordPress or online business, there’s a lot of online community stuff and social media going on.

How are they same? How are they different? How do you think about building community online versus in person? Or is it really just the same thing, different show. Or different venue? Oh,

Raquel Karina: I think it’s a hundred percent different. Or I guess maybe not a hundred percent, but it is extremely different.

But they’re both, I guess they’re not equal in value, but they’re very valuable and so I’m very pro social media. I do think I have a little bit of a different perspective as I am not one to doom scroll, and I don’t say that as a brag. I. It’s not fair if that’s not my vice, but I am an 80% producer, 20% consumer. So I like to produce content. I like to do a lot of IG stories. If anyone follows me on Instagram I’m a big yeah. Producer and I try not to scroll. And if I do, I wanna see who am I’m connected to, right? So social media for that sense is beautiful. I love it.

And we’re. It was like, MySpace. And I really loved that and I was so careful about curating those top six photos. And then remember when it went to nine, you could do three more. It was like a big deal. And and I do love that and I love that you and I can meet virtually right now.

I love that we could use a virtual component to connect in real time. I do think that’s important, and I would rather have that today than what it was 30 plus years ago. Where we didn’t have this or we, yeah, maybe we could talk on the phone, but it’s not even remotely the same that we could see each other and we could see each other pretty well, at the end of the day though, it’s, we’ll never replace in-person connection. It is a supplement. Absolutely, and I’m very, and I don’t think I need to describe what the definition of a supplement is versus the actual thing, but when it, you and I, having this conversation right now in real time is beautiful and lovely, but if we were in person, our energies, our vibe would be felt in exchanged there because there’s a, an energy exchange that happens with people, and that’s what happens at an in-person event.

And so where I do draw a line for me personally is my online community, cultivating community building will be on social, will be in connection, will be casual, will be personal, will be real. And on LinkedIn. Sure, we’ll be business centric, but when it comes to an event. I have no desire to do a virtual event.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So

Raquel Karina: if anyone wants to hire Brian Richards, he’s amazing at that. He’s also really good in-person events as well, but I have no desire and that I know my lane. And where I really see the biggest need in our world is for in-person events, and especially for more of the intimate event that we had last week, as opposed to, for instance, cloud Fest, which is a really big production or Word camp, US, Europe, Asia, thousands of people, it you obviously can still and I love them. I love them. I’m an extrovert. I love and I love the energy I get. But having that smaller, one 50 to 200 person event is what I’m just really loving right now.

Building that up.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I think one of the reasons community building is misunderstood or just not as explored is because we have our own individual hangups. It could be shyness imposter syndrome, fear of being on stage just. All kinds of anxiety and stuff. And I think in the tech community or in the online business community, there’s a lot of life that happens behind the computer and people get comfortable there.

What do you recommend to somebody or, and maybe tell us about your own journey on how to get past all that and get out there in real life and build community from a inner game or personal development perspective?

Raquel Karina: A couple of things. Again, not exactly fair. A lot of the stories that were shared about me rich Tabor Brian Cords at all others is I’m seeing a pattern of the, like the movie up.

Did you see up? I did. And the whole beginning before the montage opening montage where Ellie just basically forces, what was his name? Carl Fredrickson, was that his name? To be friends and so I’m getting a, a sense that’s sort of me, that I’m like, I come and I’m like, you and I are friends, and that’s how it goes.

And. It’s not gonna stop. Same thing like how I remember I met you and Thomas at Cabo Press and it, we were in that, that, I forget what they’re called, but like that small group together, that lunch group. And I immediately was just like these are my friends now. And they’re, that’s just is what it is.

And so I think one leaning into the Raquel’s ’cause they’re, we’re here and actors. What’d you say?

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

The people? Connectors?

Raquel Karina: Yes. So the ones who are like very friendly and very pull you in, let them pull you in and just in that sense, I would say be a little brave and just go for it.

The other I. And again that, there’s always gonna be one or two or three, in any given community. And I think for our audience there’s definitely, we’re a tech audience, so there’s gonna be less, of that, my personality types and more of the introverted. But I do see is a lot of I guess careful.

Timidness into getting out there. And a lot of us are really amazing on the keyboard, and like we got our avatars and there’s so many people like I know, and then I see them in person. I’m like, who are you? And then I find out, oh, actually they’re because I know they’re avatar.

And so there’s, and I’m trying to think of like different things to say that we haven’t already heard about. Be brave. But if you could take your like online reputation. Hopefully you’ve cultivated that well, and you’re not a meanie, you’re not a bully. But if you could take that online reputation and just know that people are eager to meet you in person, then yeah, start there.

Start with that. Start with oh, I see. I’ll see, and I’m already gonna forget his first name, but his handle is jazz sequence everywhere, and.

Chris Badgett: I’m not sure.

Raquel Karina: Okay and he works for Pantheon. I think it’s Chris. And again, if you’re in tech, just say Chris or Matt or Mike, and sorry Chris, but Yeah.

And and and he’s so known it’s not everywhere. So then when and he even said, I think he made the comment at press comp that he hopes someone can pull him out off of the being a wallflower. Because obviously online he’s very open, but in, in person, maybe he just felt a little bit shy and totally using a case study, and he doesn’t even know this, but like he seemed to be very involved and very active throughout the entire conference.

So don’t be afraid to latch onto someone who’s maybe giving you a little nudges and pushes to get out there. And also use the reputation that you’ve built up. And allow that to be like a stepping stool for you to get out there. And then the other thing is just open up your mouth and give it a shot.

And our community is really kind for the most part. So I would say just do it.

Chris Badgett: It’s really welcoming. I can’t remember the exact analogy or where I heard it, but like some it’s like when you see small groups talking. In some communities, it’s like a bagel. You can’t break in. Yeah.

Or you should be like a croissant and there’s always like room for somebody to join. Doesn’t matter like how far you are and how long you’ve been in the industry or whatever. I. I’ve always appreciated that about this community.

Raquel Karina: Yeah, very much. We, I think there’s a big push for that too, of we know that, and any sort of trainings we’ve been a part of in this community, it’s very openly discussed to have your circle open.

I. Or if you see someone, oh. A quick story. Where Canada, last July during lunch we were, it was a group of us comfortable, knew each other, friends, and we’re all sitting at a table. And then next to us was somebody who we didn’t know by herself, sitting at a table. And James Guru got up and he is let’s go talk to our new friend over here.

Nice. And just started talking with her and getting to know her and. It’s like doing being that way and that’s the type of community that we have. We have like people like that who are making us all feel welcome,

Chris Badgett: shift gears into content. I was really impressed with all of the talks. They were fantastic.

And I think you all did a it wasn’t like a call for speakers and suggest your topic. You guys like literally designed what you wanted and co-created it with people. Tell us about that decision and that process.

Raquel Karina: Yeah, honestly, there wasn’t a lot of thought into it and I commend my team. ’cause sometimes I just wonder if I’ve, if I’m driving them crazy ’cause I just get these ideas and I just go with it and I’m just like, this is what we’re doing.

Come on everybody. ’cause I, we really didn’t really discuss it other than let’s just start inviting all of our speakers. And as we started inviting them, it became clear that it was gonna be invite only and I’m not a fan of that phrase ’cause it sounds so pretentious. It wasn’t about that. It was very strategic, especially with, at that point, knowing where we were with WordPress and what was going on with the community and.

The lawsuit and all of that, and knowing the direction we wanted press comp to go in, it just made sense that we wanted to invite certain speakers. And with that meant we wanted speakers from automatic speakers, from WP Engine, speakers from the community itself. And then we told each of our speakers may inspire us, challenge us, or make us cry.

Though that was the only command and the speakers we chose, we already knew they came with it. We already knew that they’re powerhouses and a lot of them I cracked myself up. I’m just putting everybody on blast right now. But like Rich Tabor, he’s so polished and so amazing and I question if he is actually ai ’cause he’s just amazing.

Can you get raw with us? I wanna see raw rich. Raw rich. It sounds funny. And even then I was really touched because he said some things on stage that he just doesn’t ever talk about. I’ve never seen him talk about his children. It’s not that he doesn’t love his children, but this was the platform for it.

Or to share stories about what happens in his home and. Yeah, that, that’s what I wanted. I wanted on stage to, for me to experience what I experienced at previous word sorry, omics, where I was like touched or I was like offended. I wanted even a little bit of that, or because those things, if you handle them well, if you’re open, then oh my God, amazing things can happen.

Amazing. And so that was the intention. We hand selected our speakers. Not all of them came through and even some, like poor Oliver Sils got like sick right. Literally days before and couldn’t come. But yeah, we hand selected and we told them, make us cry. Inspire us or challenge us. And that was the reason.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Job well done on that. Let’s pivot into tech real quick. ’cause I think if somebody’s thinking about designing an event, they might get a little down the rabbit hole of oh my gosh, I gotta figure out lights and cameras and projectors and the pointer thing that makes the slides go and stuff like that.

Legit you said earlier that oh, you just put a deposit on the hotel and it came with its own insurance. Does did the hotel have all the audio video stuff or did you have to figure that out?

Raquel Karina: Yeah. So those were the first steps. And thankfully having organized several other events you just know what to do.

So yes, the hotel does have their own av but that meant multiple meetings, figuring out, what they’re gonna do on stage and how much, ’cause that has its own budget and, proposals. And that was the other thing too from that standpoint is, this is not a word camp.

God bless word camps, but it’s not. So we want lighting, we want curtains, we want, all of the bells and whistles on that stage, and. Then same thing. It’s funny you say that because that is something that you think about is they’re called confidence monitors, the ones that allow the speakers to see what the audience sees and Yeah.

And the clicker and all of those are itemized on lines, on, on the proposal. And that does come with experience, but also if someone’s first getting into it, any AV company you go with, they’re gonna know and they’re gonna, they’re gonna tell you everything that you would. Need to know and they’ll work with you and what you need.

Was that the full question about Oh I would say too, there’s things as simple as like signage, and that takes design because you gotta design the signs. And I would say give you a little insider, pro tip, go with a local printer. Okay? Whatever you do, go with a local printer because.

If there’s a mess up, like you’re not dealing with shipping once, so you don’t have to pay for shipping, especially, you could just pick it all up when they’re local. But that’s huge and not a huge expense if you’re doing it locally. I’m a firm believer local is cheaper than getting it from someplace that’s shipped.

But there’s little things like that. And then obviously when you use a hotel. There’s a lot that you just have to use with the hotel, and most people know when you’re using a hotel where the costs come in is f and b food and beverage. Okay? So really you don’t even get charged to use the hotel. You promise hotel rooms and you buy a bunch of food.

That’s really where it comes in. So those parties was really where we strategized to pay. At the hotel and for the services really for allowing us to use their space. And that’s really we could go into a whole other podcast on running events and what that looks like, but those are just some little bit of the things you have to decide and deal with.

Chris Badgett: What about sponsors? How’d you get ’em? And I know you’re familiar with it from WordPress. ’cause WordPress events have always done sponsors, but. Particularly if somebody’s never done it before, how do, how should they think about finding sponsors and giving ’em booths and what makes the sponsor wanna do it and figuring out pricing and all that stuff.

Raquel Karina: Yeah, that’s it’s a big undertaking on nothing to be trifled with. That is one area that I know for me. I wanna do better just from a personal goal is like getting out in front of that quicker. And because it was the resurrection of Pressonomics, there definitely was a lot of social clout in the community for, and also with me.

And I’m very grateful that I’ve built the relationships that I have because people just knew like that they knew what this event was and they knew the value of it and, but it was not easy. I would say having a prospectus. I know even in post status, they were just talking about that and having a prospectus early on to talk about the value that a sponsor’s gonna gain from sponsoring your event.

And just go on the internet and find something and copy it or ask chap, GPT and chat GPT will blow your mind with some prospectus items. And even if you didn’t like, that was the hard part for me is I couldn’t use previous. Omics numbers, so I had to use like organic numbers. So it was more so projections and thankfully it more than delivered.

But the prospectus if this is something you think about in your future that you want start having relationships with these sponsors now and for no reason other than just to have the relationship with this person and I’m, oh my gosh, I cannot preach that more than I, I do right now. Building trusted relationships with people with no expectation.

With none. That is the biggest, best way to do this because you know that there’s trust when you know someone and I. You. And when you start to know someone, you have this trust and they decide to produce a product, then you’re like, oh, I know this person. I know their character.

I’m gonna buy their plugin or a service, like an agency or a service, like an event. People knew me, they knew my character. They knew my like portfolio of events that I’d put on. And if you do that now and you want to do an event in the future, then you’re gonna have that built in clout and people are gonna sponsor without even asking.

I’ve given a shout out to Roger a couple times from Kinta, but it was a no brainer. He literally, we had the quickest conversation in the world. He’s Hey, let’s talk press conference. I was like, okay. We got on the phone, he is okay, so we’re sponsoring and we’re gonna do notebooks and just send me the invoice.

It was just like that, like he didn’t even question. And Roger had never been to Omics. So having those trusted relationships is huge. And then, like I said though, like my personal challenge was I can’t just rely on people who know me and know omics. And we did have some new sponsors that, we’re also new to the community.

Yeah. So getting the prospectus out, really understanding what your value is. Really getting creative with your sponsor packages and how that can attract more. And understanding your target audience and allowing that to dictate how we’re to price point sponsors. That’s a big one too, because, depending on your type of event, is it similar to a word camp then that’s gonna help dictate your sponsor cost and levels.

Is it not? Is it like what a press comp was, where it’s the business side then? Yeah, that’s also gonna dictate because you need more cost is more. And then at the end of the day, of course. Everything costs money. So you need to make sure all the costs are covered because you can’t put on an event and lose money and be in the negative.

That’d be awful. Yep. Ho sponsors,

Chris Badgett: you mentioned the power of building relationships before you need them or with no expectation and everything. Just curious if you had to guess, and I know you’re a natural and you just get out there, but like how many. Events or things at least related to this conference do you go to in a year, like once a month or even more frequent or It ebbs and flows.

Depends. If somebody’s trying to get out in their community, like it’s more than just one shot, one deal is you gotta keep going. And what do you think is a reasonable event count per year?

Raquel Karina: It’s contingent on your availability. And budget. So pre pandemic, I, there was, I think felt like once a month, maybe once every other month.

So possibly eight times eight events. Most of those were word camps. But. Depending on the type event you’re having or you’re gonna have go to those events if you can and if you, even if cost is an issue, see if you could volunteer. For those and then you’re getting the insight scoop. And now it’s definitely my intention now as this is my business is events consulting, so I’m definitely gonna be intentional about going to other events as much as I can.

And now I have the time, which I’m very excited for. ’cause now that my kids are grown but it, I would say what do you wanna do? Do you want to plan an event? One, I’m gonna come back to this. Know your why, because if you’re wanting to plan an event because you’ve got dollar signs, especially in our industry right now with the shakeup, what that WordPress is going through.

I would say that’s a reason to not plan an event if it’s just you see a fiscal opportunity because these are big deals and people don’t wanna go to where they feel like they’re not getting value or they’re being sold. So have that knowledge now. Let’s say you want to create a word camp alternative, and I say this with an asterisk, I’m very pro word camps and feel that they’re so needed, but understanding that every community is different and that there are reasons that people can’t exactly have a word camp right now, then we’re gonna go with that.

And I already know that there’s some alternative word camps happening that are not word camps. Obviously if you’ve been to lots of word camps, that’s a really good. Indicator of what it should look like, what your sponsorship levels should look like, what venue you should use, where to price point your tickets.

Of course you get some leeway now and it can increase that because you are doing this on your own, so just consider all of that. Consider the type of event you want, why you want the event. And just start there, and then start. Oh, and your original question was like, how many events do you go to?

If it’s a work camp alternative, more than likely you’ve probably been to a lot. So there’s some options right there. Just take the, what you’ve learned. Go to some other small ones too if you have any local, like a IGA or just meetup.com meetups, things like that to get some ideas.

And if you wanna have a bigger event, then yeah, start going to Cloud Fest. And even the Figma, I forget what it’s called, the Figma Conference. It’s happening like next week or something like that. Adobe, those are some big ones. I just went to Canva. Canva create, they had a conference in LA like a few weeks ago, and I went and.

It was really very educational and a lot of what I know I don’t wanna do, it’s a different type of event. So the more you go to, the more you start to get ideas of this is what I want mine to look like, this is what I don’t want mine to look like. And all of that is data that you could then take back and come and implement.

So you, bottom line is you gotta go to some, if this is what you wanna do and see how much time and budget you have and go from there.

Chris Badgett: So Raquel, tell us about Wonderland. Curious, your business, the event consulting. What is it, what do you offer, and then what’s your plan for the future?

Raquel Karina: So I guess we’ll start shuffle that up.

I offer event consultancy, so if you want me to plan a conference or even just consult with a conference, you’re planning, I. For up, for contract there. And the whole reason I started it was a few things. I became an accidental entrepreneur and when I was still in my late twenties and had young babies and it was based out of the, this was 2010, so I was.

The economy had changed and I didn’t mean to, and I had no idea who I was. Zero idea. I did not know. All I knew was at that time I was a wife and a mom. And what I now know I didn’t know then is that those are titles that aren’t actually titles. That’s not who you are. That is a, that is a status that you could lose.

Technically you could lose those statuses. And in fact, I’m not a wife anymore. So throughout that time period of in my entrepreneurial space, which was when I met you, which is when I got into WordPress and I really started to discover who I am and what I’m good at, ’cause I literally did not know. I did not know.

I did not know. And then toward, before I basically was hit, gonna turn 40, my life got just thrown upside down, went through a divorce and exited the company and. Wanted to pursue. When it comes to my, my, me personally, what I knew I was good at, and that was events. So then I got hired with elegant themes to be their, at the time event coordinator, but then the pandemic hit and I quickly became the community manager essentially.

And through all that, I just really discovered my giftings was not virtual community building. Not that I wasn’t good at it. I definitely. I shocked myself because I don’t love building community virtually, but I’m still me everywhere I am. I don’t remember if that was pre-show or during the show that I refer to myself as like a walking wizzywig because I’m very mean no matter what.

And so I was really good at building community online, but I didn’t love it and I just craved the event space so much. And then I started to recognize I love traveling. I just love traveling. And as my kids got older, I was able to do more. And so just the stars aligned really. I always had this idea that I would start an event or a group travel company what Mendel was trying to do with Greek, Greek geek adventures, if you remember.

And I I had this idea in the back of my head that I wanted to do that, but my kids still came first. And so I didn’t do any of that. And I really made the choice. And I know people try to say you’re making excuses. I was like, excuse or not, it’s my choice. I’m choosing my kids. I cannot start my own business yet.

And then when, like I said, my baby graduated, that’s when I knew Pres stomachs was happening. And then throughout that summer when I told you I was letting things simmer, it really became clear that it’s not exactly the most sustainable to start a group travel company that’s hard to make money.

On that you would have to have a lot of group travel and employees really. And but then when I understood that I could do on my own and implement, of course with contracted help our events and that was really what. Led me to really start the company is I knew what I wanted and that was to be an event consultant and do group travel.

And group travel will be more like just for funsies and a little micro way to, to do what I do well, which is cultivate human connection. But to do it EEG in Iceland like I did with Mendel, taco, Robbie, et al, and to have this little time of being able to travel and being able to help cultivate hu human connection.

But really the bulk of what I would do would be in events consulting. And so I put myself through a little branding process back in August because I knew I needed to LLC and through that card deck. I got down to these six key words that describes me. And what stood out to me was back to when I was a little girl and I could feel myself getting teary eyed right now of two words, like wonder and curiosity and why am I crying?

And so I, those ones, it just reminded me so much of when I was a little girl and that part of me is still me, and I’m such an, I always joke that I’m an overgrown child and if anyone’s ever hung out with me, I have way more energy than a 44-year-old woman should have. And I don’t look my age that ne doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with this, but like I’ve always had just thi curiosity and tenacity in wonder.

And who does that remind any of us of who’s, like my spirit. Fictional character, which is Alice from the Lewis Carroll books. And so I got into those words, wonder and Curiosity, and I remember one of the famous words from his book is Curiouser and Curiouser. And then, I was like, how do I like, marry that with a name?

And so then I was like talking with a good friend and we were going back and forth. And then I think it might’ve been HI think I was, what is, I think I said Wonderland curious. And he’s yes, that. And then, so that was a lot of detail, but basically how I got to the name and the why and so like my tagline is Curiouser events.

Curious or travel because when you hire me or when you go to any of my events like press comp, which is mine, or group travel, which I’m planning it, come with the spirit of wonder and curiosity because it’s gonna be a little different and you’re gonna wanna have that playful nature come out of you. And I just really loved it.

I loved all. The way that came together, I loved that I didn’t necessarily need to hire somebody to do branding, even though I definitely have a designer who’s. Done amazing work, but because I had already been through a lot of branding processes or just even in our space we get exposed to a lot that, and because I’ve done so much work on myself, so much therapeutic work, like I’m blowing my own mind, it’s like I don’t even know who I am.

And so I was just so grateful that with all the work that I’ve done and all the growth I’ve had, that I came up with this and had friends that affirmed it and I’m just so excited. I’m so excited to offer these services and events to the world because then they get to do it too because I feel like we need it more.

I feel like our world needs more curiosity and wonder today more than ever. Sorry, I got a little soapboxy right there.

Chris Badgett: It’s good. That’s Raquel from Wonderland. Curious, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for putting on an exceptional event. I would encourage you out there listening or watching.

If you want event consulting or help putting it on, Raquel is a natural and obviously a person on purpose, like you found your thing and you’re going with it and it shows and it shines. So thank you for being an inspiration and keep up the amazing work. Check out raquel@wonderlandcurious.com website coming soon.

It’s on LinkedIn and social media. Any final words or other ways to connect with you, Raquel?

Raquel Karina: Yeah, I’m on all the socials pretty much at Raquel, Corina most places. I’m on every WordPress, slack instance at Raquel, just at Raquel. And I love connecting, even if anybody wants to have just like a virtual talk or if you have a TV in Phoenix, hit me up.

And that’s all. I think that’s all. I wanna end it.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, Raquel. We really appreciate it.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowEmily Middleton explains her different approach to creating online course websites and learning platforms, which involves working live with clients over Zoom instead of relying on the conventional freelancer model of email exchanges.

According to her, this live collaboration facilitates real-time feedback, minimizes miscommunication, and reveals crucial details that might otherwise go unnoticed such as clients’ doubts regarding pricing strategies or course structure. Through real-time collaboration, she can propose more astute business choices, like providing recurring memberships for enhanced scalability or fine-tuning marketing headlines to address the customer’s pain points directly.

In addition to the technical work, she highlights that successful entrepreneurs often benefit from robust emotional support systems, including mentors, coaches, and therapists that help them maintain resilience and motivation throughout their journey.

Emily stressed that minor discussions in these sessions can result in significant enhancements, like modifying pricing models for scalability or revising headlines to resonate more with customers. She and Chris Badgett talked about the emotional aspects of collaboration as well: fostering a culture in which individuals feel tied to the work, motivated, and eager to exchange ideas candidly.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. We’ve got Emily Middleton coming back on the show. We’re gonna talk about some exciting stuff around the future of collaboration around building a brand and a company culture. How to immerse yourself in your project in a way that’s gonna lead to a lot higher odds of success.

But first, welcome to the show, Emily.

Emily Middleton: Thank you. I’m happy to be here. I’m making another appearance close to episode 500. Y’all have been going for a long time and it’s been a cool journey.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it has been fun. I can’t believe we’ve been podcasting for over 10 years. That’s that’s wild. So yeah, getting up there to half a thousand episodes.

I wanted to get you on today to really dive into some counterintuitive or more just deeper insights into the learning management system projects, the online courses, the coaching programs, the membership sites. We see out there that are working you have clients in the space. You can find emily@wpcourseguide.com.

Check that out. She’s also over at Progress on Fire, on Twitter. But you work with your clients a little bit differently than a lot of web developers, WordPress developers, website builders. Tell us about. Your collaborative style of working with clients and how it’s different from the typical, I’m gonna hire a freelancer to help me build my site.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, so I do a lot of client work, and I’ve done a lot of client work for about eight years now, and it’s all been in WordPress from. Content entry into a website, copying and pasting content from one platform to the other, to now doing like full custom coding and full website builds and all that kind of stuff.

There’s a lot of different types of service that you can get when it comes to working with freelancers. When it comes to working with consultants, for me, I have a DHD. And I like need to be live on Zoom with people. So for me it evolved out of necessity that I’m like, I, it’s hard for me to pay attention to what’s going on if I’m not like working with somebody or doing like body doubling and it turned into a value add to say I.

To clients. The primary way I work is with you live on Zoom. It feels maybe like it would be easier if you were to just send me an email and I were to do the work in the background. But what that ends up with a lot of back and forth and a lot of expectations not being hit. And I can’t ask you the small questions when we’re actually working.

So if we’re live on Zoom together, if we’re live in a format where we can directly talk, I can share my screen, you can see me do the work live. It just creates so much more of a, an atmosphere of collaboration. And that’s really big for my. Consulting and client work business that I don’t see in a lot of in a lot of other businesses where that consulting and working together really comes first and foremost.

Chris Badgett: This is really a special aspect. It’s a known stereotype that I. A lot of website builders, try to minimize the amount of client contact time to as little as possible and just get in, get out, send me the stuff, and then here you go. But what ends up inevitably happening, like you mentioned, is there’s actually an iteration cycle.

Like where, okay, now I see the finished product, but I have feedback or I have new ideas as we get into this. What about this? What about that? Yeah, so this collaborative style, it makes a lot of sense to me. When do you see the light bulb really turn on for your clients when they’re getting into it?

They’re on the zoom call with you. You’re building the site. What kind of thing happens where they it clicks and they get it where they’re like, oh yeah, I’m glad we’re doing it this way. I thought maybe I could just tell ’em, build me a site. I’m selling beekeeping courses to beekeepers.

But the fact that you’re collaborating something kind of magical happens. What kind of thing is that?

Emily Middleton: Yeah I think it’s when we realized that there was a problem that would’ve gone completely unnoticed when it’s why do you want this feature? We want to have a course about. Clients will ask me questions about pricing when we’re building a site live.

They’re like what’s your pricing? And they’re like we just came up with this one. This is what other people in the industry are doing. Or, we asked chat, GPT, and this is what it said whatever the strategy was that they came up with their pricing. Having the insight about how they came up with that decision allows me to ask specific questions about like, where they’re at in the process.

It’s not just send me an email, tell me what the price of your course is. It’s we’re entering the price and I realize that you’re a little uncertain about how you came up with your price, and so maybe we need to dive in to be like, what pricing options do you have? Do you know that recurring membership pricing is one of the most scalable things you can do because it’s easier to retain customers than it is to sell new customers all the time and stuff like that.

And so I’m able to make those suggestions while we’re working that I wouldn’t really otherwise be able to ask without building this like insanely complex gravity form. And it’s so much easier to. Snuff all these questions out when it comes to working live with somebody. And so they’ll, when we’re asking the questions that they didn’t know they had, that’s really when it clicks.

Chris Badgett: There’s a counterintuitive product development strategy where you can actually build a whole product or business around the price is actually the very first thing, and pricing is a lot more complicated than people think. Whereas a lot the, what people usually do is they do what you said, which is they just kinda hold up a finger and guess, or do some studying or just kinda shoot from the hip.

But there’s a big difference between selling a course for 50 bucks or 5,000 or 500 a month. So whichever one of those options we pick. Your advice as the professional is gonna be completely different. So if you do want passive income, don’t want to talk to anybody, sit on the beach, we’re looking at the $50 course ’cause to get higher pricing, how are you gonna support them?

Are they gonna get coaching? Is there community? Is there other support mechanisms and so on. And that’s a conversation you can’t get a client to like just. Tell you all that without, and get all your insight into that without actually talking to

Emily Middleton: totally. Like I was working with a client recently putting together their first online course.

It’s like an, a new kind of course for their industry. And It’s an industry that they’re putting together like a leadership course, but there’s so many courses on leadership. It’s like a generic practice, but they’re doing like specifically leadership within an industry to solve a certain problem.

And so their headline was like. Fix your productivity. It’s that’s not, I was like, or we fix your productivity or something. I was like, what if we could reframe this headline to talk about how it helps the customer? And what we came up with was something like clients tell us that they’re constantly.

Everything is on fire all of the time. We put the fires out, click below to get started. Something like that and just noticing that kind of thing from someone who’s been exposed to the industry in so many core sites for so long. If you can take the value that you innately have as a freelancer or even as a course creator and position to the customer directly, that’s such a useful tip.

You have so much insight and you wanna lean into the insight you have as a freelancer or as a course grader.

Chris Badgett: I’m probably gonna miss some in this list, but the thing is, when you work, collaborate collaboratively, you realize that a talented web developer like Emily is not just a web developer. Emily is a graphic designer, a web developer, a web designer.

A copywriter, a business strategist, a writer, a video maker. The list goes on and on and you like, people just put somebody in a box like, oh, I need a developer to build my site. But you’re actually getting like this whole team of people and one person, but you gotta learn how to leverage their strengths, right?

And that copywriting thing. Pro tip for you out there listening an exercise. I like to do when helping somebody write a good headline or a value proposition is you think about your ideal client at two o’clock in the morning sitting up in bed at night. And this is a trick I learned from somebody named Aaron Fletcher.

So I like to give credit where it’s due, but they sit up at two o’clock in the night or they’re they go into the bathroom and they’re staring at themselves in the mirror and they say. If I could just, and then fill in the blank, so nobody says at two o’clock in the morning, if I could just increase my productivity here at two o’clock in the morning and they say, man, if I could just put out all these fires in my business or whatever, and.

Love my life and work again. These are like real living language words that people use and that’s a great copywriter will intuitively write like that and provide outside perspective. To help sharpen the message. The message is huge.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah. And I think not pigeonholing other people who are working with you on your business, like consultants into having a certain role, like you are a developer, you are a marketer.

It’s just get everyone you trust into the same room and have them collaborate on a plan that’s I feel like such a big gain. There’s like a lot of. You know how like with remote work, there’s a lot of like anxiety and depression that comes from people being alone in their cubicles in their houses, isolated from other people, only interacting.

When it comes to talking about work. Creating that feeling where everyone in your company is collaborating with each other to make a vision happen is just such a, it feels obvious. But it doesn’t feel intuitive to do. It doesn’t feel like it’s a good use of time to take your developer from Upwork. And have them talk to the consultant that you hired a few months ago. Then also sit in the room with you and figure out what action items everyone’s gonna do and what they’re really stressed about.

It’s that doesn’t feel like an intuitive, good use of time. But the things that come up in those conversations are so huge. So I recommend really just creating space for the people you choose to work with.

Chris Badgett: Another mindset tip I’ll throw in there is coming from a place of abundance and without anxiety and just having an open mind.

And what I mean by that is you can, if you’re scared and you wanna be the boss that hired the freelancer, and you just wanna maintain the frame of control and all this, but if you actually let your guard down a little bit. I know when I work with a client that I’m subconsciously like reading them.

I’m like, all right, this person already has pretty good technical skills and WordPress, so we’re not, we’re pretty strong there. We’re gonna figure out the site. It’s fine. Oh, this person is, has a low level of design chops, or they have a high level of design chops, and whatever the answer is there. We may need to spend more time and where the gaps are so you can blend with each other and fill in the gaps and you as the,

Emily Middleton: yeah.

Chris Badgett: The website creator you will not understand their industry expertise likely, unless it’s something you’re also very into as much as them. So they, the more they tell you, oh let me help you understand what. Beekeepers wanna learn and stuff like [00:12:00] that. It helps you better be like, oh, they really care about this thing.

Like maybe we should feature whatever. Like you’ve, it really, that’s a collaboration and you can’t do that over email.

Emily Middleton: You can’t watch the expressions on people’s face when they’re reading your email and. I don’t know. Getting people excited about what you’re doing is so underrated and getting yourself excited about what you’re doing is so underrated.

Like I think when I got started on my entrepreneurial journey, I was really interested in creating financial freedom and it was motivating for me to get out of a tough situation where I didn’t wanna work a nine to five. Forever that was such a big motivator. But like nowadays, now that I’m like established enough to be able to make an income working remotely from home, I’m very fortunate to have that.

I’m asking questions and I think a lot of people listening are probably also asking questions like, how do I get passionate about what I’m doing? How do I like ignite my spark? And as Dan Martel says, shine your light in through what you’re doing. And I think that’s. That’s a big piece of the puzzle towards motivation for you and other people around you.

’cause you gotta light up the people around you. Like I know you do that a lot, Chris, where you’re a founder of Lifter. You’re still in the company 10 years later. You started the podcast before starting the product. You were talking to people before then and you’re like. Always trying to connect with the people that you’re working with on a personal level. So that like they can, like you. What they’re doing and you can just get them engaged in what they’re doing in their own lives and for the work that they do with the company.

I think that’s huge.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think a great coach related to that will and you mentioned Dan Martel. He was like this, he would. He sees more potential in his clients than they see in themselves,

Emily Middleton: right?

Chris Badgett: When you do that as a web developer and the client will feel that if you believe that, and it’s true, like they will feel that and it will create an energy around the project that is just 10 times more productive and valuable than just some transaction between two people.

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Let’s, you mentioned like. Being in an industry for 10 years or just really time in the trenches, how, what patterns do you see in successful clients in terms of immersion and their subject matter versus the opposite where maybe this project isn’t gonna work out in terms of really being deep on a topic.

Emily Middleton: Yeah, I would say something like have a therapist have someone you can talk to, like a mentor or a life coach or a therapist, someone who’s involved with hearing direct feedback from your business. If you are like internalizing a lot of the stress that comes from your business and you don’t have someone like a mentor, a therapist, a psychiatrist, a life coach, somebody to talk to and help walk you through this process wherever you’re at in the process.

It’s just really isolating. I’ve noticed like times. In my life and in my business where I felt the most alone, where I felt the most demotivated is when I was talking to the least amount of people about what I’m going through. When I have a support network, I have a [00:15:00] mentor like Chris, when I have a life coach I have a life coach named Michael who’s in the lift MS community.

I. Then also have a therapist. I’ve got a lot of support from people around me who I can take my problems to and get all these perspectives, and I think the people who really can ignite their spark and really engage in the way that you need to in order to build a business successfully. They have those support networks.

They have co-founders that they can talk to. And they have co-investors, co-owners they can talk to. They have mentors in the ecosystem and those relationships, those genuine connections. Fuel their motivation to build their product, build their brand, get out in the ecosystem, motivate others to get involved with the product, and then keep doing it better.

That’s how I look at it. And that’s very different from just opportunity chasing. Yeah. Okay. So ai, artificial intelligence is hot right now, so maybe I should make a course about that because it’s hot in a growing industry. You could. But if I’m not all in on AI and been doing it forever, and I use AI every day, but, and I will make, I am, I actually have made some courses that aren’t done yet about using AI for course creation and so on.

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But you really gotta be into your subject matter and not just chasing opportunity. It is fine to want to make money online. But if you’re gonna commit and you’re gonna get clients particularly recurring, coaching clients or ongoing relationship. It’s really important to love your topic and then surround yourself with help.

I like the [00:18:00] framework. I heard once of plus minus equal, which is that if you’re in an industry it’s really good to have a mastermind of peers trying to do same or similar things and then also get coaching help in different aspects of life and business, like with people with more expertise.

That’s the plus. And then the minus is, extending a hand and helping people who are coming up behind you. A couple years or a decade behind where you’re at. And that creates like a well-rounded kind of ecosystem of support asking for help contributing back to your industry. Networking with your peers who are having very common challenges at the same time.

Yeah that’s super powerful.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, a lot of businesses and clients that. I’ve gotten related with that we’ve worked on their projects, it to some degree feels like a family and. I think it’s a really powerful thing to be able to relate to the people around you. And for me it required a lot of like psychological unblocking and a lot of working through my past and the challenges I had.

Why am I in business? I had such a big revenge agenda. I. As a part of like my whole life of I dropped outta high school because the principal slighted me by putting vandalism on my permanent record. And so I’m going to leave high school. I’m gonna prove that I can make a bunch of money and that I will be successful.

And then I’m like, I’m gonna prove to these people that I can do it. Be successful, but that revenge agenda ended up imploding on me. When I never was happy with what I was having as an outcome. So being able to approach business from a perspective of what do I want to create for my life?

Like genuinely with nobody else needing to see. It’s just like what internal feelings within me am I trying to create and how am I trying to help other people with my brand? With the consulting I do, with the YouTube videos I create, with the work I do with my clients and companies. I’m trying to create a feeling of peace with a lot of things.

Like you’re confused. You’re on Google and you’re frustrated at 2:00 AM Googling curse words and like, how do I fix my WordPress? Install all this stuff. And then you’ll find the videos solve the problem and feel much better about it. Or someone’s frustrated in their job day to day, like making them feel like they’re welcomed into their own life.

That’s what I. Bring just personally, but everybody brings a very unique set of values themselves to their work, and I think that’s critical to bring to the people around you.

Chris Badgett: I will say I’ve met a lot of people who have entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, that were at some point motivated by revenge.

Yeah. So it’s not all bad. It’s like I’m gonna show that person or that ex relationship or whatever. But I would advise like 80 20, it’s okay, that’s real. That’s natural, but 20% that 80% like positive. Yeah, mission, vision, values. It sounds like corporate speak, but it is so real and everything gets, just like we talked about, counterintuitively, you should build the price, the pricing first. Yeah, what do you want? Because that’s gonna dictate like what you’re doing, courses, coaching, whatever, what’s in the offer and all that stuff. How valuable is the result that this thing offers? Does that match up with our price?

If not, maybe we should change, but also your mission, vision and values. Life is so much easier when it’s aligned and. What’s particularly awesome, and I feel really fortunate in this regard, is when your life mission and your company mission are the same or very similar, ’cause then everything’s easy.

’cause you’re on mission like it, otherwise you’re it’s not really living a lie. It’s just you’re off you’re having to perform in a way. But when you’re on vision or on mission. It’s like wind in your sails and it’s pushing you along and your vibe attracts your tribe. So when somebody’s on mission and vision, like the right people show up at the right time.

That whole saying about when the student is ready, the master appears and all that stuff, that all comes from being on a particular mission and vision. Otherwise, you’re just wandering around and, maybe chasing some gimmicks or fads or I. Some ad that had good advertising that you could end up in some funnel or something.

But mission and vision is really cool and I would recommend that for any course creator or coach or if you’re building a website for clients, the about page, it can be hard to write an about page for a client, particularly if they’re not a copywriter and they’re like, oh, here’s my cv. I went to school here and have this thing and that thing.

But just add like the vision, like what’s the change you wanna make in the world? The mission is how you’re gonna get there, and then what are your core values? You can only pick five or six. And just doing that exercise, that’s an example of collaborating with a client. You could be on a call like figuring out the about page and literally transform their life by helping them figure out their mission, vision, and values.

Emily Middleton: Totally. That’s that’s underrated work. That’s so underrated work like we’re thinking like we need a developer to build a site. We need a marketer to tell everybody about it, and we need a sales person to make sure those sales close. But underlying all that stuff is mission, vision, values.

Chris Badgett: Once we have that, it puts the entrepreneur on path. But then they wanna enlist other people, like a somebody to help build the site. Maybe they want to get a virtual assistant, maybe they want to get somebody to help with marketing and sales. Maybe they want to get somebody to teach on the platform.

How have you seen some of your clients with a strong. Kind of company culture, it comes from mission, vision, and values, but over time it gets bigger than the, like the personal brand of the founder, even though that’s strong. What what have you seen with like [00:24:00] strong culture brands that, build magnetic courses and coaching programs and tend to, I feel like one of the most common questions we get asked, even though we’re a software company at Lifter LMS, is how do I get clients.

Do you have mission, vision, values and the company culture and have you put your brand out there and are you attracting like team members and clients? What would you say to that? I.

Emily Middleton: I it’s so complicated. It’s almost like a paradox of you need to be engaging and you need to have an audience, and you have a community and somehow get attention.

It’s where do you start with that? Like for people who have like no audience. I feel like for me it was answering the questions that were directly in front of me, like on a Facebook groups. And I was seeing with the people that were physically around me, they were asking questions I would create YouTube videos to answer those questions and send them the answers to those videos.

I think there’s a few different ways you can go about it. My strategy was to directly answer the questions, sitting in my email inbox directly, answer the questions I heard on Zoom meetings, and directly answer the questions. I saw in the comment section. Be really direct. I think that there, there’s not a perfect place to start really ever.

And I see so many people get caught up on finding that perfect place to start. And for some people. That’s what they feel like they’ve gotta do. But what I try to do through my work and what I think others that I’ve seen are successful do with their work is that they encourage people to start with what they have and where they’re at.

They have a messaging to their audience that says, you are valid in where you’re at in your journey. Your frustrations are totally real, and we’re here to help address those concerns. They’re not like, I’m ready to be a millionaire. Check out how cool my course is. They’re not like on that vibe.

They’re on the vibe of being legitimately helpful to the people around them. And for me it took a lot of, it’s like constant. Humility, I’ll produce YouTube videos and I’m like, I hate the way I sound. I hate the way I look and I hate the way that I edited this. I’m like, I’m not happy with what I did but it helps other people and even if like just a handful of people are helped by that content or it answers a question, it’s good enough for now.

So I’m producing what is good enough for now to help somebody, and I will iterate and improve over time and encouraging others to do the same whether you are billing sites for clients. And encouraging them to launch and feel comfortable with what they’re doing or whether you’re having a course or membership site and encouraging the people who are signing up for your course or membership site to feel like they are ready to start approaching whatever problem they’re looking to solve or what they’re looking to get out of life from your program.

Chris Badgett: I agree with that. Rand and culture is built one conversation at a time and the thing that people don’t get, ’cause the human mind can’t, you can’t really comprehend exponential curves is the compounding effect. So when you show up, like you said, and I call this the ground game, when you’re just helping one person, you’re like, all right, this one [00:27:00] person, I’m gonna be a, I’m gonna be the guide and I’m gonna give ’em the solution in a free video or whatever.

That’s just one person, one interaction. Video goes up. Other people search for it. They find it, they discover you and your brand, and then they find out you have paid programs or services or whatever. And then you do that daily, weekly, monthly for years, and then all of a sudden you’re like a known entity, like you have you are recognized.

I remember getting recognized in an airport, coming back from a business event, and I thought the person that recognized me was at the business event where I’m well known. But it was actually just a regular user who had no idea about the business event. And I, they saw my lifter LMS hat and we took a picture together and stuff.

I’m like, how did this happen? But when I think about it, it’s I’ve been helping people doing the ground games for over a decade, almost two decades, and the stuff compounds and I think of it like this. It’s, [00:28:00] it’s okay to want to make money and all that stuff, but if you’re in service to your community, they can feel it.

And over time you get known, ideally as the most helpful person in whatever niche or specialty. And then, if there’s a lot of people in that niche, that’s fine. There’s only one, you and your personality, your way of delivery, how you communicate. The way you help, like through video, audio, text, all of it, whatever it’s gonna attract certain people, but it really compounds.

And I think that’s the the it’s the counterintuitive because in our industry there’s a lot of, I wanna automate everything. I don’t want to talk to people. I. And I just want my online business to cash flow while I do something else. The reality is the people that really make it are super engaged.

I was looking at a LifterLMS user site the other day who I heard about that was doing really well. Many five figures a week. I’m looking at the site and I’m like, this site from a design perspective is not great. I went to the course catalog and there were like a couple things there. Not much, excuse me.

But I went to the about page and learned about how this person had been doing it for 20 years and there you go. And they’ve just been helping people for two decades.

Emily Middleton: And it’s I asked my girlfriend like a couple weeks ago. I don’t understand why clients pay me the money they do.

I like, don’t know all the answers. I’m like fumbling around and like I’m, I come up with a solution. We get something that works and we work our way to a solution that works for them. Something that something that clicks and, but I don’t get it. I don’t get it, I don’t feel like a professional. And I feel like I’m just like.

I don’t know, stumbling around in the woods with them. And she was like what I think people see is that you genuinely care about solving their problem. That you’re just as present with solving their problem as they are. And if that can be communicated, I feel like quality doesn’t matter.

Like as long as people are with you and you’re with them on solving their problem. And that genuineness and shining your light in whatever way that you have to bring to the world through your course membership or freelance practice. If that can be shown and we’re learning how to show that more, that’s what I would lean into.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to throw out another Dan Martel it’s not about your resources, it’s about your resourcefulness. We all have imposter syndrome and all that. But if you can become known as the type of person who can figure it out. And maybe you don’t have the answer right on the tip of your tongue. But you know where to go to find it or who to collaborate with to figure it out.

That’s what makes nobody’s perfect. Nobody has all the stuff, but how resourceful is this person? How unstoppable are they? It’s not how. Intelligent. They are. They have 180 IQ and have every answer. Otherwise, just go to Chad, GBT. Why don’t people do that? Because they, they want people that can, be creative figure it out, get into nuances, read between the lines.

This is this is the way,

Emily Middleton: this is the way.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Emily, this has been a great discussion. Hat’s off to you on your collaborative work style. I think it’s super unique in the space and also super valuable to people who want that. And I think the magic of it is when somebody gets into that, they’re like, oh, I didn’t know you could do all this.

And like you had these other set of skills and you’re synthesizing across these different industries. It’s like going to a doctor, right? Where you’re not a doctor and all the doctor is seeing a lot more than the patient. They’re just like, oh, this thing hurts. Or whatever. But you’re like, broadly looking at systems all over the place. And able to help with that and it’s so cool and it’s very rare in our space.

If people want to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to track you down?

Emily Middleton: My website is wp course guide.com. That’s where all my WordPress course stuff is. You can also Google Magic, Emily Middleton, and you’ll find my YouTube content. Awesome, Emily. Thanks for coming on back on the show.

Chris Badgett: Really appreciate it and keep up the amazing work.

Emily Middleton: Thank you.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this episode of LMSCast, Chris Badgett reunites with longtime collaborator Kurt von Ahnen to dissect the core patterns that determine who wins and who fails in the online education space. Drawing on decades of combined experience—from WordPress trenches to corporate training rooms—they explore what sets high-performing education entrepreneurs apart from the rest. Spoiler alert: it’s not flashy tech or funnels—it’s mindset, clarity, and grit.

Kurt Von Ahnen is an expert in LifterLM. He is from Manana No Mas. Kurt emphasizes how crucial it is to recognize your real customers while developing courses—not only end users or students but also the companies or groups that will be paying for your instruction. He describes how, after making the misstep of first aiming his Power Sport Academy instruction at technicians and service managers, he discovered that the true consumers were bigger companies that oversaw many dealerships or dealership owners.

One of the biggest takeaways is the power of intention and mindset. Too many aspiring course creators fall for the passive income myth or assume their expertise alone guarantees success. Chris and Kurt call this “mechanism-first thinking”—where creators obsess over tools and course content, but neglect the human they’re trying to help. The ones who make it focus first on who they serve, often building solutions for a previous version of themselves. That clarity eliminates guesswork and builds authentic connection.

Curriculum design is another major pitfall. Many creators overbuild, launching “giant courses” that overwhelm learners. The better approach? Keep it simple. Chunk lessons into small wins, design for clarity, and think about your learner’s level—beginner, intermediate, or advanced. Don’t skip levels. Build bridges. And remember: tools like AI can help you fill in gaps, but they won’t replace doing the hard work of thoughtful design.

Sales and marketing, too, require grounded expectations. Chris lays out four proven strategies: content marketing, relationship-based outreach, outbound prospecting, and paid ads (as a later-stage scale lever). Kurt reminds us that selling to many—through groups, businesses, or institutions—can be far more efficient than chasing one-off buyers. They share real stories of clients using LifterLMS Groups to deliver training at scale, from safety certification to corporate development programs.

Finally, success requires personal discipline, continuous improvement, and the humility to keep showing up. Whether it’s updating your course yearly, listening to student feedback, or time-blocking your calendar—this work is more marathon than sprint. Chris and Kurt close with a simple truth: your learners will come for the content, but they’ll stay for the support and the community. That’s where the real transformation—and real business success—happens.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: [00:00:00] You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined, or I should say rejoined by a special guest. His name is Kurt Von from Manana Nomas. He also does some work over here at Lifter LMS, and we wanted to have a conversation around some of the patterns we see among the education entrepreneurs that create great success for themselves, and then also the ones that end up.

A unsuccessful or failed situation. But first, welcome back on the show, Kurt.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Thanks Chris. It’s good to be back. I always enjoy chatting with you. [00:01:00]

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And we’ve been doing this for a long time. You’ve been around WordPress, I think, longer than me, since 2006 or something. 2004. Four, okay. I came in 2008.

And and you’ve been a educator and a leader. You’ve done projects, you’ve worked with clients. I also have done those things. But I wanted to start out first talking about mindset and intention. If somebody wants to create an online education company, and let’s say they’re charging money for your, for their courses or their coaching or whatever it is what patterns do you see that are those that become successful have and those that it never quite works out have when it comes to mindset and intention?

Kurt Von Ahnan: It becomes a multifaceted question, right? So obviously there’s gonna be multiple answers for this, but I see I’m gonna run the risk of sounding judgmental, [00:02:00] right? But that’s part of how this show’s gonna end up. Some people come to the game with an expectation that is very much beyond reality.

They make an assumption that they are. Known, or they’re a celebrity in their field, or they have knowledge that no one else has or that it’s an assumption. So the assumptive of, I’ll just build it and they’ll come, whereas, there’s that cliche, right? All things worth doing take work and there’s sometimes.

The real labor, the real work of launching something successfully has not set in. And so when they have their launch, they get excited, I’m gonna launch a new site. And you go, great. Have at it. And then they launch it. But their launch doesn’t include any, I. Superfluous stuff on the outside. It’s just I made the website live.

You made the website live. How did you think people were gonna get to it? How did you think people were gonna make a purchase? What? What copy do you have on your website that inspires someone to [00:03:00] make a purchase? Do they even understand that you have an offer on your page? And I think that’s. To, to me, we could get into the nooks and crannies of actions, but the question is about mindset and intent, and I think there’s too many.

There’s too many scammy things online that are saying, e-learnings a trillion dollar industry. Get your piece of the pie now make a new course. And you could drive a Lamborghini just like mine and it, and they’re skipping the whole part about it takes work. You have to be committed. Build a community, you have to moderate it.

You have to constantly, it, it’s a job.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Solid points. I see a common mindset. I call it us versus them. Focus. So if somebody’s really focused on themselves and like they want to make money online and have location freedom and financial freedom and all this like freedom you gotta help people.

So like the ones that really work out, their intention is to go [00:04:00] help somebody. And the ones that are the most successful, it’s often like a previous version of themselves angela Brown who teaches house cleaning and maids, how to start and scale their companies. Yeah, she was a house cleaner.

She’s, been walked a hundred or a thousand miles in those shoes before, and she had done education in the offline world to that industry. But she also wanted to make money online and she wanted to be able to retire and have location freedom. So that stuff’s not bad. But she knew very well that she would have to help a lot of people.

Get what they want. I, you probably know that, I think it’s Zig Ziglar or one of those lines, if you help enough people get what they want, you’ll get what you want.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah, exactly. That’s very

Chris Badgett: true.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Very true. Yeah. And you mentioned an interesting thing. I’ve learned almost the hard way that you can have a passion point for a subject.

Maybe you don’t have access to the right audience. Maybe you don’t have, the purchasing power to the right audience is the right way to say that. [00:05:00] And so then you need to get creative and say, okay, am I really working on a B2C product? Or is this really a B2B product or is this a and that comes back to mindset and intent, right?

If you’re intent add value to people, one person at a time, quality connections. But that’s one thing. And then there’s the, b2B model, right? I’m gonna sell one to many. And so then who are you making that relationship with and what’s the intention and mindset there? They’re two very different models and they take a different perspective of attack.

Chris Badgett: I think moving on to another topic, one of the most important issues or questions is literally one word, and it’s who with a question mark, who are we making this for? I see a lot of people get caught up in what I call mechanism first thinking. It’s all about the process and the knowledge, and this is what I do, but who are you actually helping with that?

Oh people who want this process, but no. Who are they? We know this whole thing about the customer [00:06:00] avatar, the ideal customer profile. But definitely the projects I’ve seen with people using Lifter lms, where it works out. The audience is super tight. It’s I think if KPC with her active Campaign Academy, yeah.

These are like marketing automation people using active campaign who are, various levels of tech. It’s very specific who she helps, just like Angela Brown with house cleaners and maids or funk Roberts with men over 40 who are trying to get in shape and, worried about low testosterone and stuff like that.

It’s super specific and Yep. I think u is the, it’s the fundamental most important question. Once you have your why and your mindset and your intention, who are we gonna help? My biggest pro tip is just help a previous version of yourself. ’cause you’re, there’s gonna be less guessing. You already know where you came from and who these people are.

But you can also branch out, but get [00:07:00] really clear on who that is. What do you say about audience and finding product market fit?

Kurt Von Ahnan: I have such a diverse background in training, e-learning, corporate models versus, course creator models, and they’re two very completely different markets. And so you nailed that who thing, but who are you helping?

Who are you adding value to? The next question is who has the purchasing power? And then that kind of changes might change the content flow, might change the user experience, might change some tools that gets into the mechanism side of it. But I think of this a lot and I’m very involved at church.

I’m a person of faith. A lot of times we’ll say, oh, invite someone to church. Invite someone to church. Oh, that feels so awkward. How would I do that? I don’t wanna, beat people over the head with a Bible. And then you have to think what got you to go to church? Someone invited me, right?

And so then it’s okay, that is a previous version of yourself. And so many times people forget [00:08:00] on the, they got so involved in becoming the expert in their field that they forget how they got started in their field. You have to go all the way back to the roots of it. At fear of running long I’ll tell you, I created a master level course on electronics diagnosis for motorcycles, and I was so excited to teach the course.

I was actually a little scared to teach the course ’cause I thought the students knew more about some of the topics than I did. And we taught the course and it was, some of it was online and some of it was live. So we’re doing the practicum where we’re live and I’m. eScribing, the courseware, and they’re all shaking their heads.

And then I handed each of ’em a multimeter and I said, okay, let’s go see how many volts are in this line. And I thought that’s the dumbest, simplest thing I could ask them to do. And not a single person in the course did it correctly. And I was like, wait a minute, I’m giving a master level course on motorcycle diagnostics with electronics, and nobody knows how a multimeter works.

That makes you realize that wherever you’re at in your level of [00:09:00] training, that previous version of yourself that you mentioned, you have to go all the way back to the first square. You can’t start on the 10th square and go up. You have to cover everything from the beginning and then get people to a level of engagement and take ’em to the next level, which is awesome.

Chris Badgett: And I also have a car, a really simple for you, car battery question that I’ll ask you after this call. Let’s go into like actual course creation or product creation. The design of the curriculum. Not so much the tools yet, but this is an area where I see a lot of pitfalls. One of ’em is, like you said, creating a master’s level course.

All of a sudden we have, I just call it a giant course. This thing is just a monstrosity, right?

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So we’re not thinking about levels like are we working with beginners, intermediate, advanced? Do we need to do several courses and bundle those as a membership instead of trying to overwhelm people? Do we need to use prerequisites to you gotta [00:10:00] kind of master this area first before you move over here.

So think about it. And oftentimes the best advice is just to keep it simple. And this goes back to the avatar, the person that you’re helping. What’s the problem they have? What’s the result that they want and what are the minimum steps required to get them from A to B and overcome any challenges along the way?

Don’t overcomplicate it. I personally find AI helpful at this stage, particularly if you’re not trained as a teacher or a designer, like you gotta do the work. Don’t just ask the AI to design a course outline for you, but go ahead and try your best to design. Sections and lessons yourself, and then ask AI to fill in the gaps.

And that’s where you can get some back and forth and get really a comprehensive and uncover some blind spots in your curriculum. But what would you say about like curriculum design?

Kurt Von Ahnan: It’s a fickle beast. There’s a lot in the l and d spaces, learning and development. So in the l and d spaces.

[00:11:00] There are a lot of professionals that will talk about chunking and micro-learning and all of these topics, meaning like what you said, take a big topic and break it into consumable chunks. And there’s a lot of reasons why it. Think of like social media, right? We’re all hooked on short videos, short things, short attention spans.

And so the idea that someone could jump into a mini course, knock out five or six lessons real quick and say, oh, I got that done, and go on to the next one. It, there’s an energy, a dopamine hit that comes from doing that, and that’s the science of it. But let’s not forget. We all talk about short form content and then the number one podcast is Joe Rogans with three hour interviews.

Yeah, so people do have an appetite as long as the value is there to go and do long, long form content. I have a client that has, I think, 96 lessons in one course, and they’re selling one course. And I thought she was crazy. ’cause originally it was gonna be four [00:12:00] courses and then a bundle, right? And then she said no, I wanna do all one.

I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna redo all the videos, I’m gonna make everything professional. Da. I thought she was crazy. She’s launched and she, I’m gonna say she’s launching successfully. I’m seeing new clients. I’m seeing people complete the course. ’cause that’s the next obstacle is course completion.

But if we get into brass tacks. She knows her niche, she knows her people. The content is stellar. The videos are awesome. They’re all professionally made, so the media is great. And the overall design of the site the colors they chose, the vibrance they chose, it’s all engaging. And they have a CRM employed that encourages people at multiple stages to get to the next step.

And your question, product creation strategy, what’s the best way to go? It’s whatever suits your audience best. And are you willing to do the work to keep the engagement?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I love that story about your client. I. I call that a like [00:13:00] a signature course. Yeah. And I know people that use Lifter and other LMS tools and they just have one course.

It’s always been just one course, one problem, one solution. It’s pretty comprehensive. It might take six weeks for somebody to complete and they just make it better and better and keep doing it. And that’s cool. And that can actually be a solution for people with. Entrepreneurial A DD, and they start thinking membership library of courses, and they have a hundred courses envisioned in their mind.

The signature course can be a powerful tool, but you’re right, it’s not a one size fits all in terms of curriculum design. It’s whatever your learners, what you can do that your learners are gonna get results with.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah, and it takes us to the next section to talk about what, ’cause we talk about technology and tools, but I think it’s so important to recognize that no matter which course you build three short ones, four short ones versus one big one versus, six of one, half dozen the other.

However you get your content in the pages. You still need to leverage some kind of [00:14:00] interaction tool or mechanism to keep people engaged to the content and convince them to finish what they’ve paid for or invested in. Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: And that’s like the milestones chunking thing. Okay, they want this big result, but first is there like a little win here?

Little win here, and you talking about the dopamine and stuff like that. Ideally every lesson would have would feel like a win. Yeah. And satisfying in some way gratifying.

Kurt Von Ahnan: But that takes you right back to the engagements features with lifter LMS. If you want to give people a badge when they get done the first section or whatever, you can do that, you, hey, you’ve earned a badge.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Yeah. And transitioning to tools, we could probably do a whole episode about this. The biggest mistake I’d say is just over obsessing about the tools and the tech and maybe even falling in love with it. It happened to me. That’s why I’m a software guy now. I love tools. I love messing around with technology and building websites, and people fall in love with it.

They fall in love with automation. [00:15:00] They fall in love with producing videos and things like that. But at the end of the day, a tool is just a tool. And, some of the most successful folks I’ve seen. They’ll often launch the course without an LMS. They’ll just do a PayPal link, do like the six weeks.

We’re just gonna deliver it live on a Zoom call, and then later they turn that into a course. But they’re always focused on getting the students the results first. Then they get the WordPress website, then they get going with the tools and just, I think it’s just a fact of life. Everybody overcomplicates it as a beginner.

And then once you get some time in the trenches, you tend to simplify and really just, get as few tools from as many different companies as you need to. And then just keep it simple and never forget. The goal is not to have a fancy website and automate everything under the sun. It’s to help your learners learn.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Sometimes when I’m working independently with a client. I’ll [00:16:00] actually share stories with them about my experiences working at Suzuki or working at Ducati or working at BRP or one of these larger companies. And they’ll be like, I gotta automate this and I gotta automate that. And they haven’t even sold, they don’t have one paying customer yet and they wanna automate all these things and I have to slow ’em down and say, are you aware of how big?

BRP is, or how big Ducati is or what, you would be amazed at how many manual processes are involved in operating and running that business, right? Think about like even people that wanna change their subscription to their bundle at lifter LMS. It’s not so like this crazy automated thing, it’s like we have people that go, oh, you don’t want this one, you want this one. So many people getting involved in the tech space for maybe the first time have these unrealistic expectations that everything is ai, or everything is automated or everything. Is this odd thing that it’s not.

And then to your point, they get distracted by shiny objects and they think. If they’re gonna have a course, they need to have [00:17:00] community, or they need to have forums, or they need to have discussion groups. And it’s man, if you don’t have a thriving community already of 50 or 75 people on some Facebook page, or active users in your site, or something like that, the chances that you’ll launch a completely cold community to nobody and then have it be successful in three to six months.

Pretty slim. Pretty slim. So you, you’ve really gotta monitor yourself on what you decide to activate.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about sales and your, and marketing as well, which are different things by the way. I often to say, marketing is like getting the lead and sales is actually closing the lead and them becoming a customer.

And by the way. What happens after the sale? IE the delivery of the program is just as important. Some people get a little over obsessed with marketing and sales and making money online, and they almost forget they gotta deliver on the other side of that. But speaking of not automating, I [00:18:00] was on a customer site the other day and I noticed they, they had their, and they’ve been doing it for a long time and are very successful.

Multiple six figures a year, and I saw they still had their cell phone on the contact page. Their cell phone number.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yep. You

Chris Badgett: know, the easiest way to sell something on the internet is to do what we do at Lifter and like jump out from behind the internet and be a human being and talk to people.

Yeah, that’s a pro tip. But marketing and sales, I would just say at a high level you have to do it. There’s three types of marketing. There’s content marketing which is just pick one, blog, YouTube podcast. Pick one of those three if you’re gonna do the content marketing route. The other thing you can do is relationships where you leverage other people’s.

Audience. So if you’re an expert in something but you don’t have an audience, but there’s somebody else who does go speak on their podcast, do a webinar for their audience, like leverage other people’s audiences. Ask your existing [00:19:00] customers for referrals, like work the human relationships. The third is outbound, which is not used very often, but is underused in my opinion.

If you’re clear on who your ideal learner is. People are easy to find on the internet. If you’re very specific, if you help chiropractors as an example, you can find chiropractors on the, you can find how to contact ’em, you can find their websites. If you help real estate agents, you can find them on the internet and all kinds, link into

Kurt Von Ahnan: the rescue

Chris Badgett: and just reach out to ’em, give ’em a free resource and let ’em know if they wanna learn more about your program.

That’s prospecting. And then the fourth is paid advertising. Which people get in their head, oh, I just wanna put a dollar in and have $2 come out. But in my experience, paid advertising is the last thing you should do. It’s more of a scaling strategy. Once you already have some more organic in the streets, like getting leads and closing sales.

Once you figure [00:20:00] that part out, then you can scale with ads. But I definitely recommend not starting with it.

Kurt Von Ahnan: I have always been amazed at people that are too shy, too prideful maybe is the word, to share what they’ve done with their inner circle.

So if you build a website and you come out with this really cool course and you don’t have 10 friends that you can put in that course.

Maybe five of ’em for free, but five, that’ll pay you for it, right? If you don’t have five people that say, oh yeah, I’ll take that course for me. That sounds cool. Then are you really secure with what you’ve built? You know what I mean? If you’re expecting the strangers on the internet to make you six figures a year off this product how come people that you know won’t buy it?

How come you won’t share it with people, and that’s where I’m very cognizant, like there’s some projects where I’ve put stuff out and then I realize, oh, it’s not as successful as I hoped it would be. And I [00:21:00] say wait a minute, who in my inner circles even knows that I’ve put this out?

And then I reach out to people, go, Hey, I don’t know if you know this or not, but I released a course on this, or I published this book last year. And people are like, oh crap. I didn’t know you published a book. Yeah. Do you want a copy of it? And then it’s amazing, right? You can get a, you can get an ebook right off the website for five bucks.

So do you want it or not? And then people will sign up and take it.

Chris Badgett: Excellent point. Another part of getting students and having them refer you is for them to actually be successful and tell their friends. Yeah. So in terms of guaranteeing results, or at least increasing the odds or the success rate the biggest mistake I see is that people just literally have no plan.

They think it’s just passive income, sit on the beach. Let the sales roll in a hundred percent completion rates and everything’s just gonna happen magically. But one of the [00:22:00] most overlooked things that the successful people figure out, I call it designing a support mechanism, and you can have multiple kinds of it.

I think of it. We actually have a chart of this on the the course plan challenge, which is on the sidebar of the LMS Cast podcast and on the blog sidebar as well. But it’s basically, there’s two lines. There’s the group in private and then the asynchronous and synchronous. And asynchronous means the support happens not in real time.

Synchronous means support happens in real time. So I’m just gonna lay out a menu of nine support mechanisms you could add and just pick the ones that resonate with you. ’cause you don’t have to do all these. You could do group coaching calls. We do that a lot at lifter LMS peer Masterminds. You can connect students with each other in little groups.

You can actually host a live event. Like you said, your course was [00:23:00] mixed and you had a in-person practicum. If you’re teaching mechanics, it’s really nice to actually be there and get your hands on tools and machines, right? Not just watching video

Kurt Von Ahnan: action.

Chris Badgett: And then you can do so a social learning group on your website or somewhere else.

You can do peer review where students review each other’s stuff. You can turn on comments on your lessons and let people ask for help and read past requests for help. You can do private coaching calls. This is where you can up the price of your program if you’re giving one-on-one time. An in-person VIP day is extreme, but some people do it.

That’s where they, this is like a high ticket course where you fly. A plane to the client or they fly to your office and they get like the white glove personal in-person experience. You can do a red phone service where you can, they can call you when they have challenges. You can do email support that’s [00:24:00] totally overlooked.

Easy to do. You can do private website content like with lifter, LMS private areas to, have a place for private one-on-one support on the website. I. And then I also see a lot of creators these days doing text-based support. So they’ll they’ll give unlimited texting. My wife’s a running coach and she gets texts from her clients with questions.

And sometimes you people do like group text threads with I forget the names of those tools. There’s some community one. Which one? One’s called community. That’s what Gary Vaynerchuk uses. Yeah. There’s. And telegram. I think that’s the one I was thinking of. But yeah, so like I just rattled off nine ways to support your people in addition to like lesson content, videos and PDFs and stuff.

’cause not all humans are exactly the same. So part of holding space for your clients or your learners, just a physical classroom has walls and the teacher’s there to help you. You can do that in the online world as [00:25:00] well.

Kurt Von Ahnan: And I think. Even if it sounds a tad negative, I think it’s really important to, to recognize if you create a course and you invite people to pay you to take your course, there is a certain responsibility to make sure they find success in finishing the course.

If they paid via Stripe and they want to file I want my money back chances are they’re gonna win their money back, right? I didn’t complete the course, I didn’t this, I didn’t, that I didn’t get value from it. And Stripe says, here’s your money back. But if you have. Success mechanisms in place, the request doesn’t even happen, right?

And so getting people to finish and getting people’s positive results documented is super, super important for the ongoing success of your environment.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about continuous improvement, persistence, and iteration. This is definitely if I had to pick three. Things that all the people that I see that are super successful with lifter LMS, [00:26:00] they all take forward and perfect action. They continuously improve. They still have imposter syndrome just like everybody else.

I. But they’re constantly like refining and learning. Like a lot of people who wanna teach are also above average, like curious learning type people.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So you have to use that. And that’s what entrepreneurship is. It’s really just error correction. You’re constantly like optimizing and fixing errors and claiming opportunities and continuous improvement.

What does that look like for a course creator? If you do a signature course after two years, burn it down and redo it from scratch. We’ve redone the lifter LMS Quickstart course on our academy three times, maybe four. And that’s because times have changed. We know what people need even better than we ever have.

The tools have changed. The times have changed. So we redo it, we [00:27:00] continuously improve it. Yeah. And that’s just important.

Kurt Von Ahnan: I was just thinking, I just moved a lot of our motorcycle dealership training over to a new platform, working with a business partner, and one of the things that occurred through that process was what areas of learning in the course.

Didn’t fully hit. ’cause we follow up with live sessions and we end up having a lot of discussion. And so I had to think of where are the possible gaps at? And then I worked really hard to create additional assignments or quizzes to go into really drive home the learning material. And but that’s a delicate balance because you’re like, you don’t wanna give people too much to do where it becomes overly burdensome, but you also wanna make sure that the learning points get, action to them, right? And so I went over it with my partner in the project and we added a lot of assignments and quizzes to it, and we’re getting better results. But that comes with, you have to be willing to experiment and look at the [00:28:00] results and then make the acknowledgement of, did this go the direction I wanted or do I need to curve it back a little bit?

But you can change it as you need as you go.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And going back to our previous point about, getting some live time with your students, whether by email or Zoom or whatever in person, you need to have a feedback loop. ’cause if you’re not hearing from them, you’re just guessing. But when they’re like there and raising their hand Hey, I’m struggling with this part, then you know what?

You have to improve and you can take some responsibility to do that. This is one you know a lot about, which is business to business or business to customer B2C versus B2B. So selling a course or coaching program to one person versus to a group of people. I think the big mistake here is that I think it was somebody like Les Brown who would say that the problem is that you’re just, your dreams are too small.

Like you’re aiming too low. But if you really expand your mind. If you could [00:29:00] sell your courses to a company, and let’s say it’s a, if you sold your course like to a Fortune 500 company that like all their employees needed it, you just have one customer, that big company and you’re done, you’re super successful, right?

Yep. And that’s a, that’s a dream to do that. But that’s why we built Lifter LMS groups because people kept they’re like, I need to be able to, offer this training at scale, and the company needs to see the progress and the reporting on the students and so on. But my advice here is to think of a world where you do both, like you sell to individuals, but you also have a way to get into groups like.

I believe Angela Brown might do that where she’s has training for individual house cleaner entrepreneurs, but also for house cleaning companies that have lots of house cleaners and maids within the organization. So think big like that. And it [00:30:00] might not be a company, it could be a school, it could be like a nonprofit group.

It could be a hospital or some kind of public works thing. And maybe you have a course for like the individual, but then you have a different one for the company. But just think big and just know that option is floating out there.

Kurt Von Ahnan: That opens up other avenues, right? So just because something doesn’t look like it’ll do it out of the box. Don’t make the crazy assumption that you’re outta luck. So in a B2B world, maybe you do make an agreement with. A university or some kind of company that’s doing continuing educational credits and you go, oh, I don’t know how to manage that through Lifter, so I’m just gonna pass, this would be a great opportunity if my software would, and then not ask, because we have a ton of people doing continuing education credits through Lifter LMS.

We have, we, we’ve got custom fields. You can add licensing to the [00:31:00] certificates. You can do expires a year from this issue date. You can do recertification. With cohorts. There’s a ton of opportunities within the platform that when you first see the platform, you might make an assumption you don’t have the capability to do.

Don’t think small just ’cause you think you have to think small. There are all kinds of ways to do things. I personally, I really get a kick out of the, the idea of do I want to sell to one or do I want to sell to many? I love the example of selling to many. I love the idea of, let’s say I wanna sell the course for a hundred dollars a person, and then 10 people wanna buy the course through a group.

That’s a thousand dollars. I’ll make ’em a deal. You can buy it for $900, right? They save a hundred bucks and then you think did I lose a hundred dollars or did I just gain $800? Because it’s one transaction. So for me, I’ll do one to many all day long. I just think it simplifies the process [00:32:00] immensely.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I want to give people an analogy. If you think about books. Courses are like a modern version of books. And where have you done books in a group before, like in a classroom, like a course can be like a virtual textbook. We have lifter, LMS users who sell their course to professors at different universities that have like however many students per class.

And it’s not the whole semester, it’s just like one part of that professor’s like curriculum for the year. Is this online course? Or you could think about a book club. Imagine a bunch of women who just had a baby and they’re like, oh, let’s, and they’re in a group with the new kids and stuff, and they’re like, oh, let’s, postpartum yoga thing.

And then they take this course together and then they do it at home. They do it in the group. Like people read books in groups all over the place. [00:33:00] Think about that for.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Courses when I worked at Ducati, the CEO of Ducati put the, a copy of Strength Finders on everybody’s desk.

And just expected everybody to magically read it, ’cause the book showed up on our desks.

The same thing very much happens with a course. Sometimes the CEO sees something, they like, boom. They buy it for 80 or a hundred people and everyone gets access to it. And Lifter makes it really easy to make that kind of transaction very actionable.

Chris Badgett: Sometimes by the way, people have knowledge and skills that may not be the most exciting thing, like workplace safety, osha, whatever.

But if you’re in those safety niches, I see a lot of people signing up for lifter in safety niches in various industries, and they’re doing this at scale. So let’s, a course is cool, but let’s talk about coaching and having a community. For both as a creator, but also [00:34:00] when we’re designing our program, and I think for course creators adding at least some element of coaching, it allows you to charge more.

You’re gonna get better results. You’re gonna have that feedback loop open, so you’re gonna learn where you need to improve or what’s working well, what people like, what they don’t like, where the gaps are. And the easiest way to do that, my pro tip is to do in office hours. We started doing office hours at lifter LMS and people started coming and we’ve been doing it for seven years or something like that.

But imagine just doing one one hour time box call once a month that accompanies your course. And PE people can show up in a group. And you don’t even have to prepare If it’s like a ask me anything, open office hours. Yeah. You’re basically just creating the digital version of like office hours a teacher might have at a university or something like that.

And it can add a lot of [00:35:00] value. And then I would just say as an entrepreneur it’s good to surround yourself with other people doing this whole crazy thing of figuring out online business and. Creating information products and coaching programs. So join the communities out there and we’ve really focused on that at Lifter to provide some community as aspects.

We have a large Facebook group, a Slack community office hours for our top customers. Ask me anything for people that have questions as they’re new and getting into it and trying to figure things out. But don’t do it alone. Both as an entrepreneur and also don’t expect your students to do it alone.

I remember one of our first lifter, LMS customers said his students felt they said they felt like they were in a ghost town. And that really resonated with me. Like especially if you come in, you’re really excited. It is nice to be on a journey with some other people. We were a part of Dan Martel’s SaaS Academy and it was cool to be [00:36:00] in that community of like software entrepreneurs.

It’s not just. The value wasn’t just Dan delivering coaching and trainings, it was the whole community aspect of it all.

Kurt Von Ahnan: When I did live workshops, I actually thought the best part about the live workshop was the interaction between I. The attendees not me, right? I’ve always and that’s not imposter syndrome.

This is just being very real. I always felt like my role was to be the best facilitator to, to extract the information from the attendees and get them to share with each other rather than put the spotlight on me and just give like a lecture. And so I’ve always liked that type of training. And I once, once you get that nailed, the engagement goes through the roof.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. Once when community done well, it’s a, there’s a saying that people come for the content, but they stay for the community. Yeah, that’s really true. I’ve experienced that as a client before. [00:37:00] It’s community is super valuable and it’s becoming even more and important in a online AI kind of world, like community matters.

So let’s close out. Talking about this is definitely something I see with the successful course creators and coaches and education entrepreneurs and people building LMS sites for clients, which is personal discipline and habits. I think about it like this, a lot of people. Have a dream to write a book.

And I’m in this camp. I have written a book that is 95% done and I have not finished. But that’s because I’m really busy with lifter LMS. He is finished. See if you’re listening, Kurt is holding up one of his many published books. But to be an entrepreneur, to be a content creator, to be a, invested person trying to help your clients. You gotta have habits and [00:38:00] discipline for me personally I’m a, I know there’s these two ends of the spectrum. Some people love planning and all this, and other people like to be more improvisational. I happen to be on the scheduling end. I’m not saying that’s better.

But the improvisational end is also good and you can build discipline and habits around that as well. For me, time boxing is really important. I use the calendar heavily to make sure I’m touching the various parts of what I do and content I need to make. And even just administrative stuff that I need to do.

For example, today there’s a block of time on my calendar where I run payroll every other Thursday. Like it’s just, it happens. If I didn’t have that on the calendar, like I’m, it just creates mental overhead. I don’t need to deal with oh wait a second, is today payday or whatever. And I have like content creation time blocks.

I have other blocks for getting into various high priority projects and things [00:39:00] like that. But at the end of the day, I think the discipline comes from just having a strong why and believing in what you want to do and then and also taking care of your health. I think burnout is an extreme problem and entrepreneurship and it’s very easy to burn out.

I’ve been there. You’ve probably been there, Kurt, you out there listening has probably been there before. And just because you burned out, it doesn’t mean it’s over. It just means you let your discipline, your habits, and your health get away from you. And those are things that you can, you can’t flick a switch and have amazing habits, discipline and health, but you can work on it and be on a upward spiral instead of a downward spiral, or at least try to stabilize where you are.

And I. Spending time, just getting outside and being with your family and also doing all the business stuff you need to do it’s important to do it all.[00:40:00]

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yes. I don’t, I’m not sure how else to respond to that other than to say yes. For me it’s physical activity. Yeah. If I feel locked into a locked in or unproductive, or writer’s block or however you describe that unproductive feeling when you’re working. For me it’s physical activity. Get out, do a short bike ride, take the dog for a walk, something, come back, reset, and and get back to it.

But those. Those daily habits are super important. Like I, I still use a digital calendar. I still have people can set appointments with me through an appointment setting link, and it puts it on a Google calendar, which shares it to my Outlook calendar, which gives me notifications in my phone and all of that.

But my daily routine is I get up. I do my daily reading a little bit of prayer time, and then I review that digital calendar and I actually write it down in my digital tablet. [00:41:00] And the act of writing it down is what solidifies my expectations for the day, and then I just make sure that I hit those days marks.

What I mean and people can’t schedule an appointment with me more than less than 24 hours in advance. So I know that I don’t have any incoming appointments for that same day. So I’m able to really monitor and manage my calendar well that way.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s an awesome, and I read a book, it’s an old book, but it’s a classic called Getting Things Done by David Allen from a productivity standpoint, and that was written before digital.

The book’s probably been updated to be more digital, but. The concepts in there are super powerful. So I definitely recommend reading the book getting things done. And what’s the Big Habits book by James Clear? I was thinking of the Seven Effective

Kurt Von Ahnan: Habits of Successful People, or whatever

Chris Badgett: that is.

That’s also good. That’s also good. I’m gonna get that book real quick here. ’cause Habits Serve You, atomic [00:42:00] Habits is James Clear’s book. I. Habits are just like a superpower. And I don’t think people realize, or they underestimate how much mental load and stress you take away by letting the habit or the calendar block hold that space for you so you’re not running around like a Yeah, with a monkey mind of chaos in your head and feeling overwhelmed.

And the last thing I’ll say on that is. To go easy on yourself. I call it calendar integrity. So I’m really scheduled person ’cause I’m trying to, I’m juggling a million things and sometimes I miss something on my calendar or something else expands over something else. But I don’t beat myself up. As long as I’m like hitting at about 80% calendar integrity, I’m good.

And if I fall off or if it’s worse, I just try to get it back to AD and I’m not too hard on myself. So just because you may have some setbacks. It does take time to build that, but then once you can count on your systems [00:43:00] and your routines, habits and tools, the stress goes way down.

Yeah. And that comes later in the journey. It takes a while to learn those lessons. I think it does. It does. This has been a great discussion, Kurt. I appreciate it. I wanted to get together with you ’cause we’ve been doing this for a long time and I know we’ve seen patterns just over a decade plus in our own lives and also in, the tens of thousands, of course creators we’ve come across and interact with.

So we want to share some top, success patterns and patterns that don’t always work out and to watch out for. But thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Is there anywhere. You’d like people to connect with you.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Just two, two main things. Anything that’s business related for me is gonna be on Ana Nomas.

So Ana Nomas on x on Facebook our own website, ana nomas.com. And if you wanna make that personal [00:44:00] connection I really hold that up to my LinkedIn account ’cause I’m the only Kurt Van Onan on LinkedIn. So when you find me, you know you got the right guy, hit connect and and we’ll see what we have in store for each other.

You’re muted.

Chris Badgett: Thank you. Thanks for coming on, Kurt. Go connect with Kurt. He is an awesome guy to have in your corner. You can find me over at lifter LMS and on Twitter. For this episode, I wish you all the best success building your online education company. Reach out to us if there’s anything we can do to help join our communities and we will catch you in the next show.

Take care.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter [00:45:00] lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, student confidence coach Anita Van Rooyen describes how she used LifterLMS to target groups rather than individuals in order to effectively sell over 5,000 course enrollments.

Instead of promoting to students individually, she collaborated with educational institutions and schools to provide her confidence-boosting activities in large quantities. She made it possible for companies to enroll and manage whole student cohorts using LifterLMS’s group enrollment functionality, with group leaders managing registrations and monitoring progress.

By designing unique access plans for various institutions, Anita customized her services to better suit their unique requirements and financial constraints. Additionally, she monitored student participation and results using LifterLMS’s reporting features, which assisted her in improving her classes over time.

Her strategy demonstrates how coaches and educators may effectively reach a wider audience by leveraging technology in conjunction with a strong value offer.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Anita Vanian. She’s from Australia, she’s a student’s confidence coach. And she’s built a cool platform with lifter LMS. We’re gonna dig into her story as a coach, as someone who helps people and cares deeply about the people she’s helping.

But first, welcome to the show, Anita. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I’m so excited to be here. Awesome. I love your excitement and your energy. I’ve seen it on social media where you’re pumped when things are going and it’s a lot. It gives me great joy to see that stuff. I. But tell us what is student confidence.com au all about?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, so we help students and mostly international students to build confidence, wellbeing to then help providers, so universities, colleges student accommodation providers. To help their students to what we call stay, play, and pay. So there’s a lot of attrition rates in universities and colleges, so helping the providers support the students in their wellbeing so that they stay, hang around, getting engaged and involved in things, and then pay their fees, which is the important part.

Chris Badgett: So is it is it like the college and the schools that have international students, you’re helping them build the confidence of international students?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yes. Yeah. So we, like our client is the university’s, the colleges and then the user is the students.

Chris Badgett: So the students are in your courses?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yes.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. What are some of the biggest challenges that those students have? I know I’ve traveled a lot around the world, like it’s really hard to be in another country, but tell us more.

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, it’s super difficult and especially with students where, obviously English isn’t their first language and there’s a lot of cultural differences.

So a lot of students that may have even been quite confident when they were back home in their home country. Come to a whole nother country and start freaking out a little bit because there’s, they’ve got no certainty. There’s nothing that they have that is. Normal like they were back at home.

So even things like that we take for granted jumping on public transport or going to the supermarket or going to the movies or anything like that is a really different experience for them. And so they oftentimes, lose a lot of confidence in that that journey.

Chris Badgett: Is there a particular role at the university that, is that you reach out to, to provide the resource to, is it like a guidance counselor or a professor or like the admissions department? Who is it?

Anita Van Rooyen: It is all of the above okay. Universities are notoriously siloed, so yeah, everybody kind of works in their own little bucket, so that’s hard, but also full of opportunities because it means that you can sell the same program into a number of different places.

For some universities it’s the wellbeing counselors. For some universities it’s also. Different faculties. For some universities it’s also like the admissions team and the student success team and the and.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about, did you do this before, like in a kind of in-person format, or how did you, how did this niche develop for you?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, look, it’s it’s really interesting. I started, I retrained about 10 years ago as a life coach focusing on confidence. I used to be the shyest person in the universe. Which I also find difficult to believe myself sometimes. But super shy retrained as in coaching and through that, wanted to have some online courses as a, an offering, a free offering to get people to go, oh yeah, okay.

She sounds like she knows what she’s talking about, to then take on my in-person, one-on-one coaching services, things like that. I started with Lifter, I think maybe eight years ago, something like that. I put my, yeah, I did my first course about that long ago. And I looked around all over the place to try and find, okay, I am not a tech person.

I need something that I can manage to do by myself as a new founder. No, no experience in the tech world at all. Looked at a lot of different platforms and found lifter and went, oh, I can actually do this. I don’t need to have technical expertise. I don’t need to build a platform myself. All that kind of thing.

So created some little videos. I look back and go, oh my God, they’re terrible. It didn’t matter. It was really important just to. Make that start point. And that was, as I said, I think about eight years ago. And look, it’s been this kind of a, as in business, it’s this up and down ebb and flow of am I doing the right thing?

Am I selling the right thing? All that kind of stuff. So I still do in-person programs and workshops with universities with Covid. Then we went to live. Online in where I live in Melbourne, we had very long lockdowns, insanely long. So everything got transferred to, live by Zoom and that kind of thing.

And I also still had prerecorded content as well and always through lifter.

Chris Badgett: Did you start with international students or were you in love with the confidence kind of mindset, coaching niche?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah. Look, I started working with dancers and performers.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Anita Van Rooyen: I used, yeah, I used to do a lot of Latin dancing and I could see that there was a really big.

Space, a really big gap there between Stu, people that would come and learn how to dance, and then those that would go take the next step and do social dancing, and then those that would perform and all of those confidence challenges that sort of came around with that. So started working with dancers and performers.

Realized I didn’t love it. I loved the confidence in building the professional and personal development for people but didn’t love working with dancers. And I think it was they wanted to be shiny on stage for three minutes, four minutes. And if their, like rest of their life was went to the dogs, that didn’t matter.

I wanted people to have a great life, not just a great sort of four minutes. So finished working with them and had another moment of, I don’t know who I’m working with, and like I meditate most mornings, and in one of my meditations I literally ask myself, who, like, why did you start this in the first place?

Why did you go down this path of wanting to do this? And. Answer came back straight away. You wanna help people with life skills. And to this day, I still don’t know how I went from that meditation to coming into this office, typing into my computer, student accommodation near me, getting on the phone and saying who looks after the wellbeing and resilience of your students?

They said, no one. And I went that’s what I do. I had no idea what I was doing, but that’s what I do. ’cause I could tell that there was a whole lot of stuff that was relatable from, performing to performing in exams, for example. And there was a lot of correlation there and transferable knowledge.

And that’s how I started. I knew a total of zero people in. International education and in universities. So started from an absolute standing start. Wow. Yeah. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And finding your niche is often a windy road, so it makes you so windy, and curl in the loop for loops and all kinds of things.

Chris Badgett: I love that insight too, I’m not a great dancer, but like I understand there’s that moment you have to perform and it’s a slice of life. But if you can do your thing for like the whole slice of life, it just has more impact in a way. Not that dancing confidence isn’t important. That’s really cool insight.

Yeah. And I’m glad that meditation brought that to you.

Anita Van Rooyen: Oh, it was. It was the best meditation I think I’ve ever done.

Chris Badgett: Just in this subject matter expertise, just for anybody who may be struggling with confidence, what are some of the core things that you unlock and help people figure out and find their way?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, I think, look I’ve also worked with a lot of entrepreneurs in my work career, and what I noticed is that. Belief, self-belief, the beliefs you have about who you are, what the world is, all that kind of thing. So much impacts either in a positive or negative way, whether you proceed, whether you move forward in life, whether you move forward with your idea, with your course, with whatever it may be.

And so like I’m a coach, I have a coach, and we work on beliefs. A lot about, what are the beliefs that I have and are they helping me? Are they serving me? And I now do that with the students that I work with as well. So take them through exercises around identifying those beliefs that are not useful.

Oftentimes it’s stuff that we, even as adults, we inherit from our parents and we just keep a hold of them and don’t ever. Really explore what they’re doing. And so helping people explore what those beliefs are that hold them back and allowing them if they choose to make a decision to dump them if they want to or if they keep them knowing what the impact of that is and then deciding on what the beliefs are that they want for themselves and becomes a really powerful space of.

Becoming the boss of yourself. And I think for a lot of us, we have, there’s a really, it’s really easy to start, go, oh, my parents, or oh, my boss, or, oh my this or my that. And starting to take that ownership of your life and your results and your non results becomes. It’s scary thing because when you are responsible for things, then it can become really scary, but it’s also fantastically empowering when you have those results and you know that it’s on you as well.

Chris Badgett: What’s an example positive belief that you use? Like just going a little meta, as a course creator, as a coach. Then what’s an example of a negative belief you had to discard to be effective and create the impact you want to create?

Anita Van Rooyen: I’m gonna go the other way around ’cause I always like to finish on a positive.

Okay. So the one that I needed to dump, which was deeply entrenched in me for whatever reason, was the belief that I’m not good enough and. I’m not good enough to speak in front of people. I’m not good enough to record myself. And ‘m not good enough to, for people to pay me to do stuff. I’m not good enough to have friends.

I’m like, it just was this pervasive and invasive and insidious kind of thing that was taking up a lot of space in my life. So moving through that, and I had to do that a number of different levels in life. And then. Shifting that one out. And I think shifting it up to, oh, literally like I’m not kind like the opposite.

I am worthy. I am worthy of having nice things and I am worthy of having results and I am worthy of all these things and I have put in the hard work and I’m worthy then of receiving the results from that. That was, that’s I think, been the. Biggest Chunkiest one. Yeah, lots of other stuff, but that’s been the most impactful.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of beliefs, it sounds like eight years ago there was a moment where you had a belief like, I need to get a website. I need to take control of my online presence or whatever. How did you get into WordPress and like having a website that you could drive?

Anita Van Rooyen: I literally knew that I needed to have something that was.

Non-techie friendly that had support built into it that was a low or no cost entry point so that I could. Test stuff out and see if this was actually even a thing or not. At one point I will let you know that I swayed I swayed from the fold and went and tried out another one. Am I allowed to say which one it was?

Learn. Is it Learn Dash, okay. Yep. And oh my God, like it’s so complicated, so overwhelming, so complex. And I just went I put some time and energy into it and then went, this is like lifter. Let me just go back to Lifter. Let me just go back to Lifter. ’cause it’s simple. Simple is good. In my world. I don’t need things to be over complicated.

There is that ability to add and modify and all the different add-on bits. And it’s on a, on that platform where other developers have come in and been able to create bits and pieces that you can add onto it. So it’s so totally customizable. The support that I have got from the team has always been super on point and.

I love that. ’cause as a, an individual, like I now have a guy that helps me with a couple of little techie bits that I just, I know that, needs to happen. But for the most part, like I still upload all the videos. I create all the stuff on the platform and. And it’s easy. And that’s what I love.

’cause easy is good in tech world. And yeah, and it’s just, it has literally been like an eight year journey. A little swim off to the left for a moment with Learn Dash and then come back and I don’t regret it for a single second.

Chris Badgett: Do you remember how you first found lifter LMS or discovered what you wanted to do with your, for your LMS aspect of your website?

Anita Van Rooyen: I look, I remember, I think like most people, jumping on Google and going what’s a good learning system? I didn’t even know. What to call it like that? It was an LMSI just was like, how do you make course, how do you make a course? Look through a couple of different sort of, review sites and, and they’d have 10 different options and reading through them and having a bit of a look.

And it did become quite the job to work out which one but the name lifter kept coming up. And it kept coming up and it kept coming up. As, recommended. And the more then I looked into it and I think also what I really loved was that space of being able to try it out for free.

Yeah. As a micro micro business with zero budget not even really a beer budget on a like zero budget. I wanted to have something that I could try out just the base, see how usable it was, see what it could do. And I love that about Lifter and how you guys. Work things and how you guys make your business.

Because supporting entrepreneurs at that really early stage when you have no money, but you’ve got energy and you’ve got all that kind of stuff and you just want it to happen. Having that space where you can try things out and have a go and. It still looks really professional without having to pay huge, like monthly fees and all kinds of stuff like that.

I love the intention behind that of wanting to help others, wanting to help entrepreneur entrepreneurs to start up and be successful. And so that was really what got me over the line is the sense that you are in it with us. That made me just okay, these guys get it. And that was just that, that sold me.

And so I love that. Like I’ve, checked out some other stuff over time but always come back to Lifter for its simplicity for the way that you run your business. And I love it.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. We do feel strongly about that in the sense of no course creator left behind.

Like we’re trying to help as much as we possibly can. And I

Anita Van Rooyen: think that comes through in everything that I’ve seen and everything. I. Even when I’ve been on the free not paid, you a thing for a number of years, then you guys have still supported, you’ve still, like when I’ve sent support requests, you’ve still rep replied to them, you’re still giving me good advice, all that kind of thing.

And that makes your business really sticky. I appreciate that. I’m glad to hear all that. Is there any like specific features in the product that you really love or use a lot as an example?

Look, I don’t use quizzes but I have now got, I’m gonna sound really like a bit of a wally, but I’ve got like a tech stack now, which I feel fancy saying.

’cause I use Lifter. I’ve now I use bunny.net for storage. Yeah. And Presto player. Yeah, to have the overlays and some fancy kind of fun things like that for the students. It took me, it did take me a hot minute to work out how to make all of that kind of work together, but now it is and it’s just, it’s fantastic.

It’s, I don’t know, what do I love about it? I think the ease. That’s, I know there’s not really a specific feature that I use so much, but the ease of being able to create content, create courses, just make stuff happen without the need for a developer. I was literally had a meeting with a lady the other day that I’ve known for a couple of years, and she went down the path of creating a whole platform.

Herself. I’m like, from scratch. Like, why would you do that? Why would you do that? She told me that she spent well over a hundred thousand, she thinks is probably closer to 200,000 on developers, on the on all sorts of stuff. And I’m like, girl, what are you thinking? There’s so much out there. And I told her about Lifter.

I tell everybody about Lifter. I couldn’t believe that she’d spent that much money on a platform when there are these amazing platforms out there that have got support built into them, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I’m a, I feel like I’m now super fangirling on you, but I’m just, I love what you do and I’m so grateful.

Chris Badgett: We appreciate it. I’m glad it’s working out for you. And you mentioned like. Selling to groups? Are you using the groups add-on? Are you, tell us about what you’re doing from the groups aspect, because a lot of course, creators are going one-to-one, but it sounds like you’re going one to many. So what are you doing there?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, look, I started one-to-one and realized that was a really hard slog. Even tried, I think I went on to Coursera. For a moment, put a couple of courses up on there. And again, you just, you don’t have control over stuff. So decided that within the university and higher education space that I.

Rather than students having to pay for things, the universities and colleges can pay. They’ve got budget for these kind of programs. So the groups add on that I bought has been incredibly useful. I now make a different group for each different provider and then within that, even each different semester.

Because then I can do reporting on this provider, these students in this semester and it just works. I use that combined with the membership area. So create different memberships that then the groups have access to whatever level membership that they purchase. So that has proven to be really successful.

We’ve now sold, I think 5,000 registrations. One, yeah. I’m, I’ve made it intentionally really cost effective. So like the base, like what we call the base kind of platform is $2 per student. When bought in bulk I’ve now got like a minimum amount that people need to pay. So even if they’ve got a hundred students, there’s a minimum sort of spend required because of the setup and.

$2 a student is super, super cheap, right? Then I’ve got other content that I’ve added on in collaboration with some other entrepreneurs as well. Small business owners who are experts in different areas. One in job seeking, one in financial literacy, another one in for like Asian students.

Do you need to have an English name? Because. There’s all of these different things that international students really need. So having that space of being able to collaborate with other other content producers as well, and put their content on my platform, and then we have a profit sharing arrangement, it’s win.

And I love that.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

Are there any other tools you mentioned in your tech stack that you love, like you mentioned presto player bunny.net. Like what do you use for hosting, what do you use to manage your email list? Any other plugins you use, what theme do you use? That kind of thing.

Anita Van Rooyen: I would love to be able to tell you what plug what theme we use.

I can’t exactly remember because my. Tech guy put that on there. When at the moment we are not using the, what’s the one you’ve got iPilot? Yeah. We’re not using that at the moment because I just recently bought the Infinity bundle. Okay. So going through all that different stuff because because I set the platform up to be for group sales.

It’s like almost now working backwards to make things accessible for individuals as well. Okay. We’re just about to do the, like a stripe add in that’s part of the bundle. And some other different things. We’ve also got the advanced videos. We use that as well to make sure that students aren’t just going complete.

’cause we have that. With some students who were like, who were given an incentive to watch the videos by their provider and just went ding. So added on the advanced videos. So yeah, and now as I said, working backwards to make the courses available to.

Individuals. So students that are like home, say home stay students or students who are homeschooling, where it’s an individual family that can then purchase this to get access to communication skills and stress management and confidence skills and those kind of things that are on the platform.

Chris Badgett: Are you mostly focused on Australia or is this branching outside of. Oz

Anita Van Rooyen: the great thing because it’s an online prerecorded on demand, all of those things with and now, ’cause there’s certificates, we call it micro microcredentials ’cause that’s what universities love to hear. It is universal. So we’ve started in Australia because that’s where I am.

And obviously now looking at. Other countries where there is, English speakers. We’ve also, through bunny.net, have put on captions in a number of different languages, including Chinese Hindi and Spanish. So there’s all these kind of bonus, extra things that the providers get that make it super global.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, I noticed. I know. It’s

Anita Van Rooyen: very exciting.

Chris Badgett: I, it’s a big issue. That’s why I love when people find international student confidence is a niche, but even where I live in Maine, my daughter goes to a private school. There’s a lot of international students, and I’m thinking about like how important the student confidence thing is.

It’s, yeah it’s very important.

Anita Van Rooyen: And it’s really it’s really interesting because like I’m in this niche of international students, but really it’s the same for domestic students around the world as well. A lot of them are struggling with, mental health challenges, confidence challenges, all kinds of things like that as well.

So I’m hoping that also we can expand into domestic students, high school students and build lives.

Chris Badgett: It’s a big issue. Yeah. And just to double click on that a little bit we’re of a different generation, you and I, but like maybe shed some insight on confidence issues that younger generations may have these days that are a little different from the world we came from.

What’s changed or what’s emergent these days?

Anita Van Rooyen: I think the biggest one is this horrible, terrible disease I call comparisonitis. Social media and stuff. Social media, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That comparison between, the perfection of filters on screen and what people see in themselves.

And, that comes from comparing the brightest, shiniest outside of other people to the darkest horriblest, idea of yourself and going, oh, they’re so amazing and their life is fantastic and they’re doing all these things and I’m just me. So I think that one is the biggest challenge.

Chris Badgett: I can only imagine because I came from a world, pre-internet and my comparison set was like, whatever, 5,200 people, not 2 million, a billion, two, 2 billion. It’s, that’s so different.

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: For a developing mind and Oh,

Anita Van Rooyen: absolutely. Absolutely. And look, I think the other one that we have, I have to talk about is the impact of Covid and lockdowns.

And, we’re seeing now I was talking to a couple of university providers and they were saying that I. This year for students and that’s domestic and international, that this year has been the worst for mental health and behavioral challenges. And I just, with my human behavior hat on went, okay, so let’s go back.

So these students that are in a university now, first year we’re in year eight. When Lockdowns first happened, where is the biggest amount of behavioral challenges in school is year eight students, year eight and year nine. And again, from that human behavior perspective, when trauma happens, which Covid was a form of trauma development, shuts down.

So for those students who were okay, COVID is actually great, they’re doing pretty well. For those that really struggled during lockdowns without seeing their friends and being at school and all that kind of thing, this is a trauma. And so their like adult development prog progress shuts down.

So there is these really huge challenges and it’s only gonna get worse ’cause. There’s still a whole lot of students that are going through, getting older in school, but their development level, social development, emotional development level is shut down. So I think there’s a lot of stuff to, to come.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Tell us a little bit about your team. I believe you have other coaches as well, and you have a tech person, so an education entrepreneur, they do as much as they can, but then they start, it seems many times they start, filling in team members and, building a business of a community of folks to help.

What does your team set look like?

Anita Van Rooyen: Look, they’re all part-timers or casual, so like I don’t have a massive team around me. I am still very bootstrappy cashflow conscious, all that kind of thing. Yeah. My tech guy is a guy that I literally. Call when I need to send him an email and say, Hey, this is going wrong.

Can you help me fix it? Or Can you upgrade this or can you do that? So yeah, and the other coaches are also people that I call on as need. Still a teeny tiny business.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Tell us a little bit more just about the impact of your platform. Is that you’ve helped like about 5,000 plus students, which is amazing.

What are some of the success stories or just impact you’re seeing from your work that brings you motivation to keep going and doing this project?

Anita Van Rooyen: I think. Like in the within the course, I have an area after each lesson that’s what’s the, use the usefulness of this piece of content like for each lesson and.

I wanna make sure that the content remains relevant as time changes. And what we’re finding is that students consistently rate the content really useful to them. It’s short bits of content, five to 10 minutes long maximum because short attention spans so that’s been really. Great.

And then also at the end of each kind of course there is a space there that’s open for free text of what’s been the biggest learning, what have you loved, what’s been the biggest takeaway for you and the students. Then I. Not all of them, but we’ll oftentimes put in some content around how they now feel more confident to talk to other students, or they feel more confident to start engaging with the next door neighbor, that they’ve been living next to for five years and have never spoken to and now.

If they’re talking to them or it’s helped them to feel more more confident to want to volunteer in the community and those kind of things. Other students have said that they now feel that they can contribute in class, whereas before they were sitting there, they might know the answer, but they wouldn’t add to the conversation in class.

And now they’re. Putting their hand up and wanting to contribute and those kind of things and those stories of a student that’s now moving forward in their life more easily. They’ve got themself, the job, all that kind of thing. That’s the reason I get outta bed.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s amazing.

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: In terms of courses or instructional design, curriculum design, is it like one main course or you have a bunch of different courses and you mentioned using memberships and groups as well, but what’s your like kind of framework for the architecture of the program?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yep. So there is the kind of what we call the base platform is three mini micro-credential.

Courses. One is communication skills, one is stress management, and the other one is around building confidence in life. Then there’s the, there’s add on. So universities have to buy the base platform and then they can add on other modules as well. So they can add on a module called I just need a Job, which is to help students.

Get a job. ’cause they, we hear this all the time. Oh, I just need a job. So we called it, I just need a job. And then there’s financial literacy as well because it’s another really big challenge for students. And then that third one of, do I need an English name? Because that’s what students ask. So the providers can just by the base platform or they can then choose to add on any of those modules that they choose.

And that’s just an extra kind of couple of dollars. Per module. But then that goes across the board to their students. So the way we’ve set it up is that with each new intake of students, so whether it’s semester or trimester that the universities work on that, they report back to us and say, this is how many students we’ve got coming in this semester.

Invoice us for this many people.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s very cool. And you’re a very talented copywriter. I know because the, it’s all about feedback loops. So if this, you keep hearing, I need a job, I need a product named, I need a,

Anita Van Rooyen: I just need a job. Yeah. And it’s using, it’s like, it’s literally using the language that the students use and that creates.

Then that stickiness with them. The other thing that we’ve done also is with a number of the add-on courses, especially with the one I just need a job because that’s a very popular one with students, is to then cross reference other content that I’ve got on that base platform. So when we’re talking about I just need a job.

Okay, when you’re going for an interview, you may also need these confident skills. So have a look at these lessons and put hyperlinks into there, into the other content so that there is that double space of getting in results because the universities wanna see that students are using it, how they’re using it.

That kind of reporting. So having those courses cross-reference each other a bit means that then there’s more likelihood that students will go and have a look at other content that they may not necessarily look at.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s amazing. What, how long does it take you as an example to make the module, I need a job?

Like when you realized there was a need for that, what was the process and timeline for, okay, we’re gonna add this Add-on mini course.

Anita Van Rooyen: Yep. So that was one that I did with a career coach. So some of that was, we literally did a Zoom meeting that we recorded together. She. Planned out a bit of a a broad script, and we went through that.

For the ones that I did myself, I literally just went, okay, in communication skills, what are the things that students would need? And each of those lessons is each of those courses is 14 lessons so that you could do it in. Over two weeks if you did one at one every day. And it was literally started off as a brain dump of this is the questions that students would ask about.

Okay, if I was looking to build my communication skills, what is it that I would need? So some of it was based on what I know students want. And then other parts of it was what I know that students need. Because they are not always the same thing. Yeah. And it’s one of those challenges ’cause a lot of providers, a lot of universities say, oh yeah, we’ll ask the students, you know exactly what they want and we’ll give them what they want.

I’m like, sure. I also need to give them what they need that they don’t know. That they don’t know that they need. So having that insight means that then we can give them both of those sides of the coin. And for me, when I’m creating content I love to wing it. Probably shouldn’t say that, but I love to win it.

It’s art and

Chris Badgett: science, right? There’s art too.

Anita Van Rooyen: Totally. Totally. So I will have a couple of dot points of the things that I absolutely wanna cover. And I’ve got some examples and some stories and stuff that I weave into it, but I don’t have a script. I don’t work that way very well. I love free balling it, and just seeing.

Where it goes and then edit it as need be. But I’ve found having that intention of making them really short, really sharp, having a review point at the end to cover off. Okay. These are the main things that we looked at has been really helpful. And it’s meant that I haven’t needed to go into like overwhelm of, oh my God, this is all so much.

I have to have everything scripted and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Although what I can say, I look back and the first couple of courses that I created were very scripted. Very scripted. And I didn’t put my face on the camera. I had slides because I was, it was a slideshow and I was, ’cause I was still really in that space of.

I’m not very confident. I’m a confidence coach, but I’m still not very confident in this level of stuff. And so I, it was a slideshow with a voice record behind it, and there was nothing wrong with that. I look back now and think, oh, that’s a bit lame. But I pulled that out. I had a provider a couple of years ago who was like, oh, do you have something that’s really short?

I said, oh, actually I’ve got this program that I created, eight years ago, whatever. And the students still got value out of it, so I was like, you know what, like we don’t have to have perfect content. It doesn’t have to be super polished. The lighting doesn’t have to be perfect. The microphone doesn’t have to be perfect.

Nothing has to be perfect if you go in and deliver some stuff with passion and enthusiasm about any topic. Then that gets received really well.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned one of the qualities I see in people that are successful with these types of projects, which is consistent and perfect action and continuous improvement.

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And you’ve great, given some great advice there. Is there any other advice you’ve been at this for eight years for somebody, sometimes it’s slow in the beginning or it’s hard to get started. Any other tips around. Just keeping moving on and, finding your way.

Anita Van Rooyen: I think the biggest tip is get out of your own way.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Anita Van Rooyen: Our mindset is so powerful. It’s the one thing that will stop us more certainly than anything else. At all. If your mindset is in that space of whatever happens, I’ll just keep going, then it doesn’t matter if the technology doesn’t work or if the microphone doesn’t work properly or anything doesn’t happen.

If you don’t get sales immediately, when you put more work into your mindset and yourself than any other thing, everything else works out for you.

Chris Badgett: This is a popular question. It is around like getting students, or in your case, like getting providers ’cause you’re selling to groups mostly. You got some sales initially, but what is your, what powers your marketing engine?

How do you think about growth and like getting new sales?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, that’s always the challenge is, the world domination ever growing expansion. And look, I’m probably one of the worst people to ask ’cause I am the least business person I know. And run a lot by the seat of my pants rather than a lot of planned things.

But like I put content out regularly. I

Chris Badgett: what type of content? Like videos or blog posts or what newsletter?

Anita Van Rooyen: I use Link. I use LinkedIn a lot.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Anita Van Rooyen: Because all of the people that I’m wanting to connect with are all on LinkedIn emails, I found that LinkedIn has been more. Useful than emails even than bulk emails because emails, when you’re talking to the vice chancellor of a university or a dean or something like that, they oftentimes have their gatekeeper, and so your emails don’t necessarily get through.

LinkedIn is more of a personal thing. It’s on your phone. People are looking at it on like weird o’clock, like Sunday night at 8:00 PM. I will get people except my LinkedIn requests, because the end of the weekend they’re sitting watching TV or something and they’ll have a bit of a scroll and go, oh yeah, I’ll add her.

And so you know that you’re getting to directly to some decision makers. What’s also been really useful for us is. Going and putting ourselves out there for a number of different awards and things like that. So we’ve won a couple of innovation awards and student Services awards, and we just were listed recently in an Australian Government Department of Education, best Practice Guide for International Student Wellbeing.

So that gives us some of that gravitas of. Okay, we’ve been recognized by somebody else rather than you just beating on your own chest saying how wonderful you are. There’s people outside of that have said, yeah, okay, you’re doing some cool stuff. And, which is great ’cause the stuff that I do is a little off center, right?

It’s a little, it’s a little, Mindy and it’s experiential and all kinds of things like that. It is a bit left of center and that means that sometimes it’s seen as a bit fluffy. I always get student testimonials when I’m doing things. Use those a lot because the student voice is really important.

The biggest thing that I learned in my business, which I only learned a couple of years ago, was. That when I am selling to universities and colleges, rather than telling a story about student wellbeing, which is what I do, and student confidence, it’s what is it that the university, the person who’s buying it, what is it that they need?

So I think we started, I started off saying about how we work with providers to help them. Helps students to stay, play, and pay because retention, engagement and completionis their number one driver. That’s their

Chris Badgett: metrics.

Anita Van Rooyen: That’s the metric that they have. Yeah. Yeah. And it took me ages to work that out.

And I ended up getting advice from another guy who works in this space and he said, Anita, like all your website is talking about is wellbeing and wellbeing, and what they care about is. Student retention, engagement, and completion. How you do that, they don’t care. There’s some legal requirements that they have to have some stuff, but retention, engagement, completion, that’s what they care about.

So make everything related to that and that has super helped me with getting more sales.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You say you’re not that salesy, businessy marketing, but you’re like a brilliant copywriter. I’m reading the headline on your homepage and it’s helping your students to stay, pay and repay or stay play and repay.

And

Anita Van Rooyen: repay. Yeah. And that’s

Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s brilliant. That’s. Talking to the buyer directly and their term. Yeah. And how you do that. You have your secret sauce and your method.

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah. And it’s, it’s, that’s through innovative wellbeing, confidence, progress, blah, blah, blah, blah. But this is what you want.

This is what we deliver.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Results based learning. Anita, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you for being a shining light. I’m so happy you’ve been around for eight years and, I think what makes me the most excited is the, the students you’re helping with their confidence.

That’s such a impact and a positive ripple you put out into the world. So good on you for doing that. And keep up the amazing work. That’s Anita Van Ruen. She’s a student confidence.com au. Any final words for those out there listening in terms of building their confidence or getting out there and teaching online?

Anita Van Rooyen: Give it a crack. I think the biggest thing that, the one that was the hardest learning for me was get out of your own way. Do more work on yourself than on your business because it repays thousands of times over and connect with other like-minded businesses, entrepreneurs. It’s the reason why I have.

Come back to Lifter any time that I’ve gone, oh, let me just check that out. I’ve always come back to Lifter. ’cause it’s really, I love it. I love it. And I think that, I do feel, it does feel like you’re in, that you’re in the, you’re in it with us. You’re in the trenches with us. And creating a group of people around you.

Collaboration is the new black.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Anita, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Go check out student confidence.com au and Anita, thanks again for coming and we’ll have to do this again down the road in a couple years and see the more impact you’ve created in the world.

Anita Van Rooyen: I’d love to. Thanks so much, Chris.

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Get Popup Maker NowJames Kemp’s genuineness and depth in this LMSCast episode, which discusses what it truly takes to create and develop a product that serves millions of people, is what makes it so ideal and genuine. In this LMScast, James talks about how he went from working as a web designer at a small business to being the Core Product Manager at WooCommerce. His tone is really accessible and grounded.

He candidly discusses the difficulties, trials, and epiphanies that molded his journey rather than only highlighting his accomplishments. James provides insightful information about how WooCommerce strikes a balance between usability and complexity, particularly for novice and expert users, demonstrating a thorough comprehension of both product design and user experience.

He adds a welcome element of candor by being open about the platform’s present shortcomings and areas for development. James discusses his personal drive to make a significant contribution to the open-source eCommerce industry in addition to the technical aspects.

All of this, together with the organic flow and respect between him and presenter Chris Badgett, makes this LMSCast episode not just educational but also really motivating and real.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend. His name is James Kemp. He’s the core product manager at WooCommerce. I’ve known James for a long time. He has an awesome Twitter. You can find him at James C. Kemp on Twitter or X. But first, welcome to the show, James.

James Kemp: Yeah, thanks Chris. Good to be here finally.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Awesome, man. It’s, we’re gonna have an exciting conversation around WooCommerce and just your life and what you do with Woo. But first tell us about [00:01:00] your role at WooCommerce. What do you do there?

James Kemp: Yeah, like you said core products manager and that’s yeah I wanna say a fairly new role, but it is a new role at WooCommerce.

Prior to that, I was a product manager. I. At WooCommerce and the difference there is that a product manager focuses on specific they tend to have specific focus areas. So my focus area prior to being core product manager was order management. So I would focus on products that enhance or features improvements that kind of enhanced the order management experience.

Whereas now the core product manager role is working alongside all of the other product managers and creating a more cohesive vision of every aspect of WooCommerce and. Joining the dots between the different teams within [00:02:00] WooCommerce and what each each product manager and each subsequent engineering team and design team are working on, but also connecting the users and, the merchants, the builders and their experience and what they’re expecting from WooCommerce on the whole, yeah, and I’m also I’m helping out a little bit with some platform stuff. So we separated between product and platform. And product is essentially the experience that either a merchant or a user or a customer on a WooCommerce store would have. And platform is more like behind the scenes kind of stuff.

Like performance and things like that. I’m helping it a little bit with platform at the moment as well, just because the person who usually leads that is on sabbatical. So yeah, that’s that’s me at the moment.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. And similar to Lifter LMS, which has a free core [00:03:00] plugin.

WooCommerce has a free core plugin and then tons of extensions. Do you have any sense of how many add-ons for WooCommerce exists? It’s thousands, I’m guessing. But

James Kemp: yeah, I would say thousands. I did have the number on our marketplace. So WooCommerce has a marketplace typically, or Yeah in the past.

Primarily that is for premium extension. So it’s a marketplace where you buy a product to enhance WooCommerce. They also had they would list SaaS, software as a service based products as well in the marketplace. And I think they’re looking at listing free products now as well, which will be interesting.

But yeah, I believe on the marketplace and I have this number somewhere, but I did not bring it with me. There’s thousands on that marketplace alone. Then not all, WooCommerce extensions are in that marketplace. So yeah, there’s definitely a big collection of extensions available

Chris Badgett: Going back to Core, I know from the LMS space, it sounds easy, like in the beginning it’s like for the user, they just wanna put some of course together, put some videos in it, sell access to it. But over time what happens is people start asking for more and more. And I know the same is true in e-commerce.

The beginner user, in their mind, they’re just like, I just wanna be able to sell a product for my website, which on the surface sounds pretty. Straightforward in the sense that okay, there’s a product and we can take billing, and then they’re either gonna get it mailed to them or it’s a digital product, but it’s not that simple.

And there’s a lot of complexity that grows over decades. But you still wanna protect the user, particularly a first time user or beginning beginner user, or in your case store owner to be able to get in there and get started without getting overwhelmed. So how do you think about complexity [00:05:00] but also protecting the beginner user?

James Kemp: Yeah, I think this has always been the biggest challenge, like you say, and I think WooCommerce’s approach previously has always been to be quite a lean core offering. And I think that is still the case, but over time. What merchants expect from a lean offering has changed. That there’s things that merchants and even builders expect now that maybe they wouldn’t have five years ago.

So yeah there’s definitely like an evolution that happens. And my view is to still keep the core as lean as possible. But we want to make sure that what we are offering are the essential tools that, the majority of merchants or builders would require in order to get started with [00:06:00] e-commerce.

Chris Badgett: WooCommerce has always been, or at least in recent years positioned against Shopify as like a software as a service solution. In some ways, software as a service solutions can be a little easier to get started in, but they’ve become much more limited in flexibility, customizability, they often get a lot more expensive over time.

But as an insider inside of WooCommerce, how do you think about Shopify versus WooCommerce?

James Kemp: I think everyone has different views on this. One of my views is. That they’re serving for slightly different user types. I agree with what you’re saying, that it appears easier to create or to launch a very simple store on a software on a software as a service, products like Shopify because you can just.

[00:07:00] There’s no decisions to make. You can just go to the website, create a login, create an account, and your store is active. Whereas with something like WooCommerce, you’ve got to think a bit more where am I gonna host this? How much is it gonna cost me? And that cost differs depending on where you has it.

So there’s definitely like a barrier to entry there. But I do feel like. And you touched on it with, as you progressed down the line, you realized that a platform like WooCommerce is a lot more flexible and extensible than something like Shopify, which is much more strict and rigid in the add-ons and customizability that you can put into it.

And I think many of the people. Who come into WooCommerce are looking for that flexibility out of the box which makes the whole decision process of, where am I gonna host this a bit more palatable to them, I think. But yeah if you had someone highly non-technical wanting to spin up a store, then.

WooCommerce is a hard sell for them at the moment. And that is something that we’re trying to improve. And that’s not an improvement at the products level. That’s an improvement at the marketing level. We need to build a better path into just spinning up a WooCommerce store and then having them be able to take that and set it live and use it.

But we’re also trying to like, cater that experience to any host and, any preference of where you want to host this thing. So it’s a challenge for sure, but like I say I think they’re slightly different user types. And maybe they shouldn’t be and maybe they won’t be, further down the line once we, enhance the path into WooCommerce. I think there’s definitely there’s scope there to improve that process.

Chris Badgett: I’m looking at WooCommerce on the WordPress repository, the free core plugin, and it has over 8 million active installations. So tell us about your story. How did you go from a guy who found WordPress to building WooCommerce add-ons to core product manager at Woo responsible in, in a way for eight, 8 million plus users?

Tell us about that journey.

James Kemp: Yeah, there’s an interesting stat actually. We update what we call the newsroom every month typically which is woocommerce.com/newsroom. It gives some statistics about WooCommerce and where we stand in the grand scheme of the internet. And currently and we we make conservative adjustments to the numbers that we get.

The statistic right now is that 33% of all e-commerce stores are powered by WooCommerce. Which is a huge [00:10:00] number. And it ties into my story a little bit, which yeah if you aren’t aware, which I’m sure many people aren’t. I started with WordPress back in 2009 when I was working at a web design agency.

WordPress was their tool of choice for. Actually, when I started we were just using HTML not even PHP, just HTML. Then, yes, PHP started making its way into our workflow and we’d have, like dynamic copyright dates in the footer and template parts for headers that we could carry across different pages.

And then WordPress made its way into that. Process as well for content management. I think it was used a little bit for specific sites that maybe required a bit more. And we were using Magento at the time as well for e-commerce. WooCommerce wasn’t I always forget when it was first launched, [00:11:00] but it was around that time, but it wasn’t, a big thing yet.

Jigo shop was still a thing back then. Which WooCommerce was a fork of. So yeah, we were using WordPress and Magento and I have always, so I started my role as a designer what they called a web designer, which was someone that would design and then build the website. So it was a mix of design and development.

And I’ve always been keen to experiment and just build things. So one of the things I built at that time was a plugin that for WordPress, that integrated Magento elements into your WordPress site. So we could bring in like the Magento cart and put it in the WordPress header and carry, that cart session across the whole site.

I built that as a free plugin released it on.org as a free plugin. And then I built some add-ons for that [00:12:00] as premium plugins. They were things like single sign-on and some other things that I can’t recall right now. And I sold them on Code Canyon, which is a, an Invato product.

Invato have like. Different marketplaces for different types of products. And code Kenyon was their software or, code code snippet marketplace. They had not just WordPress related products that you could buy there, you could buy scripts for PHP and things like that.

So yeah, I put those products on there and at some point we shifted over to. Using WooCommerce. And I had left this company by then and started my own web design. I call it an agency. It was only two of us building websites for clients and we started using WordPress and WooCommerce, and this was like 2011.

And just in that. Interaction with [00:13:00] clients, they would ask for features that weren’t available in WooCommerce. And my proposal to them would be I can build this for you for a lower price if you allow me the license to then sell this as a product. So my first WooCommerce product was called multiple images per variation for WooCommerce.

So it was quite a practical tongue twister name. Eventually renamed as woo thumbs and is still selling today. But that’s where my, love for selling software and selling products. Started over the course of the next. Seven to eight years I built up a collection of WooCommerce specific plugins eventually rebranded from selling under my own name to selling under iconic wp which is still the brand name today, iconic wp.com.

And yeah I built that up [00:14:00] into a business that, provided. My full-time job, provided income for myself and my family. But also we hired, we had three developers. We had a support team that we outsourced to level up. We had a designer, we had a content person, so we had a. A business essentially selling WooCommerce plugins until 2021 where that business was acquired by Liquid Web Stellar wp which is where it still resides now.

And then I worked there for a couple of years, still running iconic and doing the same stuff that I was doing prior to the acquisition, but with. A bit more backing from Stellar and that the interactions you can then get from other product based companies. And then I got to a point where felt like I’d done as much as I could for iconic, and, the majority of our products [00:15:00] were like utility based.

Not solution based. They were enhancements to WooCommerce. And I wanted to be able to take my knowledge of WooCommerce and my kind of understanding of design, of development, of marketing, of product, and place it somewhere where I could have more impact. So I reached out to Paul, who was the CEO of WooCommerce at the time.

I just said, is there any job for me that would satisfy those needs to put my skills to a products that would impact more people? And then, yeah we went through the process and here I am. Like I say, that kind of ties back to that 33% figure that now I can that what I’m doing feels more impactful.

Feels like it’s, it’s valuable to that number of [00:16:00] people. And that’s a big responsibility. But, a satisfying feeling when it goes right.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How do you keep your cool just with 33% of e-commerce, impacted by your decisions? I feel the same way on a much smaller scale in the LMS niche.

There’s a lot of people who depend on the software, but I guess I’ve just gotten used to it, so it doesn’t bother me. But does that, do you ever feel that pressure of all the people out there

James Kemp: just, yeah, I mean there’s definitely, pressure. I think the way I counteract that is previously I think WooCommerce would develop features, develop things in WooCommerce, and they would release it and people would find out about that stuff as it was released.

I think one of the things that I’ve tried to bring to the table since, since being in my [00:17:00] role, is to be a bit more open with the community, with the users, with the merchants and the builders about what we’re working on, and get feedback, right at the beginning of the process rather than, and then using that as a tool to make a decision rather than just making a decision.

Assuming that, I know best or the team knows best and then dealing with the consequences. I feel like it’s counteractive a lot more because I’ve validated those decisions before they’re actually rolled out or implemented. And that’s not to say that, we won’t get things wrong sometimes, but I think being where I am now, I have the ability to, ensure that if a decision is made incorrectly, that we’re able to reverse that or remedy it in some way rather than this is out there now and deal with it. That’s not the kind of approach that I like to take especially with, with the user base that we have. [00:18:00]

Chris Badgett: It doesn’t surprise me.

But great product people use their, use, the products that they work on. So you’re also an awesome photographer. I bought one of your grease prints for my mom for Christmas.

James Kemp: Yeah. How did she like it?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. She loved it. It’s up and its up in the house. But you have your photography site, which is at James Kemp photo, and then you did a physical product.

I think their wooden puzzle site called puzzles unlocked.com. Tell us about those pet projects.

James Kemp: Yeah, I think, and I touched on this earlier actually which is quite nice that I have a desire to just be creative and build, and I think that comes through in, just doing photography in general but also wanting to build things in code and wanting to solve puzzles.

Like all of these kind of tie into that creative aspect would [00:19:00] just having that outlet to be creative in some way. So one of the things I wanted to do that I hadn’t really done before was to actually use WooCommerce as a merchant. I. Previously I had used WooCommerce as a builder building stores for other merchants.

So I understood the needs that they had in terms of what they needed from the product, but I didn’t have the understanding of how they would experience WooCommerce as a merchant, with the day-to-day, like managing orders and shipping stuff and, taking payments and.

Dealing with refunds and things like that. So yeah I wanted to dog food it, which is what they call that process of using your own product. And the first experiment with that was the photo site. So I set that up with a essentially a drop shipper. It’s a UK [00:20:00] based printing. Place that they do framing as well.

So they’ve got quite a good selection of services that suited it quite well. And also the print quality that, that they produce is really good. So yeah, I set that up as a little demo a little trial of, using WooCommerce as a merchant figuring out. And approaching like the product of WooCommerce from a different mindset.

So that was quite nice. But then I wanted to experience what it would be like to have a WooCommerce store that is shipping physical products and is not essentially a print on demand. Like the other one say, yeah, I set up a puzzle store. Puzzles unlocked.com, which like you say, sells not jigsaw type puzzles, but puzzles that are more like escape room in a box type puzzles.

And that was quite a different experience that required. And this isn’t necessarily like a difference in, [00:21:00] in WooCommerce. But more like setting up a business like that. Because it required some upfront funds. I had to buy the product and store the product and sell it. Buy it at cost and sell it at profit.

And also deal with shipping, which I didn’t have to deal with on the photo site. Yeah, it’s been interesting to. To try that. And I think in both cases the biggest stumbling block for me is marketing and, just not having traffic to the site. So you can, and this would be the case on any platform, right?

You can set up a store, but if no one’s there, then you’re not gonna sell anything. And I feel like that’s something that. That we try and help with, but I think there’s things we could do there that, that could improve visibility through like partnerships with, TikTok and Google Ads and like all these different kind of marketing channels.

But [00:22:00] again, that kind of stuff requires money. And not every. A person setting up a store has money. They just want somewhere to sell stuff. And maybe they already have an audience and they can, publicize it that way. But yeah, that, that was a, that was the biggest challenge for me.

I think.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Woo is so flexible. You mentioned a print on demand store, physical product store. We use WooCommerce. Been using it for over 12 years to sell Lifter LMS, like a digital software product on a subscription. You could sell event tickets. I do some running and I’ve played around with minimalist shoes and I know the Zero shoes guy sells his shoes with, from a WooCommerce store.

Is that Patrick? I’m trying to remember his name. I can see his face in my mind. He is really good at marketing, by the way. Yeah. But it is so flexible. Tell us about just like all the different options you can do [00:23:00] from physical products, print on demand, event tickets, whatever courses like Lifter has a course product, a membership product that integrates with WooCommerce, so does paid memberships pro, like it’s just.

It’s huge. Like you can sell anything with WooCommerce. I haven’t seen anything you couldn’t sell, but I think it was originally designed for selling t-shirts, if I’m not mistaken. But

James Kemp: yeah, I think you touched on it there, that it’s flexible enough to sell anything. And the beauty of the ecosystem of WooCommerce and WordPress in general.

Is that most of the things that you could think about and, the methods of selling have already been thought about and there’s already like a solution somewhere that you can either just use straight out of the box or build on top of. And I think, that’s one of the best things about WooCommerce is just how flexible it is and something that, I particularly like to think about when we’re [00:24:00]discussing new features, like how could a third party extend this particular thing that we’re building? Because I think that’s why WooCommerce is as successful as it is because it is that flexible. But yeah to answer your question, I think it could sell just about anything which is, very powerful.

Chris Badgett: During the pandemic there was like online restaurant ordering, like that’s a whole other niche. That’s huge. There’s so many. I think WordPress, one of its strengths is the international aspect of it. Multi-language. And Shopify is from Canada and I think I would, I’m guessing, but I would say the majority of their users are in North America.

Or Europe maybe, but WordPress is everywhere. And one of the strengths of WooCommerce, different countries have different like payment gateway situations and laws and tax issues and all these things. And WooCommerce is right there with solutions for all that around the world.

James Kemp: Yeah, [00:25:00] exactly.

And I think that’s also one of the challenges, right? Because we have solutions for. A lot of these things in Germany they have very specific e-commerce regulations and the things that we need to think about, like at what point should that be a core feature to support merchants in Germany or merchants in Australia or China, or, wherever they are.

And that’s a tricky challenge like. Like you say, payment methods is, one thing that not everywhere accepts the same type of payment method. Majority of these different places, and even down to the individual will host in different, they’ll host the website in a different place and they’ll have different regulations about security and things like that.

So it’s a it’s a blessing and a challenge. Like how flexible it is. But I think one of the key things is, and I touched on this [00:26:00] earlier as well, we, we wanna have the essentials for the majority of users. And then anything else should be, we should have the ability to extend it, to meet the needs of those specific you know, environments or locations.

Chris Badgett: As a product manager, creative person, visionary where do you see artificial intelligence interacting with the WooCommerce project or for merchants and store owners? Like how, where are we going with AI and e-commerce and how will, or how could Woo be a part of that story?

James Kemp: Yeah. It’s a tricky one with WooCommerce because.

AI costs money and WooCommerce is inherently free. The core of WooCommerce is a free offering. So rolling AI based things into core is [00:27:00] not really viable because someone has to absorb that cost. What I do see as an offering is. More like hosted solutions that interact with WooCommerce.

And I think specifically, and this ties back to like my challenge when creating a store I think that AI can act as an assistant with knowledge of your store and the specifics of what you’re trying to sell and give you, proactive advice. So you’re not, you don’t need to go to the AI and say how can I do X, Y, and Z?

It would come to you and say, if you change this, you’ll convert X percent more people. Or, if you update these meta things you’ll boost your traffic by X percent. And I think that’s like a valuable, way that AI could be used alongside, the typical things that you might expect, like enhancing product descriptions and editing photos and [00:28:00] interacting with an AI to, carry out store admin tasks for you.

I, I think the proactive insight side of things would be one of the most valuable things. But yeah, like I said, I it is not something that we could put into court because there’s a cost to it that, you know and we have thought about how we could do that. And yeah, it’s there’s ways but yeah, I it needs exploration.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The proactive, WooCommerce assistant would be amazing. I think about, I use a. Reporting SaaS integration with our WooCommerce store called Merick. I really love it and core WooCommerce reporting has improved a ton over the years. But all that data is just sitting in there that I know in ai particularly if it could, if it’s not just looking at my data but has like a language model or whatever of all. Yeah. Like of many stores or whatever, and it’s oh, I think the [00:29:00] easiest like magic wand thing to think about is something like pricing. So Yeah, exactly. Based on this pricing and based on what’s happening in your store, cross reference across millions of other sites.

I think you should charge this much or raise this price, lower this price, do this price localization thing. By the way, do you want me to set that up for you and install the plugin and just handle all that for you? That’s a dream scenario.

James Kemp: Yeah, that would be awesome. I think one of the challenges as well as all the other challenges I mentioned is just having people share that kind of data.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

James Kemp: Sensitive data. Yeah. Because yeah, when it becomes e-commerce data, it does become, sensitive. But also sharing that data does benefit them as well, because they’ll be able to get the same insights. But yeah I think that’s a challenge and a hurdle that would need to be overcome in order for something like that to be successful.

Because like you say [00:30:00] I think the value of that is in the AI knowing. Based on data, what works. And that requires data.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think the part too on that is a conversion rate optimization assistant. So hey, maybe you should put a testimonial here by the button or whatever. Or this thing’s broken on your side or based on the like.

Hotjar user interactions and stuff, like there’s a blind spot over here and all this stuff. Yeah.

James Kemp: Yeah. I think there’s tons of cool stuff that you can do, and I think as well, like AI is advancing so quickly. Yeah. That I think there’s use cases that we haven’t even considered yet.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. In five years, it’ll, who knows what we’re gonna be doing and if it, the tools just get exponentially more powerful.

James Kemp: The other thing and it’s not something that we would do, but the, AI assisted coding [00:31:00] has made it a lot easier for people to create their own solutions to a specific problem that they have. You can get AI now to spin up a plugin to do something. And it will pretty much work out of the box.

So I expect to see that improve over time. I think code quality and like code security will become more essential in the output on those types of things. But yeah, I think that’s. It’s quite a different landscape now than from when I started, which is interesting.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Last question for you, James.

Like, how do you think about the future of Blue, like the vision for it, because it’s an established product, it’s used by 33% of e-commerce, like where to go from here besides ai? What else? How do you think about the future?

James Kemp: Yeah, I think I. Again, we’ve led in, in our conversation here to my answer.

I [00:32:00] think WooCommerce outta the box needs to offer the essentials and that’s gonna evolve over time as different things become more essential. I think. There’s a modernization that needs to happen with WooCommerce and is happening. We rolled out our new brand recently which will, align us a bit more with being able to market the product more effectively and like having this brand message that, that we can put forward.

And just really knowing who we’re targeting there, whereas I think. The previous brand other than the colors hadn’t evolved much from when it was originally created, and I think it was quite a developer heavy like branding that we had previously. So yeah, I think there’s modernization that needs to happen and the making sure that the core product offers the majority of, offers the essential tools to the [00:33:00] majority of users. Also, performance is something that we’re massively focused on at the moment. Just making sure that every part of the product is performing and product quality is something that we’re, keeping in mind for anything that we put into WooCommerce, how.

How how does it affect the experience for different types of users? And is it, does it have what they need? Is it fun to use? Is it good to use? All that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think that’s like the short term focus. And that’s the 2025 focus. And I think what we will see as time goes on is how can we offer more advanced tools to, to WooCommerce users potentially like outside of WooCommerce.

So that we have more capabilities to. Offer functionality in a consistent way. One of the challenges that we have with WooCommerce as a product is making it work consistently across all the different environments that you can host it in. So I think offloading some of that to a controlled environment.

If, if the user wants that is a good way to do it. Yeah and I think that, aligns well with being able to offer things like ai and, have have that kind of data model behind ai based things as well.

Chris Badgett: I just wanna highlight something you touched on earlier that helping store owners sell and do marketing basically, and sales.

I think about that a lot at Lifter LMS and customers literally ask for it all the time. I’m like, cool. I built it. Now how do I sell it? Or how do I market it? And I’ve helped users like develop, kind of ad funnel pages that lead into a sales call and things like that. But in my mind, I’m thinking, and I, you would probably agree that it’s not part of [00:35:00] WooCommerce core.

We have coupons, right? But that’s if you open up marketing and WooCommerce, there’s coupons and that’s it, right? But there’s there’s a lot of other ways to do marketing and I think that’s not necessarily part of the WooCommerce core. It really depends on what the product is and what the niche is and what the personality of the store owner is.

But helping merchants sell, not like actually sell, not just open a store is like a greenfield opportunity for add-on developers, service providers and stuff that could really do something.

James Kemp: I think it’s a challenge because. Typically like marketing costs money. Yeah. I do think there’s, SEO is still a big thing and I think there’s an era of ai, SEO that these AI tools that people use are recommending products and services and [00:36:00] people are using, AI instead of Google to.

Determine, what kind of product they want to buy. So I think what we can do as a product, as a platform is to make sure that we have rich schema like the meta that you need on product pages and things out of the box. And as much. As much of that information and data for things like Google and AI tools available out of the box with, little to no setup required.

I think that’s the kind of stuff that we can help with. And hopefully that will see some improvements. But yeah, I think marketing is tricky because it costs money. You even need to have an audience. You need to know where your audience is or you have to pay to, capture the audience via, Google ads or Facebook ads or TikTok ads and all that kind of stuff.

And I think a lot of merchants like me particularly, didn’t [00:37:00] really have funds to, to put in straight away. I wanted to launch a store and. Make some money and then put that money back into marketing and things like that. So yeah the challenge is once you’ve launched your store, what’s next?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I agree. I think there’s a big opportunity with TikTok. I. Like having your feed go into TikTok, just like the WooCommerce Facebook plugin would put your products into your Facebook business page or whatever. Yeah,

James Kemp: that’s, and I guess the question is like, should those type of integrations be something that comes in core?

I would say probably not in core. Just, yeah. That’s the. Ties back into different people requiring different things. Like not everyone’s gonna require specifically a TikTok integration. But what we should be able to do is let them know that [00:38:00] exists. Yeah. And make it easy to install separately.

Which I think is another part of. How we could improve the core offering. So we’re not necessarily adding the feature to core, but we’re saying like this is a one click install type thing. You don’t need to go finding it. Yeah,

Chris Badgett: stuff. That’s James Kemp. He’s the core product manager at WooCommerce.

You can find him on Twitter at Ja. James C. Kemp. Thanks for coming on the show, James. I always enjoy our conversations. I could nerd out about e-commerce and woo and WordPress forever. Thanks for doing that with me for an hour. Really appreciate it. Any other final words for the people?

James Kemp: Just if you have any questions about WooCommerce or suggestions or just want to be heard, want to be directed to the right place, then you know, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter slash x.

And I will do my best to accommodate. Thanks for coming on, James. [00:39:00] Yeah, thank you.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Michael Wolf share a passion for online education, technology, and personal transformation.

Michael Wolf left his job in corporate sales to co-found Golden XPR, a learning platform devoted to personal change, and Empowering Now. Through the use of ancient languages and systematic research, he explains how his goal is to assist move the world from “greed to grace” by getting deeper insights.

With more than 3,000 lessons and 33 courses developed on LifterLMS, Michael highlights the value of fusing technology with purposeful learning. He also emphasizes the fruitful collaboration with his co-founder, Maha Jolene Louie, who combines his technical and structural approach with her creative and language skills.

Michael wants to make selling coaching services online and online education a vehicle for genuine change by combining philosophy, self-awareness, and real-world application in his comprehensive learning method.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode Transcript:Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Oh, there we go. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, a longtime friend, and lifter, LMS community user community member. His name is Michael Wolf. He’s from Empowering Now and Golden. XPR Michael’s got something special for you. To check out, go to golden xpr.com/lifter.

He’s gonna tell us more what that’s all about in a little bit. But first, welcome to the show, Michael. Thank you, Chris. It’s a privilege to be with you. It’s really awesome to do this episode. The cool thing about running a software company, we’re both super passionate about education but there’s a community that builds behind it, and you’ve been around for a while.

So I’m excited to get into your story what you’re doing with the tools, how you got there. But let’s start now like current state, like what are you doing with teaching online, and then where did it start in the beginning?

Michael Wolf: Thanks, Chris. Great question. Yeah. What are we doing now? We have a pretty extensive lifter site.

Our entire learning management site is built around lifter and we’ve got. In the neighborhood of 33 courses, and that’s with over 3000 lessons. So quite extensive In terms of the teaching content, we have probably around two dozen inquiry tools, featuring a random number generator to assist in doing inquiry.

We have six memberships. We’ve got basically all. Lifter’s core functionality deploys custom fields, notes, videos, social. We’ve integrated with Groundhog, WP Fusion Astra and Elementary for the front end plus gravity forms. So we’re pretty much whatever lifter recommends kind of house. We do it and we stay with the latest updates consistently.

In terms of students, we’ve got roughly 60 registered students. We deliver one-on-one services with extensive use of private areas. We also are in the process of a Train the trainer program using lifter groups in a beta mode at the moment. And we have, wow, what else am I forgetting?

We’ve got it all deployed. Trust that gives you a flavor for what we’re up to.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And it’s cool to see when, lifter’s extendable, so you could just have one free course on your site or you can get complex with coaching and community and all kinds of stuff.

That’s so cool to see. You’re using the majority of the tools. Tell us a little bit about. What empowering now and Golden XPR is all about like your subject matter and what is this niche?

Michael Wolf: Thank you, Chris. Yes. It goes back to the early two thousands and at that point I was a high tech sales guy.

My background is in corporate sales, worked for Xerox Parametric Technology, I-B-M-P-T-C. I’ve always been a software sales guy. Going way back to the beginning and. I had a life changing experience and that’s really a longer story. But after that experience, I really did an about face with my life and I began to open to receive a business plan to help our planet.

And that sounds lofty and perhaps on the strange side of things, but the mission that had come to me was to help transition our planet from greed to grace. If we look at greed it’s more than just money hunger. It’s like any place where I’m not enough, there’s unfelt, greed, and it’s really insidious how for me in my life, greed has sourced so much unconscious behavior.

So I went through a deep experience. I said, look, I’m really committed to bringing forward something impactful and real, and. That’s when I wrote the business plan for Empowering Now, which was, as I mentioned a learning idea. I knew that I needed to develop a curriculum. I knew that we needed to build out the courses and train trainers, all of this idea.

So that was the vision is to provide something meaningful for the healthcare system, the political system, the monetary system, without being. Just another woo training option. Something that was practical and real well as soon as the business model was written. Interestingly, I met my business partner, ma Jolene Louie, and she’s an artist and an author from France and has spent her entire life essentially revealing.

Codes that have been held in ancient language. So that comprises the business model and the beginnings of the curriculum, which we’ve been now working on close to 17 years together. Very long-term project. This is our life’s work, both from a business model and from a curriculum perspective. So we we really need it and have depended upon.

A strong technical foundation so that doesn’t plague us as we do grow.

Chris Badgett: So how did you like start with, you said how many courses, now

Michael Wolf: we’re up to 33 courses.

Chris Badgett: So did it start with one, or, I’m sure it did, but like, how did you get going?

Michael Wolf: Making lots of mistakes would be the practical answer,

Chris Badgett: but

Michael Wolf: the that, what that’s not saying is that, that there’s probably been 200, 300, maybe 500 books that have been written that have been synthesized down to the current 33.

So Maha is one of these really gifted creative types that, if something doesn’t work or if we make an error, we take that in, we assimilate that, and that becomes, okay, let’s do it differently next time. Fail off and fail a lot mentality. But in 2018 we published the first 22 courses, and that was after three years of development on the backend.

Writing, editing, publishing, changing. So we went through lots of changes, which involved the initial mystery school launch, which had 22 courses, and that was introductory courses. We have a, an application called Expired Tarot, which uses the Hebrew letters in order to gain insights for inquiries.

So those 22 courses were what we launched with. We just decided not to launch till we were happy with it. We’re we knew that it, yes, we could have launched sooner and that was what we were advised to do, but we didn’t. We waited till the first 22 were prepared because that’s what we needed to do.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the partnership ’cause some of the most successful lifter LMS projects I see it’s often like a couple people or more behind the project, how do you all divide and conquer and think about making that partnership successful?

Michael Wolf: Good question. There’s two sides to that answer. One side would be the interpersonal side, which is we’re both completely committed to one ideal, which is know thyself. So any problem I have with my partner reflects something that I have not yet understood about myself without that agreement.

Nothing else works. And what I would say in terms of my partnering with Maha is the two of us are quite opposite. I’m your traditional male archetype south Texas country boy, business guy, and more recently educated obviously, and all of the modalities that were associated with transformation and workshops.

I’ve been through lots of. Lots of different mod modalities there. Maha’s the artist and she’s, she thinks in terms of beauty. And if you look back at the gates to the eternal Maha has gifts, literally the touch all three, the good, the true and the beautiful. And really it’s that kind of synthesis that produce experiences tat are worth having.

That would, that’s be one big part of it is the, working through the interpersonal side of realizing that my partner is me and the other is that, I’ve largely focused on tech and editing and, ideas and structures for how we deliver the content. And that goes hand in hand with what she’s receiving relative to the written materials that source the mystery school.

Chris Badgett: I know you’re big with language, so if there’s better words than what I’m going to use, but is it a an artist and a producer kind of dynamic?

Michael Wolf: Similar. Yeah. The other part that she’s clearly the artist and the author and she has a deep relationship with ancient language, not just Hebrew, but Greek and is schooled in virtually all modes of ancient scripture and revealing patterns that are common to all modes of let’s just call it human development.

And from my perspective, less of a producer. But yes, I’m an editor. I also say, Hey, look, just this doesn’t make sense to me. Can we, and so that editing role is part of it, and increasingly I’ve noticed that this material somehow lives in me, not as if I’m the author, but I can feel things when I’m opening to this sort of, language concept, and it, again, it’s not like Spanish versus French or c plus versus, some other Java scripting language. What we’re speaking into is the understanding that language is life. In other words, what I see an experience represents patterns and ideas that flow through archetypal.

Archetypal elements that give us what we call life. And so when I begin to look at the a language that’s alive, many people will say, oh, language is only a symbol. Yes. And there’s a realm at which when I am real life is language. That would be a summary.

Chris Badgett: Lemme see if I can ask this in the right way.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

This is interesting. A lot of folks, whether they’re want to teach online or they’re building websites for clients, they wanna make more sales, you have a background in sales, but you’ve also taken this path with transcending greed. The word that comes to mind for me, like you strike me as a gentleman.

A gentle man. And how does a gentle man sell? So I’m so take us through the kind of how to look at language and what’s inside that question

Michael Wolf: that’s sourced. My initial idea, the, and then the idea started, if I might go back one second. In 2006, I quit my corporate job. I was making a lot of money.

Way more than I needed at the time. And then I started working on donation and I had a large child support payment and lots of bills. Long story short, I went broke. 2010 I went back to work and I worked for IBM for another 10 years covering corporate accounts. But in the time where I was off, I recognized that as a healer.

I still had to buy groceries and I still had, there’s this thing called money that people struggle with, and so I really was interested in knowing that I was enough beyond the amount of money in my checking account. And so what my idea for the business model was that if the business model delivered the sense of enough as a product.

I wouldn’t have to worry about, I got nothing to sell. And I have what I know is that for me, my own development is worth more than all the money in the world. I am not for sale. And that’s really the core idea that I wanted to transmit as a concept in leadership. A way in which I could interact with world other.

Family, food, sex, money from the perspective that I’m enough. And so that’s the business model and the way that it developed was out of a lot of failures. We’ve for a long time I really thought that I needed students and that had me showing up as. The, I don’t know, the overbearing teacher that needed to find students and needed to find that’s not happening anymore.

I’m in service to people that are interested in making the decision. So the business model is structured as that. While we do have some things. Where folks are given an opportunity to contribute. The clients set their own tuition and that’s very cool. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Tell us just for people that are interested in the subject matter here. What’s at golden xpr.com/lifter.

Michael Wolf: Thank you, Chris. Yeah. On that, and I have to go back and thank Lifter, and especially you, Chris. You are one of those. Influential people that when you, when I first got this plugin, I listened to every LMS cast out there and I was, everything that you would recommend, I would say I need that, don’t need that.

So anyway, I’m happy to provide the offer of two different things. One is a course that we just completed recording. It’s called The Small Print of the Law of Attraction. It is a very rich. Teaching and it’s not pro faint of heart. It’s not it’s a very beautiful teaching. The overall number of recordings, I think there’s over a hundred recordings.

There’s a 120 some odd lessons in it. We’re offering it complimentary. No need to pay. If you find value out of it and you decide that you were. You’re interested in learning more. Reach out, but that is complimentary. The small print of Law of Attraction. And the other is a complimentary ebook, which is from one of our latest publications.

It’s sample chapter of the Love that has no opposite. Which was published last year on Amazon. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: That what the whole book. What tell us at a high level what is the love that has no opposite about

Michael Wolf: Whew. It’s about something that’s everybody’s written about over the generations. It’s the first sentence of the Bible, and it has six chapters that unfold essentially a code.

That demonstrates the difference between what we call primary communication. There’s this Genesis chapter one where God says, let there be light, and there was light, zero delay, zero unconscious time. Genesis chapter two has a different atom. A different name for God in Hebrew and introduces Adam that’s lonely and disobedient and guilty and ashamed and punished ultimately.

And so those two stories of creation really demonstrate two ways of creativity. One is instantaneous where there’s zero delay, no unconscious time, and the other which demonstrates. A pattern, if you will, of the collective unconscious. So the love that has no opposite unfolds that and is a it’s a very deep study of language, of power and how we keep ourselves in what we call scare city, where not only do I not have enough, but I’m afraid.

Chris Badgett: Wisdom and I don’t know if I’m saying it the etymology or of words like scarcity. You’re a master at unpacking those and teaching those. On the language front, what’s the, let’s say our, we only speak English as an example. What do we learn from, ancient languages. That doesn’t necessarily translate, or maybe it does. But like how does this study of language. Tell us about the richness of that and how we may be perhaps limited. If we are just in our native tongue and what does that mean in terms of our worldview and stuff like that? Big question.

Michael Wolf: Think about language as not only. Spoken, but also consider the idea that numbers must be involved.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Sounds must be involved.

Michael Wolf: Linguistically structured information is a small fraction of language. And so when we get into the discussion of a meta language and what.

What’s interesting about what we’re doing is that we’re bringing a resonance between the ancient language of Hebrew, which we call she, because it’s the feminine receiving, Maha being essentially in my view the world’s most powerful woman rabbi that has come to bring a woman’s view. Of male scriptures.

So truth be told, we all have a male and female component, those sides of us that give and receive. And truly, I cannot be total unless I am in harmony between my giving and my receiving. Thus the sense of enough. But coming back to the idea of language, what we’ve discovered and what we continue to witness is that there’s a very deep resonance between the English language, which is the most spoken language on the planet right now, and the oldest language with, Hebrew is an alphabet that has not changed form and has been preserved in its original method.

Original way since the initial revelation of the Bible way back when. So we’ve got something that is dancing together to highlight perspectives that really come back to an an embodied sense of integrity. I said a lot. Thanks. Yeah

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. I remember digging into some of your stuff around the different, the four different missions of being a coach, a seeker, a emissary, and a visionary.

How does that play into all this?

Michael Wolf: Yes. The way I would say that for myself is I’m not gonna engage in this kind of work unless I am really interested in bringing forward full potential. It’s likely that it’s likely that the. This is not just about finding a parking space on Main Street.

It’s not about, it’s about understanding the difference between where what I say I want and what I experience in reality are different. So I. What we found in our work is that most of the people that are engaging are folks that would claim to have some sort of initiative to be an emissary between one group or another, or folks that are coaches.

They’re here to help and of course. Going back to Socrates Healer, heal Thyself. That’s really the program we have for coaches and mentors and some folks are just unlimited seekers. And we have a program of infinite depth that addresses those folks that are seekers. And many of our clients are visionaries.

They see new ways of doing things, and clearly in order to really be a visionary in our climate today. I had to reconcile the money issue with my vision of a business model. So visionaries are stressed with a future vision that have constraints in the now. So to reconcile that, what, those are the kinds of people that most of our clients have ended up falling into.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the the actual mechanics of the platform in the sense of what’s in the stack. It’s, you’ve got courses, there’s books, there’s coaching calls, like what all comes together to facilitate the learning and the transformation?

Michael Wolf: Good question. Yes, we have, on Golden xpr.com. We’ve got six memberships, and those memberships are marketed to individuals and they support our one-on-one work with clients.

So when someone signs up for the one-on-one program, they receive access to the entire mystery school. All of the 33 courses we have extensive use of private areas there. So when we. Deliver our coaching sessions. At the conclusion of the session, we have something called an ecap. That ECAP gets published on lifter private areas. Then prior to the next session. They’re invited to fill out a form.

How did you do with the last session Since we were looking at this particular area and it keeps those. The, that learning alive we couldn’t operate without private areas at the moment. That’s one of our most powerful capabilities for one-on-one work. We also do a group course every Monday night, and anyone who’s interested can go to our events page check out the Paradise Circle.

The first month is free. We invite you to contribute after that if you’re interested. But Paradise Circle is similar to a inquiry game where one person gets in the hot seat and we. I come up with a structured inquiry and then go around the circle and everybody says, oh yeah, I can relate to that.

This is how it applies to me. So we do a group class that’s not recorded, but it is live. And then we have recorded several offline courses. Most recently the the small print of the Law of attraction using lifter videos. So custom fields are huge for us. We have a ongoing inquiry tool, which. It’s called the seven by seven tool that someone picks out something. That they’re gonna make alive over a seven week period, and every day they go through and complete the lesson.

And so that, that’s available using custom fields. We use Groundhog extensively integrated in a number of our inquiry tools. We have WP Fusion, Zapier Acuity. And then as I mentioned earlier, going down the path of lifter groups as well.

Chris Badgett: For those that are thinking about getting into coaching, how do you like what’s the structure?

Is there does somebody come with challenges or do you come with something specific to focus on? Or both? Or how do you coach?

Michael Wolf: Before we invite anybody into a long-term coaching agreement, we do a three month kick the tires because. We may not wanna work together. They can quit anytime.

There’s no shoulds. But the way that we focus on it is we’ve got a very specific introduction to all of that. It’s called the Power Conversation that we start off with. And then once they’ve entered the three [00:26:00] month trial period, and that’s, lifter access plan with three months, then we sit down and we discuss, do we resonate, do we wanna move?

And as we do. Basically from week to week, the issue of the day develops and we’re using the curriculum and all of the pages that I mentioned before with the private areas to, to allow for studying in between sessions plus the group course. So it’s all integrated. One place to go, one place to interact from one-on-one group and on your own.

Very cool.

Chris Badgett: What kind of impact is this work having in the world? What are either anecdotally or stories of

Michael Wolf: We’ve done no advertising. We’ve done nothing really public and everything has been word of mouth up until now. And I would say that what speaks for where we are now is all of our students have decided to become at one level.

A train the trainer, they’re all interested in becoming that. That’s a hundred percent of our clients are interested.

Chris Badgett: Writing message. Yeah. That’s a pretty good conversion rate, if you will.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, that’s what I think you were the one that taught me that, Chris, I can remember you said don’t focus on how much money you’re gonna make, half fun doing what you do and focus on the impact.

Yeah. And that I took that to heart. And that’s exactly, that’s where exactly where we are.

Chris Badgett: That’s when people become raving fans and wanna spread the message and train the trainer, there’s no higher form of success or signal of what’s going on in the platform. That’s awesome.

Michael Wolf: Yeah. I took you at face value on that.

Chris Badgett: Cool. What do you think about the future? Like, where do you want to go with it? For somebody who’s, you said you launched in 2018. What you’re committed? Like you’re the, it’s inside of you at this point. What where do you want to go with it?

Michael Wolf: From the beginning, from the very beginning. The program was designed to scale. It was designed to offer learning that could scale. That wouldn’t require a development team of, hundreds of people. So scaling yes. In, in supporting our clients is really right up there without, because if we do a good job there.

Then everything else is gonna happen. If we can make it easy for those that are working with us to gain results and to share the content, it’ll happen naturally. Our work is strange. In other words, the, if you look at the material from a marketing perspective, it’s. It’s not the kind of thing that in my experience, that you can just read and say, oh yeah, I wanna buy 10 of those.

It’s just not that, it’s not that kind of messaging, but scaling is part of it. Impact is part of it. I do see that the, there will be a day coming where we will have a global stage. I’m imagining. Folks like Jordan Peterson would be very interested in what we’re providing. And others I can’t wait till we meet Ken Wilber, for example.

I’m just, if So those are the kinds of conversations that when we get further down, I’m imagining there’s gonna be more interaction. But folks who are out there in this community doing big things on the global stage I’m imagining that we’ll be in that position.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I remember it was a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, I was at a, like a a fair for organic farming and a bunch of stuff and there was like this book area and I picked up a Ken Wilber’s book on the theory of everything or something related to that.

And I went down that rabbit hole and I. I’m not, I’m the kind of person that’s into this kind of stuff and I know there’s a lot out there. ’cause I remember when I look at Ken Wilbur as an example, or Jordan Peterson’s work, there’s a lot of people that go deep into. These [more visionary seeking transcendent things.

So it’s, and like you said the platform is infinite. It’s infinitely particularly with the train the trainer thing, it’s, it can go as far as it could ever go. Before we started recording, you mentioned democratizing education was important. You mentioned you had sold websites for a million bucks or something, and.

And lifter has a free tool and some add-ons and all that, but obviously it’s free to much cheaper than a million bucks. Tell us about democratizing education from your perspective.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, thank you Chris. And I’m going back to the days where I’m sitting in my apartment listening to LMS cast and the vision of democratizing education coming from.

In 1999, I got hired by a company called Vignette. And Vignette was based upon TCL tools, control Language, and it was a scripting language where you would build a content management app and a content delivery app. And it was a very. High performancewebsite, and back then you could go to the dot coms, which were booming up everywhere, and it would be half a million to a million dollars for a simple website.

That continued for years where, you know the web was just launched. It wasn’t that long ago. And then WordPress and Jumela were. Adversaries for a while. We built our initial site based upon Jumela, which was difficult, and we went down what is the one that you know yeah, a Moodle.

A Moodle, I was interested because I do see our curriculum would be able to leveraged for universities at some place. I was looking at the whole Moodle approach and. As soon as the business model became clear, the next point was, nobody’s going to invest in this idea. It’s too weird. So we gotta do it on our own.

And when you were back in your early days, way more talking about this idea of democratizing education, and I’m thinking about what I wanna do in terms of the sense of enough, it was a like a perfect marriage. You had my listening straight out of the shoot. That’s been the reality for us in terms of really looking at what we’ve been able to do in terms of a life work and to put it onto something that I can trust, we can trust and it works and secure all of the things that you would need for a strategic platform are there.

That’s a, there’s probably more. I may have left something out.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Michael Wolf. He’s at golden xpr.com/lifter. He’s got some free stuff for you. I love getting into Michael’s work. Take some time, set it aside and get into the book and the course. Highly recommend it.

Any final words for the coaches, the seekers, the emissaries and the visionaries out there

Michael Wolf: fail often. Invite failure. Fears are a path to sacredness and any fear that I can understand offers a new relationship with what life is really about is to come into the sacred. Fear is not something to be resisted, but to be embraced and understood.

And that’s been in our backend in terms of doing something as radical as what we’re up to is. Daily, am I enough to do this project, and taking a step anyway, in the face of the fear, in the face of the overwhelming size of it, and the lack of support and the lack of money and all of that. Just don’t give up.

Get clear on what it is that you’re here for and reach out to other communities. Go to the lifter, office hours and share and talk and listen and give yourself. Space to do it in in your own time.

Chris Badgett: Thanks Michael. It is great to have you on. We’ll have to do it again down the road.

Michael Wolf: Look forward to it.

Chris Badgett: Go to golden xpr.com/lifter and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Michael Wolf: Thank you, Chris. Thank you everybody.

Chris Badgett: That’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jill Schulman discuss leadership, bravery, and overcoming fear in both personal and professional growth.

Jill Schulman is an educator, business leader, leadership specialist, and former U.S. Marine Corps officer who places a strong emphasis on both professional and personal development. She entered the business sector after serving as an officer in the Marine Corps, where she swiftly advanced to leadership roles but soon came to understand that leadership is a talent that needs constant learning and improvement.

Her next book, “The Science of Bravery”, which will be published in the summer of 2025, examines how courage is acting in spite of fear rather than avoiding it. She offers research-backed techniques to help people overcome their fears, especially those related to self-doubt and impostor syndrome.

Jill stresses the significance of mentality, which includes cultivating optimism, controlling self-talk, redefining stress as a tool for progress, and adopting a growth mindset. She uses studies from positive psychology to assist leaders who have experienced defeats rethink their challenges and restore confidence.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Jill Schulman. You can find her online@jillschulman.com. Check out her newsletter. We’re gonna dive deep today into bravery, into leadership and Jill story. She’s a US Marine Corps veteran, she’s a corporate leader.

And she’s been involved in academia, she’s done a lot of things, and she’s out there to help a lot of people. But first, welcome to the show, Jill.

Jill Schulman: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: What lit the bug for you for leadership? Like where did that, there’s always a seed for that story. Yeah. Where was that seed for you?

Jill Schulman: It. I think it started as a Marine, ’cause I was a Marine Corps officer, so they teach us a lot about how to be an effective leader in the military. And then when I got outta the Marine Corps and I went into corporate America I got promoted pretty quickly into a leadership position. But you know what my biggest aha was?

How? I didn’t know crap about leadership. I thought I knew it all. And I was with a large pharmaceutical company that invested a lot in leadership development and they had us go through classes and I kept having these moments where I’m like. Whoa. I’m doing it wrong. So what I learned about leadership is just that L like leadership just isn’t something you’re naturally born with.

It’s a skill that’s learnable and practicable and you gotta be like open. You gotta work on your craft. Like your job as a leader is to not. Do the thing not to deliver results. Your job is to now take care of the people or lead the people who are driving results. So it’s about leading human beings who are complex with emotions and skills and all that stuff.

And so as I was going through a lot of those leadership classes for myself, I had these, oh. I always call ’em, oh crap moments, oh crap. Like I’m doing it wrong. It made such a profound impact on my development. And then I thought I was a good leader, but then I realized I wasn’t a great leader. Then I learned all these things and I think I became a much better leader.

Or, I don’t, I wouldn’t say great leader, but I kept learning and getting better and better as a leader. And that ended up leading to my decision to dedicate my career to like leadership development, to create these aha moments.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. Leadership is really a, it’s like a lifelong journey.

You never arrive. It just keeps going. It’s a skill with no bottom. You have a book coming out in the summer of 2025. The Science of Bravery.

Jill Schulman: Yeah. And I

Chris Badgett: know it takes bravery to be in the Marine Corps. It takes bravery to be a leader. But tell us about. The big ideas and inspiration for the book.

Jill Schulman: Yeah. So the inspiration from the book really came when I went back to school to study the science of happiness and wellbeing. So positive psychology is the study of how can you elevate happiness and wellbeing to live your best life. And believe it or not, there’s a scientific study of it.

There’s all the science behind that. I went back to school because I was really curious about. How positive psychology can really help organizations. Because I was in the organizational space and what I discovered as I learned, and then I decided what I was gonna do my capstone on, which is like your own little research project at the end of a master’s program, is I was really interested in how bravery, which is defined as.

Not eliminating fear, it’s not becoming fearless. That’s not what bravery is. And people think that oh, to be brave, you’re just fearless. You’re just, you’re not afraid of anything. Like actually that would be the opposite. If you’re not afraid of anything, then you’re not brave. ’cause bravery is taking action despite fear, toward things that align with your values or things that you really want intrinsically, right?

And so I started taking a deep dive into that research and found that so many people, they end up living sometimes a life of regret or they don’t accomplish what they want because fear holds them back. So this is something that is so common out there and I’m like, whoa. Like if people are letting fear hold ’em back and they wanna be braver.

And there is research that says that bravery is one of the top two strengths that people wanna increase based on the research from Ryan Anemic from the from the Via strengths organization. But people just don’t know how. I just, I wanted, so I took a dive, a deep dive into, the science of it and what emerged is there are evidence-based things that you can do to build bravery.

And a lot of people think like either you’re bravery or not, but you can build. The skill of bravery, just like you can build any other skill or I like, I call it like a muscle, right? And when you do, here’s the exciting thing. This is what I get really excited about, is when you do like your self-confidence increases your self-belief and you feel like, wow, I did that.

So it has a profound impact not only on people’s success in business. Which is important, but what’s really even more important is your overall happiness and wellbeing. And there’s all the evidence to back it up. And there’s not a lot, there’s not a lot out there on teaching people how to be brave.

So I feel like there’s a gap. There’s kind of a gap in what people are teaching to organizations are out there. There’s a lot of people that. Are out there, they’re motivational speakers. Look at me. I was really brave. And just go out there and do it rr, and it’s really inspiring and it’s really entertaining.

But then you leave there and you’re like you don’t do anything differently because we don’t have the evidence-based strategy. So I’m like part like. I’m part academic geek, ’cause everything I do is scientific based. So I’ve got all the research behind it, but then I find that my message is very motivating for people because I help them realize what’s holding ’em back from getting what they really want.

I’m on now a mission. So the book is gonna be on that written as a parable. It’s like entertaining and I feel like stories make things stick. But I feel like this is what I’m called to do, is to help people understand the science and apply it so they can, they can. Avoid a life of regret.

Chris Badgett: One of the big challenges in the education entrepreneur space, people teaching online and starting coaching companies and things is imposter syndrome. How would you apply? This science of bravery to that fear of being, fear of failure. Fear of being on stage, even fear of success.

Jill Schulman: Yeah. Yeah. Great question.

So one of the three dimensions that, that are in my book, in my research is on what I call brave mindset. But let’s dive into that. ’cause what you’re talking about in terms of imposter syndrome is that people feel like, I’m not good enough. I’m in this position, but maybe I’m not someone people should be listening to.

They don’t feel like. They deserve to be there. So I wanna just expand instead of just imposter syndrome. What happens when people just don’t believe that they can do hard things or that they’re gonna be successful? What if their mindset isn’t supporting their success?

Under brave mindset, there’s four different skills that I teach. Everything I do is very practical. I’m not gonna just be up in the clouds talking about, just believe that you can, that doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. We need to give people like tangible evidence-based strategies to do this. So the four that I teach the first one is growth mindset, which everyone’s heard about.

It’s Carol Dweck’s work, but it absolutely makes an impact. So I teach the power of yet, like no one is going to come to my online program to listen to me teach yet. So just using that word like, ugh, I’m just not a runner. Yet I could never speak in front of 500 people on a stage yet. So using that power of yet, it really what it does, it opens the door of possibility and it makes people recognize that our skills and abilities are not fixed.

They can grow with hard work and effort. Now it’s not gonna be easy. Wthin growth mindset too the journey to get there won’t be easy, but it’s possible. Just helping people understand it’s possible. So I always start there. That’s the first step. And then we build on that and go, okay, so if you believe it’s possible and the journey isn’t gonna be easy, then we get into the second mindset, which is stress is enhancing the mindset.

So there’s a lot of work that’s newer in the world of psychology on the psychology of stress, right? Kelly McGonigal, Aaliyah Crumb and others, they’ve done research on this, and what they found is if you believe that challenges and stress are bad, then they will be bad and they will hold you back.

But if you believe that challenges and stress. Challenges make you stronger and stress is your body responding to perform at its best. You’re literally what, how you appraise challenges and stress predicts your response to them psychologically and physiologically. And there’s so much science.

I could go on for probably three hours on just that so things are possible through the power of, yet it’s not gonna be easy. There’s gonna be ups and downs, but when there’s downs and challenges, it’s learning. So now we’re getting somewhere and then we layer on top of that. And I won’t go into these in much detail, but we get into optimism versus pessimism and how you can move from being pessimistic to optimistic.

This is Dr. Marty Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania. All of his research on learned optimism and that just in general. Our emotions don’t necessarily just happen to us. We have the power to generate the emotions that will best serve us, our families, our customers, our communities, the world.

Like it just drives me crazy. Everyone’s I’m just a victim. Like I just feel sad today. So I’m just gonna go sit in the corner and have a pity party. That’s a choice, but you have the power to change your emotional state. You wanna recognize the emotions you’re feeling, be curious, name them, and then decide what type of emotion do I wanna be experiencing today to support, that comes from Barbara f Fredrickson and her book on positivity that she wrote.

And then the last one is we talk about the voices in their heads. So if you have imposter syndrome, you’re saying horrible things to yourself, you’re saying you’re a loser, you shouldn’t be here. All these, if you’re saying these things to yourself. That are not helping you, we should probably try to change that.

So then we get into how can you change the self-talk and it’s possible. And I always cite Ethan Cross’s work on his book on Shatter. He’s got a brand new one called Shift. But his book on shatter really something that I teach a couple of those strategies. So tho all those things together, if we can just change like our.

Our mindset in those four ways you are gonna be like off to the races. It starts with mindset. If you believe that you can’t, then you’re right. If you believe that you can, you’re right. So those are some evidence-based strategies that I use with my clients to help them with that

Chris Badgett: word. Specific context of where, let’s say somebody’s not becoming a new leader, but let’s say they were leading strongly in their career or whatever, but then they had some setbacks.

Maybe they got a divorce, maybe they had a business partnership breakup. Maybe their business isn’t growing like it used to. How do you like, get somebody back on track? And I’m guessing it’s the same strategies, but any particular nuanced advice for the leader who lost their way?

Jill Schulman: So in that case, I would go to, that’s more of a when adversity strikes.

Sometimes our natural reaction is everything is ruined. I’m not gonna be able to change it, and it’s all me. So what you’re describing is a pessimistic, explanatory style. When things happen to us, we explain it to ourselves, and this is happening in our head. So if we just say the sky is falling, everything is ruined, it’s never gonna change, that is pessimism.

And that is not helpful. So we need to get into a optimistic mindset. Optimism does not mean Pollyanna. If I just pretend everything’s okay, it’s gonna be okay. No, that is not it. We need to be, we need to be realists. This really sucks. I. This divorce, I never saw it coming or this partnership breaking up.

So we need to be real and go what is going on? Let’s recognize the adversity that strikes, or the thing that’s going on. That’s really hard. But then we need to look to the future and be optimistic about our ability to overcome it, to be able to have a better future. And Marty Seligman has this like a, B, C, d, E like model.

And I don’t remember it off the top of my head, which I should, ’cause I studied under Marty Seligman. But the way I simplify it is he just says, you basically almost have to argue with yourself and say if you say like everything is ruined, is everything really ruined? No, this is it. This isn’t everything.

It’s actually isolated. This is one thing and I have the skills. And abilities where I can overcome this. He’s got this formula this A, B, C, D, E. And if anyone were to Google it, like Marty Seligman, learned optimism like his A, B, C, D, E model, it’s these five steps to change your viewpoint in terms of everything’s ruined.

I’m not gonna be able to do anything to ever change it, to be to saying this really sucks, but. I am optimistic that I can overcome this in order to be able to, have a great life or get my business back on track. If you believe it’s possible, then what happens? Chris if you believe there’s nothing you can do and everything’s ruined, then what action are you gonna take?

Chris Badgett: Much.

Jill Schulman: You’re not gonna take it. You’re gonna go sit in the corner and cry. You’re gonna go to the bar and drink or but you’re not gonna take any action that’s gonna help you. But if you believe that it’s possible that we can overcome this. And to have a better future that causes people to take action.

So the reason why pessimistic to optimistic from a psychology perspective is people who have optimism, even though it’s really hard, will take action. People who are pessimistic don’t do anything. So we just need to be able to get back in the optimism like again, it really sucks. This is not very good, but I’m optimistic.

There’s things I can do, and we, and then it allows us to start taking action.

Chris Badgett: Part of the education entrepreneur goal is to do what you’re doing, which is to take your life experience, your career, your things you learned in school, and put it all together into a body of work like you’ve done with this book. How do you what do you think? Came together for you to be able to create this body of work and stay focused and, lead the project, manage the project, get it done.

Jill Schulman: Yeah I’m just, now I’m speaking outside of my expertise ’cause I know a lot about leadership, psychology, science of bravery. Now I’m just telling you like my experience here. I know for me just was so interested in this. It was fascinating to me, and it seemed like there was a need.

So for me it was like my passion project. So I don’t know if it’s the same for your audience out there, but they’re probably super passionate about. Their coaching business and how they can help people, whatever they, they have on their platform to be able to help people with.

So for me, it was just finding the thing that I’m really passionate about, and this is supported by the literature, by Angela Duckworth. She writes, grit, how are we gonna have the grit to actually get this thing off the ground? And she says, then grit is the long-term passion and perseverance to achieve a long-term goal.

And. What she teaches is if it’s not really meaningful, if it, you don’t feel like it’s a passion project, that’s a calling, you’re probably not going to have long-term like, passion, perseverance to get through the rough stuff. So for me it was like, I’m like, this is it. This is maybe this.

Sounds a little bit like pie in the sky, but I’m like, this is the impact I wanna have on the world. I feel like I can, so I think I found that, and then and then as I started building it, Chris, I wrote the book. I wrote the first manuscript, and then I started realizing that there are so many other people.

That tell a similar message, and I’m like, oh, I thought it was all original, right? And I went through this little oh gosh, did I pick the wrong thing? But then I came to this aha moment, which is if I really believe in teaching the science of bravery so that people can really overcome their fears and get what they want, if there’s more people other than me sharing this, that’s good for the, that’s good for humanity in the world.

I like use the analogy of, if anyone you know goes to church and they have any type of faith, whatever, like there’s not just one pastor, like there’s lots of pastors preaching the same word, and that makes the world better. So I just have to realize like now I, I connect with and try to elevate their platform, they elevate me because like we all like.

I just feel, I believe in an abundance mindset. So I think I went from like kind of scarcity oh my gosh, I wanna be the only one of going. No, we need as many people as possible talking about this, because there’s a lot of people that let fear hold him back, so I can’t do it on my own.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

Love that. I love that. Tell us something about that you learned about leadership that for somebody who wasn’t in the military, like what did you, what’s something that military uniquely teaches about leadership? That civilians may not. Know about or at least have as easy access to training on or something like that.

Jill Schulman: There’s two things that come to mind. Number one is the comradery that we feel in the Marine Corps. I. Is so unique. It’s like going through really hard things together makes you bond like nothing else. So I think sometimes when you can do how do you create that same experience sometimes in a corporate environment or with a team that you lead If you have a small business is, sometimes you gotta get outta the office and do something, that’s.

Maybe challenging or like physical or something like that. And it’s amazing how that can create some bonds. So I think that’s just you go through, I didn’t go through bootcamp. I was an officer, but I went through like officer candidate school. I went through the basic school just going on missions, deploying with other people like it, I think that’s one thing.

And then the other thing that comes to mind, I had it on my mind. This is this is the other thing is, the Marine Corps in all services, we are taught to always first share Commander’s intent. And it’s what is that? And Commander’s intent is really just making sure every single time you task someone or give a mission, you always talk about commander’s intent is the why of the mission.

That way it allows agility in execution with your Marines. So instead of my Marines just saying go attack the hill, I’d say the commander’s intent is we’re trying to secure this area to be safe for the local civilians, and to eliminate the threat. That is the whole intent, commander’s intent.

Right now your orders, your mission is to attack the hill, right? And get the enemy off of it. I need to give them the why, to give them agility and execution. Then you need to trust your, for me is to trust my Marines. If my Marines are moving over to the hilltop and the enemy moved off and a bunch of kids are flying a kite on top of the hill, do they still attack the hill?

So just, taking the time to. Communicate commander’s intent, which is just, it’s really the why, like why am I asking you to do the thing? Because when they understand the why, they’re more motivated intrinsically, and they’re gonna make better decisions. They’re gonna be more innovative and more agile.

And I don’t see that enough in corporate America. I think we just say just do this thing. But when you just take that extra moment to tell ’em the why, they feel like, Chris, if I was doing it to you, first of all, you’re gonna feel respected. I’m like, let me tell you the bigger picture on what we’re trying to accomplish here.

So this is really the intent behind what we’re doing. Your job is you’re this little piece, and this is what we’re asking you to do, but I want you to understand how it plugs into, so then you already feel like more respected and valued. ’cause you’re like, oh wow. So you’re motivated, you’re more informed.

And then when. Murphy’s Law happens or like something, they actually understand how to make the best decision to fulfill Commander’s intent.

Chris Badgett: Cool. Very cool. Tell us more about the, the decision to do parable for the book. I love it. ’cause story is such a powerful teaching tool. But particularly when you’re coming from there’s all this science, right?

Yeah. And this study and this resource, and this long list of like sources for the book or whatever. But yeah. Tell us about the parable and story teaching through story.

Jill Schulman: Yeah. I think stories make things stickier. And I think of some of the books I’ve read over the years on leadership. Like I love the One Minute Manager.

I think one of the best leadership books ever written was a one Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. I don’t know, have you read it?

Chris Badgett: I have read it. You have read it? It’s been a while. Yeah, it’s

Jill Schulman: been a while. But it like, it literally teaches you the basics of how to be a good leader and it’s a story.

And it just, it sticks. And so when I go to companies and especially when I have new leaders, I make that required reading. I should be getting a little commission or something from the Ken Blanchard company, because I’m selling so many of these books, but I love it. I just, I have them read that and then they come in and then we do some skill building on the things that he teaches in the book of setting expectations and, giving praise and feedback.

But and the other. Personal motivation. So I love the one minute manager who moved my cheese, the energy bus, like all these, like John Gordon is a master of of parables. And when I pick up a John Gordon book, when it’s a parable, guess what? I read the whole thing. Have you ever picked up a story and not read the end of it, but how about business books that have all the science in it?

Do you pick it up and read it cover to cover? I don’t, and I know that’s gonna happen. So I, so in my parable, I, I. I’m sharing all the evidence-based strategies and then I say in the beginning, author’s note, like all the sciences in the back. But I think if I present it as a story, more people are gonna read it.

They’re gonna read it to the end and it’s gonna stick. And hopefully you guys just trust and if there’s any nerds out there like me, ’cause I’m a nerd, like I, if someone tells me something, I’m like, I want the studies behind it. So I want it, but I actually, what I personally want is give me a story and then gimme all the science in the back.

But don’t make it boring. Don’t make it a boring book and, ’cause I’m not gonna read the whole thing. So I don’t know. I, so I followed, I followed the model, I followed the lead of Ken Blanchard and John Gordon. And I don’t know, fingers crossed, this is my first book. So I hope it’s successful.

Chris Badgett: Modeling’s a part of leadership, right? You gotta model the leaders you love and admire and respect.

Jill Schulman: Exactly. Exactly. And you know what? The fact that you just said that when you look at the science of bravery, I’ve got three different dimensions that I teach in my book and my speaking and all that, and one of them is what I call brave relationships.

So find people who have done the thing that you wanna do that you’re a little bit scared of for me, like writing a book and then surround yourself with people that have done it successfully or get. Maybe, find two or three people that you can approach and ask for their help and their advice.

Don’t just feel like you’ve gotta do things on your own. And this might be the opposite of what you think. Bravery. Bravery. I could just figure it out on my own and I’m just like, oh, I’m gonna I’m like, that is. People being scared to be vulnerable. So a couple brave things is it takes a little bit of bravery to walk up to someone that you’re a little intimidated by because they wrote a book and it’s, but go up and ask, right?

I used to lead sales, so I’m like, you just gotta go up and ask, right? So go up and ask and you’ll be surprised at how many people will help. And then you need to also be vulnerable and say I don’t really know how to market a book like you did so well, can you give me some pointers? So being brave is.

Not is admitting when you have questions, you need advice, you need support and asking for help. It’s a lot of literature on the science of social support. If you have the right social support and you ask for help and you get the support, you’re more apt to achieve your goal. I’m telling people to do this, not.

Just because I found it successful. The literature, the science supports it that if you have people that can help you in the journey that have done it before, you’re gonna be more successful.

Chris Badgett: It’s like the comradery and the military, but there’s also the community of elders and things like that.

Jill Schulman: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Totally Tell us

Chris Badgett: sometimes, a point of view builds off of mistakes or outdated things. Perhaps. I’m trying to keep it positive, but what do you think of are some like common leadership or bravery ideas that are. Not quite functional, that don’t really work, but are accepted in society that, that your work perhaps challenges or path?

Jill Schulman: Yeah. The biggest one that comes to mind is the misnomer that we should desire a life of comfort to be the happiest and have the most fulfilled life. People think that the key to happiness is I don’t want any challenges in life. I don’t want any adversity and I just wanna be comfortable.

Wouldn’t it be great if I just won a million dollars and could go on vacation every week? And we think that’s, would make you happy. That is not what will make people happy. There’s even studies that people that win the lottery, and of course they’re elated for a while ’cause all that stuff they get to buy makes them, but within a year their level of happiness.

Measured as subjective, wellbeing is at the exact same level it was a year before. So getting things handed to you doesn’t so the misnomer that I wanna avoid adversity or I want to seek the comfortable path to make me happy, that is not true. And. And I’m on a mission to change that. I want people to realize that, ’cause there’s when adversity strikes or when we experience challenges, there’s, it can happen different ways.

Sometimes they happen to us and when they happen to us, we gotta deal with them. And a lot of people call that resilience, right? , I can help people with resilience. But I’m, I don’t wanna just help people like get back up when they’re knocked down. I want people to go after. I want you to seek discomfort.

Seek adversity and challenges, but the meaningful kind, right? What do you really wanna do? What do you want to achieve? And that’s, you’re a little bit, that you’re a little bit scared of. And for me it was writing a book, getting on all these live podcasts, right? Getting on big stages. These are the things that I’m like, it’s a little scary, right?

But, when it comes to this misnomer that, comfort leads to happiness, it is not true. And I can, prove it scientifically. And what I want people to realize is that seeking challenges that will have, sometimes a rocky road will lead to the highest levels of success, happiness, and wellbeing.

But it sounds counterintuitive, right? You’re like, wait, I’m supposed to do like the hard thing. Yeah. I want you to do the, I want you to be uncomfortable. Like in the Marine Corps we have a, so two little phrases from the military. You might have heard these. So in the Marine Corps we say pain is weakness, leaving the body.

We have it tattooed on our bodies that actually, I don’t know, have any tattoos, but a lot of my fellow Marines did, or we have it on t-shirts, that pain is weakening, was weakness leaving the body. So not necessarily physical pain, but discomfort in terms of doing things we haven’t done before. So discomfort is weakness, leaving the butt, making you stronger, more confident. And then in the, I have a lot of friends who are Navy Seals and they just say, embrace the suck. Embrace the suck. But it’s not just, like even if you look at the stoics ancient Greek philosophers, they knew this to be true, right?

They say the obstacle is the way, you know the reason why, you know things are. Difficult. What’s the quote? I’m not, I’m trying to think of the quote, but there’s a quote, but I believe by Marcus Aurelius that says, the reason why things are hard is not because things were easy, it’s because things were too easy.

Things are now difficult, so it just so I totally botched that one. You’ll have to figure, you’ll have to look it up and put it in the show notes, but. We have known these universal truths for a long time. Even in, in religious, text, and there’s stories about this over and over again.

But in today’s day and age in 2025, we’re getting a little soft. Technology’s advanced so much that everything is so easy. So I think the pendulum is swinging a little too more like comfort and just take more self-care days. If you take a self-care day, six days in a row, you are lazy. You are not doing the right thing for yourself.

You wanna take care of yourself, set a challenging goal and get the hell out of bed and get to work. That is the real self-care. So I just wanna write the ship here ’cause we’re getting a little too soft

Chris Badgett: word for that. Set is fun, comfortable is one I’ve heard before. So comfortable. I have not

Jill Schulman: heard that before.

I love that.

Chris Badgett: Let’s double click a little bit more on stress. I love the analogy of there’s the comfort zone, the stretch zone, which is where you get fun, comfortable, but then there’s like the panic zone where, yeah, you can go there, but maybe don’t spend too much time up there. You might get some long-term negative impacts, but tell us about how to lead. Use bravery through stress, particularly leaders. Most of the ones I know, like they have higher than the average stress loads. And I know a lot of it’s self-inflicted and mindset, but how do we better manage stress?

Jill Schulman: You started off talking about the three zones so I completely agree with that. Like we want the right amount of stress. I wanna cite the original researchers that looked at the relationship between performance and stress, and that’s Dr. Ys and Dotson, who originally published it in 1908. So let’s give credit to the original researchers. But what they found is that when there’s not enough stress, it leads to boredom and complacency.

So we don’t wanna stay in the comfort zone even though it feels very alluring to stay in there. So we if, unless you want a low level of performance and complacency, and actually that can lead to things like depression. Because you just don’t feel like if you wanna stay there, I don’t think anyone wants to stay there, right?

So too little stress is bad for you, bad for your professional wellbeing bad for your happiness and wellbeing. So we don’t wanna be in the comfort zone, too long. On the opposite end of the spectrum, what they found, if the level of stress was too high specifically, or if people feel like it’s impossible or there’s never a break.

Then that can lead to lowers a level of performance and wellbeing because that, that leads into to that chronic stress, which can lead to burnout. So we think of this as Goldilocks in the Three Bears, right? You don’t want too little, you don’t want too much. You gotta find the middle. And really the middle, and this is where bravery comes into, is you gotta figure out like what is a little scary for you?

But with hard work and effort using the power of yet, I can accomplish it really in the next six to nine months. So like for me, like getting on a stage of probably 500 people, that’s comfortable for me getting on the stage in terms of in, in front of 5,000 people. Now, that’s uncomfortable for me, right?

That would be a good challenge for me. But people who have never spoken before so for me. It’s in the comfort zone to be speaking to a, an audience of 500. But for people who’ve never spoken before, they might, that might be in their. Like panic, overwhelm area. They, maybe for them they would the top of their curve would be, I’m gonna speak in front of 20, people like to start off.

So it’s just realizing that everyone has their own curve, and that’s what bravery is. It’s your perception of how challenging it is for you and it’s different. And then I love that because I live in Southern California, like you gotta ride the wave. So if this is the. Curve, which looks like a wave, right?

When you get in that curve, right? Or when you’re at the top of that curve, which is kinda like the top of the wave, you can ride that wave moving forward and do more and more challenging things. And that’s really the research by Chiney High in his book called Flow. Have you ever heard of people say, get in the flow?

That’s flow. Flow is you’re right on the edge between you’re doing something where you’re challenged, but it’s engaging because it’s like you’re trying to get a little bit better, but it’s not too far where it feels impossible. So you wanna get in that flow state. That is a sweet spot.

So that would be my advice. Are you just think of that curve and go, maybe I need to like dial back a little bit, right? So I’m in that healthy curve, which leads to happiness, higher levels of wellbeing and physiological physiological health. If I’m too bored, should I challenge myself a little bit more?

Yeah, so hopefully that helps.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Last question for you, Jill. If you out there watching or listening is really inspired and there’s, they’re waiting on the book, but what’s one action or one project or one mindset shift to focus on like today, immediately, like after this episode ends to start moving in a Yeah.

More brave, leading direction.

Jill Schulman: Yeah, I think the most foundational one is the power of yet, which I’ve talked about. But you can believe and dream and create a vision board and manifest in all this stuff. But if you don’t take any action, you’re not gonna be able to accomplish crap. So I want them to believe they can.

But then the second dimension in my model that I teach is called brave action. You’ve got to align your actions with. Your goals and your ambitions. So this comes down to ruthless planning, prioritization, and focus. And this is the real self-care. I want your audience to make a promise to themselves. I want them to make a promise to themselves that they will.

This is literally where I want you to get outta calendar, right? And go what is this thing that I wanna do that I’ve been a little bit shy of doing? And then I want you to add the word yet, and I want you to develop a plan. What can I do over this next week to start taking little steps in that direction to start exploring it?

And I want you to put it on your calendar. And then here’s the hint too. It has to be the first thing you attack first thing in the morning. A lot of the research by Baumeister who talks about motivation says that we only have so much, so many psychological resources, to keep us motivated, especially if something’s hard.

What we normally do is we like, we look at our to-do list and the thing that we’re like, oh gosh, that’s the scary thing. We put it till the end of the day and we do all the easy stuff, and then we wait until the end of the day, and then what happens at the end of the day? We push it back to the next day, and then we pro procrastinate.

So make a promise to yourself. And if this is just one tip that will change your life, is keep your word to yourself every day. Get out of bed and make the promise to yourself, and then you get a dopamine hit, you’re gonna feel so great, right? Keep the promises to yourself and I’m okay doing a day of rest, right?

One day a week, just veg out and do nothing and do your rest. The other six days, get after it, get it to work, and it’s for you. It’s a promise you to make yourself. So if they believe that they can do it with the power of yet, and they make promises to themselves and they follow through on those promises that can change them their lives.

Chris Badgett: Jill, this has been awesome. Tell everybody how to connect with you a little more about your book and where to find you online.

Jill Schulman: Oh, thank you. If you’ve actually gotten to the end of the podcast, you’re already thinking like Jill is quite a nerd ’cause she cites all the evidence. However, I promise the book.

And my website, it’s I try to make it something that’s interesting to all. If people wanna go to my website, or if you wanna follow me on really any social media, I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on YouTube. I’m trying to think of all the things of my I’m, I’ve got my website, which is jill schulman.com.

And what I try to do is I try to give little tiny messages that give you that little bit of motivation each day. You and I talked about that at the beginning. So if you do use social media to help you achieve your goals. And so make sure you subscribe to people like Chris, and what he’s doing. ’cause it helps you in your specific business. For me, if it helps you and you want me to, give you some tips and I kick you in the butt a little bit ’cause I do that a little bit. I if you follow different people and when you go to pick up your phone, if that is your feed, like that is a positive use of like social media, right?

So I would love if it helps them, if you wanna increase your bravery and you can. It’s like a muscle, but you gotta keep doing it day in and day out. So that’s why I try to, I make a commitment to my audience and my followers that, at least three days a week, I give a message always with a little bit of evidence, but something that’s gonna motivate you to be brave to move toward your goals.

So go to my website. You can sign up for my newsletter. There’s a free assessment on there too, to take a bravery assessment and free resources. But if you follow me and sign up for my newsletter I think you’ll get a lot of value.

Chris Badgett: You can find her@jillschulman.com. Thank for coming on the show, Jill. We really appreciate it. Thanks for the inspiring message and all the strategies and tactics there. It’s been amazing and I can’t wait to read your book. Thank you. All right.

Jill Schulman: Thank you so much, Chris. Have a great day. Bye.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett talks with Nick Usborne about his initiative, Your Awesome Life Story, a website that helps people, especially those over 50, record and save their life experiences for those who come after them.

Nick Usborne has decades of expertise in the field and is a prolific author, educator, and course developer. In order to preserve family history and make sure that priceless experiences, lessons, and memories are not lost over time, Nick emphasizes the need of documenting personal narratives. He talks about how many people lament that their family’s legacy is lacking since they didn’t document their parents’ or grandparents’ stories before they died away.

Nick’s project provides a number of platforms for producing and disseminating life stories, such as scrapbooks, audio or video recordings, written memoirs, and even dynamic websites. Importantly, he reassures that one doesn’t need to be a professional writer to tell their story authenticity matters more than style.

Your Awesome Life Story encourages people to record their life, which helps close the generational divide, strengthen family ties, and leave a rich legacy for future generations.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest and good friend. His name is Nick Usborne. I’ve known Nick for about six years and he is a prolific course creator. And writer, teacher he’s been in this industry for a long time. He’s got a new project called Your Awesome Life Story.

We’re going to dig into that today. But first, welcome to the show, Nick.

Nick Usborne: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Always fun to talk with you.

Chris Badgett: Tell us What your awesome life story is it’s basically and by the way, I just want to say head over to your awesome life story dot com. So you can look at what we’re talking about.

And Nick, if it’s possible, maybe turn down your speaker volume a little bit. I can hear it coming through your mic just a little bit.

Nick Usborne: Oh, all right. Let me have a look. So say something to me, make sure I can still hear you.

Chris Badgett: Yourawesomelifestory. com.

Nick Usborne: And does it sound any better now?

Chris Badgett: Sounds perfect.

Nick Usborne: Okay, cool. All right. All right. So what is it? It’s basically a service, for people who, boomers or say you’re over 50 and you want to create a record of yourself, of your life.

So it’s about writing your life story. It’s part of kind of the family history, scrapbooking, journaling, that whole thing where people don’t want to lose everything. Like I’ve spoken to so many people who say, Oh man, I wish I’d done that. With my dad or with my mom or with my grandma before she passed, because now I know she had so many kind of stories and lessons to share and she did such great thing, interesting things in her life and there’s no record of it.

So it’s lost to us. So the idea of writing and creating and then publishing a life story is you, it’s a legacy. It’s something you can share with your kids, with your family, it can be passed down so your grandkids can find out about your life and there’s so many. I started off when I started creating this was just, Hey, wouldn’t it be fun for people to create their life story?

And then the more I got into it, the kind of deeper I found the topic became I was talking to someone who does activities in a retirement home. And she was saying, Hey, that’s great. There’s so many people here who would like to report their stories, but so many other fringe benefits, like getting a group of people together to share their stories, to get to know each other better, there’s the, I don’t know it’s just such an adventure.

The more I dig into it, the more I see this as a kind of life adventure of, yeah why do I want. Everything that I’ve done, everything I’ve learned to be lost. It’d be, Hey, I got some particular stories that my kids just love. They just say, Hey, tell me the story about when you, and this is usually about when I was in my teens or early twenties, when I was crazy.

And they want to hear those crazy stories. If I didn’t share them, they wouldn’t know. And I’m sure my, from my parents, particularly my mom, my dad left some of his stories behind, but my mom didn’t. There’s probably so much there that I never, she was just like mom, but I didn’t know her before, she was married.

I didn’t know what her aspirations and what she did when she was younger. So I think there’s a lot of, there’s a huge loss within a family and it connects family. It connects generations. A grand, a grandson can say, Hey, you know what? Grandpa’s not so different. He had these same struggles when he was young.

When I think about Nick, I think about the story of you living in a cave in Turkey, I believe. It’s just, that’s such a cool story. Let’s make sure it’s not forgotten one day,

I should have used that as an example in the course. And I haven’t, that’s not lost. I’ve written that one up with texts and the store and the photographs and everything.

Chris Badgett: You’re a writer, very talented writer but your awesome life story is for anybody. And how do you, what’s your approach to getting people that aren’t necessarily writers or YouTubers or content creators to capture that, which is particularly common, especially in the older generations today.

Not being creators, if you will, for the modern web.

Nick Usborne: I think all of us have some capacity to write. Yeah, because even if we’re not writing for the web, we’ve written letters. If you’re old enough, you’ve written letters, you’ve written postcards. You, you know how to communicate. And one of the things I say in the course is, Hey you don’t have to have had a celebrity life to make your life story worth sharing, your kids don’t care about the celebrity stuff.

They just want to learn about you. And also you don’t have to write like you’re, John Grisham or Stephen King. You can just write in your own voice. And sometimes you’ll get a younger person helping a grandparent. With their life story and they’re likely to just record them on video or audio and say, Hey grandma, tell us about, and then that can be transcribed.

If you don’t feel like, so there’s all kinds of different ways to do this.

Chris Badgett: And what are some of the formats, if it’s not a book, it could be what?

Nick Usborne: My dad wrote up just a part of his life because I was raised on a farm and my dad had that farm for 30 years. So his life story, he didn’t talk about his, when he was younger, he didn’t talk about when he was retired.

He just talked about those 30 years. And he actually did it just simply as a binder, like a scrapbook. And he typed up the story. He added photographs. There was like newspaper clippings, things like that. So yeah he just, he was retired when he did it and he just sat down and he’s typewriter and then wrote it up.

So that was a binder. There’s another member of my family, like a second or third cousin, he’s actually built a kind of family story as a website, which is also interesting because the thing about it, if you did on a website, it’s a living history. Is you can add to it, somebody has a grandchild or you suddenly remember something, or you find some photographs in the attic.

When my, both my parents have passed and particularly when my mother passed, she was the second to go. There were so many boxes of albums and photos and things like that. And it was fun to look at but the trouble was a lot of those pictures had no context. We’d love to, I’d love to say, Hey, mom, where was this taken?

And why did you keep this? What was this? We never really had, so we had bits and pieces and old letters and postcards. Old ferry tickets from vacations going, from England to France, just all kinds of stuff. So yeah, you can add all kinds of, I’ve lost track of the question now.

I’m rambling. It’s

Chris Badgett: just a content. The different formats it could take. So it could be a

Nick Usborne: website, it could be a binder. Another friend I have who he was actually, he originally set out just to write like a letter to his children. So that’s a format. You sometimes see that, letter to my younger self or yet letter to my children.

So he was going to do a letter to his children because his kids were leaving school, they were graduating, but that had no education in finance and money. At school. And you thought that’s not good. This friend is his, he’s, he went through all kinds of struggles and he tried different businesses and they didn’t work.

Then suddenly they did. And now he’s very wealthy and very comfortable. He wanted to share that with his kids. So he started off just as a letter to my kids. And then he thought hang on, there must be other parents out there who feel the same, that their kids get no education in money matters and entrepreneurship and stuff like that.

So he turned that into an actual book and it’s like a three, I got a copy here somewhere. It’s like a 300 page book he had published, by a big name publisher. So you can go that route or you can just do it yourself. You can publish it as a, just as a, an ebook, as a PDF, or you can take that PDF and publish it on the Kindle, Amazon Kindle.

So there’s lots of different ways of doing it. And, or you could do it just as audio or video. It’s. I guess through the mechanism or the, how you approach helping somebody achieve this, because I know it could seem like a big project, but how do you ease into it in your course of like process?

Chris Badgett: How does somebody get started and on the path and what are some of the milestones and methods in your course?

Nick Usborne: So I take them through kind of steps, because like you say, it can feel overwhelming. Like I have no idea how to do this. So I said, okay, step by step. So step one is why are you doing this?

What’s your why? I want to hand this down to my kids or the why could be, it could be a journal of rediscovery for yourself. It could almost be therapy for yourself is Hey, there’s all kinds of stuff I went through and I just want to review that and get back through that. And so it can be therapeutic too.

And also the why is. Yeah. Like, why do you want to do it? Then there’s the who, but who are you doing this for? Is this just for immediate family? Is it really an intimate thing just for immediate family? Or is it for like extended family and friends? Or is it for everyone? Like my friend who published it, as a big name publisher.

Is it this for everyone? That matters too. And then I say, okay, let’s now gather together all your stuff, boxes of stuff. These are the building blocks, the kind of bricks of your story. And then we get into, okay, how do we structure this? Like, how do we find the beginning of the middle of the end?

And where do we begin? So I have a big beard on. So basically what I’m doing is I’m, I don’t throw anyone at the deep into the deep end with the course. I say, okay. Why are you doing this? Who are you doing it for? Where’s your stuff? Let’s put that into a structure. And then in the next session, we look at, okay, we’ve got a structure, but let’s do a bit of storytelling here.

Let’s apply some of the kind of theory of story to this and make it maybe a little bit more exciting to read, interesting to read. Rather than just dull pros, as it were and then there’s all kinds of tools that I talk about. And one of the things I do right at the end is a section that’s almost, I don’t think I titled it this, but it’s close to saying, Hey, I’m not dead yet.

It’s my story so far, but maybe my story so far can inspire me to do other stuff in my life. So I might, as I’m writing my story, I think. You know what? That was such a period of my life. You mentioned like I lived in Turkey for a while. I can say, you know what? I should go back there. I’m going to put that in the bucket list.

I’m going to go back to Turkey and revisit that place and see if any of the people I knew back then are still there. So that goes in my bucket list, or it could be something I haven’t done. I’ve never, Hey, I’ve never been further east. I’ve never been to the far east. I quite like to go to the far east.

So I’ll put that on my bucket list. So when you do your life story it’s a voyage of rediscovery for yourself and for your family. But. Can also be an inspiration for, Hey, here’s some of the things I want to do with the rest of my life. I’m not done yet. It could be volume two, somewhere down the road, or if it’s a website, then you just keep adding to the website.

Okay. Here’s the journal of our finally my trip out to the far East. Here’s the journal. And I put it on the website. Funny question

Chris Badgett: for you. What if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed? Oh my gosh, there’s so many stories, so many different parts of life. How do you choose what to not focus on part of it?

Nick Usborne: Again, I did, I go through this in the course is there are some things that you don’t want to, my brother was writing a book like a memoir and he was chatting to me and he was asking me about stuff. And there was a particular episode that he said, oh, I want to put this in. And he mentioned that and I was like, no way, because that particular episode was very personal, very painful for me.

Back in, in our early childhood, and I said, no, please do not, I do not want that shit. So there’s some things that you may not want to share. And definitely in terms of privacy, if it involves someone else, you should ask them before you decide to share that, or it could be, Hey, maybe I’ve had struggles.

Maybe I’ve had addiction. Maybe I had problems with her in any relationship. Is it good for me to go back through that? It might be. Do I want to share that with everyone? Maybe I do. If this is a story and part of redemption, maybe I don’t. So you’re going to go through stuff and it’s like any kind of editing of any kind of story or anything like that is, is the stuff you want to put in and the stuff you don’t want to put in.

And part of it, I talk about a push pin structure. Think of highlights, again, you talk about the trip to Turkey. Okay. That’s the kind of push pin thing. I’ll put that up on the wall. That’s interesting. It was interesting when I moved from England to Canada. That was a big deal. I’m going to put that in it, where, so there, there’s, you can do almost like a highlights reel. You don’t have to cover everything. No one wants to know everything, but it’s, think about what’s interesting to you, but also think about what would be interesting to your kids, to your grandkids, what would they like to know about you?

And also like one of the things that I’ve done and I talk about in the course is because the world changes so quickly I’ve got a. Even in the closer picture of a slide rule. So slide rule is what we used to use at school before there were calculators. But my kids and their kids, they wouldn’t, if I showed them a picture, a slide rule, they’d have no idea what it is.

So I put that in there because it’s interesting. Wow, think of all the changes that have taken place just over a relatively short period. So it’s fun and it’s. I hope at no point did I say, Oh, this is hard work. I really don’t want this to be hard work. This is fun.

This is exploration. And this is going back through. This is like ringing up old friends, someone you haven’t spoken to for 20 years and say, Hey, I’m doing this thing. And I suddenly thought, do you remember that trip we took? Do you remember that concert we went to? Do you remember that time we misbehaved, whatever it is.

And it’s you can reconnect with people. I’ve done that. I went back to England and I reconnected with one of my very first bosses after I left school like I worked in a quarry and they, he was a master Mason and he was a fantastic guy who had a huge influence on my life, I, when I went back to see him, I hadn’t seen him for over 20 years.

So that was again, part of rediscovering, rediscovering important times in my life, important people in my life. And I think we get, we’re always rushing forward. We’re so obsessed with the present and the future. And the past is gone and I think that’s a shame. I think it can be my process of creating the course.

I’ve necessarily gone through the process myself of creating this life story for myself. And. It’s really interesting and it is healing in a way. And it’s so interesting to look at those big forks in the road. Like when I came to Canada from England, what if I hadn’t? What if what stimulated me to come to Canada?

I wouldn’t be talking, I probably wouldn’t be having this conversation with you now. We wouldn’t have met the way we did all those years ago. So there’s these forks in the road, which are fascinating when you look at them. Wow. And I’ve spoken to that, about that with my kids of Hey, just imagine if, because I, my, my kids, I bumped into their mother.

Oh, I guess it’s always the case. It’s like almost by, I wasn’t looking for her. Yeah. I just bumped into her and all of a sudden we, we’re married and having children and stuff. What if I hadn’t, she was in fact the person who sold me my first. Flat, my first apartment in London.

What if I’d gone to another realtor? What if I hadn’t seen that ad, whatever it was, everything changes. So it’s fun. It’s really interesting. And I’ve involved my kids a bit in it. Because again, part of my story is my life with my children, raising my children. So I said, Hey, do you remember that time?

And sometimes we have very different memories. Of what, they’ll say, do you remember? And I’m like, no, what was that? And then they remind me and I think, oh, true. That was great. Anyway,

Chris Badgett: let’s talk more about that therapeutic aspect. What are particularly, I think when you’re getting older.

There’s some pain of loneliness, boredom maybe looking for meaning and significance and you’re talking about how good it can be. But what’s some of the kind of the negative side of like where people are at later in life? That this could really help with I

Nick Usborne: think

Chris Badgett: it’s

Nick Usborne: part of it and I talk about this in the course is, and this is when I was talking about retirement homes, the lady there who’s in charge of activities that say one of the biggest.

Issues there is that people become less social, that fewer social connections as you get older, you tend to have fewer people around. So she was saying that what she loved about the idea is that it gathers all the people together in a group and all of a sudden they’re talking with each other. And somebody says something and someone else just burst into laughter and said, Oh, that was me too.

I did that. Or I, I saw that band. Oh my goodness, we were at the same event and we never even knew. And it just brings people to life a bit, I think. And it’s and even if it’s not old people, it could be, I don’t, maybe I’m old, I don’t feel that way. But just like I said, get reconnecting with that boss of mine, having conversations with I, I got back in touch with the headmaster of my high school.

We had a conversation, so again it’s reconnecting with people. Again, for sure I’ve thought about and revisited moments in my life that were not wonderful. And again, that can be really helpful to revisit those moments where things were not great. So I just think it’s ever since as I’ve created lots of courses and they’re generally for the, in the marketing space, this is a new departure for me to do something outside of the digital marketing space.

This is just for anyone and everyone. It just started off as just this little tiny spark of an idea. And what generally happens with me is a spark of an idea either kind of flickers and goes out or it just starts this yeah. And it’s been like that for me with this is I find it so interesting.

I find it so fascinating. And I love like stories man, people, everyone loves stories, right? And stories are great connectors between generations, between cultures from across the world. I can sit down and laugh about something silly that has a thanks, it’s a story about Thanksgiving dinner.

Hey, you could go to Japan, go to China. They may not have Thanksgiving, but they’ll have those holidays and they’ll have the same experience and have the same funny stories, different language, different culture, different place. But stories bind us as humans and their stories endure. But Bible stories, pre Bible stories, ancient Greek stories, ancient Rome story, these stories are still alive.

They connect us with the past, they connect us with the present. Stories like, Hey, I remember reading my little kid, my kids stories of bedtime, they’re such a central part of who we are. And how we connect with others, whether it’s different cultures, different age groups, different, anything, everything like that kind of glue that hold us together.

So when I talk about your awesome life story, it, when I say awesome, whatever you may think, oh yeah, my life wasn’t that interesting. I bet it was, I bet you have some good stories to share. You don’t have to be a celebrity. You don’t have to be a superstar to have it. The story worth sharing.

So yeah, for me, this has just turned into this big roaring project. I, and like I say, everywhere, every time I turn everything I look at this, I just think, Oh man, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. So it’s growing like nuts now. Like for instance, that thing of the retirement homes never occurred to me when I started the project that, that people in homes might be interested in me helping a group of seniors sit around and tell their life stories.

And it was only when I started talking to the kind of administrators and activities people there that I said, Oh, my goodness, this would be wonderful because it addresses so many issues of community of socializing. Of memory, it stimulates memory in older people. It’s really good for older people and their kind of brain health, as it were to, to remember stuff.

It’s really helpful for them. So it never occurred to me that when I started the course but like I say, the deeper I go, the more the applications I find and the more interested I become. And that’s important because as like starting and publishing and selling a course is not always easy.

There are bumps along the road. It never, I always think it’s going to take off, go viral. A gazillion people will buy it on day one. It didn’t happen. So you, there’s a grind. You have to keep on grinding, working at it. And if you don’t love it, it’s really hard that grind.

But if you do love it, then it becomes easier.

Chris Badgett: So I watched the movie last night the new remake of Moby Dick. And the author had to work hard to get one of the survivors, as an old man who was a kid during the incident, to tell his story. So if you’re a kid, or a partner, spouse, or friend, and you’re trying to encourage The person you care about to that you think this might be really good for them, or you’re just genuinely curious and you want to get those stories captured.

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Chris Badgett: How, what would you say to somebody like that? Or it could be like the retirement home activity coordinator. To encourage somebody to buy into the idea of doing this.

Nick Usborne: You can’t force it. There’ll be people who are very private and don’t want to. But I would say generally more often than not, we like it when people express interest in us, in our lives.

It’s Oh, you’re interested in me. You’re interested in my life. That’s cool. Let me tell you stuff. And I think particularly if there’s a strong bond there, like if, Hey, I’m just thinking if one of my grandkids asked me something like that, I’d just melt because my grandkids.

So I’d say, sure, of course, go sit here. I’ll tell you some, I’ll tell you some stories. And your dad can tell me to shut up when I tell stories that aren’t appropriate. But it’s I think most of us we like the idea of being asked cause it makes us feel not important, but it makes us it’s like our life matters.

It’s like an endorsement of likes it is. It’s like the subtext is grandpa, your life matters to me. And that, like I said, that makes me melt inside. Yeah, but like I say you can’t force it. Some people are very private and they won’t want to. They won’t want to talk about stuff like that or they’ll have had, a lot of almost insurmountable difficulties in their life.

And they just don’t want to revisit that. You got to respect that say, okay, that’s okay. And if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group setting, like in a retirement home, maybe out of a group of six or seven people, maybe there’ll be one or two who just like to sit there and listen. And that’s okay.

Chris Badgett: What what’s like a realistic timeline for somebody to go through this process, just in general, I know different strokes for different folks, but it’s somebody pulled us off in a couple months, three months.

Nick Usborne: Yeah, I think you can, I think that’s about right. You can do this in two or three months.

One of the things I say in, I interrupt one of the sessions in my course. I say, okay, hang on. And that’s where I’m talking about the discovery process of finding all this stuff and maybe interviewing some old friends or school teachers or old bosses, or maybe finding, maybe your local paper’s still there and they have archives and you can go back to when you were a teenager or you played on a sports team and you think it might’ve been in the newspaper.

All this kind of discovery stuff. I say don’t rush this. The process of putting together the raw materials for your story, the journey is half the value. Yes, it’ll be great when you’re done and you can share this, but like the real value here is this journey of putting it together. Yeah, so don’t rush it.

Like you want to, and it’s tricky cause I also say don’t slow to a crawl and lose momentum, but don’t feel this like a deadline and enjoy and be present for those times when you’re discovering stuff or you’re interviewing someone, or you’re going out for a beer with someone that you haven’t talked to for 15 years or 20 years.

Don’t rush that stuff. Because even if at the end. You never put this down on paper, which I hope everyone does or on, whatever medium, even if, just the process, just going through the process up to that point has huge value, I think, of exploring, re exploring your life through the stories of your life.

Chris Badgett: It’s almost like a working vacation. It’s fun. But there’s some work aspect to it, but yeah it’s enjoyable.

Nick Usborne: Yeah. And there’s no deadline. There’s no failing. There’s no, it’s just a, it’s just a journey. And I think like I say, it was, keep trying to think of what was the original spark?

And I can’t remember. I think it was, I think there was just like a page in a book that I read. Months of my life in the middle of last year that I just think it just, that was just the spark and I can’t remember the book and I but I’m pretty sure I was reading a book and I don’t think I finished the book.

I think when I had that spark, I stopped on that page and I thought that, and it wasn’t about life stories. It was about life, but I can’t remember why it sparked the idea. But yeah, sometimes you just never know where it’s going to come from, the idea.

Chris Badgett: What’s your approach to teaching in the course?

Is it like videos, text assignments? How do you do

Nick Usborne: it? Yeah, I do kind of video. First of all, I build PowerPoint because I want to show things. I want to illustrate things. And then I go through them. It’s as if I’m doing it. I record it. The course as it stands at the moment is pre recorded. So there’s nine different videos, nine, nine sessions.

And basically it’s me, my voiceover on PowerPoint slides, but at the end of each session, there is a worksheet. So this is part of the kind of teaching process that I go through. And I said, look, listen to his session one. Here’s the worksheet and this stuff for you to do. There’s an assignment that there’s lines where you write stuff down.

So I encourage people to go through, listen to the session, complete the workbook, the worksheet, before they go to the next session. So they’re internalizing and they’re participating because the, this, like with courses, sometimes we get into courses and we just we’re half present, half not, and we’re listening to it.

And then maybe we see something out the window and then maybe we’re halfway through and we don’t even go back for the rest of the course. And that happens a lot. So I don’t want that to happen. That’s why I have these worksheets in between sessions. to get people to actually participate and to internalize what they’ve learned and to build up, in the end, they’re going to have these nine different worksheets as a pile, as a little binder, as it were.

I also have some kind of bonus materials. There’s one of them is a prompting guide, where if you are sitting with your grandmother, How do you prompt her to remember? Hey grandma, like if, when you walked out your door, when you were 10 years old, what did you see when you went to the shops, what shops did you go into?

And what did they have? When you left school, grandpa what was your dream? What did you want to do? And then what happened? And so it’s one of the, one of the downloads, one of the kind of bonus downloads is 52 different prompts to, to actually, and that is those 52 prompts are really interesting.

Cause you can do it to yourself. You can go through them and get and do it yourself. And it’s really interesting to unearth stuff that you haven’t thought about forever. I did it. I said a while back, my wife said, Oh, do you remember that time we went to Pittsburgh? And I said, I’ve never been to Pittsburgh in my life.

She said, sure you do. We went together. I said, we did not. And she had to really prompt me and remind me of the specifics of that trip. And I said, Oh, wow, you’re of course you’re right. She could remember I didn’t. But then I did and it’s like we forget so much and it’s not like part of the prompting and part of this whole process is we, our memories, this back shelf, there’s the back room storage of our memories and there’s front, the front window of our memories.

And we often get lived through life just looking in the front, the store window, the front, the big memories that we hold in the front. But man, we got so many memories stored back there in the shed behind during the, on shelves back there. And that is where some of the amazing stuff is in those memories and stories that we haven’t thought about for a decade or decades.

And that’s what the prompts are for. Is it helps you unearth those and you go, ah, and you go back into the storage room and you pull out the, and it’s Oh man, I haven’t thought about that for so long. I should give that guy a call. So again, it’s enriching. It’s reminding you of the kind of tapestry of your life and the weave of your life.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the free guide on your site. So if somebody wants to check things out, you have sign up with an email address and they get your life story discovery guide. Yeah. What’s in there?

Nick Usborne: It’s basically, it covers a fair bit of what we talked about today. It’s basically a lot of it is the why.

So the course is the practical hands on step by step that, that free it’s, Hey, it’s 47 pages. It’s not nothing. It’s not like one of those three page freebies the substance there, but what it takes you through a lot of the, why the emotional journey of why this is important, how it can be good for you, how it can strengthen your family.

How it can. Bridge gaps in the family it can bring people together. So a lot of the reasons why in the discovery guide is to discover why you want to do this. And then at the end, if you think, you know what? Yeah, I do want to do this. I’ve discovered the one, then you go into the course and that’s the practical step by step.

Okay. Here’s how we’re going to do it.

Chris Badgett: So if somebody out there is listening to this and what their curiosity is peaked, or they know someone like, let’s say they have an older parent and they see this opportunity, what would you say to them to encourage them to follow this thread? Get the, get,

Nick Usborne: Get the guide.

The, anything you’ll pay for the, any payment for that is I’ll send you a series of three or four emails in the days to come. But even the emails are informative rather than pitching. Yeah, take the guide and talk about it. Talk about it with people in the family. Talk about it with, say it could be an elder relative.

Sometimes, I guess I mainly. Speaking to if I’m buying Facebook advertising for this, which I do to get people to see this, I’m targeting the 50 plus 55 plus. But like you say you could be 25 and you’re thinking of your grandma or your parents or that old friend who’s lived next door forever and used to babysit you when you were a kid.

And that seems to be, I’ve mentioned before, I think it seems to be a real motivator for some people. This is almost I’m not ready yet, but I’d love to help. I wish I’d spoken to, I’ve got a friend whose mother. And she had Alzheimer’s it’s not a lot of fun. And she was saying, ah, I wish I’d thought about this for my mom before that, that took hold that I’d captured her story in time.

Because again, like when someone’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia or whatever, it is that fear, the horror of everything is lost. Everything in my mind, every memory, everything is gone. So it can be very powerful for them to invite them to let’s capture that. Let’s capture your life story.

So yeah, I’d get the discovery guide. That’s the starting point that, that explores the reasons why. And then you can get the course for yourself if you want to do it for yourself, or you can get it to help, to go through it with an older relative or friend.

Chris Badgett: And I’ll just say, we don’t have to mention the price because Nick may change it at some point, but it’s very affordable and approachable.

So if you’re intrigued, I’d encourage you to check out yourawesomelifestory. com. Any final words for the people, Nick?

Nick Usborne: If you’re course creators, or you want to create courses do what I did, which is follow the spark, follow the flame. There’s lots of, there’s lots of people who will say, Hey, here are the hot topics. Here’s where you need to be. Here’s where you want to be. That’s okay.

But I, but but I think your greatest work will come and your most successful courses will come out of where it lights a fire inside you. It’s like I say, this is I’m ridiculous. I published a number of courses and I always think on day one, Oh my goodness, this is awesome. A hundred people are going to buy it in the first five minutes and they don’t, but it’s what kind of drives me.

Like I say, if you’re not in love with your topic, it’s really hard to keep going because it is a grind. You have to keep working it. It’s a business. You have to keep working it. So find something you love. You want to share that is important to you that has meaning for you and that you think has deep meaning for other people.

And yeah, now when you invest the time it’s important. It’s rewarding. So yeah, Jeff is something you love with a spark.

Chris Badgett: I just thought of it as you were talking were to use a course as like the finished product, you could, for example, like I’m thinking about this, if if I went through a prompt hey, what lessons do I wish my kids knew When they’re my age or before they get here.

So they have an easier time or better time or whatever. Why would I teach them? And then is there a story that goes with that? And you can literally like use a core structure, which are literally called life lessons or lessons. They could be life lessons and do that. And then even one, there could be a whole course about finances and money as an example and then another course about love and another course about travel, another course.

Nick Usborne: To the point about the story thing, it’s say, if I say to one of my kids or grandkids, listen to me, I have years of experience. Let me give you some advice. Generally doesn’t work like, Hey, old person, just shush. But if I say, let me tell you a story and the lesson is embedded in the story.

Then that’s something that people want to hear about and that stories are teaching tools, the fair, don’t go into the woods. Cause the big bad wolf, we tell stories to keep our kids safe, don’t, don’t go out after dark into the woods. It’s a scary place.

The wolves will get you. So yeah, stories are fun. Sorry. Rambling.

Chris Badgett: No, it’s good. It’s good. Yeah. Story is part of teaching. That’s Nick Usborne, yourawesomelifestory. com. Check it out. Get the guide. Thanks for coming back on the show, Nick. It’s always a pleasure to have you. I can’t wait to see where this goes as time goes on.

And it’s really providing a valuable service to the world and humanity and people’s. Hearts, minds, and memories. It’s very cool. Like you said, it’s a spark. And the more I look at this project, the bigger that flame keeps getting. It’s a good idea.

Nick Usborne: Okay. Hey, and we should mention this is built.

I’d love my, the whole thing is built on Lifter LMS. Come on, man. You gotta, we gotta do a bit of promotion.

Chris Badgett: And Nick is a serial creator. He has many core sites built on lifter help mess. So it’s always fun to see what you do. And I love seeing it when it’s something like this that can really put out a ripple of positive impact in the world.

One of the other things is there’s a lot of kind of negative ripples in the world right now, or all around the world. I love the idea of putting something positive out there as a bit of a counterbalance modest, but just a little thing. Going back, like you said, we’re really focused on the present and the future, and we have our recent window of memory, but there’s a lot of gems back there to go find.

Nick Usborne: Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming back on the show, Nick. We really appreciate it. You’re

Nick Usborne: welcome. Thank you for inviting me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, James LePage from Automatic and Chris Badgett explore how AI is changing WordPress, online education, and coaching.

James LePage, who has experience in web development, entrepreneurship, and artificial intelligence, is a prominent figure in the AI and WordPress fields. From creating websites for neighbors to managing a prosperous organization that specialized in WooCommerce and online learning systems, he began working with WordPress as a youngster.

From creating websites for neighbors to managing a prosperous organization that specialized in WooCommerce and online learning systems, he began working with WordPress as a youngster.

In this episode, James talks about how he went from working as a freelance WordPress developer as a teenager to managing an agency. Exploring AI, and ultimately selling his firm, WPAI, to Automattic. He emphasizes how AI is revolutionizing automation, website building, and course production, simplifying difficult processes for non-developers.

The topic of formal education’s applicability in the IT industry is also covered in the conversation, with James highlighting the importance of experiential learning and incubator settings.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is James LePage. You can find him on Twitter or X at James W. LePage. James is a leader in the AI space, particularly in WordPress. And we’re going to dive deep on artificial intelligence, WordPress, and specifically around courses and coaching and teaching and things like that.

But first, welcome to the show, James. Thank you very much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Awesome, man. I can’t wait for this conversation. We met briefly at an event, but it’s going to be really cool to dive deep and get into what you’ve been up to. Tell us about just your journey with WordPress and artificial intelligence, just to lay the groundwork for, where you are, what you’re doing and your area of focus.

James LePage: Yeah, I have been involved in WordPress basically since I’ve grown up. So I’ve grown up in this industry and I got started when I was a pretty young teen and working in a kitchen and realized I didn’t like working in a kitchen. There was a chef who was mean to me, threw knives at me. I was like, I don’t like this.

I need to go do something else. And that’s something else ended up being tinkering with WordPress and eventually realizing, hey. This is a really easy thing to break into and get started in. So started building WordPress sites for myself and the neighbors and. Started off on page builders, but grew into learning the basics of HTML and then CSS and then JavaScript and PHP.

And I think that type of story is something that I’ve seen a lot of stories similar in the WordPress industry. So I started and grew into a developer. Was freelancing for a little bit, ended up making an agency. That agency I ran for a few years. It went from just me as a credit credibility device to getting a first developer and then a designer and growing into eight people doing some pretty big DTC projects, specifically.

On WooCommerce, but also some course websites, which I had mentioned to you. So we have some of that course experience in the background of my mind ran the agency for a bit and ended up selling the portfolio in college. In college, I also was studying AI when a lot of AI research was coming out around transformers and gen AI and things like that.

And then left WordPress for a bit, did a venture backed startup. I was the technical co founder. It was called chair club based in New York city. And. That was a big idea that didn’t work out. So after it didn’t work out, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And it was like do I go back to the agency world?

Do I go try to break into Fang and the more traditional software development, or do I do what I love doing and found something again? And I ended up taking option three and option three was really clear to me because. AI was becoming really powerful at that point, GPT two, and then GPT three were coming out and it was really clear to me that, Hey, I had a lot of problems in my agency building things.

And I think AI could be really beneficial on the code side to start. So launched the first product in what grew into WPAI, which was another venture backed startup. Specifically, as the super creative name suggests for WordPress and AI and launched the first product called CodeWP, which was a very creative name again, a code generator for WordPress ran that for a bit and then also started down the path of creating an AI agent for WordPress that did things for you before it was cool and Yeah, built that and then very recently in December ended up getting acquired by Automatic and still breaking into the role at Automatic.

But we’re thinking about big picture AI specifically in the context of WordPress and the open web and publishing and what that looks like in the short, mid and long term future. So that’s a long introduction, but that is my entire background in WordPress.

Chris Badgett: That’s a very well stated introduction is quite the journey you’ve been on.

I have to ask just because education is important to those who watch this. It’s interesting. You studied AI in college. What did you get out of that? And would you recommend that to somebody entering college years these years in 2025? How important is it?

James LePage: It’s an interesting question. So my approach to college was very anti college and it was difficult for me to actually go to college because I was running a very successful agency in high school that was, it was doing very well.

And we had really big projects and I was apprehensive of doing that and school at the same time, ended up going to school. I went to Syracuse university and they had a really great entrepreneurship track. So I actually, Ended up taking the major in entrepreneurship. And as a part of that major, it was college and you still did your classes, but it was entrepreneurship.

So you had your opportunity to work on your business and you were essentially mandated to study topics. And I was in school at the time that the AI was having a lot of research. Published about it transformers and then also the application of transformers around gpt2 and that grew into gpt3 and chat gpt in the systems that we see today that was happening.

So for me, it was logical. All right, I’m forced to study like I have to learn. Oh, no. So I ended up studying AI and that provided an incredible base and foundation. For me to be able to understand how these systems actually work. And I think that’s one of my superpowers where I can look at these systems and be like, Oh, this is how it works.

So it makes the actual thought of how you implement it. For example, with code WP, the idea of, all right, I can really easily. use one of these models fine tune an understanding of WooCommerce code into it, provide relevant code samples and get a really crazy system that takes my request and spits out a WooCommerce code snippet, which was the actual original idea behind CodeWP.

So the education was really important. And I don’t know, I don’t know the place of college in software. I think that I actually do know a lot of software developers who didn’t go to school and think differently. And they’re really effective because of that. I know many who have comp sci degrees and are really effective because of that as well.

So it’s an interesting question. My education is legitimate, but it’s a bit different than the path that a lot of other people took.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool to combine your entrepreneurship, the business you’re actually building and working in with school at the same time. And that’s it just creates some synergy there or whatever.

That’s a pretty cool way to think about it. Like you’re not just, getting ideas and studying. You’re like working on your business and learning technology.

James LePage: It was almost more of an ideas incubator. And the most impactful part of Syracuse specifically was they had an incredible incubator and they had.

A lot of people, there were a lot of people in AI who actually run pretty successful AI startups at this point. There are a lot of people out of AI and everybody just talking and sharing ideas paired with the mandate to actually learn paired with the fact that a lot of my buddies in this incubator, we’re also running either services, businesses, or trying to raise for a startup, or in some cases, actually running a startup and that ecosystem and environment was really helpful.

So I actually would hope that. Education goes that way in the future, especially as we see more impact with AI. And there’s a whole nother podcast to do on AI and education, but I think that moving towards that collaborative environment is really helpful. And I actually see a lot of parallels with the course industry.

So I’m sure we can touch back on that in, in the future.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Take us into the future a little bit. The whole world is a gush with AI, my old parents are using chat GPT but like particularly around WordPress and publishing and building websites. What do you see the future?

That’s how the masses aren’t really seeing yet as a deep practitioner of AI, like the opportunity, like what is it?

James LePage: I think there’s a really big. And there are a million different answers. So I’ll try my best to do some of the answers. The first answer is us as people who build WordPress and the creators and WordPress and those in agency, those trying to do their own site, those freelancing and building for others.

I think that. There are a massive amount of AI tools coming out that are here to stay, and those who adopt these AI tools become super, super powered in terms of being able to code, being able to ideate on content, being able to ideate on images and designs and things like that. So I think the immediate opportunity for everybody is to really embrace these tools and look at how you can use them in your day to day lives and be a more effective creator.

And those who adopt that, I think, are really well positioned for whatever the future of AI holds. You’ll notice that I didn’t say write an entire WordPress site, or click one button and create a WordPress site, or paint a painting by clicking one button and creating an image. And I really think that In the grand scheme of things, human creativity is really important, and it’s going to become more and more important in the future, as we’ve already seen, I think, with these AI generated articles, and they all sound the same, and it’s all it’s content, but how beneficial really is it to us?

I’m already seeing people who are not liking this and like against the AI side of things. So I think that aspect of how do I augment myself? How do I improve my workflows, not replace them with AI becomes important right now, but also how am I creating and maintaining that human element of what I do in that near future.

So that’s the near future question. I think you can become really powerful. Especially in WordPress. So that’s why in WPAI, we built CodeWP and we built AgentWP. It was like, how do we provide these tools to the people who build to just be quicker? And I hated writing code snippets that were 80 percent the same for WooCommerce.

So we built the tool to fix that. I think that was like the real mentality behind those products. That’s also what we’re thinking about at Automatic. And I think the whole industry is thinking about this. Like, how do we build tools to be more effective on the web? So that’s the short answer. I can also do a long answer, but I’ll break if there are any questions in between.

Chris Badgett: I just, I’d say, I think GitHub Copilot has a really good name because the Copilot, the AI is there to sit beside you, not replace you or take your job. If you get really good at leveraging your Copilot. You’re going to be like 10 times more productive and save time and have more room for the creativity.

And a quick clarifying question for the technical folks out there. How does chat GPT as an example? Differ or get hub copilot differ from

James LePage: code WP started as this single turn prompt tool that you could say I want this functionality for my site and it would do its best to generate a single code snippet that you would install into functions PHP or like a plug in like code snippets to extend this little functionality.

So a good example is that in WooCommerce You have a WooCommerce subscriptions plugin and you want to add this like additional subscription term. I think it comes with 12 or 24 months and I want 36 months. And if I wanted to code that, I could go on stack overflow. I could go on the WooCommerce docs.

I can look through like the actual setup for this, but it’s simple enough and we can put it into this AI system and have this system output a really good. Piece of code for that specific functionality. And that was the origin of code WP. And it went through a few iterations. We ended up selling as we were working on the third iteration, but it really started growing more and more into an IDE.

Where you would be conversationally working with this development environment and creating multiple files. It wasn’t just a PHP code snippet, now it could create a PHP primary file for a plugin and then generate the JavaScript and the CSS and enqueue those and create like a little functionality plugin.

And that’s what it was really good at. It wasn’t anything to go and create the next lifter LMS with one button or gravity forms or whatever it was. And I don’t think we’ll ever have systems that really do that, but it was one of those things where it’s okay, I need this functionality for a client and I know what I need to do.

I just don’t know how to do it. Exactly. So I’m going to have this tool do it for me. And we saw a lot of people love it. It was awesome to ride that wave of growth and appreciation as everything else was happening. So that product was launched a week before chat TBT. So we just rode the wave on the WordPress side of things, which was awesome.

And that also allowed us to do a lot of real discovery of what people wanted. In terms of AI for WordPress where people were asking like, Hey, code WP, can you go and help me do a performance scan or a security scanner? Tell me why this page is blank and white. I have no idea. And that led to the second product agent WP, which was this thing in WordPress.

And it was like, okay if we have this agent in WordPress and we can give it access to the file system in a safe way, and the ability to run and execute code in a safe way. Then at some point, this thing can read your error logs and tell you why this page is white and sit beside you as that copilot and do things for you, but also use what WordPress has to offer, which is this framework for data and functionality, basically and help you do really anything.

So that was actually the motto is do anything WordPress and got pretty far along on that and then ended up at automatic and we’re keeping that mentality of. What can we do with AI and WordPress in a way that makes sense for the users of our awesome CMS? So that’s what we’re thinking about now

Chris Badgett: How do you think about that across different types of users, like the developers, the power users, the first time user, it seems challenging to make everybody happy, but maybe I’m not thinking about it the same way, or maybe somebody, one segment, you got to focus on first or whatever.

James LePage: It’s interesting because there are a lot of approaches that you have when it comes to AI and WordPress, because you have so many of these little user groups, and one approach is, AI is fairly robust and you can build a pretty robust system that. You can scale it up and down in terms of complexity and what it can do and what it has access to.

So for the really basic first time user who just needs to know how to change their homepage to home from the blogs page, it can just say, Hey, go click this link and it will bring you to the relevance settings page. And it will say, here’s the settings page. And when you do this will happen. But for the developer, it can identify, Oh.

This is a question that is not as simple as moving to a new page. This is a question that requires code. So I’m going to go and use that functionality that’s been built into the system to go and generate relevant code. So that’s one approach where you have a super generic system that adapts to the user base.

Another approach is. Using user interface to silo different products. So for example, code WP it’s actually, it’s up and there’s always going to be a reference of what the code WP product was because I’m really proud of what we had built. Same with agent WP code WP. Was million buttons, a million options, a code editor front and center, like really built for a developer built for somebody who is ready to develop.

And it was an AI product and it was still a conversational AI product, but that was built in a way where you had this tool bench to go and work on. And the agent. Was built with a single text input and it handled everything under the surface. And it was all using similar, actually it was using a lot of the same shared models and data infrastructure between our two products, but it was packaged in a way where it made it a lot easier for one group who was.

Less technical in one group. We were super technical to go and make it happen. Those two approaches, I think each have their merits and I don’t really have a clear answer because we have done both at this point. So it’s a, it’s an interesting thing to think about.

Chris Badgett: We paused after talking about the near term.

What do you see further out with AI and WordPress?

James LePage: I think it makes WordPress really important. So I think WordPress ends up becoming this. I mentioned this before, so there’s a mantra in automatic and throughout WordPress is the operating system for the open web. And I always looked at that and I was like, I don’t know, like I build websites with this. But I think that becomes much more true as these AI systems and AI content and AI, everything starts taking hold.

And I think. The place WordPress has in this is a way that you can build sites in the near term But in the long term this is a way that you manage all of your personal content all of your writing all of your videos all of your images and it can surface as a website, but it can also surface as A source for maybe a voice assistant coming from some speaker somewhere, some AR VR experience or whatever else AI pushes the interaction model towards.

So the WordPress product becomes super important because you need a way to manage all your stuff. You also, in the midterm, still need a way to manage your functionality, and maybe you still want a website. I’m not saying websites are going anywhere. I love websites. You still need that underlying system to make it all happen.

There aren’t too many underlying systems that are open source, that power 42 percent of the internet already, and are built for headless with a great API. With extensibility like wordpress. So I think it has a really big places that operating system such framework for the web as The internet does change because I think it will.

I think what will remain constant, which is what we started on is the human element. There’s always going to be the need for human created thoughts, human created ideas, images. It’s actually probably going to be way more important. And I’m hoping that at some point there’s going to be a standard, maybe.

at the browser level or the OS level to verify this image was taken with an iPhone. This content was written by James himself. There’s the stamp. So we know, and you can repurpose the content however you want. You can present it as a website, you can present it as an AI bot, whatever, but the actual content and the way you manage it and the way you handle it will be really important.

And I think The human bit will be the most important. I

Chris Badgett: like that. It’s a it’s like a much bigger vision of what a content management system means. Like that content is not just images and texts on a screen on a webpage, right? It could go a lot of places for the human. They need a central place to manage their human created content and maybe some AI generated content as well.

That’s really cool. Let’s turn the focus to the somebody who’s trying to teach online. Let’s say they, they want to make an online course and make money selling that through the internet all over the world. Maybe they have a coaching aspect where they do zoom calls or maybe that’s an upsell or whatever.

How can course creators leverage AI these days? And where do you see the industry going for the e learning website powered by WordPress?

James LePage: Yeah, I think probably the most important first thing is that I probably wouldn’t try to make a course with AI. I would lean on the human element. The reason why you’re making a course because you’re the expert in your domain and you want to Provide that knowledge to other people, be it for free or for profit or whatever it is.

So focusing on that aspect of the human bit is the first step. I’d say it’s probably really, I haven’t created a course. I actually always thought about creating courses, but never ended up doing it. And I’d probably be pretty tempted to. Use a lot of AI to make my stuff. I think that the general trend of where everything’s going is people are picking up on AI created content and when they do, they really don’t like it.

So in, in a specific scenario, so one of those scenarios would probably be education for those who are creating the courses and putting together this experience. that surfaces in a website or is an app or whatever it is. I think that AI is going to really help those individual creators who need to navigate WordPress and need to navigate complex data models and user interfaces that surface as really well built products like lifter.

And they can use these tools to be. Much quicker with what would ones take maybe like a day or a week. Now you can focus all on the content and you’ll probably see really smart implementations of AI on a plugin level, on the WordPress level, on a browser and a device level as well, to really assist you in the process of actually how do I put together this page?

How do I actually like. Assign this video content to this specific lesson. And how does this lesson play into a more general course structure? I think that type of usage of AI integrated, but also in systems like chat, dbt, where you’re trying to plan out I know how lifter works. I know how WordPress works.

Let me like think through maybe my structure of the course before I start or how I’m putting the actual content together in a logical presentation for the user. I think those are immediate things that we can do. And in the near future, there’s going to be a lot of tools around, let’s make it easier for you to create this website and create this experience and get this content out to people.

And then I think in the longer term, AI is going to modify and merge and you can probably use a I in the context of education where you have all this knowledge and you want to make it really easy for somebody to access that knowledge and There’s always the place for this structured style of education, but sitting next to that structured style of written content or videos, there could be an assistant, and it could be answering questions in real time, maybe anchored to the video providing that perplexity style search where you’re looking through things, and it’s like, Oh, James wrote about this in a community aspect of his course, or James had a lesson about this, and here’s what he had to say.

So I think that type of generative aspect of AI is going to be Pretty helpful in the mid future. And then again, like as the interaction model with technology and it’s whole starts to change the human aspect, especially like the video stuff, like I’m just speaking to you person to person.

Here’s what I know. Here’s what you want to know. I think that’s going to be really important as well. The concept of education online and the course online honestly, probably won’t be that disrupted by AI and I’m going to, like I said I’m going to be looking for people created content and hopefully there’s like actual verification.

James actually made this to be able to have that experience.

Chris Badgett: Can you talk us technically through this concept of an AI assistant for the student or an AI tutor? A course should work for everybody, but it should also work in challenging circumstances. And as we all know, in a classroom some people are doing better, some people are doing average, some people are really getting stuck.

How would an AI tutor work? It’s essentially trained on All the content and the student could be like, Hey, I’m stuck on this part of what James said over here tell us about how, an AI tutoring system would work

James LePage: technically. I think that there’s a lot to think about first the system itself.

So of course, you could look at a course, like just a repository of data. This is a lot of information. Yes. Like I put together all of these lessons and they’re the written lessons, plans, and maybe like quizzes and courses or quizzes and videos, and all of this results in the user purchasing this to fulfill their goal of learning this specific topic.

And. When you think about it, like a whole bunch of data, structured data, then you can think about, okay what does AI need to be really good? What does it need to answer the right questions? And if you go and ask chat, GBT, and it’s gotten way better over the years, but if you go and ask this thing, a super complex question with no access to the web, no access to anything, maybe it will answer it.

on a surface level. It’s not going to answer it in a super detailed level. It’s not going to answer it in a super personalized level. Worst case, it’s actually going to answer it and it’s going to be wrong. And it’s going to hallucinate this response. Now me as the student is going to be like, Oh, I know this crazy formula and it’s completely wrong.

And I think where you can implement this AI tutor in the context of a course is this tutor can draw on the information that the course has to offer. And instead of you can use it as this like artificial intelligence, or you can use it as a really powerful search tool that can present information in a personalized way to the user.

So I’m on a video and I’m learning about this specific topic. And I paused the video at X timestamp. And I’m like, wow, I really did not understand anything that was just said here and I can rewind it. I watched it like 500 times. I still can’t figure it out. At that point what does the student do?

If education, like being able to contact the instructors included, I’d probably call up the instructor and I’d be like, Hey, can you explain this in a different way? And that instructor would use the same information that was probably presented, but presented in a different way. That’s unique to my request, my, my request to understand.

And this assistant can do the same thing. It can pull in all of the information from the course. It can pull in information from that specific lesson. And I can ask about. Hey, can you dive a little bit deeper onto this specific point that maybe the video glossed over, but maybe the information is available in the course or something like it, and it can surface this in a really unique way, and it can actually cite the lessons, too.

So I see the interfaces like, let’s have this thing like a copilot sit beside you and be available to answer these questions, be available to repurpose the human content. And cite the sources. So we know that this is a relevant and accurate answer, but it’s an answer structured in a way that best matches your question.

And I think that’s a really powerful education device because you basically have that on demand answering aspect of the instructor. And the instructor always has the position in the education of, Hey, like I need to really understand what this user is. I’m the subject matter expert. I’m going to answer in this way.

I don’t think the copilot could ever really do that, but I think it can surface those immediately. Relevant questions, and that excites me a lot. And I actually already do this with ChatGBT, and I’ll take AI papers, and I’ll put it into ChatGBT, and I’ll read the paper, and I’ll bump into a problem, and I’ll be like, Oh, let’s talk a little bit deeper about that, and let’s reframe how this paper presents things, maybe in a simpler way, or in a different way.

And that style of education, paired with AIs, is really helpful to me.

Chris Badgett: Based on what you’re saying, it gives me even more excitement about WordPress in terms of being a educational content management system. So if a teacher is old school and has like folders of paper, lesson plans or whatever, their content is not digitized.

But the more people have their content digitized in videos. In courses or whatever, it could be often Google Docs and other tools outside of WordPress, but it’s making sure that as a teacher of the future that your content is managed and accessible by AI is really important and WordPress is going to play a significant role in that, I think.

James LePage: Absolutely. And that’s a lot of what I’m thinking about and focused on at Automatic, but also as a community member and somebody who’s been. With WordPress and AI since the start of all this generative stuff. It’s like, how do we make WordPress an easier way to take what you have and then surface it in a website?

Like, how do we make building websites easier? Because that’s the purpose of a website. How do I present myself digitally? But then in the mid future, like how do we. Get the right content for the right context and then present it to a user in a unique way and circling back to what you said about the education and maybe these professors or teachers have all of these like written documents and these crazy things.

I think that WordPress. Paired with AI can help the digitization process and help classify and tag and categorize this information and make it more accessible to users. So you don’t really have to take the super long process of Oh, I have all these paper notes. I have to go through them and type them out.

I don’t want to do that. So that’s a really interesting thought about how you make information more accessible. Then also another interesting thought is say you have this. educational system and you have 50 students and they all read and look through your course and There are a lot of questions that arise from it.

And how do you make this Educational system better for users in the future and for students in the future? You can have an FAQ or they append information on to Maybe has a new video like, Hey, here’s some common questions that popped up from the first cohort in this style of system. The teacher can go and answer these questions.

And now these questions are relevant and available to an AI assistant or however else you’re choosing to present information. They can also like scribble notes like if you have WordPress as this content management system and you have it integrated with AI, maybe I draw a diagram to better show the user that student.

A specific concept. And now that diagram is always available to the user and can be used as the A. I. To refer to or maybe make a diagram of its own to try and answer the question. So you have this ever growing collection of knowledge, and that becomes really powerful. And it’s a different way of presenting education, but it all comes back to you need the expert behind all of this stuff.

And it’s just how are you presenting content that comes from the expert? To the actual end user.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of subject matter experts, some folks don’t really understand AI agents yet. So how would like a course creator first, what is an AI agent? Second, like how would a course creator leverage an AI agent either for education or just for their business?

Like the thing that pops in my mind is if I build. A course that targets a very specific type of person. I would love to set an AI agent loose to go find all of my ideal students and send them this personalized email and invite them to my free training and see if they’ll be a fit for the paid course or whatever.

But tell us, riff a little bit on AI agents.

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James LePage: I, so I started smiling when you asked for the definition because we started building this agent a year and a half ago and agents really picked up maybe like in the past three months and have really become a topic of discussion, but they’ve come from marketing.

So there was never really a clear definition of what this agent is. It’s this crazy AI thing that does things and it’s going to change the entire world, but it was always like if I can say that as a company, I can go raise. 50 million and try to figure out what an AI agent actually is. And that’s been the case for a while.

And for us, when we started working on our agent, our definition was, all right, we want this thing to live in WordPress and do tasks for users and start in a synchronous manner. I ask it to go and. Update a setting and maybe I don’t know where the setting is. So it goes to the settings page and it updates it and says, here’s what I did.

And in the far future, the goal with that agent was, all right, let’s have this proactively just exist in WordPress and help do the plugin updates and help do the performance and security scans and the stuff that I don’t want to do. I just want to push it off to this expert assistant. So that was our agent.

And I think recently the industry has converged on the same definition of it’s an AI system that does things for users. And it can do things in front of you. It can do things behind you, upside down, whatever it is. It’s a system that does something, an AI system that does something. And the reason we’ve come to these.

Pretty clear definitions at this point is because now there are systems that can actually do things for you in specific applications and industries. So like in WordPress, but also opening eyes, pushing systems like operator, they just announced this thing that can see a computer screen and click around.

And there’ve been systems like that in the past. This is probably the biggest marketed one. So we’re getting to systems like this. I think the way. People online should think about these systems is as right now, really powerful automation tools. Instead of building a Zapier flow or a Zapier flow, I’m going to go and think about, and then prompt this assistant to do something similar.

And maybe it’s going to work. Maybe it’s not. The thing with the operator product is the web is a wild place that is made of many different frameworks and. Sometimes accessible, sometimes not. So computers have problems with the web as people do. So it’s not the most stable right now, but at some point you’re going to have these things that do things for you.

You can automate away a lot of the busy work you can in the context of education, maybe I’m trying to do research for a new lesson that I want to push out. I can have this go and probably pull in maybe a hundred relevant articles and. Maybe pre scan them and say here’s why I think that this paper is relevant to your AI course.

And obviously not have the thing, read the paper for me. I don’t think it’s going to be good at that, but classifying and categorizing and then helping me go and say, all right, I should read this paper to make this lesson. That’s probably the way. That style of like general agent is going to be really impactful.

I think in the context of WordPress, I know in the context of WordPress, we’re working on things that can make the annoying parts of WordPress easier. So the maintenance, the updates, the security actually using WordPress, like how do you make that experience better so people can focus on what they’re good at?

Like course creation or website creation or selling physical products or running my bakery, which I need my WordPress site to go and link off to. So that’s probably high level how I look at agents. It’s really fluid. It’s something that there’s a lot of like grandiose ideas. If we’re going to have like swarms of agents talking to agents and the agents will do agent things, and then eventually it’ll tell the human that it just bought a car for a super great, like maybe we’ll have that. Maybe we won’t. My main thought about agents is there are probably some immediate automation benefits. There are probably some really fun industry specific applications. And it’s probably something that in the concept of an AI that does stuff for you, you should probably watch.

But I don’t know if we’re going to have like swarms of agents buying cars and piloting Tesla robots anytime soon. Who knows? We’ll see.

Chris Badgett: What do you think about like a website builder who’s not a developer and they start getting, more ability to create custom code using AI tools or doing it in future WordPress tools.

How do you, like the human is also still needed for example, you could build a whole app without being a developer. And now you have an app, but what if it breaks? What if there’s security problems? Like how should people think about using AI to code without having a human coder around?

James LePage: There are two sides to the question. The first side is the tools that companies make. So the tools that we made at WPAI, and now that we’re working on at Automatic, it’s up to. Us, the creators, to make these tools in a way that are safe and accurate and as good as we possibly can make them.

So when it came to CodeWP in the beginning, there was like no thought towards security, no thought towards accessibility. And as the product grew, we got much more focused on, okay we need a system that makes sure there’s a bulletproof sanitization of anything going in or out of these code snippets and these plugins eventually.

So that was our responsibility. And we had to build the tools to use the models to apply them to our specific products and use cases in a safe, accurate manner that was intended for our industry. So that’s one side of it. And the other side of it is. Just going and creating systems that actually offer value and tying that back into the responsibility of the builder.

I don’t think the responsibility really ever falls into the user’s lap, unless you’re using general tools and generalist tools. And eventually I think these systems will be so good that. We can move a lot of the crazy stuff towards the AI. So the user themselves is acting as the expert in their business and in what they do.

And they’re piloting this system, knowing that it’s outputting good stuff. Or it’s saying, no, I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that. And that’s a really important system that we were working on with our agent. AI always says yes. So you have to create systems for it to say no, to not do something.

As opposed to doing something and blowing up your site or doing something and it not being what you want it to do. So it comes back to build really good systems. And then follow and subscribe to the mindset of the do it with me user. So I’m an expert. I’m, I like using the bakery example, because one day I’m going to open a bakery.

So it’s I run my bakery. I know the customers that come in, I know my location. And I know why people come to my bakery. I know we cook our bread in this awesome, incredible, specific way. I don’t want to build a website really, but I want to present on a website. So I want to have this AI do it with me.

I want to walk it through, like here are my needs and my requirements. And I want it to either build the site or tell me, no, I can’t build the site.

Go hire a real professional. I’m just a little AI agent. So when you build good AI systems that know their limits and are really accurate and you have the do it with me style user, I think that opens up the accessibility to.

A lot of people that would never create websites or pay people to create websites anyway. And that means more usage of WordPress. That means my bakery becomes more impressive. So at some point I need to hire a full marketing agency to create the brand, to create a better website. And it’s just, I think it’s beneficial for everybody.

Chris Badgett: Last question for you, James. One of the things that excites me about WordPress and AI is the open source. Nature of WordPress so that, the code is easily accessible to the entire world for like free open source software. Whereas like a closed environment, SAS application, it’s like a walled garden and things can’t, AI can’t necessarily train on it unless it’s internal inside that company or whatever.

What are the benefits of, Like open source software in the world of AI.

James LePage: It’s the most, it’s the most beneficial selling point that you could possibly have because specific to WordPress, it’s been open source for over 20 years at this point, I think. So the models themselves already know how WordPress works and that’s great in, in isolation, but for us who build systems that make WordPress more accessible to applied systems, that means that we already have.

A starting point that is miles ahead of things like Webflow the models already know. So when we build pipelines. When we fine tune these things, when we create these systems. They can be awesome. And they can be really impactful. I think you’ll see really helpful, impactful systems coming out of us and other people in the future because of it.

Then also like open source the mentality of open source. The ability to self host, the ability to own your own data, the ability to look through a code base, the ability to have say in where a project goes, so not making this API change that maybe a closed source company would just hit a button and now it’s version three, putting thought into how does this play into my needs?

That’s what WordPress is all about, and I think that idea going into AI and how AI impacts the open web and WordPress running 42 percent plus of the open web that’s the most impactful, most powerful thing ever. I could be building AI at any company doing anything, and I think that WordPress is really powerful, and that’s why I choose to build in WordPress.

That’s why I started the AI startup in WordPress. That’s why I’m at Automatic now. I think that’s everything. So I think that’s a good closer because I love WordPress. I think it being open source is incredibly beneficial in the AI sense. And there’s a lot of opportunity in terms of the human element of content creation, putting it into this open source CMS, adapting with the changes that AI will bring and moving into a glass half full and an exciting future as opposed to something

Chris Badgett: else.

That’s James LePage. You can find him on Twitter and X over at James W. LePage. Look for him there. Give him a follow. Thanks for coming on the show. This has been a really fun conversation about AI. I know you out there watching and listening have learned a few things and hopefully you’re excited as I am about the future.

Thanks so much, James. I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to do this again in two years and see where we’re at.

James LePage: It’s fun to be on an exponential curve. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And with that Twitter address, my DMS are always open. So if anybody has questions and wants to bounce ideas around and try to see where we’re going with AI we’re all in this together and I love answering these questions.

So feel free to get me on X James W the page. Thanks James.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowChris Badgett and Jim Hankins discuss how Jim and his wife, Doreen, developed a flourishing e-learning firm in the firearm safety teaching area. Training was an important part of the company when they first opened as a gun store. They eventually discovered their love for teaching and switched to weapon safety instruction. Doreen swiftly rose to prominence as one of the best educators in the field. Using her knowledge to expand their company. To assist other instructors and other companies increase their web presence. She even penned a book called “The Firearms Marketing Toolkit“.

Realizing the potential of online education, they started providing weapon safety instruction renewal courses in Michigan. Opening up the procedure to a larger audience. Additionally, they created a real estate agent safety course that was authorized for continuing education credits, thereby broadening their scope. Their ability to strategically seek out to and cultivate relationships with regulatory bodies is a key component of their success.

They sought to have their courses approved by regulatory bodies so that they could become the preferred supplier of weapon safety instruction, as handgun training frequently entails both legal compliance and required knowledge.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jim Hankins. He’s from cribops. com. Jim is a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur who has found a niche successfully deployed e learning and repeated ways in the firearm safety niche.

And he’s done this business with his wife and there’s so much to unpack here, but first welcome to the show, Jim. Thanks Chris. It’s great to be here. So tell us about when I saw you, when you reached out or we connected and I saw you had so many sites. I was like, this is awesome. It’s hard enough for some people to get one site off the ground.

Tell us about the genesis of firearm safety training and how you were able to. Figure go into this niche, but also do it in a repeated manner in different contexts.

Jim Hankins: Sure. So my wife and I started this business firearms training business actually starting as a gun store, as a retail outlet with training as a.

Big part of the business, but yeah, so it’s, yeah, 17 years ago. Then we just over time decided that we actually really liked the training aspect of it and gave up the, the retail side of it and just went a hundred percent for training. Doreen is a marketing genius when it comes to just relationship building and local local marketing, cause that’s a very local business, and so she just became pretty successful over time. And in the firearms training business, there’s, certifying bodies that create the content that the States we’ll say, yes, this meets our criteria and and they oftentimes have other services that they provide that they sell to customers and Doreen became one of the top instructors in that space.

So yeah, long story short, she then wrote a book. There’s a book an Amazon called the firearms marketing toolkit, if I remember correctly. That’s focused on helping firearms instructors really, it applies to any local business on how to, how to be found on the internet.

And we started. Providing services, coaching services and hosting services for CRM, marketing, automation, those kind of things, anything to help them make the most of the time because they’re usually solopreneurs, right? Or there might maybe a husband and wife, team they oftentimes have a, main job and this is a side hustle they do on the weekends, right?

So anything they could do to help automate that process of, user sign up and those kind of things. We started recording content for them that they could in turn sell or give away to their customers to get them moving in the direction of using e learning as another aspect of their business.

Dream was getting pretty successful with that concept in the state of Michigan, she created a renewal class that could be taken online. So now that could be purchased anywhere in the state. She created a real estate agent safety. Class that actually she went through the process of getting it approved for continuing education.

And so now you get to see credits for that. She just started pushing that type of content out to other instructors. And then that became, a whole another business of hosting, web hosting and CRM hosting for the class. For the instructors. Yeah. Yeah that’s how we got into the, learning management as a service and providing it to other customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you guys create the content or you’re using licensed content or a little bit of both.

Jim Hankins: We’re creating all of our own content. Then just literally providing that over to them as a white label and they can, sell or. Or give away as a lead magnet. In some cases, it’s really short just for the purpose of lead magnets.

It could be content that helps the students become acclimated to the vernacular before the class. They have a little, 30 minute class that they can take at their option. Before they join if they’re new to that world. And yeah, so that’s what we do.

Chris Badgett: What, like I see a lot of people who are in the mandatory education space.

It could be for a job like to keep a license or get credits or it could be like I’ve seen stuff in the court systems. But I think one of the biggest things you have to figure out and one of those is if there is a governing body, how to work with them or find them or help get them to promote you once you’re approved and just build that relationship.

What kind of general advice do you have about? Being seen and working with a, like a governing regulatory body. Yeah. So it’s

Jim Hankins: all about income producing activities is what I’ve heard others say. Yeah. So you have to look at what can you do on a daily basis to reach out and expand your business to be found, it’s hard to. For people to find you if you’re not doing anything to to make that happen. I’ll give you a simple example, as you mentioned, the court systems. There are people that uh, do things they shouldn’t have and get in trouble with the law. As it relates to firearms training, one of the simple things that Doreen did was she.

That can in fact, she just did this last night dropping off a bunch of mailers to the the bail bondsman’s and the, various court related folks to tell them about our court ordered firearms safety training as an option. And so the, and then she does that, right.

Those are typically live, but that’s an example of, just reaching out into your community and figuring out, what can you offer at, one to many. That that enables you to, satisfy a need and create a niche all by yourself. I’m pretty confident there’s probably nobody else doing that because they just haven’t thought of it and she’s able to, yeah.

Do those classes all throughout the week. And it makes it easy for the court system, right? Cause they’ve already had these court ordered, firearm safety training, but then the people go to the trainers looking for the offering and they’ll say, yeah, we don’t have that.

Yeah. So she doesn’t remote. And there’s no, no, obviously no firearms involved because these people are, have been now precluded from having, a firearm, but they still need to have the aim to understand what they did wrong. As it relates to the law. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: It sounds so simple, but find a need and fill it, do outbound sales and find the people that are talking to the people that need what you have and just develop that relationship and scale that.

It sounds so simple, but yes. It’s not like locals, local people.

Jim Hankins: All the things that used to work still work in local, like the tear offs printed on, cork boards and outside of grocery stores and things like that.

Business cards at the local diner. She still does all those things. And, when we go and frequent those diners, as we do. We look and there’s one tag left on the tear off up time to, put the new one, out there. So yeah, it’s just yeah, basic blocking and tackling on the local side.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about, you have a lot of websites in the firearm safety. Like why are there so many sites? I know you have ranges, you have. Trainers, individual trainers. Like how do you, how did you scale this thing and why are there different sites and all that?

Jim Hankins: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: There,

Jim Hankins: like I said there’s two kind of large training organizations that create the content that instructors then use.

And, they’re certified to be an instructor by those those organizations, and then they just, put the we’re open sign out front of their business and off they go. There’s about a, it’s hard to say that how many are active. There’s probably about 145, 000 instructors in the U S that do this and maybe, maybe half of that number are active.

I don’t, I don’t know. And, and so there, yeah, there’s no regional requirements. In fact, we had a, in our brick and mortar classroom, we had another instructor open up three doors down in a, like a strip mall area. So it’s a very competitive market, but there’s just, it’s predominantly the people states where there’s a requirement for for training to get a license.

Yeah that’s the bread and butter. Then there are organizations that just do training, just safety training in general. Families will bring their kids in and those kinds of things businesses will bring their employees and depending on the type of business, like if it’s a security business or really anything.

And yeah, the instructors are there to, to fill that need. And we’re essentially helping them with the marketing. Tool set the learning content and even the concept that they could have make their own content or use something other than what they’d been teaching. That’s for whatever, it’s funny.

The light go light bulb goes off in their mind. They’re like, Oh, you mean I could create my own content? I was like yes, you can. You don’t just have to focus on the state. The state license based content, you can do all these other things, like as the example, one of the courses we provide is that real estate agent safety class that they can use.

They don’t have to go off and get it certified in their state for CE credits but they could, if they wanted to but yeah, anything like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think it’s interesting how my, my, I got started in all this actually in a niche gardening niche. It made me realize, and this was like almost 15 years ago, I think.

We may be super technical people here on this call, but there’s a lot of industries that are still digitizing, still, figuring out scaling systems and automation and things like this. Can you give us a sense, maybe some figures of how big the niche is? Cause when I think of safety niche I’ve seen a lot of like martial arts, personal safety training on LFTR LMS and stuff like that.

Self defense, like safety is a huge niche and firearm safety is like a sub niche within that. But like, how big is this thing? Cause I, the human mind just can’t comprehend the scale of certain niches,

Jim Hankins: yeah. I don’t have those figures off the top of my head. But it is quite large.

And then you can extend out to facilities, security, and all those kinds of things. It just balloons just there, there’s so many different, yeah, sub niches of the of safety in general. So I, I came from. A fair amount of focus. I mentioned that I left my wife to run the firearms training business while I had one of my apps acquired and it was safety based.

So in fact, it was called safety grid. So it was a panic button that was I joined a company that did satellite emergency notification coordination. You pressed a button, a panic button on a satellite device, and it would, they coordinate the the response, right? Pull you outside the mountain, out in the middle of the ocean, wherever you happen to be, right?

And so I, I. They took the kind of intellectual property that I had for a group based alerting system that I called group safety. The reason why they brought me in was it was, this was post Sandy hook. And so I was listening to the 911 recordings and trying to figure out what kind of technical.

Solutions could have been brought to bear to increase the response time and to better coordinate the information because there was a lot of confusion as you might imagine in that event. And so when I and the company that I joined. At the time was my service provider to do the monitor alert.

I would send the alert to them. They would, do the the event coordination. And I called them and I said, Hey, I’d really like it. If you’d be able to facilitate me sending you a group based alerting so that I could tell which building somebody was in and coordinate that. And then I had.

Communication between all the parties that they could communicate themselves silent observation. Of what was happening those kinds of things. And they’re like, yeah, this is really interesting. Can you join us? Uh, we’re going to have a meeting here and we’d like to get more information.

I was like, Oh, I guess I could. And it ended up being in Morocco where they had their the meeting, the gentleman, one of the gentlemen lived there. And then, yeah, the rest was history. They asked me to join and, I, build a product in that space. So yeah, so I’ve been in the safety space on the technical side, building, life and limb services.

So I built their cloud infrastructure for that. And then Garmin bought them, bought the assets of that business back about three years ago, I had my exit. Now here I am one trick pony again building other messaging services.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And am I correct? All the, or most of all this, these businesses and projects have been just you and your wife one of the things I’ve noticed in some successful e learning businesses are that there’s often like a technical person and then like the marketing sales and expertise and stuff.

It’s just interesting. Tell us about the dynamic in that partnership on the business side, like how it how you guys complement each other,

Jim Hankins: right? Yeah, and you’re right. So there’s that whole, creative and marketing, brain side, which is not me. I’m more of the technical guy. And yeah, we just we leverage each other’s strengths and it’s tough as a a husband and wife to, kind of balance that okay.

Now works off. Sometimes that’s really hard to turn the work off. It never really is totally off, but yeah, we just, wake up and what are we going to do today? And, you’re going to do this and I’m going to do this. And occasionally we meet in the middle and then get things done.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: As a technical person, I’m super curious, like how did you get into WordPress? For example, you could have built like a custom LMS solution or whatever. Yeah. How did you get to WordPress?

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So I did have a period of my life where I worked at an ISP and then I owned my own ISP.

I did have some on the hosting side I had, hosting WordPress, as they say, I think it’s, I think you could say that. Yeah, I was providing services that included. Hosting WordPress. So I had that some kind of familiarity with it as a kind of back end job or C developer, WordPress wouldn’t normally be my first thing I would reach for a solution, but in the context of the, like the firearms trainers, they already have a a WordPress site.

Many times, or they’re on Wix or something else. I’ll usually pull them into WordPress from that. It’s sometimes better to just. You know, accept the world that you live in and figure out ways that you can optimize it. With a very small amount of coding on my side, I can drop in something that connects their WordPress site to something else.

And make it happen. It’s great that Lifter because it’s of its existence. It makes it super easy for us to incorporate that e learning content, which is part of our offer. With, super, super easy, stamping those those solutions out and hosting them and centrally managing that stuff.

So you have a great product as it relates to, all the features and the API, which we leverage to to make it easier as we start to stamp more and more of these sites. Out there and each of them, have their own little niches in the. In and of themselves. If it’s a range, then they’re going to have a completely different, requirements than just a regular instructor.

Chris Badgett: Do you know can you think back to how you chose lifter LMS? And decided I think this is the option for us.

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So very specifically the, one of the requirements we had was we got approached by one of the national training organizations that had an underwritten product that they.

I wanted to start enabling ranges and some instructors to resell. And they asked us if we could do that, that the integration with them and enable it, be an enablement partner for them in that space. And so the product needed to be at that point WordPress based because we’d already cross that line. But it also needed to have a concept of membership. And I preferred not to have, to, to play with multiple products if I didn’t have to as for my, enterprise, days of knowing that, you know, having. One source as close as possible to have, the solution is, the cost of delivery is going to be less.

And yeah, you have that membership feature, the group feature, which was super interesting. And we just integrated with the the events that come from enrollment. To build a custom offer that did the integration to allow them to resell the membership. So we WordPress becomes a single point of truth for this national organization with hundreds of thousands of members today to enable their, many thousands of instructors to resell their product offer.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the unique way you’re using memberships.

Jim Hankins: Yeah so in, in the case of the the ranges. Many of them already have a concept of a membership and the national. To use their the range, get a discount, guarantee they’re going to have a slot or what have you.

So the national training organization obviously is looking. Helping them have more door swings, increasing their membership. And in most cases, the the ranges didn’t have an automated. Way of selling this membership. You came in, you had to go into the store and, they’d probably write you down on a, a three ring, VIP piece of paper, sticky note, the side of the cash register, who knows, they’re usually one or two person, shops, so they’re not, huge conglomerates. So we come in and provide an ability for them to sell those memberships online, which, they haven’t done yet. But then also have those memberships have more stickiness because of that that membership offers like an underwritten product that You know that the members would like, right?

And then their website becomes the single point of truth to come in and update their payment information, add more members to their memberships, et cetera. So we had that piece then. And then the next thing that, of course, that came, which we Surprisingly, I didn’t think of right off the gate because this move so fast was you have the people at the point of sale that need to be able to look up those memberships.

And yeah, we’re working on making that a little more less of a need to log in directly into the WordPress back end to. Just have that, checkout experience. So yeah, so it’s just central to the to the part of them being able to sell memberships both on premise at the cash register, point of sale.

One of the ways we did that was with a foo point of sale and using the WooCommerce integration and Lifter LMS, so that kind of, that, that kind of. Another example of trying to find something off the shelf that we could quickly get together and connect the dots. And so that it would check the box of, point of sale slash selling the service online.

So yeah, that’s a,

Chris Badgett: another. Such a small world. I was I literally had a meal. Both in Taiwan and in Portland, Oregon at a WordPress event with the founder of Foo. Okay, great. It’s neat to see people using the tools together. You mentioned memberships, groups. I know you’re using courses.

Are there any other key features of lifter? For example, are you using the certification, like certificates or anything, or

Jim Hankins: some instructors ask for those things, usually the, these certificates in their case are like really state governed. So they’re usually, their paper ink signed.

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Jim Hankins: And they haven’t started asking for that too much. We’re not using those features. It’s mostly around the the ability to event on when they’ve signed up so that you know, like for example, if they sign up for an in person class, we might use foo events for listing that event and then use that to trigger the.

The pre training that they’ll get, so we’ll auto enroll them based upon that to give them access to training, and then we’ll link those events to the CRM to do the suggestive sale after the fact for nurturing to, suggest either other in person training or, e learning training.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So as a prolific LMS website creator, what are some besides Lyft or LMS, what are some essential like plugins theme? What hosting do you like to use? What are like the key tool sets that you really love working with?

Jim Hankins: So we do our own hosting and we host on Amazon. I’ve spent, many years working on Amazon.

That’s what I built that emergency response system on. Yeah, so we’re huge fans of that mostly so that we have, more control. And if a customer raises a problem, we’re able to get right to, the root of the problem because we own the infrastructure in that case, or the, infrastructure is code, a thing.

Our, we’re huge fans of Jack’s WP fusion. So we use that quite a bit to integrate with our, with CRM and what do you

Chris Badgett: like for CRM?

Jim Hankins: So we’re actually, we resell GHL currently but we are also taking a, we have the Fluent CRM offer, and we’re looking to try to pull that in to make it a little simpler, so people aren’t bouncing back and forth between user interfaces the Fluent Community is super interesting as well, so we’re we’re taking a look at that and then, the kind of, Impetus of launching the new offering for crib ops for webhook processing.

We use that as part of our our tool set as well. We, used it ourselves internally, and now we’ve brought that out to the public for for sale as a software, as a service to so many, WordPress sites use webhooks, in inbound and outbound for various things.

And crib ops basically gives gives you the ability to have kind of a production ready. Place to send a webhook so that you don’t lose messages that are important to your business or to your customer order fulfillment, et cetera, right? So we take we give the ability for the message to be in queued when it’s sent.

So in the event that the actual service that’s supposed to be receiving the webhook is down or is overwhelmed because you got lucky and you’ve got this viral sale going on, right? We’re Production ready buffer in between where you’re sitting the webhook and where you’re you’re processing it.

And that also we call it crib ops tongue in cheek because it is, it also enables you to run those webhook processing things, automations AI enrichment, whatever it is you’re doing on premise you don’t need a you don’t need to open up your. Firewall and expose your network to the world.

It’s a, our software talks to that place where the messages are queued. And it pulls it in and then you send it wherever you need to send it. It could be N8N or things like that, that allow you to not only process, zillions of messages, but do so at, near, near zero costs because you’re just paying for whatever the wattage is of the compute stuff that you have, which could be old servers or PCs, et cetera, that are, laying around gathering dust, wake them up, blow them off put a fresh operating system on and make them.

Put them to work saving you money and providing value to the customer. So

Chris Badgett: for the non technical listener, could you just describe like a web hook and a simple example of how an LMS site might use one? Yeah.

Jim Hankins: So LFTR has actually inbuilt the ability to send a web hooks which are nothing more than you can think of them as notifications.

That’s of interest. And you basically you can go right into LFTR and and tell it, Hey, at the point of enrollment, I would like you to send me that notification because I’m going to go off and do other things in, in, in advance of them, attending or. Because of them attending an enrollment, right?

And that could be like in the firearms training world, that could be, they need to sign waivers or, those kinds of things in advance of, attending a course. And it’s important that the. that the message be delivered at the right time, right? So right within Lifter LMS in the settings there you can, set that up and then in there, it asks for a URL and that URL is the web hook endpoint, what we provide is a way where we give you the option to generate your own web hook endpoint, and then you’ll then be responsible for.

Taking the message in and doing whatever it is. The lots of people use services like Zapier that’s or make Linode those kinds of services that are public automation tool sets, but you’re going to pay. For the number of tasks that you run through, and they generally start with about like 10, 000, or so workflows a month.

But if you’re using the service for things like maybe a reactivation campaign, so you have many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or a million. Customer contacts that you’re reaching out to on a regular basis that becomes a cost prohibitive to run it through a service like that, or as you could run a service, on premise doing all the same things, enriching it with AI or whatever it is you’d like to do using.

Local GPU resources versus paying for it in the cloud to process millions of messages. And yeah, we just sit in front of that to allow you to do that at scale and without losing messages Due to like momentary outages of your internet connection or, your computer tipping over cat takes out the network cable or whatever it is you have going on.

Yeah. So we’ll hold onto that message long enough for you to recover from that, let you know if there is a problem. And then once you get started back up, the message is there to process and do whatever it is it needs to do. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Go check out crib ops. com. A few more just final questions for you, Jim.

Can you help describe like the kind of impact you’ve been able to have with your LMS projects? Like something like Number of students, number of courses, like lives touched, anything like that? Just, I just want to inspire people from somebody who’s done lifter at scale, what they’re doing.

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So like in the space with the the instructor field that is a, a passion project for many. And the, it’s the difference between them still being able to do it and not by giving them the opportunity to make additional income, additional revenue sources they hadn’t even dreamed of by taking what’s in their mind and putting it putting it in, into LFTR LMS and providing to the world and.

If you are, out there listening and you’re familiar with LFTR LMS and maybe you’re only doing your site maybe step back for a minute and consider, could you help others do what you’re doing in your niche and provide that as a as a coaching or hosting services to others to make a difference in whatever niche you’re in.

Chris Badgett: How has this impacted like this e learning at scale impacted just your quality of life. I’m assuming you have some like location freedom, like you just tell us about the impact of figuring this whole thing out with your wife.

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So. Obviously the one to many is amazing with e learning, and the re return on the investment of time is just silly. Because you spend more time avoiding creating the content than actually creating the content, you’ll vacillate over, does this just make my, hair look, look okay.

Or my lack of hair. So this is my audio. Okay. Should I put RGB lighting in the background? All these things that people vacillate over, I would suggest just create the content, right? In fact, most of the content she creates there she isn’t even on camera. She’s just doing a presentation recording and audio.

So good audio get the content out there and. And get going, right? You know that, I see that a lot of it on the lifter calls as well, where people are really struggling, with, kind of analysis paralysis of getting the the content out. And I would just suggest you just get the content out there, get get, fail fast, right?

If somebody doesn’t like your content, you’ll know, because they won’t watch it. After sign up, you’ll see how much they they watch. You’ll figure out where they’ve stopped and you can analyze it and iterate and improve. And the knowledge you have in your head is worth something to someone who hasn’t walked in the same exact path as you have, and you can help them and whatever it is you’re out there.

Chris Badgett: And my last question for you, Jim like what motivates you? It seems like you’re having fun and you’ve been doing this a while, like what’s the, there’s lots of different kinds of motivation, but what keeps you going and excited about the future?

Jim Hankins: I think it’s just one I’m blessed to have my family to, to work with me, so it’s super.

Amazing to be able to get up every day and, what are we going to do today? Who, yeah, what’s on our list and the kind of the collaboration that happens I really enjoy that. I like bringing technology to life and training to life and the magic of being able to press a button.

And all of a sudden an audience of, the size of the world can consume it. And I don’t know it’s an addiction.

Chris Badgett: It’s a healthy addiction. Yeah. That’s Jim Hankins. Go check out cribops. com. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your journey with us today. I’m really proud, honored, and inspired at what you’ve been able to accomplish.

It’s that’s what motivates me to. Like our mission is to accelerate yours and your mission is to accelerate other people and it just keeps going. It’s like a ripple that goes out. And it’s a lot of,

Jim Hankins: it really is. And yeah, thank you so much. One for having us on and to your team for doing a wonderful job in answering questions. About LifterLMS and the business in general of e learning.

They’re super Professional. And I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of calls, watching them, just do an awesome job of helping people through the process as they come in. So

Chris Badgett: thank you. Thank you so much, Jim. We really appreciate it.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowFor education entrepreneurs, Chris and Jason stress the value of community building as a long-term commitment and a development strategy. A free community may be a very effective marketing strategy by fostering trust and authority.

A community must, however, be focused on the areas where the target audience currently interacts, whether in person or online, if it is to succeed. They emphasize that social media calls for real interaction and active dialogue in addition to content posting.

A community may feel transactional rather than communal if material is delivered without interaction. Particularly in the beginning, when daily interaction and replying to each message promote involvement, consistency is essential. Support from teammates can help keep the momentum going over time.

Engagement should also extend beyond self-promotion; adding value, responding to inquiries. And taking part in conversations all contribute to the development of credibility and trust. Entrepreneurs may build a vibrant, active community that supports their educational company by striking a balance between content, interaction, and consistency.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Welcome back to the education entrepreneur mentor series. This is a five part series that goes over the five critical hats. That you need to wear or have included in your team’s skillset to be successful as an education entrepreneur. Teaching online, building an education based company. Those five critical hats are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, The technologists and the community builder.

This is the fifth and final part of the series where we go over becoming the community builder. Enjoy this session and be sure to check out all five parts of the series.

In this session, let’s talk about community building, and this is really. I think the least understood, hat, if you will. And a space of courses, coaching, and community. Community, I think, is the least understood, has the highest failure rate yet. In fact, it’s one of the things that’s as old as humanity, this idea of community. But I think we’ve had trouble translating community to the online world in many ways. It’s pretty new to online in terms of building education and really thinking about intentionally and design it. Let’s start before the product.

Let’s think about building free communities is a form of marketing community based marketing. In my opinion, is actually one of the strongest forms of marketing. If you can, in fact use your free community. Or somebody else’s free community to get traction for your ideas, build authority.

But first let’s imagine planting a community, like your own community. You’re committing to this strategy, I want to build a community that I can leverage for marketing. But a community always has more than just being an ends, a means to an ends. It’s something you really have to commit to. And in terms of planting your community. I think the most important thing is to plant the community where your avatar is, predominantly.

And sometimes if you’re an advanced subject matter expert, you may have, quote, graduated to some other kind of community where the professionals hang out. But it’s important to not lose sight of where You know your learners are. I noticed this in the early days of Lifter LMS and building community.

A lot of the WordPress people and the course creators were really strongly in Facebook and in technology. We ended up in like these slack communities and these more geeky, techie communities like Discord and and so on. And just remember where your people are. It’s part of your avatar research.

Where do they hang out? Both online communities and person communities. What conferences do they go to? Where are they socially gathering in the real world and on the internet? When I’m helping people with community design. I often have to go back to first principles and explain what social media is from my perspective.

I think a lot of people get this wrong. So I like to describe social media as really being two words, like there’s social and there’s media. Media, when it comes to building a social media community, a lot of subject matter experts are. Like I’m going to post content like every Monday in my group, I’m going to post this type of content.

I’m going to post links to My new course launch or do other kinds of marketing content. I wrote a new post, I published a new video, but that’s just media. So that’s not an online or that’s not a social media community. Just have a community that you post media to. And then there’s the social part. Which I think a lot of people get wrong where you actually have to be social and. Your community members need to be social for it to not be a dead community or feel like.

a pitch fest. So I think of social as conversation. So it could be commenting on somebody else’s post. It could be posing a question and not just like, all right, cool. I posed a question as my post for the day and walk away. If people start commenting, you want to engage and not just be like broadcasting.

This is a conversation. This is social. Building a community is a really big commitment and it’s important to, especially as the leader to not just do media and not just do social and just like react and stuff, but not post your leadership content, if you will, consistency is the name of the game.

With community. I think the best communities, especially in the beginning, it’s really a daily commitment. So if you actually get somebody who’s excited about joining this group. It’s probably best that they hear from you that day from their first post or when they join, you can send them a private message, welcoming them.

And then do that every day. In my experience I built a 10, 000 person Facebook group of. Course creators and web professionals who serve this market. And that was over the course of 10 years, but in the beginning, I was in there every single day. I had a rule that I would have nobody leave a post and not have a comment no matter what for me or the community.

So I was really committed to every single conversation and being consistent posting. And conversating on a daily basis. And as time goes on, I could scale back a little bit. I had team members get in and help facilitate in the conversations and the content. So I don’t, I’m not in there every single day like. I once was in my free community, but it was a huge commitment that I didn’t take lightly.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, I think some of that I can relate to is. The idea of not just posting in these communities, but also engaging in the social and having replies and. I forget what ratios are good. And I know Gary Vaynerchuk has a formula folks should look up. I think it’s called 8 cents or 10 cents.

Like you spend, you think of it like you’re spending pennies or maybe it’s 80 cents or something like that. He’s got some kind of math of but the basic idea is don’t just post your own stuff. If you’re on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, when the social media is like engaged with the community, answer questions. It’s important to not just answer questions about your own product or stuff you can sell. But like just be helpful in other ways to build trust and karma and affinity and stuff like that.

And I like your point about. Looking for your community where they already are, rather than trying to build something and bring them in. And I’m I think folks often either want to look for or build like the social network for blank. There are some, there are a few of those that are out there, but for almost every blank, Facebook is the social network for blank.

So you’re like, what’s the social network for car enthusiasts? Facebook, or Instagram owned by Facebook, something like that. It’s if they’re already on Facebook, meet them where they’re at is really useful. So I think when you’re building your own community when I’ve been building communities in the past, this has been the case.

And I think it’s true in some that I’ve, I’ve seen through our customers and stuff. We see that everything is support. People are going to use every communication channel for support, including your community that you built for them to talk to each other. They’re also going to ask support, like questions of you through that channel.

I think we mentioned this in an earlier discussion too. That’s like any way they can get ahold of you through a blog comment or a Twitter DM. Or they find your phone number and call you at two in the morning. Like they’re going to try to get ahold of you. And so that’s true in these communities as well.

And I know that we, so we. We struggle with that to just have our community and discussion forum devolve into another support forum. And what we do to combat that is we engage and redirect. So we don’t try to stop it. It’s going to happen, like it’s very natural and. It’s not every once in a while someone’s I don’t want to go through the official. I think I know better and not get faster support here.

But usually people are just, I’m here now. I have a question. I ask it. So allow people to ask questions and non support channels. Don’t try to like police that aspect of your community too much. And I think another tip there is to give the, once you’ve hit like a certain mass folks in the community. Give them a chance to talk about it amongst themselves before you come in as, the kind of know it all and say, here’s what I think.

And sometimes you’re surprised, like they’ll answer the question better than you would have. You’ll learn new things, like you don’t shut down the community to just make it like a really quick answer. And they feel good communicating amongst themselves. But sometimes it is like a kind of support question that only you can answer or you happen to be the only one watching in that case, like if you can give a short answer, like just a link, just one word answer, just one sentence answer, give it and move on.

Oh, I had a question. Here’s the answer. Cool. If it’s a more technical issue that like you would want to get on a call and coach them through. Or you need to follow up through some other. It means that you’ve set up for a support, just kindly remind people that like what the proper channel is for that.

And we get that, you use these phrases, like the best way to get help with that kind of thing is through this official channel. The fastest way is here. And and you can use this too. If you aren’t using that community for a kind of support. But people are still asking questions on Facebook or other social media, sprinkle in links. Back to your own community or the official community.

Thank you. If you’re in like a Facebook group that’s branded and has other goals, don’t, you gotta be careful about that. But if, push people back to your own community that you own. And then a side note here is to have a code of conduct. This is like a big topic that we could talk about forever too. But it feels related to this is like having a code of conduct.

About how folks should use your community, what they should and shouldn’t talk about. What kind of behavior will get you kicked out and enforce it. It can be tempting to try to have a very lousy fair attitude about things and it’s good to not crush the conversation and let it go. But if you let certain bad behaviors into your community. Like it’s going to be problematic and that’s another one where maybe we can share some examples of our codes of conduct that we use for our communities.

As a personal story the reason I’m thinking about this what happens, your discussion form becomes a support form is we went through that paid memberships pro support was originally like a, through a BB press online forum. Then we had the idea, let’s start a community forum for the folks to talk about like business issues and other things amongst themselves.

We’ll try to start a discussion. And we tried to. Participate every day. We weren’t going where people were like, so we weren’t on Facebook where there already was. We struggled to get the conversation going. And we were working on it, but even when it was going well, like eight out of 10 posts were just. They clicked the wrong button and posted support in the wrong channel.

Like it was very clear, like the support channel is right here and this is for non support things. We tried to enforce it no move here, go here. It was just confusing people. So we were like, we ended up shutting down the discussion community and we waited way too long to start it up again.

We have a version now that’s on Slack and going well. And we were motivated because we found like an unofficial forum on Facebook that we weren’t even part of that had hundreds of people and we’re like, someone else is running community. We should run one too. And now, so we, open that discussion forum and we’re doing a lot of the stuff you were talking about, the building community and being in there and spending the time for the whole team and just tackling the support issues because that’s a very common thing that’s happening with people who are trying to, build businesses and use tools.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think having the code of conduct. I just want to mention there’s this idea of having a safe space. So the main thing you want to do is protect your people. As a leader of the community, if somebody is, being insensitive or rude. Or any outside of your company values and a really negative way. You can pick them out of the community, particularly.

Any community, but the free community, there’s just no room for it. I see some folks get a little overly restrictive. When you join some Facebook groups, as an example, they’re often like, you can’t promote your own thing. No external links and it’s a, it gets a little restrictive. So I try to find the middle path of if someone like is helping somebody and says by the way. I actually have a business that does this cool, no big deal.

If somebody’s trying to answer somebody’s question and they drop a link to a resource that’s not ours, that’s. I’m not policing that. They’re not picking that out. It’s definitely a balance and something you have to learn by feel and a healthy community is like a, it’s a give and take. So you know, you’re figured this out well, when a solid community member will actually give more than they take.

Kind of like how we talk about email marketing, like value piece, and then maybe you pitch a product. So there’s like this overweight to being giving and helpful some to think about. And just one more pro tip is that. If you have an all star community member who’s doing really well in your community, doesn’t work at your company. You can deputize them and make them a moderator or ask them to do more. Potentially give them free access to your course, your membership, your software, whatever. Because some people just really shine in communities, both online and offline. And that’s a, it can be a real asset to your company.

Jason Coleman: It’s a good place to recruit from, even for more formal roles. And I think something I’ll say about that code of conduct that you touched on was. Making sure you preserve that open space for people to, so they can have discussions. And I think you might feel like if you’re writing code of conduct, don’t think of it as like we’re policing certain kinds of conversations just for the sake of it or because we don’t like it.

If you think there should be a goal for the forum. Have the water cooler random channel where you’re talking about, Netflix shows and stuff. Cool. But in the general section, it’s Hey, we’re all trying to build businesses here. Hey, we’re all trying to launch, courses here.

Hey, we’re all trying to talk about football here. There’s a goal for the community is if you keep that in mind. And then the second one is you want to encourage as much as possible discussion around that goal. That’ll guide you over the types of behaviors that draw away from if certain kinds of.

Yeah. Overly aggressive and, political or, different things that get posted, they discourage people from coming and participating. And that can guide you as you’re not picking I like these people, no, I don’t these people, I like this way of talking, I don’t this way of talking.

It’s I have a goal for the community, and if your discussion is pushing the goal forward, that’s good. And certain types of discussion that, like You know steal the air from the room and cause other people to be quiet. It’s you know, you want to handle that?

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about paid communities as like part of the product.

Like it’s in the pricing, it’s a line item on your features that community is included in your purchase. The big idea here is a concept I call finding the others. So if you’ve ever, and I guarantee that anytime anybody has had the experience of Oh I found my people, for me, I’ve run in like entrepreneur circles, climbing circles.

Dog sledding circles. I like find the others like, Oh, there’s these people that have the same interests and idiosyncrasies as me. That can be like a huge benefit and it happens for free in life, but it can also happen by design as part of a course. And often when you find a really good, kind of customer avatar, there’s actually like some negative emotion there, like loneliness or nobody understands me.

Or, I’m happy in my family or my friend group, but I have this like weird little obsession or hobby or interest or whatever, and then you find those other people that are like really into drones or starting companies or a certain type of fitness workout or yoga or whatever it is, and there’s this like excitement and energy giving experience of finding the others.

There’s a saying in our industry when. You build a great community and it becomes like this real viable business and it’s growing over time. People will often say the subject matter expert will say they came for the content, the courses, the coaching, but they stay for the community.

We’ve talked about recurring revenue in another session and having a functioning community can be a big part of that. Like, how do you do that and create that finding the other’s experience? You can actually look to the offline world in the communities you participate in, whether it’s spiritual or sports or some kind of fitness thing or some kind of food thing.

There’s often this concept of rituals. A group will have their rituals, like at a sporting event, there’s a series of events. If you do religious things, there’s like these series of events that happens. So like creating rituals in your community can be very helpful. I was in a community once where, I think it was once a month there was a post in a group about what are your top three wins?

And the community members, the most engaged members would be like, I accomplished one, two, three, then the other people would do it and then they would comment on everybody else’s thing. And it was a big celebratory thing. That was a really strong ritual. The other thing you can do is in terms of finding the others, there’s going to be like, you’re the leader of your program or whatever, but these other leaders are going to emerge in the community, maybe with like sub subject matter expertise, like some kind of specialty, or they’re particularly good.

And they’ve become so obsessed with your content that they know what you would say. And they’ll answer on behalf of you or Oh, check out. His training on this, or, Jason has a concept around not using exclamation points here. Here’s why you should not use exclamation points too much in your copywriting and stuff like that.

And then you can like, as the like community leader if that, if there’s an untapped resource in your community, a helper, and somebody asks a question and you can be like humble, this is where you’re the guide and not the guru. Which we talked about in another session, is you can be like, Hey, here’s a couple thoughts on that question you just asked, but we actually have this community member, Sally, over here, who really knows this aspect really well, and you tag her, and she comes in and helps, so you’re conducting your community like an orchestra.

And then the other thing that happens when you build a strong community, it’s working, and that’s great, but one of the challenges that presents As part of your, the community aspect of your product is particularly if you have some long time members, they become power users. And they’ve been through all your material.

They love it. They’re here. They’re maybe at the next level of your training or whatever. So you get the graduate students mixed in with the freshman class. And sometimes the new people feel a little overwhelmed and it actually makes their imposter syndrome worse. So they’re like, Oh my God, all these folks in here are already so advanced in mind the right place.

I don’t want to look immature or I don’t know what I’m doing and stuff like that. So design around that, have a process for. Welcoming new members, making sure they feel welcome and seen, and set the expectation, particularly with your advanced users in the community that like, Hey, there’s an expectation to help the new people coming up.

Kind of like that little brother, little sister kind of thing. And I just want to mention that Jason and I are here as business partners because we met at some. Paid and free communities, events, pop up events, and things that happened over the years. We got to know each other by investing in paid and free communities.

It’s amazing. What happens is when you have a strong paid community. I’ve seen it in my free and paid communities where members become like. They do business together, potentially all the way up to business partnerships, so communities can be really powerful and focus on this concept of helping people find the others.

And I just want to spotlight a great book on this topic called The Business of Belonging. I forget the author’s name, but it’s something to check out to, dig deeper into this concept of intentionally designing community.

Jason Coleman: David Spinks.

Yeah. So the author of that business of belonging, how to make community your competitive advantage by David Spinks. So that was the book you were thinking about. I’d like to put a pin in a couple of things. One, like you talked to, we met at an in person event and we do so much work online. The majority of what we’re doing and we’re talking about is online communities.

And we even stressed how that’s amazing. Cause there’s, thousands of people for every niche. Around the world, but if you can get in person, there’s something about even if it’s just with some of those like key people who come up out of your community on a small scale, or you tag along to another conference, let’s all meet up at this other thing.

Like we did through WordPress events. Meeting in person is just obviously like another level and another level of attachment and friendship and, honestly, that, that happens with folks in your community. And then another part of the we talked to how like the free community, you can think of it as marketing.

It can be used as marketing for products. And then you specify like the paid community as a product. I found that’s important. And as we’re building up this community that we have now, which is free, but eventually have a pay component, I think about it like we have a bigger team. So there’s literally like a marketing team and a product team.

And because the marketing folks have communication jobs and. Online communities where you’re talking feels like a communication activity, the same people who do like marketing and sales are like leading the community. They have this like skill set that transfers, but we have to be careful about that.

It’s actually like a different, when the community itself is the product it’s a different skill set. And you’re like, you don’t have to sell anymore. I’m already here. You have to deliver. We, we potentially should have the same way in our, when we develop other products and, sprints or quarters or.

Sessions that we plan, what are we going to do, how are we going to improve it? We’re going to add features. So having that same mindset of we’re building the product itself and it will help you I think, really engage in a community in a constructive way to make it better.

What is the goal of the community? How do we make it better? What do we, we changed? And not that, marketing people are great and obviously like they communicate well, but you’re not just, you’re not marketing to them. They’re already there. Another issue that comes up with these paid communities is I don’t know, you call it like the chicken and egg situation.

So there’s a few tactics to, to help with that. And what’s, I guess a, another big idea to think about the spotlight’s a reason why these paid communities are useful, so that we, you can build content that’s one to one. That’s like coaching, like we’re talking together. Or one to many, that’s like maybe like a paid course and video that they watch and you distribute or through a newsletter.

Or you can have this kind of many to many integration, interaction with your users where they’re talking amongst themselves. And that’s also value that they get. So that’s the main value. That’s one of the values that folks can get out of the community. Maybe it is the main value, like that the people are talking amongst themselves.

And, but that needs a critical mass of people in there talking to make it, but then, and it’s the what is, it’s someone’s number, someone’s law for as the community gets bigger, it gets more valuable. But how do you do that in the beginning when you don’t really have anyone in there if you’re trying to build something new?

So a couple of tactics I’ve seen work are free trials for paid communities. And so either start up and say, everyone’s welcome to come. And at some point you say, Hey, we’re going to be free for the next three months and then we’re going paid. Probably better if you can do it up front as much as possible.

So people know, and it’s like a trial. So perhaps they purchase your course. They do the course, they get dumped into the community in some sense. And you’re like, Hey, you can hang out here for three months and then it’s X dollars per month. And that gives them time and give them some tasks and motivations to participate in the community, send them on a quest rituals.

I love you talked about rituals earlier. It’s so such a powerful psychological thing for humans. And so then they get addicted to the community and it’s not a lot of money or it feels like a good value for them and they stick around. Another thing I’ve seen that’s pretty cool as a way to get people into a pay community is that you can pay to get in or there’s some way to get in for free, either because you’re like a VIP or you seed it with certain people or like the first 200 are free and then you cut off.

One of the more clever things I’ve seen is Ian Castle, who has a community that talks about small cap stock investing. It’s called Micro Cap Club, and I’m not sure if he still does this, but he has like a, it’s quite, it’s investing at a high level. It’s a pretty expensive community to get into.

But folks can get in for free if they provide research. So I, I don’t know if he does it anymore, but it’s very clever. It was like either pay a thousand dollars or whatever the price was. Or if you give us five pages of research on a stock of your choice and we like it, we’ll let you in for free. So it’s Oh, like either you’re paying to get in or you’re volunteering to get in.

You could think of clever variations on that. And I’ll just finish these are some ways to build a paid community from scratch. And like a warning is that I’ve always seen this a couple of times and we have, we should get this guy on the talk about it because it’s wow, you made this work, but I’ve rarely seen at work where someone built a paid community for someone else’s community.

Like they have to be part of that community and also like in a pretty deep way, like already connected. So they know everyone or they’re like the ideal avatar. So they just build it for themselves and then make sense. Usually it’s a very extroverted person who can make all the connections and encourage people to join.

Sometimes you’ll see a community and you’re like, that’s a cool community and they have money and I can build this for them, or it’s adjacent to mine. I’ll build it and try to get people to come and there’s something about that. Like it, it’s just, it’s harder if you’re not building it for yourself.

Chris Badgett: And I know we’ve been talking a lot about consistency and showing up, but you can test this idea by doing a pop up community. Just have a one time event as like a market test. It could be an in person conference. It could be. Like a special workshop that involves working together. I remember Jason and I were at an event together called Cabo Press that our friend Chris Lemma put on.

And I think I went the second year it happened, and then I went, I believe, five more years after that. I enjoyed it so much. It was once a year pop up mastermind retreat in Cabo, Mexico. With a really interesting format. Like the sessions were in pools, half the day was scheduled. Half wasn’t some like lunch group seating assignments or whatever were assigned, other things were free form.

It was a really well done community, but it wasn’t like something that recurred every day or anything like that, it was like an annual event pop up event for a certain type of customer avatar. And that was just a great experience. And I remember when Chris said that. The first time he ran it, he didn’t know if anybody would come and 10 people came and then I went on year two and 20 people came and then on year three there were like 60 people and now he has a, like a application.

He’s always done it by application because he really wanted to protect like the want to make sure the right people were coming. It wasn’t just something that like anybody can come if you pay me, this is for this specific type of person. So he had his screening mechanism. At LFTR LMS one time I brought in a subject matter expert in instructional design and like creating MVPs, minimum viable products, where we they did the workshop.

I just held the space and we were using a software tool called Miro for groups to collaborate together. And we had a couple of people we built, platforms for and help them flesh out their idea as a group over the course of three days. That’s called a bootcamp. And it was a great experience, but it wasn’t like we were committing to doing that every month.

And it was, you’re getting on this treadmill of commitment. So think about you can test community in the same ways as you can pre sell and test other things without the recurring commitment. And let’s talk about community design and management.

Jason Coleman: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: There’s a saying. I like to say about community, which is if you build it, they will not come.

It’s not about getting a community software. Like I signed up for a Facebook group or I use, I have installed the Lifter LMS social learning plugin. I now have a community. It’s true. You do, but you built the house or you’ve scheduled the thing, but are people going to show up or are they going to keep showing up?

I think of it as like holding space, like you really have to, this becomes a part of your life. You have to lead it. And you got to make the space for it. You got to protect it. And in terms of leadership, what I mean by that is you this is one of those lead by example things. And you got to post useful content.

You have to like actually be social. You have to like help and highlight the people that are really outstanding in your community. If, like a spammer comes in or somebody’s behaving inappropriately, you have to kick them out. You have to protect the community. And I think it’s also cool to be human in community.

Like it may be like a professional business related community or athletic advice or health related advice community. Let a little bit of the humanity and sometimes you’ll see community members support each other, if something bad happens or helps, they might celebrate a birthday, even though they’re not, they’ve never met in person or anything like that.

And in terms of community design and management. I’ll talk about Dan Martell’s SaaS Academy community, which was really well done. He had a Facebook group. This was a two year program I was in for software founders. And there was courses and content and stuff, but there were also, the Facebook group was very active.

And like you said, Jason, Dan was very involved. He was in there, he was posting content, he was answering people’s questions. He was being that, doing that humble thing where you know what? We have this community member who’s really the best at subject matter X tag, that person, I think he called that signposting and it was a great experience.

And then the the in person events he ran big cities around the United States and Canada three times a year. We would fly out to that, stay in a hotel together the actual conference room had round tables, not just like chairs in a, auditorium style. And he would intentionally design, or he and his team design who sat with who for all three days.

So he’s trying to help develop relationships this person needs to meet this person, this person is at a similar revenue stage. This person is really good at marketing. This person’s really good at product. This person’s, really good at sales or whatever. And his group, his table groups were like, awesome.

I just remember being like, wow, I had that experience of finding the others. He had scaled his company, beyond his size. And he had a great team that was very much involved, like doing these duties of community design and management. Ultimately he brought in. It wasn’t just him talking from the stage, he had a top expert about pricing who we’ve both studied, Marcos Rivera.

That’s how I met Marcos. And he’s one of the top software pricing experts in the world. So Dan guided us to Marcos and held the space for that, knowledge transfer to happen.

Jason Coleman: Some of the key themes are like. Being intentional about it, being committed continuously working on it. I like how you pointed out being human in the community and especially for those like online, versions of community where it’s hard to remember that or you feel like you’re interacting or in a certain way.

But just remembering there’s a human on the other side of the screen will give you like the grace to work in moments, allow them to have mistakes and get closer. I mentioned outside these people, if you interact with them enough, they become your friends. Like we live like quite a bit of our life online.

And I don’t know, probably a few people like that. They’re just like, Oh, you’re friends with them. Yeah. Hey, when was the last time you saw him? I’ve never seen this person in my whole life. Like they have a frog avatar and I don’t even know what they look like or whatever. But yeah I’m, that’s a fan, that’s a core value of ours about being human that helps guide things.

Yeah, and maybe so something I’d like to talk about around designing your community because I’ve seen folks struggle with it is to make sure that you have a concentration of your discussion or put another way, don’t dilute the discussion. And what I mean by that is minimize the different channels or categories or forums.

Like until absolutely necessary. So if you’re familiar with a forum that can have multiple sub forums or Slack has multiple channels. Or you’re, if you’re using a posting mechanism and you have different categories what I would recommend is start with one channel or as few as possible.

And it’s okay if it’s noisy, you you want it to feel like there’s a lot of people here, it’s bumping, there’s a lot going on. If you spread that out across a bunch of categories too early, it becomes like the wild west and like I see like little dust balls flying by the, it’s like where are we?

And you also, if you have too many categories spread out too thin, too, it confuses people about where to post. They’re like, I have an idea, but I don’t know if that should be in general discussion or special discussion or, news. Is that news or is it discussion? I’m not sure. So let the new channels and forms or categories come up organically.

You’ll, if it’s noisy in that channel and there’s one channel where everyone’s talking, you’ll start, oh, this is a common thing, oh, every day. Or these people like to talk about this. We need a special, place just for this kind of conversation because you want to avoid what’s called like the paralysis of choice when you’re posting.

I mentioned there’s too many options. You don’t know where to put something. Another part of like channel category design that can throw people off as if you use. Like jokey, clever names. And we used to call this like a web design if your menu was like mystery meat. You remember that term?

You, everyone wanted to say what is this called? It’s called like Jason’s Garden. And you’re like, it’s your about page. People know these things are called about pages. Just say about, and that’s what the title of the link should be. It’s the same thing when you’re, labeling your categories and channels.

You want to use descriptive names that explain, what kind of conversation goes there and have a sticky post or some kind of note that’s this is what talks here and lightly police it, if you have a support channel or like a development channel and people start talking about development and you just quietly nudge them Hey, you should talk over here.

Yeah. Minimize the in jokes. You talked about how there’s like these like PhD level, after a while experts who are in your forum, they’ve been there and they start building like a cabal, like this, like force of nature. There are different, those folks who’ve been on your forum for a while are like, they’re, they work in the forums in different way.

And they have these like in jokes that develop. That can be a source of community, but you want to be conscious of like when new folks get onboarded that they don’t just get hurled into this maybe even just have a one pager, here’s all the jokes and terms, but avoid naming your categories after those things.

I guess like a personal story to like nail that home is I’m part of a, like a small investing group on a slack. And I think there’s six folks in there right now, but there’s 12 different channels. So it’s only six people talking, but 12 channels and and a lot of them do have this kind of like mystery meat name.

There’s stuff like the CFO’s office, rat race or big picture. And I’m often like sharing news about something and I’m like, is this big picture news? Or it’s about my job cause I found it while I was working or I take the CFO role in my business. So maybe it’s CFOs, like it’s confusing where they go and it’s confusing then even just literally the user experience of using the Slack app.

I get a notification, I’m like, that looks interesting. And if I click on it and Slack kind of breaks, it doesn’t take me to it. Then I go into the root of the form and I’m like, wait, I don’t know which channel that would have been in. And yet, so like you want to minimize that kind of like hunting and pecking and and this is like a small group of people who know each other, mostly offline anyway, and we’re willing to put in the work to talk to each other.

But if you’re trying to build a community in charge for access and grow it like this kind of friction is, it’s going to be counterproductive.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just another pro tip. If you just do have one channel, like in Facebook, as an example. You can use, you still have, just have one channel, but you can add a hashtag and you can train members like, Oh, if this is like your wins post, put hashtag wins on it.

Or when you start the thread, put the wins thread on it. So you can create some filtering with hashtags. And another cool thing is some communities are more serious or focused than others. And one cool one that we do is called the water cooler. So for example, in Slack. Whenever you start a Slack instance, it comes with a general channel and a random channel.

So Slack knows this, that like these two will happen no matter what, likely. So

Jason Coleman: When I said one channel, I was thinking the one channel and the water cooler general random channel. Yeah. Yeah. It’s important.

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If you’re like if it’s really serious, you want like the subject matter to really stay focused in the general channel, you can use that random channel or that water cooler is the, not junk drawer, but like everything else over here, personal life over here.

If you’re like really on mission and you want to keep your main channel or main key channels really focused. Let’s talk about online versus offline communities, in my opinion, and experience as both a user or a member of communities and also a creator of communities, I think hybrid is the best where you have some offline and some online, now it’s really hard if you.

Sell training courses and coaching all over the world to create an in person event. But if you can, or at least do it in your home country, or if you’re big enough in your own city or geographic region I highly recommend it. You can all, one thing you can do to add an offline community, if you’re like small and you’re not sure if you can pull it off is you can actually tag on to an existing offline community that.

Your people are already likely going to. There could be like a professional conference that happens for the industry that your people are in, or maybe it’s a sporting event or something, so you can just like, either right before, during, or after, it could be as small as like a two hour let’s meet up at this location.

Grab some drinks or some food and, just get together and chat and meet each other in person. It can be that simple. So there’s ways to hack your way into the momentum of where these people are already hanging out. And that’s why it’s good to be clear on who your customer avatar is.

And you can. You can also test communities. So similar to marketing and doing pre selling and things like that. It’s good to run some tests. So you may think that your main community is in a Facebook group, like that’s pretty good guess. But there may be this other opportunity that you don’t know about crypto people are on discord a lot.

Techie people typically are working in Slack for their company, so you could have just like another Slack group. They’re already in Slack, so you’re right there. There’s all kinds of different ways to think about it. I do like the idea of staying focused, but it’s good to test. And one way you can do it is just test yourself as an individual.

Join somebody else’s community that has the same avatar, see how active it is. over there. And sometimes you will find oh wait, I could have two communities, or maybe my community’s migrating over here to this platform. I might want to try that. I might want to try having it on my website and see if I can make it work.

So it’s okay to do some tests, but I definitely recommend not. Just finding as many community platforms as you can and starting them all at once is too much to manage. It’s also not the end of the world to shut down one with heads up like, Hey, we’re, this community is moving here. You mentioned earlier you were on a forum and you, I think shut that down and moved over here.

We actually started at Lister LMS with a BB press forum as well, decided that it was better. Through a support ticket system and our live calls and things like that, our office hours. But I want to tell a story about the Lifter LMS community. Like our main original, customer avatar is a DIY course creator, coach, subject matter expert.

That’s where trying to wear all these five hats we’re talking about in this training. But what I noticed is no matter what I did. This other avatar was always here, which is, I build websites for clients, the, the WordPress professional, the agency, and then within that avatar is also on Facebook.

But within that, the people that were more engineering developer focused, they did not like Facebook. They weren’t that engaged with it. So what we ended up doing was testing out Slack channel, a developer community on Slack for Lifter LMS, and then that became like the developer spot and like the conversations are so different.

What’s happening over in the developers versus in the Facebook community. And to your point earlier about, marketing isn’t always the best to facilitate the product side of community, what is happening is like the marketing folks are better with the Facebook side, but the actual Lifter LMS engineers, the developers are engaging more in the developer community.

So it’s interesting how you get, you can try to control community, but it’s also just going to happen. Like you mentioned, there was a. Community about your product, a Facebook group that you or none of your team were even in and you found it and then you joined the community about your product.

It’s funny.

Jason Coleman: We’re like,

Chris Badgett: this is cool. Can we join?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, that was pretty awesome to discover. It made me feel good. It was like, wow, there’s like hundreds of people working on this thing. I don’t, I still don’t know what the status is though. We’re competing with them, but they’re on Facebook.

We’re on Slack. One thing I liked about your like the Lifter LMS developers community is it had a test or like a form you had to fill out to get in.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And Discord does this really well. They have these tools to build these like checkbox mazes. You have to go through to make sure you get it.

And Facebook groups will have questionnaires. You have to fill out an application process. I know I’m paid memberships, pros directory, or we have an approvals. Plug in and there’s ways to do that. That’s that’s an interesting tool and especially for these like online offline community hybrids where and we’ve seen some crazy ones like you have to live in one of these like 12 houses to be in the community.

So you had to prove you live there. We were like talking with someone. Over like the technical challenges of that. But yeah, it’s I find like the honor system goes a long way of just ask, you can ask people, we have an alumni association, Facebook group, and one of the questions is what year did you graduate?

And people like don’t answer or they don’t, it’s like they could, it’s very easy to make something up, just pick a random year. But people don’t do it. And then you’re like, you can filter on that. Like they definitely aren’t alumni if they don’t remember what year they graduated from or chose not to fill it out.

It was like an automatic spammer or something. Yeah. and that’s good enough. And then you police it retroactively if people come in and they’re not actually like for these I’ve seen lots of these communities that are focused on like a physical space or like the, mountain association or homeowners association or something like that.

And you want to make sure, or even on professional associations have applications are you actually a nurse? Are you actually a police officer? Another thing that comes up in my communication with these kinds of offline communities that are coming online for the first time. And I thought we could chat about it a bit is I remember having customer interviews with a bunch of these and the same conversation kept coming up where they would say, what I really want is a place for my members to be able to collaborate.

And I’d be like, Oh, cool. Like collaborate on what? And they often like, couldn’t really answer to Oh no, just like collaborate. I was like what does that mean? And I think a lot of times I. Back then I have a guess, but I was like, I really don’t know, they, a lot of people talk about collaboration, and it depends on the context of the organization, but I’m like, I think I I don’t know what it means, or is it like this weird buzzword that people feel like they have to have?

But one thing I do realize is it’s a kind of, a lot of them are part of an association where there’s one person who does all the work there, it’s a, it’s like a nature preserve and there’s people have membership and some people donate and some people are members because they bought a brick on the path or something.

But there’s really one person who organizes and maintains it all and does all the work and maybe what they mean by collaborate is get more people to help out here. And I was like, and I don’t actually have the answer for that. I was like, I don’t know how to have technology force people to participate more.

That’s a really tough question. I don’t know if you have no tools about that. And the other thing I could come up with then briefly is like in like a board situation, that same kind of thing that comes up sometimes one person is handling the technology and like they want to talk with each other about things.

And that’s almost Oh, I want to train them on how to use Google meet to or like a kind of web conferencing software to talk online and how to use Google docs or some other system to keep track of notes. So these are maybe like ideas for how to productize that, like within our scope for some of our customers when they, but I was curious, like if that came up with you, like what do folks mean by collaborate?

It seems like this fuzzy term people use. And these challenges of like offline communities, like trying to get more participation and like collaborate through online communication.

Chris Badgett: It can be unhealthy when the idea of collaboration is I want more people to work for free for me. Yeah. And I think this comes to that holding space and leading the community, setting expectations around.

All right, I want you to, you’re here, you can ask for help, but, for every ask try to help three people or just try to help one on one, like even the balance in the universe. Yeah. So it doesn’t become like platform. For where everybody’s just trying to take, cause then it’s not a healthy community.

Yeah. Do you remember like early

Jason Coleman: MIR, IRC forums and you would like share files. It was like you were a leech and you had to upload so many files before you could take. I’ve seen that and I’ve definitely seen in codes of conduct for communities. They talk specifically about like how to give back and give them back in certain ways or helping out.

If you’ve been here a while, help out the new folks. Make sure you do that. Like they encourage it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And it’s sound like a Reddit, I believe you can’t do a post until you’ve commented a bunch of times. So they’re like getting you to, help or contribute. Before, posting your own thing, let’s talk about other people’s communities.

If you’re a subject matter expert, yeah, you’re trying to build a thing, but you’re likely not in a vacuum. There’s existing other communities around your idea, either very closely or tangentially related by communities of where people are before they’re ready for your community or where they might go after.

So there’s this idea like in marketing is an example where. You can leverage other people’s audiences. And so that means even if you have zero email lists, as an example, you can go to somebody who does have a big email list, create like a training or a free resource. And you take their stage and contribute to their community and maybe get Some people over to your community or your offer.

The way I think about this is just the general idea of being a helper give before you get, so for example, even in the Lifter LMS space, I’d be in like a general, let’s say WordPress community. And someone’s literally having trouble with one of my competitor’s softwares. And the question they’re asking is not like exactly about their software, but I’m like, okay, this is a website that a competitor has, but I actually know the answer to what this person is asking.

Like, where should I host my videos or whatever? I’m still going to help them. So giving with no expectation of return is super powerful. Joint venture partnerships are a really interesting one. And I’ll tell a story about that in a second, but what a joint venture partnership is in a perfect world is you have an audience or community.

This other person have an audience and community. They may be exactly the same or similar overlapping. And it’s like an exchange, okay, I’ll do a webinar for your community, you do a webinar for my community, we’ll both email our lists we’ll invite the people in, and there can be an offer at the end of the webinar to get the free thing or sign up for the paid thing.

And those can work really well. So an example that I do at Lifter LMS there’s two, the two audiences of the course creator and like kind of the website building professional. There’s some people that I do joint venture partnerships with that have like really just the course creator.

They’re not like techies at all. And I have a bunch of techies that you know, but also course creators. So we’re not, our products are not in competition. This person is selling. Coaching and courses and stuff. I’m more in the software side, but we have a lot of overlap in your audience. So once a year, we basically do an email exchange and email to whatever the the main offer is and some, something like that.

And we’ve, this person I’ve met with, I’ve been, I’ve gone offline and I’ve been to their house and your home. I’ve been to mastermind events that they’ve put on it. And we just developed. Partnership, we’ve become friends, we ask each other for just business help from time to time.

And we have this kind of business relationship where we just do this exchange once a year and it’s, I’ve probably done that for six or seven years at this point. So that’s a joint venture partnership. Then there’s affiliate partnerships, which are a little more straightforward in the sense that you can set up an affiliate program where.

If somebody promotes your course or your membership they get a unique link that’s trackable and there’s automated systems for handling this. So they can promote your program to their community the affiliates, the affiliate system man measures and tracks that link click. And if ultimately within 30 days or whatever, that person ends up buying something.

That person earns an affiliate commission, which in the core space is typically anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of the transaction amount. So that’s a way to introduce an affiliate program to your online education platform. It’s a way for other people to essentially sell for you to their audience. Collaboration point.

Story with LFTR LMS but around the same time as we introduced our Facebook group, there was another popular software called WP Fusion, which connects your website with LFTR on it and other popular software to CRM companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and so on. And we’ve integrated our softwares together.

They work really well together. I help out in the WP fusion Facebook group. Jack, the founder of WP fusion, whenever somebody has like a marketing automation question or whatever, he comes over to our Facebook group, he helps out. So it’s just like this partnership where we’re leveraging each other’s community, but it’s a triple win.

It’s good for, me, it’s good for Jack and most importantly, it’s good for the user. They’re getting the help from that, that outside expert and the outside expert is also now getting exposure, potentially new customers. We recommend each other’s software. We both use each other’s software.

It’s just a strong partnership where two communities are working for the benefit of all.

Jason Coleman: So many good options there for how to think about these other communities. And you talked about adjacent communities that come before, after in the journey. And I think that like a phrase is like, what’s next is.

Is this one that can be used in a sense of if someone takes a course and at the end of it, they’re finished and you don’t have a community, if you don’t have your own, what’s next, it’s what’s next, maybe you pass it off to another community that, and you become an affiliate of theirs. Or you give someone sales leads for an even bigger course, or you could be on the other end of it where you reach out to some of these other products and communities.

That have that kind of what’s next moment, like they finish this thing, they graduate from that, but that person doesn’t serve that user anymore or have an upsell. And but you do, so it’s a good way to through these affiliate relationships. Cross pollinate between products and communities.

Yeah, I’m,

I’m thinking about interacting with community communities like Reddit in the subreddits in social media and places, or if you’re in someone else’s Facebook group and you, he gave some of the polite ideas around how you should interact there, like you should be helpful, you shouldn’t, always be promoting, you help people, even if they’re your competitors.

Another one. Like a way to think about it when you’re interacting in these communities online is to be yourself and very clearly make it clear, like who you are. I think there can be a temptation, for example, when you’re on a subreddit and someone says, what’s the best LMS to almost and you’re like, I have one to just like almost pretend you’re someone else or just answer and not be clear that you’re the owner of the product that you just linked to.

Because it, that feels more potentially more authentic to the moment or it’s like awkward to out yourself, but I think that’s troublesome if you don’t declare your biases and aren’t clear about who you are, these like internet sleuths will go through your history and be like, wait a second, this is Chris Badgett, you like, and they’ll think you’re up to shady stuff, even if you just felt a little awkward, you don’t want to make it awkward.

You just had a good answer for someone. So it’s almost yeah. Be a little obnoxious about it. I have a bias cause I’m Jason Coleman, the owner of this thing, but we have a really good product that answers that are really good blog posts that answers this question. Even on, on some sites, if they allow it in a signature or some point, put it in the footer, use your clear, your real name, stuff like that.

Declare that you’re biased about what you’re, how you’re responding. And I think people appreciate like on something on like Reddit where you can upvote and downvote. I’m always worried when I do this, it’s like, all right, I’m biased because I own this thing, but we have a really good solution.

Here’s how it works. And that, I think I’m worried people would downvote it. Cause yeah, you can’t trust that. There’s this, like in some of these forms, like Reddit knows the bias is there and they’re sensitive to it and they don’t want to talk to you. They want to talk to other people. But if you’re there and you’re like, Hey, I’m biased, but here’s, and you’re just useful.

I’m surprised you don’t get as many downvotes and people who know about your product might upvote it. And so people respect the honesty. So like another case of this is paid memberships pro, we have a bunch of free open source plugins and a lot of them are hosted on wordpress. org and wordpress.

org had their own support forum system and we had ours. And this has always been a little bit of a challenge because you. If you don’t support people in wordpress. org, it actually affects like your ranking, your search ranking, and there’s no way to disable it or just say, we don’t support it here.

We support it over here. They’re like, Hey, if you host on wordpress. org, you have to support on our system too. So actually there’s a support for them and I would pay people to monitor that and answer questions. But it’s still from time to time, as this happened, at least a couple of times, someone would give us a negative review either on wordpress.

org itself, or even on a third party type review site. And they’d be like, Paid memberships pro charges for support and they wouldn’t answer my question, but I went to WordPress and WordPress answered my question and I’m like, Oh, like WordPress didn’t answer your question. Like I paid someone to answer your question.

Like that person works for me, that person is part of, as part of paid memberships pro and it just wasn’t clear because it’s called wordpress. org. The website is a big WordPress logo everywhere and folks who, beginners mindset, they’re interacting with it. They’re confused about how they’re getting support.

So they just, all they saw was. When you go to slash supported payment, just pro we offer paid support. And now we, that forced us that feedback to we should more prominently focus on our free support. And especially now that we’ve moved outside the. org repo, we have to make our free support more prominent.

So we don’t lose people who just think you have to pay. But yeah, but what we did, so that’s one thing we did was like, Hey, made our phone free support through our our email and contact forms more clear. But we also on wordpress. org would put in our signature every time we help someone, Jason Coleman, owner of Paid Memberships Pro or your title at Paid Memberships Pro to try to make it a little more clear Hey, this is a Paid Memberships Pro person interacting with you.

There’s so many benefits to just like. Actually being yourself and being clear about who you are and being one human being per account rather than playing games and trying to, be a character or pretend you’re someone you’re not.

Chris Badgett: And that completes our session on community. And if you enjoyed this, I just want to say I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Jason, and this has been a great conversation around community.

I’d encourage anybody who listens to this to think about. All the five hats in addition to the community hat, the expert, the entrepreneur, the technologist, the teacher, and the community builder. And if you’re really into this stuff, you’re not alone. So in many ways, Jason and I are really into this stuff.

We’ve been in it for over a decade. And finding the others, like we found each other through the internet. So if this is your niche and you’re feeling the vibe from, of this community you’re not alone. I just want anybody who hears this conversation to really think about that.

And Jason, I appreciate the great discussion we’ve had. Yeah, thanks.

Jason Coleman: Awesome.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast, Chris and Jason talk about how LMS technology has advanced and how LifterLMS revolutionized online learning by fusing course administration and content production in a seamless manner. In the past, educators had to produce structured material using independent e-learning authoring tools, which they then had to export and import into an LMS.

By developing on top of an already-existing content management system, LifterLMS, however, removed this unnecessary step and increased process efficiency. They stress how crucial it is to strike a balance between offering an all-in-one platform and preserving flexibility so that customers can combine LifterLMS with other tools they already use and modify it.

The platform’s inception may be traced back to their agency work, when they observed a notable requirement from customers who required a single solution to handle marketing automation and course management and delivery. Because of this necessity, they created LifterLMS, a system that not only makes creating courses easier but also changes to meet the changing demands of education entrepreneurs.

They also go over the more general trend of technology bundling and unbundling, in which software solutions either specialize in certain tasks or combine several functionalities onto a single platform.

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Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series. Where we go over the five critical hats that you need to wear or find skills within your team members to become a successful education entrepreneur teaching online. Those five hats are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder.

Today in my conversation with my business partner at LifterLMS, Jason Coleman, we’re going to get into Becoming the technologist. Enjoy this session.

So now we’re going to get into the becoming a technologist and leveraging technology as an education entrepreneur. Let’s start with a conversation around learning management system or LMS technology. The big idea I want to throw out here and how this world has changed with learning management systems. Which technically isn’t a new technology, the internet.

Was created by the United States Defense Department. And then educational institutions started using the internet to share research. So learning and education and research has really been with the internet since the 70s, I believe. But learning management systems sprung up to help people structure content and create learning pathways.

And it’s evolved a lot over the last 40 years where we come into the story is this idea. I actually had a customer at LifterLMS tell me this, who’s been in the e learning space for a long time. He said that, did you know, you don’t have a learning management system, which we call an LMS. He said, you actually have a LCMS and I was like, what is that?

Please educate me about the business. So it’s a learning content management system. So with the old days. What you would do is you would have what was known as a e learning authoring tool. And you would create, your structured content. Your quizzes, and it would at the end be exportable as a package of e learning in a file.

And then you would go look around the world for a learning management system to plug that into. But where we came in with. LifterLMS is we built it on top of an existing content management system. So that the act of creating the content was already baked into the software of the learning management system.

So it took two industries and combined them into one. Which makes our lives easier as technology integrates and becomes a super app of online education. You don’t need as many separate solutions to deliver the end product from idea to. The cool thing about technology, just like with the iPhone, a thousand songs in your pocket. You’ve just simplified a user experience into a more efficiently packaged, better design solution.

So the wild thing about technology is that. You can today there’s been basically over the recent history of technology, a lot of bundling and integration. But also unbundling. If you look at something like marketing software, there’s like these all in one solutions. And then there’s these points solutions like, Oh, this software.

Just does lead capture this software just does this other little piece of a technology stack that you need. So with Lifter LMS as an example at the beginning I was fascinated with this idea of well. Let’s just make it as all in one as we can let’s make it a platform and that’s really what the course creator the educator the entrepreneur wants is. They don’t really want to think about the details of technology. They just want a platform to, take their idea and just plug it into the platform.

But then with Lifter LMS as an example. We wanted it to be all in one. But we also wanted it to be flexible, extendable, customizable and open source. Yes, it’s an all in one, but it’s also exists within the ecosystem of easy other tools.

Technology that you can plug into it so that you can use the tools you’re already using.

So the way this all started back in 2013 as we were building the first version of LifterLMS is. We actually had an agency where we were serving clients and the kind of early days of the online course. The coaching business community at this time, a lot of our agency clients were using a marketing automation software called infusion soft.

And that did a lot of marketing automation stuff, but they actually needed the digital product. They needed a way to deliver the courses, have progress tracking and all that. So we, provided, we kept building actually with open source software, which Infusionsoft wasn’t, but everything else they needed with WordPress.

We kept building these custom early types of learning management systems. And our clients needed it so bad that we’re like, we just need to build a product that meets this need for all of these people to have an integrated learning management system that also included all the tooling you would ever need to create the content as well, all in one place that was both affordable, customizable, and, integrates with tools and technology that people also want to use.

Jason Coleman: Lister LMS is. an awesome platform. Obviously, I think that this one I got involved, I think it strikes that balance of all in one and flexible. It, it hits it in the right spot. It won’t hit it for everybody. I remember being at a conference at the ASAE, the Association of Associations. And it was within reference to the association management software, which is an adjacent type thing.

And but I remember Yeah. Yeah. A few people notice, but one woman in particular is I literally can only, I only want one login and one password and you’re like, Oh, like you still have to have a web host and you’re like, you don’t use it a lot, but you have to log in there once and you still have, or your domain and your email service, like we can automate it, but you still have to log in once it was like our services and one login, but what it is the most important stuff that you work with day to day, That stuff keeps going into the core product and it’s edging.

But if you, it is flexible that you can take out different pieces. If you’re like, I’d rather do email this way, I’d rather do video this way. I’d rather hosted over here. But I don’t know if like how you think about that in terms of where, how do you find the sweet spot or folks, how folks who are thinking about the tools I feel like that when I was like, you’re maybe a little too worried about having logins.

Things like one pass are around now. But yeah, how do you talk people through that? Like thinking about what does all in one really mean?

Chris Badgett: I think about it with if somebody just has an idea and they buy a domain name and a web hosting account. And they want to teach online. If they only had to get one more tool, what would it be?

And but then there’s like these power users, more people who are maybe pretty developed in the technology sector who want all this customizability and flexibility. So there’s this kind of this idea when you create a solution that if you take care of the ends, the middle will take care of your. So if you take care of the person that’s just wants one thing to buy after they get their domain name and their hosting and they’re happy.

And then on the other end, somebody who needs like a developer who has tons of technology and wants to customize the software, it being open source, as long as these two characters are happy we’re the most flexible and good to go.

Jason Coleman: Sometimes folks want the absolute simplest thing. And they’ll go for a fully hosted closed environment.

You can’t take your content with you type place. And it’s hard to tell early on why you need that flexibility. You either have to be creative or like know something. Take our word for it that so often you start out that way. And then when you have traction and success, like there’s going to be something about your, the website or the tool you’re using to host your LMS that you’re going to want to change, tweak, alter.

And if you’re in a closed environment. That may not be the case. And even worse things happen sometimes. I think like medium is like a blogging platform and they changed like their business model. And then all of a sudden you had to think about that with, you can’t have free content on there anymore because they’re trying to make money selling subscriptions and you’re like, wait, I was just using this as a free blogging tool and it’s now it’s not for you anymore.

And that’s like a risky run when you go with a fully hosted service, if they. Think, Oh, we’re going to become like masterclass and only focus on like the top tier celebrities and you’re not there yet. You slowly become less important to them. And, but if you use an open system, like Lifter LMS, on top of WordPress on, general hosting, you have that flexibility of, it’s something, it’s a little more complicated, but if something changes, then you can take your content with you.

Export it and move to something totally different, or more than likely, you can just customize what’s already there, swap in a component that you need.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s there’s this idea of owning versus, versus renting. So on a hosted solution, you’re literally renting space on somebody else’s website.

But when you own it with a tool like Lifter LMS or Pavement Resources Pro, it’s your website, right? That’s a really big difference that people don’t realize they. Perhaps made the wrong decision earlier and they’re like, you know what, I do want to own my website and I want to own my data.

I want more flexibility. I want control over the future and the business decisions made about the software. That’s the power of

Jason Coleman: owning your website. The kind of flip side of using an LMS which has a lot of functionality, we’ve talked about various forms of it you can keep it simple. So I, and I see folks who want to get started and they feel like.

They have to organize it, into modules and courses and lessons and chapters and sections and or they, they need quizzes and assignments and tools and that they don’t have that stuff and they might have something simpler. And I always encourage folks definitely initially go lo fi like you can do something simple.

There’s. A lot of successful courses that made a lot of money and the course is like a single page or post on a website and you just have to pay for access to it, or it’s a single PDFs or like a PowerPoint is really popular. That might be a tool that you’ve already used to like in your, consulting work or like you’re giving a demonstration.

It’s just make that an even better PD PowerPoint or Google docs presentation and sell access that. So I definitely have paid like a hundred dollars for a marketing course. It was literally like a a PowerPoint presentation. That’s an awesome way, like to, you don’t have to use all that technology or a whole platform to get started.

You can sell something simple. And that said, like it’s sometimes it’s a start. So I’ve recommended, a paid memberships pro is a membership platform. And I remember I went to the podcast movement conference cause we had some podcasts as customers and I was talking to those folks and I was like I was thinking of ways of we could, have a premium version of your podcast and pay for the old episodes or the new episodes early or like an extra episode.

I was like, what are you guys trying to do? Let’s make a membership site. And like 99 percent of folks were like, it’s going to be a free podcast and I’m going to monetize through courses. I was like, Oh, so it was like the first time I was like, let’s do courses. And they’re like, how do you do it? And I gave them the spiel of you could be simple, right?

Your course could be a PowerPoint. And and I stayed there for a while, like as a business, like facilitating that and people would integrate paymericious pro with Lifter LMS and other LMS tools. That’s like part of the beauty of an open platform for WordPress. You can even take two platforms and make them work together and use the best parts.

But when I started publishing my own courses in that way, that started out as simple. Like pretty much single posts organized into sections. I realized, Oh, here’s the value of the LMS. I didn’t know if people were finishing the course I wanted to use some of those courses for like certification to make sure. Like I was training development partners to make sure they knew how to use our tool can help our customers.

I probably would want to write a quiz to force them. To both prove that they read the content and then also prove that they understood the content. And like piece by piece, I’m I started learning cause I got into it like, Oh yeah, all these things make sense. This is why we need video as well.

Like it should be multimodal and that kind of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Keeping it simple is it’s a great place to start. Like I see a lot of folks these days, like pre selling a course that doesn’t exist. They create a Google document, like this is what’s going to be in the program. They’re making sure they get people and, but I think it’s important to, I’m a big fan of that.

Super simple, super manual. Hey, here’s my PayPal email address, send us much money if you want access. It starts in a month but also think about your iterative cycle. All right, first I’m just going to deliver it potentially as a live coaching program. All they’re going to get is like a calendar invite to a recurring zoom event for several weeks.

That’s the first version. And then, cool, we’re going to record those videos, and then that’s going to become the first version of the course. The, essentially replays of the coaching session. Then as you go further down the line, I think I’m going to re-shoot those lessons based on all the feedback I’ve gotten from my learners.

Maybe put in some knowledge checks like quizzes. Oh, I think I’m gonna add a certification program So it’s important to think like how far are you willing to go or do you want to go? you always just want to do like a Virtual meeting coaching or do you want to end up with something more robust in the end?

I think about that issue with web hosting a lot It’s great to save money and keep it low tech and get the cheap low cost web hosting But if you really think your thing is going to get traction, at least choose a web host that’s going to be able to scale with you and provide more features without this massive like infrastructure change later.

Let’s talk about e commerce. It’s never been easier to sell digital products and programs on the internet to essentially make money online. One of, one of my favorite stories about you, Jason, is you were one of the first, if not the first person to create an e commerce transaction on a WordPress website.

I’m sure it was a lot harder then than it is now. What’s happened, since that time, like 15 years later, is that your website, there’s there’s like a mindset change and kind of a reality changes. Websites used to just be like. A marketing info content. We call this like web 1.

They’re just, it’s like a brochure for a business as an example, but you still had to go to this different thing, like the actual business. And then we added web 2. 0, which introduced interaction, like social media, commenting systems, forums, and so on. And then that’s continued to evolve and we’re on the cusp.

Some might argue we’re at web 3. 0, which is the internet of value, which is like a totally kind of new thing. But e commerce has never been easier. You can create digital products and programs and services on your website. Accepting the money and offloading all the details of how somebody, the computer across the world and there’s a credit card and you get paid into your bank account and they get access to content or events or anything is now quite easy once you have a base level.

understanding of technology. And then the software, not only does it simplify like the actual selling process, but also the access. This is the beauty of like membership software and LMS software is the access. Do they get a free trial, do they get a paid trial? And do they get everything?

Does it drip out over time? What if they miss a payment on a recurring plan? Is this a course cohort that’s only for six months? All that are just, is just settings and software now. So if you can think of it, it’s now easily possible with tools like Lifter LMS and PayMemberships Pro. The other thing you can do is sometimes I think people when it comes to e commerce think a little too small in the sense that like you can, this is what made me fall in love with teaching online and what continues to motivate me today is that this idea that you could publish something on your website and then anybody anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a browser basically on a smartphone, computer or tablet.

Can access your content or, and potentially buy stuff from you. But when it comes to e commerce we love Stripe as an example. But PayPal is a way of also exchanging and buying things on the internet is accepted in more countries in the world, and that may change. So you can actually offer people different ways to pay you through your website.

There’s even crypto payment gateways and all kinds of payment gateways that you can use Stripe and PayPal are probably the most popular. So pro tip is if you’re doing the e commerce offer those two, and you might actually make more money, help more people because you’re. Giving people access to, to buy from you based on the country they live in and so on.

And one thing I just want to acknowledge, and I’ve seen this with every digital entrepreneur I know, is that it never gets old seeing a payment notification, however you get that. Like for me, I have a thing in our company Slack, a channel where I see the payments that have come in and I look at it every day.

And, while I was asleep. These people bought the software, this person paid with PayPal, this person paid with Stripe, and it just never gets old. It literally like, when is this going to get old? It’s been over a decade. And my very first one, just to tell the story I created an online gardening and permaculture course with my wife.

And and I started blogging about that too, like how I built the site, which is how I started, starting to form ideas about Lifter LMS. This, cause this was before it existed, but anyways. That first sale, I, published the course, went to sleep, woke up the next morning, somebody in New Zealand named Ron, who I’ve never met, never heard of had purchased the course overnight and here we are, this is like 12 years or 13 years later from.

Waking up and seeing that purchase notification from New Zealand.

Jason Coleman: I remember I used to get text messages every time there was a sale and we were having like five sales a day. It wasn’t that big a deal, but we ran our first really big sale in like 2017 when we digging in the pay mergers pro and we dropped the price and ran a sale.

And I think we had 150 sales that day. So my, my phone was. Buzzing every few minutes. I remember my son was younger at the time and he asked me he’s what is that? And I explained, sometimes I over communicate to the kids when they were younger and I was like, Oh, we had a sale. So he was like 47.

I just got 47 and we were grocery shopping. And then he wanted to get something at checkout and he’s you just got 47. You can afford this. And I was like, Oh, he’s getting lippy with me. And yeah, I turned the thing off my phone cause it’s too annoying. But yeah it’s awesome.

And I think of the person on the other end, it’s like, it’s a whole human being doing something awesome and launching something, building stuff and trusting. Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. And you thought about like all around the world. Yeah. So it’s this is related to e commerce. But I want to touch on that point.

To help motivate folks. That the internet is so huge. Like our user base is around the world. And I think of I forget exact statistics, but like every McDonald’s has like serves 20, 000 people or maybe it’s 40, 000 people in the United States. And you can think of like the McDonald’s and roughly only the people near it can go and get served by that McDonald’s.

But if you’re building, so if you built course content and people had to come get it from you in person, you can only serve the people like that you can touch on the, and no matter how niche your subject matter is I think you have. One of your early customers or successful customer teaches folks how to make balloon animals and stuff.

Yeah. And you’re like, it’s there’s a few balloon animal clowns and service folks. And there’s but it’s in the, the 20 mile radius that the McDonald’s serves here. There’s maybe one or two, like you can’t make a lot of money selling that course by hand. But on the internet, there’s thousands and thousands of these folks.

So that’s the same story for every single niche. And that gets me excited about like we serve folks in that same way through software and education we do, but every topic, no matter how small, has like a worldwide audience. And it’s pretty awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to put a number to the balloon artist guy, his name is Ziv Raviv.

In his first year, I think he sold over, I think it was like 237, 000 for his balloon artists Academy. And a micro niche, this isn’t a major niche. I just want to add, there’s this social science concept called Dunbar’s number, which if you think before internet, before social media, just regular old flesh and blood human, we can only keep in contact.

Or keep up relationships with 140 people. Otherwise our brain just can’t handle that many relationships. So when you think about if you can do something at scale with an online education program, you get past that human limit. Like you said, like a teacher typically has 20, 30 kids in the classroom, but you can now have 3000, 300, 000 and it’s just wild, but the human mind isn’t really designed to even comprehend the scale of the internet.

It’s just too big. It’s like the number of stars in the sky. Like usually you can’t comprehend it.

Jason Coleman: We also, we’re talking about gateways for e commerce. So the gateway is that. Service that helps you collect credit card payments or crypto payments or bank ACH payments sometimes. And I think the big idea and my advice here is to use the very best payment gateway.

It’s such a core important piece of your business. I’ve been working in e commerce for 20 years now and early with WordPress e commerce, like you said, and did it myself and watched the tooling get better and better. Have watched some of these gateways come and go and popularity and service and deal with the changing tide of different rules and taxing across the world.

Stripe does it best, like ever since they launched until now, they’ve done it best and without calling out other gateways, like they’re so good that the other gateways are partnering with Stripe to use Stripe technology and their own platforms or like part, be hosted on by Stripe or bundled up with Stripe’s tools.

And you mentioned like offering multiple payment solutions. I think Stripe itself will do that in particular. There’s a few different ways to use Stripe, but if you use it, they’re offsite, they call it Stripe Checkout, so that when someone clicks the pay, they actually go to the Stripe window where it pops up on the screen, and the checkout experience is on the Stripe website, especially if you do that, you can enable all kinds of payment methods, and I think there’s literally like 150 across the world for your customers that way, and they’re, experimenting with crypto now, and some places are even wrapping PayPal through that method, but it’s weird business.

Thanks. I think so allow as many payment methods as possible also make use of their tax services and subscription services if you can they, if you’re only using stripe, it makes taxes a little bit easier because then you you have one source to send to your, your accountant of where the money goes and how to do it.

And they also can calculate sales tax with every rule around the world. And their subscription services like. Because at the scale they’re at, they have relationships with banks. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes people get surprised by it. When someone’s credit card expires, Stripe somehow automatically has relationships with the banks, where they’re like, oh, I got your new number, and you didn’t even have to update.

And it’s almost like a weird privacy thing. I think some people, when they get a new card, they assume hey, this is cool, all my subscriptions are gonna cancel. But Stripe is no, I got you, I already gave them your new number. So you gotta be careful as a consumer if you think, just cause you got a new number stuff isn’t gonna charge you.

But that’s the kind of thing that like other gateways and at the software level, we don’t have relationships with the banks to automatically get someone’s credit card number and update it. So using their tooling and their services around it are all really good. And, they increase sales, they reduce friction and the checkout in particular.

So got sold on the Kool Aid at the Stripe conference last year, Stripe sessions. Also because I deal with this right as a developer who builds the tooling around these things. I firsthand feel the challenge of handling credit cards and spam. Privacy and subscriptions with and even something as simple as. It’s called a zip code here, it’s called a post code and postal code in the UK or something. The whole country of India, I forget the exact details, I’m probably misrepresenting it, but they outlawed subscription recurring payments. And they’re like, oh, what do we do now?

So like, all these different rules, and Stripe had a presentation or slide where they showed all those, and then they demoed their offsite Stripe checkout. Automatically adjust. So if you’re buying from a certain country and Stripe knows you, this is how you usually pay. You usually, they remember, cause there’s at such a big scale, they call it link.

Some like I used you, even people may have run into it. You’re on a website, you say bye. And it’s I sent you a number. Is this it? Does your phone cool? I got you. And so the checkout is really fast. So all these tools make it easy to like both, serve to as much of the world that Stripe supports.

And also like they’re a huge company that’s optimizing and using like artificial intelligence to optimize the checkout form. And so some folks when they build a website and in many ways, including the checkout, like they, they want, like the experience to be part of their brand and the feel unique and special.

I think checkout, there are ways to like make, get your colors and your logo and make sure it’s clear this is your website, that branding is important. But the kind of feeling unique, you don’t want your checkout to be unique. You want your checkout to be as common as possible. Like they do this all the time as fast as possible.

You can do that with Stripe. There’s that’s my Stripe commercial.

Chris Badgett: And on that note, I think it’s really important not to overcomplicate it. For example, if you’re using Lifter LMS to power your learning management system, you don’t need to become a developer and learn about. The PHP and react code and everything that makes it work e commerce with all its nuance, like PCI compliance and fraud and everything, you get to a level where the software is so good that you just have to trust it.

Literally like with Lyft or LMS, install the Lyft or LMS Stripe connector plugin, press connect to Stripe, let it know which bank account you want the money to go in, and you’re good to go. But if you really want to learn the nuances of e commerce, you can, but the tools have never been easier and more approachable.

And you mentioned recurring payments and challenges in India. It just got me thinking about recurring payments in general. There’s this idea that a lot of us want. Recurring revenue wouldn’t it be nice to have recurring revenue? Of course it would be, but if you’re going to do that, you really need to have recurring value.

So just to, take a look back to what’s the easiest way to get recurring value in a topic we discussed in the last session. Is you may have a self study DIY online course, but if you just add one monthly office hours hour where you interact with people in a virtual meeting and support them, now you have recurring value.

That’s probably the easiest way to do that. So just think about that with your pricing and if you can do recurring revenue or not. Let’s look at kind of design technology. So in this world of online education, there’s three, three layers, I like to think about it. There is software, hardware, and what I call wetware, which is like human beings.

And we’re going to talk about that in the community aspect that’s coming in a little bit. But in terms of. Some people are really good at software, but then there’s also all this hardware, like your computer itself cameras, microphones, like we’re in a pro setup right now making this with some of the best hardware, but this can all be overwhelming. If you’re going to create multimedia content, what are the essentials? And the way I think about it is if you’re going to become an online education entrepreneur, you do need to become essentially a personal media company. And this is, has gone mainstream. What’s the number one thing a kid says they want to be when they grow up?

It’s a YouTuber. Yeah. A YouTuber. So video producer. And you used to have to be in Hollywood and have the set and the crew and all the stuff to make that happen. But now everybody can do it from their phone or their computer. So mastering, I say mastering, but just getting started with video production, editing, and publishing.

That the video content is a skill that every creator needs to have. I’ve coached many video content creators in the LMS niche. And if somebody is like super beginner, like what’s the absolute easiest solution, the place to start is you open up a virtual meeting, like zoom with yourself by yourself.

You hit the record button in zoom. You do your presentation, talking head or slides, slideshow and all that. Do zero editing and then take the video file and publish it to your video hosting. And you’ve got it. So that’s like the simple entry into video editing. And it’s an infinite well that you just work on upgrading your video over time.

I’ve been working with video. I’m 46 years old. I started working with video probably around the age of 16 and even still like we’re in a professional video studio that can do way better than what I could do as my own personal media company. High quality audio also matters. If I had to pick one, I would go for good audio before I went for good video.

And often, what’s the level one of that. is use earbuds that have a mic on it. If you’re recording, let’s say on your phone or on your computer so that you’re not using the stock computer microphone, which is typically not as good quality, although that’s also getting better and better.

There’s also so many great USB microphones that are higher quality, let’s say in the 50 to 200 price range that you just plug it into your computer. You’re good to go with like superior than most audio or audio quality. Then when it comes to visual communication, one of the things you want to think about too is branding and consistency.

So like when you’re creating images or you’re getting fancy on your videos and you’re putting your name under your talking head, it’s called your lower thirds or whatever. You got to develop your brand, like use the same colors, your brand colors, use the same font, don’t change the font, use the same typography, like just be consistent and nobody’s great at branding on day one.

I often recommend hiring a some branding service to help you come up with your brand guide to get you started, particularly if you’re not a strong designer. But designers are design is funny because everybody has an opinion and kind of thinks they’re above average, but it’s not the case. Even the LifterLMS logo, which you can see on the screen here, that was outsourced to a company called 99 designs.

That was about 300 or as a design competition. We picked the one we liked the most. And they came up with our typography and we’ve continued to iterate on our brand and you can always do a rebrand over time, but. And in terms of your visual presentation, consistency is really important.

Also being consistent with your quality of video and audio, but you can always upgrade and experiment with upgrading over time. Just get on the train, get the fundamentals and get started.

Jason Coleman: I didn’t realize that it was a 99 designs logo. That’s one of the best 99 designs logos. Yeah. And it’s in logo tournament and some of those, I don’t know what the popular ones are now.

You can get good stuff out of there. And, you often can take that and then take that to a designer, like they, the process is useful. They help you think about your brand and your logo. That’s a really cool tool. I I also, like you were talking about uploading video kind of rough edits on doing the zoom webinar and then just uploading as is.

I, it’s funny we’ve been doing some YouTube content for the past few years and I found we’ve been trying to produce and sometimes we’re just like, whatever, just record it live and push it. And it’s like a longer piece. And sometimes that content does better. So I don’t know what it is about the YouTube algorithm or like the YouTube viewer that, they appreciate that long form content.

And then another tool suggestion for someone like me who thinks more like a writer and also just a good video editor itself and has other useful features is Descript and we use that lifter and paid memberships pro and Descript basically what they do is you import the video and they create a real time transcription.

It can do cool things like remove ums and ahs and likes for you automatically and automatically edit. But that same process, then you can rewrite the transcript or delete things from the transcript and it will automatically delete parts of the video. Video editing is like splicing and you gotta find the spot and figure out, I’m like, was I really talking about this and play, pause and scrub?

But if you see the transcript, you’re just like, I don’t want to say that you delete the sentence and the video that corresponds to that sentence disappears and they have all this awesome technology to make it still sound natural and they have a good they also have a good studio sound which is like a filter on your voice, which is this kind of magic filter that makes bad microphone sound better.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we’re in a, we’re in a professional studio right now. I, but I’ve been blown away with my amateur setup at home. And I just clicked the studio sound button, wait 30 seconds. It’s sounds similar to this. I tend to do a lot of ums and ahs and it it just cleans it right up. And it’s important to think about like the pace of technology change.

When I first started editing videos, I was using iMovie and this is back in around 2006 to even cut a clip, cut a piece out and then move it. It would then need 30 seconds to process and now they’re, it just, everything has gotten exponentially faster and it’s just getting easier and easier. You just need to start. It’s all about starting.

Jason Coleman: So we also can talk about some of the, design aspects of writing. I think it’s very useful to develop what we call like content briefs, a template every time you write something and publish something, try to stick to this format. We also have a writing guide, and that’s especially important if you have a team. Where you want to keep a consistent voice across all the content that you’re doing.

But it’s also important as a reminder for yourself if you’re small. I think I’ll find the ones we use at Paid Memberships Pro and open them up and share them somehow with this. But like the important aspects of the content brief. So it’s before you start writing you actually like before I say, if you like have a a moment of clarity and it’s like the writing is pouring out of you or the video is pouring out of you, lean into that.

That’s like number one, like you’re the, you’ve become an expert. And now you’re using technology to deliver stuff to the world don’t slow yourself down or if you typically operate like a faucet, and even if you don’t people have these bursts of inspiration, so lean into that when you have it, but a lot of the time you’ll have writer’s block, you won’t have inspiration, you’ll be like, I know I have to write about this, but I don’t know where to begin, I don’t know where to start, and having the content brief helps, we do them for blog posts, and it has reminders, so before you start to write, you’re like, who is the audience of this?

What are you telling them? What’s like the basic information? We have a sales funnel, so sales funnel is a huge topic we could talk about a lot, but basically at the top, you’re like reaching new people and getting their attention. And at the bottom you’re converting them into a sale.

And and in the middle there’s a couple steps depending on which kind of sales funnel you’re using. Knowing which part of the funnel they’re at changes the writing. Cause if The, you’re writing something that’s near the conversion stage of the funnel, that it’s like the bottom of your, what you’re writing should be like now buy it, or you should talk more about buying and the features.

And if you’re writing something at the top where you’re just trying to get attention you can’t, you need, you want to be more current topical, there’s a different form format and think different way that you’ll go about writing. We also talk about use case and we also think about SEO. Here, I’ll talk a little bit about SEO too, but in our brief, we say that keywords that we’re targeting and then we also have a writing guide, which is a separate document that just talks about style and I’ll find that so we can share it.

But basically parts of our writing guide is to be shorter, clear sentences like no contractions. So instead of saying doesn’t say does not and this is right, cause we’re a technical writing often and we have an international audience. We found that. Stuff that’s clear, fewer contractions translates easier, or if you’re a non native speaker, it’s easier to read.

It’s weird like that, something as simple as a contraction, which like is meant to speed up how you type and speak, it actually slows down how you read. If you take doesn’t and turn it into does not. I think typically the typical reader, especially non native English reader, like reads it faster.

And so it’s this weird counterintuitive thing. And then another rule we have is like no exclamation points or as few as possible. It’s I think maybe I used to say no. And the marketing team has said can we have one? And you’re like, that’s it. Like per post per email, you get one. Cause it loses its effectiveness after the first one.

If everything is exciting and oh my God and Russian free save ship click. It doesn’t work. And I think you’ll find about exclamation points. Oftentimes you write them with the exclamation point. Cool. You were excited when you wrote that down. If you take it out, like periods are strong too. It’s like a stronger statement.

You’re not like, we’re running a sale. It’s you take it out of we’re running a sale period. Gotcha. And another point on search engine optimization, SEO, people often think about this when writing. There’s all agencies that write and they’re like SEO focused. They’re like, Oh, we do it like, they start with SEO.

That’s how they think about the writing process that can be useful. Some of them do good work, but I think it’s better to just the tactics and search engine optimization are always changing. There was a Google update yesterday and we’re waiting to see how does our search engine ranking change now that Google updated things, but what’s always true.

And Google says this, and you just have to trust them that they’re actually trying to get the best content in front of their users is just be as useful as possible. And a very clear way to make sure you’re doing that is to search for something that you would like to land on. We’re talking about, yeah, I don’t know, how to write a content brief and you want to teach people how to write content briefs, search for how to write a content brief, find the top result, maybe go past the ads, or maybe there’s a weird Reddit thread that’s not a real page, find that.

The first real piece of content, that’s a result and then copy what they did or copy it and make it better. Like you want to do everything they did. You want to make a better version of that resource. It’s if I was searching for this, what would I need? And we’ve found success that way.

So there’s a lot of like tactics and SEO strategy and there’s little things that you should do. It’s, and I won’t get into it. It’s it’s easy and you should just do it. If you’re actually like, I’m trying to rank for this, the best way I’ve seen to do that is to just find the number one result and make a better version of that page.

They have a video, you need a video, they have an outline, you need an outline. And they have this, you probably need that. But a better one, and sometimes you can do it it can feel overwhelming, but, you’re exceptional, and they’re probably sitting on their laurels And maybe not necessarily focused on your market or your target, niche.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. There’s so much in here. I have three three things to tie in here. One is that when it comes to templates, there’s this idea of thinking in systems. And we talked earlier in another session about having a teaching framework. Like key ideas, strategies, tactics, action items, case studies.

There’s lots of different teaching frameworks, but templates make your life so much easier. A content brief gives you a templated structure on how to approach a writing project. If you use a tool like Canva and you do designs, let’s say you’re doing YouTube thumbnails or video thumbnails for inside your course or whatever.

Do you have a template in Canva that’s on brand that you can modify and make different? Think about creating these systems that makes your life so much better. And then instead of always improving individual pieces, improve your system. And then the future just gets better faster. You mentioned funnels and we could probably have a whole section on that, but we’ve talked a lot in this, these sessions that about thinking through time and not delivering.

Just, Hey, here’s my knowledge. Here’s my library. Good luck. Now you can know what I know, but actually thinking about a user journey through time. So once I learned this concept, it really changed how I thought about education and marketing and helping customers and clients get the result that they want.

So I’m just going to lay out what a funnel is in the, from the stages standpoint. Whatever your course is about, I’ll use an example to make it so I’ll use a case study or an example to make the concepts more useful. So let’s say I was teaching people how to create their first online course.

The first stage is called unaware. So this is where someone doesn’t know the problem they have. This is the hardest stage to market to, but you can, if you think about it. So let’s say somebody’s in a job, they don’t like it. They feel creative, they don’t know what, what’s missing. And they feel like there’s something more, they want to make more money, but they’re unaware of what the core problem is.

But then the next stage is problem where it’s like, you know what? I want to work on line or I want to create a digital product. So they’ve become problem aware of I want to quit my job, I want to do this other thing, or I want to get a side hustle going in the experiment over here.

And then they become solution aware, where alright, there’s a lot of different ways to do online businesses. Maybe I think I want to do a course. So now they’re aware of a particular solution. And then they become product aware. Okay, what is, what are the tools, how can I create an online course?

And they come up with five or 10, Oh, there’s this company and that company and this company and that company. And then they become most aware, like they’ve made a selection. I want to move forward with this tool. And this is where like sales starts kicking in. You’re getting close to that conversion point.

And the conversion happens. So that’s like the top of the funnel all the way down to the conversion point. And then what a lot of people miss is like the inverse other side that happens, which is okay. In my hypothetical example of I want to create an online course. I’ve got the software, I’ve got somebody who’s going to coach me through it, help me through it and everything.

Then the other side, or the customer success side happens, which is onboarding. Alright, welcome to my program about how to build an online course. Here’s the community, go introduce yourself here’s how to get started with the tool that you’re using and so on that’s the onboarding to keep your learner, like the orientation, if you will.

And then there’s what’s called activation, which is, what’s that level that if I can just get them past here, they’re going to stick, and they’re, they’re making good progress, and they’re definitely not going to refund or have remorse for choosing this training. And then there’s retention, like what if it’s an annual program and we’re getting up to you’ve been with us a year, what’s it going to take to stay with us another year?

Or a lot of things are monthly. You have those monthly like retention and if they don’t stay, that’s called churn. And then there’s expansion where, okay, they’ve stayed, they’re staying. And now you have premium offers. Maybe it’s like private coaching. It’s an upsell. So there’s a whole timeline that, that happened right there.

So that’s the marketing funnel and the customer success funnel.

Jason Coleman: I think we need like one of those animated, of course things. Yeah, we’ll fund that.

Chris Badgett: They might upsell us at this recording studio to put that together. It might be a service they have here. And then SEO is also cool. I just wanted to throw in a quick pro tip.

I’ve been a student of SEO for a long time. Stands for search engine optimization. Like doing actual work to get your webpage, your content to rank at the number one for a search term. And I had a particular piece of content that I really wanted to rank number one. It was ranked 27 for a phrase. I worked with a great team that helped put together another piece.

It got to 23 or 17 in the search result. It was very competitive. And then I got some coaching, which we talked about earlier about being a lifelong learner about so I could study SEO and get better. And the coach made one comment, which was like, there’s this one article that if you just go read it and do everything in the article, I’m 99 percent sure you’ll get to number one.

So I did that. I went to that article, it’s by Brian Dean, the website is called Backlinko, and it’s called Google’s 200 ranking factors, the complete list. Then over the course of six months, I slowly implemented everything in that article. Now for the past year, this piece that I was trying to rank stays at number one.

It’s almost always at number one. I still continuously improve and tweak it. But just wanted to give a pro tip out there and that’s advanced SEO to like, go do all these 200 things. And like I said, I’ve been in it for a while, but it’s a, it’s definitely a nice skill to learn, or at least learn how to think that way.

Let’s turn the page in technology to one of the coolest parts, which is automation. So if you think about it one of the things that makes us human is our ability to use tools, right? Helped us invent. Agriculture, the industrial revolution, the information age, and it just keeps going on and on.

And now we have these tools that allow us to automate repetitive tasks or one off tasks that we no longer have to deal with our own inputs or reduce the amount of inputs. Automation is how you get leverage. So not only can you publish a course or membership. Online and reach the whole world. You can automate a lot of the processes involved in running that kind of initiative or business.

In the early days of LifterLMS, we had a saying that we wanted to scale the human touch with robotics. So what that means is use automation, use technology, but don’t forget about the human in the system. There’s this idea that, Oh, I make my online business, my course, and I’m on the beach and my, with my laptop for our work week, you can get there, but there’s nothing there’s passive income is a myth in my opinion.

But there’s so much you can do to do the work of five people, 10 people, a hundred people through automation and, reduce that demand on your. Individual human contribution. So I like to think about email automation as a good place to start. You can run an entire online business with just like a Gmail account, just manually reaching out to people, responding to people, sending them things that they asked for, but you can automate all of that, which the place to start, like we’ve talked in these sessions about.

Seeing patterns and frequently asked questions. So there’s two main places to start when you see those frequently asked questions, tying that this into the sales funnel or the customer success funnel side of the funnel. If you’re getting repetitive questions that like a lot of people have, you can create an email automation campaign.

Let’s say there they haven’t bought yet. So they’re in the prospect part of your funnel. Where you’re addressing this question in advance, even if they haven’t asked and email automations, you spread out over hours or days or weeks. So it’s like this drip campaign that just keeps running.

And same with onboarding Oh, anytime somebody starts this program, they always ask us. So after they buy maybe four hours later or the next day, there’s this email. Welcome to the program. Here are the next three things you should do next. Introduce yourself in the community, start with the intro course, and reply to this email with your biggest challenge so we can point you to the resource that would be most helpful for you.

That’s an example, by the way, of scaling the human touch with robotics, that last piece. Cause I didn’t try to automate that interaction away. I also said, reply to this email, which means a human is going to personal moment and like help that person in a unique way. So I definitely don’t recommend automating everything.

And then when it comes to e learning, the learning management system actually automates a ton of stuff like progress, tracking curriculum, delivery. You can get advanced with certifications, gamification, like achievement badges. Think about all the grading that teachers do in a traditional classroom, like on paper, like when we were kids, multiple choice quiz or test.

You can now have that be 100 percent automated. Just the website will do all the grading to instantly deliver the result. And the last thing I’ll just say tactically about not never is to never stop automating. It’s not that I’m obsessed with it, but I’m always looking for new opportunities to automate and get a little more leverage, a little more time back.

And when I have more time back, then I can be the human in the machine and be like, how can I create more value than anybody else for my avatar and deliver that really unique human aspect? And one of my favorite forms of automation, I’ve always been really big into video. When I was a high schooler, I was that guy in the friend group who had the video camera and take it with us, like rock climbing or hanging out and just filming stuff.

So I’ve been around video for a long time. I fell in love with the idea of video marketing. And so I see video as automation. I think of when you put yourself on YouTube as an example. And you’re just being authentically you and you’re just trying to help people. Maybe you’re marketing, content marketing.

Maybe you’re trying to help your customers, whatever you’re trying to do. You’re literally creating a digital twin of yourself that multiple people can be watching at once. So as Lifter LMS started to grow, as an example, I look at our YouTube channel as like multiple team members.

There’s a metric I follow called watch time. Not, likes and views are cool, but the actual amount of time somebody spent consuming your video content has far surpassed what I could do in real time without ever sleeping. So there’s like these, this group of team members are just constantly talking and created.

Over a thousand videos. And that’s how you get leverage.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah, every 40 hours of watch time is like a full time job, full time person. Yeah. Like just selling your stuff. It’s awesome. A couple of points on, when you’re, you said automate everything, which I agree with, and I think it’s related to a topic we talked about earlier about standard operating procedures and systems documentation for building a business.

And I always feel like an early version of like full automation, where like a human isn’t involved at all, it handles it, is like you write down the steps for a human to do that. And so these things are very related to me where you, I like starting with you write the SOP, here’s how I, as a human, do this thing, and now you have the guide, and are there steps in there that you can just automate a step, or you can, you learn how you can automate the whole thing.

But all you could also automate by outsourcing. So like another human can do this so you can hand over that SOP to someone and it’s as good as automated. So yeah it’s interesting thing how those two things are related. And then, we talked about email marketing and different kinds of sending emails in different forms and specifically answering like FAQ type questions by email.

I know when we do this in what we call email series of certain aspects. I generally tend folks as I’m working with them to email more than they feel comfortable with. It’s it’s almost always there because I spent like the FAQ is a great example because. If you say you had five really big questions people are thinking about before they convert about your course.

So that’s really five emails is probably best. It’s not, do you have any questions? Cause everybody just ignores it. But if the subject line is like, are you worried about X? You’re like, yeah, I am. Click and read. So each of those FAQs has to be a separate email. Say everyone only has one of those issues.

Those emails have a 20 percent open rate, which may or may not be good. But four out of those five emails won’t get opened. For the other one. And so if people are metric minded and they’re looking, they’re like, we send these five females, it feels inefficient. Most people aren’t even reading them.

It’s oh, but everyone who reads the one, focus on the conversions, and I think that’s good in general for a lot of the even YouTube stats is if you’re comparing yourself to like Mr. Beast, you’re like, you want like millions and millions of views. You’re like, nah, like hundreds of views, hundreds thinking of it and watch time.

But by email and most, anyway, so back to email, emailing, you should email more than you really feel comfortable with. People will get off your list. And Jared, I like to say, if someone’s like seeing your content and they want to get off the list, like they probably weren’t like a customer or they weren’t in your target market.

You, you can overdo it and be open to that feedback when you feel it and feel out if they’re actually a customer when they say you’re emailing too much. And you’re like, wait, is this like a real customer or my target market? Maybe I can combine some emails. But yeah, probably email more than you’re comfortable with.

Something else that, so when I think about automation, another thing I think about is artificial intelligence, AI, and that’s a big movement, it’s a big way. The end game of that is it’s automating almost everything a human can do. The tooling like the large language model chat, GPT, like tools are so good right now that you really have to be using these tools.

And I know some folks have like ethical concerns about the tools and how they scrape data from, artists and musicians and writers and. Who owns that content. I think there’s issues. It’s just like the MP3s where like it becomes so easy to share music that it’s just going to happen.

And you’re like, how do you, the world has to change to do this. It’s I think it was like if a robot is reading the internet faster than I can and learning, it’s just if I read the internet to learn too, it just does it way better than me. But anyway, so I think these tools aren’t going to go away.

So the best performers are people who are doing, doing the best and performing even in educating folks and getting the word out and running businesses are going to be using these tools. And so you should make sure that you, the people who work with the tools are going to benefit. So I think you should strategies to augment yourself with AI.

And so again, I’m talking about chat, GPT cloud, by anthropic perplexity is a good one for research, but these tools, you basically talk to the AI and they help you do things. And for writing in particular a method that you can use with chat, GPT, what I like to do is. This is an example of a good way to use this tool if you’ve only interacted with them sparsely.

So if I’m going to write a course, what I’ll do is I’ll write up my rough notes, really rough. Just dump out of my brain, don’t worry about punctuation, just space. I’ll take random notes from here, random notes from here. A conversation with someone else, so some of it’s my own words. I’ll put links in.

I’m like, I want the feel of this. So it’s very rough and it’s scattered and you almost have to fight it. And now I’m a writer, right? So I almost have to fight it, but the tendency to want to actually start writing and putting the thoughts together at this point, but if you dump that into something like chat GPT and you ask it, Hey, can you write a first draft?

And you even can update that content brief and that writing guide. And it’ll take that into account as well. It’ll write like a decent first draft and depending on what you’re talking about By decent, like it’s legible, it’s real English, and we’ve worked with some of these there’s good writing agencies, and there’s subpar ones, and it’s it’s funny sometimes you have a human write something before these, it’s like it’s it sounds like a robot wrote it, even though it’s a human who’s not actually engaging in the writing process doesn’t do as good of a job as these AI tools do at writing stuff.

So you get a first, a good first draft, then you edit the draft. And make sure and key point here is that you have to double check everything. I say, we also use AI tools for programming and we use AI tools for writing, and I would say every single line has to be checked and made sure it’s truthful.

It’s, if it’s code, it actually runs, it actually does what it says it’s supposed to do. Instead of writing you really have to. Go through and edit that draft a lot. You don’t want to just fix a couple things. Then, actually, after then, when you have a second draft that you wrote based on that first draft, you can ask ChatGPT for advice.

What I try to do is not just give it and say, hey, make it better, but say give it the thing you’ve written and say, can you give me some recommendations? And use your content brief for how I can do this better. Tell me what I should change. And it’ll say, it’ll give you like the advice and also make suggestions and then you can apply the suggestions because if you dump something in and just ask it to make it better it it can make changes you’re not aware of it, like does what’s called a hallucination or if you change things, it was, it gets confused.

But if you just ask it for advice and then you apply the advice at that stage of writing, it’s a good thing to do. And like another example of like how great AI is and like how it’s useful. I really try to, I use it in almost everything I’m doing to help me think. And used AI to help myself write the notes that we’re reading off of and using to guide this video.

So Chris has like a great outline. He went through it in one of the earlier sessions. And you had your talking points in a lot of these ahead of me. And so then I said, Hey, this is what the general topic is. This is the bigger overarching topic. Here’s what Chris said. And then ChachiPD knows about me.

There’s like a system prompt and it has this thing called memory where oh, okay. You run paid memberships pro. Now I know that you’re Jason Coleman. This is and then I can dump a little, and I would, we had, there’s a story part to this and I would write the story and be like, I want to talk about this.

And I’m like, I don’t really know, like what’s the right term for this. What’s this called? Did anyone else talk about this? I forget which website I heard this from first. And then chat GPT would take a stab at those notes. Here’s the topic points. Here’s the tactics. And here’s some information about other people who have talked about this.

And sometimes I’d be like, I actually don’t know anything about what you’re talking about. That’s actually not me. You’re, that’s something else. But sometimes it’ll nail it. It’s Oh yeah, that’s exactly how I operate. I know all about this. And thanks for helping me remember who, where I got that point from.

And it gave me a starting point for the, what is the strategy called? I was like, what’s the best way to phrase this? And I’m rambling about it. Like AI is good about. The zeitgeist and how people phrase things. So a lot of stuff we do, and that’s another way it’s useful for learning is there’s different ways to talk about this.

People use different terms, but that the AI is. Like literally programmed to be like the general, synthesis of everything on the internet. So it’s really good at pulling out this is how most people talk about this. So I used it to write these own notes.

Chris Badgett: We talked in an earlier session about the expert’s curse and not, being really advanced in the subject matter and needing to keep beginner’s mind in mind.

And that would be an excellent use of AI. Hey, I’m PhD in this topic, I’m making a course for beginners, help me, go back to the fundamentals and make sure I don’t get too advanced too quickly. Can you help me like focus? This is the outline I’m thinking, keep in mind is for beginners.

Can you help me like make sure I don’t gloss over any important fundamental information? That would be a great tool or a great way to use AI as an assistant. I also wanted to mention in our course plan challenge. Which kind of helps you figure out what course to make and come up with your course outline.

We use a concept called Ikigai, which is a Japanese term and way of figuring out your reason for being in the world, which is deep, but it essentially combines what you love, which is your passion, what you’re good at, which is your skills. What you can be paid for, like the marketability or financial possibility of this topic and what the world actually needs.

And we actually, Jason developed AI to help you in part of that training, some AI powered tooling to help you find your icky guy, which can then help you pick your course topic, which you can then outline with it. So use AI, just get started. It’s not a replacement. It’s a It’s a co pilot, it’s an assistant.

Let’s talk about productivity. AI makes you more productive, but productivity is an infinite well. I’m a fan of productivity. There is you can actually get too productive and burnout and there is some magic and like open space in your calendar or not having every, minute of your day planned out and stuff like that.

But, when you wear so many hats, it’s important to optimize and get more productive in the world, which we naturally do as humans as we move along in life. And, like for example, if you’re, if you become a parent, all of a sudden you have an entire new job that’s even more than full time and we tend to figure it out, but there’s productivity things that happen within that.

So I like to just continually invest in improving my productivity. I recommend people do the same. But also don’t over optimize there, leave some magic and space in your life. But with course creation and building these types of online businesses, the global theme I think about in terms of productivity is don’t let your brain.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Get Popup Maker NowIn this LMScast episode, Jason Coleman and Chris Badgett discuss teaching tactics for online courses, with an emphasis on how to interact with novices.

They discuss the value of comprehending the “beginner’s mindset” and the difficulties associated with being an expert. One important issue they raise is that it might be challenging for specialists to relate to novice students, which can result in too complex course content.

They suggest simplifying the material and employing “spiral learning,” in which students gradually go over subjects in more detail.

They also discuss the need to streamline your courses to concentrate on the most important 5% of the required information. As well as the benefits of iterating and improving course material based on student comments and experiences. This method facilitates pupils’ comprehension and retention of material. The episode emphasizes how important it is for instructors to assume their students’ roles to ensure that the material is understandable. Accessible, and pertinent to their requirements.

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Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: Welcome back to the education entrepreneur mentor series. This is a five part series where we go over the five critical hats. that you need to wear or have the skills contained within your team to find success as an education entrepreneur. Somebody who’s teaching online, building an online education company, coaching, or building an education based business.

Those five hats that need to be worn to cover the bases are becoming the expert. the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder. This is part three. We’re going to be getting into becoming the teacher. Enjoy this session with my business partner at Lifter LMS, Jason Coleman, and make sure you check out all five parts of this series.

Enjoy.

In this session, we’re going to talk about becoming the teacher or instructional designer, as it’s known in the e learning space. It’s one thing to be an expert in some kind of subject matter, but the ability to teach, to coach, to design curriculum is an important part of being an education entrepreneur.

Let’s start our conversation around Beginner’s Mind, which is a concept that comes from Zen Buddhism. And digging into that, I just want to touch on the idea that it’s easy to lose touch with the learner, particularly if you’ve been in your subject matter expertise for a really long time. We’ve all talked to somebody who’s an expert in something.

And it’s just going in one ear and out the other, it’s just too advanced. One of the strategies I learned around how to work with this, I learned from an instructional designer named Julie Dirksen. She has this concept called shelf space. So as we learn and master our subject matter, our shelf space and our ability to hold concepts, frameworks, you know, strategies, tactics, it just gets bigger.

Where as a beginner has a really small amount of shelf space because they’re new to the subject matter and when, if you don’t accommodate for that, the, the learner just kind of gets overwhelmed or there’s too much jargon in. So some of the ways to kind of get past that, and it’s also by the way called the expert’s curse.

So the expert just can’t get out of their own head and they’ve got their library of Alexandria with lots of shelf space. But one way to think about it is imagine talking to a previous version of yourself. What would that look like? Like you’re really advanced in investing, but if you were talking to you know, the investor that you were 15 years ago, you probably would kind of streamline it down a little bit.

And this is where this concept of minimum effective dose comes in. So it’s not about like. Let me pack my library of Alexandria of knowledge into this content. Just kind of give them everything. It’s more like, what’s the least amount that I could teach, explain, concepts. Potentially assignments, activities, and things to get them moving.

In the direction of expanding their shelf space. Julie also taught me the concept of spiral learning. Which is the idea that you don’t have to teach everything. You know, about a piece of a subject matter in one go. It’s actually a lot better to let’s say there’s like 10 key areas of a subject matter to do kind of a spiral across those 10 key areas on like fundamental ideas.

And then when you get back to, you know, that first area, then you can expand on that a little bit. So instead of trying to go deep on like one aspect and take them from, you know, elementary school to PhD, let’s go elementary all the way around and start building and it’s kind of how the traditional grade system works.

So at Lifter LMS as an example, one of our top performing lead generation tools, and also new customer or user onboarding tools is our quick start course, which has somewhere around 30, 000 people in it. And the concept behind that course is the idea that if I can only show people 5 percent of the most important aspects of the software, how to use it, how to set up the website, how to collect payments, create content and all that, what would I teach in that 5%?

So the course content is in total probably about 30 minutes. Even though if I were to teach everything that left your LMS does. I might need like five hours to kind of go over everything. But that would be completely overwhelming. Yeah,

Jason Coleman: I feel that. I think about that with my children too. And I always had trouble with that.

I have these very lofty ideas that I want to instill in them. But there’s like a framework, like that shelf that’s needed. He can’t talk about this complicated subject until you build the. You know, you have to meet the person where they’re at. When you’re teaching them.

I think a tactic I’ve. I’ve tried in some of the investing material. I’ve done is like I want to be able to have someone watch me as I’m researching a stock and I’m taking all the notes and writing all the very complicated things I’m doing.

And and actually benefit from that, like go along on that journey with me. But there’s like a list of like 20 things they have to know. So I actually like started with the end point and said, I want my students to be here. Like they understand they can watch this whole video and they know everything that’s going on.

And I can’t share that video with them yet. But that gives me like the syllabus for you know, all the aspects. I love the spiral thing. I think there’s other versions of that too, where you, you learn something and then. You, learn more and more and then.

It’s like good to relearn that thing. It was like a different context.

Like that was the easy version. There’s all these videos on YouTube. Does Fox media do them or something? And there it’s whatever. It’s like a symphony and five levels of difficulty or like.

You know that series is really good at like hammering that point of like, Here’s one way to understand it, and then there’s another level of understanding it, another level of understanding, the same thing.

That idea of like, going back to the basics. It’s good to, to realize that like your students aren’t as bored with like the basic information as, as you are. Like I was talking about the, you know, the stock research, like that’s what I do actually. And it’s easy for me. I’m like, I do it anyway. I could just put the camera on and then share it.

And it feels fun and I would love to talk to people and engage on that level. But if I was really trying to enter educate folks. That’s not gonna work. Like they need to know the basics. So it’s good to keep teaching the basics and getting better at it. And some of the best teachers that we know I think like Seth Godin, I think of Gary Vaynerchuk and Warren Buffett’s kind of like his, his annual letters, like would often hammer home the same points.

And if you follow these folks for a long time. You almost get bored of it too. You’re like, this guy has like three, you know, tricks or three things that he teaches. It was, is that like what do you call that? Like the mid twit mind. So it’s like, this guy only has three things he teaches or, and it’s like, that’s so exciting.

Then in the middle, it’s like. I have three things he teaches. Like, that’s nothing. Then the expert is like, actually only have like one or three things that you teach. And so, yeah, I, I think if you really dig into that, trying to educate folks, like. Educate the basics. Like give the same talk over and over.

I used to do more conferences and talks and I would feel almost like a comedian. Like I did my set. It’s recorded. Peace out. Now I’m working on my next one. Like, and there’s some part of me that felt bad if I gave the same talk more than once. But it doesn’t really make sense because if you’re in a different conference, 10 percent is like folks who’ve seen it before.

But also if you give the same talk over and over again, you can make it better and better and get good at delivering it. And so I’ve seen that also like on the conference circuit, like folks give the same talk. And then I think another tactic is to take intro courses for things, things that you think you know, really well already.

So I think folks are surprised if I think I understand investing really well, and I’d be, you know, if I. I bought a course because I thought it was interesting. I would want to skip to like the later sections where the meat is and it’s like, nah, slow down and just see how they explain the basics. And every once in a while you see something, you’re like, Oh, I didn’t actually realize that.

I didn’t know that the origin of that was here. Or I didn’t know that was pulled from this. You know, where that came from. And I guess a personal story, you know, that helped me understand some of these concepts of like focusing on the basics and going back to the basics. I was at a conference and actually it was interesting.

I was going to do a 40 minute talk and about a week before they said, can you instead do like a four hour workshop? And I was like, I guess let’s go, you know? So I took my talk and I turned it into a workshop and I had an early slide. It was a business one on one workshop. So it was like folks starting out building a business from scratch.

And I talked about some of the stuff that we talked like in the operation section. And I had a slide early on that was like, Hey, let’s review the stuff you guys already know, like in business, you want to make money. What is that? That’s revenue minus expenses equals profit. Everyone’s on board. Cool.

Next slide. And when I said next slide, like half the audience was like, wait, wait, wait, what, what go back? Can I write that down? And I was like, Whoa, like these folks, like they’re, they were good photographers. They were good at selling the things they sold. They were good at tinting windshields. Like the result, it was like a really interesting Collect a group of people with like small businesses as, but they had never really thought of this stuff and it, it actually, you know they didn’t consciously think about even something as, it seems as basic to me as like profit and revenue and expenses.

And so I was like, slow down and I went back and, you know, spent some time on that slide.

Chris Badgett: I remember there’s this football coach. I can’t remember which one, like some of the great coaches, but he had this thing where the very first day of the very first practice, his very first kind of teaching to the football team was this is how you tie your shoes.

Jason Coleman: Like

Chris Badgett: going literally to the very first step. And if you look at the offline world, like a great teacher, let’s say in a university, a professor. They may get like a new class of freshmen every year. So they’re like kind of physically forced to be reminded, okay, these are freshmen. They’re just getting started and then they can perfect it over time.

And also just want to note that the beginner’s market is often the biggest market. So if you look at YouTube videos and You know, or if you look at like course sales on Udemy and stuff, like the, whatever subject matter 101, like these courses often have the best sales. So if you need motivation to like keep it simple, just remember there’s often a lot of revenue potential by not forgetting about the beginners.

Let’s talk about instructional design. What is it? Why is it important? Cause sometimes like a beginner might think, Oh, I just need to get on camera, talk about my subject matter expertise. But what you’re designing is not just content, you’re designing a learning journey. It’s, it’s not a content dump.

We’re not putting the library of Alexandria like in video format and crossing our fingers and hope they figure it out. So it’s, it’s all about designing a transformational path. So the main ones we see in online education in terms of transformational paths are like, you know, incremental improvements or.

Like big result, big transformation, and some of the top, you know, highest value courses and memberships and communities actually help somebody create a new identity. So, think about that. What is the end result? Design for the end result. Do the chunking and work backwards from that end result and create the milestones like we talked about in a previous session.

But also, think about Getting your learners taking action to make the progress, because people need more than just content to learn and make a change. And some of the ways to think about that are, yes, they need some content, they need some core ideas, concepts, strategies. But this is why I’m a big fan of assignments, particularly if you’re helping somebody go from A to B.

Giving them like, okay, we’ve learned this concepts, now do X. And also maintain beginner’s mind and remember this may be the first time they’re doing that. So get them taking action. Potentially, we’ll talk about community later, but perhaps, you know, getting involved in like a social learning aspect like learning together can add more richness to the experience.

And then as a side note, it is good. They’ll also be entertaining. So like a boring teacher, that’s just blah, blah, blah. Here’s the, here’s your homework. Make it fun and entertaining. If you look at some of the top performing YouTube channels, they’re entertaining as well. It’s, there’s a term for that.

It’s called edutainment. We recently about a year or two ago at Lifter LMS designed. We wanted to focus on a problem of, okay, sometimes people are buying our softwares, but they’re not ready. They don’t have their course idea. They’re kind of doing things out of order, which is a challenge. Like maybe they’re buying software, maybe they’re studying ads or.

Trying to build an affiliate program, but they don’t actually have their course figured out yet. Like, what’s it called? Who’s it for? What’s the syllabus? Maybe start creating that content. So we designed a free mini course called the Course Plan Challenge to help people figure out, A, what topic that they sh would be best for them to focus on.

How to really define their avatar, which we’ve talked about in a previous session. How to start doing the curriculum design. And so we’re Kind of getting people ready for the software through training and really just mastering that beginner’s mind. So if you think about, this is why fourth dimensional thinking is really important.

You’re not just providing content in an isolated bubble of time. These people are on a journey, you’re hooking into a pain point or an opportunity for a particular person, all the way to them being successful with your program and what do they need throughout that, like content, ideas, worksheets, you know, there’s a lot of multimedia, which we’ll talk about a little bit that you can do to kind of make your experience even richer, but yeah, plant, think through time, not just like it’s an isolated, isolated package that they need to know about.

Jason Coleman: That course plan challenge course is awesome. Like, so here’s a plug for that. I, I think I definitely have like, I, I Helped implement it on the website in certain ways. So I had to like, look at it too. That was my first exposure to it was kind of not taking the course, but just like doing stuff.

But then afterwards I referred back to it when I was planning a course on myself, my own. And I bet you probably do too. You almost like go back to your own course.

Chris Badgett: That’s the same planning.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s awesome when you have like a piece of content like that. Yeah. Yeah. A few posts and things that I reference the, you know, in the, the book I wrote about WordPress is one of those two where it’s like, Oh, I don’t remember this, but I wrote about it in the book.

It’s funny. Yeah. So yeah, plug for the course plan challenge. That’s awesome content. I yeah, you talked about like being entertaining and turning it on that’s tough for me. I remember, I think of like the teacher’s voice, like my kids in elementary school, all the good teachers, like they, you know, you’re talking to them, like they have a normal voice and then when they’re talking to students, man, I would like mimic it now, you know, but it’s like higher pitch and you’re like, Oh yeah. And like, you know, energetic and you get it, making it sound exciting. You’re talking about the boring stammer, but it’s like, this is awesome. It’s funny you said that. Then it like triggers in my head now, like I should turn that on for this.

And I, I don’t practice it enough. I think to have it natural. And I remember thinking about that when I was homeschooling my kids for about a year in COVID, I was like, I think the content is good. But like, I really think like, the teacher. I don’t have like, the energy they need right now, and I like that they’ve taken action too and I thought I could ask you, cause I, I feel like I struggle with this when I’m consuming content, I like, I like to read books, and sometimes reading books at like, 11 at night, before you, before you go to bed, or like, early in the morning, no one’s around, and and it’s a business book and I’m like, that’s really good ideas.

And it’s like, okay, now take action and do these things before you read the next chapter. And I’m like yeah, no, no, actually later. So I don’t know if you have tips for like encouraging that or making folks more likely to take those action and those next steps.

Chris Badgett: I think just to answer that real quick, that’s one of the cool things about learning management system is you can use things like required assignments.

Prerequisites, like you can’t move on to the next section to fill or drip content. You can’t, the next one isn’t coming for another week. So to create the space. So I

Jason Coleman: think like the course plan challenge has like a very clear, there was like six part layout of start to finish some of the stuff we’re talking about, you know, how to develop the outline and plan for your course.

Another method I’ve seen work with folks is to design a course through like content accumulation and then later strategically curate it. So, you know, the idea here is to produce content, useful content, continuously. And I talked before about like eBomb as a method of that, whenever you answer a question for someone.

As an expert, other people have that question, write it down, share it somehow, put it somewhere. It’s good to publish it if possible, but if, even if not, just kind of write, write down all this content. And force yourself to do that, and get good, and then at the end, you, you can or, organize it into, you know, a structured learning path.

You could build it into a course, some other versions of this Are like, so you have, say like blog posts once a week for a year, you got 52 blog posts. Then you can build these hubs around common concepts or use cases. Or it’s often called pillar content from like a marketing perspective. So like, cool, you talked about you know, once we’ve done in the past, so I’m thinking we have membership software.

And so we’re answering all these questions about the different problems of setting up a membership site and running a site and thinking about pricing and things like that, and then. We build content hubs around common use cases. So we have a hub for course people who are building like a course, like memberships and people who are building associations and people who are building video sites and we aggregate all the content into those hubs.

And then what’s good when you’re building those hubs is you’ll realize there’s gaps in the content. So when you do that practice of curating the content into a course or a hub or a pillar. You’re like, Oh, you know what we don’t have is, you know, we’re trying to All the content from A to B on this topic, we’re actually missing some of the key questions we don’t answer, or we link out to someone else’s website for that, or we often refer some other tool, and it’s like, oh, that’s a missing piece that we should write ourselves.

So yeah, we did that for Penguin Research Pro with the use cases. It was awesome because we’ve been writing content for years and years and years. When we put together the hubs, we kind of did almost for ourselves as like a practice to help us focus on the use cases. It was something that we could deliver to folks when they sign up, Hey, what use case are you?

And then we give them the hub. It’s like, here’s a better way to like browse through our content. And when, when we put it together, we were like, we were given that as like a freebie add on to the full membership. And we’re like, this is valuable in itself. This feels like. More valuable than the software, like the ideas that we’ve been talking about.

So you might find content you’re building for some other reason when you package it together, it becomes valuable and you can put a price tag on it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think one of the things is like this presentation, these sessions are all about really identifies an aspect of this, where when you put your customer at the center of your business and not your product.

Like you mentioned, Oh, this, this other thing may be more valuable than the software. What that, in my view, what that comes from is, okay, this, this particular type of customer in this case, they need technology, which we’re going to talk about in another session. And that’s what we do. That’s what our business is.

And we incorporate a lot of the other things we’re talking about here, but they need help with all these other things like becoming a teacher you know, being a subject matter expert, building community and so on. So you can expand outside of the scope of your core business and just provide more resources to help people even further.

And that’s just a helpful way to think about it. And like you said, you can sometimes signpost other resources like, Oh, well, they really need to figure out this other thing. There’s this other expert over here and just introduce them to another body of work. There’s a saying, just because you’re on the train, it doesn’t mean you have to carry the luggage.

So sometimes you can use. Your depth of knowledge and connections to point people in other areas that are going to support them. That ultimately supports your core business as well. Let’s talk about lesson design. People are not robots and there’s variation in personality types, culture you know, predispositions and learning, it often comes up and there’s like multiple learning styles.

So how do you design for that? And there’s also consumption styles. Like how do people like to consume content or engage in community or get support? Kind of the classic learning style thing is, well, there’s visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Visual people are they like watching videos. They like seeing, like, pictures and graphics.

Auditory people like to listen. If you listen to podcasts, and like a lot, like me, you’re probably an auditory person. There, there’s a few you know, really nerd out on YouTube. You’re probably a visual person. There’s also the, the readers, like people who like to read, you know, I know lots of people who they really dislike video and they, they prefer to read.

Kinesthetic people they don’t like reading, watching videos or listening. They just, they’re actually really into like the assignment, the get moving, like get action. I just want to start like playing with this software or this movement technique or these art implements and just start, I, I learn by doing is what kinesthetic is.

And then there’s the it’s not really a tension span, but it’s the idea that some people like rip through content and they’re just like scanning and then other people are deep divers like they read every word, they watch the video really slowly, they’ll like email you and be like, Hey, you have a typo here on line 736 about whatever, like they’re very detailed.

So when I’m creating content either for marketing or as part of training, I think about that sort of a classic example of that. If I’m doing a video lesson and there’s like a big idea and concept and thing, I’ll kind of spotlight at the beginning for the scanner people who are going to move really fast and maybe not watch the whole thing just to kind of give them their, their quick hit.

But then of course I’ll go into detail and do the whole deep dive for the deep divers. And then the quizzing and assignments aspect. This really helps the, particularly the assignments help the kinesthetic learners. So like, cool, we’re actually, we have a project here. We’re going to do something.

So not just creating content for consumption, but think about action. And I, I really learned about this different learning style, content consumption style, making sure we’re taking action and not just consuming information. At Lifter LMS as an example with our support, I lean more, and many of us, by the way, are we do all these things like we scan, we deep dive, we watch, we read but you’re often stronger in one area.

Like, I think you’re more of a reader, I’m more of a, you know, video audio guy, but I also know you like video and I also read, but you probably have a primary, it’s kind of like a personality type, but when doing support for software like Lifter LMS. I realize the biggest mistake we can make is to assume the world is as we are, particularly in a teaching role.

If you happen to love videos and all you do is make videos and have a YouTube channel and have video lessons, you’re kind of ignoring a large percentage of the population. So we’ve made a commitment to make technical documentation with a lot of words, a lot of screenshots. And we do YouTube tutorials for the video learning folks.

We do courses that have more assignments and just mix all the multimedia styles. We do live calls. Some people, like, really like to learn in community. You get into that and, like, people have different types of conversation preferences. Like, oh, I just want to send an email. I want to jump on Zoom. I want to watch your live stream and not have the pressure of being live on a call with you, but I’ll be in the comments and you’ll notice people cluster, you’ll start seeing the same names in different places.

So thinking about that is, is, is one way to do that. And, and like even something like a refund policy for a course or membership. That’s really for the kinesthetic people. Like I don’t want to read your sales page. I’m just going to buy the thing. And then if I don’t like it, I’m going to ask for a refund.

We also do trials as a conversion tool. So that’s for the. I don’t want to read your sales page. Let me test it out before I buy it. And and even in the software itself, like there’s places as an example that like, oh, here’s a video tutorial, here’s a link to technical documentation. The way the course builder works, it, it kind of encourages people to create different.

You know, types of learning content and resources. So it’s a, it’s like personalities, you know, so many personalities in the world at the same thing applies to what the different types of learners, and they may, they may be exactly your same avatar, but they’re going to have all that variation and personality.

Jason Coleman: With the different learning styles and the kind of content types, modalities of making content. I know it puts pressure on folks that they feel like, Oh, I have to be a good writer and a good video person and make podcasts. And I have to build, you know, visual displays of this information. But what’s good is there’s lots of tooling and help you can get with those stages.

So I, I always recommend like starting with the modality that you’re most comfortable with. And then using that to build things. So an example for myself, like, I think I I’m a reader, I’m a writer. So when I was doing video and trying to do it off the cuff, it’s not coming across as well. And it got easier for me when I scripted it, basically like wrote a blog post and then like, you know, kind of sort of read it as I was doing the video.

But that helped me like organize my thoughts and figure out what was important to talk about. And, and some people go in the, and actually I’ve gone in the opposite direction. Sometimes there’s like a very complicated topic and I don’t actually understand it. I started recording and I ramble with someone on my marketing team and they just ask me questions and they dig deep.

Then they get a bunch of content and they’re like, okay, I’m going to turn this into a blog post, a written blog post. There’s tooling, like if you made the video, you made a bunch of videos and now you want to make blog posts, you can get the transcripts.

And run it through something like ChatGPT and say, here’s my transcript, write me like a blog post, and it you don’t want to paste, you know, post that directly, but it gives you like a really good first draft if you’re good at making video and not so good at making, you know, writing stuff from scratch.

And, and I yeah, just, so. Yeah, just, it is so important. I know like on my team, we’ve had a lot of written content over the years and we try to do more video and you the best version of a YouTube video is like thinking specifically about the YouTube market and how they consume content and how long it is, and it should be visual and not just words, not just a talking head, like the ideal, most Produce videos on YouTube.

The ones that do really well are very well thought out. There’s kind of an 80, 20 there where they’re like, I have the blog post. If I film myself talking head, reading the blog post, that’s better than no video at all. And so, and it’s a good starting point. And then you can see if you gain traction, you know, like, Oh, there’s a little bit of traction in this video.

We should probably make a better one. So that’s encouraged folks start with the modality that, that you’re best with use that to kind of go into the other media realm. And then, you know, allow yourself to 80, 20, like just put something out there. It’s not perfect. People still appreciate it because they want to listen to it while they’re washing their dishes.

They can’t, you know, read it on the laptop, whatever.

So another thing that, you know, when I think about building courses and educational material it’s important to focus on a single path learning journey. So you’re going from A to B, but there’s a bunch of options in the middle. There’s a, he said. You know, use different tools and, and so it’s, it helps, especially with the first version of things to simplify by addressing like one clear path from start to finish.

And so an example of that that, you know, notoriously it was hard for me was I’ve tried, I don’t think we even have something on our website called the membership handbook. But with our membership site handbook, we’ve been doing this for like over 15 years. And it’s like, day one, I was like, we should have a quote unquote handbook for how to set up a membership site.

We have these content hubs and other things, but there’s probably seven drafts of the membership site handbook. The thing that killed it every time early on was that there’s so many options for like, where do you host your website? You know, which tool do you use? Our tool, of course. Okay, cool.

That’s an easy decision. But then it’s like, which email tool do you use? Which You know, how do you build your course if you’re building it? And, and I found the membership handbook that’s gone on. I’m never going to make it, but I’ve made similar content. It helps to simplify. It’s one path. It’s like, so I, I note the choices, but then make one choice for them.

That’s the default choice. And it helps to remember your customer avatar when you’re doing that. Cause you’re like, Oh, who am I talking to? I’m Oh, Chris Badgett. You know, as my avatar, you have like this very specific person you’re talking to, you can kind of guess which tool they already have or that they’re going to know about and just pick that one, pick the obvious one or the default one or the one that you have a partnership with.

And yeah, like the, the path that the folks are learning is like membership site handbook. Another problem with that is it’s like a vague concept. It’s not like, you know launch your membership site or get your first membership sale or find your first member. Or it’s even, we have six different use cases.

So a handbook for each use case would probably be good. It’s too vague. It’s good to, Hey, you’re taking Crispadget, your avatar from A to B to a very specific outcome, like we talked about and yeah, eliminating those what ifs. That’s the other thing too. So there’s options of tooling and ways you could go about things, but there’s also like almost FAQ style, like, what do you do if this happens?

What do you do if this happens? What if. You, you know, your customer you’re selling to doesn’t have a lot of money, so you probably, what if this, what if that and take note of those, maybe you even have FAQ sections, but don’t let it derail you when you’re writing the first draft from A to B, just, you know, log those what ifs for later, and assume it, you know, the ideal situation.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think one way you can kind of litmus test yourself. If you’re at the handbook idea, it’s getting a little out of hand, getting hard to like figure out what to do next, how to structure. I call this problem in the course industry, creating a giant course. So if you find yourself like, Oh, this is expanding.

This is like 50 or a hundred lessons. It’s probably getting a little long in the tooth and it can be really liberating to think about many courses. So. Like with Paid Memberships Pro as an example, like, a handbook for associations sounds easier to create as a separate thing from like a handbook for course creators a handbook for communities, and so you, you kind of Can separate those out.

And if the same trainings are relevant to your avatar, just not all jumbled together, then a membership or course bundle can be used to offer access to that. So you allow a bit of it, a little bit of that choose your own adventure while also like kind of simplifying the learning experience in each of the many courses.

Let’s talk about user experience design. We’ve talked about learning journeys, but It’s, it’s really important to think about designing that as like a total user experience and how people learn through time. So, you know, traditional school system starts elementary all the way up to higher education, and that’s a process that can take you know, years, decades.

But so like you kind of get the macro view, but if you really zoom in on the micro view, like just take it one step at a time and when you kind of chunk things down to lessons it’s good to come up with your, your own instructional design framework. So here as an example, we’re talking through like topic area.

Like a big idea slash strategy. Then we get into some tactics and then we’re using story as a way to do like case study, learning with examples through story. And then we’re also adding in a little conversation, which people learn from. I found it really interesting. The Google’s notebook, LLM, I think it’s called like, you can give it a resource.

And the way you learn is you have this option to turn it into a car, an AI generated conversation, people learn by that. And that’s what we’re doing here. We’re having a conversation react and so on. But one of the easiest ways like to come up with your instructional design framework is to think of concepts.

So like, what are the big ideas? What are the strategies? What are the tactics? And then give people specific actions to take to move forward. And we have a lot more options besides quizzing. Like I’m just going to check, some people call that a knowledge check to make sure like you got, you got the core ideas.

But getting people involved in projects, there’s things, there’s a type of learning called project based learning. It’s not just about theory. This goes back to that idea of different learning styles. Some people do really good with theory and they can kind of extrapolate and figure out how to put it into practice.

Other people do better with like, let’s get moving in a project and kind of back in and back and reinforce like what the core concepts are. The other thing is designing for what happens when people get stuck when they fall down. This is the same thing that happens in traditional education where, you know, you have your all stars.

You have your people that are kind of getting left behind and you have like the average performance. So design through time what kind of resources and support you want to have. That could be like office hours. It could be a contact form, like right next to syllabus. So a student could like privately reach out to the instructor.

It could be some community aspect. Which we’ll talk about in a little bit. I heard this phrase once, like surround yourself with help. That’s what you want your people to feel like. There’s a whole, And there’s this great training, but there’s also like all these resources and there’s like a menu of them that can appeal to different personality types and consumption styles.

And I was in a training or a coaching program called SAS Academy, and I, I thought it was a really cool implementation. There was probably 300 courses in there. There was live. Coaching, training, and coaching calls. There were in person events in big cities around the U S three times a year. There’s a Facebook group.

There was you could just like email the company and get help. So like, it was just like a full featured robust user experience that had like tons of resources and people could really choose their own adventure through it. All while driving to the same outcome.

Jason Coleman: When I think about. Resources and support and like additional help around like a core, you know, course or learning experience.

Sometimes there’s a lot of different options and you can kind of copy what you’ve seen elsewhere or kind of what’s been recommended or some things might seem obvious. But a lot of times it’s good to, you know, get the core material out there. And as long as you have a way for your, you know, your users to get back to you through like a, you know, send them an email, ask for feedback.

Have a contact form have, you know, if there’s a support or you dump them into a community where people can chat, like, it’s, it’s important to get that feedback and that feedback is kind of, they’re going to tell you what they needed. There’s this kind of trick where you could almost do this too. I actually, I thought of this, I do this with my kids.

I’ve never done it with in the context of business, but someone’s birthday is coming up and you don’t know what to get them. You can pretend like I just got you like the best thing for your birthday and you’ll never guess what it is. And you’re like, actually, try it. Like, do you think you know what it is?

And they’ll guess and if you keep track of the guesses, you’re like, all right, well, here’s three things that Chris wants for his birthday. So it feels like that kind of thing where if you kind of it’d be interesting to like do that in advance. Working on bonuses, like you’ll never guess what they are.

Actually try to guess. And then what people say is like that they’re telling you what they want. And you’re like, okay, cool. That’s they, you know. This person used a core resource, but they need, you know, extra documentation support or video, or they want something else and you can figure it out. And so, yeah, it’s interesting.

Like, I think you, you mentioned designing like the total user experience and there’s different modalities and having these extra things you know, tagged onto your content and that really helps reinforce and, and get the outcomes that you want and it’s really important. I feel like a lot of times I’m, I’m like the keep it simple guy or, or I see the importance of that.

And I also remember all the conversations I’ve had with folks who feel slowed down by that or paralyzed by that, or like, I’m never going to be able to do all that. So I talked about like, Hey, there’s different media and modalities that you can produce your content as like, pick the one you do the best and focus on that and make that the core of what you’re doing and make sure you ship that at least.

So if you write well, right. And if you’re good on camera, do videos. And as always, like, I think it’s good to start small and try to, you know, we’ve talked in different ways of trying to not make it too complicated, bite off, you know, something you can chew, work on that, do it really well publishing early is important when I talked about earlier in sessions, how there’s a difference between like putting the content together and just having it ready for publish and actually publishing it and putting it out there.

You get feedback. There’s folks who I forget the fellow has a writing course and he loves Twitter. He’s like, I tweet a bunch of random stuff and whenever tweets get engagement, that’s the core idea. I should make sure when I write my book, I actually focus on that. So he wants to write books and share books, but you know, he tweets because he gets a sense of like, which of the ideas are kind of, are hitting his audience the best.

So that’s a form of publishing and, you know, early, like small forms, teasers you wrote the first lesson, push that out there, see if you can get attention. There’s lots of ways to do that. And also not just publish early, but get paid early. If you’re trying to make money on these things, there is always a difference of the audience who’s willing to consume this, but not pay for it.

Or the person who’s paying for it is a different type of customer or user reader learner. And so getting money involved in the system, like makes it real for, for yourself and also for the person learning. And you said to one thing at a time, like step by step. So focus. I think, like, I think about paid memberships pro and off the lift our own messes this way too, where there’s so many features in the core product, there’s so many add ons, there’s so many other plugins, third party plugins, you can tie in other services.

And a lot of people come to the software and they see it on, they get excited and it’s like funner for them to like. Add a form, add a community, add an email list, it should be drip feed, right? I guess everyone’s doing that and they, they get overwhelmed and it’s kind of like, well, like remember you’re trying to help your learner get from point A to point B, focus on the core, you know, experience and educational content you’re producing, make sure you nail that, and then these things are accessories, they’re helpers, they’re additional, and definitely it is better to have them, but it’s also good to do one at a time so that folks don’t feel overwhelmed.

Dispersed. It’s kind of like if you start at the same time, like a slack, a Facebook group and an online community, like they don’t know where to go. You know, it’s like only one of those at a time.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Even like what we’re, what we’re doing here is we’re kind of expanding the shelf space to be like, Hey, there’s all these personality types.

There’s all these different content types. There’s all these consumption styles. And so you still, like as an expert can, you know, kind of research and we’re, we’re expanding your mind here you don’t have to implement everything right away, but the first step is just like kind of awareness that. Oh, wow.

This, this is more rich and nuanced and detailed and there’s all these options, but then like you said, shrink it back one step at a time and don’t forget beginner’s mind. And some of the most successful people I see with softwares like ours are, you know, they take consistent and perfect action, but they also continuously improve.

So this is why, you know, doing a signature course, like one main thing might be a good idea. Cause it’s like. When you podcast or you become a YouTuber, there’s a saying that your first video is your worst video. So if you’re continuously improving, I’m like, all right, it’s been a year or whatever. I’m gonna remake that course or I found that I could better train my learners using this method of like concept, activity, community conversation, whatever it is.

I need to retool or supplement that old lesson. So It’s not about just moving on or doing too many things at once. I wanted to double click on support systems. Cause I think this is how it holds a lot of potential and it’s poorly understood. And I like to tell a story with this. There’s a popular online education platform called masterclass.

I think it’s about. 19 a month or something like that. And they did, they build a great product there. You can learn from the best in the world and like what amounts to about of hour of training per course. And you can learn how to tell jokes from Steve Martin. You can learn a business from Sarah Blakely and how to be an entrepreneur and stuff like that.

But if you get stuck and you fall down. Or you have questions, they’re not there to interact with you. There’s literally zero support and that’s why it’s 19 a month. But if you want, there may be somebody who’s not as far along as as Steve Martin is a comedian, but there may be this other person who.

Teaches stand up comedy who you can talk to one on one who will review your bits or your jokes and like give you feedback So like you may be able to charge that that comedy educator may be able to charge 2000 for the course, for the signature course called zero to like, you know, improv comedy success or whatever, because they’re like really supporting you and support systems similar to consumption styles and learning styles.

There’s two layers to this. One layer is what do you like to do? This is your world. This is your creation. Do you like doing one on one coaching? Do you like moderating and holding space for a community? You like doing office hours, like, there’s all these different ways. Do you like email? Do you like text message?

Like, some people do support, like, hey, unlimited instant message. And there’s, there’s two vectors of this. And this is actually really detailed out in detail in the course plan challenge to help you think through this. But there’s two kinds of support. There’s synchronous and asynchronous. So synchronous means I’m helping you in real time together.

So that could be a one on one call could be instant messenger. It could be like a group training that you do live. It could be a in person event and then asynchronous. Some people prefer like, Hey, I need time freedom. I don’t want my calendar filled up when I’m doing things kind of in my own speed.

Email support may be better for that. And you have to set expectations. So people are like, Hey, I haven’t heard from you in five minutes. Like you need to set like what your expectations are. Then the other vector is private versus group. So if you do offer one on one like synchronous private coaching support.

Or you offer one on one email support. That takes more time, but it’s more valuable. So you can charge a lot more. And you can even have plans on your course or your membership where like, you know, it’s like course only, 200 bucks. Course plus group coaching, 1, 000. Course plus private coaching, 5, 000. So it, it affects like the value and just anchoring that to this idea of like masterclass where it’s 20 bucks a month or it’s here and I have your back and we’re going to be working together privately.

It’s 2, 000 a month. So figure out both what you want as an individual, cause this is your creation and two, what would be most helpful for your customer avatar? Cause. You know, for example, if I was helping somebody or an avatar that had a certain health concern or, or medical challenge, they may not want any kind of group, anything, it’s a private thing and they just, so my, it would not be appropriate to even explore the group options, but maybe it is, it just depends on your avatar and my pro tip for you is the easiest way to add this to do it and support your people better, but also to make more money is to offer what I call a group.

Ask me anything, office hours. So this is a group coaching call. You could do it on you know, like a webinar platform. And you could do it on a YouTube live stream with comments. You could even do it not by face, like, Hey, there’s a time of day. I’ll be in this Slack channel. You see people do this on Twitter sometimes like, Hey, I’m waiting at the airport, like ask me anything for the next hour, but the cool thing about the office hours is it’s time boxed.

Like, let’s say it’s an hour every week or every two weeks or once a month, so you’re only committing as a creator to, you know, that time box. It’s also scalable. You could have two people show up. You could have 201st come, first serve, or you take the questions in advance and kind of choreo graph it a little bit.

But that’s the quickest way to go from the $20 a month. Do DIY self-study training to actually having some high fidelity support system that doesn’t eat your lunch for time. Provides a lot of value. Also actually creates a little bit of community aspect. ’cause people will be at the office hours and I’m like, oh, that’s a great question, even though they didn’t come up with it.

And then they’re, they’re learning. So and that, that’s what we did at Lifter LMS too. I realized. You know, selling software, there’s a lot of this like automate everything, have a passive, you know, business, but like there was so much demand, you know, you see it in emails and stuff, can I just get on a call with you?

I’m like, well, we don’t charge like an arm and a leg for the software. In fact, a lot of it’s free. How can I, but how can I meet this need? Oh, so we introduced the office hours, which happens once a week and it continues to, we’ve been running it for about five years.

Jason Coleman: We used to have consultation calls, so it’s like for 300, you could talk to us for an hour about anything.

And then some folks are like, I can’t afford 300. Then I tried a couple times to be like, all right. I’ll help you out, just let me record it, and I can use it for content. They’re like, that’s weird, what is the way I want to do it? But then you’re like, that’s exactly what the open office hours are, like they ask me anything, and it’s just a reframing of that you know, it’s such a multiplier on, force multiplier on your time.

So we have a version of that now too, it’s, it’s great. And it’s also a good source of, you know, for content. I think I love it. Like all the different, you know, ways you can support someone. And I think something that’s important to remember when you’re kind of presenting these options and kind of writing sales pages for them and things like that is to.

Explain like what, what the common experience is like when, when you submit a ticket, this is what’s going to happen when you get on the call. This is exactly what’s going to happen. And even better yet, like testimonials that are like, I had this issue. I talked to Chris for 30 minutes and totally solved my issue.

So that, that can be like, it’s easy to forget that you kind of like, Hey, we do this, this and this. And people have like an expectation or some kind of pretense or like, like you said You’re in a marketplace of other people solving the same solution, and you’re trying to stand out by like delivering a superior support experience.

You’re like, you got to tell people up front that it’s superior and kind of own it. So we had an exercise too, where we revamped our support page, where it’s like, we’re actually better than everyone, but we’re not telling them. So like, let’s tell them tell the person, you know, about to enter our funnel.

There’s different ways to deliver support. And what you’ll find, even if your intention is not to have a channel, a new channel for support, everything is support. Any way that someone can talk to you, they will. Use it for support. I mean, we turned off blog comments on our blog posts a while ago because 90 percent of them were random support.

So it’s like, here’s a blog post about how to do this thing. And it’s like, my comment’s not about what you wrote about, but I was wondering how to do this. And I was like, did you not see the like click for support link in the upper right of the page? So yeah, yeah, every method is going to be support.

You should decide up front the best way that you support your, your users and your learners and how you, your preferred methods of communication and then stick to it. So, but it is good still to like allow the support to originate from anywhere organically, cause you, you kind of can’t fight it. But funnel it proactively into the channels.

So some, for example. Like another funny example, like to support comes out, I would do these customer conference surveys, so I am going to call you and I’ll ask you some questions for my benefit to learn more about my customer. And when I coach my team, he’s doing this too, is like at least half of them.

They’re only taking the call cause they, that’s the way they know to talk to you on the phone and they have a support question they’re going to ask you. So it’s like, try to answer the support thing and then be like, Hey, I helped you. Can you help me answer these questions now? But we also you know.

When folks are DMing you on Twitter or contacting you you know, if it’s a quick answer, answer it, but always, even if you answer it quickly, say the best way to get help is to go through the proper channel. The fastest way to get help is to go through the proper channel. Something I use now, because I have a team, is like, I’m not actually the best person to answer this question.

I know I seem like it is because I’m kind of the face of the company, but the team is experts, or experts, and they know this better than I do. So, every time you redirect support, kind of include that. And yeah, the other thing, you know, about this when, you know, doing support is that exceptions become the expectations.

So an example of that is we do technical support through our ticketing system on the website, and we don’t do support on the weekends because our teams working Monday through Friday. And sometimes the team is like. I’m not doing anything. I really care about this person’s project. I’m going to go above and beyond and help them on the weekends, like, cause they just can’t help it.

They’re like, Oh, it’s a problem in my head. And and so they give the feedback on the weekend and that’s okay to do in extreme cases or sometimes every time you do that, that person just learned, Oh, actually they do do support on the weekends. Or they do do support through Twitter. I mean, this is like a cliche Twitter is like, you call the phone system.

How do I, can you help me with my purchase? I want a refund. No, you can’t do a blah, blah, blah. And then you just yell on Twitter and then they DM you and say, how can I help you? And then all of a sudden you’re magically like talking to the C suite and they’re going to reverse everything for you. So yeah, if you make these exceptions, like people learn about them.

Chris Badgett: 90 or like, let’s say 80, 20, 80%. Like, yes, you do need to reinforce boundaries. And actually, but on the other side, sometimes if they do get through, or you make an exception, I learned this concept from you. I was already kind of doing it, but I didn’t have a name for it. You call it a make my day? So every now and then, someone will reach out to you through the wrong channel, or even you might see them struggling.

Like in a social community or wherever and you’re like, man, I can really help this person. They’re being so nice you know, they’ve already like sent in a testimonial or whatever and Either you you help them off channel like and just over deliver and then or like you actually seek them out and you’re like Hey, I saw in this group is happening, you know, we don’t normally do this But you know I really appreciate what you’ve done in our community and we really want to help you and then you you call it a make my day So that’s something you find you can do as a creator.

And the crazy thing with that kind of thing is sometimes then that person, you know, will upgrade to your bigger offer or if they haven’t read a testimonial, they will, you know, they tell your friends, they become an affiliate or whatever. So it’s this weird. Dichotomy of like maintain boundaries, but also like, break the rules.

Yeah, yeah. And over deliver. And

Jason Coleman: the important part of that is to do it consciously instead of reactively. And forget where I got that from is ’cause it’s funny. Maybe it wasn’t that good for, but I think the company went outta business. It was like a department story. Either like Neiman Marcus or of those types, you know, like a, a big department store.

And they used to give their sales team a budget of like a thousand dollars a month. To like make the day so you’d be in the buy shoes and it’s an expensive high value department store, but you buy like 200 worth of shoes. And if you said you were hungry, the person could like tap into their budget and like go buy you food so you could eat the food while you’re trying on shoes or something like crazy.

That doesn’t usually happen in an apartment store and sometimes you would get they would spend more like taking care of you than they would. And that was part of like their core values and how they did some, but it also was probably like a marketing budget item. Like that money didn’t come out of the support budget.

It came out like this is marketing and we hope that person goes on to say things. And I feel like like Scrooge McDuck or like the Scrooge over here, like bah humbug don’t help people. But in reality, if you you know, you scale a product, you have hundreds of folks, you can’t give this level of care to every customer.

So it’s good to do it selectively and when we do that, kind of make, make your day. We have time. It’s a customer that’s interesting or like matches our values or we have some idea that they’re a sneezer who’s going to talk about it or, or, or be nice. It can be a good story and that kind of thing. Or, or sometimes it’s a technical challenge.

Like we actually have this challenge where I’m curious to figure out like, cool. I’ve never used that email marketing tool. Let’s figure it out for them. Yeah, so that’s great. Yeah. When to bend the rules.

Chris Badgett: And the last thing I’ll say on this support thing is you may be. You may just have a pricing problem.

It’s notorious in our industry that people under price, you know, this is part of the expert’s curse. You’re so close to it. You know, all the stuff you’ve kind of undervalued what you do, or maybe you have some imposter syndrome going. So if you’re kind of like, well, I don’t want to do. You know, unlimited email support, cause my courses is 200.

It’s really well done. They should just follow the steps and do the exercises. Yeah. But if you, if it was 1, 000, would you answer an email from them twice a week and give them that access? And there will be some people that like, quote, abuse that you’re getting like five emails a day. But there’ll also be like tons of people who are like, I don’t really need help.

It’s included as a benefit of the bundle. And then there’ll be kind of like the average, which is how I kind of get to like that two emails a week. Is that worth an extra 800 a month to you? So always think about pricing when it comes to support and it might change your mind on what type of support you want to do and how much and

Jason Coleman: all that.

Yeah, it’s going to be flexible cause like, like, Hey, this is how we do things. People keep trying to do support on Facebook or whatever. Every time that happens, that’s an indication that people really want to communicate that way and you should consider, or they want a phone call and every time they ask and you say, we don’t do phone calls.

It’s like a mental note. Maybe we should figure out how we can do phone calls. We can make money off this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you don’t have to necessarily change your pricing. You could just add one more plan that has that level that where the cost benefit analysis makes sense.

Jason Coleman: So many options. Just carry it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post Part 3/5: Becoming the Teacher, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series appeared first on LMScast.

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jason Coleman explore the various responsibilities that successful education entrepreneurs must juggle in this discussion.

They emphasize sales and marketing in particular, as well as the role of the entrepreneur. Chris explains a straightforward technique for figuring out what the pain points of customers are. Entrepreneurs may leverage these pain areas to produce useful content, deals. Also marketing materials by breaking them down into smaller problems.

Finding client problems, for instance, might serve as inspiration for blog entries, emails. Or social media postings, which facilitates audience connection and trust-building. Jason continues, “It’s important to address pain points directly. And clearly because people are more likely to act when they feel that their particular issues are understood.”

Chris and Jason together highlight how crucial it is to be genuine and unambiguous. Education entrepreneurs may create enduring firms by comprehending the demands of their customers and coming up with answers.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the education entrepreneur series. This is a five part series where we go over the five critical hats. That you need to wear as an education entrepreneur. Or within the skill set of your team based on what we’ve seen with success. With education, entrepreneurship, teaching online, coaching, building education based businesses.

Those five hats are being the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder. Today, my business partner, Jason Coleman and I are going to be talking about becoming the entrepreneur. Enjoy this session.

All right, let’s talk about becoming the entrepreneur. This is a topic we could go for weeks or years on. But we’ve, you know, kind of thought about some of the most important things. Let’s start with sales and marketing. You know, there’s a saying in business that nothing ever happens until a sale is made. Just kind of going into sales and marketing.

The big idea here to make this process easier. is to map the pain. Which we’ve talked about in our expert series, and then how to think about actually making the sale. And there’s a concept I have called conversion tools. That helps make selling both easier from a process standpoint and as something you can scale.

So for me, My strength in marketing is content and then my strength in sales is creating conversion tools. So to get into what that means at a tactical level. Content marketing is really built around this idea of pain. If you look at your target audience or your customer avatar. What are their like chief top five pain point areas?

And when you identify those, you can then find sub pain points underneath that kind of pillar. Category cluster of pain and those become like individual pieces of content. So if you’ve forced yourself to come up with what are the five primary pain points. Then maybe 10 to 12 like sub more specific nuances or variations of that pain point. That is 50 pieces of content.

It’s like a year’s worth of content ideas. And you can create blog posts, you can create YouTube videos, you can create podcasts. You can create a social media strategy, you can do email marketing and ideally your product, your course, your membership. Whatever it is really helps with all of that. That’s kind of the content marketing, you know, sort of top of the funnel that flows into your business offer.

And I’ll give you an example of that in a little bit. But then once you have these like content ideas that basically stem from the five primary pain points. You can come up with a content framework. We’re actually using a content framework in this conversation we’re having right now. So that, okay, well there’s this, I’m an expert.

I, I have all these ideas. How do I like, kind of consistently deliver value in a way that’s not overwhelming in. In the form of content. So like a content framework like we’re using here is we have like a topic area like sales and marketing. We have like a big idea. A strategy, like I’m talking about content and conversion tools.

Right now I’m giving you three or so tactics. Then I’m going to tell a story about, you know, what’s going on there. So that’s a content framework and that’s a way of teaching like strategy tactics, story. Also known as like a case study in a way. And then we’re also having a conversation, which is also a form of education.

So the content framework is awesome. I just wrote a book. I’m in the editing process with that. Every chapter similar to this has like. A set series of things like tactics and strategies and stories to create a content framework. That actually made writing a book as a subject matter expert in this topic easier for me. Because then it was like, okay, well, what’s a, what’s, what’s a story related to this and so on.

So it makes content creation easier. Now conversion tools there’s a lot of different ways to think about that. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding around sales and marketing and how they’re different. But sales is actually, let’s say somebody enjoyed your content and then they find out about your offer.

The process of actually creating the sale or the quote conversion event. How do you do that? In the offline world, people do that with a conversation. Like if I walk onto a car lot and I meet the salesperson. You know, I get in a conversation and I get the sales pitch, they handle my objections and then. I take it for a test drive and then I buy the car or I don’t buy the car.

I try a different car. That’s kind of the sales choreography or sales motion as it’s called. But when you look at information products and online products, digital products. Courses, coaching, membership communities, there’s sort of four main ways to create a conversion tool. One is a trial that can be a free trial.

Like, Hey, first month’s free. It could be a paid trial. Like it’s a dollar for a month or a week. The other way to do it is to do a demo. So you could have like, Hey, here’s a sample. You know, training or come to this one for free and let me like demo you. Or let me take you on a tour of like what’s inside the program. I’m going to kind of demo how people use it and so on.

And then there’s a webinar, which is like a sales presentation at scale. Where you kind of make the pitch to like a group. You can even automate that and create like an automated webinar that just runs. And then you can also do old school traditional sales, which is one on one conversations, book a call.

Here’s a Calendly link schedule a meeting. You can call it a strategy call and not a sales call to take. You know, take some of the resistance down. But once you figure out, you know, sort of your, your marketing mix. And there’s other types besides content. There’s also outbound marketing. There’s you know, paid ads.

There’s a lot of different ways to do marketing, but for me, content is the primary. And just to show you an example of mapping the five pain points. Which really ties into our avatar training we did earlier, which is what we’re doing here after over a decade in this industry. I noticed in. The users of LifterLMS and broadly in this category of treating, of serving course creators, coaches, experts, community builders. And so on, that the ones that were successful had within themselves. They had to wear these five, having an, being an entrepreneur is hard.

They, we all talk about wearing multiple hats.ut in online education, there’s these five hats that I can see in every single program that is successful, that. The founder is either like a unicorn and can do all five of these hats successfully at a satisfactory level, or they build a team to fill in the gaps.

So, and if somebody’s failing, that’s the first thing I do is I diagnose like across these five hats. And this is part of this whole training. We’re doing the series, you know, the five hats are being the expert, being the entrepreneur, being the teacher, instructional designer. Being a technologist and then the fifth hat is being a community builder.

So we’re literally using that, you know, these are the five pain points and. There’s a lot of challenges within those that. You know, becomes a foundation for this content and why if you’re somebody who’s watching this. They’re thinking if this is. All of this is really resonating, you know, they’re in the target market, they’re an education entrepreneur and we’re just here trying to help people.

So that’s how I kind of think about if I could give you one idea. About improving or starting your sales and marketing program, map the pain. Create that, that map to make content out of, and then choreograph your sales process and try to package that in a conversion tool. And the best place to start is just book a call and do one on one sales.

And then once you see something that’s repeatable. Then you can start doing some of these other scalable, even automated models.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. I think something that’s amazing about. Like the current day and online sales and marketing is that that pain point is so immediate. So and I think it’s helpful to think of it in a very literal way when you’re writing sales copy or developing these conversion tools that like literally this person is feeling this pain right now because a lot of times it is so immediate you’re like God damn.

And I wish there was a way to, and you’re like literally Googling exactly the pain point. And you’re hoping like, you know. If you’re doing marketing through, you know, search engines, you’re trying to like have up a, have a result there. So that’s what’s amazing. And even if it’s not immediate. Like some of the skill and copywriting then is like, you know you know, press on the pain point a little like, Hey, remember that?

Don’t you, you hate this. But. moment. Yeah. It’s like that. That’s so immediate for folks. I also like, yeah, that we talked about frameworks making things easier. That’s so good. Cause I think in sales and marketing, a lot of, Times early on before you, you, you catch like a groove and, and how to do things.

You feel like you’re just trying to get things to stick thrown out the wall. And I’ve had this with sales and marketing people that we like train up. Like for example, we write like a weekly email to our, you know, our customers, people on the mailing list, the customers. And I think for some folks when you give them that task, it feels like.

like term paper. It’s like, I’m writing a book every week and it has to be like different and awesome and clever and everyone has to be amazing and over the top and perfect. And it’s, you know, that, you know, it’s what I developed as a framework. It’s like, no, like, Hey, just answer these questions in this order and that’s the first draft and then make it good and ship.

And it’s like, it doesn’t have to be creative. And there is room for like that super over the top iterated, perfect email that you send everyone in your funnel. But that’s not what that exercise of like writing a weekly newsletter was in the moment. So yeah, recognizing where like the frameworks can be used.

Like when you feel A little lost about what am I supposed to be doing here? I kind of don’t know what I’m doing. Try to find a framework. And there’s so many for so many sales and merchants things, and they share a lot. And it’s almost like, just pick one, right. And maybe pick a different one if you feel like you’re getting tired of one.

And over time you’ll kind of like start to understand, understand the underlying psychology of how they work. So I think along that vein, like, Okay. there’s lots of different frameworks and methods of doing sales and marketing. Something that I find really useful is to keep it simple. And just so I think of marketing in this way is like, I’m just finding the people who need my thing and I’m telling them about my thing.

And it’s, so it’s like, if you’re looking at, you know, a sales funnel or the forget the funnel, it’s a milestone map. It’s a journey. It’s a customer journey. You can get overwhelmed a little bit. And if you’re overwhelmed by the marketing strategies, like just think in that framework of like simpler terms that Like you make something that people need.

You need to find the people who need that thing. So finding where they are as part of marketing, and then you need to tell them about your thing and there’s different, you know, is it a story, is there a framework for the stories? It’s like, just make sure you’re telling them about your thing and you’re not tricking them into buying.

You know, I, ideally, if you chose to write customer avatar, like we talked about last time you know, it should be an easy sell. It should write it if you really, and that’s what I said before I was talking about customer avatars. If you know exactly who you’re talking to, it’s just a conversation. Like it’s not too clever.

And this has happened before you know, in our marketing team, where They’re trying to figure out how to write sales copy and stuff and and I often try to simplify it I’m like, hey, like we have a thing they they want our thing. We’re not fooling them We have a really good thing and they want it.

We just have to tell them about it and it simplifies things It makes it less high You know It’s like it’s not So contentious and it’s not the it’s not the most critical thing that does email be absolutely perfect. It’s like now you just tell them

Chris Badgett: In terms of keeping it simple I love this quote. I heard that you get tired of your marketing before your market ever does.

So as you become more of an advanced marketer and salesperson, it’s like, okay, now I got to do a B testing and I’m going to do paid ads. I’m going to do them over here too. And. And there’s sort of like one main channel, like when people drive onto the car lot or then you put up a billboard, like you kind of figure out the main channel and it’s easy to think you always got to do something new, but actually just keep it simple.

Just stay focused on the avatar, what they need, how they usually come in, how they like to be sold to and how to over deliver on the value. It’s not complicated.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, yeah, and I think that’s useful to even if you’re like outsourcing marketing or if you’re hiring someone to bring them on You There might be a mismatch of like their career path and their goals to like try something new or force like a channel or strategy and, and your need to like just find the people and tell them about the thing.

So early on there is like, you do want to experiment and iterate and try a bunch of things to figure out like which of these channels is working. But once one works, like just dig into it and then it gets boring and you might find like the marketer that you hired. Is very bored or like the marketing company you hired is very bored.

And that’s something to like, look out for. And are they pushing you into another channel a little too early before you really optimize the first one? So

Chris Badgett: I think it is good to move to also once you master a channel to move on. But. And like, all right, let’s see if we can get ads working or whatever, but don’t just forget and stop doing that other thing and come back to it and keep, keep doing that thing that was working and improve on that.

I like this idea when you’re thinking about improving your sales and marketing to, if you’re going to do something new, like in a quarter, say, do two more things that you’re already doing better, like take them to the next level. So it’s, it doesn’t become this new to new to new to new thing and your, your focus just gets totally scattered.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, I’m sure there’s a clever name for it, where there’s like a bias towards like different and new when like sometimes the thing you have to do is refresh your old content, refresh your old funnels and conversion tools and update them. And that’s more high value for you than, you know, trying something different.

Chris Badgett: I think that is a cognitive bias. It’s, I think it’s called novelty bias. Okay, novelty bias, good name. Being an entrepreneur is actually creating a company and forming a business. And a lot of people get stuck here. I’ve been stuck here. And you overthink it. So like the classic thing at the beginning, at least in the United States, that people get stuck on is, well, should I form an LLC or an S corp?

And then they’re like, do I need to pay thousands of dollars to a lawyer? And so on. I think it’s, it’s really all about just getting started and, and like, just do a if you’re having trouble, like, I don’t know what I’m gonna name my company. I don’t want to name my product. Just pick something and start and see if you can make a sale.

And it’s not fun to rebrand later, but like when I first started my web design agency, I’m like, I don’t know what to call it. I’m just going to call it Badget Media. That’s my last name. And if I do products later. it’ll just be sold through badger media. And I didn’t have to like, think about it a lot. And the way to think about just actually putting the infrastructure you need in place is like, you need the ability to accept money over the internet, sell a product and not go to jail and do your taxes.

Right. So what, what’s, what’s involved in that is it’s just, I think about it like, okay, pick a name. Once you have a name You can buy a domain name. Once you have a domain name, you can have a website. You can create an email address. Once you have a separate email address and a business name, you know, register, go to your town office and register the, the business name.

Once you have that, then you can open a bank account. Once you have a bank account, you can open a PayPal account or Stripe account to accept money through the internet. Now you have a website. Now you can put an offer up. Now you’re good to go. And at tax time, you know, you’re, you’ve kind of got all those fundamentals in place.

And if you’re just doing a personal brand, I do recommend like keeping the funds separate and like your business kind of becomes its own identity, different email, different bank accounts. And there’s just, it’s just the basics, but some people get all caught up in the details of that, of like, what do I name it?

And how do I figure out e commerce? But it’s really not that complicated.

Jason Coleman: I feel like. We should probably try to write up a framework of all these things and share it as a handout for this of like. These are the steps, like it’s a, they’re pretty simple, but like each one feels super critical and irreversible.

And while it is like a pain in the butt to change your logo or your brand or some of these things later on it’s not too hard. It’s like, it’s not, yeah. Like if it’s, if it’s necessary, it’s, it’s kind of better to get in the habit and, Get it running and actually make something and sell it and make some money and put it in a business bank account.

It’s kind of like, Oh, cool. Now you like completed the loop. Now pick a part to make better. And maybe you realize early on, like branding will be important and you narrow in, but. It’s just like

Chris Badgett: with paid memberships pro, like it’s actually stranger studios, which is an agency. Yeah. There was Lifter LMS was Badget Media and then code box.

And now there’s this brand. It’s fine.

Jason Coleman: That name stranger studios. Like I thought I would make video games and that sounds like a really good video game. And then when I started doing I built websites for school, I had a job. And then when I started getting con, you know contracts on the side, I already had this website, stranger studios, and this name.

So I started using it. I didn’t even have the business at the time. Like you can go pretty far just on like filing personal returns. But then it stuck. And then I come up with the reason it was like, Oh, we’re strangers. Like everyone’s strangers on the internet, but like, let’s not be strangers. I forget like what our pitch was back when we did consulting.

Yeah. It was good to just get into it. And our thing comes up a lot of times, it’s like forming a business is partnerships. Like either you know, you, you have a partner. Like I build my business with my wife. I’m very lucky that like you could just be lucky like me and have a life partner that you marry into.

They have all the skills you don’t have and help you in every way to run a business. And being married, like we run it 50, 50 and it works out. And I think because We’re married. We’re forced to get through it. Like, like we but in general, that 50, 50 percentage doesn’t often work. I’ve seen it cases where it doesn’t work.

And, and even in my, my own history where it didn’t work, I can get to. So it’s like But before you figure out the details of how to split up the partnership, like that’s confusing too. It’s like, I think it is good to try to find a partner and you can’t go really far alone. There’s, there’s, you know, lots of tools and AI will help you.

And. I think it’s good to get started and probably in the space of content marketing you know, like learning educational content, there’s probably a higher percentage of solo preneurs than partners. But if you, so get started, but when you start building something like, it’s so good to have a partner they help out in so many ways.

And it’s, it’s kind of like, and there are risks, but it’s kind of like love in that, you know there’s There’s a lot of potential pain if it doesn’t work out for unraveling a business relationship, but it’s, it’s worth it for like the rewards of like going through this together because when there’s hard times and when you run into issues and when you’re learning things, there’s, it’s great to have someone to like be excited with and help you out and talk through and second guess everything you’re doing.

So there’s different forms, but so if you’re literally going to have like a partner. Like share a business and you’re incorporating. I think what I, what I found that work out is if you can find one of the partners to have more than 50%, like 60, 40 split instead of 50, 50, cause that deadlock, if you have two partners or like in our case with investor geeks, we had a business and it wasn’t even incorporated, but we like on paper agreed like, Hey, this is all third.

We were making ad revenue and we would split it. What happened was like it was only one we only got one third of the output from the business And so we had other things going on. We weren’t motivated to work on that We this other thing we had a hundred percent of we got and then also there wasn’t any one person who had more than the others That was motivated to make it work.

You know, like, Hey, like if it’s more than 50%, if you own more than 50%, like there’s one person who’s ultimately going to be responsible for the business. And sometimes the business needs that. Cause if you run into you bump heads, you’re like, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Dissolve.

Whereas like if it’s 60, 40, one of you is like, it’s your job to know what to do. You’re like ultimately responsible for his business. And so. If you can get into that relation, that kind of situation, I’ve, I’ve seen it work out better and to have a tiebreaker for those kinds of things works out. And even if you don’t like Kim and I are 50, 50, we it was like a tactic to, if you have like a business with your, your spouse or even just a, like one other partner.

We would in the consulting days, we always had a tiebreaker. So in the consulting days, whoever found the project was like the head. So when they decision on the project or like what to do about it, or if we’re firing that client or, or who’s in charge, who makes the decisions as it goes, whoever found the client, you know, was the one who like broke the ties on that.

And so that helps where we were 50, 50, but for every project someone was in charge. And so we weren’t getting stuck. And later on when we went to products, we had an agreement where like, I was like, Hey, we’re 50, 50, but I’m the CEO. So like the tiebreakers I’ll, I’ll make the tiebreakers and it

Chris Badgett: helps. I think partnerships are great because entrepreneurship’s lonely.

It’s like, it can be super lonely, especially online. If you’re not interacting with people in person is as much as a quote, normal person. So having partners is, is great just from a loneliness perspective, but also coming back to like this idea of having to wear multiple hats. I mentioned like you kind of need a base level of efficiency across being an expert, being an entrepreneur, being a teacher, being a technologist.

And being a community builder, it’s really nice to share those hats with a partner. And some of the most successful Lifter LMS sites I see as an example, there’s like this partnership between a techie and a talent. So like the face of the business and everything, and then there’s somebody else who like does the website, does marketing and other things.

So it’s, it’s, it’s much easier to do it together than. A solo act though, you can definitely do it. Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And sometimes there’s like support groups or masterminds or communities that you can take part in that help fill that gap. If you, if you’re kind of feel all alone,

Chris Badgett: let’s talk about product. Like we said earlier, a sales, nothing ever happens till something is sold, but you have to have something to sell.

So I’m a big fan of product. And a product really should be like. the solution to a problem as efficiently as possible. And I learned this framework from a guy named Dane Maxwell. He said, the Holy grail of business is just three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. And a lot of us get really focused on the mechanism, like how we solve it, what’s in the course, the VIT, making the videos.

And even when we’re selling, we keep talking about the mechanism. But like really good sales is like, Oh, I will help you achieve X result in Y number of days through Z mechanism. And what, what’s primary there is the result. It’s the improvement offer or the transformation. And so really design your product around solving a problem, not your body of knowledge.

This goes back to like the library of Alexandria thing we talked about in terms of what people actually want to buy. And you know, once you have that result, that solution to a problem to create a mechanism or a transformation there’s this concept in instructional design called chunking. So like, if I’m going to, you know, help somebody find the love of their life, if I was a dating coach, you know, the end result is finding your love of the love of your life.

Right. So that’s like a huge result. But like you can do it. It’s probably easiest to like reverse engineer instead of being like starting at zero and be like, all right, I have somebody who’s frustrated. They haven’t found a partner. What do they do first? You can often work back from the end and be like, what happens right before they found the love of life?

Well, there’s this kind of this milestone where these people decide that they’re going to go from short term to long term relationship. So how could I coach somebody or create training around that concept? And if you go back from this there’s sort of like a dating process and then you go back from that.

There’s a first date. And then, before that, there’s like learning how to approach and be comfortable, comfortable around the type of person you’re going after. And before that, there’s kind of this phase where you really need to kind of become the best version of yourself or do some of your inner work and like kind of get ready to like go out into the world and do this thing.

I’m not even a dating coach, but like, I’m kind of like finding these milestones or these chunks that need to happen to get this result. And by doing that, you’re actually creating. your unique mechanism of how you help people. So that’s, that’s kind of the customer result mechanism. And then the other thing is as if we use our dating coach example your program should work for your avatar in challenging circumstances.

So if they have setbacks or maybe it’s not like your actual avatar and this there’s a lot of this other type of person in your program, which is also fine. But like, maybe they have this other challenge that not everybody has, like, how can I improve my training or my coaching so that it still works, let’s say, even if the per, they’re trying to date and they’re, they speak a different language, as an example, I’m just thinking of something like, how would this program still work if there was a language barrier or a culture barrier or a geographic barrier?

Like they met online and they really think that like, there’s all these like challenging circumstances. So. Don’t just think like in a perfect world, this is how it would work. It still should work under pressure in the same way, like a good vehicle can like drive in the snow or in the rain, it’ll still get you from a to B.

One of the biggest parts about product is pricing. And this is something you know, we’re both fans of a guy named Patrick Campbell and his, one of his hooks, he’s all about pricing, particularly in subscription businesses. He ended up selling his company for a couple of hundred million dollars, but hit one of his hooks about pricing is face it.

You just guessed. And when he says that, like his avatar, like people like us with subscription software business are like, yeah, you’re right. You know, like they all, so he like understands the avatar or whatever. But pricing is key. We could do a whole thing on pricing, but just to throw some quick ideas out there there’s different there’s like value based pricing or like if you were going to do this like one on one with somebody, how much would that cost?

How valuable is the result that you’re promising? So if you can, if you truly are a matchmaker and help people find the love of their life, what’s that worth to a person? It’s priceless. And so if you really want to go for something that’s really lucrative, find priceless things I’m sure there’s all kinds of like, if you’re a health coach and you specialize in some challenge that you can help people overcome this, it’s kind of priceless where somebody goes from a permanent chronic condition to like exactly where they want.

Whereas like if you’re like, like if I was doing business coaching, I might, I could be like, I’ll help you grow by 10 percent every year, whatever. Like that’s an incremental improvement. That’s still valuable, but that’s not as valuable as like, I’m going to help you scale from like small business to mid market.

And I think about it in terms of return on investment. I could talk about pricing forever, but I’ll leave it with this one thing, which is Whatever you do, price it, try to price it at 10 to a hundred X ROI for your end customer return on investment. So. If I think helping somebody find the love of their life and in their mind, they think like I would pay 20, 000 to find the love of my life, maybe charge two grand for that.

Or if you want to go broader,

Jason Coleman: it should feel like 10 times as much value for what they paid.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s like, yeah. Cause they should not feel like price gouge. If you’re going to help a business grow. And they invest like 10 grand in you, your training should deliver at least a hundred grand worth of value for them.

And then they’ll keep coming back. They’ll tell their friends that’s good pricing.

Jason Coleman: That makes the math easy. You’re kind of like, if I do this thing that sometimes people coach businesses to make more money. So it’s like literally money. So it’s like, at the end of this, you will make an extra a hundred thousand dollars a year, would you be willing to pay?

20, 000 for that. It’s like a no brainer. Right. And if it feels like it feels like a good investment when it has that kind of ROI,

Chris Badgett: I think business is actually the easiest because you can use money. So when you have your, your chief problem or these five pain points, there’s often metrics like business metrics.

It’s easy. I think it’s a little harder. Like what’s the value of finding the love of your life? It’s a little different. And just a quick story about Lifter LMS. We decided we started out as paid. We wanted to make sure people would buy it. It was 150. We sold 42 copies in the first week of the launch.

We said we were going to shut down the business if we didn’t sell more than a hundred. We were bullheaded and decided to keep going anyways. But then later We made the decision to make the core product free and have add ons and bundles and stuff Which is how we made made the money, but so like you can test your pricing So even if you think just test it, like pre sell it or work with an early group of people and just get going.

Jason Coleman: The market is more flexible and like you can change your prices and people don’t really notice. And, and often, especially in the beginning, it’s like, don’t feel. Attached to the 50 people who just bought at a certain price. It is like, if they notice you make it free or raise your price, they may get upset in some direction, but you’re like, think about the 50, 000 people you’re eventually going to serve.

So it’s like, that sometimes helps. It’s like, it’s, it’s difficult to make those changes, but you can, yeah. Change your pricing. If it didn’t work out, you can launch something again. If the launch didn’t go well, like apparently no one noticed, they won’t notice the second time either, but you’re trying to do it better.

Yeah. There’s so much to like to dig into here. The, as another resource for folks, when you were talking about results and chunking, that sounded a lot like there’s this book called badass by making users awesome by Kathy Sierra. And I I think it’s a book about product and touches marketing, but but it’s like a, the, the analogy they use in that book over and over is you’re not telling someone how to use a camera.

You’re telling them how to become a photographer. That’s like the result, you know? And so it’s like the documentation, you know, isn’t just how to do it. It’s kind of like how to get to the result. And the, and you’re going to be more successful if you build your products that way. And I think Yeah, we, on pricing really quick, it’s like, yeah, the guest is good.

I think like trust your guests too. People downplay the guests and their systems. I have a couple of things like about pricing that. Or maybe newish to like everything that’s out there you could find. One is like do all the methods that everyone, all the methods are really good. So do all of them and then kind of like take the average or what your gut is telling you after you do the exercise.

Like you kind of learn the exercise of like time and materials plus a margin, like make sure you’re making money. That’s really important in doing that exercise. Is like, can I price this product in a way that I’ll still make money? That’s really important to like go through the exercise and the number you get out is, is an indicator of what might be the price.

And then if you trust your gut, what’s everyone else charging? That’s another method. But I forget the, like the, you, you, you threw out a couple other methods for figuring out pricing. And so it’s like, do all that. And then kind of like, you know, the process of going through that a number of different ways, then you’d be like, Oh, actually it feels like the price should be about this.

And the other thing on pricing I think about is like the timing of the pricing. So we think about that too. I think we talked earlier about we, like you had a paid, you went paid and then free or like you could charge monthly or annually. And it, the, When you ask for money should match like when you’re delivering the value.

So an example to drill at home is there was a course I saw where it was, you know, quit drinking in a month and It was amazing. I think it was priced at like a hundred bucks and this person was making money selling that course, it was transforming people’s lives. And he was building like a little free community.

And he’s like, how can I make recurring revenue off the community? Like how can I deliver more value to them and keep making money? And it’s like, this problem is tough. Cause if. Your product does what it really says. Everyone loses 20 pounds. They save a bunch of money than I spending on alcohol. They repair the relationship with their mother and their spouse and their kids, like their whole life changes in month one.

And you already anchored that price of a hundred dollars. So like I’ll change your life for a hundred bucks. And then it’s like, I’m going to sell you a gym membership for 200. Like it doesn’t work. Like so in reality, what I think that person had to do in that case is like, if you have a product that delivers a ton of value upfront, like charge upfront And then, you know, you deliver ongoing value, charge a smaller amount ongoing.

But I think that exercise, it’s not talked about too much of thinking about the timing of the product, of the pricing. We can also get into like, we were talking about product. Now we were talking about marketing earlier, kind of an old school marketing idea that I think sometimes gets lost when your head’s deep.

And what you’re doing is that product is marketing. And so what you want to do is use customer insights to guide your product development. And your positioning of your product. And so it’s, you’re not, not just like how to sell to them. Like, so as you’re talking with customers and you should always be talking with customers, it’s like either do consulting.

So you’re doing your type with them or take calls or find a way to like, always be talking with your customers. Cause you’re going to learn from them. And as you learn from them, you might think I’m learning how to like market to them better. We talked about that. That is true. But. The real market is like, maybe the product should kind of sell itself.

And if you improve the product using what you’ve learned from the marketing, you know, all that stuff will flow more easily. There’s like a positioning is this term to figure out early, like, which is really important and we could dive into, but it’s basically. There’s other products that solve the thing my course or my product also solves How is mine positioned verse those and I think you talked to some points Of like is it?

You know, what’s the mechanism is it or I think we’re talking about like speed insight Yeah. And certainty. So it’s kind of like, which, which of those am I like levering, leveraging most first, like the other solutions out there you know, like a gym is like, you come here three times a week and then you get healthy, or if it’s kind of like a diet has a different pace but it’s kind of solving the same.

Problem. So figuring out, you know, your, your course, how do you position it? And I think positioning like pay memberships pro also made the decision to be a freemium product. And part of that was positioning of like, let’s be the best free membership plugin. So there’s like a paid one and let’s be the free one that has the widest distribution.

Let’s be the biggest free one was, you know, and that, that’s how we would differentiate between with the others. And there’s another term here is like called product market fit, which is you know, when you are developing a product early on, you’re building a course, you’re, you know, you coach someone through something and then you tried to build a course around your coaching, but it didn’t hit for the masses like it did for that one person.

And you’re like, why, what’s wrong? And you go back and reiterate. And it’s crucial that you, One of the reasons to be a hundred percent focused is it takes a certain amount of grit when you try something like that and it doesn’t work to not give up and be like, ah, the product doesn’t make any sense.

No one will ever get it. And like actually dig in and be like, I have to make this work. What could I do to make it work? And that iterative process is like product market fit. So I so an example of this and What we’ve done, we have a membership platform. We built this tool to run Black Friday sales called Sitewide Sales, and we used it ourself, we dog fooded, and then we used it for a subset of our customers.

And I think we had like a few hundred, maybe like a thousand people using this on a membership platform to run Black Friday sales. And then we’re like, everyone should use this to run every Black Friday sale. So we tried to build like a general purpose version. And it was like how to run a sitewide sale on like any e commerce site was the goal.

And it wasn’t getting traction. People weren’t, it wasn’t obvious to people what the need was. And we built like a really good tool that works. But then when we were talking to folks, There was a couple insights that did stick. Like, so I’m like getting market feedback here. And one of them was like, Oh, like one of the killer features to be going to have is that they could schedule a sale.

So a pain point was like, Hey, do you ever run a sale? And you have to like wake up at midnight to like. Put the banner on your website and update the coupon code and set it live. You’re like, that’s so annoying. I hate that. And you’re like, yeah. So like, what if you could set it up in advance? And like, okay, that’s a feature.

And that was a feature we had, but it was like buried in the settings. It needed to be like the feature. And. And I was talking to you earlier, you’re like, it also had to like change the name. It’s not site wide sales. It’s like timed sales, scheduled sales. It’s like, that’s like the core thing that people get excited about.

That needs to be like the name of the product, the focus of the product. And, and technically if you do that in this case, like there’s like a, Obscure technical reason why that’s hard, like to run multiple sales at the same time and have them all scheduled at an advance and overlap and automate.

There’s like a hard, it’s a hard technical challenge based on how we already built the product to do that after the fact. So what happened actually is like, we got that key insight and we’re like, shit, we should have from the beginning built it like this with, this is the focus with this technical architecture.

And then it would. So serve the killer app that like, it seems to be clicking with people when we’re trying to sell it. And that’s like, it, it needed another iteration. We didn’t give it cause it was a side project. And maybe that’s another story, like, you know, how to handle side projects. But yeah, I remember like product is like, yeah, product market fit, iterate through it, figuring out your positioning, always talking to customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Product is marketing. I love it. And sometimes if you’re thinking. Well, I don’t know what to do in my marketing. Just move the free line and give away a little bit of your product or use it. And two examples, like at Lifter LMS, our top performing lead generation the way we get email addresses and, and it kind of also works as a conversion tool is we use our software to make a free course about how to use our software that we give away for free.

And so like the product is literally marketing itself. And I think as of now, we’ve probably had somewhere around 35, 000 people come into that and it just works. But just to give a different example, like with the dating coach example, we kind of talked about the end result, you know, they’re getting married or whatever.

But that first step was about working on yourself and getting ready to like go out into the market and approach people or whatever. So maybe make step one free, just move it over the free line and give that away for free. That’s your, your main marketing tool. And at the end of it, there’s just a call to action to be, by the way, this is step one in a six step process about how to find the love of your life.

And now you have this like really strong marketing, which is actually a piece of your product. In terms of the mechanism of delivery, here’s step one. You can have that for free. So, so you, you don’t have to like overcomplicate it. And in terms of, um, marketing and just a pro tip out there, if you’re ever thinking about just, you’re already got this working, let’s say as a dating coach, like, well, just go out past your end result of you know, finding the love of your life, maybe the next thing is something about.

A parenting thing or something like what’s going to happen next. So always think about people. If you put people at the center of your business, not your product, decisions get much easier. You’re like, Hey, I’m trying to expand my company. Well, like what do they need after they find a love of your life?

And just stay with that same avatar and, and go with them.

Jason Coleman: That’s awesome. Sometimes like successful pivots are. I had the right audience, but they weren’t willing to pay for this thing, but they are willing to pay for this other thing and this other format or this other version and keeping your eye open, eyes open for that kind of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Being flexible is so key. Let’s talk about operations and you know, part of, even if you’re a solopreneur, there’s all this, these functions that are going on inside the business. And if you’re doing everything, you still kind of have to do everything if you’re doing it by yourself. So it comes from corporate culture, but having an organizational chart, even if it’s just you, I recommend making the organization organizational chart, like you’re the CEO of the business name

Jason Coleman: over and over and every column

Chris Badgett: who’s doing operations, who’s doing sales, who’s doing marketing, who’s doing product, who’s doing support, who’s doing design.

You can slice and dice the org, however you want. But like map it out and that’ll also, you’re, you’re, you’re going to be stronger somewhere. Like a lot of people really love product and like the coaching or the courses and the, all that, but they hate marketing. Well, somebody has got to do marketing and somebody needs to sell people.

So map it out and. One of the ways I like to think about that is you put your name everywhere and when you’re like, oh, maybe this is working, what’s the first thing I would do? If I could hire somebody, where do I want to delegate? Typically the first answer particularly if you don’t have a partner and you’re not already like dividing and conquering is perhaps getting a virtual assistant to help you in some of these processes or even take over something like customer success and Or even marketing if you really don’t like marketing, but your assistant is really good at writing and could take your ideas for from a content Spreadsheet or calendar that you make and help execute that that’s fantastic Partnering Is good like for your business, but you can also partner with outsource agencies to help Fill in the org chart.

So for example, if you want, if you don’t want to learn to run paid ads yourself, you can partner with an ad agency to do it. You could potentially even negotiate instead of, you know, just paying whatever the rate is, like giving them a percentage of sales that are tracked through their generation. So like being creative about partnerships is helpful because it is overwhelming to wear all these hats.

And particularly if you’re early on. And can’t if you can’t afford to like go big, you could get creative in the partnerships. Like one of my first courses where I brought in other expert instructors in the platform, I didn’t pay them anything until their stuff started selling. So they got a percentage of sales.

I was able to partner to help create product within the org that wasn’t all on me and that business was with my wife as well. So yeah, typically a virtual assistant is a good first hire just to try to unload and delegate some of the things you’re either not good at or just can’t find time for that you can build a process around.

And then also there’s this idea when you do start to get a team to have like a singly responsible individual on each part of the business. And that’s all, that’s you everywhere when you’re a solopreneur, but. It’s really nice. What, what happens is sometimes entrepreneurs can be a little bit of control freaks and not, not like fully delegate.

It doesn’t mean you’re not involved. You’re not, you’re still need to manage and coach and stuff like that. But having different singly responsible individuals and like empowering them, like from a management philosophy, the way I look at that is particularly at a high level position in the org chart is.

If you’re the CEO, like you’re still like setting the goal and the vision and stuff, but give them freedom on how to get there. Cause they’re a different person. Hopefully they’re better at you at the thing. And just, but think about the org chart. Like when I see an entrepreneur who’s just stressed out, like there’s so much going on, you kind of got to slow down and like, what is, how is this ecosystem working?

And, and you know, it’s something that’s never perfect. Like you kind of have to refine it over time. So yeah.

Jason Coleman: It’s a good activity. It’s like business plans. It’s like, you know, you make the business plan and that’s not worth so much cause things change so rapidly that it, but the planning process of writing the business plan helps you figure things out.

I feel that way about org charts. Like very quickly after we settle an org chart in a business, it goes out of date and you’re like, Oh, we just hired some. So they’re not an org chart. And you’re like, yeah, okay, we’ll get to it. And I could totally relate to that. The first time I put that together yeah.

I think I got, you know, maybe it was like, that also has talked about an e myth revisited of doing an org chart, even if you’re a small team and you put your name on every spot and maybe like a tactic if you’re in that phase where you’re doing everything. Is to pick days of the week and like Friday is the day when I’m CEO and I do CEO stuff and like Wednesday is the day I do marketing and I do marketing stuff and to kind of make sure that you don’t, you don’t forget to work on critical areas of the business when you’re at, you know, until you figure out a way to either automate some of those aspects, outsource some of them or hire people to work on them.

But it’s good to be, if you’re thinking about what you’re doing as a business, you’re going to write down all these roles. And then yes, I think I said like the E Myth Revisited, that, that was like a transformational book for me thinking about business. And you know, it made me think of business as building systems and there’s other folks who talk about stuff like that, but in like maybe like the main.

you know take away from that book is like, right. Standard operating procedures for everything. And like that, that is building the business. And it’s an interesting book if I reread it and the, it’s like half story, like a fictional story. He’s talking to a woman about her business and half kind of prescriptive, like here’s what you got to do.

And I remember like I devoured that book the first time I read it and that the story really helped hammer at home. But then as, I had already been in business for a while rereading it. I was skipping over the fiction and like, just tell me what to do, man. I’m trying to remember like exactly how to do this thing.

But yeah, so. you have org chart, these are the roles. And then the different roles, like they, they do things. I call them standard operating procedures. There’s different names for these things, but it’s basically like write down instructions for everything you do or record yourself as you’re doing something.

That’s all, you know, you can hand off a recording of yourself doing it, but also write down what you’re doing and why and how you’re thinking about it. And. Especially when you’re hiring folks, but you can do it for yourself when you’re not. Cause it’s just, I still run the SOPs in my own business. Cause it reminds you what to do.

I’m doing all kinds of stuff. And I’m like, how do you do this again? And make sure you don’t miss steps and the goal for a good SOP. And don’t tell this to the people that you hire, but you want the most mediocre workers to be able to run, execute the SOPs. And I forget, I think that’s, It’s kind of the phrasing that Michael Gerber uses in the e myth book.

So it’s like right up to SOP for the lowest. You shouldn’t have to like, like early on in a business, you’re, you’re, you’re an exceptional person and you’re the one who makes everything work and you’re like a great, you know, sales person or a great developer or a great content writer, and eventually then you hire out those roles.

And like, maybe you’re lucky and you hire someone who’s even better than you are, but probably they’re expensive and you’re not actually hiring at that. So you don’t want your business to only work because awesome people are running it. You know, there’s definitely parts of your business where it’s like, write the SOP for the lowest common denominator, mediocre person who could execute that task.

And if you, you keep that in mind, you make them as simple as possible. And then another kind of tip related tip to that, when you, you start thinking in terms of systems in your business is that you can fudge it early on and automate things later. So you know, in the short term, you can use human power and time to do things and kind of make a mental note.

I’m either going to ditch this cause I can’t scale it or when I scale it, we’re going to have to automate this. So like a real good example is if you’re, you’re selling a course. And it leads to, there’s a kind of like coaching or consultation aspect. It’s like do it yourself and you’re, you do it really well.

But your time as the CEO of this business is really valuable, but like be willing to do it early on yourself. And it just takes time. And then in the future, you can automate aspects of that or subcontract it to someone else. Or even sometimes it’s like, even as simple as like, we need to send an email this many days after they do, and I don’t know how to like actually program the thing to send the email.

It’s like, just take notes. Like you’re, especially in the early days, you’re watching every single cell anyway, like send the email yourself, do it manually. So don’t be scared to do things manually or things that take time. And if it works out, you can automate it later.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. For standard operating procedures or SOPs, I think one just a pro tip out there is at the top of it you kind of got to sell the idea to the team member a little bit.

Like, why is this important? Instead of them opening, I’d be like, like, let’s say we’re a coach or a course creator and we have somebody helping us with new onboarding, new clients. If we want them to. The new client to receive like a personalized email and maybe some branded swag in the mail or something like that.

Before step one, like open your email, step two, use this templated message. Like before getting into all that, you know, saying something like we want all our customers to feel special, valued and welcome to this community. It’s part of our brand because of X, Y, and Z. You’re kind of like providing context and like company culture and

Jason Coleman: the values.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So there’s something to do. Let’s talk about team and leadership. One idea I want to dig into here is sometimes leadership and management kind of get lumped into the same thing. Just like sales and marketing where they’re, they’re actually different, but there is overlap and the same thing like leadership and management are not the same, but there is overlap.

So I wanted to talk about more of the leadership side. Like the management side is sort of like in the operations of like, okay, we have these standard operating procedures. This is the process. This is how we do things, you know, quality control and, you know, performance and things like that. Leadership is more higher level And, and I find that people tend to gravitate towards like, there’s like layers of leadership, like the top being like a transformational, super inspiring leader at the bottom of the leadership hierarchy is like, I have to listen to this person cause they send me a paycheck or whatever.

And we all want to like move up and become higher levels of leaders. And the crazy thing within leadership is that when you have a team, Not everybody will see you as the same. Like some may see you as like transfer, transformational, inspirational, and others may see you as like, I’m just working here cause I need the money.

I need the paycheck. And it’s not bad or good. But like it’s good to kind of move up and tactically one of the ways to kind of get clearer on your leadership is to actually get clear on your, your vision, your mission, your values, your strategies, your tactics, and actual projects. So whenever somebody’s like feeling like crazy busy, they’re often like in the weeds of projects, which you should be, or tactically executing some kind of campaign.

But particularly at the top of that figuring out your vision and mission to use our dating coach example, like, why do I care about helping people find the love of their life? Maybe it has something to do with a lot of like loneliness or depression in society. Maybe you have a personal story from a friend or family member that, you know, inspired you to start this thing.

Like what’s the story, what’s your vision? What wrong do you want to write in the world? Mission’s a little more goal oriented. Like I want to help a hundred people find the love of their life in 2026. So they’re like, And then you put this stuff on your website, like on your about page of what you’re, what you’re doing.

It’s easy just to be get really busy in the projects. Like I’m creating content, I’m, I’m doing marketing, I’m building this site. I’m figuring all this stuff out, but whenever you get stuck or you’re not sure what to do or not sure what to prioritize by going back to that leadership, you did leadership work you did earlier on what’s your vision and mission.

It can often settle things down, help you prioritize. I’m also a big fan of leading by example. If you have a team so, you know, demonstrate the work ethic. You want to see others do in our example of like helping new customers on board and you like have as a part of your company culture that you actually do really care about your customers.

You’re not just trying to separate. money from their wallet. You got to show that like it’s good for your team to see you like over deliver to somebody or if a customer was getting challenged, like even breaking process and being like, this has happened to me in a coaching program where like it didn’t include private coaching, but the coach, like I just emailed him, I’m like, I’m this challenge.

He’s like, let’s jump on a call. I’ll be glad to talk through that with you for like 30 minutes. And that like demonstrate his team sees that. Yeah. And that like demonstrates that Hey, this is how we treat our customers here. It sets company culture. Then the other thing about leadership that’s really important, I think, is to take good care of the people, not just below you, but above and beside you as well.

I, there’s a framework for this. I’d give credit if I could remember the person’s name, but it’s called plus minus equal. So when you really want to grow and you really want to develop your leadership. You want to lead your team, you know, they’re kind of below you. Or your customers the equals you want to like connect with other leaders in your industry and just try to help each other.

Some people call that masterminding. You and I both do that as well. Then look up above you, like reach out for mentoring, get help, treat those people well try to add value and give back to them and stuff like that. And it just kind of develops this leadership momentum. And just as a personal story, I always think about this.

I had a boss once tell me a long time ago that. He promoted me up to being a manager of the company and this was in Alaska and there’s a lot of like dying crazy stuff that happened, whether in situations and all kinds of stuff. He’s like, man, you’re so calm under pressure and level. And when I remember him saying that, I’m like, I’m not, I just must not show it.

I am like common or pressure. So whenever something kicks off you know, I try to just be calm and be like stable because it helps your team is sort of, you’re kind of like a lightning rod and your team will feed off that energy. And I think being on time is an important one too. Like, If you’re a leader and you’re like cracking down on people for being late or not keeping commitments, but you’re also like never on time, it’s a little contradictory.

So if you want to have a culture of like timeliness and respecting other people’s calendars and schedules and stuff like that, it’s really important to like practice what you preach and have congruency there. And I’ve always appreciated that. And of course things come up and like, Hey, I’m late. Sorry, I’m late.

This thing happened or whatever. But that’s how I, Those are some tips on leadership.

Jason Coleman: All that resonates with me around like leading from the inside and by example, and try to do that as much as possible of getting side by side with them. I feel like sometimes when I’m training managers early on, they think When you’re managing someone, they do stuff for the manager.

Like all the work trickles up and it’s like, I don’t know exactly what the percentage breakdowns you were kind of referring to some of the things related, but it’s about like third. So like a third of your time as a manager is like, you’re doing your own stuff. A third of the time your employees are like helping you do that thing.

And then a third of the time you’re helping them do their thing too. Like, don’t forget that last one. Like you should be like And I think that helps. Yeah. Like the glue that holds everything together and like keeps the respect of everyone. But then there are those times when, you know, you’re in the trench with folks. But then as the leader of the business, you, you know, you are doing these high level CEO things and you are. You’re there’s a, like solving the big business decisions.

That’s why they’re an employee. They just want a job, you know, and like, you. Handling the risk and some of the pressures and I think of it like an umbrella. I’m like Preserving these folks from thinking about these things that are just gonna that don’t concern them. I’m like a micromanager way of like trying to hide the information. It’s really just kind of if this thing is just worrisome for people you know, let’s Let’s insulate them from that.

I, we I, I start to like really micromanage the, like you’re in a Slack with me. I think when we started working together, a lot of my first kind of feedback of like. How I do business for how you do business was around like the communication. And Slack and kind of like the management channel. Like the channel is marketing, but some of the discussion goes in the management channel.

Cause you don’t want the marketers to see you fighting, you know, it’s like fight over here amongst, and then. You know, show yourself as a solid front. Like, you know, we’re all doing this together. And then it like, Oh, they’re really smart. They know exactly what we’re doing. Like they gave us like the one directive.

They didn’t see the indecision. We’re like, I don’t know if we should be doing this. They’re like, I’m thinking of one of three things. I don’t know. Let’s do the first thing. Cool. And I, I think that’s not like, I don’t think of it from, I hope, like from like a micromanaged, like control everyone’s, and I make fun of it all the time.

I’m like, the idea of police, like Jason is like trying to police everyone’s ideas. I’m not coming from that standpoint. I’m coming from kind of like a caring standpoint of like nurturing and trying to give people the space to do their job outside of the distractions and, and really just kind of managing the flow down.

And, and I think. If you do that, like there’s a lot of respect that like it makes folks jobs more enjoyable. I think a lot of the stuff that people hate about jobs is like the bureaucracy and the politics and the confusion and, and that, and you kind of insulate that. So we’re talking about team and leadership and you were just talking about having a vision, building a mission and setting your core values.

You know, as a business and using those to guide you. And in particular, I think. That’s useful in all kinds of contexts, but in particular in hiring, it’s been super useful for us. And so the suggestion here is to like define your core values early and use them to hire folks. And I think where I’ve seen this idea written most clearly is in a book called traction by Gina Wickman.

And that’s like the entrepreneurial operating system EOS. There’s like a whole, like, you know, group and a lot of kind of midsize businesses use this framework for everything, but it has a really good chapter about defining core values. And what I loved about it was it wasn’t like an abstract exercise.

And you could do it at any time. Like it really was. So if you, at this point I already had some employees and it’s kind of like, think about your ideal employees, the ones you like, what do you like about them? You know, and like takes you through the steps. You write down all these things. All right, which of your employees are problematic?

What don’t you like about them? Kind of figure out and, and, you know, you can go through process and we have core values, both our businesses and they overlap, you know, kind of well. And so once you have these, you’re like, Oh, like everyone who works here and is great is like a hundred a plus on all these core values and people who have problems are failing at one or more of the values.

And so you can start reviewing people internally about that. But then when you’re hiring, was the kind of the big ah ha for me, was I used to hire, say I was hiring someone in marketing, I would ask them questions about how they’ve marketed before and try to judge if they have the skill set to do the job they’re gonna do.

And instead now when I’m hiring people, every question I’m trying to drill into, do they have the values of everyone else who works here. Cause that’s, Turns out more important than the skill set because if we work together for six months and you have all the skills But you don’t have the values. I found it’s almost impossible to kind of for some of these values or so And maybe to make it more clear like There’s one value in particular we have at stranger studios, which is you know, taking responsibility for your own work.

And we’ve found that that’s probably the most important of all the values we have, because it’s the one that you use to fix things when they’re broken. So if I sit down with someone and we have another value, which is like you know heifers or you know, have a commitment to open source and transparency.

And maybe something’s out of line there if they don’t take responsibility for, you know, why they’re not meeting that value. Like there’s not even like a tool to lever to make it better. And I mean, I could go on advice like that, taking responsibility, like an example of that is when, when there’s problems and why it’s so important, like when, you know, Something’s not getting done.

Like an employee you have messed up. They sent out like a blog post and it was poorly worded. It was undrafted. It looks like they might’ve plagiarized like the worst thing you could imagine. And then you’re like, Hey, that’s a problem. You definitely need to talk to that employee. They’re probably breaking some core values while they did the sloppy work.

So having those core values to talk it through. But As a manager, having responsibility for this work means that I have to take responsibility. Like, how did this happen on my watch? What did I do wrong? Why didn’t I explain to this person that this, why did they think this work would fly? What, you know, why did they think they could get away with this?

Why didn’t they know how to do this? And so we’re always doing that. So it’s like at every level, it’s kind of like, you know, taking responsibility for what you did for the work that you do. So I’m diving into like one specific value. We have, you know, five of them, but it’s once we know these things and it’s like, man, these things really, we developed them based on the people that we worked with and we wanted to work with and what we liked about them.

And these were the traits. Then we you know, definitely tested the people who, you know, thought about these with the people who are working at the business and whenever we hire, we test on those first. And then definitely the skills are important too. I’ve, I’ve realized. You know, basically we have to trial everyone like it’s when we hire someone to do a job It’s nearly impossible to know if they can actually do that job well until you actually work together Even if you see stuff in their portfolio There’s sometimes there’s cases like oh, they were working with someone else and the person who really can do it is that other person you didn’t hire or but It’s it’s hard to to judge people.

Some people really get it interviewing and not just get it doing the job and but you can train people on skills and and Things but it’s hard to train them on values. So looking out for that early is key.

Chris Badgett: I Think one thing when creating your values is they don’t have to be cheesy You So like you might think like trust, integrity, work hard, but you can actually have fun with it and they can be kind of creative.

And like the first things you think of of like, of course you want to work at a company that has integrity. Like that should be every company. It’s not really that unique. So like spend some time on it, like at least a week, like thinking about it, talking to team about it, just introspection. I just also just want to iterate that like terminating or firing people is one of the hardest things you do as an entrepreneur.

And when it’s about the values, it becomes easier because it’s not about, Oh, I feel this way or you made me feel this way. It’s more about, this is the culture. These are like kind of the rules here of how we operate. And oftentimes, you know, this person has been given, like clearly communicated that like, Like, for example, at LFTR LMS, one of our company values is clear communication.

So if I were ever to let somebody go for communication, I would have tried to coach them, help them level up, get on the same page, understand expectations with communications more, and then, you know, give them a path to improve and look out for it and revisit. So then when it does come time to a termination conversation, if that’s going to happen, It’s not about how I feel.

It’s just protecting the values of the company and we’re not seeing change and it becomes easier to do.

Jason Coleman: And that’s key. You said like protecting the values of the company. Cause it’s, it’s like, if you let folks in who don’t have those same values, it kind of poisons the well and you know, people, if work ethic is important and that’s built into the values, people come in without it, then other people are like, Oh, he’s not working hard.

Why do I have to work hard? Or you know, they’re not communicating well. Why do I have to communicate well? So yeah,

Chris Badgett: and one more thing just to add on that is To make your life easier if your personal values and your business values overlap pretty good or even are the same It’s so easy just to show up because this is like, this is who I am at work.

This is who I am at home. And it’s just like the same, you’re not like a different person at work. And when we talked about the customer avatar before, if the person you’re targeting is also in this values group, there’s just so much congruency. That it’s not hard or forced or like that’s where I’m talking about one day Like you don’t want to necessarily serve everybody because this other group that doesn’t have these values at all Probably aren’t going to be that fun to work with or support or whatever So it’s it sounds quick like oh write down the six most important values But like really think about it and think about it and who you hire and who you want to work with as customers and so on Let’s talk about thinking in spreadsheets and building models.

The thing I love about spreadsheets is I’m kind of on the, I’m like, if there’s like the right brain, who’s like artists left brain hardcore analytical spreadsheets, more on the analytical side. I’m probably Right of center in terms of my creative, like way of abstract thinking. But I love working in spreadsheets because it removes abstraction.

Like I do a lot of mind maps. I mean, looking at one of my notes right here, like here’s a mind map of things I want to talk about values. But if I was actually going to like codify my values and like get more specific and make sure they fit, I’d move off the mind map and move into a spreadsheet.

Because this cell needs to have a data point in it. And then once I have that data, or that word, or those numbers, I can build formulas and do stuff. So I just love the idea of removing abstraction and forcing yourself to work in spreadsheets. Like, even as like a course creator, if you’re gonna create like a resource to go with a training, like a worksheet, this is how I create worksheets.

I would be like, well, how do I support this person? I start mind mapping on my paper, but then ultimately I’m going to build that spreadsheet and put boxes on there and give this box a name and that’s going to become PDF worksheet. So I moved from abstract, you know, brainstorming into concrete, valuable resource.

You can do that for course outlining too. So like, okay, I’m a, to use our dating coach example, I was just brainstorming when I came up with those like milestones of like what needs to happen on the way to finding the love of your life. So that’s kind of a brainstorm, but eventually we want to put that in a spreadsheet and start thinking about you know, the order of things, what’s missing.

Is there anything that goes between this and so on? Marketing content is the same. Where if we find our five pain points and then we got our mind map going and then we can create like a spreadsheet that gives us like categories and filters and columns for like, Oh, for this pain point, here’s the 12 topics.

And then, you know, it could just keep expanding because there’s only so much we can carry in our working memory. So moving off of like journals and scribbles to like spreadsheets and tabs is really powerful. And then on the more business side, like business planning, using our dating coach example again, like if I was going to get into adding a line of business for like, okay, they found their soul mate.

Now we’re going to do like how to do the family thing or whatever. Be like, well, how many customers do I have? Like what percentage of people like want to have kids? And I could start forecasting numbers and stuff, which is something you’re really good at. Your forecasts are awesome of like kind of validating ideas.

And what if that grows at 10 percent every year? And now we have these two products, the love of your life and then awesome family product. And what’s it, what does that look like in 10 years? There’s only so much of that you can calculate in your brain. So that’s, that’s really helpful. And just a personal story, like you’ve done that.

Like when you look at things like growth, like at Lifter LMS, like, okay, if we set these goals and this is where we want to be in five years, you said something to me the other day, like, Oh, if you grow, if you want to double the business, if you grow 15 percent every year, in three years, you’ve doubled the business.

I don’t know if it’s 25%, but yeah, but that’s like, Instead of being like. I want to grow, like, let’s double the business. That’s like the abstract thought and let’s do it next year. It’s like, well, but if we do it this way and this compounds and let’s model that out in math, it really starts making sense.

And you get it a more concrete plan.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. I call that like another aspect of that, doing that spreadsheet, I call it like positive visualization through spreadsheets. It’s like you, you kind of model your business and how it works and you’re like, what if I grow 25 percent per year? Click and drag, you know, it doesn’t like 25 percent is pretty big.

Like we don’t like the power of compounding. You drag out 10, 20 years. You’re like, Oh my God, this is huge. And there’s something about like putting that number in there 25 percent and like committing to it to like, you find a way to do it. And if you have a good spreadsheet model, it’s like, you’ll have cells like a really simple model.

I’m selling courses to people at a certain price. And it’s like how many How many people times what price is how much I make and if you want to make more money You either have more courses more people or higher price. There’s like no other way to make more money Like so which of those dials needs to turn so if you’re like, I’m gonna go 25% Am I trying to get 25 percent more users?

Am I raising my prices 25 percent and hoping that people will buy it? Am I, you know, going to expand. You know, horizontally through new courses and sell them to the same people where other products and things. Yeah. So, I mean, I love it. It’s funny. I’m like on the left side of the right brain, left brain thing.

And so I do love these spreadsheets, especially like early on to model the business. It feels almost irresponsible to like start. spending money on a business before you realize like how that spending that money turns into the money you’re going to make back, like to have a rough idea. This is how we make money.

And I, so it’s good to get out of your, so for folks who are maybe right brained, I see folks like we’re, we’re gushing over spreadsheets and I see some folks are just like, I don’t like numbers. I don’t, I don’t get it. I don’t know how they work. And so they avoid that completely. And I, I think it’s like good to try to get out of your comfort zone and, and, and dig into that.

Then more specifically, like when you’re doing these kind of like modeling forecast type sheets. You know, that could be as simple as I said, how many customers times what price it’s like the numbers are going to be imprecise and to be okay with having the spreadsheet isn’t, and I think that’s another hangup some folks have is they’re like, Why do that?

I’m like, just drag 25%. Doesn’t mean you grow 25%. You’re like, yes, but the product, like, okay, now dig into it. You have to figure out how to grow 25 percent or like, it has to make sense. There’s a, you know, don’t be scared of the spread, spreadsheets or the fact that you, you can’t really know. That’s it.

Yeah. So yeah, in investing sometimes. And you see if it makes sense. Like you know, you have to tell a story then to justify those numbers. This happens in like stock investing too, where you’re like, they’re growing at 30 percent per year. And then you’re kind of like, it’s a, they’re a company that sells cars for example.

And you’re like, you drag that out five, 10 years and you’re like, that’s more cars than there are in the whole entire world. So you’re like, they have to do something other than sell cars if they’re going to keep growing at 30 percent and like that. So that’s like the numbers in the spreadsheet lead to the story that you have to tell to figure out like the next move you got to make in your business.

Yeah. And so, yeah, like, don’t be scared of spreadsheets. Use rough estimates to get an idea and you can always update your sheet as you, you learn more. So if you realize you know, the, the assumptions you made about pricing, about how many people would stick around if you raise prices, assumptions about, you know, like you blow up and you’re on Oprah and now like that users goes off the chain.

It’s like, okay, now you need to, that’s a good thing. You got to adjust your spreadsheet to account for that. Yeah. And I think. I’ve seen, I see this a lot on, I do I’m treasurer on a, like a private school board. And I, part of that, I build a forecast just like we do for lifter. And like, it’s kind of, we don’t set a budget per se, but we do a forecast that is like a rep, like stay within these numbers.

But not like every domain has a budget, but that’s how we figure out, you know, is, is the school making money or losing money? And I, other people on the board just have, I see like that just maybe they’re You know, they have, they struggle with either like the spreadsheets scare them or they’re like, it’s not exact.

And it’s like, it’s just a forecast and you do your best and you adjust. If I’m wrong, then we adjust. And actually, you know, oh my God, we overshot. The school lost money. That is bad to lose money. But hopefully mid year you can check in and be like, shoot, we’re going to end up, you know, and kind of adjust if you can.

Or if you have like a cushion of money, like, okay, last year we lost money cause we didn’t have a good forecast. Why? Okay. It changed these adjustments. Next year’s forecast is going to be better.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. One of my favorite business spreadsheets, and this was a trick I learned from Dan Martell. It’s called a precision scorecard.

And this is something I recommend everybody do who has a business, which is Create a spreadsheet that has like the main functions. So like for a course creator business as an example, you’ve got sales, you have marketing, you have like customer satisfaction or just customer results metrics, and maybe you have some operation stuff just for the actual running of the business.

And then pick three metrics. so that you can be more scientific about it and you can see things and you report it every week. So three metrics per department. So to give an example, like marketing as an example, if you have an online business, you’re going to want, you might want to look at traffic, like how many in your Google analytics, how many, how many people visited the website this week, you know, and sales, you might have whatever your conversion tool, if it’s a one on one call, you might have like meetings booked.

Meetings, show up rate, sales conversion rate, so that would be like three there. And then you just, you fill it out every week. I actually like actually going and tracking down the numbers myself. I often think like, oh, that’s something an assistant can do. But the very act of me like digging in, getting the data, putting in the sheet, looking at it, looking at it last week, looking at it the same week a year ago.

I start like seeing patterns and I get ideas and, and, and it’s great to celebrate where you’re winning. Like, Oh my gosh, our traffic doubled this week. It tells you like, Oh, that marketing thing we did worked or, or you’ll find a problem. Like if you do ongoing monthly coaching and you have like a really high churn rate of people not renewing or canceling, there’s something to dig in there.

So it’s sort of like a, when you go to the doctor. And they run labs and they’re looking at all these markers that helps like figure out what to do,

Jason Coleman: diagnose the health of the business.

Chris Badgett: Let’s look at kind of being an entrepreneur and like, it’s sort of this thing I’ve heard. Um, I’m trying to remember the guy’s name.

I heard this from, but like, there’s this one quality of entrepreneurs that they can’t turn it off. It’s like a thing. So they’re like always kind of in business, you know, They’re always looking at through the lens of business or entrepreneurship wherever they go like If you’re picking up your kids at school and like man, this pickup process is really inefficient like at my kids school I had to like You had to like go against traffic make a u turn in the back of the parking lot to get in line It was just it was always like chaos but you can learn from any domain.

And the big idea is really just pattern recognition. So if you can’t turn it off, if you’re always just grinding on like seeing systems and wanting to optimize and fix everything and start new companies, cause you see like something new working, you can, you start identifying patterns. So pattern recognition is.

a big part of being an entrepreneur. And when you study either different types of businesses or even different disciplines entirely, you can see patterns that you could apply over to your company. And then when you see pattern, then you can start, okay, I see a pattern here that’s sort of like, For me, it’s kind of like right brain and then it’s like, let’s push it over to the left brain and start building it.

Like what is the actual mechanism and system here? How does this work? And then you can, can I apply that system in my business? And for marketing specifically, like everything is marketing. As of recording this, we just watched a presidential election process. It played out over years and months and it’s a giant marketing campaign.

So when I’m looking at that, I’m like, okay, this is the this text message I’m getting on my phone. Let’s look at the candidates websites. You know, what is like, what’s happening on social media? Like it’s all marketing is everywhere. Communication’s everywhere. So you might learn something that you see in like a presidential campaign or let’s say a Black Friday retail ad for like clothing, but you sell courses and coaching, but like, was there something in that brand of clothing the way they did it?

They were like, I think I can try that over in mine, but kind of format it differently for what I offer. And we mentioned earlier about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. The people that read that book are kind of business and marketing nerds like myself and Jason. Yeah. But what he did is he actually studied like cults, which is more of like a social science, social thing.

He was like, how do these cult leaders like develop all this influence? So he took something from sort of a social science world and brought it over to business and marketing. And so there’s all these Chowdhury nerds in business. So that’s just a great example of taking it from over here and applying it to a completely different industry.

Jason Coleman: This reminds me of a tactic I heard from Alex Ormazi, who’s on YouTube about exposing yourself to these other things. He recommends like not turning off ads or paying to get rid of ads on YouTube. Like if you’re ever going to make a YouTube ad, you want to expose yourself to all these ads and kind of see what seems to be working.

Or when something grabs your attention, you’re like, wait, why did that grab my attention? Why did I react to that text message or that email or that phone call or, you know and take mental notes and be like, Oh, we could, we could do it that way. That’s awesome. And I think, you know, I, I definitely have this in my life where I’m, I’m always thinking about business.

We’re here in this space. I think we’ve both been done and we’re like, what’s it cost to lease this? How much did these lights cost? And it’s like, you just can’t turn it off. You can’t do it. Whenever I’m at a restaurant and it’s kind of like, how many tables? Am I like, how did the turnover? You know, Kim and I, Kim, Kim started making dog treats for our dogs.

And we’re immediately like, how could you scale this up and make that? She’s like, no, dude, you just, you have a hobby, keep it as a hobby sometimes. But I’m always thinking about that. And I guess one thing that’s useful about that is that you know, you can pull things from our industries, apply it to your business.

You can also use that same mindset to analyze your own business. So if you can tap into that and find that kind of beginner’s mindset of you know. Trying to experience. What do I offer? What do I give away? What do I sell? If I, you know, how would I think about that? And and you can kind of consider other You know big changes like we get caught in our ways like it’s a free man product.

This is how we sell it We sell this thing. Let’s not, you know, tweak the business model But I have that thing. I mean, that’s always analyzing, come up with business models on the fly. Like turn that on my own business. Don’t be afraid to like entertain big changes. And there’s a really good blog post by Jason Cohen of a smart bear and WP engine where I forget what is this?

It’s some crazy numbers, like 20 or more like thought experiments to like push you outside your comfort zone and consider different business models. Like if you sell something for 500, what if you sold it for 50, 000, what would you have to do in your business? To like justify a 50, 000 price point. And what’s really amazing is if you go through that exercise, maybe you’ll be like, I should be in the business of selling 50, 000 things.

That could be cool. But you might realize like, wait, I have this thing to justify a 50, 000 price point. And it doesn’t actually cost me any money. I can record it once and give it away for free, basically. And deliver more value to my people who are paying 500. So you like, you push yourself. And if you’re, you constantly have that.

So. Don’t be stuck in, in a way about you know, your, your business model and consider things. And even if you’re not gonna, we’ve changed slightly our business model over time, but we’ve done things, you know you know, like is offering lifetime deals or not. And we have like a mutual friend in the same space who I think is more defensive on this.

Like he, he has, I think he’s struggling to grow. He runs a very similar business and he wants to push the same levers he’s been pushing. But it’s kind of not going to work. Like I, I think of this analogy, which is silly. Cause I don’t go to the gym that often, but like when I used to work out when I was younger, you’re like, you do a bench press and you’re like, cool.

I go from like 150 to like 200 pounds bench press and you hit a wall. And at that point, like just doing the bench press over and over again, it’s not going to push you. You need to exercise other muscles that contribute. And, you know, shake it up a little bit and try something different. And so I think this mutual friend, like, I think is hitting a wall and trying to do the same exercises.

And it’s like, consider this thing that you give away for free. You could charge for it. And you’re like, how do you do that? Like you really could like nothing sacred. And that’s part of it too. If you’re like, nothing’s really sacred, we’re just thinking, we’re just exploring opportunities. Go with me here.

Like, you’re like, come along on this journey and see what it feels like. If you made this big change in your business, you don’t have to do it. We’re just talking. But sometimes you get insights that way.

Chris Badgett: I think one of the coolest ways to always be businessing that can be a lot of fun is to flip the script.

Like, In sales and marketing it used to be called like the mark or the prospect, like who’s the target, right? In sales, direct sales. So I actually really enjoy when it’s flipped. Like if I’m going to buy a car, I’m the mark, like I’m semi, but I am fully aware I’m like looking at everything and I actually enjoy it because I know what’s going on.

I know what good sales looks like. I know what not great sales looks like. And it’s fun just to be on the other side. So if you want to create a course, flip it, take somebody’s course. That’s something you’re interested in. If you want to become a coach, like get coached, see what they’re doing in their business.

If you want to run a services agency, hire a services agency. And if you do those things that are in alignment with your business, there’s a lot of synergy. So. You know, for example, I hired a coach for I mentioned the Dan Martell several times and he has a program called SAS Academy for SAS founders.

While it’s extra time, I also wanted to go in there and see what it was like to be on the other side and be the client and how does this coach do his thing? And it’s really informed things like that. And if you’re starting to delegate in your org chart And you’re, you’re, you’re have a service offering or an agency.

Like you can hire an agency to run ads for you and see how it goes. What can you learn from their process? And so I’m not just get the service and the result.

Jason Coleman: When you’re building a product or pricing something, you’re like, you’re, you know, you’re pricing a course. You’re like, what courses have you taken recently?

What did you like about them? What were they priced? What things have you spent money on personally? Why, how? Never stop learning. Yeah, it’s always on.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jason Coleman explore the importance of developing subject matter expertise as an education entrepreneur, highlighting important tactics and procedures.

By comparing this path to handicrafts, they highlight how mastery necessitates a strong, lifetime dedication to education and ongoing development. This dedication goes beyond first-time interest and necessitates constant interaction with business advancements, continuous learning, and an openness to change and try new things.

Chris Badgett has spent more than 15 years working in the online education and course development sector, constantly changing jobs as a software entrepreneur, agency owner, and course producer. A key component of developing competence is creating a deliberate “media diet.” This is consciously consuming materials that are in line with particular objectives, whether they are books, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, or newsletters.

Jason Coleman emphasizes how crucial it is to modify this diet in accordance with present goals, such as emphasizing business-related items when an entrepreneur is starting out. In order to establish a learning and collaboration ecosystem, tools such as YouTube’s “Watch Later” feature, carefully chosen subreddits, and resource sharing via Slack are essential.

Writing becomes a fundamental component of the professional journey, acting as a means of elucidating and expanding comprehension. Drawing from the Feynman Technique, Chris and Jason stress that true comprehension comes from the ability to explain complex concepts simply.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Hello and welcome to the education entrepreneur mentor series where we unpack the five critical hats that you as an education entrepreneur yourself or with a team need to wear to be successful teaching online, potentially building a business around your knowledge, skills, and experience. Those five hats are being an expert, being an entrepreneur, being a teacher, being a technologist, and being a community builder.

Today, Jason and I are going to be talking about becoming the expert. So we’re going to be talking about the expert hat. Enjoy this session.

All right, today we’re talking about becoming the expert, and the first idea we want to dig into is developing subject matter expertise. And I have this idea around craftsmanship and what does it mean to be a craftsperson or a craftsman. And really I think the main strategy here is it’s all about lifelong learning.

It’s a huge commitment. And once you commit, you really have to commit. ’cause you can do a project in school and learn in shop class, how to build a wooden toolbox. But if you really wanna become like a finished carpenter, you’re gonna need to spend years in that industry. And so there’s a big commitment, but it takes continuous improvement and lifelong learning.

And some of the ways I do that is once you commit, like I committed to online courses as an example. First it was just a fascination, but I really committed about 15 years ago. I just fell in love with the industry. And once I decided to do business in this area, both as a course creator and later with an agency and later with software.

It’s just a commitment that I’ve kept up with and once you commit as a crafts person It’s really important to keep up with your industry and not rest on your laurels And one of the ways I keep up with the industry of online education, influencer marketing, online coaching industry, course creator into industry is through YouTube podcasts, newsletters, books, and blogs.

Like it’s almost like entertainment for me to spend a big chunk of time on that. And the other part of lifelong learning is just not stopping and asking for help. Whether that’s coaches, mentors, community, peer masterminds, that’s part of being a craftsperson is that continuous learning.

So for example, a couple of years ago, I joined Dan Martell’s SAS Academy, which is designed for software founders. I spent two years in the program. It was a coaching program community that are like 300 training courses in there. I looked at that like my nontraditional master’s degree. When I signed up, I committed for two years and the other piece, which is really fun is making time for experimentation.

We’ve been doing that lately in our businesses with AI tools. I was recently trying to create a course with all AI and I’m making a course about that from our community, but it’s not just about studying. It’s also about experimentation and. For me, I’m just constantly experimenting, constantly studying my industry and my fascination, looking at competitors.

Seeing what influencers are coming up in the space, what’s new with the tech. And I’ve just, I feel like I have my pulse on it, like an obsession.

Jason Coleman: Something that stands out to me is that I think we both do is curate this media diet consciously. And I go through phases in my life where something is different, isn’t focused.

Am I like being a developer? Or like a father or like working on the business and when I’m working on the business, I’ll update my YouTube subscriptions and put different things on my watch later, like on Reddit. If you’re on Reddit as a site and you just look at what they show you, it’s all like dogs doing backflips and people breaking their legs and like whatever hilarious things.

But if you actually subscribe to the subreddits that are related to business and your topic, you start getting that as like a newsfeed. So like I hide all the like poker. Parenting, politics, unsubscribe from all that stuff, subscribe to all the business stuff and immerse myself. I’m reading books.

So it’s Oh, like the book I’m reading, fiction start, I have these business books I want to read. I’m in a business mindset. I’ll start reading the business books while I’m, so I changed my media diet. across all the different forms. And that helps me like stay in the zone.

So even when I’m relaxing and going for a walk and listen to a podcast, it could be, if I’m working on the business, it’s like a business podcast instead of a comedy podcast or whatever might, also be in there.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I just to piggyback on that, I like to, when I am walking, it’s learning time for me or when I’m exercising.

If I hear something like I need to implement that, I like literally email myself on out just like a note to jog my memory. And also I appreciate, like I, you mentioned watch later on YouTube. I also like Slack myself all the time using our instant messenger and also have trusted.

People like if Jason sends me a slack message with Hey, check out this video. Like I, I highly value it. It’s like the human feed of like curators that, that have similar interests.

Jason Coleman: Some, I want to talk about like, how do you develop subject matter expertise and really dive in and learn something like one of the big ideas I have is around writing to learn.

And it’s not my idea. I think there’s a name like called the Feynman technique Richard Feynman, the physicist. So the basic idea is you don’t really understand something until you can explain it well in the simplest terms and forcing yourself to write about it forces you to do that. And so more recently, like folks like David Perel, James Clear and Anne Lamott, like all talk about this, like power of writing to help you organize your thoughts.

I think writing is unique. Some folks aren’t good writers. So maybe it’s, making videos forces you, or like doing audio if there’s some other medium that kind of works for you, drawing diagrams, but I think writing in particular is special about organizing your thoughts. And tactically, I would, recommend blogging like you’re trying to learn about something you feel like you have what I don’t know anything yet.

What do I have to write about it? It’s write about your experience learning about this thing. A tactic for that, if you feel like. Jason says, write something, but I don’t know what to write about is this concept called an e bomb, which I take from the 30 by 500 course by Alex Hillman and Amy Hoy.

And that’s basically like when someone asks you a question or sends the E stands for email, when someone sends you an email and you answer it, that’s content. It’s oh, other people have that same question. Put it on your blog. And answer it, maybe a little bit better, a little bit longer, long form, go into it more deeply.

And so that’s that’s where you can find these content. Or if you have a question and you answer it, and then the other one is publishing it so don’t just write it down and put it away in your journal. There’s something about putting it online and other people can read it that like forces you to really nail it.

So often I have an idea and it’s in my notes. Then when I’m like, I’m going to write this and publish it, I’m like, I don’t actually understand that as well as. Or I thought I knew the history, but I don’t, let me read and get it more clear. I always thought like in, in college, like everyone struggles to write and you’re like, I’m trying to get like a hundred percent.

That means I like followed, like the best practices of writing. It’s so artificial. I didn’t really learn to write well until I started publishing for other people to read. And it’s there’s an audience and you have to explain something to them and transfer knowledge.

It forces you to really do that well. And so like in our, my career, like where this came up was the investor geeks blog, which was like my first kind of WordPress project online. Me and two other friends had just come out of college and we had decent jobs and we had four or one case for the first time.

And that literally was probably like one of the first blog posts is like, What is a 401k? And as we learned about it, we wrote about it like, Oh, this is what it is. There’s different kinds and here’s how you should think about it. So every time we learn something about investing, we would blog about it there.

And it really forced us to understand what we were talking about. And we had an audience and, we built an audience from that, but also probably the biggest value we got from that was just learning all those things and how to manage money. So now later in life. Yeah. When business is going well I know all these things.

Chris Badgett: I think writing is critical and it’s almost like it’s going out of fashion. Like what a kids want to be when they grow up, they want to be a YouTuber. It’s about video, visual, the rise of Instagram and everything. But writing it literally, it’s not just blogging, like social media is writing a script for a video is writing emails, writing, writing a business plan is writing, communicating to your team or your friends is writing text messaging.

It’s all writing. So it’s like the super skill. And you mentioned blogging. I think. There’s a misconception that like, Oh, is blogging dead? Everything’s on social media. Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t blog. And, really owning your library of content, especially while building in public and what you’re learning, it just sharpens you so much.

And it’s all about putting in the reps. Yeah, nobody’s a great writer at the beginning or, graphic designer or teacher, but just putting in the reps as a subject matter expert, all of a sudden it’s that whole thing about you overestimate what you can do in a day, but underestimate what you can do in a year.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. And I think on that point of, Is blogging out of fashion. There probably was a moment where on the internet content wise, you could learn something, become an expert, write a blog and kind of become famous as a blogger. And now it feels like you said, YouTube, social media, it’s different. It’s all, it’s like in the moment it’s shorter attention.

It’s, it has to be outraged, not just look how smart I am. And that’s like chat GPT knows everything anyway. Like I don’t have to like search for a blog on what a 401k is. Like Google just tells me when I. Search it. It’s still a good method to organize your thoughts. And then once you have that content, you can repurpose it and you like, okay, I wrote the blog post now, you want to, record yourself talking about it and share that on social media 10 times.

So if as part of a bigger marketing strategy, like you said, it’s you still write a script often before you video record, you write a draft before you talk to your team, sending emails and stuff. So it’s still a good skill as a baseline for, even if the As a marketing engine, it’s not as strong as it used to be.

Chris Badgett: I think just one more point on that, that I call it a news item. So if you’re going to do a marketing campaign about a new product launch or a sale or something important, the first thing I do is write a blog post about it or a page of content on the site. And that becomes the hub of all that other stuff, like social media, building a course about it, sending emails, all this other types of writing, but that blog.

Post the news item is the core of everything. We’re talking about

Jason Coleman: educational content. If you have ideas for courses and lessons and things like writing a blog post about one core aspect of it and sharing it around and trying to see how it sticks, see what’s interesting to people, that’s really useful for helping you in the early stages of, figuring out the content.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk about inner game. As a subject matter expert looking to teach online or just being an entrepreneur, there’s a lot of inner work that has to happen. The biggest thing I see is imposter syndrome, like who am I to do X or I’m not ready, perfectionism creeps in. And what I’ve learned over probably 15 plus years being an entrepreneur is that Entrepreneurship is personal development.

It’s like the, in my opinion, one of the highest and most useful ways to improve yourself. And, but these things creep up like imposter syndrome and self belief issues. We hear about things like fear of failure, but actually fear of success is a bigger problem. Like not what if I fail, but what if it works?

And now my high school friends are going to see me and I have this like new identity and Oh, I remember when that guy was doing XYZ and now he’s like teaching business or doing whatever. Like it, you get all this, get in your head and creates this imposter syndrome thing.

Everybody deals with this. Yeah. I would say even like presidential candidates as an example, like deal with that. Like in the highest job positions. If you don’t have imposter syndrome. You might be a psychopath, but one of the ways that I work on that, that I’ve learned over the years is shifting the focus.

Don’t make it about you and the perception of you just focus on helping people. Cause as soon as you transition the focus from I need to be perfect to how can I best help these people? Some of the weight of imposter syndrome just melts away. And the other thing is, I’ve noticed this at Lifter LMS as an example.

It’s been going for over 10 years, and I’ve, pattern recognition is something that entrepreneurs do, which we’ll talk about later. But one of the things I’ve noticed with the projects that are successful, the people that, make the million dollars, or get 300 enrollments on their first sale or the first time they offer their course or their membership or whatever, Is that people have, these people all have this mode of consistent, imperfect action.

So they’re okay with like little micro failures along the way, or, I’m like 80 percent happy with this course. Let’s just ship it. Like they, they overcome. Is that the

Jason Coleman: same as I’ve heard of like a bias towards action as like a skill? Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And it’s, and I add the word imperfect, a bias towards imperfect action, but it’s forward.

Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that really helps, and I think this is like writing you have to put in the reps, is just developing a thick skin because when you go on the internet as a public expert or entrepreneur, there are quote haters or you get judged. You’re on stage. And the reality is there’s a lot of mental illness in society, a lot of negative energy you get.

Online is really more of a reflection of the person who’s given that out. And of course, nobody’s perfect. If you can admit mistakes, if you do make a mistake and you get some negative blowback, but just having a thick skin, it just comes with time. I think we’ve both seen that in our companies at lifter LMS and paid memberships pro that like when you’re doing customer support and working with people.

Sometimes people are like frustrated, they’re angry, maybe the tone’s not great. But after you do it for a decade, you’re just trying to help these people. You understand their project’s really important to them, understand there’s all these cultural differences and people are in different emotional states.

It’s not that you get immune, but your skin thickens. Yeah, you take

Jason Coleman: it a little less personally. It’s like you said, it’s not about you. It’s about them. Exactly. It’s like the mental switch.

Chris Badgett: Exactly. And if we’re all coming from a frame of we’re just trying to help. Yeah. Yeah. The whole business is just a business of helping.

And if you’re coming to us for support or coaching or content, it’s just a frame of helping. One of the things I wanted to talk about in terms of a story related to this an imposter syndrome. One of my first course projects I did with my wife, and we did it in the organic gardening and permaculture niche.

And I wanted to get other course creators, like more famous people. So like here’s imposter syndrome, like who are the best organic gardening and permaculture experts in the world? And there’s a guy who had the bestselling book on Amazon and the topic of permaculture named Toby Hemingway. He was, I was living in Montana at the time he was doing a talk over in Idaho or Washington state.

And I was just dreaming a little bit with my wife. We could just go over to that talk, film it, talk to him about it, get him to become an expert on our platform. All he has to do is say, yes we’ll just make the pitch. I was like, to my wife, Sam, that’s her name. And I said, just send him an email, tell him all that stuff I just said, and just ask him. I was joking when I said this, but she didn’t really see it as a joke. She emailed him. I just said, finish the email with just saying, where do you want us to send the check?

Jason Coleman: And

Chris Badgett: she literally wrote him that. And he said, yes. And a week later we filmed it and then he put it on his website and then we got a bunch of traffic.

We did more stuff with him. But that’s, sometimes you just got to be a little bold to get past the imposter syndrome. And there’s just P people are just people. Yeah. And yeah, we made a good offer. He said yes. And we did a partnership.

Jason Coleman: And imposter syndrome is everywhere. And like you said, if you don’t have it, that’s almost something that’s wrong.

And the people who don’t have it to me, anyway, they’re annoying. The opposite is what, a know it all. Yeah. And those folks, I guess have a different path where they can fake it to you and make it. But I think. I start to see in others if you dive deep and build relationships with folks, you see how other people are imperfect and you’re like, Oh I’m as smart as them.

I should be able to do this too. And I guess it’s just something you build up over time. The other thing you talked about was like dealing with the haters, the hate you get. That’s the negativity from stuff. If you’re putting content out online, building courses and putting it, making yourself a public figure, exposing yourself to that.

You just open up to it on a scale and we know as humans I forget what it is like I think it’s humans process negative things like four times as much as positive. So that it’s like a, an investing, there’s I forget what they call it, like negativity bias. So if someone says something bad about you, like that hits you like four times as hard as if someone says, Hey, your hair looks nice.

You’re gonna be like, sure, that’s good. And I have a post about this, tons of things to deal with that. But I think, One thing that’s important early on that helps is to seek out that positive and ask for it and be open about it. So sometimes like example that we got negative reviews that were hitting us on like the paid memberships pro product.

And we had an emailing list and it was like, let’s just email them and say Hey, could you say something nice about us and give us a review? We really appreciate it. Boom. And then a bunch of customers came back and gave us some reviews and then we could dive into that. And yeah, it’s good to process that stuff too.

Cause there is. underlying the whatever the negativity that’s in there. It’s there’s a point. So you’re like, Hey, is there a point to this? Is there a way that I can learn from this? Cool. Take that out and then, try to deal with it. So another thing about intergame related to that maybe is I see a lot of folks who who give up too early sometimes and they have big dreams They want to make a million dollars and then they only make a little bit of money and it feels like insurmountable and so a concept that helps there is to think about getting just one percent better every day And this is a concept that’s james out to share talks about in his book choose yourself And there’s other flavors of this but it’s like a focus on incremental growth.

And so it’s You know, when you’re shooting for some big goal, this many members, this many subscribers, this much money. You could get upset on the, on that path when you handle setbacks and you talked about having thick skin helps with that. Another thing that helps with that is starting small.

So there’s this tactic. So it’s Hey, I want to make a million dollars a year. I wish I could credit this. We’ll find it. Who talks about this, but it’s a, okay, you want to make a million dollars a year and that seems hard. What would make that easy? And you’re like, if I had this, it’d be real easy to make a million dollars.

So oh, if I had a million email subscribers, I just need a dollar for my rhythm and I could do that. Oh, cool. Okay. How do you make a million email subscribers? Okay. I don’t know. What would make it easy to have a million email subscribers? It’s I don’t know if some other guy with a mailing list with 10 million promoted my email list.

And I’m making something up, but it’s, that’s that kind of thing. You can scale back from your big goal. And come up with the small goal. That’s this is the next step. What’s the next good step for this. So I think thinking about that and focusing on those small steps and also like always be learning.

So this is like a trick is like of handling setbacks. If you set out to make a course and sell it, it’s the first time you’ve ever done it and you like to be successful. I want people to learn from this and make money off it. That could happen, but it might not. But one thing you can control is you can learn from the process.

At the end of it, you’ll know how to create a course and promote it and sell it and put it out there. And so some, I always try to have that with every new project. It feels like a little risky or brand new is like, how can I always be learning? How can I like, even if I fail, still pull something from this, like a version of all these things I’m thinking about.

That come, this comes up often in like the, maybe like the indie hacker space or people who are trying to build a business on the side. They set a goal I need $10,000 a month, and that will replace my like, nice cushy job, and then I can do this full time. And they build up a system, they get attention, they start selling stuff.

They create a way to sell money or sell money, had to get to sell things to make money. And like after six months or a year of work, they’re making like a thousand dollars a month. And they’re like, I failed. I’m only making a thousand dollars a month. I need 10, 000 a month. And they feel like they’re 10 percent of the way there.

But in reality, like an experience of watching people do this and our own experience going through it is they’re really halfway to 10, 000. Like that first step is so hard. Just getting any money is like a big deal. And of course there could be like problems with the market or the product that you’re building that kind of limit its potential.

To that it might not grow to 10,000, but the effort part of it is you’ve done half the effort to get, if you’re at a thousand dollars a month, you’ve done half the effort to get to $10,000 a month. And I think people don’t think of things that way. So it’s that message sometimes helps people like keep pushing when they’re ready to give up.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Failure is feedback. That’s how I think about it. And that’s, it’s like a reframe. Like I heard a really cool reframe that stuck with me as soon as I heard it. This is like inner game stuff. You know how a lot of people say, man, I’m crazy busy. I heard this guy on a podcast being interviewed and he never said that.

He said, I’m active. It’s I’m not busy. I’m active. Like he would reframe what the interviewer was saying to put a positive spin on it or a productive spin on it. Yeah. And in terms of 1 percent better every day. I don’t know the math behind that you, you might know, but if you do get 1 percent better every day, you’re like a thousand percent better at the end of a year or something like that.

It compounds. It’s crazy. Yeah. And then one way I noticed that which kind of ties into the imposter syndrome thing is I went. The first time I started getting out from behind my computer and going to industry events and things, nobody knew who I was or is not very well known. And only a couple of years later, I’d show up at similar events and like a lot of people knew who I was, but I was writing, I was publishing and put myself out there as being authentic.

And then, but it didn’t feel like it at the time, but every day I was just shipping a little bit, shipping a little bit, trying to help people, making imperfect content, and that just compound to becoming a micro celebrity in a niche.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. It’s nice to have a buddy in that process that can help. For me, I need a buddy to do this.

I don’t know. Maybe some people just on their own to like really when those moments come up. Celebrate them as wins. I’m always like moving on to the next thing, but it’s nice when someone’s Oh my God, that’s crazy. Everyone knows you here. That’s a big deal. You’re like, Oh, okay. Felt normal or like a thousand dollars a month on the side.

That’s crazy. That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And getting off zero, like you were saying Oh, you’ve made a thousand dollars. It’s a failure. Like I see it all the time. I’ll talk to a course creator who is man, I only got three sales. I’m like, yeah, but that’s not zero sales. Yeah. It’s like a big deal.

And I can. Be very different in a couple of years. Let’s talk about creating influence. Yeah. And I’ve actually never been comfortable or a fan of the phrase like influencer is probably my own limiting beliefs or imposter syndrome or whatever. What came before influencer? Was it guru or. They all have their challenges, right?

Even what we’re talking about today, being an expert. Okay, subject matter expert. And it’s a little counterintuitive, is sometimes I’m a really strong introvert, so it was hard for me to take the stage and just put myself out there on the internet, but eventually I just said, okay, I guess I’m doing this, and over time I got comfortable with it.

The other thing I found with that when you do take the stage, that’s the big idea is like at some point you got to get out of your head and onto the web and, be public. And I think it’s a lot of work to try to manufacture a persona or a brand. So just being yourself authentically and you can be like the professional version of yourself.

So for example, if you have a bad day or something bad’s going on in your life, it’s going to the doctor. The doctor still shows up for work, puts on the white coat and gets the job done, but they might be having a bad day. There’s some little bit of professionalism that you just show up, but you got to take the stage.

And I see a lot of, I’ve heard this in another community. They have a name for this person. They call it good idea, Glenn, like a person with a lot of ideas that like nothing ever happens or there’s never visible work. And if you don’t do it, you’re never going to create. influence. And one of the things, if you are going to create influence, I’m a big fan of this idea that your vibe attracts your tribe.

So the more you act like yourself when you take the stage and the vibe you put out there, you’re going to attract people like that. I noticed that for example, in Dan Martell’s SAS Academy that I joined, like Dan’s like a smart entrepreneur dude. And he had a bunch of software companies, but he’s also like into fitness and like lifestyle and make sure relationships are good and stuff.

So I think of him as like full stack. So when I get in there, I’m like, Oh, there’s other people in there that, yes, they care about business and growing software companies. But they’re also like, care about lifestyle and a lot of bootstrappers in there and stuff. And I was like, cool. Yeah.

Like the vibe he was putting out there attracted a great community and a couple of tactical things about creating influence. The first one is if you haven’t done it yet, you need to read Robert Cialdini’s book called influence. And he even has a second book called. Pre fluence, I believe that’s what it is about what to do before you try to influence.

But Cialdini goes over the seven things, which are reciprocity, social proof, authority, liking, and I think there’s one more I’m missing. And once you really get all that stuff, It helps give you a roadmap of what to do. I think reciprocity is one of the easiest ones to understand, which is if you want to create influence, give something away for free.

So tying into what we were talking about earlier, like when you write a useful, valuable blog posts that somebody finds value in, that’s like a form of influence. You’re giving away something for free. If you like stay committed as a craftsperson to a subject matter. Like I’m a total online course nerd.

That’s like consistency. That’s another part of influences is that and then just being authentic as you do that, it’s, it works. And the crazy thing about Cialdini is. A lot of his research was around cults, like how to cults create influence like cult leaders. So when you’re reading the book, you’re like, man, this is a little gross.

Like I’m not trying to become a guru or manipulate people. I think the difference between positive influence and manipulation is intent. Are you just trying to help these people and influence them in a positive way? Or are you trying to take their money, get them in a cold and pull them away from their family or whatever your, that is.

And then I think it’s really important. I think a lot of people miss this step. If you are going to create influence is to choose your audience wisely. So sometimes when you create a business, you think that, Oh, it’s for everybody. Is it really though? Does it, do you want to work with every type of person out there?

And so make a choice about a lot of, it’s just, and we’ll talk about this more later about. Your customer avatar and niching and things like that. But I had an aha moment, of course, as a human and a idealist, I do want to help everybody. I want to save the world. But I think you do your best job as a expert really picking a tribe or community to help.

And that whole community thing, the tribal thing is real. From my story, I’ve moved through several tribes. Like I was anthropology guy in college. I was after that climber Mountaineer guy, then I was a dog musher guy in Alaska. Now I’m a software guy, a tech entrepreneur guy.

And I move in these tribes and I think there’s a lot of loneliness out there. And if you’ve, if you’re vibe attracts your tribe and you want to help these people, you like these people, that creates a lot of sustainability in your project.

Jason Coleman: Chad Dini’s book is awesome. It feels influence, feels like this magical thing that just happens.

And then he just lays it out and very clear left brain. This is the reality of it. And you’re like, oh, it’s the playbook. And there is that risk, like when there’s other things like this. When you know the playbook, it feels like manipulation, and you’re like, it might be inauthentic.

It’s really hard to find that line. But I think like in marketing in particular, it can feel like sleazy at times you’re using these tactics and you remind yourself we actually make this thing that they want we’re actually helping them if they actually complete my course, it’s good for them.

And so if you believe that in the core, then it can help you use some of these tactics and under understanding that you pick up from like a book like that. You were talking about choosing your audience wisely. And I, yeah, I guess like the customer avatars about that. I’m reminded of the who’s the guy with the pumping patch video.

Chris Badgett: Oh, I know what you’re talking about. It’s a personal finance thing

Jason Coleman: or

Chris Badgett: it’s about finance.

Jason Coleman: I think it’s on business, but that he’s every so often you take a list of all your customers and you think of which customers do I hate and they cause the most stress, and it’s okay, how can I, and which customers do I like and they’re the most awesome and I love working with them.

And it’s of course, after that, then you should like, okay how can I rearrange my business? So then I’m serving these people I like and not serving these people I don’t like, and it could be as simple as like on your copy, be like, this isn’t the product for these whiny assholes that end up in my

Chris Badgett: customer chain.

I recommend that by the way, for when you’re writing a sales page and having a section who it’s for three bullet points who it’s not for three bullet points. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like good exercise. Yeah.

Jason Coleman: Every bad customer to bounces off your sales page is a good outcome as well, including this is really for you.

Come on in. But if you’re the kinds of folks who get into this business, like we solve pro we’re good at solving problems. We like helping people and you just do it reflexively when you’re in the weeds. And then you find out you’re like, it’s, you got to take a step back and be like, what are we doing?

Am I doing, am I actually doing the thing I really want to do and helping the people I really want to help? Am I in, in the tribe I want to be in. I think you touched on this too, of, building influence through trust. You said about like giving stuff away for free. And that’s almost like a core value that we have.

We build this free software, just solving problems for people, delivering value that You’ll naturally build up a reputation for being someone who gets something done and delivers And I think a lot of folks maybe if you in the content space you’re building like a course or education I think very rarely do you have that top secret?

These are the five ingredients that make the thing and I have to hold, you know Don’t share that unless people give me the money a lot of people feel that way but more often You probably should switch your mindset and it’s give away your best stuff for free And it’s like just put it out there for free on your blog send it to them If all you want to do is hook them to sell a thing like what’s gonna do it best But the big idea the nugget the most useful tactic the you know The clearest description of like how you go from you know Where you are, to where you want to be and get your outcome.

So like the clearest way you can do that, the best content you have is always good to put out for free. And then people will pay for access to you for having it in a clear, organized way. A tactic like that, that I often recommend for people want to build courses is like, so I talked about blogging as a way to learn.

You blog, just blog, keep blogging, write the thing, give it away for free. And when you’re done, like if you did that once a week for a year and I have 52 decent articles and you’re like, all right, cool. Take that content and now build it into a different format that you can sell. And you’d be surprised, you feel like, Oh, they can just get my stuff for free. So why would they pay for it? But the real interaction, typical interaction on this website is someone searches for something. They see your one good article and then your post like promotes, here’s the book that explains everything. And you’re like, Oh, I, you got me.

Let me get the book that explains everything. There’s also a speak with your actions instead of your words. And so it’s like actually do it, talk about yourself. And your journey, instead of theorizing I felt that way when I was like writing notes for this, sometimes it’s I so that pumpkin patch, I wish I could remember that guy’s name.

That’s a story I heard that’s useful and I could share useful stories. Like we’re in the space, we have lots of useful stories, but that’s actually when I did and worked. So I actually went through that process a couple of times and I try to go back to it every time. So I’m, I can give, I’m really talking about something that is authentic to like.

I operate. And maybe it’s just another rephrasing of this. Gary Vaynerchuk has a book called jab, right hook. And he’s thinking about if you have emails, if you have a four email series, don’t always be selling. I think that’s like always be selling is probably something someone says, but actually.

I think you might have a better outcome if you’re like give, and then you deliver value and now they’re on your side. And then you’re like, Hey, by the way, I sell this thing and it could help you too. And that’s like a mode that I use both. So it’s it’s funny, I’m talking about like selling, but it’s like this, these concepts build influence towards the sale.

So it’s these If you think about it in that way, a story also related to Gary Vaynerchuk. That’s like the antithesis of this. I have a lot of, some of the stories I have in here are like you said, like learning from your failures early on. I had this website, wine log. net. It was like a social site for wine and you could keep track of the wine you’re drinking.

And there was a couple of other websites in the space. Cellar tracker is the one that was like the old school one. That’s still around. So they, they won. So shout out to sell a tracker. I keep track of your wine with cell tracker. It’s a really good app. But at the time they were like this old windows 95 slow, not really web to a website.

We built like the modern version of it. There’s another site called court. And there’s all these wine websites were coming up and Gary had a wine podcast and he was advertising on all our websites. I remember he, Hbought an ad on our site and I had twelve hundred dollars for an ad placement for a month or something and he’s like you should give it to me for I forget how you tried to talk me down to 600 bucks or something like that and I stuck to 1200 and he was like, alright Jason He’s like I’m gonna give you 1200 bucks, but like you should know like you Probably should have took the 600 deal and just had me had the goodwill towards you.

It was great. He gave me like this little business nugget. And at the time I was like I was like, I don’t know. I didn’t want to give up the money, I was like, that’s what I think it’s worth. It should be worth it. I don’t care who you are. It was my attitude at the time. And fast forward for a bunch of other reasons, like Gary Vaynerchuk bought that website corked and built it into his brand.

And it became part like, and we were friends, but you’re like we interacted before, but yeah, Our wine website didn’t tie onto Gary Vaynerchuk and made some of the biggest wine websites in the world. So it’s like I, for 600 bucks, I lost a little bit of influence with Gary Vaynerchuk, which would have been useful.

And I wasn’t thinking at the time. And I do feel it’s funny. It’s like when you put a price tag on something, that’s your price and you should stick to it. And I’m not like a big biz dev guy. But I think in that moment, if I really was thinking about what was best for that website, if I was like, how do I build influence so that I can turn this into a bigger thing?

It was like, Oh, cool. You got the attention of The biggest, like social, early social media guys talking about wine right now, like building influence with him and his connections was way more important than money at the time. And it’s instead that conversation of cool, I’ll do an ad for your paying.

And what more can I do for you to help you? That would have paid back in spades. If I had been helping Gary and said the other way around what would have, how would that relationship developed?

Chris Badgett: Giving away your best stuff for free. Like in that case maybe not give Gary the free ad, but reduce the price, give him the hookup.

And one way I think about that is this concept from I think I first heard it from Eben Pagan is moving the free line, like not necessarily all the way to free. But information wants to be free. So like you should be giving away uncomfortably free amounts of stuff or valuable stuff. And like you said but if it’s also like available on the internet and other places, what you’re actually selling is your way of supporting it, your unique style that just resonates with people or whatever.

But, and we, but like with Lifter LMS and paper shows pro we give away so much for free with our core softwares that are in many ways more powerful than really expensive paid solutions and it works. So moving the free line and then show, don’t tell. I like that a lot. It’s easy to like, talk about things theoretically.

And some of the way I built influence in WordPress is I didn’t just say you should use WordPress, build a blog, sign up for a hosting account here and install the software. One of the first courses I made was how to build a WordPress website in a weekend. I showed people how to do it.

I just sat down and turned on ScreenFlow and recorded it. Turned it into a six module course. Put it on Udemy, put it on YouTube as a video playlist. And then what happened is, so what I’m, my idea here of creating influence is give away your secret sauce, tell people your process, particularly if you have an agency or whatever.

Because at that time people were watching my videos on Udemy or on YouTube and they’re like, you know what? This stuff is actually complicated. Can I just hire you?

Jason Coleman: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So by moving the free line, then the clients came in. Not just from my local community, but from all over the world. And that was uncomfortable to be like shouldn’t I just build websites for people?

I’m just going to teach everybody how to do it themselves and show them, not just tell them about it. Let’s look at the difference between being a guide versus a guru. I really love this framing. And a guru, like it’s like a religious figure who. Preaches and speaks truth. And this is the way but a guide, and I actually come from a background of guiding wilderness guiding.

So I understand guiding at a deep level. It’s a guru would just be like climb this mountain and a guide is going to be up there adapting working with people, dealing with setbacks, dealing with weather changes, and I think also being a guide. Takes a lot of pressure off like you don’t need to be the guru Giving a sermon.

You just need to help people get results. And the big idea here is Instead of just having quote the best information as a subject matter expert Be like a results getter for people like the guy doesn’t climb the mountain for you like they help you get that outcome of Climbing the mountain successfully you Or whatever your niche is, starting a business, getting in shape, finding the love of your life.

People want results. They don’t necessarily want you to be, give them like the golden book. They really, there’s a underlying motivation and result or transformation that people want. And I think it’s really important when you do become a guide to marry a problem. So don’t necessarily think about who’s my target market.

You should think about that, but what problem do you want to solve in the world? What what wrong do you want to write in the world and just obsess about it? And I can’t really explain how I got obsessed about it, but I love this idea of people being able to post, basically create information products and create this digital content.

Anybody, anywhere in the world could pull it up on a web browser, put their credit card or their PayPal account in and build this online business around. I just fell in love with this problem and tying it to the problem of education because education has a lot of potential to make societies better, improve people’s lives.

And all and help people economically and so on. I just fell in love with the problem. And one of the ways to, get good at this and being a results getter, a helper, a guide is to build the name for it as a customer advisory board. So like regularly I meet with some of our users, our customers, I’m hearing what their challenges are, what their wins are.

It totally informs how I think about. What product do we make? Or you hear about how are we different from the competition? What’s our positioning? And then when I think about problems and marrying a problem I heard this from a guy named Dev Basu, I believe that people only buy three things, which is speed, certainty, or insight.

And there’s a fourth one, which is to stay out of jail, but that one’s more this is why we hire accountants at tax time and so on to stay out of jail. But, and usually the speed, certainty, and insight, sometimes it’s a combination of those, but there’s usually one primary. If I’m, if I was going to do like a health course it, you could take different approaches, like speed, you’re going to get this health outcome really fast, or if I’m going to do certainty, it’s going to be like, okay, this is actually going to work this time.

If it’s going to be insight, it’s going to be. Yeah, the industry is completely wrong and I’m going to give you like new ways to think about health and whatever the specific result I’m trying to get is. So I often think about speed, certainty and insight, not just in marketing and selling, but also our approach to this problem and how we solve it because the speed, certainty and insight people don’t, aren’t necessarily buying you as an influencer.

They’re buying the result. But even under the result is that quality of speed, certainty or insight.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then the last thing is, this is a classic mistake that experts make. I call it like the library of Alexandria problem where people don’t necessarily want, especially these days with information overload and internet everywhere, infinite scrolling.

It’s not about giving people like so much stuff and like a hundred hours of training and 50 bonuses and all these modules and stuff. What’s the minimum effect? A guide, once you get, wants to get you to the top of the mountain as efficiently as possible while staying safe. And that is They’re not trying to teach you everything they know about mountaineering or climbing or whatever.

It’s just we’re going to help you get this result as efficiently as possible. I think it came from Tim Ferriss, the minimum effective dose, like productivity folks are all about this idea of what’s the minimum I can do to get the maximum output? What’s the 80, 20. So instead of giving your customer as an expert Hey, here, check out my awesome library of knowledge.

It’s I can get you this result quickly. So in terms of guiding, I feel like we’ve been guiding people at Lifter LMS for over a decade now. And we’re not just selling them a product. We’re not just giving them software. We’re not just providing technical documentation. I talked to users, customers, people who are just in the industry, people using competitor products.

We get on live calls and we do all this like personalized guiding. And one of the, one of the last kind of ideas around that is when you’re helping your market they really want you to still be able to help them even in challenging circumstances. And this is why how guiding is different from being a guru.

A guru would say this is the way a guide will be like, Oh, I see you’re having this challenge adapt this way. And you’ll still get the outcome person be different challenge. Okay. Let me help you adapt. And over time you can bake that wisdom into your. actual process. So maybe it’s more automated or whatever, but humans are not robots.

So eventually you do end up with some personalization there and that’s why they like you.

Jason Coleman: I’m hearing there in this guide, the difference between a guide and a guru is instead of here’s my knowledge, take it or leave it. You’re taking responsibility for the outcome. I think that’s a challenge in that you’re trying to teach someone something and you feel like I’m giving them all the information. But they’re not getting it, is that their problem, but really you could be a better teacher by meeting them where they’re at. Maybe you said how to get from a to C, but they’re actually at B, they need a different path guide, guide to get there.

So I like that it’s, and yeah, taking responsibility for the outcomes that you’re given instead of just like being an info dump on people. I hope it’s useful. I think it’d be more effective.

Chris Badgett: And on that note, just like a pro tip, I think the sh it is shared. Like some people would just be like, Oh, I have churned.

My people didn’t renew their monthly membership or the annual thing because they just didn’t do the work. So I, but there is a piece that is shared. Like the people do have to do the work. Oh yeah. There is some failure that’s outside of your control, but there’s a lot we can do as. As the expert to help when there are setbacks.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. We all know those folks who, it goes both ways. Like we know those folks who are like the idea people. Who’d never actually get over the hump of shipping and getting something done. And if they’re also selling to an audience of people who sometimes like, I would like to lose weight, but I’m not actually going to do anything to, to make a difference, the folks who are super successful, they find like a different way to talk to a different subset of that group, and maybe some of these folks aren’t hopeless, trying to get results and dealing with it on that level at the same time, I think.

You don’t have to know everything. So you don’t, maybe that’s related. We talked about a few different ways of focusing on helping people and being resourceful instead of omniscient. Like you said, like the library of Alexandria, right? So it’s Oh, it’s not just dumping everything there is to know about this.

If one tactic of how to get the A to B, that will help people. Congrats, something that you can turn into content that you can, give away and sell to, to help people. It’s like a mindset shift of being the kind of person who can find the answers instead of having them.

Like we said, don’t be the no at all. You’ll figure it out. And when you figure it out, then you can share that experience with folks. I’m building a network of experts to consult with. You don’t have to be the only one who knows there’s other folks. Don’t be scared that like they’re your competitors.

They’re also like potential partners that, you know, Oh, this, software’s better for this use case. You should use that software. It’s good for that. Or my content focuses on helping this target audience, but you’re, you fall outside of it. It’s good to know. It’s important to like.

Communicate confidently that you’ll be able to find the answer to them. You want to be known as someone who’s able to find the answers and follow up and come back. It’s it’s crazy. I think it’s crazy impressive sometimes. Through customer support channels or interactions with folks online and checking, they throw a zinger and you’re like, I have no idea.

I never heard of that one. And then if you come back the next day and you’re like, I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about this and here’s everything I learned about it and how it fits into the stuff I do know. They’re like, wow, that feels like a guide, not a guru. And they’re like, Oh, this is someone who’s really helping me with my specific issues.

Get to where I need to go. This kind of mindset is something I had when out of college, I worked for two years as a consultant at Accenture. It’s like one of the, what do they call it? The big five consulting companies. And that experience is crazy. Cause as a really young person who didn’t know much, I’m thrown like into these businesses.

And people are paying a lot of money for this guy who’s supposed to have the answers. And I don’t know anything yet. This is my first job out of college and I’ve only been here a couple of months. So they really bill you and charge for you as if you have the answers. And I think it’s clear.

to most of the, the people on the the business side that are working with you, they’re like, this guy, kid doesn’t know it, but super quickly and they train you on this at Accenture. They do a good job of like, when they ask you a question, you don’t know the answer. You tell them like, don’t worry, you hired Accenture at a whole team.

There’s a team of experts and I’m going to talk to them and they’re going to give me an answer and I’m going to tell you, and I’ll facilitate this. And You do that a couple of times and they don’t sweat the fact that you’re like, you’re this fresh young kid who doesn’t know anything cause you’ve proven that you’re helping them anyway.

There’s this other aspect of that, that you’re still useful to them at finding the answers, even if you don’t have them. And over time, that’s how you become the kind of person after, you do that for 10 years and a lot of the questions are, I’ve seen this a bunch of times before. Here’s like the three things that help people, you become the person who knows it all.

Chris Badgett: Being the person that can find the answers is, can also help you actually just launch. So I see it all the time where let’s say you’re doing a membership site and you have like individual trainings or mini courses and maybe you think you have to build like a hundred of those before it’s ready to launch.

But if you just have a few ready, And you offer actual one on one or group support, the customers, your early customers will literally pull the product out of you and be like, Oh, okay. They need help with this now. So now you don’t have to just assume, exactly what this person who has come to you made a purchase, ask for your help needs, there’s like a real feedback loop and you can just create in front of them.

I don’t have that for you yet. And then by the time we meet next week or next month. We’ll have a new training on exactly that problem. So I think that’s really cool. It allows you to just launch and pre sell and just help people more in real time, giving them exactly what they need. Once you, your community gets bigger, you’ll start seeing patterns of that.

And you’ll intuitively know Oh, this other thing, they really, I’ve had seven people who really need help with this thing, but that’s where. So your like quarterly plan or your annual plan just gets mapped out in front of you and you’re not guessing because there you have paying customers asking for your help with X.

Yeah. And that’s the benefit of lifelong learning when you make the commitment to that is. You’re also learning how to learn. It makes you more resourceful because you’re kind of Matt, you’re focusing on craftsmanship and mastery. So you’re getting better at metal learning or the act of actually learning, which is part of being resourceful.

Let’s talk about the customer avatar.

Jason Coleman: All right.

Chris Badgett: So this goes by a lot of different names. Some people call it your audience, your niche. Your ICP, which stands for your ideal customer profile. And these things all are like a little different, but I think the customer avatar is really the main, the avatars, the way to think about it.

So who is the ideal person? That’s a perfect fit for your course or your coaching program or your online community your reader, your audience, and. How do you figure that out? And the key to that, in my opinion, is to actually obsess about it forever. It’s a forever commitment. One of the easiest ways to do it is to actually, if you’re like not sure what to choose, and you’re like one of these people who’s like interested in a lot of different things, I don’t know what to make my course about or my coaching program or my online business, just do a previous version of yourself.

Cause you, you remember yourself. So like when Chris or Jason was just starting an agency. And what did they need help with? It’s easy cause you know who it is. If you’re already moving and let’s say you have a services business and you’re trying to productize, you already have these people that are paying you money. You can think about productizing what you know, and you’re learning about their challenges and you’ve already got the this kind of avatar forming like who’s my favorite customer.

Like we were talking about earlier Who do I not want to work with that develops like your anti customer avatar. But once you have this person nailed down, it could be an it could be a previous version of yourself It could be like your favorite client.

That also happens to pay you the most money and be the easiest to work with or whatever So Some people also invent like a fictional version, which is fine too, where you just Oh, it’s a woman who’s just had a baby.

She’s in this income range. She’s just left corporate, whatever. And you’re like figuring out this avatar based on Demographic stuff like we’re talking about there, but also psychographic stuff like, Oh, but they’re depressed because of this. Or, they’re really emotional about this topic and so on.

So you just map out this avatar of like you’re the FBI or whatever, and you’re profiling like some suspect you’re looking for is one way to think about it. And one of the things I like to do when I get into the customer avatar, is do a pain and opportunity map. So what is the, what are the most painful things in this person’s life?

What are their, when on the opposite side of pain. What are their goals? And what opportunity are they seeking. Would they pay money to get closer to? Cause it’s either away from pain or towards pleasure. And if you can find the top six pain points in the top six what do they want to move towards?

And then which one of those is like primary or which, what’s another theme that like governs all of that? Is there an identity transformation? There’s this idea that you can have your avatar, you give them incremental improvements, but if you can actually like change their identity, That’s the most powerful product you can sell.

You can charge the most for it. So an example of that would be like in the business niche if my program is going to help you quit your day job and become an online entrepreneur, six figure entrepreneur, this is like the classic example. That’s like an identity transformation. Somebody who’s stuck in corporate hates their job to entrepreneur with a working business.

He’s happy and has. impact and lifestyle freedom. So that’s like a transformation. So think about that. It is okay to help people with incremental improvements, but those big flips of identity transformation, like I’ve seen one that’s a little more counterintuitive is I’ve seen a user help people move to Australia and become doctors in Australia.

So it’s it’s that’s like a major change. And that’s what his program was. all about. And the other thing that happens, this is just more of a nuance with the avatar. I’ve often, when I started with Lifter LMS, I had the subject matter expert person that we’ve been talking about here is the avatar, the aspiring course creator, the monetized knowledge person, somebody who has a lot of passion.

They want to create impact income and freedom by helping others through teaching and charging for that with the information product. That there’s a lot more that goes to that avatar. I won’t go into the two pages of it, like who they are, but what ended up happening is I was moving forward with this.

I started noticing all these agencies. And, WordPress professionals and stuff showing up like, Oh, the people that build sites for clients in this niche for courses or membership sites, Or e commerce stores and they want to diversify into digital products, but they have this like agency person that’s helping them.

And I started looking at who’s following me on social media. It’s Oh, the people that actually interact with my tweets and stuff is like these agency and WordPress and technology people. So I ended up like having to split there’s two avatars and no matter what I do okay, we’re just going to focus on this one.

This other one’s always here. And so that sometimes happens. But I think it’s a really valuable exercise to figure out the avatar, obsess about it. And just be open to, it’s not something you set in like year one and you’re good, like it evolves and it changes and you end up in weird situations like I’m talking about where I have two.

Jason Coleman: A common template for that shows up in like business to business space is there’s the person who uses your training and then the person who pays for it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And they have different needs and avatars. And if you want to reach that audience and sell to them, you have to map both people, the person who’s paying for it and the person who’s that you’re actually, delivering the content for man, a couple mistakes.

I see folks run into. When they’re working on their customer avatars. And I say that because I’ve run into these mistakes several times over and over, like I’m actually talking about myself, my friend who’s had these issues. But I do see it a lot. Cause we help a lot of, similar businesses and people too is one is like resisting, like not going niche enough, not making it specific enough and resisting that.

Under the pretense of I’m trying to make a big thing that helps everybody. And I’ve done that. Like it’s a membership platform for all kinds of things. The problem with that is that that I, this customer avatar is very useful tool when you’re writing sales copy. When you’re figuring out how to build the product and when you’re figuring out. The content or the, learning, if you, it’s almost like you want to go through the exercise of really having a very specific customer avatar.

And feel what it feels like to write like you write sales copying it so hard and you’re like you’re not talking to me You’re talking to chris badgett He’s this old, he’s right in front of you. He looks like this is what he loves. This was, and you’re like, Oh, you’re just talking to Chris Badgett. It flows.

You’re just like, this is what he needs to know. And what I would tell him, some people resist that they want to niche down. And I think also if you do, it doesn’t mean you can’t help everybody. It’s just a bullseye. It’s just the center of the target. And you’ll still help a bunch of people that, you know, but there’s someone in the middle that you’re writing towards.

Chris Badgett: It’s just a quick example of that, like Apple computer. Like when they did the whole, the crazy ones, the artists, the misfits, all this, a lot of other people still have Apple products besides the, the artistic, innovators type people. Yeah, but the avatar and maybe it still is like that.

Yeah, it’s but it doesn’t mean you can’t sell to and help other people

Jason Coleman: Related to that when you’re building your customer avatar. I think a mistake I made early on was thinking about like demographic Information like man or woman or they like, You know, expensive things are cheap things or how they dress or you almost think of building a Facebook ad and you can choose to demographic traits.

And I find that stuff is not as important when you’re building your customer avatar as the things you talked about, which were like, what are their pain points? What are their common challenges? And in like we were figuring out use cases for paid memberships pro. And if there, or there’s a bunch of people who build courses and the thing that’s common among them is not if you think of a yoga course and like a, health food course and a get fit course, the thing that’s not common is that like they’re women and they, I don’t know, demographic information about those folks.

It’s was not as useful as they wanted to build a website. To sell their course. That’s what’s common among them. The, and specific chat. So that’s the top. And then specifically, like what was challenging about it? Was it that they, had struggled to make the content. It was that they struggled with the tooling?nd then you’re like helping them with their specific problems and challenges instead of, I think sometimes people get caught up in the fluff of I’m trying to speak to women, so it needs to look and smell this way, right? And you’re like no focus on the challenges. Another thing to focus on is, the people who want to pay you, it’s assuming you’re doing this, you don’t have some outside funding source and you’re just spreading the word.

You’re trying to turn this into a business. I find like a very specific version of this. And when it comes up is you’re you’re selling something and there’s a cancel, people can cancel and they churn. And I think early on, there’s almost a lot of. recommendations to, hold on to those people.

So you only have three customers and one of them left. And you’re like, I guess like a third get them back. I need that a hundred dollars a month or whatever they’re charging. And you struggle and. I don’t think you should totally ignore that person. You should get the feedback, but very specifically, like they came into your orbit and they left, like that’s a very clear signal that they don’t want to pay you for the thing you have currently.

So maybe take some feedback and you can use that to figure out like, am I creating the right thing? But that customer that left is like not your customer avatar. are, is that the person you’re serving or not? If they are and they left, that’s like a different story now. Okay. I, Don’t want that person to go.

So then think about how you could keep them. But a lot of the people who will bounce out and cancel out and churn. are like, that’s a good turn. They actually don’t need the thing. And you don’t want to strive too hard to focus on those folks. And I think we also talked about like various forms of consulting and customer interaction as a way to get this feedback.

So I guess I’m thinking, how do you find out? It, I’m assuming the situation where you have a little bit of traction, you’re selling something and you want to g. So you want to find out more about your current customers so you can figure out how to find them and make more of them. It’s like focusing on the ones who pay you.

And I think you can have these like consultation calls with them. Sometimes if you’re selling like an info product, it’s Hey, for an hourly rate. You can still talk to me or I mean in the early days, like put an hour, actually probably put an hourly rate and then say, but actually it’s free for the first whatever, or I’m giving, everyone who signs up gets, instead of 300 an hour, they got to talk to me for an hour for free.

But talk to your customers and do like you said that there’s so many reasons why Products of all kinds folks who build them start out as consultants because they were very close with a customer and trying to solve specific Problems and then they realize other people have this problem So if you skipped over that part and you have a little bit of success people are buying your stuff It’s like maybe back take a step back and consult some of them and work really closely with them to figure out who they are and what problems they have.

And so some tools you could do. So like that consultation calls put an hourly rate for people to just talk to you if your time is busy. And then we did a paid memberships pro, and I’ve seen other folks do this, like what we call do it for me setups. So it’s and then like the educational space, I think it’s pretty common of I have a course, but if you want mentorship and like a more, high touch help through this.

You can pay me more and then I’ll do that. And you can price those lower. It’s a, they make, it’s a way to make money. So it’s like another way to make money off your audience and stuff. But I think always think about it as Oh, this is me like learning about a very, not just a customer, but a customer is willing to pay more than what the average customer pays me.

Like it’s a super valuable customer to dig into and try to figure out. And I guess quickly, like when paid nurses pro did the, to do it for me, like how it worked, we were selling for at that time. I think I don’t know, various times, like 100 a year, you gain access to the software and support, but for 500, we’ll spend five hours, like helping you to set it up.

And it was a way to talk to a lot of customers. And again, that thing of figuring out who you like to work with and who you don’t. I remember the stats when we did the, do it for me Like 50 percent of them were perfect. It was like, this is our ideal customer and they just need a little bit of help.

And we help them exactly how we can. We get a little bit like, Oh, we build a tool that we can give to other people where we fixed a bug or we learned something was like perfect. And then after. The five hours was up, like they went on their way and they didn’t need us anymore. Another 25 percent in that cohort were, they needed more.

So it went really well. And then they’re like, you’re the smartest WordPress person I know. Can you do all this other stuff for me? And we’re like, we’re not consultants. We don’t do online. We’re building a product. So it didn’t they like, which is, it’s a good problem to have. And you got to build partners of people that you can push that work off to, but it’s I, you helped me with this.

Can you help me with my whole life? And you’re like, we don’t actually do that. But then 25% We’re just crazy bad failures because we were taking the money up front and then saying, Hey, we’ll solve your problem in five hours. And just the expectations were off. And they were quote unquote bad customers, but that experience of digging it wait, why was it bad?

Why did they think they would get this when they were only going to get this and using that information of how to change the copy and the documentation and the product itself. So that when those people come, they deflect before they pay you.

Chris Badgett: One more pro tip with the figuring out your avatar and who’s going to pay you is to just pre sell them.

Don’t even create anything yet except for the sales page. So I want, I think I want to sell to this person. This is the problem I want to solve. This is my mechanism of how I’m going to solve it. And you can set it up. You can use our softwares to take the money. You can be totally transparent and give them like, Hey, it starts like a month from now and even say if I don’t get this many orders, I’m going to refund your money and so on.

Pre selling helps. I love the idea of if you’re not already a consultant and like really understand the avatar and the The solution in the problem space do coaching first before you try to do a course and do private coaching work with them one on one, even if you’re losing some money, based on your hourly rate or whatever, it’s very validating to make sure like this avatar is right.

I can help them. I’ll over deliver through private coaching or even done for you services. And there is a framework I learned, which is really simple. They can help with this, like structuring these things, which is DIY, do it yourself, DWI, which is done with you. And then DFY, which is done for you.

and the passive online course with no support is do it yourself, good luck. The done with you is like we’ve got courses, we also have like weekly office hours and so on. And then done for you is more like a agency, like you’re hiring us and we’re going to get you the result. We’ll get it done for you.

So using that, those frameworks help and yeah, it takes time to adjust and get that avatar offer clarity. So you got to experiment. It’s part of the learning process. Let’s talk about practicing with intention. I’m pretty convinced you, the reason why a lot of folks fail or lose momentum is that they, not only did they not commit to a problem for an extended period of time, but they didn’t It wasn’t the right problem for them and they didn’t really go all in on a single problem.

They got shiny object syndrome. For me, if you’re going to spend all this time creating courses, coaching community, maybe writing a book, maybe doing public speaking, Becoming the person for this, category of problem. It’s a huge commitment. So in my view, if you’re not willing to focus on this avatar and this problem or problem set for more than a decade or at least a decade, it’s probably not worth doing.

Maybe you don’t love the space enough or. You’re not just, you just don’t have the passion to keep going. So it’s just to make a decade commitment when you choose your problem, particularly if you’re one of those people that has multiple interests, maybe like fitness, maybe like investing. Maybe you like cooking and you’re like, I want to get into this space.

I’m not sure which one to focus on. There’s this test you can do called the onstage test, which is like if five years from now, if you’re on a stage giving a talk about this topic. and your mother or your family or whoever is in the audience watching you like, are we good here? Are you still doing this in five years?

It’s called the stage test and really putting in those 10, 000 hours. So your products and programs will get better with 10, 000 hours. And if you’ve already spent 10, 000 hours in this space and that decade commitment it’s going to work, but it’s a huge commitment. So don’t take it lightly. I think this idea of get rich quick overnight success, it’s just not helpful because it’s not the way it works.

And when you do marry these problems and stuff, you can revise as you learn. There’s sort of two ways I think about it is, or patterns I’ve seen in the space when you become a subject matter expert. There’s whatever your niche is, you can either be like, I’m the person for X and I have this signature program that delivers this result for this person.

It’s called this name. And then every year you rebuild it, you deliver it. Again and again through cohorts Maybe you just redo all the content every now and again and you have a signature program Then there’s more of like the serial entrepreneur who’s okay. I’m really committed to this avatar And i’m just gonna I am going to build the library But it’s I’m taking micro problems and I’m like building a thing here.

And I just keep going until I’ve essentially surrounded this person with help. And it’s not really a signature program. It’s more of a doctor patient thing, like where the coach is like prescribing Oh, you need help with this problem. Take this training in my program, come to office hours on the weekend.

It’s more. It’s less of this signature structure thing and more of a prescriptive. Hey, you’re in the club and then I’m here to help you and prescribe training and content as needed. And the other thing that’s okay to do is to admit mistakes. If you, maybe your signature program has a major problem in it and Hey, I think I need to take this part out.

It’s not helpful. Or maybe I structured my offer so that it’s actually not starting early enough in their journey. Or maybe I’m not staying with them after they get to this point and they really need me for another part or this middle part is not working. If I’m helping people build an agency and I show them how to do that, but they’re ha my clients are having trouble getting clients.

Like I think what I’m teaching, maybe it’s not working. I got to readjust. And I got to learn. I got to be resourceful. And then in terms of practicing with intention, I take this seriously. So like when I make a commitment, like when I got into sled dogs or I got into the LMS space or I became a podcaster or started a YouTube channel I knew I would be doing it 10 years later.

And that decade commitment is just it’s both sounds like a lot of work, but it’s also freeing you know what, I could see myself in 10 years. And it helps rule out things that maybe you shouldn’t focus on. Whatever’s hot of the day, you might see an opportunity, but do you see yourself doing that in 10 years?

Jason Coleman: That’s great stuff. I it’s funny, it’s like you brought up 10, 000 hours and I know what it means and you know what it means. There’s like a famous essay about 10, 000 hours and that’s like the average time it takes for someone to be labeled as an expert for something or mastery. Yeah. They love all mastery.

And yeah. That’s the thing is we’re talking about becoming an expert at something. And one way definitely is to do it over and over again, like 10, 000 hours. And you like through osmosis, you’ll accidentally become good at it. Like almost anything, if you just do it that often. But I think when practicing with intention will get you there faster and better.

I think like anything that any skill I’ve tried to learn if you trying to get better at guitar. Just learning songs and playing is pretty good. But if there’s a reason, like there’s coaches. There’s a reason that like coaches who aren’t the best can still help people. Who are the best is they’re walking them through exercises that, you know, for guitar, stretch your fingers.

Learn to memorize, these chords and changes and notes and, keys and things. So setting goals for each practice session, like one small concrete thing to improve over time. And so recognizing every time you do, every time you write a blog post, I did it for this podcast, every time I’m recording something I wrote.

So for this, it was, don’t cough. And I wrote the. the overarching topic of this discussion is becoming an expert. So it was like, Oh, remember to like, keep tagging that. So I put that on like on the top of my notes and over time the. These things will become more natural.

And that’s really how you become better at a skill. And I think it’s also how you can learn with intention as well. So yeah, you do the same thing over and over, but better each time. And then I think another version of that is not to be scared to copy from the best.

And so you might feel that you have to do it your own way or pay your dues. Which is, it’s true, but don’t, it’s, it is good to just copy. And there’s an ethical way to do it. Like whether it’s copy as practice. And even I brought up the guitar. It’s you watch like a really good guitarist and you’re like, and let me try to learn that someone else’s song, and there’s like a good course, I think it’s called copy that is like a sales copywriting course. And there’s 10 different examples of really good sales pages. It’s like literally put this on your screen and then type it up and feel what it’s like to write those words as if you wrote them.

And yeah. Building websites or like building courses, like a good, if you there’s a course that you really like, it’s like just steal some aspect of it. You’re not going to copy the whole course, but it’s like copy the structure of the course, but it’s your content. It’s about a totally different subject matter, but you just steal the structure of it.

And if you steal it, be like, Hey, give props to it if it makes sense. Or there’s other ways you can do that. You can take your favorite parts of some of the. other material and and apply it to your own work. And don’t be worried about doing that again. Like you don’t have to be the guru, the person who knows it all.

This just comes out of, your glorious, magical brain is. Being transparent about how you figured it out and working towards this helps.

Chris Badgett: I think copying, that’s in humans there’s mirror neurons in our brain. It’s how we learn language and kids copy their parents and their siblings and stuff like that.

That’s just what makes us human. I’ve heard it called R and D, which stands for rob and duplicate. That’s a funny way to say it. So you want to R and D, but you want to actually give credit. Like you’ve heard us cite, like earlier, I said, moving the free line, that’s Ed and Pagan. You found the 10, 000 hours from Malcolm Gladwell and so on.

So good site credit. And the other thing is to just think about remixing because a great book, like a nonfiction book, came from research where there’s a lot of different ideas. So what plagiarism is like not giving credit, copying exactly, not mixing and matching with other things. And so that’s, I think that’s an important thing for an expert, especially a lifelong learner.

Just because you heard something really good from somebody else in your industry, you can use it. Just give them credit, mix it into your style and your framework and everything. And you’re good. That’s how like great books are written.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this episode of LMScast, Tim McIvor, the developer of SchoolPsych.com, a website that offers professional development for school psychologists, joins Chris Badgett. He discusses how to build continuing education.

Tim talks about how he went from working as a school psychologist to starting a charity organization and then starting a company to satisfy the demands of his industry for continuous education. Recorded webinars are available on SchoolPsych.com to assist school psychologists in completing the 75 hours of professional development needed to renew their licenses.

Tim emphasizes how LifterLMS has been essential to his platform, allowing for features like quizzes, automatic certifications, and organized lectures that adhere to accreditation requirements.

He has enabled school psychologists throughout the world to enhance their practices and have a beneficial influence on the pupils they serve by utilizing technology to make training more accessible.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Tim McIvor. He’s from school psych. com, he’s a creator. He’s doing a lot of cool things in the education space. We’re going to get into his story. We’re going to learn about the impact he’s making, how he’s using LFTR LMS, but first, welcome to the show, Tim.

Thanks so much for having me, Chris. I’m really excited to talk to you. I love seeing people find success and build cool platforms. Can you tell us what schoolpsych. com is all about?

Tim McIvor: Absolutely. It’s a professional development platform for school psychologists to renew their license through my recorded webinars.

So basically there is a national association of school psychologists and they give out a different accreditation system where you can become a provider and approved provider for this national association. And then once you get that. Like schoolsick. com currently has that once you get that, you can provide certificates that school psychologists can then use to renew their license.

So it’s all built around this system of school psychologists needing these certificates in order to renew their license.

Chris Badgett: Is the license something they have to renew every year or every three years? And they need

Tim McIvor: 75 hours of professional development.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And is this I don’t know the industry really well.

Is this like. All public school psychologists need this or how does that work?

Tim McIvor: So pretty much all public school psychologists need this if they are considered a nationally certified school psychologist. And school psychologists are very motivated to be nationally certified school psychologists because it’s an important credential to have for getting good jobs.

And then on top of that, you usually get a stipend for having that nationally certified credential. It’s not technically necessary to work in public schools. It can just there’s a lot of benefits to having it, getting better jobs, getting stipends.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. And just to better understand the industry correct me if I’m wrong, but not every public school has a school psychologist, like where do they operate or do they, does every school have a school?

Yeah.

Tim McIvor: It’s something we get a lot because we go on behind the scenes. So although not every school has a full time five days a week school psychologist for every single public school in the United States. There is a school psychologist assigned to that school. For me personally, for the past 10 years, I’ve worked at three schools.

And so it’s always been two days at one school, two days at another school and one day at the last school. So yeah, we’re behind the scenes. As students, they might not know who I am unless they work directly with me. Okay. And so they might feel like they don’t have a school psychologist or they don’t have this because we are typically assigned to multiple schools.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to better understand what school psychologists do, like what are some of the most common psychological issues that the industry helps with in the United States?

Tim McIvor: So basically we’re not the school counselors who are doing all like the counseling and all the scheduling and all the help with the school college applications.

We’re doing the special education evaluations. And we’re doing all the testing. We were writing up reports and determining if students qualify. For services. So our job is very rewarding in that sense, in that we are directly able to work with students who are referred to us, test them on these different tests that we’ve been trained on and determine whether they qualify for additional services under Different special education categories that they might qualify under such as a learning disability autism.

There’s ADHD It counts under the other health impairment category and then of course we do more than this job But as far as the primary role I would say is the special education testing But of course we do a lot of consultation with teachers crisis prevention data analysis and so on and so forth

Chris Badgett: Awesome tell us your story because it sounds like you were a you are were a school psychologist, but you decided to get into the the education side to meet the need of continuing education.

How did you make that turn or what inspired you to, get involved in education for certification and all that?

Tim McIvor: Yeah. It started in graduate school where I was asking around how do you get the best jobs in school psychology? And one of the head people of the Boston Public Schools told me that if you volunteer in a professional development association and she was referring to the Massachusetts School Psychologists Association specifically you would be able to network very well.

That would be one of the best ways to be able to get a good job. And she was absolutely right. People were able to. Pull strings for me to get jobs that were in demand. But that actually ended up being only one benefit. The other benefit is I get to learn how a professional development association works in school psychology.

And then when I went out to Nevada. After I got a job out there, they didn’t have one of these state associations, but because I had done all that volunteer work for MISPA sorry, for Massachusetts I helped create one with about five other very passionate school psychologists, and we created the Nevada Association of School Psychologists is a nonprofit, and we basically Helped the state run a whole bunch of professional development conferences.

It’s still going strong to this day. And I was the president of it from its inception for the first two years. And that’s when I really learned how to build a professional development association from the ground up.

Chris Badgett: That’s very cool. And how long ago was that, that you set out to build the association?

Tim McIvor: That was 2014. And that was actually as my first year as a school psychologist. Yeah. I was doing that and so I was the president of an entire state Simultaneously while being a first year school psychologist probably i’m probably the only person to ever do something like that It was just crazy. But people had a lot of respect for me for doing it Obviously very motivated hard working and it worked out very well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m guessing you were in this industry of continuing education, did you start by delivering it at in person? Why yes. Continuing at events.

Tim McIvor: Yeah I did the traditional route the entire time I was president just doing these in person conferences, but I knew that, with go to training, go to webinar type platforms, you could totally do it live and it would make it so much easier than having to book a venue.

Plus Nevada is such a rural. State in so many parts that for them to all have to fly to one place for professional development, didn’t seem very smart. So after those two years as president, I started looking into how we could make it more accessible for that nonprofit. And I was also taking notes for my own to create a business.

And that’s exactly what I did that the year after I was president in 2017 I created a business where. I was launching live webinars on GoToWebinar, on GoToTraining. But I noticed that I, after the webinar, I wanted somewhere where we had these recordings to put it up for people who missed the training, who missed the webinar.

And that’s where LifterLMS came into play.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So what was your history with WordPress? Was this your first WordPress site or were you already using it for something else?

Tim McIvor: No, I actually had built like five websites by then. I’m one of those crazy people who graphic design is just a passion of mine.

And so like any chance I could get to build a website for example, during my internship year, I was like the tennis coach for the high school tennis team. And I was like, let’s build a website. Like I would find any reason under the sun to build a website. And so I just love building websites and I knew it would be good because I knew I wanted to get into the business aspect of school psychology eventually.

And yeah, I did have a little bit of a background with WordPress prior to this.

Chris Badgett: So tell us about the story of how you decided to use Lifter LMS. Sometimes people get a little overwhelmed with all the LMS is out there and there’s this decision fatigue and like figuring out which tools or plugins to use.

Tell us about how you figured that out and ended up with Lifter.

Tim McIvor: I remember watching a YouTube video in early 2017 about how to create an LMS platform. And it was literally the first YouTube video I looked up was by a guy named Adam and I’m trying to remember the name of his platform.

It was like, WP something crafter, I think crafter. Thank you. WP crafter. Awesome guy created a great video. I think he, he now owns Presto. You know what I’m talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome guy. Really appreciated his videos. Never talked to him or met him in person, but I could just tell he’s a very upbeat, nice guy.

And He showed step by step how to use Lifter LMS and how to set it up. And I was sold. I didn’t actually have to look at any other platform. I did later just because somebody else who I collaborated with, who wasn’t good with technical skills, wanted a platform. And I helped her find Rizuku and Kajabi and things like that.

But for me, I felt very strongly that right from the get go, that Lipter LMS checked all the boxes. And there were a lot of boxes to check because the National Association, in order to be an approved provider and give these certificates for school psychologists to renew their licensure, you had to have quizzes, you had to have evaluation feedback, you had to have, Generated certificates.

The lessons had to be structured in such a way and everything that they required Lifter LMS had. And so I never ended up looking elsewhere. I’ve been a loyal Lifter LMS customer since 2017.

Chris Badgett: Okay. Oh, awesome. You’ve been around that long. Very cool. You mentioned a lot of the things like.

Quizzes and certificates. What other features do you like most about LFTR or use the most?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, absolutely. I really like just starting off the bat the user friendly nature of the platform. And I love how in the dashboard, it just permanently stores your certificates. I can tell you that school psychologists, yes, they’re interested in professional development, but ultimately, They’re most interested in just making sure they get those certificates and that they can find them three years down the road when they are looking to renew their license.

And so for them to see that it’s all just stored with the name of the certificate, the date, and just how easy it is to auto generate these certificates on my end so that I don’t have to email each person really gave me an edge in creating this. Platform because there are other school psychologists who tried to do this type of thing, but didn’t really know how to because they figured, they might have to email individually the certificate and oftentimes what these nonprofits do is after a live conference, they’re, printing out certificates.

I’m going to write the name down. It’s very it takes a lot of time. It’s very time consuming. But the way lifter LMS just sets all this up as very auto generated help save me a bunch of time. So I could focus on. What I really care about which is just teaching school psychologists, best practices.

For me, the passion is all about how can we get school psychologists, the best possible training from the best possible people to make the largest amount of impact on the students we serve. And that to me is A big passion to know that I can be part of having a major impact, not just on the three schools I work at, but also globally.

There are school psychologists across the entire world who are using school psych dot com right now.

Chris Badgett: Oh, so cool. How do you handle the situation where if you’re used to like a webinar or a filmed event where it’s like one presentation. It’s not necessarily a course with multiple lessons.

Are you creating like a sort of a mini course that just has one lesson per course? Yeah, so one hour

Tim McIvor: webinar, followed by a quiz followed by an evaluation feedback and you’ll see that all of my webinars are set up the same way. It’s three lessons and second lessons quiz third lessons evaluation feedback But yeah, it really is just that one First lesson.

That’s the webinar. That’s the content. I’ve never had to use multiple lessons. There are some features on literal mess. I know that would be helpful for like university professors. But for me, it’s just simplified in that sense.

Chris Badgett: Do you do all the website stuff yourself or does somebody help you with it?

Tim McIvor: Yeah there were very few times where i’ve had to go on what’s that website called like code press or something like that Yeah codable where you ask the software engineer To help you fix something, but it was never related to Lyft or LMS. It was related to like security and things like that.

Making sure my website is secure from hackers. I was having an issue with that for a bit. But yeah for the most part, just learning things on YouTube that the one thing that I wanted to make sure I said today was that every time I would. Reach out to your support team. Since 2017, I’ve always gotten great responses.

I’ve even sometimes gotten video tutorials tailored specifically to my website on how to do something, which I’ve never seen a company do before. I’ve never seen a support team that specific in helping their customers. And so that’s why I’m a huge fan of Lyft or LMS. I think that’s where. You guys really stand out.

You have a great product and then it just the best support team I’ve ever seen.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. We we think about support, like it’s not a cost center to be minimized. It’s actually a feature of the product. So like we try to go big there.

Tim McIvor: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: You have you do a lot and that’s part of your story.

Hey, I started my first job and built an association at the same time. But like when it comes to content creation. I guess in theory you could teach everything, but you have other people teaching and you teach some, or tell us about how you gather and source all the material.

Tim McIvor: I think at first I thought that I could just do it all.

I did 12. I was broke at the time. School psychologists don’t necessarily make a ton of money. So I didn’t have money to pay speakers. And so the first, 12 webinars I made were all me. And then I noticed that once I started reaching out to guest speakers there was a lot more interest in the website because, I specialized in technology and school psychology and one person I’ll never forget how they explained this to me.

That’s like almost eating your vegetables. Like it’s good for you. School psychologists. should be learning about technology and school psychology, but in reality, they want like the meat and potatoes. They want the behavior interventions. They want all these topics that are highly in demand that I couldn’t necessarily be the expert and give them.

So that’s why I realized in order to truly make this website great I needed to start reaching out. And after I had created those 12 webinars. I had just taken any money I had made from that and put it into guest speakers. And now we’re up to over 50 webinars on the platform.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do Do the webinars remain current and usable over time, or do they have a shelf life?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, I would say after about six, seven years, some of these webinars need to either be redone or just taken off the platform. And then for my technology webinars, because I did them, I could just go in and update them where needed, which I’ve done over the years.

Chris Badgett: If somebody is thinking about recruiting other Kind of content creators.

Do you now do you like pay them or do you pay them a royalty? Or are they just happy to do it to get exposure or experience? At

Tim McIvor: first, I was looking mostly for people who would do it for exposure. Maybe they had a book. And then there were a few school psychologists who were pretty well known. Who I was just really good friends with and they didn’t mind doing it at a cheaper price.

In fact, one of them I had quoted a pretty high price and said, Oh, you don’t have to pay me that much. I’ll do it for this. Like just very nice people in general, the field of school psychology is not your typical. Tech, this textbook business people. They’re just extremely nice people who are very passionate and have similar passions to mine.

I’m just wanting to get the word out of how to best help kids. But then again, there’s also very high in demand speakers who I don’t blame them for charging very high speaker feeds because everyone is wanting them. And it It’s a big range but as my website’s grown, I’ve been able to get speakers that who are more in demand and charge a higher price.

And so it, it’s grown over time what I can pay people.

Chris Badgett: Is this become your full time thing or you’re also still a school psychologist?

Tim McIvor: As of this as of this year, I actually stopped my full time job as a school psychologist. This along with just some part time consultation with the Boston Public Schools as well as just a few other more minor business ventures is my full time thing.

So basically it was getting to the point where this was doing better. than my full time job as a school psychologist. I felt like I had more impact here globally to help Children. It just aligned with my passions. So I had been a school psychologist for five years in Nevada full time, then a school psychologist for five years in Florida full time.

This is my first ever school year where I’m not actually in the schools anymore. So yeah lifter illness is, has helped me substantially. And in getting to that goal, which is just a dream of mine.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Awesome. Congratulations on that. Thank you. How do I know people who do like professional development or are thinking about it?

What they often ask how do you get clients or how do you get in the flow of people needing continuing education credits? Like how did you Get that going. And what do you continue to do?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, that’s one of the areas where I think I thrive. The most is the marketing component because I am competing with about a thousand other professional development associations that there’s maybe not a thousand, but there are so many different providers who provide these NASA approved certificates.

There are also the APA, which the American Psychological Association, which provides certificates, and our National Association counts those as well. So if you count all the providers from the A. P. A. Then it’s well over 1000 who I’m competing against. But one way I’ve found to really stand out. Is I’m extremely active on social media.

I was watching a few YouTube videos. I remember back in 2020 that had said in order to stand out, you need to add humor. You can’t just constantly promote your webinars. People won’t like it. They won’t follow you. They’ll just get bored of your page. But if with a few exceptions, of course, who are super passionate about professional development.

But if you can incorporate some really funny humor or really meaningful, valuable resources into your social media posts, that schools that call this can find a lot of value. And then every once in a while mentioned that you’ve got a new professional development webinar on your platform. That has been the key to my success.

I’ve gotten over 10, 000 followers on both Facebook and Instagram that way. And they even. In that YouTube video had mentioned these are some of the accounts where they’re using humor and they’re getting like 100, 000 followers. And it was like this accountant, this like random accountant Twitter page that was using pretty good humor.

And I just learned how they did it and then applied it to my page.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s cool. Is there seasonality to this continuing ed or is it just always happening? People are signing up or do people tend to get their credits at a certain time of year or whatever?

Tim McIvor: It’s all year round, but I noticed that June is a great Time because it’s pretty much the end of the school year.

They’re wrapping up the school year. The kids are out, but sometimes the school psychologist still need to work another maybe week or so without the students. And so they’re getting around to all the things they wanted to do during the school year, but didn’t have time to. And a lot of that is professional development.

Another one is August. And September at the very beginning of the school year school psychologists don’t necessarily have the busiest schedules yet because usually the teachers are still getting to know their students before referring them to the school psychologist and there’s usually a honeymoon to where the students are maybe behaving much better than they typically do throughout the school year.

Chris Badgett: What’s the business model? Are you doing like just a la carte, individual core sales or how do you, what’s the,

Tim McIvor: that was the main difference between when I was only making a little bit of money on this. And when I realized that certain ways to price it took it exponentially more sales.

And What I realized maybe a year and a half ago is that instead of doing just individual webinars, which there’s still an option to for individual webinars at 25 a webinar, you can purchase an individual webinar or for 99. You can access. All the webinars. And I do the sale about three times a year.

I noticed I get most of my revenue just from those three sales. So what I found is that how you do your pricing dramatically impacts how successful you are, because I would say the first five years, I really didn’t make a lot of money just on the individual 25 per webinar pricing setup.

It wasn’t until I started doing that. All the webinars for X amount that people really started flocking to the website.

Chris Badgett: Do you have a, is there an access period on that? Like you get access for a year or is it lifetime access or what?

Tim McIvor: It’s a one year access to all the webinars.

Chris Badgett: Can people take the same training three years later or do they have to do new stuff all the time or how does that work?

Tim McIvor: Sometimes they do. And then I’ll have to go into the certificate and manually edit it. So I want to give LifterLMS some credit because I know you guys started out where the certificate page was very rigid. And by now it’s just so flexible. One of the best things you guys did was create such a versatile.

Certificate set up because that actually has been extremely helpful. The certificates are probably the most important after the content of the webinar itself, the certificates are the most important component to my website. And so when people are saying, Hey I watched this webinar again, three years later, I can go in and manually edit the date to, to show that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Tim McIvor: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Do you have any like metrics you can share, like to get a sense of impact, like how many students are over

Tim McIvor: 5, 000 individual users. Over 5, 000 school psychologists and keep in mind, this is a very niche, small field. This is not like school counselors where there’s 150, 000 of them.

There’s only about 30 to 40, 000 school psychologists nationwide. There’s a shortage of us. And so for me to have. 5, 000 users and there’s really only 30, 000. It’s like a six of the entire demographic, which I’m really proud of.

Chris Badgett: Wow. You’ve got 15 percent of the market or whatever. That’s amazing. It’s pretty good.

How do you think about you’ve scaled this thing and it’s going great. Did you start like in Nevada or wherever. And then, like, how did you think about going to multiple states? And you’ve also mentioned international expansion. Like, how do you think about that?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, I just started promoting on these Facebook forums where all the school psychologists talked nationally and internationally.

And I would never promote it on these Facebook forums. I would just basically like share memes to these Facebook groups, wherever all these school psychologists nationally are talking. Then they started following me on Facebook. I noticed for with Instagram, I would just do follow for follow type techniques where I’d follow school psychologists all across the country.

And it really didn’t matter that I was in Nevada because this was accessible.

Chris Badgett: Your ground game is strong. Like you’re doing a lot to get it out there.

Tim McIvor: It was very cool to see what, when I did the Google analytics and see Oh my gosh, this isn’t just in the U S this is everywhere.

I couldn’t believe that.

Chris Badgett: So like you your program’s kind of designed around the U S standards, but like other countries and stuff, except for credit or

Tim McIvor: no, it’s what it is. There’s like a lot of. School psychologists on like military, but US school psychologists like on military bases and they say like without this I could have never kept my kept renewing my national certification for the US.

So sometimes people have plans to go back to the US after X amount of years and so they might be for whatever reason. In a different country but they still want to keep up their national certification here in the u. s And they say my website’s the best way to do that

Chris Badgett: what just shifting gears back to the tech What other tech is really critical to you like software or plugins or themes or hosting that?

You know a really important part of your stack

Tim McIvor: Sure. I think that videos are the next biggest thing. And I really for, because there are school psychologists who are deaf and hard of hearing, and because we are so focused on helping and accommodating students with disabilities, it would be very hypocritical if I wasn’t accommodating school psychologists.

With disabilities such as those who are deaf and hard of hearing. So closed captions is a must for all of my webinars and there are closed captions on there. And then on top of that features that I would love to have is, with the advanced lift or homeless videos. I’ve looked into it and I’ve actually bought it twice and then realized that there was a certain feature that is making it.

Less versatile. So basically, when you’re watching the video, and then you click out of the screen to, for example, click on a different window, or maybe you’re clicking on the PowerPoint slides, the video stops. And I’ve never really wanted that to happen. I want it to flow. For some of my technology webinars.

I say we’re gonna, we’re gonna learn excel in real time so that you can start to crunch the numbers. But if they’re clicking on excel and then the video immediately stops, or if they’re clicking on Google sheets or Google forms, all these different technology platforms, it defeats the purpose. So one of the things I had.

Wanted to mention in the Lifter LMS advanced videos feedback is that I love a lot of the different features. I just wish there was a way to toggle off the when you click on a different screen, the video immediately stops because I think it actually. loses a little bit of user friendliness that way.

I understand the purpose. We want to make sure people watch it from start to finish. But I also think that if people don’t want to watch something, they’ll find a way they’ll just be on their phones with the thing on silent. You know what I mean? Like ultimately we want to give users some flexibility.

If there is a PowerPoint slides on another tab to look at it while they’re listening to the video. And so I’ve actually bought. The advanced videos and then realized it wasn’t for me because of that feature and you know how you can vote for something to be Updated I put in a vote And I don’t think it did very well But I voted to just give it a little toggle on and off that way we can choose whether we want it To be that way or not.

Chris Badgett: I’ll have to look closely at that I thought we had a that was like an option to turn on or off. But if that’s not Okay, that’s good feedback. I

Tim McIvor: would love, right now my users, when they go to my webinars, I have to tell them in the notes note where you left off, because they can’t remember.

Where you left off and I know advanced videos plugin, it’ll remember where you left off, which is why I really want that plugin. But because of the other component of the plugin, I haven’t been able to use it.

Chris Badgett: All right. Yeah. That’s really good. That’s totally sensible. That makes a lot of sense.

Tim McIvor: Cool.

Chris Badgett: And you asking for that live here definitely helps. Maybe

Tim McIvor: other people will see this and vote for it. That would be great. But yeah,

Chris Badgett: what are you using for video hosting

Tim McIvor: Vimeo?

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Tim McIvor: that’s

Chris Badgett: the standard. That’s great.

Tim McIvor: I know that Adam is big on from WP crafters, big on w bunny. net. And so I, I. I had made it on my to do list to check that out.

Maybe it’s a cheaper option. Vimeo just raised their prices on us. So who knows, maybe bunny. net is the future. And so that’s one of the things on my to do list is maybe transferring it over to bunny. net.

Chris Badgett: All right. Any other like essential tech, like what do you put your email list on and or any other plugins you love and stuff?

Tim McIvor: I, I do love how with the Lifter LMS reporting, I can just download everything to Excel and then upload it to Brevo a email marketing. One of the things that I also wanted to give some feedback on was like the memberships. Sometimes people don’t want the subscription of basically having to have it auto renew every time.

But let’s say those same people, they. Purchase a one year subscription to all the webinars on schoolsick. com and then right before that membership is over, they repurchase a membership for another year. They renew without without it. What am I trying to say without their first membership expiring yet?

It doesn’t trigger an entire new year on all the webinars. It has to say expired before that happens. And basically, that’s one of the problems that I’ve run into. And from your tech support, they said that would be a good thing to work on in the future, but it would be extremely helpful because there are people who pay for my membership and then they end up wondering what happens a few days later when all their webinars expire.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that is something to look at. So you’re selling the membership is all access with the annual renewal.

Tim McIvor: So for me, I don’t, yeah it’s an annual renewal, but every time I do a different membership, so I have the spring break sale, that’s one membership. Then I have the fall membership.

Then I have the blacks Friday membership. And then I have a new like 2025 spring break membership. So these are all different memberships. So they go from. The 2024 spring break membership and then by the 2025 spring break membership a few days before their 2024 spring break membership ends and then it doesn’t auto renew all the webinars because they’re not expired yet.

Chris Badgett: I see what you’re saying Yeah, we could look at that and how to smooth that out for you

Tim McIvor: Yeah, I think anytime somebody just buys something it should immediately kind of auto update the enrollment to the new okay, this is when the year starts because they just bought it Even if they bought it while they were still enrolled in it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s good feedback. You say you were manually adding people to Brevo?

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Yeah. You can do that.

Chris Badgett: I was just wondering if have you heard of WP fusion?

Tim McIvor: No, I haven’t.

Chris Badgett: I’m going to check right now, but WPP fusion just, excuse me, automates. Passing contacts from LifterMS to the CRMs.

Oh, cool. And I’m wondering if if Brevo is on their list.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Let me check out WPFusion. I chose Brevo just because it’s cheaper. Know it’s maybe not one of the most well known of the email marketing platforms.

Chris Badgett: WPFusion integrates with 50 or so Oh yeah. I’m there.

I’m done. Yeah, they do have a Brevo integration. So that’s awesome. Thank

Tim McIvor: you for letting me know that makes it a lot easier.

Chris Badgett: And they probably have a Black Friday sale coming up.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And I give you guys a lot of credit that the 60 percent off. Sometimes the crazy Black Friday sales that you guys do is just always love those.

Always look forward to those. Appreciate that.

Chris Badgett: And I noticed you do a Black Friday strategy as well.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. That, that’s how I said I got the sales from like exponentially higher when I started saying, you can have all the webinars for XML. That was really what was my biggest breakthrough in business so far.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. There’s a saying that I always try to remember cause I’ve been doing running sales and doing marketing for a long time that you get tired of your marketing before your market ever does. So just keep doing sales hammering.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Hammer. And sometimes I’ll do the same meme from two years ago and people will forget that I even posted that meme.

And so for me, it’s Oh, that’s so lame to post the same joke twice. But then it gets three times as many likes. I’m like, Oh, I guess people forgot I did it or something. I don’t know.

Chris Badgett: And there’s new people that come in.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. New people. Sometimes you have to be a little bit repetitive with some of your content and it saves you time that way.

You’re not constantly having to look for new stuff,

Chris Badgett: how just big picture question, how has the school psych. com website and online business and education platform changed your life?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, that, that’s been the biggest component is that with my day job that I had for 10 years, it was just such a grind having to do basically an eight to five every Monday through Friday, and then go home and work on these passion projects at nights and weekends so to be able to have a platform that helped me very quickly get to where my goals were to the point where I’m no longer working my days, I’m able to just solely focus on my passion projects and be creative.

I honestly have never felt happier in my entire life. And I never knew that this could ever happen. Like I would say five years ago, I wasn’t making that much money. So I never saw the true potential of it. Ironically, it wasn’t until COVID that people started really going from these live conferences to recorded webinars.

And that’s when it started to take off.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s fantastic. What was the timeline from let’s say when you got your WordPress site set up and you chose Lifter to that moment where you it was really working and you were able to like, how many years are we talking about there?

Tim McIvor: Talking about six years where I realized, okay, I can actually quit my job because this is making more money than my regular job. And then I just to be on the safe side, did one more year in the schools. And that was my hardest year because by that point, my website truly was Extremely time consuming.

There’s a lot of people messaging me wanting to, either collaborate with webinars or this or that it was growing. And so it’s to the point where I really needed to be able to work on this full time. So seven years.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And you’re definitely no stranger to hard work. It sounds and is it besides like having outside content creators that are doing webinar content, is it just you or do you have any team members or,

Tim McIvor: so I do have team members, but they’re not necessarily, I’m like.

Pretty much the main guy who runs this thing, but I feel like it’s always important to get second opinions on things. And so I’ve set it up in a way where there are certain school psychologists who have volunteered to help me out. They’re friends of mine, and I’ll go to them for either advice or just a variety of different tasks that are very are not very time consuming, but are very helpful to me to get second opinions and I’ll make sure that they get all the webinars for free all the time for helping volunteer.

Chris Badgett: And what motivates you like, to do a side project and, just keep working on it grinding for six, seven years. And I know it was like getting growing over time, but what kept you motivated at all that to do all that?

Tim McIvor: A big foundation of that and that was my passion for making sure school psychologists knew the correct the correct best practices.

And I’ll give you a story, which is that in the 90s, there were these reading wars, and it’s like, how do we teach kids to read? theory which focused on phonics and one theory that just basically focused on whole words and context clues. And these two groups were basically constantly fighting over school district money because one had a curriculum for whole word, one had a curriculum for phonics.

And then in the nineties they did all this research saying it’s phonics. Phonics is much better than whole word reading. But in the two thousands because whole word reading had such good marketing and they had so much money behind it and it was a lot more books so they could make a lot more money.

So big corporations were very interested. Whole word reading one out in the 2000s and a lot of children were taught to read using whole word reading, which was not the best way. Now there are going to be kids who basically learned it and made the best of it, which is fine. But the kids who had learning disabilities needed phonics, meaning that we weren’t getting at all students with this method.

And as a result, a lot of kids had fallen behind. And so that was just one story that we learned about in graduate school of how important it is. To know the best practices in order to give the best recommendations, and by now in 2024, a lot of those companies that teach whole word reading are going broke because finally, the word is getting out that, phonics is the sole way you can’t just teach kids to read based on context clues, having them guess what it might, what the word might mean.

And basically taking that one story and applying it to all different areas of school. psychology. We need to teach school psychologists to recommend great interventions to teachers great recommendations to parents of what to do at home. School psychologists are involved with so many different areas of the school that if they’re very knowledgeable, they can equip so many other educators and just have an amazing impact on the children we work with.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s definitely something I’ve seen with people who stay the course and find success is, making money and is nice, but there’s got to be that passion and sense of there’s going to be a why,

Tim McIvor: because the amount of weekends in my late twenties, early thirties, and the amount of nights.

That I could have been out doing really fun hobbies or this or that. You have to have a why when it gets tough and I’ve always had that really strong, why

Chris Badgett: Tim, I want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story and I’m really proud of you and it’s it’s really inspiring to see what you’ve done and the impact you’re making in the world and what it’s done for your life and stuff like that.

Keep up the great work. Thanks for being a shining example.

Tim McIvor: Oh, absolutely. Anytime. Bye bye. Always happy to be on this podcast. And if you want me out in a future episode, I’d be more than happy to, honestly, I was so honored to be on this.

Chris Badgett: Great. We’ll have to do it again in another couple of years.

Yeah. We can get an update.

Tim McIvor: Where am I? Where am I in a few years? I would love that.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you so much, Tim.

Tim McIvor: Absolutely. Take care, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In the LMSCast episode, Chris Lema discusses the idea of motivation and explains that it is not an external factor that varies but rather an inherent component of an individual’s wiring.

In the WordPress and technology communities, Chris Lema is well-known for his leadership, business strategy, and motivating ideas. He is the CEO of Motivation AI. He emphasizes that each person has a unique kind of drive that is ingrained in their DNA by equating motivation with fixed characteristics like height or eye color.

Chris contends that people are constantly motivated when jobs or objectives fit with their innate wiring, challenging the conventional wisdom that views motivation as a resource that has to be replenished. He presents the MCode (Motivation Code), a program that examines an individual’s motivational wiring by analyzing their life tales.

People can better understand why certain experiences seem rewarding while others don’t by adjusting their job and surroundings to reflect what really motivates and excites them. He also discusses his work with CaboPress and his position as CEO of Motivation AI, highlighting the significance of comprehending motivation in both personal and professional circumstances.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Chris Lemma. I’ve known Chris for probably a decade or almost a decade. It’s been a very long time. Chris has done a lot of things. Currently he’s the CEO of motivation AI. You can find out about that at motivation code.

com. We’re going to be talking a lot about that today. Chris is also the founder of Cabo press. I believe I went six times. Which is awesome. And maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that. But first, Chris, welcome to the show. It’s great to be here. Awesome, man. Just to bookmark it in for the people out there watching and listening, what is motivation?

I find that an extremely interesting, just core concept. How do you think about it? Yeah, I know there’s a lot, but what is it at the highest level?

Chris Lema: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think the easiest way to think about it is like thinking about your eye color or your hair color your height. These are things that you did not control.

You were born and you did not do anything to manifest your eye color. You didn’t do anything to manifest your height. It’s just is what it is. And so I think of motivation, right? The characteristic of motivation as the way in which you’re wired and your DNA, you didn’t control your DNA and you don’t control per se, how you’re wired.

Most people tend to think about motivation in a completely different way. They think about it as gas in the gas tank. So you either have a lot of motivation or you have a little motivation. They don’t think about it as eye color. Cause you’re like I. I always have blue eyes or always have brown eyes and you’re like, and you always have motivation. But what you have is a certain kind of motivation. You’re wired for a particular kind of motivation. And and often when we find that I don’t feel motivated, when we use that phrase, I don’t, what we’re really saying is the things that are in front of me are not stimulating the part of me that is wired in a certain way.

So the things that are put in front of me. Are not aspirational. So therefore I’m not excited about it. And you’re like, you’re not excited about it. But if we took this and we changed it and we made it, so it was aspirational. We made it results driven, or we made it, performance and challenging base, then all of a sudden you’d be like, Ooh, I’m excited about it again.

And that means, okay we’ve locked in. The thing that you’re trying to get done in line with how you’re wired. So how you’re wired is as static as your eye color and your height and what have you. It is not fuel in a tank that has to be replenished. So when you see those means that are like motivation lasts a day, discipline lasts forever.

And you’re like no. Stop back up. You have motivation every day and you, we all know this is true, right? Because there have been times in every person’s life when you’re sitting at home on the couch in your pajamas or in your shorts and a t shirt or whatever. And someone comes in and goes, Hey, do you want to go out?

You want to leave the house? You want to leave the apartment? And we’re like, no. I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like moving. I don’t feel like anything. And then they say the magic word, whatever it is that you love the most. I was thinking of going for ice cream or I thought I’d go to Disneyland or whatever it is.

And then all of a sudden you’re like, give me two minutes. I’ll be dressed. I’ll be ready. Like you were sitting on that couch and you were like, I have zero motivation. And then they put the right thing in front of you. And suddenly you’re Ooh, I can rally. I’m going to go in my room and I’m going to change.

I’m going to be ready, I’m going to go. The real trick is how have you lived this long and not known how you’re wired? How have you gone this long and not know what stirs you up? What motivates you? What gets you super Oh, I’m changed. I’m going, I’m changing and I’m ready to go. And that’s what the M code does is it analyze your stories.

It collects all this data, has you answer questions, and then it tells you, here’s how you are. Wired based on the stories you told us. So we’re not making anything up. It’s not that artificial choose between what would you do on a Friday night, go out with friends or stay at home and read a book.

Like those are all they’re fictitious. They’re abstract. They’re not. Your own story. So when we ask people to do that arbitrary choice between a and B. We’re going to get an arbitrary answer in the form of a report and codes different in that it’s looking at your own stories and it pulls it together.

Then it says, here’s how we think you’re wired or here’s some of the ways that we think you’re wired. Once people read it and put words to it and see it, then suddenly they’re like, Oh my gosh, that’s why I hated that job. That’s why I love that job. You’re like, yes, that’s exactly why.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wonder if you can comment on, it seems like there’s a quote crisis of motivation in society. Like in YouTube, if I go to YouTube, sometimes I’m looking at trending videos and there’s a lot about how to get motivated and tell us about what’s going on in society or what and why is motivation important right now?

Why does it appear to be failing right now more than ever or we just more aware of it?

Chris Lema: So so I think it’s there’s several different streams that all come together one of which is we don’t try and connect these dots If you look at the number of creators that exist today compared to five years ago, compared to 10 years ago, and in the U S particularly, again, you don’t want to make this connection, but you can’t help, but go the cost of health insurance and being able to insure yourself independently. So there’s tons of people. 10 years ago, who didn’t do, didn’t even have, didn’t think about a side hustle and didn’t think about going independent and working on their own because they needed their health insurance.

They needed it for their family. So they stayed in a job. And the one overarching dynamic in a job is that you have a boss that tells you what to do. So you don’t have to, you don’t have to figure out what your day’s about, right? There are some jobs where they put your whole schedule of what you need to do in each minute of every day on your schedule, and you just obey.

And then whatever it is, several years ago, more people leaving independently today, more people than that, you have people who are figuring out on their own. But so rise a new problem. What happens when you’ve spent the last 10, 20, 30 years of your life, obeying someone else and doing what someone else tells you, and you’re doing the thing that they told you to do to be successful, whether or not it is the thing you need to do to be successful and whether or not they, at the end of the year, give you the benefit, the bonus, the whatever to say you were successful.

Regardless of all that you’ve been living in one modality, and then you come out to do your own thing and you realize. You’re the boss of yourself and potentially you’re a horrible boss, right? It turns out like you have a whole lot of negative self talk. You’re dousing your brain with negative chemicals because you’re sitting here telling yourself you suck at things.

You’re frustrated and you don’t really know what is the next step. So what’s the result of all that? You get to the end of day, you sit down and you go, I just don’t have the motivation. You’re like no. The issue isn’t motivation. The issue is you don’t have the skills. It turns out walking out of a job and going to build your own empire is not something you do on your own.

It’s not something you do without a plan. It’s not something, and every one of us who has done something like down the outside realizes this would have been a lot easier if I had a plan or if I had a structure, if I had a accountability, if I had partners, if all these things that would help it.

So I don’t think. The crisis is explicitly a motivation crisis. I think we use the term I’m not motivated as a way to reflect on the fact that I’m overwhelmed. I’m tired. And the truth is while that was happening, all the people that left the workforce left the companies in dire straits too, right?

When everyone left those companies now put more work on their existing employees. And didn’t give them more pay. As a result, they’re also getting burnt out. And what do you say when you’re getting burnt out? I’m just not motivated. So we use this phrase, right? But what we’re saying is inside organizations, we’re getting overworked, underpaid, and.

And frustrated by a boss that doesn’t listen to us and outside of work we’re doing our own thing and it turns out we’re not good to ourselves. There’s a lot of negative self talk. We do a lot of things that slowly create friction and stress in our lives. And as a result, we often say the same thing that people at work say, which is I’m just not motivated.

The truth is a better phrase I’m burnt out and I’m lost. And you can get help with both of those, but you got to start by acknowledging what the real issue is.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s talk about motivation code. Yeah. What is it? Why was it created? And how is it different from a personality test like Myers Briggs?

I’m an introvert, extrovert, and so on.

Chris Lema: There are a bunch of really great personality assessments out there. Myers Briggs, Enneagram, DISC, StrengthFinder the list goes on and on. Gosh, one of my favorites is the Colby Index A and there’s so many good ones. Here’s what normally happens.

You take it. It says something surprising to you Ooh, it figured out this thing that I already know about myself, but now this thing knows to you, you love people, you rather be alone you are so excited and you’re an external processor and you interrupt other people when they’re talking, whatever it is, and you go, Oh my gosh.

But even if a personality assessment tells you that you step on other people’s toes by jumping, like you already know what they’re going to say, and then you finish their sentence and you interrupt them and you say the next thing, even if it tells you all that. More often than not, we read it, we go, Oh that’s cool.

That’s cool that you figured that out about me, but I already knew that. And then we move on. So my standard test is wait two weeks and after two weeks, find out if any of these personality assessments have changed your life and what you discover is. And the reason they don’t is because most of what they’re trying to do is solve the magic puzzle that says, we really saw you.

So they give you a name, they tell you what, you’re a panda or you’re green or you’re a dinosaur or you’re a, you’re an ENFP or whatever, whatever they do, they’re going to tell you something and you go, that’s But that’s where the, that’s where the magic ends.

And some of those are science backed and some of them are not science backed. And that’s just what that is. M code is sitting on top of SEMA, which is the science of motivated abilities and that science is now some 60 years old and the The assessment that we put online used to be a manual and there’s still people that do it manually, right?

They handwrite stuff and and the biographers that do that kind of work have been doing that forever. I learned about SEMA and those assessments in the year 2000. And at that point they were being used by Disney and NASA and Harvard, right? They were places where they were using them to look at hiring new employees putting them in, promoting into bigger senior roles, all that kind of good stuff.

And I wanted to use it myself. I couldn’t get access to it because it was only for big companies. Two and a half years ago, I bought all the SEMA related companies. So there were five companies. We bought them all. We merged them into one. That’s Motivations AI and I became the CEO of that company.

And in buying all those companies and pulling them all together, right? What we were saying is, hey, the science is important, but more than just the science is making it all available online. And once you make it available online, then more people can take it. So we now make it available to lots of different people, not just big corporations.

And the goal is not the magic trick. The goal is not, Oh, you finished taking the assessment. Here’s your report. Look, you’re a driver. You’re an achiever. And that’s it. The goal is all the applied science, right? How do you take that science and turn it into something that’s useful for you in your day to day two weeks from now, a month from now?

Six weeks from now. For a boss, it means helping the boss figure out how to create assignments for different people. Why are differently for an individual who is trying to figure out their work, right? It’s looking at, okay, how do you reshape the work you’re doing so that it aligns with your motivation for someone in sales, it’s, how do you look at your prospect and know which of these dimensions of motivation are they, and how to best.

Negotiate a deal with someone who’s a optimizer versus a driver, right? And so all of that becomes right. There is no right answer, wrong answer. There’s no good answer, bad answer. It’s just, look, there’s eight different dimensions of motivation. Let’s figure out who you are, who your employees are, who the people you interact with at work are, and let’s figure out the semantic bridge between who you are and who they are and how to get that language effective, right?

How to behave in a way that allows you To switch between different kinds of people, but deliver the same value to all of them, right? We’ve all had situations at work. Where like I had when I was at liquid web, I had two people and I think, them both, Jessica Frick was one of my product managers and Christine Trinos was another one of my product managers.

And both of them are amazing women. Both of them are absolutely incredible. Top notch eight plus players, but they’re also wired very differently. And so I was giving Jessica one set of jobs and I was giving Christine a different set of jobs. And one day Jessica calls me up and goes, what’s up? Hey, you gave Christina other job that you didn’t give me.

Are you not giving it to me? Because you don’t think I can handle it. And I’m like, what? So I said, Jessica, do you want to do that? She’s no, I would hate that job. That’s why I didn’t give it to you. I gave Christine the stuff that she would not only love, but she would excel at, and I gave you the stuff you would love and you would excel at.

Even if you have the same exact job title, I’m giving you different jobs so that you’re in your sweet spot. I’ve been doing that for decades. When we pull all this stuff together for M code, we were like, we can do this and make it available to every manager, right? We can make it so every manager knows how to do this way more effectively.

And every employee and every employer and every salesperson, all these people can. Be better at what they’re doing when they realize, Oh I need to interact with different people, different ways, because they’re wired differently. And I’m wired in a particular way.

Chris Badgett: So I took the M code and my strongest motivational dimensions are visionary driver and learner.

And so let’s say I was working for you. What kind of work would you give me? And what kind of work would you not give me?

Chris Lema: A visionary. When you think about your goal orientation, right? When you think about how you think about goals, a visionary is transformative. You want to talk about what is the transformation that’s going to happen.

A learner on the other hand is all about the knowledge driven mastery oriented goals, right? And a driver is results and ambition and Solving problems. So those are three different, those are three different things. And what we got to figure out is which is your strongest, right? And which is the thing that would, if I gave you a goal, right?

If you, if I wanted to give a goal to Chris, the driver, I would go, Hey, Chris, we got these issues. We got these and you’d be like issues. I love issues, I just want to stomp out these issues, right? I just want to, I want to close them out. And I want to check them off. I want to get them done. If I’m talking to Chris, the learner, I’d be like, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this new framework.

You’re like new framework. Where do I get access to the new framework? How can I learn everything I can learn from this new framework? How can I put it to use? Give me a project where I can put it to use. And if I talk to visionary, I’m like, listen, here’s what I want us to, here’s what I want us to do.

And if we do this, I think we can completely change the game. Oh, my God. Changing the game. I love that’s what I want. So you’re talking about, three different ways to shape the work based on those three. And so if I spent time with you, if I read through your entire M code report, I’d be like, okay, you When it comes to goal orientation, he’s more visionary than anything else.

When it comes to work style prop, preference, he’s probably more learner than he is driver, right? When it comes to interpersonal though, he’s more driver than he’s learner. So let’s do this. And so you’re going to start shaping how I give you assignments, how I work with you, how I give you feedback.

All of that changes based on who it is I’m talking to, and I won’t talk that way, even if I had the same bits of data to give them, I wouldn’t give it to someone who was an optimizer orchestrator. I wouldn’t give them the same thing as I would give you. And that’s what we’re, if you played basketball in the NBA and you could only dribble with your right hand, you would not play basketball in the NBA.

If you could dribble with your right hand and your left hand, you could maybe get to the NBA. But if you don’t have what we call handles, if you can’t bounce the ball between your leg and around your back and actually start moving your whole body one way and then pivot all the way to the other, if you can’t pivot and turn around, if you don’t have those skills, you don’t play that game.

And the reality is we have a whole bunch of managers and supervisors and bosses. Who can only dribble with the right hand. They grew up in homes where their mom told them, Hey, treat others the way you want to be treated. Since they’re right handed and they can only do the right hand, they expect the whole rest of the world to understand and interact with people that, that talk that way and work that way and do that way.

And your mom was wrong. It’s not treat everyone the way you want to be treated. It’s treat everyone the way they want to be treated. And once you get that and you understand that changes the game.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Can you clarify for me? There’s the strongest motivational dimensions, but then there’s like the top five motivations for me, that’s explore, develop, realize the vision, experience the ideal and meet the challenge.

So what are those motivations?

Chris Lema: Those are motivations. And if you go into your stacked rank list of your 32 motivations, you’ll see 32 motivations with those five at the top, and you’ll have others are at the bottom, you’ll see that the top. Let’s say about 10 are green and then the next 10 are like yellow.

And the last 10 are red. And the red doesn’t mean that you’re bad at them. It just means these aren’t the things that are going to wake you up. So these are all the very specific. So we took all your stories when you were giving them to us and we decoded your answers, mapped them, the stories, and found the elements that made it so that we could take this list of 32 motivations and put them in a stack rank and tell you, these are the things that really.

Light you up. They motivate you. They move you. So of course experience the ideal or realize vision, anything that is more visionary. You’re going to be because visionary is your is one of your top dimensions. You’re going to be like, yeah, that’s my jam. I love, I can see the future.

I can see what I want. And then I want to pursue it. I want everyone to pursue it, I see the vision. I want to chase it down. And so the eight dimensions are the handles that let you hold on to all those 32, if you had to memorize, the top 10 and in what order and what you’d be like, gosh that’s really hard.

And the truth is. They’re in different places, so it’s easier. Yes, you should read through all those top five and all that stuff and put it into practice in order for you to talk about it, in order for you to think about and interact with other people, having a dimension gives you that kind of overlay.

And so if I didn’t, if I didn’t know your scores or whatever, I’d be like I know visionary and learner. I know that because I’ve interacted with Chris and you can’t help communicate your visionariness and your learner ness. Also, I would tell you that, Hey it’s no shock. You’re in the job you’re in.

And it’s no shock. You’re in the industry you’re in, but it’s also no shock that you’re in the job you’re in. And so you’re a living embodiment that. That our assessment is correct because you’re like, Hey, if someone didn’t know the details of anything of your report or your life or whatever, and they’re like, he’s the CEO of a LMS product in a space where he’s trying to teach other people who are educators to educate well and effectively to the whole rest.

You’re like, sounds visionary and learner all day long. We’re not trying to play a magic game, right. And we’re, there’s no magic trick here.

And we’re just trying to go, let’s give you the vocabulary and let’s give you the understanding so that you can better lean into who you are and what you’re doing, but also you realize you’ve had employees at Lyft or LMS that aren’t you.

You’ve had employees that are not visionary. You’ve had employees that are not learners. So even when you go to give them a task, and you’re like, here, just, here’s this new thing, and you can learn it, and you do it, and then they’re like, my job sucks. And you’re like, how can your job sucks? I would’ve loved that.

That would’ve been my favorite task. That would’ve been awesome. I would’ve loved it. And then you discover, oh, they’re not me. They’re different. And what you need to do for that different person is give them a completely different assignment that lines up with them. And it turns out that most of the things we want done can be done a lot of different ways.

You, you used to work in mountains. You know that if someone says, I want to hike, pick a famous mountain, right? Kilimanjaro, whatever, right? I want it. That doesn’t say the full, that’s not the full sentence, right? That’s not the full story. Cause you’re like, wait, with Sherpas or without Sherpas, with oxygen, without oxygen on the East face, the West face, the North face, the South face, like there’s so much more than just, I want to climb that mountain.

And it doesn’t mean that there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. It just means, Hey, some people are for Sherpas. Some people prefer oxygen. And some don’t, some people want to go the easiest route switchbacks up and down. Other people are like, I’m going to hike the ice cliff all the way up.

And you’re like, Hey. Different people are motivational dimensions. Do that. They basically say there’s eight different ways to think about the world. And these are, you’re wired one of eight different ways. In fact, you’re likely wired one or two or three of eight different ways. And if you stay in that realm, you’re going to stay lit up, excited, happy.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t ever be frustrated, depressed. Or anxious it just means you’ll be in your sweet spot more often, right? And that’s what we educate on That’s what we’re trying to do.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about understanding. We’ve talked about understanding self and management and leadership and using these tools What about more laterally?

Let’s say A business partnership or a life partner or friends. Yeah. There’s that kind of thing that happens where sometimes opposites attract, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe you should have some overlap, but then have some difference. Like how do you. How do you think about that horizontal relationship with the M code?

Chris Lema: I think there’s, I think there’s two or three things that you really want to get nailed. And that is you don’t want all of the same. So like on a

Chris Badgett: team

Chris Lema: just like on a team. So I was talking to a guy who was telling me about his onboarding sequence at his company.

And I said, let me guess, did you take the MCOT? He’s I did. I’m like, let me guess you’re a driver. He goes, you’re right. I am. I’m like, yep. And let me guess the people that succeed in your onboarding. All our drivers, they’re all very similar to you. He goes, yeah. I’m like, cause you’ve built an onboarding sequence.

Who would scare the living dates off of optimizers, orchestrators, relators, influencers like they would be they would get the instructions of the onboarding and they’d be like, I’m out. I’m out. And and I go, the problem when you’ve assembled a whole group of. One kind in this particular case drivers love solving problems.

You know what happens when a group of drivers all finish all the problems? They make up new problems. That’s what they do. They make up problems to solve because that’s how they feel alive. So what do they do? They start going, oh, you know what, what could happen? This could happen. They start predicting what could happen, even though it hasn’t happened.

Then they’re like, we got to get everybody pay attention. And then we go chasing off to chase after a fake imaginary dragon that wasn’t really there. Because that’s their language. That’s how they work is overcoming and over, and surmounting the challenges that are in front of them. The same thing happens if you’re two drivers that are married or two, two visionaries married who’s doing the checkbook, right?

Who’s balancing the budget, right? They’re like, Oh, I see visions. I see visions too. And you’re like, Whoa, someone has to make sure the electricity gets paid. So I find that the, my number one rule is is make sure that you’re not all the same. You can’t try for all your partners are achievers and you’re an achiever or all your partners are orchestrators and you’re an orchestrator.

Like you just don’t want, you don’t want. Too much overage, right? It’s going to, it’s going to clash in its own way. The opposite things we don’t have tons of opposites in the list, but there are some, right? Like you could see an achiever and a orchestrator go head to head sometimes.

And so the ones that are more diametrically opposed, those are probably not perfect pairings for people, especially partners or in relationship, partly because you’re trying to constantly make the case for something that the other one just. It’s just not wired for. So for example, I’ve spent a lot of time in startups and it doesn’t mean I haven’t had stints in big corporate gigs but even in the corporate gig, I’m trying to carve out an entrepreneurial effort.

Why? Because if someone tells me these are the three meetings a day you have to go to, and this is the process for doing X, Y, and Z, and here’s how you check the list on all these boxes. And I’m like those are my lowest motivations. So if you look at your stack rank, you might have do it right somewhere in the middle, right?

My do it right is last. It doesn’t mean I want to do anything wrong. It just means the exactitude of making sure that I do it exactly per process is not ever going to motivate me. In fact, it will frustrate me. So when I worked at Liquid Web, a hosting company They had an hope, a whole process for how you book travel, a whole process.

They have used this corporate card. You run it on this corporate travel system. Then it, it’s automatically covered or whatever. And it was all designed so that employees didn’t have to part with their own money at any part of the process. But it was like, you had to change your password every two weeks.

The software didn’t carry all the airlines. It didn’t go to all the cities I wanted to go to. And so it was a pain in the butt. And I just was like, Nope. So what I do, I just started using my own credit card and booking my own travel. And at some point they were like, Hey, you haven’t turned in anything for this track.

I’m like, Oh yeah, I have expense reports. They’re like, when are you going to turn those in? I’m like, whatever. We got to almost the end of the year. They’re like, you have to, if you want to get paid, you have to. And I’m like, I don’t really care about getting paid. I just, I don’t. Like I would gladly lose a thousand dollars of my own personal money on airline tickets, then not lose a penny, but have to use that horrible system because a horrible system was just so broken for what I was doing.

Do it right is never going to be the top of my list. So if do it right, is your number one, right? If Chris Badgett is do it right. Number one, and Chris Lema is do it right. 32. Partnership is gonna be hard, right? Because you’re like, Hey, I want to do this partnership. Let’s just write out the terms of this agreement.

And let’s write out the commitments we’re each gonna make. And let’s write out everything that holds us accountable. Let’s make sure we have a checklist in here and let’s have a meeting where we can back you’re doing all these. And I’m like, partnerships are all about. Let’s make it work and let’s make some money together.

So why don’t we just put something in play? Let’s just run it, see how much money we make. Then we’ll go from there. You’re like no. I need to have everything right. You see how those things just don’t line up well. That’s where, whether you’re talking about spouses or business partners or anything else, in a peer network.

The most important thing is not so much the pairing, it’s understanding the other person, is being able to look and see, okay. They’re an optimizer. So they are process oriented. They’re focused on efficiency. How can I help them and serve them in this relationship? Even though that’s not my first rodeo, right?

It’s not my, it’s not my, it’s not my first, it’s not the thing that I would think about or pursue, right? They are detail oriented. I am high achieving. I care about getting the win and you care about getting all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed. And how do we find common ground? So that’s where M code really helps peer relationships.

Chris Badgett: Good news. We can partner because do it right is third from the bottom of my list. So that helped me understand what is it on the bottom of my list is be unique. Yeah. See, what does that mean? And

Chris Lema: beat and be unique is one of my top five.

So look at us on this screen right now, right? We’re both sitting in nice offices.

We both have nice camera gear. We’re both able to get on video and talk whenever, but only one of us is matching his shirt. To his hat. And the other one is certainly not right. You could interview a hundred guests and I’m guessing I’m the only one who’s wearing a shirt and a hat, the match. And I get up every morning and every morning, I hat and then the shirt that’s going to go with it. And then I start my day. Other people call that decision fatigue and they want to wear the same black t shirt all day, every day, because that’s what Steve Jobs did.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Chris Lema: That’s fine. And they don’t care that they’re wearing the same outfit every day, or even they don’t care if they get on a phone call like this, a video call, and let’s say there’s five people and all five are all tech bros, all wearing black t shirts and they all look identical and to them, they don’t care.

They’re like, Hey, let’s get on with the topic of our conversation. And for me, I’m like, Oh my God, did I miss the memo? Like, why are you all looking the same as a be uniquer? I have owned cars and often lease cars for about two years. Then when I start seeing the car that I’m driving everywhere around, I’m like time to turn this car in because I like having a car that’s unique that says, Hey, that must be Chris summer because that’s the only Bronco that’s cut up that way in Houston, right?

But if everyone had it, then I’d be like, Nah. So I was driving a Range Rover and I love my Range Rover, but then everyone was driving Range Rover. And then I was like, no, I gave it to my wife. She doesn’t have be unique. So she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care how many people have the same car she does.

And I do. So be unique is about, can you stand out? Can you be recognized for the things that, that make you different? You want to be, seen as separate and there’s a whole lot of people like most of the world that is like. Why would I care about that? Like, why would I care about that at all?

So for most people, be unique is towards the bottom, right? For most people, that’s just not a thing. And then for me it’s I don’t know, number two or number three. And you’re like, Whoa that’s a big deal for you. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it is. I just, I don’t want to be the same as everybody else.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. And that feeds into my next question, which is, how do we, I feel like I got lucky, because I, traveled, went into lots of cultures, anthropology, studies, social science. I realized at a very young age that, man, people are different. Man, people have different ways of seeing and being in the world.

And that’s ultimately helped me in work and being a manager and just understanding people very different. And. Being productive. So I got lucky in that I had a background that kind of helped me undo or figure out those blind spots of how people are so different and almost all everybody is.

How does one, remove those blinders and just get a, get better able to do that. As you’re telling that story right there, I’m like, Oh man. If I send Chris a gift, like maybe it needs to match like the hat and the shirt, not just the shirt. And that would say a little more I understand you.

I see you. Yeah. But how do we learn to see the world like others and influence them, communicate with them and so on?

Chris Lema: The first thing is. My, my rough math says about a third of the population doesn’t care. A third of the population just doesn’t care at all about seeing others, like they’re just, they’re on a, they’re on a choose your own adventure game and they’re the only one playing the game and they got the remote control and they’re choosing left left.

And they just, nothing else matters. And nothing we do is going to fix that, right? You have a third of the world that just doesn’t get it. That’s not bad. It’s just an issue of exposure. If you’re living in a country where you have almost no diversity, everybody’s basically the same. You don’t even know to think in that way that, Oh, there might be somebody who thinks up is down and down is up.

And you’re like, what? It just doesn’t, go to a community where they all drive cars. I grew up in Southern California. There are whole neighborhoods of people that have never walked. Three blocks in their life, right? There are communities that don’t have sidewalks.

They’re like why what’s a sidewalk, right? Like their whole life is they got 16. They got keys to a car. They got in their car They drove a mile to their school, right? And you’re like, oh, it’s a mile. I can walk it and they’re like What are you talking about? There are lots of places where people have blind spots, but it’s environmental, it’s not personal.

In the first case, the first third, it’s a little bit personal because what they’re really saying is I don’t need anyone else. I don’t care about anyone else. I’m just doing my own thing. In the second group. It’s. Constraints based on the environment they’re in. They didn’t even know that something, and then you have the third group, which are people who didn’t know, but once they know their eyes are open, then they’re like, Oh my God, feed it more.

Give me more. I want to learn more. I want to learn how to be better here and there. My wife, you can’t go to, you can’t, and Melissa, you’ve met her. You can’t go to a dinner. With Melissa. If you’re hungry, right? Because when you sit down the table and here comes a waiter or waitress, Melissa is going to immediately be like, how do you pronounce your name?

Where are you from? What’s your family history? You’re like, I’m starving. I just wanted food. And now I have to wait for 30 minutes while Melissa. The waiter have their own little back and forth. But she wants I’m starving. every person to feel seen. She wants everybody to feel like, Hey, I know how to say your name.

I know where your family comes from. I know your story. She does that every meal we go to every restaurant we go to everything right. All she wants is more info. Once you start giving it to him, once you’re like. Hey, you know how this is how you do growth and development? And they go, yeah, I’m like, I do growth totally different.

What do you mean? Like I’m all about skill mastery, even if I’ve never done it. If I start doing it, I want to go, Oh, how do I get to expert mode? I want to, I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to do all the reps. I’m going to go over and over until I get it perfectly because I’m all about mastery. And she’s I just want knowledge.

I just want to, pull in more information. I want to read biographies and I’m like, what? No, I don’t care about all that. I just care about I want to be the best at doing it or the best in my peer group. And once she sees, Oh, we’re different. Then she can then start thinking about how to approach.

People differently. So you got one third that doesn’t care. You got one third that doesn’t know. And you got one third that would love to know and be eager to get it. And so of course, my answer is go with the goers, go with the one third that want to learn and grow more and then expose the third that are like, I didn’t even know that was possible.

Or I didn’t even know that people could be wired differently. Some of those may move into the first camp and ignore the third camp, because no matter how much you talk to them, no matter how much you do, they’re just like, Yeah, whatever. And you’re just, it’s coming in one year and go out the other.

And that’s a waste of time. So you, and I’m not writing anyone off, but there’s just some people who are like, I don’t care how someone else is wired. I care about how I’m wired and what I do. And you’re like, okay. That is what that is.

Chris Badgett: Let’s contextualize it for a course creator or coach.

So like when it comes to content, like course content, lessons, videos, texts, PDS, whatever, there’s this learning style concept of visual auditory kinesthetic and all these things. And coaching I think of as you can just do coaching without courses, but it’s more human and dynamic and stuff like that.

It’s a support mechanism. So how can course creators and coaches use something like the M code to create better content and also better help their people when they fall down or get stuck?

Chris Lema: So that’s a great question. I think what you’re going to discover is for every person. So we mentioned at the top of the call, I run a conference called Cabo press.

This year we just did our 10th. I had everyone take the M code, right? You do the seating arrangements by the M code. I didn’t do seating. I didn’t do some arrangements, but it definitely influenced some of my lunch groups and it influenced some of our dinners. Here’s the thing you look at 60 people and I would say 80 percent of them, maybe higher, maybe 85 percent were all achievers and drivers, or at least they were an achiever or driver in their top three spots.

85 percent at least. We had two influencers, two learners, one relator, right? Does that mean that there are no relator entrepreneurs? No. It means that all my marketing and messaging, all my recruiting, all my communication targets, achievers, and drivers who are the C who are sitting in the CEO role of their agencies, product companies, and SAS companies.

That’s all it means is that the way in which I talk, the way in which I describe it, The way in which I invite the people that I’m inclined to invite are predominantly achievers and drivers. And they, and there’s a couple learners and a couple, influencers and maybe a relater, but if you look at that relater, the one relater that’s there I’ve done nothing to recruit them.

They have crossed every semantic bridge. And they have crossed every Delta between where they were and where I’m, they did all the work to get to me. They did all the heavy lifting because I was. Translating my stuff to achievers and drivers. And the same is true for course creators and coaches is that you’re going to discover that you work mostly with, you connect mostly with, you shape your messaging, mostly for two to four of our eight dimensions.

It doesn’t mean that for others. Are not going to come your way. It’s just, they’re going to do all the heavy lifting because you haven’t even spent time thinking about it. So when we think about resilience and adaptability, all the stuff that is like support oriented that you’re trying to get up an achiever is going to be goal focused.

A driver is going to be pressure filled, right? Resilient. They’re going to be like, Hey, I can persist in the midst of hard stuff. A learner is going to be intellectually agile. I’m flexible in my brain. I can pick up new things. And you’re going to go, yeah, these are the things that I like to do.

So you might think of, Hey, I’ve been doing one on one coaching, but I’m going to have this once a month group call where anybody can do whatever and support. And you go, okay, but this is for a certain group of people that want to feel connected with each other. That community part that all my stuff for achievers and drivers, there’s no community part, right?

You go to my conference at common press, you get these lunch groups, you get dinner groups. I’m not doing any of those things. I’m not delivering value in those moments, but I’ve crafted those moments So that people can connect with each other because that’s so important or 7 a. m. They go out and they work out.

And this time I did all three workouts, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which was a huge deal, but it’s creating another sense of community. And there are certain people, relators and influencers who are like, I love this. I love that there’s this place where we connect. And you’re like, yes, I have to craft my offering.

To deliver value to different groups, even if I specifically focus in one realm. So what I would tell a coach, I would tell a a course creator. I say, first go take the M code and you can do it for 19 bucks, right? The light version gives you enough of what you need, but you can take it for 19 bucks and you go and you learn it.

And then as you’re working with your clients, your coaching clients, You there’s a gift. Once you go inside, right? There’s a gift option. You can buy it for your clients. So go buy it for your three coaching clients or your five coaching clients, Jennifer Bourne, who runs PPP, which is a whole community around running their digital agency.

She signed up for a subscription. And then she gave it to all her people, right? So 20 people could take it each month or 25 people could take it each month and she had them all take it so that she could know better who they were and she could then start shaping. It’s not just the content itself, though, that the language you use is going to likely be more aligned to one or two dimensions.

But then what are the other components of your offering that, Connect to something else, right? Influencers love having impact. If I give you a bunch of it’s all about me, it’s all about me, it’s all about me self discovery worksheets, eventually you’re going to be like, I’m tired of just navel gazing and looking at me all the time.

I care about looking out. I want to care about, serving my community. You better give them an assignment that goes in that direction because if they do, if you do this all the time and you’re thinking, but I love to be aware of myself and my stuff. And you’re like, yes, Mr. Lerner, but Mr.

Influencer wants to make an impact on the outside world. And if you don’t get him focused outside a little bit, he’s going to quit your program because he’s going to put you in a camp that says all you do is think about yourself. You don’t care about impact. So I’m going to go somewhere else. And you’re like, whoa, stop.

I totally care about impact. So how do I create. A component of my offering that really lights you up. Or if influencer is one of your main players, or if relators when your main players are optimized, when your main players, how do I change the language in my lesson? To hit them more. What you’ll discover is most of us when we’re course creating and we’re recording lessons, we’re just choosing illustrations that come to mind, top of head, right?

Or top of head when you were writing your script, if you write scripts all of those are just your defaults. So of course, all your stories are going to line up with things that would work for you. That doesn’t mean it worked for everyone else. So once we expose you to all eight dimensions and we teach you about it, of course, our goal is to help you be able to create content in different ways.

And we’ll show you, look, just doing this can shift. A driver article to be an influencer article or a learner article or what have you, right? Or you may go, oh, lesson one is really more driver oriented, but lesson two is all going to be about influencer and impact, right? And so you can weave different lessons in the course of a project so that everybody’s feeling connected to some assign.

Now I like lesson three and the other guy’s I like lesson four. And you’re like, of course you do, because you’re this and you’re that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us how what somebody should do if they want to get M code for themselves and for their team. And once they get into it, how to best get the most value out of it.

Yeah.

Chris Lema: Okay. So number one, you go to motivation code. com and you buy the light version. If you want to spend 79 by the premium version, it’ll give you way more in the report. But if you’re just getting started and you want to try it. Buy the 19 one. It doesn’t stop you after you’ve gotten the report on the other end and then you get more excited.

It doesn’t stop you from upgrading that 19 paying the additional 60 bucks and getting the premium report accessible to you. Once you’ve done your report then you go to in the, my products, there’s a gift section and you buy. Let’s say your team is seven more people, you buy seven more lights and that’s 19 bucks a pop.

You buy the seven and then you go into, you get the link right for each one of these and you send it to each person and let them take it. And when they take it right, they’re going to be like, Oh my gosh, did you know that do you know that? So it’s super awesome. Yeah. Also we have in that same catalog, right?

So it’s all product led growth. It’s all inside the SAS. When you go into the, my products, just like you were able to buy the the light one or, the or the premium as a gift, you can also buy a 90 minute impact session. And If you have already bought the light and then you upgraded to the premium and you read the full premium report and you’re like, Oh my God, this is blowing my mind is amazing.

I want to talk with someone about this. I want to talk to a certified coach who can help me explore this and go deeper with it. Then you have the ability to buy a 90 minute impact session. And that is awesome. You will thank me forever for that 90 minutes because it’s phenomenal, but then you go, Hey, wait, my whole team took M code.

How do I get someone right? And a certified trainer, how do I get them involved in doing a team training and the team training is 3, 500 bucks, it’ll pull your whole team together. And and it will even create some dynamic slides that show you the nuances between your team, right?

Which becomes really enlightening. Now, I will say this. If you go the 19 route and you buy the 9 gift for your team, and then you buy the team one, you buy a team, it’s 3, 500, whatever. If you’re thinking about buying the 79 premium version, Don’t go that route instead go straight to the team edition Because the team edition when you pay the 3500 for the team session You’ll also be able to buy the premium report for 49 So you get a discount, right?

And so you’re like, yeah I’ll buy the team thing and what you get is a certified executive coach who meets with your whole team and covers not only a little bit of the inside work, but also covers the Outside and the cross connects, right? So it’ll show you, Hey, you have a team and this is what we’re seeing in your team.

And also here are some blind spots or some little issues, or here’s some predictive stories that might. I have literally walked into a room and said so let me guess you have an affiliate program and it’s not working well. And the CEO is looking at his executive team going, okay, who spilled the beans?

Who told him this? And I’m like no I I, no one, you can stop looking around, right? Just look at me. Nobody told me that you guys were struggling. You have an entire marketing department and they’re all this big. Motivational dimension instead of this, what I should have seen is this.

And this, what I saw was this, here’s how that manifests itself. This, and this are likely problems. And they’re like. Oh my God, that’s exact. I’m like, that’s what happens when your marketers are drivers, right? Like they’re just going to go off a checklist. You haven’t had a new item added to that checklist in forever.

And they’re like, yeah, you’re right. I go, because that’s not what they’re going to do. They’re not going to come up with new stuff. So you’re going to need an influencer or later. You’re going to need some of these other people to come in. And that’s how you get the most of it. It all starts at motivation code.

com. It starts with a 19 assessment, but it can be, you can buy a lot more and it’s all there ready to help you make most use of all this stuff.

Chris Badgett: Chris, this has been amazing. Thank you for coming on the show. This is such great work and it has such big potential for individuals and teams and really the world.

It’s very cool. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Chris Lema: Thank you for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this episode of LMScast, host Chris Badgett interviews Jason Yarusi, a successful real estate investor and entrepreneur. Jason’s journey to building a $300 million real estate portfolio is a story of transformation, perseverance, and strategic action in apartment syndication. He shares his path from an unfulfilling start in life, which included working in bars and dealing with personal issues, to creating a real estate empire specializing in large apartment complexes.

Jason Yarusi is a multifamily investor, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and business coach. Through his business, Yarusi Holdings, he has amassed a portfolio of more than 3,000 commercial real estate properties and oversees more than $300 million in real estate.

He talks about how a major accident led him to realize that he needed to change, and how little changes in his habits and perspective put him on a different course. Jason describes his approach of concentrating on a single market niche apartment syndication and growing it via collaboration, procedures, and guidance from seasoned mentors.

Jason provides insightful advice on how to overcome obstacles and create a long-lasting company, emphasizing the need of planning, networking, and open communication with investors. This motivational discussion explores tenacity, self-improvement, and practical guidance for anybody hoping to succeed in life or real estate.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jason, you’re Roosie. You can find them at Jason, you’re Roosie. com and the live 100 podcast. But first welcome to the show, Jason. Hey, Chris, it’s great to be here. I’m excited to dig into it with you. You’ve got a lot of interesting threads in your story.

One is about how you built a real estate investing empire, how you help other people do the same and your own journey of perseverance and personal development. I think there’s a lot we can learn here, but let’s start with the real estate story. I consider myself a novice real estate investor. I’ve built one spec home I’ve sold two lots.

I have a rental a second property that I rent out right now. I’ve run an Airbnb business off of my house. Which was just a travel trailer that I fenced in, in my yard at one point, but I’ve always loved real estate and been fascinated by it. But just to give some context, can you tell us about where you’re at as a real estate investor today?

Jason Yarusi: Yeah you say novice, 99 percent of the world have no real estate investment. So you are well ahead of most in the world who have gone out there and probably thought of it, but never taken action. That’s usually the biggest piece with real estate is it’s such a big blue ocean.

You can do so many different things with it. Yeah. But sometimes when there’s so much opportunity in so many different directions, you can go, it paralyzes you, right? You get stuck because you just don’t know where to start, right? So kudos for you just getting out of the gate and, myself, I, I faced some some loss like during my high school years, right?

So some friends passed away. A girlfriend was killed in a car accident, went to college. I was just lost in what I wanted to do, right? Just didn’t feel like I had much direction. I’d feel like things were crumbling around me. My dad had a small family business that was constantly struggling.

I got into college, through sports and just didn’t really have much desire. So I ended up picking business as a major. Got a finance degree and left college. Just was not really motivated. I moved into New York city, just, doing odd jobs, didn’t want to do anything with my degree.

I didn’t want to do anything with, business or finance. And so I just started working in bars and restaurants and it was, it was fun, but it wasn’t fulfilling. If that would make sense. Like you’re just doing stuff. It’s like energetic, but you’re just like, what am I doing? And around you, you have a lot of people.

Friends who are, getting jobs, right? They’re getting that full time jobs. Maybe they’re, getting married. They’re doing all these things that seem like they’re progressing in life while you’re here. Just, going living by the moment, right? And with that, that breeded, a lot of chaotic results, and I just wasn’t really happy with where I was.

It just didn’t wasn’t really satisfying for the day in and day out. It just wasn’t being productive like within my own life. And work did that for a couple of years, and then one night just angry at the world. Out of nowhere, I was riding my bike home at two or three in the morning. Got hit by a car. It threw me in the air. I got taken to the hospital and some broken bones. And some stitches in my face.

I got a pin in my wrist and I get out of the hospital and just getting back to my apartment. My mind is so focused. I need to get back to work because I need to make rent. And I had this like moment of pause. I was like, okay. This is a crazy thought and just hit by a car. I’m at a place I don’t want to be.

I don’t like the job. I don’t like where I am. And now I’m thinking about is how after this I can just get back to exactly where I don’t want to be. So I made like a pack for myself. It wasn’t this like magical transformation overnight, but I was like, okay, if I’m going to keep doing this, then I have to be okay getting these results and not complain about it.

or I need to start to change something. But the thing was, I just didn’t know what to change. So slowly and surely, I just started to do little things, right? So get up early, right? Stop drinking after work, right? Stop, doing things that weren’t really in a path that was going to be positive.

Start working out start reading, right? Just start putting myself into the moment. other areas where people positive and little by li to change. So I went from the bar to owning a bar, New York City. I opened a New York City before movi out of nowhere, Hurricane decimated, a lo

business. This small business really was targeted heavy construction jobs that did a lot with lifting homes. So his business went overnight from a couple jobs to like thousands of calls a day. And so my little brother was working for me. My now wife was working with me. We moved to New Jersey and helped dad really scale up the business.

And that was fun, but it wasn’t really again the direction I wanted to go. So we kept asking what was it? At this time, my now wife, she was pregnant with her first child. And Our day was so chaotic. It was so busy that if there was 25 hours in a day, I could have done it. So we came upon the word real estate, right?

And that, like we said earlier, was just this big blue ocean. What we did is we just started to try different formats. So we went out there, we started, flipping houses, we built houses, we started wholesaling, we started doing Airbnb’s, started doing all these different forms of real estate. It was going fine, but it was just, we weren’t, Really, we were doing good, but we weren’t doing great because it was just anywhere and everywhere.

One day came upon someone who was buying apartment communities, and they were actually buying larger apartment communities, putting together a team, putting together a process and allowing the process and the team to do the work. And that was that moment where I was like, I get it. This is how you can really scale a real estate business is that you have to go all in one sector and one part of a piece of the puzzle, put together the team, put together the process, put together the pattern, and then rinse and repeat.

So we stopped all the other real estate we were doing. We went all into learning the large apartment investing business. And back in 2017, we brought a 94 unit while living in New Jersey and Louisville, Kentucky. And that was the first of the evolution of buying apartment communities. We’ve now since brought about 3, 000.

400 3, 500 units pretty much down here in the southeast, mainly large apartment buildings, and it’s been about 320 to 340 million of real estate.

Chris Badgett: Wow, what a cool story. I have a ton of questions So when you started learning from somebody that there was like a system and a process you could put in place to scale this multi family or apartment strategy what were you learning through?

Was it through books? Was it through a mastermind, through online courses, coaching? What was it?

Jason Yarusi: So the first was a podcast, right? Came up on a podcast because and what happened was like, I heard that cause you hear, you go on podcasts and you go on a real estate podcast and one day to the next it’s tax liens, flipping wholesaling, it’s all over the place.

So I heard that. I was like, whoa. Okay. I understand that model. That model really makes sense. What I did is I put the blinders on instead of going on to the generic real estate policy. I went all in from learning podcast and learning from books and then looking for networks, right? Looking for groups that were doing this, right?

So I just found people that were doing it. I found two different people that were doing it in two different ways. One was buying it through syndication. That’s a model we use a lot where basically you’ll pull funds from investors and yourself to be able to buy a large asset. And the other We’re buying it through their, basically friends and family, like one or two partners in themselves and they were managing it themselves.

So I took both processes, I learned from both and then I put together my own process to back in. Because what I found is that lots of times we want to recreate the wheel, right? You want to redo the process and make it like your own when in fact, if you just see other people, that are doing it successfully.

You say what are they doing? And you follow that pattern. It allows you to get out of the gate to be successful in trying to re engineer this whole process for yourself.

Chris Badgett: How did you get the kind of startup capital for the first 94 unit property?

Jason Yarusi: Yeah. Great question. So had a great Suggestion by someone is that it’s always, we want to say, Hey, once I get the deal, I’ll get the money.

But once you get the deal, the hardest thing is to get the money because now you’re under pressure, right? So instead of me being able to come to you, Chris, and be like, Hey, listen I’m learning about buying apartment buildings. I’m really excited about this. The reason I can do this is because they have cashflow.

They have appreciation, depreciation. tax benefits debt pay down and you’re able to put together a team to run all this. So I don’t have to do the day to day. So we’re going off to large assets and I give you all the understanding and reasoning for you to understand the investment that you can go make a qualified decision, right?

But if I need your money today, then I have to say, Hey, are you ready to invest right now? Because I have to close in 30 days. That’s not a good feeling for you. And it puts a lot of pressure on me. So I had a very great suggestion is that I created the type of property I wanted to go after. So I knew that in Louisville, I was going to find a 75 to 125 unit apartment building.

It was going to be built between 1970 and 2000. That was really focused for the workforce housing. It was going to be in the south side of Louisville because that’s where a lot of the workforce housing was targeted And the price was going to be anywhere between three and seven million depending on the product right depending on the property And then I did my analysis and I made a one page, a very simple one page about what I was going to find.

Now I’ve set the standard of what I’m looking for. So now when I was talking to brokers and talking to bankers, I was telling specifically what I wanted to find, right? So that now helps me. It also starts setting a reticular activator in my mind in motion because now I’m looking for it, right?

Everything in front of me, that’s what I’m targeting on. Then I started to talk to my network. I started talking to basically my friends and my family. And saying, Hey, listen, I’m looking for this kind of investment. I’m going to do this for a number of reasons. Some, we just mentioned the cashflow appreciation, right?

And you can partake in this because you will be a partner in the deal. However, I’m going to do all the operations, all the management, all the generation. I’m going to sign a loan, put together the whole process, but you’re going to come in there as a passive investor. It’s going to offer these kinds of returns.

That’s the returns sector we’ve set up for it. Would you have interest if I can find this? And what that did is it didn’t put any pressure on them. And then it gave them a very simple one page to go back there and explore. But I would find that I was able to get commitment between 25, So by the time I found the 94 unit, I had already mentally raised about 1.

of yeses. right? It’s not money I took in, but I had the confidence that I had been able to raise that amount of money through people who would have interest when I found it. So when I did find that deal, I just went back to the people and within that it was almost like I think it was a day and a half. I had all the capital committed because I had already done the pre work and the pressure was no longer on them because they had already got all their questions out.

Some the one pager was sufficient, right? They got it. Someone to see a lot more detail and then we’re able to get into the weeds, but it didn’t put this over resounding pressure of, Hey, I got this deal. I need you to give me an answer right now.

Chris Badgett: So how long after that deal went through, did you realize Hey, this is definitely going to work.

Like this is all going to work out well for everybody involved.

Jason Yarusi: Pretty quickly. You take 45 to 60 days just to get like your feet under you. But what was empowering there is that I, at the same time of finding investors, I was putting together teams, right? I was finding who was gonna be my property manager, who’s going to be my insurance broker, who was going to be all the team around me.

So when I took on the deal, it wasn’t me trying to find the, like all the nuts and bolts of how the deal works. I had qualified team that just put this into the process of what they do each and every day. So I said, okay, here’s my objectives with the deal. Here’s what I want to do, here’s my renovation plan.

And here’s my marketing plan, right? Give me your feedback and your suggestions as we get into this. When we closed, we were running out of the gate, but to see it in formality of like just saying, okay, the renovation would take place. And now we’d be able to get a unit leased within two or three weeks or seven days at the new rental rates.

That’s when the proof of the pudding started coming to say, okay, the business plan is actually hitting the stride right now. What we’re anticipating is now actually being executed on the back end.

Chris Badgett: Wow. And what had to change in your mindset to pull that off? Like, going from guy who was in the accident on the bike to being a guy who could put a deal together for 94 units.

Did you break through any mental barriers or mindset shifts? I’m sure you did. Just let us know what happened.

Jason Yarusi: Almost everything. And you find when you grow up your belief system for better or worse is formulated by just your surrounding, the people that your family, your parents, like who you’re around in school just who you grew up with what. patterns within terms of people that pretty much are in your daily life or even like what you watch on TV. And not for instance, I just, there, there was a ton of scarcity in my world, right?

A ton of things of just that there’s never enough, or if someone did something that they, someone made a lot of money, they probably had to do something bad to get it right. There was all these just. Bad beliefs in my mind that we were always limited in our growth, right? limited in our opportunity.

We wouldn’t have these opportunities, even though others did, that wouldn’t be our world, right? I was constantly in a state of blame for many years, right? Just saying that where I was at was everybody else’s reason, right? My parents reasons, my school reasons, the loss I had, or, the government blame, whoever, like I would’ve pointed a finger at them until one day I just said, really with the idea of what was happening is that no matter what, it’s me, right?

I I am the one making these decisions here. So I can, and the stokes have the part of you control what you think, right? And you control how you act to what’s given to you, right? And many times we get lost in this format is that we lose control of how we’re acting to what’s coming to us, right?

Sometimes. It’s not fair, but that’s okay. It’s just life and how you show up in the moment really can set the stage of how you can continue to progress. So the more I started to put the onus on, okay, I can only control my actions, right? I can only control what I’m doing each and every day, I can’t control the goals, right?

I can’t like the 94, I couldn’t control. If and when that showed up, but I knew if I did the steps, it was, and I said, okay, each day I’m going to get up and I’m going to call brokers. I’m going to underwrite deals. I’m going to make offers, right? I knew it was going to give me one step closer when that goal was going to come.

I don’t know. And when I got out of the mold of just saying that the goal was the pinnacle moment, it was just the actions became the pinnacle moment. It’s like a lot with working out. If you run you may have the action of you want to do a goal of a marathon, but that doesn’t start with you just doing the marathon that starts with you getting up, three to five times a week and start to run three miles, five miles, in different parts, different starts, different sprints, long runs, doing your training, your actions that you control. It’s a lot with, our habits of life. We get so lost in the goal. Like right now, like we’re coming to the end of the year. Most people like you’re probably waiting for like the new year to start.

I get my new year’s resolution out of the way, but 92 percent of new year’s resolutions fail. Why is because we set this big overarching goal that we have no foundation to start. So like today I’m gonna lose 40 pounds. You haven’t worked out in a year and a half, but you’re just gonna go lose 40 pounds.

So the first weekend you work out for three and a half hours the first day and you’re like, Oh, I’m so sore. And maybe you’re like, I won’t go back. You don’t go back for nine days. And then you work out for a half hour and you just get busy again. And then it all goes off because we haven’t built the foundation to start giving us the support to be able to progress forward into the actions of what will bring us to where we want to be.

Chris Badgett: So how old were you when you got the first 94 unit deal?

Jason Yarusi: 36. All right. 37. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then how long has the journey been to today? How many units is it today?

Jason Yarusi: To be honest, we just closed three 55, so we’re probably about 3, 500 units right around there. So who

Chris Badgett: did you need to become to scale from 94 unit guy to 3, 500 unit guy?

Or were you, or did you, is the stuff we already talked about, it just was the natural thing that carried you through?

Jason Yarusi: No, absolutely a great question, right? Because with the 94 unit and then I did a 48 unit and a 58 unit, right? And it was myself and my wife run all these projects and then we were capped, right?

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How Jason Yarusi Built a 300 Million Dollar Real Estate Investing Portfolio and Teaches His Process appeared first on LMScast.

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In this LMScast episode, Wes Tatters and Michael Eisenwasser present Rapyd Cloud, a hosting solution created to meet the particular requirements of high-concurrency, dynamic WordPress websites.

Michael Eisenwasser offers extensive experience in creating social networking solutions for WordPress, having co-founded and operated BuddyBoss for more than 14 years.

The infrastructure of Rapyd Cloud was created by Wes, a well-known server architect in the WordPress community, to meet the particular requirements of systems like BuddyBoss and LifterLMS, where users see customized content. With platforms like BuddyBoss and LifterLMS, where each user gets tailored information like unique newsfeeds, course progress, or quizzes, traditional hosting frequently falls short.

Significant computational demands, frequent site crashes during periods of heavy traffic, and the requirement for expensive over-provisioning of resources are the outcomes of this. By providing dynamic resource allocation that adapts according to demand, effective pricing based on average consumption, and state-of-the-art infrastructure with cutting-edge AWS technology, Rapyd Cloud addresses these problems.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by two very special guests. We’ve got Michael Eisenwasser and Wes Tatters. They’re from Rapyd Cloud, which is innovating in the hosting space, particularly for sites that have a lot of dynamic content, have a lot of concurrent users. This is a big challenge in our industry.

They’re here with the solution at Rapyd Cloud. But first, welcome to the show.

Michael Eisenwasser: Thank you.

Chris Badgett: Thanks a lot. And Michael was actually a guest on the show, I think about nine years ago, a very early guest. So it’s really fun to connect after a decade. Before we get into the rapyd story, tell us about the history here.

Cause this came from the buddy boss world. So tell us, yeah,

Michael Eisenwasser: sure. So I had been running buddy boss with my partner Tom for the last 14 years. So we’ve been in this industry for a long time, and BuddyBoss was actually acquired just a little while ago in June. And and BuddyBoss also has been a good partner with LifterLMS for a lot of these years.

Many of our customers, when they want an LMS, they work with LifterLMS. And so BuddyBoss has social networking features, LifterLMS has the courses, and probably more than half the BuddyBoss customers were doing social learning. And that is really hard to host. So that was the biggest challenge that our customers would face.

And the biggest pain point for most of the customers was that they could not find adequate hosting anywhere in the WordPress world. And so they would either, if they got any level of success, they’d have, if you have a normal WordPress site, that’s like a blog, it’s pretty straightforward to host.

You can just do hard page caching, but if you’re trying to host a site where every single user is seeing unique content, that’s where it gets challenging. So on a buddy, while site you have a community, imagine you’re like Facebook, every person who’s logged in. As a different news feed, different messages, different profile, they’re effectively seeing a different website.

So if you have a hundred people log in at the same time, your server has to create a hundred websites. And then you add an LMS on top of it. And now every course, every quiz, it’s all unique. Not every course, but every their progression through the course and their progression to the quiz and all that.

It’s all in notifications. It’s all unique per user. So our customers couldn’t find adequate hosting sites would crash during launches. The only solution they had was to go to a traditional host and pay for like the top tier hosting plan, they were afraid that it might crash. So they’d be. Paying exorbitant amounts to have enough overhead all the time.

And so we, and we can go into it and tell the whole story, but basically we created a first party hosting solution that provides something that does not exist in the WordPress market. We provide hosting for sites that have a lot of concurrent users who are seeing different types of content rapid is built to ground up the service.

Those users. And if you have that kind of site that will you’d be shocked at how fast it is on rapid and how competitively priced it is for that customer base because it’s all around us. It’s very efficient at doing that.

Chris Badgett: Let’s just take a moment to celebrate the innovation in the room here. And what I mean by that is we took WordPress.

And then buddy boss brought Facebook to your WordPress website. What’s your LMS brought like you, Demi to your WordPress website. This is, these are incredible innovations in the space when you really think about it. And of course, when you think about it in the traditional software market, Like you, the way you described Facebook was great.

How everybody’s essentially getting a different website or somebody taking a course has unique things on their screen and unique quiz questions and progress and all this stuff. It’s heavy on hosting. And I feel like this part of the market has been underserved simply because I think it’s just a, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a smaller fraction of the where hosting companies get their customers from, but it’s an important piece of the internet that has special needs and attention required.

So take us into the tech a little bit. Like what, what has the traditional hosting industry. Just not been doing to really accommodate dynamic high concurrent user sites.

Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. So was can take over that. I’ll just introduce Wes. Although a lot, some people may know who he is, he’s pretty well known in the WordPress world.

Wes is a. server architect mastermind who has designed at a high level our whole server stack for Rapyd. And with that Wes can answer.

Wes Tatters: I think one of the challenges for dynamic hosting is that there’s no one solution fits all the boxes. Traditional hosting is a set of boxes. You have this size box, or this size box.

And for dynamic hosts, it’s the big box. It’s the box that’s not going to crash when their site has a new marketing campaign that launched on, or a product that goes viral in a WooCommerce platform or a new cohort starting of classes The traditional solution, once you’re in this dynamic spaces, you’ll initially be told you need a VPS or you need a eight CPU cores or 32 gigabytes of RAM.

You’ll be told specific, numbers that you’re supposed to meet to try and to to achieve what you need at that peak point in time. The problem is most of us don’t need that. 8 CPU cores or 16 CPU cores or 150 workers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But to achieve that in the standard hosting world, that’s what you have to do.

You have to go and buy a product, which is often very expensive or overpriced in terms of what you really need. Instead of a product that suits your needs. So we started from the ground up looking at what BuddyBoss customers needed. First, we realized that most BuddyBoss customers are shaped.

What that means is that at different times of the day or different times of the week, they have different user experiences. Some sites might have load in the morning. And some sites might have loads in the evening. Might only be busy on a Saturday. So that was our starting point, designing a platform that didn’t punish people or penalize people for the periods of time when they weren’t busy.

That was the starting point. It’s finding a way to even out or balance out or average out a customer’s utilization across a period of time. So at Rapyd, we don’t technically sell CPU cores. Yes, if you look at our site, you’ll find mentions of our plans are like to CPU cores or like for CPU cores. But what we’re actually doing is simply selling people processing resources.

So if you need a lot of resources or a lot of processing power on a Monday morning, you have availability and access to that when you need it. Providing you average out your load across a week, you don’t then get penalized for that spike where all of a sudden at Thursday afternoon, you need 150 concurrent users or a thousand concurrent users.

So it’s designing the architecture in a way that is different to a traditional hosting platform. To do that, we built it on top of some of the best infrastructure available. We use Amazon. We’re an AWS partner. We utilize their latest high performance resources at all times. So you’re not on a rapyd platform getting a small CPU core or a, an old, 10 year old, 15 year old processor.

This is the other problem we have with traditional hosts. If you look at the problem of hosting we have a term called race to the bottom and it’s been happening in the WordPress space for some time. How can we get it cheaper, how can we get it cheaper? And ow can we get it cheaper?

And the way hosting companies get their hostings cheaper is not to upgrade them. They don’t put modern CPU cores in, of course that costs money. So we’ll just run it on the CPU for the last five or 10 years. We don’t, we don’t improve our platform performance. We don’t improve our network performance because all those things cost money.

So what you wind up with is product that over time I’m running on infrastructure, which is incredibly old. Some of the hosting companies out there are running data centers, big data centers that to upgrade will cost a small fortune. So they leave them where they are. They’re sitting on first and second generation Intel CPU cores.

We’re now on fifth generation CPU cores. They will, being launched this week. In terms of server. Rapyd will always be on the latest. Product that’s available. Currently, we’re running exclusively on AMD fourth generation CPU in the service space. So it’s about choosing a platform and choosing a product that’s ideally suited to the dynamic space.

Latest technology, best infrastructure and best practices right across the board.

Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah, we’ll even upgrade the CPUs in the background for an existing plan on the customer, which we’ve done

Wes Tatters: since launching. Yeah, as new technology becomes available, everything updates. The customer doesn’t even know it’s happening.

We doubled our display, we doubled our disk performance in the last two months increasing all of our disk infrastructure. It just happened. The customers aren’t aware that anything’s happening inside the infrastructure. Um, that’s our sort of objective and that, that’s our guarantee long term.

We’ll always be there ensuring that what our customers get is best for their needs.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. And that’s a great philosophy to have from day one as you build the company. I think one of the challenges of the hosting industry for non engineering users, which is most users, is they hit a pricing page or a compare page and they get a little lost in the technology.

So just for a short spot in this interview, could you give us some high level education on, CPU, RAM, PHP workers? What does this mean? Like we’re supposed to, as a non technical buyer, we’re supposed to Oh I think I need this or that, but we don’t really know. So can we do a public service and level up some understanding of that?

Wes Tatters: Yeah. 100 percent

PHP is our underlying platform. It’s the software that ensures that WordPress runs. PHP is a very mature product, but also comes with its own set of problems. Every time someone requests a page on a website, it requires what’s called a PHP worker. So that’s a program that’s going to run to generate that page request.

Number of PHP workers that are available on your hosting controls the number of page requests that can happen at the same time. It’s that simple. If your site says you’ve got 10 PHP workers, then it’s impossible to generate more than 10 simultaneous requests because those PHP workers are single threaded.

They’re exclusive to that page request. So if you’ve got a site with 10 people visiting at the same time, then 10 PHP workers will be running every time that page request hits. Now, the problem is when we get into big WordPress sites might be a hundred concurrent users. So now we’re talking about something that might need a hundred PHP workers to generate all those simultaneous page requests.

On top of that, we have sites like BuddyBoss and Lifter that use Ajax or REST requests. Every one of those requests also needs a PHP worker. So in BuddyBoss for a number of years, BuddyBoss, to load the BuddyBoss activity feed used to take four page requests. So it would load the main page, it would then load the activity feed, it would then load a notification window, and it would load a message, messaging window.

That’s four PHP workers, four concurrent requests to generate that single page of information. Again, now you add a hundred concurrent users on the site, and all of a sudden you’ve got quite a lot of performance load. The other challenge with the PHP worker is that PHP workers need exclusive memory.

So while a PHP worker is running, it needs a little block of RAM that’s available to it and only it. Now on a small blogging site, it might be a simple blog, you might only need 20 or 30 megabytes of RAM. Exclusively allocated to that PHP worker. On a dynamic site with BuddyBoss, Lifter, WooCommerce, we have sites that need 250 megabytes of RAM to load that page, to do all the processing.

Similarly, in WP admin, we have sites potentially needing up to a gigabyte of memory. To handle all that background processing. When you’re in a block builder like Gutenberg, all of the juggling that’s happening requires a lot of extra memory. PHP workers are uniquely linked to two things.

The, a number of concurrent users and the avail of, and the amount of them available memory. Inside your hosting. So if your host says, for example, you’ve got unlimited PHP workers. It doesn’t make sense because to have unlimited PHP workers would mean you needed unlimited memory. And we all know that your plan only gave you 16 megabytes, gigabytes of Ram or eight gigabytes of Ram, or maybe 32.

So we get into a lot of. of marketing jargon that doesn’t necessarily match up with our technology needs. We then get into challenges about what that all means. The first question comes CPU. So a CPU obviously is a computer. We know what a computer is. And we know that our iPhone has a a CPU in it. We know that our computer and our laptop has a CPU in it.

The CPU is the processing unit that does all the work. No two CPUs, however, are created equal. It’s a bit like buying a four cylinder engine car or an eight cylinder engine car. You can actually buy two four cylinder engine cars, one that’s super powerful and one that’s incredibly slow. Of course, they’re different versions or different iterations.

So over time, most of the hosting companies have wound up in situations where they sell CPU cores at a price point. But not necessarily the latest CPU. So if we look at the CPU world in the hosting world, there are currently four generations of hosting service CPUs available from both AMD and Intel that work with WordPress.

Very recently AMD have just released their fifth generation CPU cores. Each time a new CPU core is released, the main thing that they’re trying to achieve is better performance. So which means that CPU, the new model runs faster now, for example, we transitioned during a beta from third generation to fourth generation CPU cores in our platform.

We actually delayed our launch by a month. We were working with AWS to ensure that we could launch on a new platform. Received a 30 percent page load performance increase by changing from a third generation to a fourth generation CPU. Now, in again, the dynamic world, 30 percent page load increase is a big win because the amount of time it takes to generate your page controls concurrency as well.

Chris Badgett: So

Wes Tatters: if your page takes a long time to generate, that means the PHP worker is allocated to that page request for a longer amount of time. So if we can reduce the amount of time it takes to generate that page, we can again increase the amount of concurrency in the

Chris Badgett: platform. A business and a technical question here is, as you all looked at developing Rapyd Cloud the market wants like high performance hosting at a great price, And this part of the market that’s really good at high traffic, dynamic content, concurrent users.

How did you what insight did you have where you had the aha that I think we can pull this off and create a way better product at a better price. And then how do you do that? Technically?

Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. The insight I had or Tom and I again for years and years, we dealt with seeing Buddy West customers complaining about performance constantly.

And often they would blame the product and say, the product’s not built efficiently enough, or has some performance issue. And we knew if they just were on really good hosting, it would work there. There’s just the nature of it. Was explained when you have, if you have a hundred people log in at the same time, it is hard to host that no matter what you do with the product.

People don’t realize something like Facebook, the amount of resources that go behind it to host it. So we wanted to. Build a solution for this for a long time, but servers were not our core competency. Our core competency was building software. But nonetheless, we did everything we could to improve the performance of buddy loss itself as make as efficient as we could.

And we had one year, a number, a couple of years ago, where I guess about three years ago, we pushed out an update to BuddyBoss where we spent months just trying to optimize all the code and make it as efficient as possible. Get rid of all the low hanging fruit, double queries and things like that, optimizing a lot.

And we spent a long time working on, I believe it was BuddyBoss 1. 9. 1. 9. Yeah, 1. 9. It was a good release. And we want to market that we’ve made the product much more efficient. And so we were trying to figure out how do we run benchmarks on this and prove that it’s faster. Because if you have one user logged in, it doesn’t really mean much.

You have to simulate huge amounts of concurrent users and run benchmarking as that. And we spent a couple months trying to produce all the data to prove that it was faster and write a blog post and a video about it. And so we finally were ready. We pushed the release live and published our results. And the same day, Wes is in our Facebook group, publishing his results.

He’s you’re right. It is faster. The stuff he was publishing was more sophisticated than what we had. Wes, and we were, that’s, we were shocked by it. Also Wes had been in our Facebook group for a long time. Anytime people did have these performance issues, Wes would be there like, Hey, DM me.

And then they’d come back later and post that their site’s running fast. Now that, Whatever was did fixed it. So when this happened, Tom was like, Hey, you know what? We got to hire Wes. We’re like, let’s hire him. Let’s finally do this. We had wanted to for a long time. Let’s, we’d want it to build something like that.

Once I’m like, let’s hire was take his recipe. And make it the best it can possibly be put resources behind it, build a development team behind it. Take everything we know from all these years at BuddyBus. We know how to do customer support and how to do software development. And so we took what he had created, which was working really well and made the best version of it.

And then we took all the stuff we know about software development and user experience and By the way, an extremely easy to use. Customer dashboard. So even though Wes is talking about all this technical stuff, customer perspective is not like that. The customer experience is super easy to use dashboard.

We’ve taken care of everything. Like you can update plugins. You can update themes. We have patch deck on there running, showing if you have security vulnerabilities and you can update the plugin there. And we have WooCommerce settings. We are not a lot of people know it yet, but we are the fastest host in the world for WooCommerce sites.

So we knew we could pull it off because of that. Then once we started building it before we even had the dashboard available, we had some customers who had apps, buddy bus app running, and we’re having really big performance issues. And some of these people were paying, thousands of dollars a month in hosting.

They were complaining and saying, we’re not sure if we can stay with buddy bus, cause we have all this performance problems and it’s getting expensive to host. We said, Hey, we have this thing. We’ve been working on the backgrounds. We want to give you private access to this. Dashboard’s not ready, but we’ll put your stuff on our hosting.

And they were just shocked at how fast it was. And the user, once we saw the feedback from the customers and then watching, you can go to love. rapid. cloud and see all our testimonials. It’s incredible. Once we saw the feedback from all these customers, one after the next thing, like you’ve transformed my whole website, I can’t believe how fast it is.

That gave us the confidence for okay, we’ve really done it. We’ve pulled it off. And we decided it was time basically to sell body boss. And focus all of our energy, all of our time, all of our effort on.

Wes Tatters: And part of that As I said, we’re very closely tied to BuddyBoss by being a separate entity.

It gives us the ability to open dialogues that possibly would have been harder to have. If we were just BuddyBoss we are here for every dynamic platform, every dynamic. So WooCommerce, Lifter, LearnDash, Tutor LMS Peepso the membership plugins, The membership we’re actively talking with the fluent team who are leasing a community product of a fluent community.

It’s in late beta now and will be public within weeks. Rapyd is ideally suited. To those platforms. The reason it’s ideally suited is that one of the things that communities do is get successful and it’s very different to have a blog. And I talk with people and say, yeah, a lot of.

People, when they start their WordPress site are really over the moon. When they hit that hundred visitors a month, I’ve started to get something credible when they hit that hundred visitors a week, they’re starting to go, this might be a, this might be a business, a hundred visitors a day, and they’re going, if I can keep doing this, I can, Give up my day job.

The smallest BuddyBoss sites, some of the smallest Lifter sites, are actually really quite sad if they’re only getting 100 visitors a day. Because their communities, they need people coming in, checking their Facebook feed, or checking their feed, looking at the, looking at conversations, visiting blogs. If it’s a Lifter site, they need people to complete the course.

They need the, they need them to do it. Do all the lessons and complete the course. It’s a cohort that’s joining. It might be a 30 person cohort. They need to get in and do those things. So in this space, the small numbers that people are excited about in a blogging site become quite rapidly. Oh, we’ve got a success problem.

I have a small customer that built a A social learning platform based on Buddy Boss to teach indigenous people in New Zealand, the Maori people, their own language. The like many languages, the cultures die. She built this little site just to teach the people in her local community.

Then last year was approached by the New Zealand government going could we like run this in every last room? She’s now got a buddy boss site with thousands of concurrent users at nine a. m. Every day. In classrooms across New Zealand that success is this same problem. Because what we do is different we need this dynamic server capabilities.

And next year, she’s told me only recently, she’ll have 30, 000 people trying to log on Monday morning on the second week of February. Can I handle this? And we can work it out for her.

Chris Badgett: I actually have a background in anthropology and cultural survival is a important topic to me. I also love New Zealand So that’s such a cool.

Cool story Let’s maybe you guys can help me answer a question that i’m sure you’ve gotten to particularly around buddy boss when people come in and they have questions they have big hopes and dreams they’re hoping they get a thousand ten thousand a hundred thousand sometimes even millions of users on their site How do you direct them?

Then they ask which, which hosting do I need? Like, where do I start? And let’s say they’re like, Oh, we just

Wes Tatters: say rapid, but yeah.

Chris Badgett: Like, how do you think about that scale? Like in the past, I’ve always first, it’s probably a good idea to pre sell and. Get some validation and just choose a host that can grow with you as your needs change.

But yeah, how do you answer that at rapyd, like in terms of somebody’s they’re coming in and let’s say it works like your New Zealand person, how do they, how does the relationship and the plans and the pricing. Particularly what people don’t want is for them to get a traffic spike and the site goes down or their launch is way more successful than they ever thought.

Like, how do you think about that relationship of kind of validating and getting started and then just scaling over time?

Michael Eisenwasser: So our starting plan. Is if you pay annually 29 a month, and that is a, not going to handle huge amounts of concurrent users, but that is an entry point. So people can get started on rapyd very inexpensively.

The smallest plan we’d recommend for a site that really has concurrent users as a production site, if you pay annually is a hundred a month. So, there is a inexpensive entry point into rapyd. And as you grow and as your needs go up, you can bump up to the next plans and to increase your tier in rapyd, the customer can do it in the dashboard themself.

And it’s instantaneous. It really is. It’s two seconds.

Wes Tatters: One of the things to understand, though, is that even on our cheapest plans, they’re on the same server. They’re on the same CPU cores. They’re actually getting the same performance regardless of which plan they’re on. What really changes as you increase plans is the amount of concurrency.

Or the amount of visits that you have access to within the platform.

Michael Eisenwasser: We can also speak to as performance boosts. So this is something that’s not live yet, but it’s working technically in the background. We’re going to build the dashboard end of it soon. And this will allow customers to increase schedule in advance, increasing their server resources for a temporary period of time.

So you could let’s say you have a launch on Friday, you could schedule in advance, starting Friday morning for the next 48 hours, I want the resources of the top tier plan, and the moment this that it begins. All the resources of the top tier plan will be dynamically allotted to your server. And when the period ends, it will drop back down.

So that’s coming early 2025, and that’s going to provide even more flexibility. But even now, because of the auto scaling nature of Rapyd, site’s very difficult for a site to crash on Rapyd infrastructure.

Wes Tatters: We we’ve done a few where we’ve worked with customers manually. We the the agile

Sorry, the Agile conference this year came to us and said we use BuddyBoss app. We want to run our BuddyBoss app as a community tool with inside the Agile conference. We’re going to have between three and five thousand people at the conference, and we want to use our BuddyBoss app to, to publish our calendars, all our session times, and let people communicate with each other.

And we did exactly this year. For them. They came to us and said, Hey, from Friday to Monday, can we have a big plan? So we did the boost. They didn’t even know what happened there their product and their their conference ran exactly the way they wanted it, but it was outperformed exactly the way they wanted it.

Their customers were thrilled. And on the Monday morning, they switched back down to their standard startup one plan, which they’d been using for development because their website. Is it really going to be used now for another six months until the next conference? So that’s the sort of flexibility that we provide to our customers already.

And it will be available in the dashboard, as Mike said, early in the new year as well. But we have a very active customer support and customer success team. One of the things that we knew when we were at wrap at buddy boss was the importance of support. So

Chris Badgett: how do

Wes Tatters: you think about support? Very differently.

We bought with us from BuddyBoss a number of BuddyBoss support team. Everyone at BuddyBoss who was in our support was effectively a PHP plugin developer. They understand PHP. And they understand WordPress. They understand plugins. That means that the support team that we bought in to Rapid. are actually skilled in building WordPress sites.

We will go the extra mile with our team to ensure that our customer sites work reliably. And we run free performance assessments. We run, free site evaluations. We’ll

Michael Eisenwasser: migrate your site to Rabbit for free, no cost.

Wes Tatters: And during that migration, we’ll fully assess the site. We’ll make a performance report analysis on, give them guidance on plugins that are causing problems show them how to improve site performance in the plugin level itself, help them with database optimization platform optimization.

We also deliver object caching natively in our product. Object Cache Pro is a native part of what we do. Tools, amazing products and relay his replacement for Redis that improves performance in factors. And again, for dynamic sites, object caching is the only caching that works.

Page caching isn’t available.

Michael Eisenwasser: I’ll mention one more thing about support. So our support system, it’s not like you send an email and wait two hours. It’s 24 seven live chat support with very fast response times. Customer satisfaction. If you look up Rapid Cloud on Trustpilot, or go again to love. rapid.

cloud, you’ll see the testimonials. The customers are really happy with our customer support.

Wes Tatters: We also built out a native AI based support platform that adds as an adjunct to our dashboard. So when you arrive at our at our, your site, you’ve got a button down the bottom, open the support. The first question you ask is instantly passed to our AI.

And we’ll respond with active answers from a massive knowledge base of information that we’ve been building and compiling, not just about hosting, but about PHP and about WordPress and about plugins. So on average our support response time is under 30 seconds. Did you,

Chris Badgett: Did you use Docspot for that?

Wes Tatters: No, it’s built. It’s built as a part of our with our with our support our chat system partners. It’s a product called intercom and, as I said, that average response time of 30 seconds from the person asking a question in many cases, they’ve in that time also received a set of information from our AI that gets them a starting point.

We find that about 35 percent of our support requests are actually answered successfully just by our AI.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell us more about the migration. Is it true, like hands off migration? If somebody is listening to this or watching this and they’re like, you know what, I’m ready to make the move.

I just want to like. Sign up and have them for

Wes Tatters: me. Is that the promise highly managed average migration times about an hour and a half, we can actually complete a migration. Often the impact of often the slowest amount of time in the migration is just getting the details that we need out of the customer.

We will do. everything. If a customer gives us access to their cloudflare account, we will even handle DNS mapping for them. We handle migration through a set of stages. It’s fully managed fully monitored by our platform and excuse me. And So much so that we actually do two migrations.

We do an entire test migration to make sure that a customer site is 100 percent compatible, 100 percent suited. I will say this. We don’t support older versions of PHP, for example. Some customers are still sitting on PHP seven point something. From for security technology reasons, we don’t support PHP.

So we assess all of those things before migrations and work with customers. We’ve worked with customers on their old sites, helping them to upgrade and ensure that all their plugins were PHP ready before migration.

Chris Badgett: That’s a great service. Another just public service announcement I wanted to make is that.

particularly for new people who are, have dreams for their online community, online learning platform. And you think about, you see these expensive hosting plans as an example, but the reality is like the agile conference that you mentioned they’re selling tickets. So you have to have real estate for your website to live on.

And the more people that need to get in the door, you need bigger real estate. So it transfers over to hosting. And so it’s really, Just baked into the business plan. You’re going to sell more tickets. Oh you’re on a higher end hosting plan that costs more, but you’re also selling, 10, 000 courses a month.

You’re making a lot of money. It’s just paying for Your real estate or your storefront or your school, which is part of it.

Wes Tatters: It is a bit of the disconnect with hosting. We see people that are running very successful six and seven figure businesses in buddy boss. Especially if they’re teamed with lifter or tutor LMS or other products that enable people to very easily monetize their products that they do sometimes skimp.

On the hosting. We’ve had customers that were losing their customers because their performance wasn’t adequate because their site, the customer going, this is great, but I can’t wait 30 seconds for the buddy was out to load my activity. And we’re looking at the site going, yeah, but. On rapid that same activity feed loads in under a second.

There are reasons to ensure that what you’re doing in the hosting space, especially in the dynamic space is paid for. And is recompense. I’ve got some small buddy boss sites that are still my old customers. They got a thousand members. They’re paid members. They pay 8 a month.

They’ve got real revenue. And they’re happy to contribute a percentage of that real revenue to the right sort of hosting, high performance, highly scalable reliable and delivering them what they need on a daily basis.

Chris Badgett: We’ve talked a lot about BuddyBoss, community stuff, LMS. You mentioned it, but could you just touch a little bit on WooCommerce?

A lot of Lyft or LMS users, as an example, also use WooCommerce. But how does a WooCommerce site perform on RapidCloud? And how do you think about speed on an e commerce site?

Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. E commerce sites face the same challenges as the other things that we’re talking about. Every user is looking at different stuff in their cart, different stuff in the checkout.

And if you run a campaign and you have a lot of traffic coming to your website and everyone’s trying to check out at the same time, your site can crash. And there’s nothing more heartbreaking than to have your site crash while everyone’s in a cart trying to check out

Chris Badgett: one Black Friday or whatever.

Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah.

And Rapid is the fastest hosting for WooCommerce in the world. It is. And we’ve, we have a WooCommerce settings page in there where we can talk to more about Elastic Search. Elastic Press, all the integration we’ve done from the live card. Yeah.

Wes Tatters: So one of the things that. One of the challenges for a big word commerce site is that as it grows, especially as their product base grows or the number of products in their cart, they have big performance hits.

One of the reasons for that is that WordPress search is not very efficient. It’s a slow product. So we partnered with Elastic, which is the a search infrastructure that pretty much takes all of what WordPress tries to do, you know, and this words and gives natural language search inside the WooCommerce dashboard.

It’s literally a drop in. So you drop it into your site, and from that moment when you start typing into the WordPress search bar, you are now using Elasticsearch. The Elasticsearch platform gives a 10 to a 50% performance improvement in search alone. It also adds native language and natural language search, which WordPress doesn’t really do very well.

In the dashboard. The other component that we focused very heavily on is caching of WooCommerce. Now it’s the one area where we actually say page caching is okay, if you do it properly. And we do it properly by page caching just the product pages and those product pages are always in sync and always active.

So much so that the customer doesn’t even know that it’s happening. If they go and edit a product inside their WooCommerce page hit save and changes. It’s instantly updated. The page caching is instantly flushed and reset for just that page. And from that point on, that page, the next time they visit, is going to be served with the latest up to date page caching.

We, we built our platform on Lightspeed Enterprise. It’s a web hosting server infrastructure. Designed specifically for very high concurrency. It’s very similar to Apache, which everyone knows. It’s like the product that everyone starts within the hosting business, but is 10 to 50 times faster at handling concurrent loads.

But again, On Rapid, the customer doesn’t need to know any of that.

That’s fantastic. It just works in the background. Same as WooCommerce caching, same as, Elasticsearch. They’re just features of Rapid that come same as object caching. They’re just there.

Chris Badgett: You guys have definitely been marinating in this problem. I say great businesses really build the business around their customer, not the product, right?

So you’re like looking at this customer that has this really needy website. That’s really important and connecting people and ideas and stuff, but it needs a lot of resources. And you’ve really designed this around helping that person. And then having a great business is just going to be a side effect of taking care of really good care of that person.

One of the things

Wes Tatters: we did do is look at the ways that sites get slowed down. And if we can identify something in WordPress. that actually slows your site down, we will work on ways to improve that performance. One of the actual classic examples that very people, few people understand is malware security.

We go and we install Melcare, or we install WordFence, or we install all in one, security. When we do that, we install a plugin on our WordPress site. That actually slows our site down. Everyone knows, oh you install WordPress, it makes your site run slower. But it is more secure. So we looked at that and went, there’s got to be a better way.

We partnered with a platform called Monarchs. Monarchs is a server level security platform. It’s not a plugin inside WordPress. It runs on the server. It has no impact on WordPress performance at all. Which means you don’t need a word fence plugin or a mail care plugin or a

Chris Badgett: backup all in one

Wes Tatters: security.

They’re all offloaded. Our backups are exactly the same. It’s all at the server level. So what that does is means that we’re continually optimizing the WordPress stack to be as fast as it can with just the things that it really needs, which is your theme, your plugins and your content. All those other overheads, be it security or backup.

Michael Eisenwasser: Cron jobs. We have the option to do, to run the WordPress Cron at the server level. Nice.

Chris Badgett: Oh, you guys have thought of everything. You probably hear that from your customers a lot, man. You guys have thought. And we will

Wes Tatters: continue to innovate. We’re talking about new products now. I’ll tell you, we may offer other things like SEO.

Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah. I see it with building SEO tools in there, but I can just tell you what, when we go too deep talking about all the technical stuff, customer can get confused, but at a high level you can go to our pricing page and see the benchmarks we’ve done. So we’ve benchmarked our startup one plan, which is our most popular plan against all the other popular managed WordPress hosts.

We’ve done a series of benchmarks and rapid is the fastest at every single benchmark against every single popular managed WordPress hosts that we’ve benchmarked against. And we guarantee it. If the customer buys, they have a 14 day refund period. If it’s not faster, we’ll refund them. We guarantee it’ll be faster.

Chris Badgett: Faster or it’s free. I love that. And I did notice that by the way, when I was on your pricing page, I’m like, I’m, I was really glad to see the benchmarking data. Cause it’s okay, now you’re helping people really understand.

Wes Tatters: And anyone that wants that data, the whole lot’s available. It’s a 150 page document that breaks down exactly how we benchmarked exactly the processes we used.

And people can go and replicate. Any of it. We’ve given them all the tools. So you want to replicate this on your own hosting? Here’s how to go and do it. So we’re very transparent about performance. We’re very transparent about being in the performance community active in the WordPress space, active in the make WordPress space in the performance area it’s something that I would say we’re passionate about.

Because impacts our customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and they got to keep their sight up and growing and scaling and all that. Go visit RapidCloud. That’s R A P Y D dot cloud. Check it out. See what we’ve been talking about. Wes and Michael, this has been a great conversation. I love that you’ve married this problem and not just recently.

You’ve been working on this for years and you have all the history with BuddyBoss. And Lifter and WooCommerce and other more needy WordPress plugins. That’s awesome. I’m so glad you created this. So everybody can head on over to rapid dot cloud. Is there anywhere else you want people to connect or other things for them to check out?

Michael Eisenwasser: They can follow our YouTube channel. We’re publishing tutorials and stuff there. But yeah, rapid. cloud is the starting point. You can find everything there from the navigation in there. You’ll see access to our knowledge base and our benchmarks and everything.

Wes Tatters: As I said, we’re very transparent.

Take a look at us. We tell people to go and look at love. rapid. cloud. It’s our vanity page. All right. But it’s a lot of really happy customers giving us honest, Testimonials about what Rapid’s managed for their platforms.

Michael Eisenwasser: They can also go to feedback. rapid. cloud if you want where we publish a roadmap of future, everything that we’ve pushed live since the product went live is there.

The things we’re working on now, things that are planned. And we post updates just like we used to do a buddy boss. We’re really open about our roadmap and things we’re working on.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Thanks for coming back on the show, Michael and Wes, for the first time. Let’s not wait nine years, but I’m really glad to have you back on.

Thanks so much for coming guys. And keep up the great work at Rapid.

Michael Eisenwasser: You too. Our pleasure. We love everything you’re doing at Lifter and it’s an honor to com.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

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In this LMScast episode, Jeff Chandler discusses his experience fostering community, authenticity, and enthusiasm within the WordPress ecosystem.

Jeff Chandler is the founder of WP Tavern, a leading hub for WordPress news and community engagement. He talks about how, for him, food became a unifying factor, creating a specialized community through common interests such as the WP Foodies group.

On social media, Jeff stresses the need of being authentic. He calls himself a “WYSIWYG” personality who adheres to the idea that “your vibe attracts your tribe”. He talks about how his early writing on WordPress inspired the development of WP Tavern, a gathering place for interesting conversations and relationships among WordPress users.

Jeff’s experience demonstrates how genuineness and individual interests may establish enduring communities in addition to fostering meaningful relationships.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jeff Chandler. I’ve known Jeff from around the WordPress community, Twitter, being online. We’ve met at WordCamps before. And I wanted to have a conversation with Jeff about writing building community Using wordpress, but first welcome to the show jeff.

Jeff Chandler: Thank you very much It’s a pleasure to be here

Chris Badgett: and you can find jeff on twitter at jeff row. The o is a zero I love watching your tweets. i’m a foodie. I used to take more pictures of food, but I always like seeing the My friends that have food interests, like posting stuff. Where did that come from?

From you? It seems like there’s a community of people that are really like knit about that.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. The last time I checked, I have about, I have over 11, 000 photos on my iPhone and if 80 percent of those are pictures of food, it would not surprise me. But I just, I don’t know. I just got into the habit.

There’s food is really. It’s like a connector and it could, there’s a sense of community around food but man it’s interesting when you have a meal and that meal just takes you to a different place. Like why I didn’t know food could be this good. Or I’ve never had this kind of experience before.

And so a lot of times when I’m taking a photo of food, it’s just a way for me to remember it. And. Actually, it’s come in handy a few times. My wife has laughed at me and joked around and said, why do you take so many pictures of a food? Then she’ll think of a recipe or something that we want to make.

And she won’t remember exactly what was in it or what it looked like. And I say, honey, hold on. So I go back into my phone, I bring up the picture and I show it to her. She goes, Oh, you know what? I don’t mind you taking photos of our food now, but yeah taking the picture of a meal. I love good meals, love good food.

And it just turns out that I’ve been doing this for a long time and now we’ve found some of my tribe on Twitter and we have this hashtag called WP foodies, and we usually send each other photos about what we’re having for dinner. Or if we come across a nice meal or whether it’s a food truck or something like that, just a way to to share and participate.

It’s our own little community, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, but yeah, every, everybody, I think everybody likes food. Everybody needs food in order to survive, but I just like taking pictures of it and having a a photographic memory of it. And I will tell you, man, the one time we went to this fancy place.

And I figured the steak there would be amazing. So I had a steak and my wife had the scallops and the scallops that my wife had the first time I bit into the scallop, I closed my eyes and it like took me to this, I felt like I was going on a magic carpet ride. And I said, there is no way a scallop should.

Kind of experience over a steak and by golly, from there on, after I did not order the steak, I ordered the scallops.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s use that as an entry point into community. And particularly with social media I’m of the Bent where if you meet me in person, i’m the same person you’re gonna see online You know, I have my professional business side, but I’m also a real human with my own interests.

We were chatting before the show about hiking, getting out in nature, gardening running, stuff like that. I like to bring just some of my just casual self to my social media. I’ve noticed you do too. How do you think about that? Is that, Intentional or what’s your philosophy behind that? What need does that meet for your soul or your spirit?

How do you think about social media and being you?

Jeff Chandler: For starters, it’s a bit of a bummer that I don’t hear a rooster going at you sometimes when I tuned into this podcast, I would hear a rooster and it would bring this whole certain farm life dynamic to the show. So I know you’re in this nice office now, but I missed the rooster.

I thought it was better. It’s

Chris Badgett: you can’t hear, yeah. And by the way, I don’t recommend moving roosters and a whole bunch of chickens across the state. It’s a pain to do that, but we did it successfully.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah, I could imagine. Oh now you have a joke. Why did the rooster cross the state?

Something like that. Yeah. So going back as far as how I present myself and who I am as a person. On social media, I have never shied away from the fact that I consider myself a whizzy wig. And for those of you who don’t know, that is what is what you get. And I have never strayed away from that.

I, the only person I know who to truly be as myself. And so there is no, I’m never. Really encountered any need to be somebody other than myself. So that’s who I am. That’s who I’m most comfortable of being. And it’s worked out. And in an age of social media where people are doing everything they can to please the algorithms and whatnot, and try to go viral.

I’m just being me and if I go viral, I’ll go viral, but I really don’t care. It’s just, I don’t have any interest in being anyone but me. But yeah, and I’ve come across a lot of people these days that appreciate the genuineness and the bluntness and the truthfulness of someone like me.

Although I will say I tell the truth a lot. And, but if your wife asks, does she look fat in this dress? Trust me, that is an opportunity that you want to not be as truthful as you’ve always has been, because if you say the wrong thing, it will hurt. Literally. I’m talking

Chris Badgett: from experience here. Yeah. There’s a saying your vibe attracts your tribe.

So if you be yourself and you attract a certain people that are interested in whatever you’re into, whether it’s WordPress or food or being a homebody or whatever it is. You want people to mag to become magnetized to the real you, right? That’s a lot less work to just be yourself.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. And then on Twitter, it’s a whole thing of, back in the day. At least when I used to produce the WordPress weekly podcast back when I was still working for WPTAV and writing for them and publishing articles at least people could hear my voice, but I haven’t been on a podcast and I haven’t been really out there as far as my voice is concerned for quite some time, for a number of years.

And I do find it to be a bummer of people reading my tweets and sometimes not being able to hear the genuineness behind the words that I’m saying, or being able to hear that I’m speaking from the heart or that I really mean when I’m saying, and so that’s a bit of a bummer but by and large, for the most part, everyone that has followed me for a number of years.

Knows that, I’m me and what I say is what I say. I’m not going to yank them by the chain. And so I’ve been able to establish that, Hey, what is what you get. That’s what you’re going to get out of

Chris Badgett: me. You mentioned riding at the WP tavern, which did you start that?

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. I founded WP tavern back in the beginning of 2009. And it was prior to that, I had started writing for Mark gauche of web law tools, collection. com, which at the time was the largest and most popular website devoted to WordPress news. In fact, it was in the WordPress dashboard. That’s how popular it was.

And Mark, actually, I started the blog and I was writing about. Publishing articles about things I was learning about WordPress at the time. And Mark happened to come across some of my articles and said, Hey, how would you like to get paid to write about this stuff? And I said, wait, is that a thing? Can you get paid to write about WordPress and articles?

He said, yeah, I said, absolutely. Let’s give it a shot. And then on top of that. I’m writing and publishing articles on the site that’s in the WordPress dashboard. Meaning everything, anything I publish shows up in the dashboards of WordPress users all over the world. Woo. Let’s go, I’m not going to say no to that.

So I started doing that for a little while. And a lot of my articles generated a number of comments. So I started. Creating a sort of community around the things that I was writing. I did, I had a I did that for about a year or so and created a following. And there was a domain that came up called WP tavern.

It was actually a gentleman by the name of Kyle Easelick. He was running a website called WP hacks in a lot of OG WordPress. People might remember that domain name where he was publishing things code snippets and things of that nature. For WordPress. And he said, Hey, I have this domain available.

You like to use it. And I said I don’t know what I would use it for or whatnot. So I made a blog post and I reached out to my community and I said, Hey, there’s this domain available. Should I break off from one blog, tools, collection. com and do something on my own? And. What do you guys think?

And everybody who chimed in said yes, do it. Have a forum, do whatever you want. We’ll follow you. So I’m like, okay. So Kyle graciously donated the domain of WP tavern to me. And it turns out that it was the perfect domain and it was perfect for what I wanted to do, because when I thought of a tavern is generally a friendly place where everybody knows your name, you come in.

You talk about what’s going on. You have some conversations. It’s a friendly and mostly polite atmosphere, but every now and then you’re going to have a bar fight and you’re gonna have to clean up broken glass and broken tables, which we ended up doing because of GPL debates and some of the other stuff that was going on in the WordPress world, but by and large.

WP Tavern was a huge success. And at one point, the who’s who of the WordPress world was a member of the WP Tavern forums. And if you wanted to get in touch or interact with who’s who of WordPress, you went to WP Tavern.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Let’s rewind the story. Before you started getting paid to write, where did the skill of writing come from or the, and the passion as well,

Jeff Chandler: man, this, wow, this goes way back.

I gotta tell you, so I’m not, it’s not like I took a journalism class. It’s not like I took a writing class. I started a long time ago. Started with there was a website way back in the day. E2 effects. And it was a. It’s what we would today, it would be similar to wordpress. com where it was, you had your subdomain and there’s a lot of other people that were using that website.

But one of the coolest things about E2FX was that it had a lot of community and networking aspects built in. So you could follow each other’s blogs or sites. You could read each other’s comments. You could, there was this whole It was like social networking, but via blogs, it was really cool, this network effect.

And what I did was I just wrote about things that I was interested in wrote my opinions about tech news that I was following. And it’s just a thing that I enjoy doing. It’s not, I didn’t take any courses or take any college courses or whatnot. I just wrote based on. No, I just wrote and published.

That’s pretty much what I did. There’s no magic to it, but the more I did it, like anything, the more you do something, the better you get at it. And that’s what happened with me. And look I had no intentions of becoming a full fledged journalist or becoming a reporter on certain things.

When I looked at it as this is interesting to me, I have thoughts and views and opinions about it. I’m going to write those and publish them. And that’s it. And if people comment on them, great. If people don’t, that’s fine. But I was just doing it for myself. And it turns out that particular skill set was valuable and other people other people could benefit from it.

Chris Badgett: I think writing is a super skill. There’s blogs and things, there’s emails, there’s copywriting on webpages. The more there’s like creating an outline for a video or a script or a business plan, or it’s just the ultimate skill. How do you in your mind see the difference between, I’m thinking about somebody who’s like a subject matter expert in a topic, And they’re thinking about, really getting into writing and creating content.

Of course, they want some SEO benefit, but how do you think about the difference between journalism and reporting versus opinion pieces versus SEO content? I think people get a little overwhelmed of what do I write about and how do I write it?

Jeff Chandler: So back in 2014, on my personal blog, jeffc. me, I wrote an article.

I wrote an article titled I am a bad journalist. And in this article I highlighted the fact that A, I never wanted to be called a journalist. B, I never called myself. A journalist. See, I never considered myself a journalist. To me, the word journalist means somebody who really goes after the story.

They do in depth investigation. And they double, triple check their sources. They do a lot of things that you would expect a journalist to do. And I never really did any of those things. I just. Took my views and opinions, and maybe I would interview somebody or I’d get I would ask somebody a question and use it as a quote, but then I would just publish a post and I was just really, I’m just a Joe Schmo, Joe, the plumber or whoever it is now that we’re that we’re describing as the average person, I’m just taking something that I have an interest in and then publishing my thoughts.

And maybe I come back to those at some point later usually it was just for me, but then I ended up getting an audience and it was an accidental audience. I wasn’t out there searching for an audience. I wasn’t out there saying, trying to get all these people to gravitate towards me. It was just me just writing stuff and hitting the publish button.

And then the magic happened where people started gravitating towards it, like a little, like a nucleus. And then just more and more. More and more things started getting attracted to the core. And it just worked out that way. And in my, I don’t know if I should say career, but in all the times I’ve written and published stuff on the web.

I’ve not once been concerned about SEO. Everyone out there is concerned about SEO, about titles, headings. How do you write this? How do you write that passive voice, this voice, anything about SEO? I threw SEO out the window and guess what? It worked for me. And it may not work for you. It may not work for somebody who is in a position of copywriting and writing articles for a business who is really looking to get that tap into that SEO and that audience.

But everything I did was from a human perspective. So I wrote as a human.

And it turns out that that was a great strategy for me in the long run.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It sounds like the traffic came from the story and your voice more than keyword optimization or anything. Exactly.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. I keyword optimization, title optimization how I wrote the stories and I didn’t care about anything about keywords or anything of that nature.

I just said, look, I’m going to write this, as a human would read it and that’s it. And if I get SEO traffic, great. If I don’t big deal and it worked for me, but I will say that and that’s just from a personal writing and publishing standpoint, but I have worked for other businesses that SEO because they need to stand out because they’re in a highly competitive atmosphere against all these Places online that are absolutely doing everything they can with SEO and keywords.

And I got to tell you, I, that’s where I struggle. I’ve always done things my own way. And when you have to write things in a way that benefits, the SEO bots and trying to get things to rank I’m terrible at it.

Chris Badgett: Let’s let’s talk a little bit about just tactically, writing is an art and a science.

So first question, that’s a little more tactical. When you’re in your flow like how many articles a week would you do or how would you set goals or does one story take a full week or is it like come out of you like super fast because it’s you’re inspired or how do you think about volume of writing when you’re in the flow?

Jeff Chandler: And I think it also has to deal with what is it you’re writing? Is it a, is it an in depth topic. And is it something that’s going to require a lot of research? Is it something that’s not super time sensitive that you can spend a few weeks on or a few months researching? In my line of work, everything I pretty much wrote and published was how can you say time based or relevant, recent based.

So I used to cover a lot of news, a lot of things that were happening. And so I would end up just writing about what I knew, and then I would get in touch with some people. To figure out answers to what I didn’t know. Then, within a day or two, a lot of times a lot shorter than that, because I was dealing with public information that people already knew.

And I would just compile that in a way, and then I would publish the article. And in my mind, I, one of the things that I eventually learned is that you don’t, when it comes to writing news posts, is that you don’t have to have All aspects and everything, correct. You don’t have to have the whole story in one post.

You can write about what you know and the things you don’t know you can mention, but you can always follow it up with another post when that information comes to light, if it ever does. So I had, I had that mindset of let’s compile what we know into a post, put it together. Have some things in the back of my mind that we don’t know and let’s see what happens.

And then eventually they would either come out with another statement or the information would present itself and I would write up a follow up post, but when I would get into the flow and the flow is awesome. If nobody has ever been in the zone, boy, they need to make something that you could just trigger yourself to be in the zone because you feel unstoppable.

And it’s just a great feeling. But when I was in the zone, words would just flow from my head into the post editor, like nothing, and I would put everything together. And before you know it, I had 700, 800 words written and it felt like nothing. And for me, an 800 to 1000 word post is a lot when I’m dealing with news or something dealing with WordPress.

So yeah, I could go through, I could publish two or three posts a day. Sometimes I could do definitely multiple items, multiple posts per week, but in the realm of WordPress, look, WordPress is a huge ecosystem. There are things happening all the time internally within the project and externally in terms of what people are building and using.

Or the issues that they’re experiencing, there’s always something to write. And my job and sort of a skill I developed was, what is it that’s going on out here that other people should know about? And that’s something that you don’t really, you can’t, I don’t know, you can’t really train yourself for it.

It was self trained. And it turns out that a lot of the things I picked and choose that other people should know about were correct.

Chris Badgett: From the sort of journalistic reporting standpoint, let’s say somebody is involved in the community, be at WordPress or the foodie scene or some health and fitness niche or some like parenting topic, whatever it is, there, there is a community around every topic.

How did you think about sourcing your like what to report on and where the story is? Where would you, what advice would you have for somebody who’s like, all right, I’m involved in X community. How do I find the story to write about?

Jeff Chandler: I started off with me. I’m using something like Google reader or freely and subscribing to a number of different websites that dealt with the topic that I was covering that I was writing about.

Subscribing to a lot of those websites figuring out where the watering holes were for these people. So various forums. Slack instances comment sections on particular websites, different social media, Twitter Facebook, what have you, and trying to insert myself into those areas via commenting or sharing my opinions or something loosely based on what I wrote about, but putting it in there and just trying to get my name out there so people can see me in these watering hole.

And then. Outside of that just, I think my personality and my ability to be friendly with people and to listen and not to be so one sided and to be great at engaging in a conversation, whether that be a debate or just hearing both sides. And I think that had a lot to do with people gravitating towards me and the things I wrote and just wanted to be part of my inner circle.

I think. I think attitude and how you approach people goes a long way towards building your vibe, your community.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned comments. I don’t like this question, but I’ll ask it this way. Are comments dead? And we all know that like social media has changed things, but there’s still blogs published today that have lots of comments on them.

But how do we think about comments in 2024, 2025? If we have a website or we want to get engaged in our community on comments.

Jeff Chandler: That’s a great question. And to be honest, we’ve been asking our comments dad since 2015 or before that it’s something that keeps up. I think, I definitely think there are situations where it makes sense to have comments disabled, depending on your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish with your content.

But. I think back to how important comments were for me and I remember publishing articles and waking up the next day or within hours, I’d get my first comment and boy, it felt great. It’s oh my God, somebody read this and took the time to comment on my article. That is pretty cool.

And most of the time these days, that doesn’t happen. It’s spam or somebody’s saying things that you don’t need to have published or, somebody is angry and upset comments used to be a great way to, to build community, to have to start your following and. It was the social networking before social networking, and then you had your trackbacks and your pingbacks, which, which was really cool.

And I, I don’t know if it sure seems like comments are dead, but with the Fediverse and the different things that are being. Created to provide that social networking aspect, but to your website and then to your comments, I think they could make, they definitely can make a comeback.

Chris Badgett: Can you describe the Fediverse if somebody isn’t familiar with that?

Jeff Chandler: That’s a good question as well. I’m not quite sure of the. Technicalities of what the Fediverse is, but from my understand, from my very basic understanding, it’s a way of, it’s a way to decentralizing, centralizing, decentralized materials. Maybe the people out there are cringing at the, at me just saying that thing but it’s to bring a lot of disjointed things together.

And so you don’t have to be inside of a closed wall or should say a walled garden, you can be, you could be open and treat your website as one place and freely have access to other things and other content, other comments. Other places. And you can create that sort of network effect. And if if somebody wants to throw a book at me right now, because that’s all wrong, please do.

But I do know that the Fediverse is a great thing. There’s a lot of work going on with the Fediverse. I think there’s a WordPress plugin out there. It’s Pub, pub, something, of it, okay. There’s some plugin that’s being worked on out there to utilize the Fediverse, but there’s great stuff ahead.

And one of the coolest things, one of the best things about my early days of blogging is that networking fat, the networking effect where I could follow people, chime in on their blogs and all that stuff. And I’m hoping we could somehow recreate that, but not have to be tied to one particular service.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of networking and spam Matt Medeiros is in the live stream comments and he would like to know who was your favorite podcast co host.

Jeff Chandler: Okay. Before I answer this, and because this came up the other day, Matt, you need to change your last name because. I and many other people always have to Google what your last name is in order to spell it correctly.

All right. You do us all a favor in a WordPress world and change your last name to something that is easy to spell. So we don’t have to Google it. As far as my favorite co host, huh?

Boy, that I had a lot of great times with John James Jacoby.

He was even killed. He was very smart. We had a lot of great in depth conversations about WordPress things on the show. And he was one of my favorite guests, but my other, I would say my favorite probably was Malcolm Peralti. And that’s because for the longest time, he was the devil’s advocate.

So when I would look at something very positive and this is great, he would be like Jeff, what about this? And think about this way and that way. And I’m like, and it wasn’t as if he was trying to be a downer, he was just coming at it from the opposite perspective. So while I was the optimist, a lot of times he was the pessimist and you know what, for a show talking about WordPress, that was a perfect combination.

And we had a lot of great conversations and interviews because of that dynamic that we had.

Chris Badgett: I like that insight. I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to the all in podcast, but it’s there. The, some of the hosts like have very different views and it’s what makes it interesting. Yes, but there’s friends.

That’s not like they’re fighting or anything.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. And quite honestly, if you’re going to listen to a show where everybody has the same opinion and everybody’s not challenging each other. It’s boring. Nobody, it’s just come on. Somebody should challenge something. Somebody should say. No, we’ll think about it this way and think about it that way.

That’s where you get into the nitty gritty. That’s where you get into the innovation and the different ideas and perspectives and where you end up in a place that you may not ever thought you would be in.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of community, WordPress is really interesting to me because for what I’ve obviously been here for a long time now, but in the beginning.

I was just like on the outside of any kind of community aspect, there’s this cool tool. I’ve learned some tutorials on YouTube on how to use it. And it was several years into my journey where I really started to discover like, Oh, there’s all these people on social media. Oh, there’s these events I can go to.

Oh, these, some of these people are becoming real friends, either online, in person, hybrid, both. And it just evolved. How do you think about community in today’s world? I’m also asking in the context of if we want to get involved in a community, like whatever, foodie niche, some health and fitness nature, whatever, how do we do community?

Jeff Chandler: Yeah, it’s, it all starts with, publishing and getting out there and just being cognizant of the fact that there are other people out there. It’s a big world. There’s a lot of people and there are going to be, you’re almost guaranteed to have others out there with the same interests as you.

And use your personality, use your ability to get out there to post and create this core, this nucleus and, in such a way to where it’s inviting of others to join you on this journey and be like, Hey, oh, you’re into that too. And you’re into that too. Yeah. All right. And it starts, you gotta start small, but you gotta just do it.

You gotta start it because if you don’t, you have nothing to gravitate towards you. A lot less thinking and a lot more doing or else. What you’re not even accomplishing anything, but in the WordPress space, it’s still very easy to start up a meetup or find a local meetup and to find people who are just getting into the software, despite it being 21 years old.

There’s still a lot of people just coming across it. And meetups are great. Meetups are, I participated and ran a meetup here in Northeast Ohio, a number of years ago. And it was fantastic. You get to. You get to teach WordPress and figure out that WordPress is not as easy as you thought it was when you’re teaching something, which was a revelation to me and just getting to talk to these people and getting to know their experiences and their journeys of how they came to WordPress and whatnot.

It’s very cool. And how the, These people just how they ended up in WordPress sometimes is really cool. But yeah, community is very important. And I will say that the WordPress community for me has been, look, Chris, over the years, when you’ve, when a lot of people have asked, what’s your favorite thing about WordPress?

One of the, one of the top answers is a. Community and be all the plugins and the ecosystem and everything like that. But community, that’s the word meaning people who are welcoming each other in people who are who share their knowledge and their time with no cost associated, just on the basis of being friendly.

That’s the community part of WordPress that a lot of people love. And this community aspect of WordPress has helped me out tremendously. On a personal basis throughout, throughout the years of 20, 2019 through 2020 and 2021, I was unemployed and there were many times where, you know, my, my cell phone service was shut off or my car was about to be repossessed or certain bills, my mortgage wasn’t going to be paid.

And while I didn’t. Feel comfortable doing it. I did reach out to the WordPress community and I said, Hey is there any chance you folks can lend me a hand and get me through some of these tough times and they delivered time and time again, they delivered, and there are many other instances of people in the WordPress community who really needed some help and collectively we pulled through and got them through some of their toughest moments in their life up to that point.

Community is very special. Nobody should ever take it for granted. And when you build it, when you build it and they come, man, take very good care of it because there’s nothing like an awesome community that, that you’re a part of, it’s almost like a side family, to be honest, and work camps to me are like family reunions that I want to go to.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. When it comes to community. WordPress as an example has an in person component with events and whatnot, but what would your advice be around? Let’s say somebody is just starting out. Maybe there’s an in person aspect, but they don’t know about it. Not necessarily with WordPress, but any community, sometimes people like behave a little differently on the internet or whatever.

So if somebody is like either starting a community or trying to get involved in an online community, what are some things to think about that might be counterintuitive compared to. More formal in person community, like your local town, for example, or things to be challenges or things to be cautious about, or opportunities.

Jeff Chandler: Oh, let’s see. I don’t know. Maybe expand them, maybe expand upon that. And we can have a conversation about that. Maybe you answer that question and then I’ll chime in.

Chris Badgett: So some challenges for me with, I’m actually like an extreme introvert, right? Sometimes I come off as an extrovert because I make a lot of videos and do webinars and, have content out there.

But if I go to a town event, You’re going to see me on the edge of the event. I may not even go but like in the online world let’s say being an introvert as an example, one, a lot of what I’m doing is like one on one interaction, this call included, which is my sweet spot as a, as an introvert.

But when in online community, sometimes they can be so massive. Like for example, there’s this concept called Dunbar’s number. Which is the human being through our evolution and whatnot is only designed to be able to maintain 145 relationships or something like that. But like you mentioned WordPress I don’t know there’s a lot of people using WordPress and maybe I’m just guessing 20, 000 people that are really active in the community aspect of it online, I can’t keep up with 20, 000 relationships.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So that’s a challenge. Another challenge is sometimes people on the internet or through email or social media or whatever, like they tend to they’re more trolls and let’s say less of a filter or. Sometimes you can get involved in a community online anonymously, which you can’t really do in person.

So that’s a challenge. We talked about comments. Like it’s good that there’s comment moderation in WordPress so that you can just get the spam stuff out of there as an example. So that’s a challenge. Sometimes big communities, there’s language barriers, that’s a challenge. Yeah I’m just spitballing with you, but those are some of the challenges.

And and also I think one of the big opportunities with an online community is in my second half of life when I really became an online person, a lot of the relationships I have, like where I’ve actually shook somebody’s hand or given them a hug or something like that, it may have existed for years online and it was cool.

We were friends then, we’re friends now, but like a lot of, there’s more opportunity to start relationships. Online, which is really cool.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. There’s many times where it’s funny when I used to host the WordPress weekly podcast back when I was doing WP tavern, I used to go to a WordCamp and believed or not, I’ve never been this extroverted.

Which is seeing if you look at my, if you look at my tweets online and you look at the way I project myself online, you’d think, boy, that guy is really into being around people, but I’ve been to word camps where I’ve stayed away and I don’t introduce myself to anybody and I go into introvert mode. So it does occasionally happen to myself as well.

Yeah, I project myself as an extrovert online, but in person I could sometimes go into introvert mode. It was funny at the WordCamp, I was speaking with somebody and there is a woman that was two rows behind me and she goes, excuse me, are you the host of the WordPress weekly podcast? And I said, yeah, how did you know?

And she goes, oh, I could tell that voice, That, that voice.

I’m like, oh yeah. So that was pretty cool. Yeah. And then we ended up with a just being able to talk and get myself out there and have her. If I wouldn’t have been talking or if I wouldn’t have been out there, throw myself out there into the community, into the in person aspects, she probably never would have met me or had that opportunity to do but yeah.

These days, word camps in the WordPress community, specifically we have done a really good job of protecting each other. For these situations where no, we have the code of conduct, we’ve got an incident response team that WordPress has but by and large we’ve been doing, we’ve done a great job of looking out for each other.

At these events. That’s not to say that some incidents haven’t still occurred. But no, this community does a great job of looking out for each other.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about WordPress specifically. I first touched it in 2008, so I’ve been here for 16 years. And if I, in some way it is, not that I’m perplexed, but I’m like, how am I here?

I end up being like why have I become so obsessed with this tool and what we’ve done with it and like the community around it and everything. Why is publishing and e commerce and online education so important to me? And it’s like a process of discovery. And I’m just looking into like, where does all this passion come from?

But I’d ask you for your side on WordPress, you wouldn’t have done all this like writing or gotten into the flow on writing or invested so much time in the community. And so on in the project without some passion, where does the passion for the surrounds of software WordPress come from?

Jeff Chandler: So I want to go back. I want to throw this back a little bit to comment, because I want to share a funny story about comments. Comments are actually the reason I got started. I chose WordPress way back in the day. At that time I was a big fan of Joomla. And for those who don’t know Joomla yeah the default theme in Joomla, I think was solar flare.

I think if I recall really uniquely out with the top and the header part with the header image and the top left nav menu. See it’s burned into my brain. But Joomla at the time didn’t have comments natively built in. You had to purchase a module or a commercial plugin or something to bolt it on.

At that time, somehow, some way I heard of something called WordPress and it had commenting built in. So I tried it out and tried to implement the website I was building into WordPress. And I said, no way I can’t do this. WordPress is too difficult. Not even going to try it. Went back to Joomla, ended up with.

The same frustrations. I said, okay, you know what, I’m going to give WordPress one more try, I’m going to take a deep breath. Once I discovered once I read a tutorial and discovered it, I could change how things worked by changing a number in the code, which was a parameter or an argument and realizing that changing things.

And the behavior of either the plugin or WordPress itself was that easy. That’s when I got the WordPress bug. That’s when it got me. And plus I had comments built in natively. It was free. And so that’s when I built the website on WordPress and then I started writing about, and this was mostly to help me.

I started writing and publishing everything I was learning about WordPress. WordPress at the time. And it just so happens that a lot of other people in that time period were just discovering WordPress. And they too were also writing and publishing everything they were learning at the time as well.

So I was part of this, there’s a unique situation looking back on it of this. Large crowd of people learning WordPress all at the same time, which lend, which lent itself to everybody helping each other and everybody looking for resources to level up their WordPress game at that time. And going through all of that built up my passion for WordPress and being able to realize, wow, editing and being, being able to do these things and WordPress is very powerful and it’s so cool.

And then having, And interacting with all these different people at the same time, it just became a lifelong I wouldn’t say lifelong cause I’m still living and it’s still there, but I still have the passion for WordPress and mostly the community and the people who build it to this day and to this day, WordPress is 21 years old and man, it’s still there.

I still have a love for it. And it’s still there.

Chris Badgett: It sounds simple. But I still, I’m just as passionate as I was when I first, when it first clicked for me, similar to you, it was this idea that you could publish something and anybody, anywhere in the world. Could look at that thing on their computer.

Just blew my mind that like your voice can go everywhere that the internet is, and that’s still like amazing. And that’s just something we just overlook and like we’re in it all day. So we don’t think about as much anymore, but that’s amazing.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. The main overarching goal of WordPress to democratize publishing is pretty great.

And it’s something worthy of getting behind. And trying to strive, be open and free to allow everybody to have their voice, to be able to have a tool that they can use to get their voice published online. It’s a very noble and worthy cause. And it’s, it has been, and still is.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

That’s Jeff Chandler. You can find him at Jeff row on Twitter. The O is a zero. Jeff, thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your story writing tips, community conversation. Really appreciate it.

Jeff Chandler: Thank you for having me. And Matt, change your last name.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Steven Sauder talks about how he overcame the difficulties of becoming an entrepreneur, started his own marketing firm, and started his podcast, “Through the Dip”.

Steven Sauder is a seasoned businessman, Steven Sauder founded Hustlefish, a digital marketing firm that specializes in paid advertising, SEO, and website creation. He talks about a crucial “dip” he had when trying to quickly grow his firm by spending substantially in infrastructure and employing account directors, only to watch the plan collapse because of poor sales and excessive expense.

He learned from this experience how crucial it is to test concepts carefully and put sustainable growth ahead of pursuing quick expansion. Steven’s podcast offers insightful information for others by focusing on the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and the lessons they have learnt from conquering them. His organization, Hustlefish, offers digital marketing services such as SEO, paid advertising, and website creation to customers that appreciate consistent, achievable growth.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a very special guest. His name is Steven Sauder. You can find him at Hustlefish. That’s at hustlefish. com. But first welcome to the show, Steven. Thanks. It’s awesome to be here. We’re going to talk about Steven’s podcasts. And we’re going to talk about his work as an agency.

We’re going to talk about marketing and different ways to think about that. But let’s start with your podcast, which is new as of this recording. It’s about to come out. I’m going to be a guest on the show. It’s called through the dip. Is that right?

Steven Sauder: Yeah. Yeah, that’s correct. We’re just getting started.

It you can find it right now on Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to it. But all there is like a little one minute and 30 second intro. But if you head over there and you subscribe You’ll get notified the second we drop our first real episode, which Chris is going to be in the first batch of those.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. A podcast is no small commitment. Tell us the story of Through the Dip, why you’re starting it, what the angle is, who it’s for. And yeah, what it’s all about.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve been around entrepreneurship pretty much my entire life. I worked for a lot of entrepreneurs. So people that were starting businesses for about 10, 15 years started one with one guy who was working out of his kind of a, like a one car garage.

And there was only four of us. Now I think they’re up to 80 people and they have some international offices thrown in there. So just being on that ride has always been a lot of fun. But about seven years ago. I started my own business and starting your own company is uniquely different to working for somebody else’s. Even though you get to watch what it’s like to start a company.

When you’re in that seat, trying to make the decisions and trying to decide Where the company should go or what. How you should spend your money or should you do a. Or should you do B it’s just a very different feeling and a very different seat to be sitting in. And while I’ve been working and building our marketing agency we’ve been working on it for about seven years now. And there was these moments where you where growth kind of stalls out.

The goals that you set, you start slipping and all of a sudden. Like these big, brilliant dreams that you had start slipping away just a little bit. Because life hits and whether it’s like the economy going up and down. Whether it’s some other force in the industry, Whether it’s personal life stuff and all of a sudden every once in a while, you find yourself in this dip and things will start going down. You have to start making some tough decisions around, where were you going to spend your money?

Who were you going to pay? All these kinds of big questions that aren’t necessarily easy to answer. And there’s not a cut and dry answer. It’s not like this is right and this is wrong. And you’re sitting there and you’re having to hold all of those things and try to figure out and navigate your way through the dip.

As an agency we just went through a dip about a year ago. I feel like some of the lessons that I learned going through those dip was some of the most important lessons that I’ve learned. I don’t think that I could have learned them any other way. And so in going through that All of a sudden I had this curiosity to talk to other people that have navigated their companies their businesses through a dip and what lessons did they learn?

What was it like? How did they make those tough decisions? And especially when you have the moment to look back a little bit and reflect on those decisions. We, like answering those questions of what would have you told yourself. Or what would have advices would you give yourself. Or even I think more you, interestingly would you do it again? Is the pain that I’m going through that dip worth it? So that’s where the idea of the podcast through the dip came from is to connect with other entrepreneurs and just learn about their lessons of navigating a business and making some of those tough calls and tough choices.

Chris Badgett: I love that. There’s a lot of content on the internet about success. And, winning and what I would call survivorship bias, but what about the hard times? So yeah and surviving that and figuring all that out and helping others with that. It’s a really noble podcast. I look forward to.

Being a serial listener to it. I love learning from other people’s stories. Tell us about one of your dips from about a year ago and your agency or whatever was going on there.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, we had some really ambitious growth plans and we had a, what I thought at the time was a really good plan to do it. I don’t, I still don’t think the plan is necessarily bad, but we put a lot of eggs.

In a single basket. And so what we decided to do was we were going to try to double our agency over the next 12 months. And what we wanted to do was go out and hire sales people or account executives, if you will, like that’s what we call them in the agency world, in different local markets.

Cities that had about somewhere between 150, 000 people more or greater up to about a half million people is the largest that we were looking at and have them get really plugged into their local community and sell our marketing services to other business owners. The premise behind that was that marketing is such a relationship business that it’s really hard to run ads around it.

It’s really hard to convince people to buy your product without having some sort of relationship because you’re asking them to put up money and you’re going to take that money and make, go spend it to make more money and then give that money back to them. It’s almost like like the financial advisor kind of world, also a very relationship driven world where it takes a lot of trust to kick something off.

So that was our plan to grow. So we hired three. Different account executives in different locations. We hire team around it so we can handle the increase flow. And we spent a lot of money on software so that we would be in a good place to be organized and streamlined and efficient as we started growing.

But the problem is that the sales never materialized the way that we thought they were. That what we thought people could do Just fell flat. And I think there’s a multitude of reasons for that. Like whether it was the right person or maybe we were selling or trying to sell the wrong thing, or maybe we didn’t have our services quite packaged up as well as they could, or build as much marketing around it as we should have.

I think all of those things played a little part in why it didn’t scale the way that we wanted it to scale. But. Ultimately what that resulted in was our overhead was incredibly high. We were just like burning through cash to have all these people, a part of our team. And then this question comes up, it’s like, how long do you burn through cash with the hopes of.

Hitting that sales goal that you have, like, how hard do you push to meet that goal? And at what point in time do you have to just pull the plug and take a loss on it and just say. You know what, this isn’t panning out the way that we expected it to work. We got to stop the bleeding somewhere and we got to downsize and we got to scale back to what we could do so we can live to fight another day.

So ultimately at the the beginning part of this year, we made the decision that, you know what, the numbers just are not looking good. There’s no way you could look at the numbers and reasonably assume that things were going to change the next three months. Unfortunately we had to go and do some layoffs and let go of some great people on our team, like people that I wish we could have kept. But there’s just no way to keep someone if you don’t have the sales to support that salary and it’s not it’s just not sustainable.

And so we ultimately had to let some people go, which was really disappointing. But now we’ve been able to right side that ship and we’re still growing just not as fast as I initially wanted to, or initially had planned. But it’s amazing to just like looking at myself like my attitude or what I was feeling.

In the moments when things weren’t going as well and the moments where things are going better now and like the level of anxiety and how I was trying to deal with that and working harder and longer hours, but like that not seeing that payoff just gets really discouraging. And all of a sudden, like just my energy level it’s felt like I just gave everything I could, but there was no more.

To give and you’re not sleeping at night because you’re trying to figure out maybe if I did this, maybe if I did that, maybe I could, get this deal to work out. There’s, I think there’s something to be said about pushing and fighting hard for something, but also not pushing too hard for something that you’re trying to create, to have it right.

Either things are going to happen and grow with you or else you’re fighting against everything Tooth and nail and maybe the world’s trying to tell you something else. Like maybe you’re going down a wrong path there Or you’re fighting a battle. That’s a little too hard to fight.

Chris Badgett: So if you could go back in time And talk Excuse me to your previous self when you were considering building a sales team knowing what you know Now what advice would you give to your previous entrepreneur self?

Getting ready to hire all these account executives.

Steven Sauder: I’d probably tell myself to go slower and to test things out more before doubling down. I think it’s really easy to have this mindset, at least for me, that like time isn’t on your side. Like I only have so many years here in this world. I only have so many, like so much money that I can make or how big can I get this?

Like I, I want to try to grow this company to be as big as I, as it can get. And I only have so many words, years to do it. So let’s go fast. But I think that’s a really dangerous mindset cause it gets you, it gets you into you referenced this earlier about people broadcasting this idea of success, right?

Like 10 X and everything. Or how do you. Like this idea of like viral growth versus this idea of just like sustainable growth. Like by virality is inherently not sustainable. If you look at viral marketing campaigns, usually it’s, it is something that like, Moves forward incredibly fast, but it doesn’t have a long lifespan.

Like very rarely does a viral thing have a long, have any sort of legs that carries it for years. It carries it for a moment and it’s cool for that moment. But I think approaching life where you’re not fighting against time and you’re not fighting against scale and you’re growing at something that is, you’re looking at more like sustainability, in growth.

How can you hit the next milestone without risking everything? There’s too much, there’s too much I think, wait that or I’m not sure what the right word to use. But people lift up people who like, not hit the home runs all the time. But it’s not the home run hitters that carry a baseball game.

And when the championship, like they’re a part of it, but like the people that could just show up and have a good batting average and just do get a couple of singles, maybe a double here, there that’s how you move the chain. That’s how you move the bases. That’s how you score.

In football and baseball and this is the truth of sports and it’s the truth of business too, but everybody wants that Hail Mary pass or that home run hit and it’s easy to fall into that trap.

Chris Badgett: So for context, what’s on offer at Hustlefish? What does the marketing agency offer? What kinds of services?

Steven Sauder: Yeah. We are a digital agency, so we do paid media. So like PPC, like Google meta tick tock like Instagram, Facebook, like all the, like the ad stuff we do SEO, and then we build a lot of websites and do some branding stuff around that. So essentially someone comes to us asking like, Hey, how.

How can I sell more of my things? Then we look at that and figure out what levers need to get pulled to scale your business or to sell more. And in working with a lot of clients, our best clients are Let’s The ones that have realistic growth models that are slow and make sense. And I’ve seen this a hundred times with the people that come in and say I want to become five times bigger and here’s this tiny budget.

But if we do it right, we can get there. It’s it doesn’t work out 99. 9999 percent of the time. But somehow I fell into that trap too. Like I, I was just like, Oh man, I think we can do it. I think if we make all the right decisions we can pull this off. But service wise, like generally when a client comes to us, we look at three things.

We look at one, do they need more traffic coming into their site? Do they just need more exposure? Two, do they need a higher conversion rate? To get whatever they want done. Or do you need to work on profitability and more of just business model type stuff? Generally, when someone’s talking about growth and scaling their problem, or the thing that they’re trying to fix, or the thing that they’re trying to propose to propel forward falls into one of those three areas.

And so we’ll help out with the first two. If it’s a little bit larger on the business model side. We’ll usually have some conversations around what they could do differently, but ultimately they’re the ones that have to fix it. But when people are coming to us looking for growth, those are like the three areas that all of our services plug into.

Chris Badgett: So we ask this question a lot on this podcast, but particularly for the agency folks out there. You tried outbound sales with sales team, but what is over the years actually working in, to answer the question, how to get clients, like what’s the mix? How do you get clients?

Steven Sauder: I think it is. For a marketing agency.

It’s all about relationships and like building those relationships with people and it’s hard to hack relationships. You can’t you can’t fake it, you got to log the hours. You got to log the time and be there and help people out wherever you can help them out. And. So I think some agencies have figured out ways to scale via like outbound type stuff. Although I’m always a little dubious about the numbers that they’ve projected out there just because all the agency owners that I know and talking to them and their numbers and what sales is looking like for them.

It’s almost always comes down to who they know and the relationships that they’ve built over time. So how long has Hustlefish been going? So we, Hustlefish is about seven years old now, but for a long time, it was just like a side hustle sort of thing. And so in reality, it’s been like more four years where it’s been a real business with like employees and like a full time commitment, for me, versus, working on a.

Chris Badgett: How much of the business comes from referrals from existing clients? I

Steven Sauder: would say maybe 40 to 30 percent of it comes from like referrals where we don’t know the person at all. And We know the person that referred them, but we don’t know the referred person that comes and talks to us.

But we usually have a good idea of how that relationship got connected back to us. And the rest of it’s like very one to one sort of relationships where we know. The person on a more personal level than just a random business sitting out there in the middle of nowhere.

Chris Badgett: How much has local played an aspect in your agency?

Like in the media area where you live versus the wide internet. Yeah.

Steven Sauder: A local is a hundred percent where. Everything comes from I, I don’t think there, I don’t think we could trace any of our customers back to a purely digital relationship where there was no geographic sort of point. We did this really interesting test about two years ago where we did a bunch of cold emails.

Reaching out to other agency owners saying, Hey if you have you’re really great at, creative copywriting but we can help build websites for you. We got some really great clients all inside of the state that we were in. So Indiana once you sent to somebody across the state line.

It was pretty much crickets. Like we got some conversations, but like this, the sale never closed or it wasn’t a great client. There’s something I think really important about geographic region and the amount of weight and trust that people put into knowing that you are there. There’s people that I didn’t meet in person.

For a long time that I chatted with, because we were in the same geographic state, like that’s the only commonality. And the only reason why they said yes to talk to me. And that’s where like the relationship started. But if. If I would have emailed somebody all the way across state lines to somewhere else, I think it would be way, way harder.

I think the one thing that’s interesting about this though, is I’ve had the exact opposite experience in the WordPress community, has this has no idea of geographic location. It has everything to do with the love for WordPress or the commonality of using that tool set or that technology.

And so I think there’s something really cool that WordPress has been able to do that many other industries have really struggled to.

Chris Badgett: In your offer stack. You do some WordPress stuff, but you also do things like paid ads and SEO, which doesn’t necessarily have to be WordPress based. How did you, how do you think about the stack of what the tools you work with and using things outside of WordPress as an example, some agencies are like super focused on WordPress and everything is just related to the WordPress site, but like running paid ads is very different.

And those are different platforms with different roles and that kind of thing. How do you think about focusing an agency on one piece of the stack versus providing more of the portfolio of solution that you do?

Steven Sauder: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think we started off just doing development stuff and that’s pretty much all we did. You build somebody, a website, and then all of a sudden either a. They need to get better conversion rates out of They’re users. Which is a little more dev centric. But still pretty firmly based in like this idea of messaging and how do you say something and but then also if.

You also need to get traffic for that site. So a lot of people have great ideas but then just don’t have the execution to generate the traffic around it. And so we would build these awesome sites and they’re just sit out there. And we wanted to get a lot more involved with how do we get these sites to do the thing that they’re supposed to do?

So drive traffic and drive conversions. And to do that, we just started working our way. Back up that, like we started out with SEO first cause it’s the closest to development maybe. And then, added paid ads onto that added, conversion rate optimization onto that.

Then as you add those services and then all of a sudden you start having people that are coming in with different technologies. Like they’re using Shopify instead of WooCommerce. Or they need a custom app built cause they’re doing something crazy custom that no one else is doing. And all of a sudden we started working in a bunch of different platforms and a lot of different services.

It became more about what is the ultimate goal. What are the best tools to use to hit that goal versus this is our little niche or stack that we’re playing in.

Chris Badgett: I love that. What’s a counterintuitive insight that you’ve figured out with working with paid ads over time?

That’s not as obvious. Oh that’s a good question. A

Steven Sauder: counterintuitive

I think the more hyper specific you can get with ads, the more interesting they become. And a common way to do that is to go down this route of like. How do I resonate with my person’s needs the most? Yeah. I think a more interesting way to do that is how do I throw up a face that somebody recognizes? Or how do I have somebody that is in their world talking to them?

So for instance we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about podcasts and like how to grow this podcast, right? An interesting way to do that would be to say, all right, when we do our podcast. I could take our podcast, chop it up into a bunch of little like ad snippets and throw it on Instagram Facebook or whatever.

And market to people who are in the WordPress space. Who are into courses and teaching people how to do things. And the chances that they would know you and recognize your face is insanely high. And so like I could run an ad instead of saying. I’m going to run an ad to people who are in this industry.

I say, how do I talk to somebody in this industry? And then funnel them to my podcast. That would be like a very interesting sort of way of doing it. If you’re thinking about it from a local standpoint. Who locally do people know? So I think an interesting thing is like a lot of, or some colleges have a kind of connection between like the college marketing department and other.

Companies and like we’ll do cross promotions with like their players and other companies and stuff. And so like you could take a basketball team, and have them come to your restaurant. And you could run ads with the basketball team at your restaurant. So all of a sudden now your ad isn’t, Hey, do you want.

Pizza or whatever it’s, Hey, check out where the basketball team hangs out. Like you love your college’s basketball team. You should hang out here. And so you’re not, you’re not approaching it from a need standpoint. You’re having people resonate with a need. You’re having people resonate with a person, which has a lot more deep, personal, like emotional ideas behind it.

That I think you can connect with people in a more real. Sort of way because it’s person to person or it’s moving it closer to person. So I don’t know I think for my like a counterintuitive ad sort of thing I think that’s an interesting way to start looking at ads is not just saying how do I?

Write the best copy or say the thing that resonates with people. How do you get? The person that already resonates with that person to say the thing. It’s a little bit similar to like influencer marketing, but done it in a more like local air way that someone who wouldn’t call themselves an influencer marketer would engage with that or something like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In our pre chat and related to what you just said you’ve mentioned marketing with heart. So going more for the heart than the need or some logical argument. Tell us more about what out in the world is the possibility of marketing more with heart.

Steven Sauder: Yeah. I think there’s things that people resonate with more than solving a problem or making money or doing whatever.

So if you’re creating a course for somebody, um, I was talking to this person about they have this blue, they teach people how to play the ukulele and do bluegrass jams. So you could market that in two different ways. You could, you would go to somebody and you could say, want to learn the ukulele?

I can teach you how to play the ukulele. Or you could say, want to learn how to play the ukulele and jam with friends or want to learn how to jam with friends. I will show you how to jam with friends or be a part of a jam session. And I’ve seen signs up and I’ve seen people doing jam sessions and parks and stuff, and I always been like, Oh, that’d be cool to be able to join them.

I have no idea how to be a part of a jam session. I can play the guitar a little bit. I’ve never jammed with people though. So that’s a very foreign concept to me, but all of a sudden, like you’re taking this idea of learning an instrument. But putting it with people and putting it in context of society and a social sort of element around it.

And I think that touches a lot closer than this need of, Oh, I need to learn how to play the ukulele is no, I need to learn how to play the ukulele so I can jam with people. And that moves it way closer to. You could say like a need or want in somebody’s heart, but it’s more tangential than what your product or service is offering, but it actually like connects more with people and with people’s hearts, because I think relationships and doing life with other people.

It is such a huge part of emotion and life in general. There’s a there’s an improv comedy club right down the road. And they do improv lessons. They get some people who just want to learn improv. But almost all of their marketing stuff is you want to make friends? Like improv class is the way to do it.

And you have this huge group of people that I don’t think would ever take improv,but they’re like, I want to know how to connect with people better. And I see that link between improv and connecting with people. So I’m going to go sign up. I’m going to go sign up for that class. They’ve taken their product and services and not just Oh, I’m teaching you how to do that.

And they made it something bigger. They made it into a community and they have a lot of other things that go around that, like reinforce that idea over and over again. But I think that gets you closer to what people love and what people care about the closer you can get to that and not just, Oh, here’s the list of the problems that I solve.

I’ll teach you to do X. Play the guitar. Or here’s an app that solves why like I think like what you’re doing with like lifter is really cool. Yeah, here’s an, here’s a plugin that you can post courses. Awesome. That’s a need solved. But if you can say no, here’s how you create a community and here’s how you create a course so that people are engaged with you and this is how you build this whole thing around this idea that you have, like that’s, that way more.

then just like a plugin that solves a problem. And things like LMS cast and like podcasting and the stuff that you do at like showing up at WordCamps and stuff like that. I think connect that all together. And it’s no, it’s not just a plugin for sale. It’s something larger here.

There’s something bigger than just solving the problem of how do you do courses on WordPress?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And yeah, it is something bigger, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. In our interview, so If you’re listening to this or watching this on youtube write down or go look for through the dip there was a great guest on this show.

His name was dane maxwell. I think he lives in indiana or illinois He wrote a book called star from zero and he had this framework of for really any business, but the whole thing was customer result mechanism. And he said, one of the biggest problems with businesses is that people get really focused on their mechanism, like running ads or stand up comedy.

Or playing an instrument. That’s just the mechanism. And we all know this as marketers is the people buy what they really want as a result. But often when we’re selling a service or a product, we over focus on the mechanism. And he had a word for that mechanism first thinking. And when you look at results and broaden out from jus. People who want to use my mechanism, that’s not really a target market.

That’s not really a clear result, but things like make friends. Discover community. Even community respect is something under the iceberg of conscious awareness. Like sometimes people buy a product because they’re looking for more respect from their community. It’s like a motivating factor.

Steven Sauder: I think what’s interesting is that. What I’ve found is people that focus on the mechanism this isn’t like a blanket statement. But there’s, I think there’s this tendency or this trend that like, if you focus on the mechanism. It’s often because you don’t understand, or you don’t know the heart component of that first. Like you have set out to solve a problem to whatever, to just solve that problem, right?

Like you are like, let’s take like lifter LMS, for example if you were a Person that was like. I’m going to build a plugin to sell. What should I build? I think there’s a market gap in learning management systems on WordPress. All right, we are going to build that plugin and we are going to put all the features in it. W’re going to solve all our customer stuff yet.

It’s really hard to move out of the mechanism place and get into something deeper. Because it has to almost flow from something deeper inside of you as the founder and the creator of this thing. Like it has to start at a level that you actually care about this thing for something larger than just solving the problem.

And what I’ve talked to, I don’t know if this is good advice or bad advice. So take it with a grain of salt. But I almost think that if you find yourself working on a product and it’s just all about the mechanism it is better to step back is the product that I should be working on right now, or is there a product that I could be working on that I truly care about?

I truly care about bluegrass music and I would love to figure out how to get more people involved in that. And so now I’m solving this problem to do it. Or. I truly care about this idea of businesses going through the dip and it’s not lonely. It’s not terrible. You learn some of the best things.

You shouldn’t try to avoid the dip at all costs possible. Like sometimes going through it is the only way you’re going to get to where you want to go. And so how do we celebrate the hard times and the lessons that we learn and the hard one. And there’s something like deeply meaningful about that for me that is propelling me forward to do this podcast versus just Oh, there’s a space.

I want to do a podcast. What could I do a podcast about? I think it should be X, Y, or Z and let’s just do it. So if you find yourself focusing on the mechanism, I think it’s really hard to shift and start focusing on the other. I forget the other two triangle things that you said, but it’s probably hard to focus on.

You have to focus on those unless you actually care about it deeper than the problem.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I love that. And the other two were clear customer and results. So like actually having a specific avatar and the result, which has me, the result has many layers. And I think what you’re tapping into is yeah, they may want to get in better shape by signing up for the gym, but underneath all that, they may want to.

Quote, look good naked or, be more attractive to the opposite to whoever they’re going after or whatever. And it’s, there’s like all this stuff below the surface and the closer you get to that, the stronger your marketing is.

Steven Sauder: Yeah. Yeah. If you, I think that it is the avatar thing is hard to create a good avatar if you don’t truly care about that avatar to begin with.

is, if you look around examples I don’t know if you’re familiar with beehive, like the newsletter software but the guys that created that, they created morning brew and they lived and breathed emails and they know what they’re doing. And the stuff that they’re launching is just like incredibly smart compared to all the other newsletter stuff that I’ve engaged with.

And it, You get this feeling that it’s coming from this very personal place of like I did this thing and it was hard and my goal is to make this thing easy for everybody like I’ve been there and there’s this resin there’s this way that they resonate with their audience that I haven’t seen come from a lot of other other tools.

There’s others out there that are similar, but I’ve, but it’s, I don’t know. It’s interesting.

Chris Badgett: And just a cheat code for that. Some of the most successful people I see with like courses and coaching programs and building communities and stuff, they’re really, their customer avatar is really just helping a previous version of themselves.

So number one, your own story and your own past pain points and everything. So instead of going and trying to find an opportunity in the market. Look in the rearview mirror of your life and, look around and see other people at that spot currently. And that’s a cheat code because you understand it too.

You can identify that person and help find them, but yeah, just to tip.

Steven Sauder: I think then three I think all of us looking back at our future selves that were or our past selves that were struggling with something like, you just want to give that person a hug and be like, man, you’re going to figure it out.

It’s going to be okay. Here’s how, and here’s why. And here’s there’s something that, that connects your soul back to that person. And by being,

Because you have that connection, I think you can create this stuff that just resonates with that person so much deeper without having to like try to come up with some weird cliche avatar to try to fake it or something like that.

Chris Badgett: And that’s why Steven’s starting the through the dip podcast. So go check that out.

He’s been through dips and he’s, knows other people have been through. And he’s curating and looking to help entrepreneurs as they navigate the dips. So that’s a search for through the dip podcast. You can also find Steven at hustlefish.com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you, Steven?

Steven Sauder: No, yeah, those two places. Through the dip. com, you can sign up with your email address right there, and you’ll get notified when we’re launching our episodes.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you for coming on the show, Steven. Really appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Really appreciate the time.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode Gina Hoyt, discusses her innovative use of LifterLMS in building a travel agent certification program.

Gina Hoyt is a passionate professional at Avoya Travel Academy, where she is instrumental in developing future travel agents. The academy provides prospective travel agents with a basic education, giving them the know-how to succeed in the field.

Given that the majority of travel agents operate from home as independent contractors, Gina stresses the need of formal training for more sales, larger commissions, and a more seamless entry into the travel sector. Her CLIA and ASTA-recognized certification program offers insights into business setup, industry best practices, and utilizing travel knowledge.

Gina attributes her ability to develop a thorough, user-friendly course to LifterLMS’s rich features, intuitive interface, and complex quizzes, automatic certifications, and wealth of learning materials. Her narrative emphasis.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Gina Hoyt. She’s from AvoyaTravelAcademy. com. She’s been using LifterLMS for a bit now. I just found out on multiple sites. But first, welcome to the show, Gina.

Gina Hoyt: Thanks, Chris. Glad to be here.

Chris Badgett: I’m excited to chat with you today and learn what you’re up to and what you’ve been building.

Tell us about Voya travel academy.com. What’s the project? What’s going on there? What did you build?

Gina Hoyt: Sure. The Voya Travel Academy is a. We’ve got an LMS solution that we’re pretty proud of. We’ve implemented a lot of the LFTR, solutions from, oh, the advanced quizzes, the videos. the audio options several different things that we love, but what we’ve built is a course really providing a foundation for travel agent, for a travel agent certification.

So those who are new to our industry who raised their hand and say, Hey, I want to be a travel agent, but don’t necessarily know where to start. This would be the first place to start is, provide getting some sort of education. Hey, when you’re become a travel agent.

And you affiliate with a host agency, you understand what that looks like and what it’s going to take.

Chris Badgett: How much of the travel agent industry is work from home?

Gina Hoyt: A lot. So I would say probably 90 percent of travel agents to leisure travel agents. Let me, because there is a difference between leisure and business, but and corporate, but most probably 90 percent of the leisure travel agents work from home today.

Chris Badgett: And tell us about the industry a little bit. Sometimes we think, Oh, the internet, we talked about this before we hit record, but I think it’s cool for people to hear. Like you can shop for a house as an example on Zillow, but you still need a real estate agent to make things happen. I think some might argue people can book flights and hotels online.

Where does the travel agent fit today? Like, how has the industry evolved given the internet and technology?

Gina Hoyt: Sure. When it comes to air only, and you’re right, we did talk about this a little bit, but if. If somebody was, if I was still booking travel and somebody came to me and said, Hey Gina, I need a domestic flight from Seattle to Vegas.

I’d say, Hey, here’s a website, go check it out and go book your flight. Because at the end of the day, I’m not going to be able to provide much value as a travel agent to an air only. But if you’re talking an international flight or even the whole package, this is really where travel agents, Can show their value in terms of what they can offer, not only with pricing, but in their knowledge, right?

So you, you want to put together an entire package. Let’s say you want, to visit Venice, Rome, Florence, and end up in London for 3 nights and you want that all put together. Can you do that today? yourself? Absolutely. You can. The truth is you can. However, if you’re booking with a travel agent, they’re going to know where to go and they’re going to have their knowledge to draw from in terms of versus you spending hours yourself looking online, right?

And then it’s is that hotel really what it seems like? Where we have a bunch of knowledge that we can draw from and suppliers that give us great values and benefits. And then Very rarely costs you anymore to book with a travel agent. Most people don’t know that or understand that, but our commissions come from the suppliers.

So even if you book with a supplier directly, you’re still paying the commission. You’re just not paying for the support that goes with it.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s cool. I feel like that’s a secret of the industry that needs to be out there more so that people know that not just the time savings, but you might even save money.

And, yeah that’s, super valuable. Tell us more about the professional certificate. When people earn that, what do they do with it? How do they think about it? How do you think about it? What is the certification all about?

Gina Hoyt: So that certification is, It’s both recognized by CLIA, which is Cruise Lines International Association, and ASTA, which is the American Society of Travel Advisors.

We’ve had both of those organizations review our program and give us a thumbs up. They actually both have a some knowledge of what our program is and what it looks like, and the content that we include. When you come out The avoid travel Academy, you’re going to have a really solid foundation in terms of number one.

How do I set up my business? Because again, we talked about 90 percent of travel agents today are work from home, probably very close to that percentage are independent contractors. So they each own and operate their own businesses. But if you don’t understand what that means, you could end up getting yourself into a little bit of trouble on the, and again, there’s nothing to be scared of, right?

It’s just have the knowledge. And that’s what we’re providing in that certification. It’s like, how do, how can you set up your business? What are the different options? What are some of the requirements, is there a requirement industry wide or state wide? in the states that you live in things to look for.

And again, we’re not telling you what to do because you’re going to own and operate your own business. So we can’t however we can provide you some really good insights and suggested best practices in moving forward and what that’s going to look like for you.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In entrepreneurship, we talk a lot about the ideal customer profile or the avatar.

What type of person, like if you think of the perfect fit person for your program. Is like the perfect travel agent. What were they doing before they made the decision to become a travel agent? And now they’re on this new journey and they’re looking for direction and guidance. Who is that person? If you could paint like a picture of them.

Gina Hoyt: Part of it is, I think that Travel agents can come from just about in any industry, right? We have a lot of health care providers. You know what I mean? That have a lot of people who come from the health care industry or even from an education background but they love to travel. They have that passion and that bug to travel.

And they, love to be of service. Those are two really good qualities. The other piece of that is to never be afraid to keep looking and asking questions. And like you talked to you and I talked about earlier before the show, being that entrepreneur, never being satisfied looking at, okay, yeah, I’m going to do this, but could I do it a little bit better and always keep and keep learning and, I think those are some great qualities of travel agents is they’re, they have the passion and they continue to learn.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Yeah, because I’m a traveler. I love traveling. I’ve been to Florence and Nice and the places you were talking about. And I’m like, yeah, if I was going to go back there, I might avoid this thing. I do that thing. And it makes sense that they have to have that travel passion.

Gina Hoyt: Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Tell us about how you found your way to LFTR LMS when you decided to do this education arm of what you do.

Gina Hoyt: Sure. Thanks. So we, so there are a lot of, especially post COVID, right? There’s a lot of people who are working from home who didn’t necessarily want to go back into the office, really wanted, they decided that they wanted to don that little entrepreneur hat and, travel is something they wanted to do.

And, We, as a Voya, as a network, years ago, we didn’t affiliate with anybody new to industry, was only experienced only, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, but we wanted to bring that new to travel person in and continue to grow the industry, not only our network, But just the industry overall.

But the biggest thing that what we’ve seen is people with education, some sort of foundational education, their sales are 50 percent higher, their commissions are higher their close rate percentage is higher when they have a solid foundation. So we set out to create a course that can provide that, provide that foundation.

And for me, when I started in this industry, 25 plus years ago I started knowing nothing. And I remember I had interviewed with a agency in the town that I lived in and I came home and my husband said what did they say? And I’m like they offered me the job, but I’m not going to take it. He goes, what are you going to do?

I said, I’m going to open my own. And he goes, okay. And I didn’t know anything about travel. So I made a ton of. And for me, it’s I love being of service. I love helping the next guy, the next, that next person in line who really wants to learn our industry. And so the big thing is you don’t have to make these same mistakes.

Let me help you. Let us help you show you the way, to give you that foundation. Are you going to make mistakes? 100 percent you are, I promise that, but hopefully it’s not as expensive as the ones I made. But anyway, so that’s how we ended up here. How we ended up with LFTR is we looked at several different LMS resources, and I was sharing with you.

I actually seen an advertisement for LFTR. I had never heard of it before, and I went, What is this? And so I started digging in, and I loved the resources that you guys, that LFTR provides, and how easy it was to build and also to teach my team, right? It’s I can teach my team how to maneuver within the software and, they’re not afraid once I show them it’s super simple and there’s, no fear there.

And so those were some really big things for us. It’s can you, can we do what we want to do and can I, is it. Repeatable. Can I show my, can I show my team members? And absolutely. And I, and so thank you. Thank you for that. We love the software.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Was that, was this project your first foray into WordPress or did you have some history with WordPress already?

Gina Hoyt: A little bit of history in WordPress. It’s been years. I, when I had my brick and mortar, I built a website. So that was years ago, by the way. So nothing recent. But I’m pretty persistent. And if I want to do something I tend to eventually figure it out or I’m not afraid to ask questions either.

Chris Badgett: I think you’ve already answered my next question, which was, learning WordPress, I know you had some previous experience, but learning Lifter, there’s like a lot of features and bells and whistles and things to figure out decisions to make. What advice would you have from somebody going into that journey of building an online education website?

From the standpoint that you said you were persistent. So to me, that’s the answer, persistence. But what else would you add around that?

Gina Hoyt: So for me, Lifter, your team makes so many videos available. And so for me, it was like, I tend. I can read and learn, but if I watch and learn, for me, it’s, that’s how I learn, so I would sit in videos and I would listen, and then I would pause, and then I would try, and then I’d turn it back on, you know what I mean, so again, that persistence, and, but if it was me, if I was recommending somebody, if this is something that you’re looking at, Go look at the videos.

Go watch them. They’re out there. You guys make it available. Thank you. Thank you, by the way, because I could have never done it otherwise. But it’s all there, and that’s how I did it. It was just by that persistence and And watching the things that are available versus saying, Hey, this isn’t available, or I don’t know how to do this.

Go look, it’s there. I promise you.

Chris Badgett: I think last time I checked, we had 1700 videos on our YouTube channel. And that’s just YouTube. That’s not our documentation and stuff. So that’s, I appreciate you saying that. Are there any features that you like most, or like parts of the software that you or your team likes, or that’s super valuable to the project?

Gina Hoyt: We love being able to use the engagements like the, automatic, certificate, awarding and triggering emails. I’ve literally used all those engagements to do everything. For the team so we don’t have to. I love it. I absolutely love it because that just takes time off of it.

Those are things that we used to do manually and I don’t have to do that anymore. Neither does the team. And so we appreciate that the advanced videos. I love that because somebody wants to plow through a course. And I get, and I understand wanting to go through quickly. I understand it, but I want people to stop, and actually absorb what you’re learning. So we love the advanced videos, the fact that they can’t. They can’t advance without, and we get that all the time. The button’s not active. My first response is, go watch the video. Go watch the video and I promise it’ll appear. So anyway, I mean you guys have, again, you guys have done a great job in terms of making the course layout how to build it.

The course builder is super simple. And then the different features between the advanced videos. There was something else too. I forgot. Anyway. Thank you again.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And what other tools besides Lifter LMS and WordPress do you find mission critical for your online education business?

You mentioned GoDaddy. Do you use them for hosting?

Gina Hoyt: Okay. Thank you. I was like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Yes. So actually we do use GoDaddy. We’ve got a couple of our product development teams that are considering maybe some other options because like I mentioned we’ve got, we have for three different websites a fourth one that we’re launching right now, getting ready to launch with a new education.

With the potential of bringing a lot more enrollees so we’re just looking at is it. continuing to be our best interest there. Do we want to go someplace else? But some of the other plugins, and I, we try to limit the amount of plugins that we use just because I don’t want any conflicts. But some of the other, We actually use Elementor and Elementor Pro for some of our WordPress features.

So the advanced quizzes, I know you asked what are some of the other things, but that comes from Lifter. So I, while I don’t necessarily use a lot of that feature on the Academy website, And then on two of our other websites that other teams are using, they use the features of the advanced quizzes. So again some great opportunity, that we use there.

And then we also use front end premium or front end admin, excuse me, and then there’s the publish press premium. capabilities pro. So to limit, so like my team, I limit what they can see. If they log into the WordPress website, there’s only certain things that I want them to be able to access. I don’t want them to see everything and be able to maneuver with everything.

So there’s a few different things that we use.

Chris Badgett: What about, you mentioned videos. What do you do for video usually? Is it mostly you? Is it are you recording the videos in Zoom or ScreenFlow or some Camtasia? What do you use in that department?

Gina Hoyt: So for our, I have a few videos that I’ve done that I actually record in zoom and I throw them into Camtasia and edit them.

And then other team members, same thing, but we also have some videos from some, of our suppliers because we have some of their certification courses within our program, because our suppliers have seen our product and they’re like, we want our certification program in your academy.

So we pull videos from there. Now we used to house all of our videos in our own,

Chris Badgett: was it Vimeo or

Gina Hoyt: it was not Vimeo, but with the advanced videos, we ended up transitioning all of our videos over to Vimeo. So we could use that advanced video feature. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Okay, that’s awesome. Tell us about just like how you gauge the success of Avoya Travel Academy.

What kind of impact have you been able to have or, maybe a story about somebody’s life that changed because of the training? Just what kind of impact is the platform having?

Gina Hoyt: For us, what we look at is, okay, so we have a test, we have a test group of students, or excuse me, of new to travel who came to the industry, who had no education, right?

And then we compare those who come through the education, and we compare them post, post graduation, post certification, graduation isn’t the appropriate, certification, And we, compare those two groups in terms of sales and close rate percentages. And as I mentioned earlier, those who take the certification, they have a much stronger base and foundation to begin with their sales, their commissions and their close rate percentage are averaging upwards over 50 percent higher than those who did not take that foundational education.

What that means for somebody, they’re going to stay in our industry longer, right? They’re going to get to do the thing that they visioned, that they had a vision for and that they love doing longer because they’re not going to get so frustrated. That was, I think part of, which was so hard about bringing somebody in new to travel, who doesn’t have a foundation, who doesn’t understand what it means.

It’s though. because there’s not that foundational understanding. They may make a hit, run into a hiccup or a challenge or make a mistake and they’ll turn tuck their tail between their legs and their leave. And it’s no, don’t leave. Let’s walk through and figure out how to make this better.

But we’re able to eliminate some of those before they ever get started.

Chris Badgett: I want to go back to some, you said earlier you mentioned that you were getting some resources from the industry to include in the training resources. Those is that something you have to license or they’re just happy to give you or how do you sometimes it can be a little overwhelming if we have to create everything ourselves when there’s all this other great stuff out there.

Tell us more about that content.

Gina Hoyt: So we have Some of our, and if you go to our website, if you look at avoid travel academy. com, you’re going to see sponsored by Norwegian cruise line sponsored by Colette. Those are 2 major industry suppliers who, have allowed us to use some of with, there are, agreements in place on the backside with those 2 suppliers in terms of what that’s going to look like.

So we don’t just go take their content. We have, agreements in place, and then there’s also another. Party, another third party out there that they’ve been in the industry a lot longer than the 25 years I’ve been here. And so we’ve partnered with them as well and have an agreement in place with them and some of their content.

And so they’ve provided us some content. So we’re really pulling content from a lot of different areas. I’ve written and created content. Some of my team has, and then we have industry, other industry people who have. Brought it all together.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Sometimes it’s not just about being a content creator, but also a curator.

You’re bringing in the and assembling the best possible stuff.

Gina Hoyt: Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: Just a quick, fun story sidetrack. I’m sure you mentioned Norwegian cruise lines.

Gina Hoyt: Are you

Chris Badgett: familiar with, I’m sure you are like Alaska cruises.

Gina Hoyt: Yes, been about there about six times, but anyway, go ahead.

Chris Badgett: So before I did Mercator LMS, I used to work at a helicopter supported sled dog tour business on a glacier above Juneau.

So the cruise ships would come in. Some of those were Norwegian and people would fly up in the helicopter and we’d take them out on sled dog rides. So that’s my old connection to the Norwegian cruise industry.

Gina Hoyt: Love it. Love it.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about I call it the offer stack. So is this like one mega certification course?

Is it a collection of courses? Is it, like what kind of support is included? If somebody has a question as they’re going through it What’s in the stack of the offer?

Gina Hoyt: So in, we have one course, we do one course, and there’s about a hundred and 19 lessons within that course. So it’s one big one to get through, we give everybody a hundred days to get through the education.

We do have a timeline on there and at the end of the day, it’s if somebody is having a struggle we understand life happens. So it. Reach out to us. We can always work with somebody on that in terms of what that looks like. In terms of support, I have an, I have myself and my team.

We, we support people all the way through. If they have any questions we have a, team email. We ask people to send their questions to the team email. Because if I’m not, if you send an email to me directly or you send an email to directly to one of my team members and let’s say they’re not in the office that day you’re not going to hear back right away where it’s most efficient to send it to our team email.

We pick up the phone, we call people, they can schedule, they can actually schedule. We have a link in all of our emails because we, it’s not just a. Register, take your money and you never hear from us again in that 100 days, you’re going to probably get 9 or 10 emails from the, throughout that process, just touching bases. Hey, we want people to know, look, we’re here. We’re here to help. And we’re here to support you. If you have questions, let us know. So you can call, you can email. You can schedule a call with one of our team members if you have any questions. If something’s not working technically our office hours are Tuesday through Saturday, but I tend to watch emails on Sunday too, just because that’s who I am.

I struggle with walking away. Yeah. So we there’s a ton of support. We’re here to see people succeed not, to take their money, have them register for a course and walk away. You know what I mean? We want to see everybody succeed.

Chris Badgett: I think that’s fantastic. I’ve done a lot of these interviews and talked to a lot of Lyft Realness users and the ones that are most successful they support their people outside of the content, whatever that means.

You mentioned phone calls and emails, whatever that is. Like people sometimes need a little help along the way, not just access to great content. So my hat’s off to you. You mentioned you had three or four other LMS projects in the works or actively going on. How have you branched out from Avoya travel academy.

com?

Gina Hoyt: So they’re all industry related and all related back to avoid in some way, shape or form. They are my employer. But we have, like I mentioned, we have the travel Academy. We also have so for. AVOIA as a host agency, the AVOIA network, the AVOIA travel network is a host agency for independent agency owners.

So there’s education that we have support teams that offer education like our early success team. They talk about sales and different things like that. Destinations and so there is a project there where we have a platform where those teams use the lifter software for their that type of education, which is separate from the travel Academy.

And then we have internal training for some of our teams. Some of our, the different support teams for Avoya. We offer, education training for employees. And then we have a fourth one that we’re getting ready to launch. Remember I talked about while we love and we want to provide Avoya and our agents the best possible resources available.

We have a commitment to our industry to the travel industry overall, and there is not a requirement right for somebody to say if you want to be a lawyer, you got to go to school for a lawyer, you know what I’m saying, if they’re in the travel industry, there’s not a mandated certification that you have to do.

But what we find is, again, and I’ve keep touching on this, is those who are in our industry have, who have a foundation, who understand what it means. They’re much more successful. And so we really feel oblig, I don’t know if obligated is the right word, but we have a desire to, help our industry overall.

So we’re actually providing a white label product. Some of our other host agencies in, the industry will be able to provide their agents and their new to network agents and education resource as well, because for whatever reason, maybe they don’t have the resources available to create it or the team, the manpower, whatever the reason is, and we’ll be able to, bring that to the table for them and it’ll be branded with their information.

Yeah, it’s pretty exciting.

Chris Badgett: I love that. You’re keeping the focus on the industry and the the travel agents at the heart of that. And, and really getting as much impact as you can out there, whether it’s your team, Avoya, the industry, it all works together and everybody wins.

It’s not, I call it the infinite game, which is, somebody doesn’t have to lose for somebody else to win. And it’s just. Let’s help everybody, basically.

Gina Hoyt: And, I was always taught the sun shines for everyone. You know what I’m saying? There’s enough to go around. And that’s even when I owned my, my, my travel agency and I would hear people get frustrated, I would talk to another agent.

This customer went and booked so and and I’m like, you have to remember the sun shines for everyone. Maybe there was a better connection there. It doesn’t matter. There’s going to be somebody else coming. You know what I mean? And, we really want to provide. Again, the sunshine’s for everyone and we want to provide something industry overall that, that benefits all of us.

Chris Badgett: What’s, your vision for the future? You’ve been doing this for a bit, like you’re doing a lot already, but is there anywhere else you’re, wanting to go with this or what, is your plan to make Voyage Travel Academy even better?

Gina Hoyt: So future goals, we’re not there yet, is we’re going to provide some ongoing education.

So some additional courses. Again, we’re not there yet. I’ve got my head in too many other arenas right this second. But as soon as those calm down and we get those launched and implemented, then we’ll start doing some research for some additional certifications. For again, not just our, the agents in our network, but overall industry wide.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And it’s also what’s interesting about your story is this industry is not like heavily controlled or regulated. It’s not like you have to have certain training or continuing ed, but you’ve realized that, hey, these people need this. I’ll provide it. People are using it. They’re getting paid 50 percent better or doing better in the career they’ve chosen.

I think it’s really cool. It’s not yeah. It’s not like you’re asking for permission. You’re just doing the thing that this, these people need and helping improve their lives. That’s really cool. Fun. Final question for you. So in leisure travel, I know there’s a broad question, but what are some counterintuitive underappreciated trips that people could do or ways to think about vacation?

That from your time in the industry, you realize, Hey, there’s a lot of opportunity off the beaten path over here, or maybe try this, but do this differently. I’m just looking for some insight from the inside of travel. What are some counterintuitive insights or little known secrets?

Gina Hoyt: Oh my.

Chris Badgett: There’s probably a lot.

Gina Hoyt: There’s a, so my head goes, which part of the world, right? It’s because to me, the world is like a candy store, right? And it’s for me, I walk into this candy store and I go, Oh, where do I start? Which piece do I want first? Let’s

Chris Badgett: divide it into three parts. Let’s say, North America, Europe, Asia.

If you were to do those three, what are some off the beaten path things or little known, insights?

Gina Hoyt: Asia, Vietnam. I, oh, Halong Bay. If you stay in a junk for a couple nights out on Halong Bay, I know One of the state colleges in the state that I live in they have a business group that goes, I don’t know if it’s every other year, the students in their business degree program, when I was selling travel, I actually had a friend who was in that course for a while.

And so she came to me and I started doing that every other year for them. And we would put some of the most amazing trips together coming down through central Vietnam and on the coastline and Halong Bay, by far. over and over every year was like the winner. People loved being out on a junk for a couple of nights and having that experience.

So if you’re going to Asia and you have an opportunity to do Vietnam go to Hong Bay. Okay. So there’s that piece. Europe. I know this is, there’s so many, I love Europe. Holy cow, there’s a lot of really cool things and I could go on and on. But one of my favorite cities in, which is probably not most, but I love Amsterdam, I love the canals.

I love the whole, that whole thing. Rome is another one, but there’s a lot of things to go see and do. Aye yai While Greece is amazing, I hate the flight. I’m West Coast, so for me trying to get there I tend to stay away just because of the flight. You know what I mean? I struggle with flights, but Africa, if you ever want to do a safari in Africa, make sure you do one that has a hot air balloon.

The hot air balloons over the Serengeti. Nothing like it. Again, something little, not everybody, not, you can’t book it through everybody, but if you find, if you’re going to look into that, being sure and do the hot air balloon over the Serengeti, it’s an amazing, it’s amazing. North America.

Holy cow. I love Hawaii, but that’s such a, for me, that’s I know I’m West Coast. So again, for me it’s like, a bread and butter thing. When I was selling travel, everybody does it, train travel, TransCanada on VRail is amazing with what the domed cars and the meals and nothing like it.

So that’s really cool going East Coast to West Coast. And I’ve been anyway, so I don’t know if I answered your questions, but I’ve.

Chris Badgett: You did. And I’ll, let me actually throw two more on real quick. What about Mexico?

Gina Hoyt: What about it? I love Mexico. If you’re looking for all inclusive and and I hear this a lot, cause I, I have a lot of friends who hear, Oh, don’t go to Mexico because of this and because of that.

And I’ll, tell you the same thing. I tell, would tell them is that As long as you stay in the areas you’re supposed to be in, you’re going to be fine. Do you know what I mean? It’s you’re going to be fine, but if you decide to venture out on your own and go into in into an area that you shouldn’t be in, you might run into some trouble, but I hate to tell you, you’re going to find that in the United States anywhere.

So any major city that you go to. Yeah, it’s fine. And there’s a lot of great, there’s a ton of great resorts, all inclusive resorts. If that if, my kids, they went for their honeymoon last year. I was a couple years ago, not my honeymoon, but I’ve been married for a lot of years. But we go. So I’m not afraid to be in Mexico. We find it safe. Like I said, as long as you’re going to the areas, And you stay in the areas that you’re to be in.

Chris Badgett: And last one, I may have a trip coming up to the Philippines. Is there anything, do you have any intel on the Philippines?

Gina Hoyt: In terms of Philippines, what, what type of travel are you looking for?

Chris Badgett: Let’s say I was at a business conference in Manila and then wanted to take a week or so at a more, beach, low key environment.

Gina Hoyt: So are you wanting to just go to a resort and stay, or are you wanting to maybe do a tour and see more? What, do you know what I mean? There’s so many, it’s not just a, Hey, I want to go here.

What do you got? There’s really an entire conversation for somebody, for a travel agent, to provide you what you, want. There, there’s an extensive conversation that needs to be had in terms of what are your expectations? If you have this thing of I want to visit this, and this, but you say, I want to go to the Philippines and stay at a beach resort and somebody gives you that, you’re going to be highly disappointed because that’s not what you had in mind.

Yeah, it’s not a simple question of go here. Unfortunately, I’m sorry.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, so we, as travelers, we need to do more research and at least get directionally, not just like the geography location, but what’s the experience we’re going for? What things do we want to see? What types?

Gina Hoyt: Yeah, and I think that a travel agent who has a really good, solid foundation, they’re going to be able to, start asking you those questions, right? They’re going to know, hey, this is a great destination. Now, share with me some of the are you going to be traveling with family with children?

Is it just you? Or what are some of the experiences you want? Then they can take all of that information. put it together. I refer to it as a puzzle. You know what I mean? And I put all, I used to take all this information and put it together like a puzzle and then I’d provide you, okay, here, this is what the puzzle can look like.

What are your thoughts? What do you think? You do, is there anything in here that I, didn’t include that you want to see or is there too much and we need to take some of it out, some of it out. So anyway. It’s a big puzzle. It’s lots of fun.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. That’s Gina Hoyt.

She’s from avoyatravelacademy. com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or any final words you have?

Gina Hoyt: Sure. On the Academy, you can always send me an email, which is just Gina. Hoyt at avoyatravel. com.

Chris Badgett: Awesome, Gina. Thank you for coming on the show and thank you for being a shining example of what I call the education entrepreneur and your persistence and all the value you’re creating in the world, helping in this industry and helping your team and all of that.

It’s I love seeing what you’re up to. So thank you.

Gina Hoyt: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Aaron talks with Chris Badgett about AI for course creators. He shares the journey of developing DocsBot.ai, from creating a proof-of-concept chatbot trained on WordPress documentation to building a powerful tool that enables companies to leverage their own documentation for content creation, customer service, and more.

Aaron Edwards is the creator of DocsBot.ai, a cutting-edge chatbot driven by AI that improves document management and business assistance. Aaron explains the fundamental idea of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which blends generative.

By giving the AI context, real-world data can help it provide precise, well-founded responses. This method tackles a prevalent issue with AI, which is that it “hallucinates” or fabricates knowledge. By giving the AI context, real-world data can help it provide precise, well-founded responses. This method tackles a prevalent issue with AI, which is that it “hallucinates” or fabricates knowledge.

Data from the actual world can assist the AI give accurate and well-founded answers by providing context. A common problem with AI is that it “hallucinates” or creates knowledge, which this approach addresses.

This podcast offers insightful information on the technological foundations of DocsBot.ai and how it can be used to many businesses, from agencies to course developers, to enhance assistance, productivity, and content reuse.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by my friend Aaron Edwards. He’s from DocsBot. ai. That’s DocsBot. ai. Go check this out. This is not going to be your average episode where we talk about chat GVT or some basic AI concepts, although we are going to talk about that stuff some.

We’re going to go deep. Aaron has been deep in the weeds with WordPress, AI, software development, solving problems for business owners. We’re going to get into it today. This is going to be a fascinating episode, but first welcome back on the show, Aaron.

Aaron Edwards: Thank you for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: Good to see you again.

I always love running into you because you’re always up to like really interesting, cutting edge things. Whether it was NFT stuff in the past, solving challenges. With the media library and uploads and stuff like that. I’ve watched you over the past couple, maybe several years launched DocSpot.

So we’re going to focus on the AI component both for WordPress professionals and agencies, but also for course creators. But first, just at a high level, what is DocSpot. AI?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, sure. The idea is let me go back. I’ll tell my story a little bit with it. As you said, I just love playing with the latest new technology.

So obviously as this generative AI stuff started coming to the forefront I was just diving in and building things, playing around with it, learning the latest Tech and stuff like that. There was images and I know we talked about in the previous episode and now doc spot and what I started out is this new technique called retrieval augmented generation.

So, chat GPT dropped in what is end of 2022, I think. And it like wowed everyone, obviously, like we’re like, Oh my gosh. But people quickly realized that what hallucinations were. So these AI models are trained to be like super, super helpful and great assistance so much so that they’ll just make stuff up to make you happy. There’s a new in that time during that fall, there’s a new technique some papers and things that have come out where People had realized that, okay, if you provide like chat GPT with context, for example, you paste in a page of text or whatever about your product or something like that you paste that in there and then you ask a question about that content that you pasted in.

Now it has like facts to ground its answers. So that way it can actually like. Provide like a accurate and valid answer by summarizing or extracting information from that text that you pasted in this context. So that’s what. This new technique called retrieval augmented generation is.

And so, I just was playing with that and I thought this would be really cool just as a proof of concept. And to learn myself is to build a chat bot that was trained on all the WordPress documentation. So I went and I like built like a web crawler that went and crawled all the documentation pages on wordpress.

org. Whether it’s the developer side or like the user kind of side, all that kind of stuff. And then. into a, it’s called a vector database, which is just a way to store that training data using AI embeddings it’s called, which is a way to do semantic search so that if you search for you give a question and it’s able to identify texts that may not have the exact same words in the question, but I do.

but able to identify pieces of text that are the same like semantic meaning or close semantic meaning. So basically that way you can transform a user’s question into an actual whatever the most relevant document pieces of documentation are to answer that question. And so I launched that and it was called, um, chat WP and it’s still online.

It’s a, let me see if I remember the URL even as WP docs dot chat. And that’s still like a free tool that’s out there. Ask me anything about WordPress. And so the kind of ideal of that was, actually I’ll share my screen. Is that all right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and if you’re listening to this on the podcast, just head on over to the Lifter LMS YouTube channel and look for Aaron Edwards, and you’ll find what we’re looking at here.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, so wpdocs. chat. Just a simple chat interface, where you could ask like questions about WordPress and then it goes. And then from that training data, it’s able to provide like. Output and examples and things like that, even code snippets and stuff that is learned from the documentation.

So that was my my learning experience and proof of concepts. And then what I did is people like were super excited about it. So I slapped a little a waitlist signup form at the bottom of the page. And I said, Hey, if you’re interested in this for your business. Let me know. And I just put a little survey there what are like the key features that you need, that kind of thing.

If you’re trying to use this for your own business and I got a lot of like good responses on that, like a good wait list and the thought, all right, this is like somewhat proven that there’s some desire, for businesses to have something like this. And I spent a month working nights all night, to put out duck spot, so that was the product, which has been going well.

It’s grown a lot, it’s my full time job now. It’s been More than a year and a half. And basically what we do is we make it super easy for businesses to train their support. It can be used internally, like for your team to be able to get answers quickly from your existing documentation, files SOPs, that kind of thing it can be used.

Some of our customers use it. For, the classic content generation or repurposing. So they have their chatbot trained with all their marketing content or whatever. And they can use that to generate, ad copy or different things like that. Or if their agency, they might have a chatbot trained for each of their clients.

And they’ll use that for content repurposing a lot of different use cases.

Chris Badgett: So what was the surprise to you as people started using it? Like who was like the main group and then what were some surprising use cases that started popping up?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. I think the biggest thing, and this is really what led it to it being a success is somehow some Japanese Twitter tech influencer.

Like from my chat bot, like in Japanese and just shared a video of it, answering questions in Japanese. And that went totally viral in Japan. It was so crazy. I like woke up in the morning and suddenly. I had 100 support tickets in Japanese and my servers are crashing. And I was getting all these signups and things like that.

I am really stressed testing it. So it’s like, What is going on? Yeah, so it went viral in Japan, which is pretty crazy. So still probably maybe a third of my customers are Japanese. And that really led me down the path of doing the work that kind of sets us apart from a lot of our competitors and that making sure that it’s very like multilingual and compatible with non English languages.

Most of all the AI announcements and benchmarks and all that stuff that you see. online and all the hype. It’s all English. Like you don’t actually realize it that, that, okay. Yeah. This tiny model that’s like amazing that like Lama or whatever that Lama three or whatever, that meta put out it sounds like so amazing, but you realize, Oh, it’s only trained on The four most common like Western languages, and the benchmarks suck on other languages.

So that’s been a really big thing, like from prompts optimization on the backend to making sure it like can detect languages properly and answer and whatever the language that the user asked questions, that kind of thing. It’s taken a lot of like work and even ongoing as I add new features, making sure that It works for all those use cases,

Chris Badgett: tell us more about like the training data or the source pages.

So for example, if I’m an agency, I may have a bunch of case studies and service offerings and a blog, bunch of blog posts about how I approach my agency work or my clients, or podcaster and I have a lot of podcast episodes. Or I’m a, I have a product that has support library of content. Like, how do people think about source pages and what could be sources?

And at what point, how much source content do you need for this to get really valuable?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. That’s like one of the harder things that we do is like the actual like code to create these like chatbots and do the retrieval augmented generation, and that’s all open source. There’s all kinds of.

Like things that you can do and probably spend that up. If you’re a developer and just a few hours, something that kind of working as a proof of concept, but really the hard part is like figuring out how to take like real world data that businesses have. Whether it’s course content, as you mentioned, documentation, crawling a website, all that kind of thing and transforming that into something that the bot understands and is able to use to answer questions accurately, without hallucinations.

So we developed a lot of different,

Source pages or ways to, Import information to your bot. So whether it’s like uploading document files PDFs or docs, PowerPoint, Excel, whatever it is, each of those things, we have to have different logic for how we parse that and how we divide it up into pieces.

That that the LLM, the large language model AI can understand. So there’s a lot of work in that. You can train it just with like FAQs that are simple to answer. You can have a crawl your entire website, like sitemap, that kind of thing. And connected to tons of cloud sources, to your notion, confluence, Salesforce, get book places where you already have documentation stored, or if you’re using like Zen desk or help scout or intercom fresh desk, like a lot of these popular, like support tools that maybe you have your knowledge base in, or you have your previous Customer support, history tickets in there, and you can use all that to train your bot so that it can answer questions into the future.

So we’re always adding like new data sources. A fun one that I worked on last month is YouTube. Yeah, it sounds awesome. You’re mentioning that you have all these YouTube videos, right? , so being able to train your bot just by dropping in a YouTube video, URL or like a URL to a playlist of a.

Of, up to a hundred different videos. And then it goes through and actually had to, this is the hard part. YouTube does not like scraping. So it’s literally like people don’t realize that’s the hard part. I had to use like a whole network of residential proxies, so it’s actually going through like people’s home computer to scrape the subtitles from YouTube and then use that to train the bot so that you can chat with your YouTube videos.

And and even as you’re chatting with them, it like provides source links to where it got the answer. So it’ll actually link to the correct second in the video where it pulled that answer from which is fun.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. In terms of humans. Potentially being concerned about I don’t want this AI to speak for me, like how what are the options in terms of just cut it loose and let it talk to anybody versus a human reviews before it gets communicated?

Like, how do you think about that moderation aspect?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, I think and a lot of our customers. They’re using it for frontline customer support. So tier one. So if you think about it, first of all, if you have a business, that customers never read the documentation, right? A

Chris Badgett: lot of our support is here’s the link to the doc.

Exactly.

Aaron Edwards: Yes. That’s whatever, 75 or something percent of the average company support is like here’s the link to the document where they answer that question for you, and in the, Previously, there’d be things like search tools and stuff try to identify that to try to prevent tickets being created, deflection, we call it but why not have the same thing that Google does now when you Google something and it gives an AI answer by looking at the top results and summarizing that into a succinct answer instead of having to go to all these pages and read and figure out how to answer your question.

That’s what we do. You take all the existing information that you’ve already written at some point, that’s already been recorded at some point in your documentation or support history or whatever, or YouTube demo videos, whatever it may be. And provide like an instant, like quick answer to them.

That’s grounded in that truth of your training data and also provides links to where it got that information. So they could click out and. And verify that if they want to or whatever. So yeah, that’s one side of it. And I think that these models are definitely well proven to be good enough for that kind of tier one support.

And I’m surprised like what it can answer too. So even like my bot is trained on all my like developer documentation for APIs and things like that. So I find myself like asking questions about how do I give me an example code for how I integrate my widget with Zendesk, And it literally both reads like my documentation, but it’s actually like performing logic and reasoning as well after reading that, just like a human would to generate new answers.

It’s not just copying, copying and pasting verbatim which is pretty amazing that these AI models are capable of doing that reasoning. So that even gets you more than what you’d say is the tier one support, because it’s not just. Not just linking to documentation, but it’s actually able to do some reasoning to

Chris Badgett: that’s very cool.

I know one of the things that I think about when, looking at AI tools is cost and we don’t have to get into the specifics of your pricing because I know it might change. But As the better AI gets, it might require more resources, which could in theory, make it more expensive. Or you need a large training set.

Like, how do you think about pricing and making it work for everybody? The the business owner, you making sure it’s a profitable venture. Like, how do you think about that?

Aaron Edwards: Man, when I launched the same week that the. Chat GPT API became available which was great timing, right? But the costs for that, like even the old, like 3.

5 model, chat, GPT model it would cost, I think three or four cents per question per user question. Now, if you’re getting like 10, 000 questions a month or

something that adds up fast, right? But at the same time, if you compare that to hiring a support person, the answer, those Whatever, 70 percent of those 10, 000 questions. That’s still super cheap, right? It was hard thing to, to factor in. And so what I actually did in the beginning is we did bring your own API key.

So you could actually put in your key from open AI, like into our dashboard and we’d save it like encrypted and use that At cost. So instead of reselling credits or something like that, like some of our competitors do with a markup, we just basically at cost, for the actual processing.

And what’s amazing is in, in less than two years, the The price for how much power you get, like from the AI model has literally dropped more than a hundred times. It’s yeah, it’s been crazy. And as a business who’s like trying to figure out like my pricing models and things like that, and how to charge.

That’s been great both for my customers who are like bringing their own key, but now I’m able to provide access like included to make it simpler for people to get started. They don’t have to have their own key, so like I heard, I think it was

said that if you’re building products on AI, like it’s changing so fast and its capabilities are changing so fast, you need to be building like on the cutting edge to where right now. It’s seems super expensive or super like impossible for it to do. Because it’s just change every two to three months.

It’s like a new model comes out two to three times price drop. It’s amazing.

Chris Badgett: Help us understand like the models in the background are you leveraging open AI or you’re leveraging llama, a combination of stuff? Like how does it, like what powers all this?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, right now we’re using only a open AI models just cause they have the best, like developer ecosystem and things like that.

We are playing with other models like Gemini and Llama. Maybe, like I said, there’s still weaknesses there for other languages. So that’s one of the things that we have to test heavily is we want to support having a chat bot in Japanese, right? And that it’s going to be able to, no matter what language the user asks a question, that it’s able to still find the right documentation, even though maybe your documentation is in English.

If someone asks a question in Japanese, it should be able to use AI to find the relevant documentation and provide an accurate answer to the user. And so for that, you need some of these larger models that are, have much more training data from other languages than English. So right now that’s the GPT 4.

That’s what kind of like our workhorses. So food like for free, like along with your plan. And that works for almost all use cases and it’s super fast and it’s super good. Multilingual as well. And then if you like, you want Much more advanced reasoning, like to where it can maybe do some custom coding and things like that as part of its answers.

Then you could jump up to the full, like GPT 4. 0 model, which has dropped down in price substantially to, it still costs less than one cent per question, more like 0. 5 really. So super cost effective. And they just keep getting more and more powerful.

Chris Badgett: Could you describe to the layman, just to highlight the rate of change with AI what’s the difference with 4.

0 in OpenAI versus 3. 5 or Turbo or whatever came before?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah a lot of it’s like proprietary, so they don’t tell us like all the technical details you can infer. There’s been a lot of new inventions. So first of all, was just like the amount of data is trained on, right? Like call that parameters, like how many parameters, that’s the size of the model.

And so like you had Like GPT two, I think. And then GPT three which is like the first ones that they had like an API. If you were really lucky, you could get a key to use that one. And that’s what some of the early like content creation things, um, used and then 3. 5 was basically, they took that same model and they did what’s called RLHF, which is basically they they Took had humans, right?

A bunch of okay, here’s the message. And then here’s what a good response is for that. And so they hired, armies of people and in Africa and other third world countries that speak English and other data set online to do that reinforcement learning on top of the existing model, which is basically where the invention of chat GPT came from.

So instead of being something where you had to figure out these weird Ways of prompting it crazily to where it like completes, like what you started. Now you can just give any kind of instruction and it just knows how to follow that instruction and provide a good output. So that didn’t really change the size of the model.

It just made it much more useful to the average user. And then you had the next big jump in model size and that was GPD four. And they say that went from GPD three is probably something like four or 500 Billion parameters. I think they estimate maybe three or 400 billion parameters.

And GPD four is probably like closer to 2 trillion. Wow. Yeah. And that’s after being pruned and cleaned up and that kind of stuff. It’s more like a tenfold increase, in size. And so that’s why it’s so much more expensive and slower. Cause it’s got to run on a whole cluster of 20, 000 GPUs, because it uses so much memory.

To do all that kind of stuff. And then I’ll put on top of that, then they’re able to do what’s called distillation, which is where you take that big model and you pull out by using like the reinforcement learning and things like that training, what’s the most useful. Parts to you, so it may not have the widespread knowledge from all that training that pulled in, but all the things that people most commonly ask, or most commonly use it for logic, it kept only those parts so you can have a 10 times smaller model that was trained that was distilled from the big one.

I’m just pulling out the most useless things. And that’s what GPT 40 mini is which is like their most cost effective model. It’s super, super fast, super inexpensive, but still very powerful, even in other languages.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And Aaron, while I’ve got you an AI expert and who’s great at teaching and communicating this stuff.

Help me understand the buzz around two concepts. I’m not sure if they’re related or not, but one is having a large context window and the other is chain of thought reasoning. What are those?

Aaron Edwards: Okay. They’re not like necessarily related, but the context window is basically like How much text or video or whatever the input, how much the AI model can handle at once.

Chris Badgett: If you’re using chat, GBT, sometimes you’re like, you try to copy paste and it’s too long or whatever.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. That kind of thing. And that’s why we do what my business does is called retrieval augmented generation. It’s like when it was GPT. Context window was 4000 tokens which a token is just like a piece of text.

Like the average word is like four tokens, I think. If you think about that and so you can imagine, okay, you can only post. Roughly around 1000 words or whatever into there as part of your question and also that usually includes the response to. So there’s a input context window and an output one, how much text they can generate.

So that kind of limits you, like how much you can put in, especially when you’re trying to answer questions from your documentation. I just crawled your website and there is what was it like almost 2000 URLs, and all the content from that that’s a lot, right? You couldn’t paste all that into chat GPT to ask questions about it, right?

Chris Badgett: But you can with DocSpot.

Aaron Edwards: ai. Yes, exactly. Because we pre process all that into getting rid of all the extra stuff and just keeping like the important chunks of text and trying to keep the chunks semantically relevant to where you’re not cutting off information between them. And then when a user asks a question, we actually search to find the most relevant pieces.

And that’s what is put in the context window for the model. But there has been. There’s been a lot of doubts if that’s like the best technique as these context windows getting bigger. So now you have GPT 4. 0, the context window is 128, 000 tokens. So that’s a big jump from 4, 000, right? The problem is you got to pay for all those tokens, right?

Cause the cost is like per token, and it’s slightly less for the input versus the output, but still that adds up a lot. So you don’t want every time you ask it or a user asks a question. To have to paste in that whole thing and pay for all that each time, you know, and there are techniques around that, like opening.

I just last week announced prompt caching. And I know Google has that and Anthropic has that now too. They’re a little bit harder to use, but basically if you’re asking the same question or at least the beginning of it. Over and over multiple times in five to 10 minutes, then it actually caches a big chunk of that’s reused each time.

And by doing that, I think that you save 50 percent on those tokens. So there are techniques around that, but still it’s inefficient to paste everything in there, but it is really useful for some things. Like I love using a Gemini. They have a 2 million in context window, which is huge. You can paste the whole book in there, right?

and do Q& A or summarization or whatever over the entire book without having to do what we do, like the reg. And the same thing like with Gemini, you can do like a video Or a bunch of images all at once because their window is so big. It’s expensive, but you can do like certain tasks that you couldn’t do before.

So we’ll see these context windows keep getting bigger and prices drop. And they introduce things like caching. I think these like chatbots and things like this for our use case are going to get even more accurate because we’ll be able to pass. Passing even more information.

Chris Badgett: And how about chain of thought reasoning, or is that a bigger advance from autocomplete or how do you, how would you describe it?

Cause obviously we want like the AI to be as good or smarter than,

Aaron Edwards: basically, like some people do

Tells it to think carefully, and how to think then it actually somehow does that internally before it gives an answer. So it’ll be like something like, all right, divide the problem into 10 steps for how you’ll solve it. And then think about if those are good steps for solving this particular problem.

And then as you generate the output, compare it to these like rules to see if that’s a good output, and it’s not like necessarily doing that internally. It’s just Telling it how to think makes it think better,

which

Aaron Edwards: is weird, right? It’s like those hacks like where people just start, Oh, if you say I’m going to get fired, if you don’t give a good answer, then it gives a better answer, these weird little quirks in the system that people like didn’t realize it’s a little bit like that.

So that’s what the chain of thought is you provide like a specific like prompt template like that, and then it. Can do a better job of more advanced like reasoning answers. And then what open AI did is they just released a new model called Oh one, if you’ve heard of that, and basically what they did is they baked in that chain of thought into the model.

So instead of having to prompt that each time, the model has actually been fine tuned with a whole bunch of examples of chain of thought. I don’t know, like really. Really advanced chain of thought prompt and then how and then the output of how it would develop that and then what the final output shown to the user should be and then they passed in whatever 100, 000 examples of that they had generated or compiled.

And use that to fine tune the model. So now it does that chain of thought internally, but on its own. So that gives you much more accurate, like things, especially if you’re wanting to do things like math or coding or it’s great if you’re trying to do something like, okay, this is. Here’s my guidelines of for how this entire like proposal should be laid out.

The outline and all the things and the logic and everything. Now here’s, I pasted in all the information, now I want you to compile that into this beautiful report. That’s 10 pages long, right? So instead of trying to just one shot that using that, Oh, one model, it’s actually does all that thinking behind the scenes and that means it’s slow because it’ll literally say, it’s like thinking about this.

Considering this, whatever, it can take five minutes sometimes for really advanced job you give it to you for it to do all that internal thinking before it spits out the final product. So it’s really cool, but it’s not like great for like customer support or chatbots to where you, you want to answer quickly.

But it is very good for things that require a lot of like complexity and thinking and reasoning to generate a good output.

Chris Badgett: And that five minutes may be like a year of human time, right? Let’s talk about something really to, for the course creator folks.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah,

Chris Badgett: there’s a lot, there’s courses and content, but there’s also coaching.

So let’s say somebody has been YouTubing on a given topic for years, or they’ve been podcasting on it for years or blogging about it, or they have a course library on their website. How could they use dark spot AI to. Answer questions, but also in more of a coaching context, so essentially a subject matter expert could turn their body of work into a like a digital mentor or coach.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, that’s actually a great idea. I really have been wanting to play around with use cases for LMS. Cause as you mentioned, I think that is really like cool way of doing it, different than just customer support or whatever, being able to chat with, or have that kind of conversation with the course content.

So there’s the one thing to where obviously it’d be like user initiated. It’d be really fun to play around with ways to have the chat bot initiate things. It’s not a

Chris Badgett: process of what’s your biggest challenge and

Aaron Edwards: right. Yeah. That kind of thing. And perform more like reasoning things, even generating like quizzes on the fly or something like that.

Would be cool.

Chris Badgett: Or even prescribing sometimes it’s a problem. It becomes a problem when you actually have too much content and then a student or a client comes in and they’re overwhelmed. So one of the things is just like helping people find the stuff that’s most related to their biggest.

Your challenge.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. And that we do very. Efficiently, as it is. But one of the cool things about DocSpot is you can embed it anywhere, we provide like a simple like chat widget that you can stick on your website, but we have a full featured API. So we have people like we have WordPress plugin authors that have it like built into the dashboard of the plugin.

That’s pretty cool. To where, yeah. So to where users can. Quickly, get a answer to a question about how to use the plugin and you can even pass in like custom metadata. So the chat bot can know, okay, what page it’s on, like what settings page or different things like that. Or you can pass in just random metadata, like, the, obviously the user’s name.

It can personalize responses or maybe like what plan they’re on, that kind of stuff, you know, the links to get to certain pages that are like to manage their account or manage their orders and WooCommerce or whatever it may be. You can pass all that in as metadata, as context to the chat, so that the bot is able to answer user questions, not just from your documentation, but from personalized metadata about the user and their state in your application.

So something like that would be really useful, like for Lifter LMS or whatever In courses. So it can know section of the course it’s on, like maybe what they’ve completed, different things like that, as well as being able to actually chat with the video content or chat with the course content and that kind of things.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: This concept of a AI tutor is a big deal. Khan Academy, that guy, I know he’s done some stuff with his body of work, but in the LMS space, we’re all chasing that AI tutor, which is. Ideally would be, could be proactive, not just reactive, like we talked about with coaching versus retrieval or reacting.

Yeah. We can’t do an AI, or sorry, go ahead. Did you have something else?

Aaron Edwards: No.

Chris Badgett: We can’t do an AI podcast without addressing like fear or concern with AI. Like, how do you think about the future? Are you worried about AI taking over? For me, it seems what happens when we, when AI becomes more intelligent than the smartest human, I would argue maybe that’s already happened.

Like, how do you think about the future, particularly with the rate of change?

Aaron Edwards: I’m not that old, but I feel like I’ve lived through at least three or four major technology waves where people said, this is going to destroy society or whatever it may be, take all our jobs, and I think the pattern has always been the same, like with new technology, new tools, it just makes us more efficient.

Obviously there’s, but just like any other tool, whether it’s technology, whether it’s a gun, whether it’s money, it just like accelerates people’s base tendencies, like for good or bad, things who use for good or bad For AI, obviously like the fear is, Oh, it’s going to like, obviously the fear is like replacing jobs.

And I’m torn on this because literally my business right now is like to help replace jobs, you have a support bot that can handle like 70 percent of your tickets granted, it’s probably like tier one, so those are the people that are going to get eliminated.

First, the ones with the lowest like capability or education or that kind of things if that happens. But also it makes lives a lot. Easier for the other workers, because they don’t have to answer those boring, repetitive questions or tasks or things like that.

Chris Badgett: And if you’re using it for pre sales, like you might actually start selling more product, which is going to require more support because people don’t have to wait to get an answer about.

Will this work for me? And that’s true.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Or other marketing use cases. Like I use my custom trained chat bot for when I get like a lead, like someone signs up, like gives them their email or whatever on the site. I actually have the chat bot go and read their website, their business website.

Oh,

Aaron Edwards: and then use that, pass it to, My train chat bot and say, okay, I want you to draft this like really bespoke custom email. That’s recommending all the specific ways my product can be used for their business. So it writes like a totally personally, way better than I ever could with an hour of research, right?

That’s giving them specific things like, Oh, here’s how you can use a chat bot for your carwash network,

Chris Badgett: yeah. Super contextual.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. So it allows like mass personalization. So I think it’s going to lock more things. I think just like other technology, it’s, I think for the most part is just going to be making users more efficient, making them able to achieve more.

I think obviously it will replace some jobs, but it creates new ones. Just like we’ve seen with every new technology. So I think instead of spending your time, like being scared, I think it’s a lot better to spend your time learning. Yeah. Playing the playground. Yeah. The way you succeed in this world of ours, and this has been true for a long time is learning how to learn.

So that means staying on top of whatever the latest technology or developments are playing with that, figuring out how to leverage that and use it in your workflows and your business, um, in your career, there’s that classic quote that your job might not be replaced by AI, but it’ll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI.

Yeah,

Aaron Edwards: and I love that quote because I think it’s very true, at least right now. Maybe someday we get to that point where, like the AI takes over everything and no one has to work anymore or something. I don’t know, I don’t really see that happening. And I think the same pattern is going to replay itself.

Like things get more efficient, new jobs that no one ever imagined, are created. So I’m a bit of an accelerationist in that. Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: Can you final thing prepare that demo where people can talk to the AI? And as Aaron’s getting that ready think about this idea that somebody could talk to your website just using voice potentially in languages.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, so this is very This is like my weekend project that I’ve been hacking together. But if you, I don’t know if you knew, but open AI just released their advanced voice mode, like both in chat, GPD plus, where you can play around with it. But last week they released an API for it. So you can actually have the real time, like conversations with AI.

And what makes this different than before is before you would have to you asked a question, it would have to first run it through a model to turn that audio into text, right? Then it would pass that text to chat, GBT, which would provide an answer in text. And then it would have to turn that text back into voice again.

latency there. Because you’re doing like three different conversions. And so like a lot of big gaps and things like that to make it just really not feel like a phone call or not feel like a real person. So their new real time API, which they just released. I was just playing with connecting that to DocSpot cause I want to create like voice agents so you can connect your phone number to it, or you can add a little widget like this that I have right here on your website.

To talk like to a human representative, human sounding representative. Obviously there’s a lot of UX things to solve. Right now there’s like a bit of a pause while it’s looking at data to answer a question, which I need to fill in those pauses, but I’ll give you a quick demo.

Hola, como puedo ayudarte hoy?

Aaron Edwards: Can you speak in

English? Absolutely. I can speak English. How can I assist you today? What kinds of questions can you answer? I can help with questions related to DocsBot testing, from features and troubleshooting to integration. Okay,

Aaron Edwards: I want to know about the pricing plans.

How about the hobby plan? How many pages does that come with?

The hobby plan for DocsBot includes up to 1, 000 source pages. If you need more detai

Aaron Edwards: Oh, that’s great.

Chris Badgett: Are you there? I’m

Aaron Edwards: here.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that was awesome.

Hello again. Regarding your question. Let me check if you can train your bot using YouTube videos. Give me a moment. Good news. You can indeed train your DocsBot using YouTube videos. This feature allows your chat bot to provide answers. Talk

Aaron Edwards: faster. It’s too slow.

You can definitely train your DocsBot using YouTube videos. This feature lets your chat bot. All right. Thank

Aaron Edwards: you.

Glad to help. If you have more questions, feel free to ask. So that’s

Aaron Edwards: A rough demo.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Thanks for giving us a glimpse into the future. It’s amazing, Aaron, what you’ve built over at Docspot AI.

So go check that out. If you’re listening to this episode, that’s docspot. ai. And how would you say Aaron was the best way for somebody to get started? They’ve listened to this episode. They’re excited. What should they do to we have

Aaron Edwards: a free plan. You don’t even need a credit card. So you can just.

Click the big, build your chat bot right now. And then you can super simply without even paying, like you can add in like URL to your site or a few different things. There’s obviously limits on how you can train your bot with the free plan, but if you need more than that, you want to try all the features.

We do have a money back guarantee. So we’ll give you 14 days to give it a try. And if it’s not good for you We’ll just give you a full refund. But for most people, it takes like less than five minutes to have a working chat bot for customer support or internal knowledge or whatever.

So it’s pretty magical.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Aaron. Thank you for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks. We’re going to have to catch up in another year and see what’s going on here. And the way the rate, this is accelerating. It might have to be before a year.

Aaron Edwards: No problem.

Chris Badgett: Super impressed.

And The way you innovate and play in the playground of technology and provide business tools is really inspiring. So thank you for coming. Thanks for coming back on the show.

All right.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Dustin Hartzler discusses creating a performance continuing education business. Dustin launched a firm focused on continuing education for functional medicine, which will be directed by Dustin’s wife, Melody.

Dustin specializes in starting and expanding continuing education companies, especially in the wellness and healthcare industries. He is from Your Website Engineer. He describes how he and Melody built Functional Medicine CE from the ground up, frequently experimenting with various formats to see which ones work best for their target audience.

In order to accommodate people with more demanding schedules, they first experimented with virtual live events such as symposia, which enabled pharmacists and other medical professionals to participate in real time. Later, they modified the content into on-demand courses.

Dustin highlights the value of community involvement in marketing in addition to the format of their classes. They also look at specialty marketing techniques like customized advertisements and professional LinkedIn communities.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Dustin Hartzler. I first found Dustin many years ago, probably a decade ago on his podcast, which is your website engineer. That’s at your website, engineer. com. I’ve seen Dustin around WordPress for a long time.

And recently I found out that his wife has a continuing education business. So I want to do a chat with Dustin today and talk about building that type of business, just story of how it all happened and what, how it all works it’s, as I look into the LifterLMS user community, some of the most successful platforms.

From a financial perspective, our continuing education projects. And so when I learned about this with Dustin, I wanted to chat with him about it, but first Dustin, welcome to the show.

Dustin Hartzler: All right. Thanks Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: So your wife, Melody has a business functional medicine, CE. com. CE stands for continuing education.

Frame us in on the niche here. What is. Functional medicine. And why do these people need CE or continuing education credits?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, for sure. And maybe I’m going to probably butcher exactly what it is. I’m just the tech guy here. But but my wife is a pharmacist and she is an entrepreneur and she has her, hand into lots of different things.

And so the functional medicine aspect side of things is basically doctors can practice functional medicine. Pharmacists can provide do functional medicine, nurse practitioners and whatnot, but functional medicine is addressing the root cause of any type of issue that you may be having. Like you could go to your doctor and say, Hey, my stomach hurts.

It consistently hurts when I eat these foods or anything along those lines. And a conventional doctor will say, Oh, you probably have I don’t know, IBS or like some sort of something. Here’s whoops. Here’s some medicine. Take that and your symptoms will go away. There are symptoms might go away, but they might crop up at different things.

There might be different avenues that, now something else hurts or, something along those lines, or maybe you’ve got heart medication. You have all these things. things. What my wife does and what she is teaching pharmacists to do is to look at the root cause. I think it’s really funny because all these pharmacists like went to school to prescribe and they verify prescriptions.

Like you would think that the first thing they want to do is say, Oh, we’ll take this prescription. This is what’s going to affect you. And it fixed you the best. But when you look at when, if you look at a customer or like a patient, at the, with the root cause of what might be ailing you. And then they do blood work and then they try to figure out, okay, it probably is this, or maybe you have a gluten intolerance and that’s what’s causing your stomach tissue.

So they’ll do some elimination diet and they’ll do some things along those lines. And so that’s what functional medicine is. And so my wife has a couple of different businesses. One is this continuing education, but the other one, there’s another piece where she’ll actually see patients virtually online.

And we came to the conclusion that there’s no real good education piece for pharmacists or doctors or whatnot to figure out how do I learn how to practice functional medicine? Like you can’t just go to Walgreens and start this. You can’t, like that’s not really a thing. And so my wife has been in doctor’s offices before and she has these longer appointments, like a patient appointment might be 90 minutes and she learns as much history as they can and then they’ll send it.

the stuff off for blood work or whatnot. But the whole premise came on. Nobody was offering this type of CE pharmacists named. I think it’s in Ohio. It’s different in every state. I think it’s 60 hours every five years for continuing education to keep your pharmacy license. And so that’s where the niche is.

It’s pharmacists or doctors or nurse practitioners that need continuing education, but they’re interested in functional medicine in learning how to do that more patient root cause approach. And so that’s How the site started.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And my dad’s actually a pharmacist and I’ve seen him do continuing education my whole life.

And I know there’s like different percentages. It probably varies by state on how much has to be in person versus online. Do you, what is it in your state? Do you know?

Dustin Hartzler: No, I do not. But I know that I think it’s based on live and on demand, I think is the way that we do it. So like we’ll have, we’re having a symposium, which is the first weekend, the first Saturday in November, which is seven hours of live CE.

And so via, even though it’s via zoom, if they’re logged in for the whole time, they get live CE credit. Otherwise they can log in and they can watch it later. And then they just basically we’ll watch the education and then they will take some sort of quiz or validation. And then they’ll get that CE approved based on the state that they live in.

So I don’t know the exact numbers. I just know that we as a company should be marketing more towards the end of the year. I think this is an idea that’s probably good. Hey, it’s. October 1st, we should probably send out a reminder Hey, you got three months, if you need some CE here, this is what we’re offering on our site.

And so there’s lots that you could do along that line. But yeah, there’s some sort of live versus on demand, but I don’t know what that is.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us a story of how this started. Like it’s one thing to be a pharmacist, but then how did Melody make the transition to becoming an educator?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, it, she actually started like right after she graduated, she did a residency at the VA in Columbus, but then like her first full time job was a pharmacy professor at a school of pharmacy. And so that’s where the. The education piece came in and so she taught students and then that was a rabbit hole of these millennials that are like, what’s going to be on the test and just tell me what’s on the test so I can study that.

And it’s she’s that’s not how pharmacy works, right? You have to learn it so that in case. That comes up someday you know how to treat your patients or whatnot. And then and then she moved into a clinic aspect. And then the clinics she was working for, like her and the doctor didn’t really see eye to eye very well.

Then it’s okay, like we’ve been doing the FX med thing for a few years and it’s okay, this might be a good time to jump, but this site started just because she saw nothing else in the space. I think it was two, we did a conference November of 2019. And this was before COVID, of course.

And it was, it was like our wildest dream, right? We hadn’t not much of a list. And she had, I think, six, four, four to six speakers or whatnot. She did maybe one of the sessions. And we sold the tickets we’re just like making this up as we go, right? Like, how much should CE cost?

Maybe 199. Let’s try 199. And we sold 80 to 90 tickets at 1. 99. You’re like that’s a pretty decent payday to do that. And then and it was all recorded via zoom. She has to, it’s a little different in the fact that she doesn’t teach everything on this site. She teaches maybe one session of the four or five.

Sometimes it’s two, sometimes it’s none, but she normally has to pay a pharmacist to do this. And it’s a thousand dollars or 2, 000 depending on what the pharmacist like will, they charge for their hourly time or whatnot. And then we record everything via zoom and then I make it look pretty and then load it into an LMS so that we can so people can see it on demand.

Then again, if our marketing funnels were, Proper, like we should be making money in sales like daily on this. That’s not really the case right this second. We do more, I think people are more engaged in live details and Hey, this is a live thing. We’re going to do a Q and a after each session.

And people, I think enjoy that more, but every once in a while, it surprises us that someone will come in and Oh, I’ll just buy the annual pass and I’ll get all of the CE and that’s five 49 for the year or whatnot. And so it’s a good Hey, we don’t have to do any more work. It’s all there.

But yeah, so that’s the general gist of how this started. And so we’ve done. Two to three conferences every year since 2019. We did see a big drop after COVID shut everything down. Like more people were doing things online, but it seemed like it, less people were coming to our online events.

I think sometimes it’s scheduling we’re like, Oh, this works well for us, but may is a very busy time. So all the graduations and stuff. We’re like, okay, maybe not may, or, this is around too close to Thanksgiving. And so there’s just different things As an entrepreneur, we’re just, just trying to figure it out.

We did do a course on a cruise boat this year which was pretty cool. That was a dream of my wife. Like, how can we do a tax deductible trip like that? So we went to Seattle and then did an Alaskan cruise. And when the cruise was on, like when we were out at sea, Which was like two and a half days.

They would have CE conference, like just at the back of the boat, they could see the icebergs and stuff out the back of the boat, which was really cool. Then I’m working on getting all those videos updated and sent out. And then that might actually be a, like kind of a live in. live cohort type class.

And we might try to do this year to Hey, if you need 14 hours of CE before the end of the year, watch two videos a week, and then we’ll have a live like Q and A at the end of it. So we’re still trying to kick around that idea. But again, like the whole entrepreneur space is just this work, will it not like, let’s see, let’s give it a try.

Chris Badgett: You definitely hit demand with those first 80 people for the ILT or instructor led virtual training. That’s awesome. Quick side note. Did your cruise ship stop in Juneau, Alaska?

Dustin Hartzler: It did.

Chris Badgett: I used to, I lived there for eight years. I used to run sled dogs on a glacier up there as part of a tour business thing.

But that’s cool. I love that idea.

Dustin Hartzler: Absolutely. I think we had, I think there was 19 people that came with us. And Is that huge? No. Would we rather have a hundred maybe, but it was a cool, like intimate group. And we kept seeing those people all across the boat too.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a cruise before, but it seems like whoever you see when you’re getting on the boat, you’ll see them a hundred times throughout the cruise or Hey, we’re having in this group. So we always saw those people all over the place, which was really cool.

And then some of them had kids there that were our kids age. And so they would hang out and do stuff like on the boat while the moms were like doing the CE. So that was cool.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And I just want to double click on that idea that you can do live virtual and create a on demand back catalog of training content.

You can do both. That’s really cool. I think some people get focused on one or the other, but you’re doing the best of both worlds simultaneously, which is cool.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, it’s cool.

Chris Badgett: How does functional medicine CE get clients? Like, how’d you get those first 80 people?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think we originally, we started out, we used somebody on Facebook for a while, like that was able to, generate some leads there, paid for advertising, those people are like so expensive.

It’s like our monthly fee is 1, 500 and we recommend you spend 1, 500 on ads. You’re like, Really? And that’s not really like the best use of our time and money. And then it’s slowly grown. I think my wife finds that sometimes like just being in different Facebook groups, there’s like a functional medicine pharmacist, mom’s group or something, or just even pharmacist moms.

And she’s in there and just, just commenting and just people finding her that way. I think that, so we did that. We did some LinkedIn advertising. We think that LinkedIn is a little bit better for this audience because more professionals are on LinkedIn. I think I’m a kind of a professional, but I never use LinkedIn.

So I don’t know if that’s really a thing. I think the hardest part is like you spend money, but it’s did they really get it from there or did they see the ads and get emails from us? And then, I don’t know, like you don’t really ever know, was our ads been worth it or not? And then recently it’s we’ve been partnering with some supplement companies and some bigger name type things.

So they’ll pay us to do like some of their content for the year. And then. As part of their contribution, they get two webinars, one or two, depending on like their level. Then they will market to their audience, this free webinar. We market to our audience for free webinar. And so then sometimes we’ll have, a webinar will happen and we’ll have 400 people registered and then there’ll be added to our email list or whatnot.

So those are some of the things that we feel that are working, but again, like I don’t know. Is it really working? Is it not? So I think that’s I don’t know how those, where those first 80 people came from. Like I think it was just I think there was some Facebook marketing involved.

There was, for a while we were offering a free signup on our site or, people might be just searching for functional medicine CE or, like that’s the name like is exactly what the URL is. So that is helpful. I think two, we were on a podcast. A friend of ours went to college that we went to college with has a, they call it your financial pharmacist.

And so they do like financial stuff for pharmacists and talk about like student loans and student loan forgiveness and stuff like that. Like we talked about the business on there. And so that was a very targeted audience. And so that might’ve been where some of the people came from, but we try to do as much like free stuff as we can.

Chris Badgett: Is there, when you say free stuff, you mean like content marketing or

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Badgett: So what kind of free stuff?

Dustin Hartzler: So it’s like getting on those podcasts or I’m doing free webinars for different people. Or, do you have sometimes it’s even like creating an event on Facebook. I think that sometimes gets people to come and then Oh, we’re going to, they were, I think they were doing like Instagram or Facebook lives for a little bit like, Hey, we’re having this conference in two weeks.

This is the stuff that we’re going to do. Here’s some of the things that you’ll learn during this conference and whatnot. So those are some things I feel like as a, it’s just, husband and wife duo. And then my wife has a couple of pharmacists that help write some content and write some newsletters and whatnot.

And it’s we’re way overstretched. Like we should be able to like, if we had somebody that could come up with, here’s our strategy for the year. Here’s like how we’re going to advertise or here’s how we’re going to market. Here’s going to be our content marketing strategy. I feel like we could do a lot better.

But then also it’s this is only like a third of all the things that she’s doing. And so it’s should we just put our blinders on and just really focus or what does that look like? But I think she’s so passionate about so many different things, like helping pharmacists, more pharmacists doing this is better, for the world, or for patients.

But then also it’s she also wants to see patients so she can have those Hey, we taught this person this and now they are, they’re feeling so much better. They don’t have to take this medicine or like we reversed IBS or, like not that’s really a thing, but like lifestyle modification is a big Passion of hers.

And so she dips her toe into a lot of different aspects there.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk geography. I know some continuing education stuff is on a state by state basis. You mentioned you’re from Ohio. Are you guys doing the whole us? Is there any international action? What geography are you serving?

Dustin Hartzler: So we can, anybody can listen to the content, but you only, Can be redeemed in the U. S. States and all 50. Yeah, exactly. I don’t think there’s any limitations based on the C. E. Companies are licensed to do to validate. So basically what happens is like we have this conference coming up in November. My wife had to come up with an outline.

Here’s the sessions. Here’s the things we’re going to talk about. Let’s put bullet points to each, here are the key learning objectives. And then they, she submits that to a professional CE company and then they can say, yes, we approve all of these things we will authorize. And then then when somebody goes through all the content, then they can submit their CE and then it’s registered.

So I think as a pharmacist, you can have a few different logins to collect all of your stuff. I don’t know how all the reporting and the dashboards, I basically like inside of our LMS, we’ll take the. Take the details. Here’s what you need to do to submit CE and then open it in a new tab and they have to fill it out themselves.

So there’s no like certification that we do. We just partner up with a company who’s, they do that full time.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Where do you see like, where do you want to go with this from here?

Dustin Hartzler: Up into the right. Is that the right terminology? Yeah, I think, I think we, like I said earlier, I think it would be great to have multiple sales a day without us doing anything continuing that, just building that brand awareness or whatnot, or like even working on the, what does the funnel look like as customers come in? Okay. They signed up for an email list and now they’ll get emails, but there’s no like really onboarding flow or like, how do we promote and how do we like how do we like sell the next course?

Somebody comes and they buy something for November and we’re going to have a conference next year. Like, how do we get them engaged in? We do have a handful of customers that pretty much anything that we bring out, like they will buy, they’re one of the first customers and that’s a very loyal following.

But I think the, the weird part is, and we’ve talked about like the, Oh, some of the LMS is, or some of the E learning platforms are like, you could buy a subscription for 200 and then, you get all access to all the content to do all the things. And it’s that doesn’t quite work in what we’re doing just because we have to pay for every CE that’s redeemed.

Like we have to pay for that. So if everybody was getting all the CE, like that gets to be a little costly on our side. So we’ve jumped around different ideas there, but it would be great to have a You know something that’s very recurring and very regular on a month to month basis versus oh, We made four sales this month or oh, we made 400 sales this month Like it being more consistent in and that’s where we’re thinking I don’t know thinking is the right word but just working with these big internet partners and showing that hey There is value in this list that we have I forget if we have It’s probably under a thousand people that have purchased any one thing but if all a thousand people bought everything we offered, like that would be pretty good, right?

Like that would be, an amazing thing. But I don’t know. I feel like we sometimes like just are like, what’s the next thing? I was telling you earlier, it’s I’m just fixing this site for a conference that’s happening in 30 days. This should have probably been done three months ago.

So we could have had a three month push of here’s all the, like here’s how we could promote this upcoming conference or whatnot. So again, I don’t know. It’s a full time job. And like for me and she’s doing all these things and kids and stuff, it’s just we can’t put the full effort that we really want to on this site.

Chris Badgett: How much of the audience or customers come back? Cause there’s recurring in the fact that they need to get this every year, every two or whatever. How does, cause that’s a snowball that can build over time.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, exactly. I would say, I haven’t really looked at the numbers, but maybe 20 percent of customers have bought multiple things, but it’s not a, so we’ve been doing it, Since 2019, say we’ll call it five years, probably two per, so that’s, there’s probably 15 old, 15 whole things that we’ve done.

And I don’t think anybody, but maybe a handful of people have done more than four or five. So there’s some and maybe it’s the topic too. Like some people aren’t interested. Like we had one on men’s health and we had one on women’s health. And this next one is about lab testing. My wife thinks this one is going to be a really big one just because so many people need to know.

The lab part of things. And that’s where you get a lot of information, just getting blood work and getting those results back in. So if anybody’s listening, that is also a WordPress creator and and a functional medicine pharmacist you can find out more, but but yeah, so that’s the, that’s the thought process about like where we go as a business and whatnot,

Chris Badgett: can you talk about, speaking of being spread thin, you mentioned bringing in other subject matter experts to teach. It sounds like maybe the majority of the content you mentioned they get paid, but how does that relationship work? Or how did you develop? Cause it can be overwhelming, all the stuff to create this kind of business and getting help with the educational content is a big thing.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So how did that come together? So now all these people contribute.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think that was some of the relationships she’s formed at some of these different conferences that she’s went to. There’s like a I4M I think is the Institute of Functional Medicine. So there’s lots of educators there that she’s reached out to, but one of them that’s coming for this conference is like one of the sponsors.

And so one of the things that she put in her sponsorship agreement is you’ll pay us this many dollars plus provide a speaker for this session. So that’s like a, Company got to pick who would be the best representation for them. Or she might find out that, Oh, this person is really good with hormone replacement therapy.

Like we’re going to talk about hormones. Let’s reach out to her or Oh, this person is world renowned in gut health or whatnot. And so it’s a lot of times like you find the person and then you like. Say, Hey, are you available this day? Or would you be interested? And then they talk about the price.

And I think it’s anywhere between a thousand and 2, 000. Like we pay these educators because their time is valuable, right? Like they have to spend time if they’re a doctor, like not only do they have to practice, but they have to come up with slides and they have to, meet the learning objectives and then they have to.

The slides have to be done like a few weeks in advance so we can look at them and make sure that are all okay. And I think the first or second one, like my wife did maybe two or three of the sessions, and she was just like completely dead because she has to do all like the back end paperwork and get all the stuff ready and then Promoted and all that kind of stuff.

And sometimes she’s Oh, this one’s going to be really easy because I don’t have to promote and present anything. I just have to get to sit in, I get to learn. And so that’s a valuable piece too. So she gets to learn and she gets educated. And so it’s the best of both worlds that we’re paying for all these people to get education by this specific person, but then she also will learn and she can add that to her tool bag of like things that she knows or how she can practice and whatnot.

Chris Badgett: So Dustin, you’re a podcaster. I remember listening to one of your episodes a long time ago that as a non developer, I’m like, finally, I understand what the database does and how that works and stuff. So just a question related to functional medicine CE, does Melody have a podcast for the niche? Or have you thought about that?

You’re like pro podcaster.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. So her other business is it’s called farm to table farm to table dot life, and there’s a podcast over there. And so that one is talking about social interview, some of her team. So that business is pharmacists are basically like, they can only practice in the state that they are licensed in.

This education piece, like you can teach for, for anywhere, but Actually do patient care. You have to be licensed in different states. So on that side of her business, she has 40, some like 1099 employees. And then, so she’ll have like conversations with them. They call it the table talk. And so it’s basically like people sitting around the table, talking about different health things or like stress or meditation or movement or things like that.

And we’ve done it that way because we feel like patients are more likely to want to learn more about fixing their gut health or fixing their, learning more along those lines, but we haven’t done it for this business per se, mainly because the podcast editor in this household, which is also me, is way behind on that podcast and my podcast per se.

But but yeah, there’s always ideas and I don’t know If that would be a really, that could be a good free content marketing strategy too, to do podcasts or even should we do like a 30 minute snip of here’s this course. And then that would be probably pretty easy.

Like here’s the first, 30 minutes of this lecture that you could get for free and then you can buy it for the rest of it. So that could be a strategy too. Wow. Yeah. There’s just never enough time for all the ideas. And so

Chris Badgett: repurposing existing content to like, Hey, get the full thing and get credit.

That’s cool. That another way to reuse it. Yeah, I think,

Dustin Hartzler: I think the hard part for me is I’m not the, I’m not the pharmacist. And so I don’t know what’s most important. So like I would have to have somebody help me like, Hey, of this hour long session, and I do use the script. So like I could plug it into the script and give the URL to somebody and say, Hey, tell me what time codes are best to put in a podcast.

And then we could put a little intro and an outro and then go from there. And so that could be, and. That’s a really good idea that we just generated on the fly. And maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll set that up during my sabbatical coming up.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Nice. What year did you start your podcast?

Dustin Hartzler: Your wordpressengineer. com. It’s actually your website engineer. We don’t want to mess with the trademark dealio. That’s going on. I funny story though, it was like in 2010 when I started, I submitted to 99 Designs and I said, my name is your website or your WordPress engineer and or the WordPress engineer, or something like that.

And luckily somebody on Upwork, or it wasn’t Upwork, it was 99 Design, said, Hey, that’s a trademark infringement. You cannot use that in A URL. And so I switched and I pivoted, and this. In what we’re talking about in WordPress these days. But I switched to your website engineer. That was when I started freelancing.

That was December of 2010, I think is when my first episode came out. And I was very consistent up until about 500 ish. There was some gaps in there close as I got closer to 500. And then the last couple of years has been a dumpster fire with my content creation strategies, just because there’s so much more I felt like at the time it was a really good way for me to get clients because they’re like, I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t want to do it.

And then also that was my contribution back to WordPress. It’s I’m not gonna I’m not gonna be able to fix code or, contribute to core, but I can spend some time like giving free education. And so that’s that’s where my spin was. And I love doing it. I still enjoy doing it.

I still like Just don’t have the bandwidth as much as I’d like to. And so I did commit officially unofficially on my show that I’m going to come back. I do have a, I mentioned I have a sabbatical coming up and part of my sabbatical is switching all my themes from old school storefront to like new block themes.

And I want to report back of Here are some gotchas or here’s some things to think about. Or like you might not remember, think through these things when you’re making that type of transition. So I might have some time, but it’s really hard to justify Hey, this is me, like spending two hours a week creating free content, but like I could spend two hours a week Tweaking and optimizing different workflows for something that it might actually generate monies.

But I still enjoy podcasting and I enjoy like the WordPress space. Of course, I’ve been to the last, I think six WordCamp U. S. and just being able to hang out with people in person and like chat and learn how they’re using WordPress and whatnot has been really cool and exciting for me.

Chris Badgett: You and I are obviously big fans of the podcasting medium, and it’s, I find people find their content personality type, whether that’s YouTube, podcasting, writing, social media, like people have their different flavors that resonate the most with them.

But how have you as a podcaster benefited the most? Focusing on that medium and being consistent and creating all this content.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. I think that, I think creating podcasts is the easiest person.

Chris Badgett: Once you’re set up, once you’re set up

Dustin Hartzler: and you’ve got the gear and whatnot. And I was, My show was anywhere between 15 and 22 ish minutes is what I was shooting for.

And I was trying to get it done in 90 minutes. That was really my, if I could prepare, I could record and I could edit and get it out in 90 minutes. Like I felt like that was good. And you write a

Chris Badgett: high quality blog post in 90 minutes, right? Yeah, exactly.

Dustin Hartzler: And if you get really good, after maybe the first hundred episodes, there’s not a lot of editing.

editing. I even got to the point where my edits were like, Hey I’m talking about the news or I’m talking about this plugin that I want to share. I just flubbed up. And I was like, yeah, I’m just going to restart the whole section over again, instead of like me having to go back and listen. Descript makes it really easy these days where you can see the exact words that you’re talking.

You’re like, Oh, I can see, let me just remove that. That’s pretty simple. But like back in the day, it’s I don’t want to have to just say Oh, the first announcement was good and now I have to go to the second one. I had to find that. And that way I could just like chop whole sections of the show out.

Then that made it a lot easier to like edit. And a lot of times I didn’t even edit, you get very comfortable with not saying or the, like stuttering around or whatnot, and then you can get it out faster. I felt like that was always good. I always felt too, that.

If you wanted to create a high quality blog post, especially in WordPress, you needed either some sort of like video or you needed some sort of Oh, I need these nine screenshots to really emphasize what I’m talking about. Then you’re like these screenshots are going to be outdated. And then it’s like now the whole thing’s, the audio medium is really good. The fact that yes, the content sometimes gets outdated, like you don’t visually see that as much. I just felt like that was the easiest way for me to get in. I loved listening to podcasts. And I, when I first got out of college, I got a iPod, like video, a video iPod with the wheel that I could download podcasts because I had an hour commute each way and I was like, okay, let’s start listening to podcasts.

And so I’d listen to those through my like tape deck. Converter type dealio. And I was like, this would be really cool to start someday. And so then I did and I was like, Oh, this is really, it’s a fun thing to if you put time and effort into meeting people, like doing videos like this is really cool.

Or sometimes it’s like I just don’t have the time to coordinate all of those things. And so that’s why I went to a solo show for probably the last 300 we’re all solo shows because it’s I don’t have time to coordinate and like with kids schedules and whatnot. And I think now I’m to the point where my day is really like pretty open.

The kids are at school all day. And then I have meetings at work, but I can set up like Calendly and get those all around there and whatnot. So I think that it’s a good medium and it’s a one that you don’t have to prep for as much, like you can make show notes in 15 minutes about the things you want to talk about and then you can just riff on them.

So that’s where I found like the most benefit for me was the easiest. And I felt since I’m a. Podcasts consumer, like I feel like I could take bits and pieces from a lot of podcasts and then turn them into my own.

Chris Badgett: Nice. That’s just almost said Justin, Dustin Hartzler. Go check out functionalmedicinece.

com. It’s a great example of continuing education. And check out the podcast, your website, engineer. com. Dustin, thank you for coming on the show and thank you for being a shining example. And with your wife, Melody being an education entrepreneur, you’ve got to wear a lot of hats and it’s amazing what you guys have done.

And I know it’s like intense and busy, but I’m so glad that you found product market fit and yet that launch. The initial launch, you got 80 people and have just continued to iterate, test things out. That’s really a cool thing. And it’s great that you can do that with your wife.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. I think it’s super fun.

And for me, like it also gets that, Hey, how can I best use WordPress to make it easy for the people that are managing the site? And so there’s some cool things like, Hey, we should probably instead of doing it this way, maybe we should use some. Post meta field, create some custom boxes so they can just put the information in and then I can use a template and then pull that information in properly or whatnot.

So there’s lots of cool overlap. And so I don’t have to be the knowledge worker and I don’t have to know everything about the CE and whatnot. And I just, here’s what we want. Here’s what we’re going to try. And I get to do that as the tech guy. So it’s super fun. There’s no like conflict with my day job and there’s no Yeah.

What do I want to say? There’s no limits like and there’s nobody saying Hey, this isn’t the right path. Or, if you work on a team and you get to develop a feature and they’re like, no, do it this way, do it this way, do it this way. Like now there’s no one like that. So I can just tinker and play.

And there’s always room for improvement. I think that’s maybe one of the. The best examples of I know we connected over Lifter LMS because like I was, I originally started this with a custom post type and I was going to customize like each of these things, like each course was in its own thing.

And then I moved to LearnDash and then I’ve done Sensei and I’ve looked at Lifter and I’ve, I’m like, I think Lifter is where I want to be. And so like there, it’s never static, right? There’s always things that be improved and changed. And as WordPress continues to develop or, the different plugins and stuff, I think that is really the neat thing.

Working at automatic, like the. The first line in our creed says I’ll never stop learning. And so I think that’s really cool. Oh this thing, new thing is out here with WordPress 6. 7 and I have 550 podcasts that I’d like to implement it. So I’ve got to go in and have to redo all of my posts.

There’s all kinds of things that you could always do and always be improving. And so I think that’s one of the cool things about WordPress. It’s a cool thing about having an e learning platform that just experiment and try and, Do surveys to your customers and figure out do they find it valuable?

Do they not? What are they looking to learn things along those lines? And once you slowly grow a list, like you’ll have people that will give you feedback and so yeah, it’s been super cool. It’s been a cool adventure and I’m excited to keep it going up into the right and maybe someday we’ll be wildly successful and we won’t have to do anything, but just crank out CE content and instead of the beach all day.

That might be a little while.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And it’s cool that functional medicine is about helping people improve their lives so that I’m sure that gives a sense of purpose and mission and all that stuff too. So it all comes together. Dustin, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Wish you and your wife all the best success.

Dustin Hartzler: Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Kurt Von Ahnen discuss LifterLMS’s Black Friday and Cyber monday deals, which runs throughout November and ends on Cyber Monday, December 2nd.

This year, LifterLMS is offering an exclusive 60% discount. By using the coupon code: BLACKFRIDAY24 you can enjoy an extraordinary 60% off LifterLMS products.

The LifterLMS Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal will go live on November 1, 2024, on the Black Friday landing page: LifterLMS Black Friday.

Additionally, there will be a lifetime discount of 70% on Cyber Monday on the Infinity Bundle. This lifetime offer will only be available on December 2, with a price of just $3,000, including bonuses. The bonuses include essential YouTube and marketing courses. These resources equip prospective course developers with the tools they need to successfully connect with their audience.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a repeat guest. His name is Kurt Von Annen from Manana Nomas. Kurt is a LifterLMS expert. He also does work at LifterLMS itself. Today, we’re going to have an interesting discussion about what’s going on this time of year, but first Kurt, welcome back on the show.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, thanks Chris. It’s great to be here, man. It’s always good to talk to you.

Chris Badgett: Let’s go ahead.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You go, I was just going to say. You wanted to get together. You invite me on the show. It’s awesome. And every time this time of year rolls around, it’s always interesting to see what we’re going to do this year.

People would say, why have black Friday deals? Why have sales? We all know people expect it. And so a Lifter LMS has always risen to the occasion. And I don’t think this year anybody’s going to be disappointed. I want to Just let’s just get it out of the way, man. Say it up front.

Like what is the black Friday deal this year? Some people have already taken advantage of it as the month already started but overall for people that don’t know yet, what’s the deal?

Chris Badgett: The deal is for black Friday at lifter LMS. And we do things a little differently. We like to remove the urgency and all that stuff.

So we actually do a black Friday sale for all of November. And this year, and typically that runs through cyber Monday this year, black or cyber Monday is actually on Monday, December 2nd. So the sale runs from November 1st through December 2nd. And the deal this year is the biggest discount we’ve ever done, which is 60 percent off of LFTR LMS.

You just have to use the coupon code black Friday, 24 at checkout. And you can go to Lifter LMS. com forward slash black dash Friday, and you’ll see all the deal details. Anybody who makes a purchase is going to get access to the bonus pack, which is 2, 000 worth of bonuses. If you purchase between November 1st and December 2nd, and we’ll go over what those are in a little bit.

And the cherry on top, the last part of the deal. Is something we do exclusively on Cyber Monday only, which is. A lifetime deal promotion. So at Lifter LMS, we offer a lifetime deal for the Infinity Bundle, which is the everything bundle. It’s everything Lifter, LMS makes. It’s for unlimited websites, and we’re doing that at 70% off.

So go check that out. That’s for three K $3,000. You can get your lifetime deal for everything. Lifter LMS makes unlimited sites. And that one is only available cyber Monday only. So if you’re thinking about that you want to mark your calendar for December 2nd, cause it’s only going to be available on that day.

And if you’re already a customer, by the way, whether you want to take advantage of the regular black Friday offer, let’s say, and get the universe bundle or get the infinity bundle on the annual subscription we can prorate and discount the value of your current license. You just have to send an email to team at Lifter LMS.

com. We’ll hook you up with a special coupon code so that you can get. Prorated for the value of your current license and also get the discount on either the regular Black Friday deal or the 70 percent off on the lifetime deal in addition to your proration. But that is a deal this year. You’ll see links to all this stuff on the Lifter LMS website on the pricing page.

And LifterLMS. com forward slash black dash Friday. All the info is there.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’m having like flashbacks because I remember and people that know me probably think I’m a very grounded person that makes really good decisions. Wink. But I’m pretty sure. I did a black Friday deal almost like nine years ago.

It’s either eight or nine years ago when I signed on with Lyft or LMS, you’ll have to look up my order and see how old I am. But I signed up and I got the bundle, the extra things. Those have an incredible value that I don’t think enough people really leverage, as someone that does the weekly office hours call we do the ask me anything calls, I don’t know of any other software company that.

Does live support like live group support in a mastermind kind of situation, has the support tickets has social support like through Facebook pages. As a customer, when I first came to LifterLMS, I remember just thinking anything I need to know is in the knowledge base. Like anything that I tried, any kind of obstacle I ran into, I want to do this.

I want to do that, I want to connect this thing. I want to do that thing. There was something in the knowledge base that kind of put me in the right direction. Back when I was using crappy themes, I didn’t have sidebars working. I was frustrated for a little while, but the information was in the knowledge base those extra goodies that come, right?

So you’ve got marketing one on one for course creators. That’s a course, right? Yeah. And then you’ve got what the, something about YouTube traffic systems. Yeah. So the YouTube, go ahead. That’s another course, right? Yeah. All right. Between those two things, do you think, and just put it out there, someone’s new, they’re like, I don’t know if I want to be a course creator.

It looks really hard. Some guy parked next to a Lamborghini on Facebook said I should have my own online course somewhere. And then they go, okay, I’m going to do it. I personally think the marketing one on one course and the YouTube training course, I think that’s enough background information in combination with Lister LMS.

To launch a course creator initiative.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. If, and if I can just pick one, if you want to get excited about one of the bonuses you get, if you purchase during the sale, all of November and the first two days of December, it would be the YouTube traffic system because. It’s one thing to build a course as a subject matter expert, but if you don’t have a way to get leads and build an audience and get people over to your website, the YouTube traffic system breaks it down exactly how to do that without becoming a full time YouTuber.

It teaches you the principles, the strategies, and the tactics to make four, just four strategic YouTube videos. That if you make those for your target audience and put them for free on YouTube and have proper call to action and linking to your course or your website or your contact form or whatever.

It’s going to set you up for some automated free marketing and traffic growth to your website. If I could do one marketing strategy as a course creator, it would be the YouTube traffic system.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Awesome. Awesome. Now the other one that I’m partial to that I see value in, and it’s, I think it’s another one of these unsung heroes.

I’m an agency. I work with a lot of other course creators trying to make their product. So you’re constantly dealing with different serial entrepreneurs that they’re out there. Let’s just face facts. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably a bubble off, right? You’re not like mainstream society.

And so your communication bullet points are all over the spectrum. And I’ve noticed. People lean into their strengths and try to ignore their weaknesses and they come at a, they come at a project in a way that leaves them really vulnerable to certain gaps. And you have that online education company startup checklist.

And that to me is, that is gold for someone getting started. Because you might be really focused on really cool graphics or really focused on integrations or really focused on video or whatever it is. And there’s going to be something in that checklist. That’s going to be a gold nugget for you. That’s going to go, Oh crap.

I didn’t think about that. And then you make sure you fill your gaps and then you launch as a fully, empowered, ready to go entity, ready to do something.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The startup checklist was born out of, my 15 years of being an entrepreneur and seeing a lot of pain and working with a lot of clients of.

Maybe they’re down the road or they’re getting in the weeds on this thing, but, oh, we haven’t even set up banking for the business or we haven’t really structured our website and our domain name and thought about email and all these like key things that if you don’t. Do in the beginning, just create a world of pain.

So even though this is not like a huge thing, it’s not a big time investment, but if you go through the checklist and make sure you check all these off, your future self will thank you later for building a online education business that you got these things done correctly in the beginning.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Now something that some people might think is like an also ran category but you give it away as part of these bonuses is.

And I dismissed him at the beginning as well. But then it’s amazing. Cause at the end of the project, these things bubble to the top and you’re like, Oh, I wish I had that. And you have it. That’s the you’ve got the graphic set for certificates, but also for the achievements. Now I’m not a. By nature, I’m not a gamification person.

So when I created my first few projects, I didn’t even think about gamification. I was like achievement badges. Who needs it? You got the, you came here to learn something. You learned it move on. But as it turns out, as I grew in my. e learning career, I came to realize that not everybody’s wired that way.

People aren’t just motivated by the information alone. They still, some people still require that dopamine hit of I accomplished something, I got a badge and it’s pretty cool that you’re able to provide that for people so that they don’t have to overthink it or burden themselves with it in development.

Chris Badgett: A hundred percent. And if you’re not a graphic designer, It’s great just to have a, a catalog of graphic assets that you can use. The achievement badges are great. Those are like pop up graphics that you can have when people complete lessons, sections, or courses, and that can add gamification.

And even if your subject matter is serious you can still incorporate these things and it does provide a little reward dopamine hit for the learner. The whole idea of achievement badges, this is a United States reference, but there’s something we have called the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, and they have this like sash they wear, or their shirt, and they have all the badges of all the things they’ve accomplished, and they’re pretty proud to show that off, and when they learn a new skill, they get the badge.

But if I could offer one, just one, I would say take a second look at certification if you haven’t thought about it. Some of the most financially successful LFTRA LMS websites are where people are selling continuing education or some kind of certification that allows their learners to either get a job or keep their job and So you can add certificates and even if you’re not in that direct use case having a certificate of accomplishment Is nice to have, even if it’s like a fitness program or a cooking class or whatever, it adds a little bit of that gamification.

It gives somebody something they may even print it out and hang it on their wall and stuff like that, or share it on social media and help get you more customers. So check that out. And then I also just wanted to mention the bonus office hours mastermind event we’re running. That’s something. That you get no matter what level you purchase that by default, you get that.

If you have the universe bundle or infinity bundle or higher, which is the lifetime infinity, but even if you just purchase one add on for LFTR LMS at a 60 percent discount, you’re going to get access to one of those calls so that you can get your questions answered live. In a group format with other great people trying to do similar things as you.

And it’s just a super valuable resource to get direct help. So that’s something else you’re going to get in the bonuses.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. In my almost a decade of playing in the masterminds and stuff, it’s amazing. How much more quickly you can develop as a professional. It’s that, iron sharpens iron thing, right?

It’s not just lifter people in there. And it’s there’s a group of people and you get ideas and feedback from multiple people, which is a really great setup.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So can we switch gears? So first off, we could talk about deals in general and why even having deals is important. We hit on the people expect it.

But I’m really curious why we do the lifetime deal with Lifter LMS.

Chris Badgett: So the reason we do a lifetime deal and by the way, I always said I was never going to offer one Because the reasons for not offering them are it can be helpful in the beginning of a company when you’re just trying to get new users and get started But when I started thinking about lifetime deals, oh, it’s really too late and technically from a financial standpoint It hurts the value of your company to have people that are receiving ongoing benefits that aren’t You Paying on a recurring basis.

But at the end of the day people have been asked about it forever. So we decided to offer it cause Hey, that’s what the people want. And I’m in the business of giving people what they want and helping people. And I don’t have plans to sell Lifter LMS. So honestly, I don’t really care about the valuation.

I’m here to help people. And even if, providing lifetime deals, quote, hurts the valuation of the company, we have no intention to sell. Why not? People are asking for it. They want it. They want the unlimited sites they believe, and they know that their platform is going to be here to stay for years, if not decades.

So why not invest upfront cap? That expense is what it is. And then you’re good to go with lifetime access to the tools and the support. So people want it. We offered it in order for us to offer it. It does cost us money to support people, improve the software, maintain the software, keep it secure and everything.

So it is of a higher price. But for Cyber Monday only, we wanted to make it as accessible as we possibly could to the most possible people. So a lot of people who are on the fence are thinking about getting a lifetime deal, Cyber Monday for our one day, super big discount, lifetime deals sale, it’s really the time to get it.

If you’re looking to get in and get it for the best price. Now,

Kurt Von Ahnen: I want to touch on this because I am a sucker for a lifetime deal.

Chris Badgett: We all are. I have lifetime deals. Like it makes sense. If you’re going to use a tool for a long time and the price is right, go for it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And here’s what I’ve noticed.

I’ve noticed that a lot of lifetime deals that I’ve got from a certain AppSumo kind of company sometimes You buy the lifetime deal and it just shrivels up or it’s not feature packed or it’s not what you expected. But I just want to hit, I just want to hit it square on the head for people.

Like maybe people are thinking are they going to fade? Are they going to go away? Are they going to this, going to that? And I think just looking at the last. Year to 18 months with LFTR LMS, it would be anything, but things have, I think things have ramped up. Maybe I’m maybe my perspective is skewed cause I work with you guys, but I know that we’ve got a new version of groups coming.

I know I’m getting really great feedback from that new feature notes. How long did notes come out, Chris?

Chris Badgett: It’s been several months at this point.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, but not years, right? It’s a few months. Favorites, the idea that users favorite and read a heart over a lesson and then other students can read a heart and then that’s just really cool.

It’s an interactive feature with favorites around all the lessons. One that I haven’t used much, but I’ve heard great things about is advanced coupons. And that’s only six months.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. About

Kurt Von Ahnen: that. Yeah. About six months old there. And I think one of the most recent things is a thing that we’re calling instant courses.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Courses that you can suck into your website, import them in, and you can do whatever you want with them. They’re real courses. You can add your videos, you can resell them, you can modify them. Yeah you’re right, Kurt. The pace of. Development, not just of making new features and new add ons is increasing, but also improving what we already have, listening to user feedback.

I got to give props to the lifter on this team. That’s really working hard and developing all these things. Cause you’re right. It is accelerating, which is one of the reasons to get a lifetime deal. Because if you like the pace of things and you like seeing the trend we’re on, you can lock it in and ride that train forever without having to have an annual subscription.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. I, some people, sometimes I find the lifetime deals offered too early. In the journey for some folks. But in Lyft LMS’s case I, when you finally offered the lifetime deal, I was like, it was a mature enough product already, and then it’s just continued to mature and the customer base has continued to have an influx of new folks.

And just me being me, I speak. Transparently, vulnerably. I just think that I don’t think stability is an issue. Like I think the community is super healthy and we see the greatest people come to the calls. They asked me anything calls and the mastermind that we do. Now let’s go, here’s the subject I hate because I’m going to jump on Thursday’s mastermind call and everybody’s going to ask me when.

But as far as like upcoming. What’s on the roadmap for LFTR LMS development wise, what could people look forward to?

Chris Badgett: There’s a lot. And the way we figure out what to build next at LFTR LMS is really by listening to the people, to the users, to the customers. And we look for patterns. We look for trends.

We look at our own insights, what we’re seeing in the industry. And we use the software ourselves and have like our own opinions of what we think needs to happen next. But some of the areas that you’ll see more focus is more stuff happening in e commerce land, just optimizing e commerce. That’s always a priority because we want to help you out there watching and listening to get paid and have the best e commerce experience.

Quizzing and assignments is really big for some people. There’s a lot of evolution and advancement we can do there. What we have already is already really good, but we’ve gotten some good feedback around those areas. The social learning aspects, the online community, not just selling courses, but also community, improving our social learning add on is an area we’ve got queued up for focused, as well as coaching.

In addition to courses and community, many people offer Coaching. And that can take many forms. And we have an add on for that called private areas with a lot of fresh ideas and things to add and focus on that. So those are just some of the areas that we’ll be focused on. And that whole time we’re always improving the lateral and that’s core.

For example we’ve done a lot lately and we’ll continue to do more advanced privacy and media protection and security features and all those things to protect your intellectual property and stuff like that. So it’s really a constant innovation train, but those are some of the highlights.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And again, thinking about last year, as far as updates to what we consider core, I remember there was an update to the user experience in the course builder.

Chris Badgett: So now

Kurt Von Ahnen: we pre populate the course builder with a certain amount of lessons and a section and some of those intuitive prompts. And then we also now have the drip feature available for the whole course. Instead of having to go through each lesson and set it up individually. And so people might not think that’s a big deal, but if you have a website with a hundred courses on it, that just became a really big deal.

So that’s super cool. As we start to wind down, Chris, I want to encourage you tell us the deals like one more time. It’s November. It’s almost Black Friday. Okay. You could have already have taken advantage of the deal and gotten 60 percent off, but we’ve got something else coming cyber Monday and you have the codes that people can use.

So let’s run through this again.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So it’s black Friday, all November sale. So that’s 60 percent off. And that’s on any add on bundle. That you want and that’s from november 1st to december 2nd because that’s when cyber monday is this year on december 2nd So to get that you just need to use the coupon code black friday 24 that being said if you’re looking to get the infinity bundle lifetime deal, which is everything lifter lms makes that is only going to be available on cyber monday, which is december 2nd And you’re going to get 70 percent off the full retail price, which is 10, 000 is the full price.

So you’ll be able to get it for a 3, 000. I think it might actually come in at 2, 000 9, 9, 9, but you get the gist of what I’m saying. And that’s the cheapest you can get the lifter LMS lifetime deal. You can come, but you can always come back later and pay more for the lifetime deal. But if you’re on the fence and you’re thinking about, I think I’m my platforms here to stay and I want to get the best deal mark your calendar for December 2nd to get the lifetime deal and whether you get the lifetime deal or just a regular black Friday.

60 percent discount. If you purchase between November 1st and December 2nd, you’re going to get six bonuses valued at 2, 000. And everybody gets that no matter what you purchase. So that’s just another benefit for taking advantage of this. And if you’re listening to this, I also just want to thank you.

I know this time of year, we do send a lot of emails. It’s an important part of marketing, getting the word out, making sure people realize there’s a sale going on. There’s this lifetime deal opportunity. It’s on this day and all that. All the email traffic and stuff will come down. You’ll in the future, you’ll just be getting more spaced out emails about LMS and all that.

So thank you. As we do this important aspect of marketing for our business with promoting the black Friday. And Cyber Monday period.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Perfect. And then just one last time, folks, you can go to LifterLMS. com forward slash black hyphen Friday forward slash black hyphen Friday. And Chris, I think that kind of wraps it up, man.

Chris Badgett: That’s it. It was great to chat, Kurt. I really appreciate it. And thanks for helping spread the word and get into this Black Friday all November sales event that we do really appreciate it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, no worries. I’ve been a member of your community for going on a decade, and it’s always great to welcome new folks in.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Brian Town highlights the loneliness that comes with entrepreneurship despite its apparent success. He talks about the psychological effects of managing a company, fixing difficulties all the time, and dealing with impostor syndrome even after years of expertise.

Brian Town is a video marketing specialist and seasoned businessman, best recognized as the founder and CEO of Michigan Creative, a full-service creative firm that specializes in web development, branding, and video production. He published a book called “The Lonely CEO“

Brian openly discusses his battles with burnout, providing details on how the constant pressures of managing a company may negatively impact both mental and physical well-being. He emphasizes the value of self-care practices like meditation, consistent exercise, and even taking breaks when necessary in order to have a good outlook.

Additionally, Brian draws attention to the strain many entrepreneurs endure in juggling their personal and professional life, where work frequently takes precedence.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Brian town is the author of the lonely CEO. You can find that at the lonely ceo. com. He’s also the founder of Michigan creative. That’s at Michigan creative. com. It’s an agency. We’re going to talk about some things that people don’t talk about when it comes to being an entrepreneur, being lonely.

The challenges there. We’re going to talk about entrepreneurial mindset. We’re going to talk about marketing and branding and just see where we go from there. But first welcome to the show, Brian.

Brian Town: Chris, appreciate it, man.

Chris Badgett: Let’s start with I don’t want to say dirty little secret. It’s more just like the taboo thing that people don’t talk about as much, which is.

The loneliness part of entrepreneurship because entrepreneurship gets a lot of acclaim and you know There’s a lot of people we put on the pedestal some of the great entrepreneurs of our time even in the smaller world in our towns and cities and stuff. We may be recognized as a success. We have a successful business whatever that means But it can be super lonely.

Let’s dig in there. What compelled you to write an entire book about that topic?

Brian Town: A mental breakdown.

My, my wife is a entrepreneur. She runs her own business too. And she won an award pretty recently. We won an award pretty recently and people were like, Oh man, you guys are the power couple.

We’re like, I wish they could come by our house. And, Sometimes you see like how stressed out we were and how worried one of us is on any given day and how we’re wondering if we, that imposter syndrome, we talk about that a lot and I just think it’s just a lonely place. And luckily I have her and she has me, but I think, every business owner that I’ve talked to, they have that same kind of.

Worry. It’s just, there’s so much, as you start to grow, she has nine employees. I have 16 and that just, there’s so much that you’re thinking of. And my biggest fear has always been, and we’ve had a handful of times, three, four, five, six times where I was like, I got to go pick up a check.

I got to find some money to make sure that we’re making payroll stuff is the things you lose sleep over. And it’s not just Oh, wow. That didn’t work out. Shut it down. It’s a little deeper and I think, your friends don’t get it. Everybody thinks you’re great success. Cause on paper and in reality, like we are successful, like things are working, but there’s been some months that most recently too, that we’re like why are we doing, What are we doing?

And I think everybody listening right now probably sometimes has felt that way and maybe be feeling that way right now. So I think that dirty little secret is it probably one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done. Yeah. Same thing. My wife says the same thing. Now, that being said, there’s so much good that’s come from it.

Whether we, let’s pretend that everybody fires us today and all my employees are like forget you, we’re leaving 14 years running an agency. Through the pandemic, my wife’s starting a business and becoming really successful pretty quickly. That’s success. We don’t see it that way.

There’s always gotta be more and what aren’t we doing?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think the concept of enough is like a thing to meditate on. What does enough mean?

Brian Town: And I think that’s the thing is like this last couple of months, I’ve been really off my game and I haven’t been meditating and I haven’t been.

Eating very well or sleeping very well. And, I think when is enough, I think is one thing that I need to do more of, but then also, I’ve been better about this over the last couple of days, but, really looking back at all the great things that you have and the great things that you’ve done, like this building, for example if I’m real stressed out, cause we didn’t get this one client or something.

I, I need to go look around, like there’s, 12 people working here right now, and it’s beautiful. And our clients, love everything that we’ve done for most of them. And so I think it’s that we all need to do a better job of not just if you’re a business owner, but I think appreciating and having gratitude for what we’ve done and what we have.

Because it’s great. And I think it’s hard to do as a business owner, because the minute we get off this call, or if you’re done listening to this, you’re thinking, all right, who’s emailing me that needs something, who’s mad, whatever, we’re always trying to think of that next thing. Why we have all this other stuff to deal with, because we’re parents and, we have tons of animals at home and it’s just It’s a stressful thing.

Chris Badgett: And the entrepreneur is a problem solver. So when you’re done with one problem, feed me another problem.

Brian Town: That’s what it is. My wife said it the best. She’s I thought I’d start this med spa and it’d be great. She’s a PA and it’d be a great thing. And it’d just be a lot of fun doing it.

It is, and it’s been really successful, but it’s always something. Most of her day, when she’s not seeing patients, I work over there one day a week. It’s solving problems. Employees go, Hey, what do you think about this? What color do you want this? And what are we going to do about this package?

And it’s all day long. You’re solving problems. So then when you get home and your fifth grade daughter needs you to help solve problems. This very complicated math, you’re like, man, I don’t know if I’m up for it.

Chris Badgett: I’ve had too many problems today. I get that.

Brian Town: Oh yeah.

Chris Badgett: How does you mentioned imposter syndrome.

I think it’s different in the very beginning, but it never goes away. Like, how has that changed for you over 10 plus years?

Brian Town: Yeah, it never really has. I’m terrible. I’m a classic case of imposter syndrome. Nobody would know it. But it’s, for me, it just, I think a really good example is when we were pitching just on Monday to Jiffy mix, which is a huge, if you’re from Michigan, they’re they are in Michigan, but they’re all over the country.

At first when they sent it to us, I’m like, okay, we’ll do this proposal. And then they asked us to come in and pitch. And then we were getting ready to pitch. I was like, we can’t do this. There’s gotta be the Ann Arbor or Detroit agencies that it’s pitching on this as well. Like we’re just here from Lansing and We’ll give it a shot and, so dumb, like I’m thinking that and then as we start to put the proposal together and showing case studies, and I looked at it Monday morning before we had to go and I was like, yeah, man, maybe we are the only ones that they should go with.

And it went really well and the pitch went really well and. We were ourselves and we do have that type of work and we can do it. And I think I don’t know why I get like that and I don’t know Necessarily if it’s a bad thing we talk about this a lot too is like I think if we didn’t have This imposter syndrome our whole entire lives maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today because I’m always trying to better that imposter because I’m, I’m worried.

I’m like I’m going to have to outperform him then because just in case they find out who we really are. And, sometimes it gets in the way a little bit, but a lot of times it’s just been how I’ve run my life and always. It always tried to get better and better. So I don’t know, man.

Chris Badgett: I’ve heard a saying that behind every entrepreneur, there’s like a trauma or a shame story or something. And maybe that’s where that imposter syndrome was born. I don’t

Brian Town: know.

Chris Badgett: Loneliness is for real. Like it’s interesting. You’re married to an entrepreneur. My wife has her own business. It’s a side thing she started, but she’s not like crazy entrepreneur person like me.

So we have me and then we have a normal person in the house. But I’ve definitely found a lot of solace in spending time with other entrepreneurs and, And then I don’t feel so lonely and all the weird stuff we think about or ways of being in the world or, common ground and it doesn’t feel so lonely anymore, but how’s that been for you in terms of fighting loneliness, like what are some things you do

Brian Town: Yeah, I think you’re right.

I think being with other entrepreneurs has been super helpful and, talking to people that have been through it. And, for me, I need to probably start my podcast again, because that was always very helpful and doing these kinds of things too, like podcaster. Good for me too, because I can, I get, it’s the only opportunity I get to talk about like the good stuff that we do and that I’ve done, and I remember when I was going down this journey of the book and then building my personal brand, when I was.

Working with a ghostwriter for the personal brand and posting and those kinds of things. I was just telling my normal story. Like I was a teacher, I had four kids, had a kid in college, decided to start a company one day. When I got done telling that, they’re like, Jesus, man, like you’ve got a lot of you’ve got a really interesting history and you’re really got a lot of great things.

But we just hang out and. And talk to other people that are still doing it. So we just think everybody can do it.

I was like, Oh, do I, Really? And because for us, man. It’s I just, we just hang, I think one of the things that we have to realize is that not most people don’t start companies and even that small few that don’t make it. So the percentage of you and I being able to still be here today, is pretty small.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s normalized.

Brian Town: Yeah, it is for us, and I, I think for me, having her be an entrepreneur now too, cause before it was like safe and, she was the.

But, I even think, I remember when she was working on her job and there were still, I think a lot of employees today are feeling entrepreneur ish too, because they have to do things on their own. And so I don’t know, I think for me, the writing, the blogging, the posting, and then doing podcasts has been super helpful.

Because it’s just an opportunity for me to maybe think I know what I’m doing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Town: Sometimes.

Chris Badgett: I know one person who like has that list that you gave to your ghostwrite content person about your life and they actually keep it in their like on a note on their phone. And before they ever have to go speak or be a guest.

They read it to like get in the mindset of Oh yeah, I haven’t done a lot of stuff. I’m worthy to be here. People want to hear what I have to say or whatever. It’s easily forgotten that where you’ve come from or everything you’ve done.

Brian Town: I just think mindset is a crazy thing. I probably would have been done a great job a couple of weeks ago and faked my way through this, but.

I wasn’t at a spot where now when I’m talking to you and telling you about these things, like I actually believe it and feel it. Cause there was just a lot of stress going on a couple of weeks ago and a lot of things that I was just like, I don’t even know if I want to continue to do this, I get like that every once in a while and it’s like, all right, nevermind, things are good, and it’s that mindset piece that. When you get out of that, it’s hard to do the things that, you need to do to stay in it. So like I wasn’t meditating. I wasn’t exercising, I wasn’t writing very much and I’ve noticed that over the last week that I started to pick those things up again because I felt like doing them Mindset’s totally different.

Chris Badgett: What other mindset tips do you have? You mentioned a lot there like your routines of self care meditation exercise just acknowledging that, Hey, maybe you’re at a low point and it tends to go back up, but what else?

Brian Town: Yeah. My morning routine it’s in the book, we, I make fun of all the gurus and stuff for do an ice bath, man, and wake up at 4am and then, go get a two hour massage.

I’m like, all right listen, I got pooping all over the house. My daughter’s mad cause she can’t find her backpack. It’s that’s not happening. I, I’ve got a couple of meditation apps that I use. And so really my routine in the morning is pretty easy. I try to get up coffee and then do a little bit of meditation for about 10, 15 minutes.

Try to write down a couple of things that I’m grateful for and thankful for and what I’m looking forward to that day. And then a winter two from yesterday and then exercise. And, that’s, that, those are the things that it doesn’t have to be like tons of weights or whatever, like just something that, that gets me in that right moment.

The other thing that I wasn’t doing for a while and now I’m back in it and I’ve got a card in my pocket. That’s just my moonshot card was what I call it. And it just, there’s a, it just says, Hey, I’ll be making million dollar, million dollars a month in a calm and creative way.

And it’s just something that I read in the morning and a million dollar month is like crazy, right? Like we’re nowhere near that. And, but it’s one of those things that, is in my pocket that I can just remember and I can feel it. And so when things are coming up where I’m like, eh, maybe I shouldn’t reach out to this client or I don’t feel like doing this or whatever, I’m Oh, hold on a second.

Is that really fit to where I want to be? And so for me, getting back into that routine and keeping those things going have been super helpful.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned calm, that’s cool. Like for such a short statement to add calm in there makes a lot of sense. Cause you could make a million dollars a month creatively and be totally like at your wits end.

Brian Town: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like it’s a little folded piece of paper. That’s just my third grade handwriting that says a million dollars a month, I’m so grateful that I’m making over a million a month at a calm, creative or calm, confident and creative way. And so I don’t know if I’ll ever hit a million dollars a month, but yeah.

It’s like that moon shot. Like it’s crazy. Like when Kennedy was like, we’re going to go to the moon. We don’t know how we’re going to do it. And we’re going to do it. It’s called, yeah, there it is. And it’s just funny how, like when I was not in the right mindset, not even did I not put it in my pocket.

I was like I’m not going to put that in my pocket. Cause it’s never going to work. And that’s so stupid, like a child.

Chris Badgett: What what causes people to feel stuck as a founder or entrepreneur? We’ve touched on some of it, but what else is in that bag of. Corrects.

Brian Town: Yeah. I think for me, it’s the pure chaos that you can control, right?

So you can control that chaos. When you’re in the mode that you don’t think you can, or it’s not going well, it can get out of control pretty quick. So I’ve been, I’ve done a really good job at really mastering my calendar. And blocking things to get things done and outsourcing tasks and not doing the things that, you shouldn’t be doing.

And it sounds easy and it sounds common because you hear this all the time, but it’s an art.

Chris Badgett: I feel like I’m still mastering my calendar and I’m pretty good at it, but it’s like constantly evolving. I don’t think it’ll ever stop.

Brian Town: Yeah. And I think doing the high level things that you should be doing as a CEO, and then we can’t always do that.

I’ve got these bills. I’ve got to talk to this client. I probably got to write something. Those are not really on my to do list that should be, but, having time that real good focus time to build your company and to vision think about, put those in your calendar.

Because if you don’t, especially if you have lots of employees and clients, like it’s just going to get filled with zooms.

Chris Badgett: Once you get some work done on yourself. Part of self is leadership. So what, 14 years into an agency and you, I believe have many, or if not all team members in the building with you whether they’re remote or in the office, leadership is required. What have been some of your leadership lessons and fumbles along the way?

Brian Town: How fumbles we, I don’t know how long this is, but I’d write about those a lot in the book too, because, I think my, so one of our core values is that, we’re all leaders and A great leader makes everyone around him or her better than they are. And that’s something that I’ve used when I was a high school teacher.

I use that same statement. I used it when I coached youth football it was just all these little pieces that I think my job is to make people leaders in this company. Then their job is then to make other people that they’re working with leaders as well. So I’ve surrounded myself with people that are better and smarter and brighter than I am.

One of my business coaches told me this, and it really stuck with me. But he was like, I was talking to him how I was worried and I was down. I was like, and he’s like, Hey man, I’m telling you, your team is going to feel it. And he’s like, if you’re down 10%, And I said I’m down a lot more than 10%.

He’s like, all right, listen, if you’re down 10%, your team’s going to feel it by 40%, and I was like I get on our team calls and I’m usually inspirational, but it’s not working. Nobody’s listening. He’s it doesn’t matter. He’s your job as a leader is to always be that one that is not necessarily pushing or, getting people to do things.

It’s to inspire them to be great. I’ve always done that in every classroom that I’ve been in, and every speech that I’ve given is my job is to inspire someone to do something and to be great. I think that’s what a leader is. And the issue with leadership today is like, when I tell this in all my classes and everything that I’ve done, it’s you’re not taught leadership, right?

And none of us off the top of our heads, especially young people can think of a good leader. I can think of a ton of really bad leaders. Bye. They can’t really think of well, who’s a good leader. And so it’s something that has to be taught a lot. And I think for me, my when I get in trouble with my leadership is, when I’m not trouble, that’s not what I meant, but the things that I’ve been really good at is taking ownership of going, Hey, I was not following the core value on this.

I was not doing this and that was really poor leadership. And so here’s what I’m going to do, to rectify that. And that alone fixes 99 percent of the problems. Like a politician, like you’d want them just to Yeah, I did that. That was terrible. And I shouldn’t have done that.

But of course they’re never going to do that, but for owning up, owning up to things when you’re not, you’re doing things that don’t meet the core values, that’s leadership.

Chris Badgett: It was about 10 years into my entrepreneur journey where I really learned the value of company values or core values, and it’s particularly powerful if you can get them to overlap with the same ones you would carry in your personal life.

And I was reading on your website before you came on. One of y’all’s is everyone we come in contact with should have a better day. And I was, I thought that’s a cool one, that’s really cool. And that the way I learned it, you can hire and fire against your core values. So it’s what you look for in the team you want to build and they’re in the character of the people.

And if it actually, nobody likes firing people. But when you see the values, and examples over time, it’s and you try to correct and change and learn and grow. And if it’s not happening, it’s, it makes that whole process easier just to have those.

Brian Town: That’s like I said, there’s lots of things that, that if we shut down tomorrow, I would be proud of.

Those core values would be one of them. And, really we help companies write their core values because I love to do it. The, the core values, the stupid core values are like customer service and integrity, like bullshit. Bullshit, that’s stupid. And so what I wanted to do is make sure that we had core values that were written in a way that.

I wanted people to be like that at work and not at work because those are the type of people that I wanted to work with. But I also felt like core values should be able to help people as well. And I think for me, that core value is my favorite. And I’ve taught that to my kids. My, it came from my dad and it was just, it’s for them too.

So look up, help somebody open a door. Be nice, whatever. If even smiling at people in the store today is like unheard of. And so my son does that all the time. And his girlfriend is so annoyed. He’s like, why are you like, why does everybody want to talk to you? And why is everybody friends with you at the store?

He’s no, I just look at people and they want to talk to me, and but for me, I was always telling people it’s not necessarily for them, but it’s. It’s for you to, it’s for you to feel like, okay, maybe you have made a difference today. Maybe you are a good person. And so I think those core values for us are the only way that we review and rate our employees.

And then we use them on all of our pitch decks as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. As I look at these and I’m transitioning to the marketing part of the conversation. About what your customers want to know before they engage with you or buy from you. And for me, like before talking to you on this podcast, I’m scanning the website and I saw the core values and I’m like check on all the ones that are there.

I’m like, this is going to be a good conversation. I’ve always felt like the about page is really important to a business. But yeah, tell us more just for whether it’s an agency or anybody in any business. Creating online, like what what do customers need to know and feel before they engage?

Brian Town: Yeah. I, our new site, which is this one that you’ve been looking at I’m really happy with the way that is. I think, for us, like what we always felt is that. I’ll go back to the Jiffy Bix thing is and I told this, there was a room of 15 people and. I was like, how do I separate myself from someone that’s going to come in here and be super technical and have 50 sites this big that they’ve built is I felt like they probably wanted to work with someone that they felt like they could work with.

For people that had good values because that’s a value based company, right? And for me, I think today it’s very, it’s very difficult today to separate yourself from your competitors because everybody has the same tools, right? We can all make our websites look great. We can all say that we have X amount of combined experience, which is the dumb thing, don’t put that on your website.

I think people want to know that they’re going to work with people that. That are like them, that have the same values that they have, but more importantly, that they have somewhere in their culture that they’re helping their employees with these values and we expect certain things.

So like a good example of customer service would be everyone you come in contact with should have a better day. So instead of putting customer service on there if that’s the thing, whether they go with us or not, I want them to have a better day because they met somebody.

Chris Badgett: And that’s visceral.

You can feel that. It’s not like 99. 9 percent customer satisfaction. It’s a different, has a totally different feel to it.

Brian Town: Yeah. And I just, my favorite, I’ve always wanted, cause I read a lot of detective novels and my dad and I used to watch a team together and I always wanted to be that guy that’s got a problem.

Oh man, you should just really talk to Brian or Michigan creative. And that’s what people do. They’re like, eh, I don’t know, you know who you should talk to. And that’s, I wanted to have that piece. I also felt that, one of our core values is creative and it’s in our name and obviously it’s what we do, but I just think there’s such, such a great value in being creative.

I think people like you and I, and probably the majority of your audience takes it for granted, cause they’re just, that’s all they’ve been all their entire lives. They were the ones that did videos for school projects and, just the weirdos and

Chris Badgett: I was like, yeah, I remember the first video I did for a school project with a VHS yeah, I did the same thing.

Brian Town: That’s why I’m sitting here right now is because we used to do videos with my mom’s little VHS camera tape to tape editing and my 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Eichel said, Hey man you ought to go into video production. That’s what I did. I went to college for video production.

That was my first job. I taught video production after that. And now, we do a ton of videos. But anyway, I think, not only your core values, but really, they want to work with a company that they think they could work with. And then also getting that brand and message, we’ll. My favorite exercise to do with clients is what we call finally. I think everybody on this could do this with their brand is. I, we made the mistake of the same thing is that we wanted to be every, everything to everyone all the time. And I still think we’re not as niche down as I would like to be.

That’s why I love what you’re doing. The niche, is great. I think if I could start all over again, I’d really think about niching to one particular group. We’re doing that more in the manufacturing space and the food space, which I’m loving. But, that finally exercises what I love to do with customers, because, as we have a couple of seconds to grab somebody’s attention.

And so what, what would it take for someone to come to your website or see an ad for a couple of seconds and for them to go and they’re on their phone on the couch at eight o’clock at night and they’re scrolling through stuff and they see your ad and they’re like, ah, finally, I’ve been looking for a company just like this, or I’ve been looking for a product just like this or a service just like this.

And that’s what I think We all need to work at, and it’s just funny because even some of the biggest companies that we’ve worked for, like they’ll come to us and they’ll go our website and our messaging is fine. It just doesn’t really tell who we really are. And I hear that over and over again.

And I’m like, great, that’s what I like to do. I love to do that. And I think, some of these really large manufacturing companies that we work with, one of them was like that. They said that same thing. Like we are the leader in the world in what we make and everybody knows it.

And, but if you go to our website and our social media and our videos, like you wouldn’t know it and they’ve got competitors that are coming up and their websites look awesome, videos look awesome, but their products aren’t as good and they’re getting pissed, so I think for me what is that message that you’re trying to get to that right person at the right time? On the right device in the right moment is what marketing’s always been. It’s really never changed. We just somehow with that gets lost because we’re trying to do so many other things.

I think

Chris Badgett: speaking of a couple of seconds to make an impression how can you help like a business owner? Think about having a more visually appealing logo and website. I’ve, I, as an example, I’m not a great designer myself. I love naming products in business. I think I have a really unique there, but yeah.

And when you talk to a potential client or existing client, they don’t necessarily have the tools and the language to tell you exactly what they want or what they think they want or what’s going to make them happy. And more importantly, their customers are prospects happy. So how do you approach the strong visuals, particularly in the logo and the web design?

Brian Town: Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll tell you an easy path to that. And then I’ll tell you a story of how I think it matters, I, it’s asking a lot of questions. Like my job is, has never been to. Come up with a great idea for you necessarily. We get to those, but I think what we found is that by just asking a bunch of the right questions, somebody usually says like that perfect tagline that’s in the business, they say that perfect, like here’s what I was thinking it should be.

And from that, those brainstorming sessions and the forms that we have, people fill out that says, why should I be your customer? If you’re at a coffee shop and someone asks, what do you do? What do you tell them? Like all these little pieces and things that we do. It’s just awesome to see people say things cause they know they just, they’re busy with everything else and they don’t have, they don’t know what to do with it.

I think our job is to take those great ideas. And build it into something that can be visual and creative and work on a bigger, in a bigger scale. And I always, I always try to, and it doesn’t always work for every client but I don’t know, maybe it does. Like I always try to get them to think about a symbol.

Like we want your logo and brand to be a symbol for something. And it’s really easy to do and fun to do with nonprofits. And we, I think how I even noticed talk like this, like I’m not classically educated in brand and marketing. I’ve learned all this stuff through figuring it out as we go.

It really came to us when we were doing some work for a company or a nonprofit that used to be called Wayne County safe and Wayne County safe, this is like ultimately one of those stories where Hey man, if we don’t do any other work, we’ve made our, And this was years ago. And I knew somebody that worked there.

So it was a small nonprofit that was in charge of in the beginning. The story goes that there was a PA Kim that worked at an emergency room in Detroit and she got assault victim in there and she had to perform or use a rape kit on her. This sounds terrible, but she was like, I’m a PA and I don’t know how to do this.

She was like, how can that be? And so she started Wayne County safe, which was in charge of getting the backlogs done that happened in the city and trying to get all these kits processed. It turned into a assault center turned into a mental health facility for women. Now it’s the largest, one of the largest assault And women’s health centers in the country.

So they came to us and they’re like, Hey, we got to change our name. It can’t be called Wayne County safe anymore. Cause this kid

Chris Badgett: first told me, I thought it was, it sounded like a armored car service or something.

Brian Town: She’s it’s too big. They’re in Wayne County, but it’s, we’re starting to do more.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Town: And we need to rebrand and we need a new website and we want you to do it. And she’s we’re gonna have to go through the process and, whatever. But we ended up getting the contract and our job was to come up with a new name and a new brand. And so I remember talking to my staff.

I said, look, we got to come up with something that’s a symbol for hope. When someone sees it, we want them to go, all right, maybe I’m going to be okay. So when I’m going through all the workshops with the staff, I kept talking about that and getting them to tell us the stories. And some of the stories are awful, right?

But there is light, tons of light that’s been there. We came up with a new name called Avalon and I don’t remember how we came up with it. So Avalon healing we’re like, okay let’s do our research and let’s pitch it. Our designer at the time came up with a logo and They, they ended up going with it.

And so we built the website and the brand and flash forward a couple of years. I’m helping them with a podcast and I’m just, I got my headphones on and I’m over at their office and there’s some guests and one of the guests who didn’t know who I was like telling his story and he was like and then someone said, Hey, check out Avalon.

And then he went to their website and then he went to their building and he saw their brand and logo and he was, or he saw the logo and he’s yeah, then I thought. Man, I just felt like I was going to be okay and I was like, what did he say? I didn’t say anything, but I was like, I told my staff, I was like, you guys, we did it, and so then that approach, we were making that up as we went.

Of course I was like, Oh yeah, we do this all the time. And my staff’s what are you, what do you mean? We haven’t done this before. I’m like, don’t worry. And now that story I tell a lot, and I still take that, that into even whatever manufacturing business or whatever, I think the idea here is that you want to be able to see their logo or wordmark or whatever, and be able to understand that it’s there.

It’s the best or it’s high quality or that’s the only company that you want to get to and we’ve been like that our entire lives it’s all about brand like the nike talk about the big brands. It’s the same thing.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s awesome You mentioned story. How do you help clients with storytelling?

Brian Town: Yeah, they’re historically, they’re typically not very good. And what they say to us all the time, we have

Chris Badgett: products and features and services.

Brian Town: Yeah. They always talk about what they do but not who they are. I have to go and speak again to the association of general contractors. I think it’s in Colorado this year.

My talk is about how to attract millennials to the trades, or I’m sorry, Gen Z to the trades. Millennials are old. And the, when I did it in Atlanta, I was like, there’s 80 people in the room. I was like, how many people here have a picture of a building or some construction tools on your homepage?

Everybody’s hand raising, great. That’s what you do. And that’s great. But they know that’s what you do. Like people know that’s what you do. And but who are you? As a company. And why should I come work for you? Getting them to think about telling that story of who they are as a company and why they do what they do, it really helps because I’m like, what happens is people first come to you because of that, and then they’re going to go start to research and see if you have the right products and services, but they’re always going to come back to that.

That’s one of the things they say to us, which I love is they’re like that’s why we hired you. We’re not creative. Yeah. I’m like, I know,

Chris Badgett: I don’t know your story, you got to talk to me, man.

Brian Town: And so a couple of different ways that we do it, I think, one of the ways that are really helpful is, if we can record videos of them telling that story, that’s great.

But the process that we have works really well. Where, we have them just answer all these random weird questions and give it to as many people as you can. And then we’ll take all that and we’ll make a summary out of it. Then I’ll go back in and start asking questions. And that three step process seems to work pretty well because.

People know it, it’s just, they have to be asked. It’s like a, it’s like a high school classroom. Like you can’t, the thing I always used to tell new teachers, if I was training, I’m like, don’t ever say, does anybody have any questions? Like at the end of talks to that’s the dumbest thing to ever leave for question.

No one has questions. No one wants to ask questions. You have to ask the right questions to get them to answer it the right way.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Yeah. I think, Nike, part of the reasons that strong is Michael Jordan’s story, right? Like the story of his life and many brand champions or influencers or whatever, it’s about the story.

Brian Town: Yeah. Apple’s the same way. Yeah.

I’m going to put a hundred songs in your pocket, and it’s the same thing. That story and really their product, their product’s cool and whatever, but it’s just. I think how they were able to do it. It’s the idea of having an Apple, having that was a status symbol.

It’s not as much anymore, but that’s how they, you were cool when you had a Mac desktop, you were that cool weird guy.

Chris Badgett: Especially if it was the green one or the orange one or whatever. I have to ask you as an agency person, who’s done a lot. How do you get clients?

It’s a, the biggest thing I hear from people who are particularly if they’re earlier on in their journey. Yeah,

Referrals are great, but what else can you do?

Brian Town: Yeah. And that’s what I spent the most of my time doing as the CEO and in a chapter in the book, I talk about sales and that’s all that matters.

And sales to me is something that I think, we’ve tried to outsource sales. We’ve tried to hire salespeople. Not much success. We’ve got one right now that she’s pretty good. So Liz, if you’re listening to this, I’m not talking about you. But is, I think there’s multiple approaches to how you get good clients.

The easy things that you have to do and as marketing companies, for whatever reason, we don’t seem to do a great job at this. But is, you have to make sure that your search engine optimization or SEO is good. Yeah. We do AdWords for ourselves. We always wanted to make sure that our social media was the best.

Cause I didn’t want somebody to go there and go, I’m not going to hire you to do that. For us, that was all those pieces, but then as a CEO and as the owner, a couple hours a day, an hour a day, every day, you need to be in charge of doing some sort of sales activity and it’s a learned, Thing.

I took some bunch of courses for years in Sandler and read tons of sales books because I had no idea how to do sales and sales is probably one of the hardest jobs that you’ll ever do because we’ve, we’ve tried sales people and that are new and hear me thinking, Oh shoot, we’ll just give a young person some little bit of salary and a great percentage.

And they’ll kill it. I could make 200, 000, they only got to sell four websites or whatever, whatever it is. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Town: But what they don’t understand is that they’re going to get a ton of nose and their percentages are terrible for closing, no matter how good you are. And so I think, always having those sales activities in the pipeline and always following up.

And so my job every day. I have a, I think an hour and then a half hour blocked off to do sales activities. And sometimes it’s just going into the CRM and following up with proposals that I’ve written, have written. Sometimes it’s reaching out to customers. Sometimes it’s prospecting for other ones and sending random emails, but a couple of big, easy wins that I think that we don’t think about doing is we always think about getting new customers.

I’m guilty of that too. When I’ve got, I don’t know, I think we host 200 some WordPress websites right now, and we’re starting to do better at this, but I should be going back over every single one of those and start reaching out to go, Hey man, here’s what I’m thinking. Let’s rebuild this. You’re not doing SEO with us.

What do you think about that? Or, Hey, did you know we do AdWords and, I’ve got a pipeline of customers that have been with me for 10 years that know and trust me. And I’m looking for someone that has never even heard of me. And so I would work your list of your current customers and then also.

We know we say referrals and referrals that come in are great. And it was funny because one of my sales trainer one, one time was like, Hey man, how many referrals did you get this year? And I’m like, I don’t know, 30. I have no idea. 30, let’s say 30. He’s cool. He’s like, how many of those did you ask for?

That’s why I didn’t ask for any of them. What do you mean? I said, no, man, that’s not how referrals work. They just come in. He’s no, dude. He’s call up your friends and call up your best customers and call up your colleagues and go, Hey, how’s it going? It’s okay, cool. Let me know if there’s anybody else I should be talking to that might be a great fit and they’re usually pumped.

If you’ve done a good job for them, they want. To help someone else. And they’re like, Oh man, you should call Rick. Rick’s got this manufacturing company. He’s getting fed up with, whatever. I’m going to, I’m going to email you too. And he’s going to be, and he usually is Hey man, you guys got to call Brian.

He’ll take care of you. And that’s almost like. A done deal, but you got to ask. And I love giving her, that’s like my favorite thing to do. Like I love giving referrals. If someone treated me, really well, like my insurance guy, you’re happy to do it. I’m man. I’m like, I do it because I know that’s going to make me look good.

Yeah. Cause they’ll call him and go, man, was took care of us in a half hour. I’m like, I know. But so I think working your current customer. The list doing sales activities every day. I’m being okay with getting nose as soon as you possibly can. Yeah. I want nose. I’d rather I want nose. Yeah. Like I just want them to go, look, man, I don’t like you.

Your goatee is weird. I don’t want to go with you. I’m like, great. Don’t pretend. And then not. Email me back. And so I think that’s important. And then get some training, get classically trained in sales. It is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.

Chris Badgett: What what’s in your agency stack?

Cause I know a lot of folks. Yeah. Particularly over here in WordPress, like they just build websites, but it sounds like you do paid ads and other things. Like what is on the menu at Michigan creative?

Brian Town: Yeah. Sometimes I’m like, man, I wish we just did WordPress websites. That would, cause when we started and I didn’t know, like I quit teaching.

On a Friday and started this company on a Monday. I had no ide, I had no idea what marketing was. And I didn’t know how to build websites. I ran into a former student a couple of months later and he, and I’m like. Hey man, what are you doing? He’s Oh, I just graduated, but I’m not really working. And I’m like, do you know how to build websites?

He’s yeah, I think so. And he was my 10 year, 10 year employee, WordPress developer. But so yeah, so we, we started and just being like, we’ll do everything. But for us right now, what we’re really trying to focus on is WordPress websites. Video production is a big part of our business.

I’ve got two full time producers and a director.

Chris Badgett: And what’s that? Is that like the sort of like the homepage video or social media video or what is What, how are you using video for your clients?

Brian Town: Yeah. What we really like to do. So yes, to all that. And what we really like to do is create brand anthem videos.

So it’s like that 92nd Superbowl, like commercial voiceover, the thing that you’d watch. And get inspired to, to work with that company. So we do a lot of brand anthem videos and I love doing those. So storytelling so we do some commercial work and some social media videos as well, but a lot of our work is, and we do a lot of interview videos too, but a lot of our work is in brand anthem and I love video because it’s that’s what I started in.

But I also really like it because these guys that I got now Matt, Zachary and Anne Marie, they run it like a, it’s entire separate company.

Chris Badgett: It’s like a division. Yeah, I

Brian Town: don’t even have to be a lot of these shoots and even recently they’re like, Hey, is there any way we could just start writing the scripts?

I’m like, wait, what do you mean? You don’t like my script writing? I got a little bit. They’re like, no, it’s just I think it’d be, I’m like, fine. But So I love that department. They’ve done just such a great job and the work they’re putting out is really cool. And I get to go sometimes and I love to ask questions of people like sit across from them on the camera and just get them to tell their story.

Like I love doing that. But then we do a ton of brand and graphic design and then also, digital digital ads, mostly social ads. We do some pay per click and then SEO.

Chris Badgett: A question about the brand anthem. I’m curious here. Is it, is the, is your agency doing the narration or you’re bringing in like the founder or somebody, or is it like hands off for the company or are they like the talent or I’m sure they have input and stuff, but how does that come together?

Brian Town: Yeah. A real brand anthem, what we do is we end up. Interviewing them and talking to them and then we’ll write the script. And then once they approve the script, then we’ll assign shots to the script, the shot list. And sometimes it’s a day, a full day shoot. Sometimes it’s a couple of days.

So we’ll go in there and let’s just say it’s a manufacturing plant. We’ll go in there and get all the shots of, employees working on the machines the CEO, people doing and interacting and just trying to make it look, good. Cool is not a good enough word, but try to make it, we want somebody to watch it and we want it to do a couple of things.

We want it to go, Oh man, like this is the company we’re looking for. Or it also works really well for employment videos too, where they’re looking to get people interested in coming to work there. And then typically what we’ll do is we’ll hire a professional voiceover person. Sometimes we’ll let them pick, do you want male, female, old, young and then we’ll just put that voiceover in.

With music and with the shots that we’ve taken. Once we have that day shoot, like they’re pretty much out. Now we have done videos where we’ll interview the CEO and that’s a little bit of a different where we still are using B roll interview, the CEO, the marketing director, whoever, CEO.

And we have done those. My favorite ones to do are just the brain anthem with voiceover music. I think every company should have a brain anthem.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. So for you out there watching, if you have an agency, maybe consider adding that to your stack.

Brian Town: And they’re great.

Cause they turn out really cool every time. Like I haven’t made a brain Anthem. We haven’t made a brain Anthem that the customer wasn’t like, Oh my God, this is awful. Like they always turn out really good.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. This has been awesome. Brian, if I want to take it back to the lonely CEO, if somebody out there, whether you’re running an agency or whatever your company is, or your education entrepreneur, if somebody’s feeling stuck alone, a little lost and they have all this chaos going on around them, number one, they should get their book, your book.

Brian Town: still has the not for sale copy, but it’s still there. Almost there. It’s like a real book.

Chris Badgett: What’s the first action they should take. It, they get your book, but what’s the first like tactical thing, even if they just turn off this podcast and they’re in that headspace, what’s a possible next step for them?

Brian Town: Yeah, I, man, I love kind of thinking out that five years, that 10 years, like, where do you want to, like, where do you see that company? Cause that’s fun. Throw it out there and just be like, this is where I want to take us and this is why, and then come back to that day and, reflect on how far you’ve already gone.

And I think I want them to understand I really want you to understand because no one, like I can. Tell you a quick story about how this will maybe resonate with your audiences. I was doing, I do a little bit of coaching and I was coaching this entrepreneur Stephanie and she was her husband ran a gym and in front of the gym was her business, which was a smoothie shop, coffee shop.

Whatever. And she was like, I was sitting in there with her and I was just helping her. And she was really getting, it was really tough. She just felt she’s I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t think anything that we’re doing is good. And I’m like, hang on, man just look around you.

This is beautiful. Like you’ve got your own shop, man. You got. There’s been like 10 people that have walked through here while we’re talking. And I said, you’re doing it. You’re making it happen. You’re the right person to do this. It’s just that self confidence I think for her, knowing that there’s a way to do it, she felt like she was trying to do everything and all at once and it wasn’t working.

And so I think. And this is from the e myth, but this, this is where I got it from, but Michael Gerber said it, when you’re in that small business and it’s just you or you and one other, you’re having to wear multiple hats but plan that out. So from nine to 10, you’re the CEO, from 1030 to 12 or whatever, you’re the marketing director and start to put in those things in place in more of a scheduled structure way.

So you don’t feel like you’re having to do everything all at the same time. And I think lastly, just. Realize that you are the one to do it. And everyone else is feeling the exact same way that you are right this moment, like as successful as I sound, I don’t have any of this figured out. Like I’m worried about the same stuff that you’re worried about.

Which when people used to tell me that, I’m like, Whoa, that doesn’t sound good.

Why am I still doing this? Like when those commercials come on from a bank and they’re like, yeah, start your dream and start our own business. My wife and I are like, yeah, don’t do that. Yeah. Are you sure? But yeah, just realize that you’re the one to do it. What’s the worst case scenario. I told that to someone, one of my clients, coaching clients.

I said, what’s the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is you’ll, she was doing a, and it’s very successful. Just in the last year, a golf simulator, brand new business. She had no idea about how to do it. And I go, what’s the worst thing that’ll happen? The worst thing that’ll happen is it won’t work and you’ll shut it down.

And you got a couch, you had a master’s degree. You’ll either do a different business or you’ll go work for someone that’s it. That’s the worst case scenario. It’s we’re all pretty smart or we could all probably get jobs. It wouldn’t, we would hate it, but that’s the worst case scenario.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The worst case is often not as bad as it feels if you like really think about it.

Brian Town: Yeah, but as a failure for us, if we had to shut down, it’s, we didn’t make it. 99 point whatever percent of the people never even started.

So I don’t know how that’s a failure. I’ll need to watch this and remind myself of this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s Brian town. He’s from Michigan creative.

You can find that at Michigan creative. com. Go check out the book, the lonely CEO. It’s got its own website, the lonely ceo. com. Brian, thanks for coming on the show. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or any final words for the listener?

Brian Town: No, man, bryantown. io is a great place. It’s got all our links on there.

And yeah, no, I don’t think final words, I think that simple realization that you’re the only person to do it and you’re the right person to do it, I think is something that I wish I would have heard years ago. I think sometimes that’s enough.

Chris Badgett: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Town: All right, man.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Eric Davis gives a concise rundown of sales funnels and explains how WordPress and LifterLMS customers can maximize their earnings by using the Upsell Plugin.

Eric Davis is the founder of Upsell Plugin, a tool designed to help businesses maximize sales by optimizing their checkout processes. He explains that a sales funnel is a set of procedures intended to lead potential buyers through a buying process by employing strategies like order bumps, upsells, and down sells.

The Upsell Plugin improves this process by allowing firms to build various sales routes while strategically increasing average order value. Although cross-selling is not the plugin’s main purpose, Eric recognizes it as related product offers even if the plugin’s main focus is upselling.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Eric Davis. You can find them over at upsell plugin. That’s upsellplugin. com. You can also find upsell plugin on the Lifter LMS add ons page. Today we’re going to talk about upselling sales funnels, how to do it in WordPress and dive into the magic that is upsell plugin.

But first welcome to the show, Eric. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Chris. Yeah, it’s great to be here and chat with another person. Who’s into marketing and helping people make more money and stuff. Absolutely. Let’s lay the ground floor for people who may be unfamiliar with sales funnels, upsells, downsells, give us a high level education of, key concepts of a sales funnel.

Eric Davis: Absolutely. Maybe I overthink it, but it’s pretty straightforward nowadays. Essentially you have somebody that’s coming to your website. You’ve gained their trust already for getting them to your site and they’re ready to purchase something from you. Specifically, let’s say a course via LifterLMS.

So now that you have them strategically and they’re engaged in your website. You’re going to want to sell them more. And there’s no better way to sell more to somebody while they’re actively checking out on your website. So What the upsell plugin allows you to do is while they’re checking out. You can take them to a separate page after they purchased that initial product and offer them an additional, course product. Whatever it is that might, help that person achieve whatever results they’re trying to accomplish.

When it comes to sales funnels, again it’s a, it’s a term that’s became more hot over the past five or so years. There’s the order bumps, the upsells, the downsells, that stuff. So somebody is going to land on your checkout page. You have some order bumps and the order bumps.

What I like to describe order bumps as is if you’re going to your grocery store and you’re checking out, there’s the gum, the men’s, that kind of stuff. So it’s like an impulse buy. You want to grab that piece of gum, add it to your cart. You’re increasing that average order value, that order value of that customer.

After they check out, you essentially send them to another page where we call it an upsell offering them another, lifter LMS course. Do you want to add this to your order? Yes or no. If they say yes, you just upsell them on a new offer. And if they say no, you essentially can take them to a downsell.

Your sales funnels with the upsell plugin can have as many. Pieces as it wants, there’s no limitations, but that’s a high level approach of a sales funnel. Hopefully it made sense.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. One where I get confused and maybe you can shed some light is I get upsell, I get downsell, but what is a cross sell?

Eric Davis: A cross sell is more of so it all goes hand to hand, at least in my mind, the way I think about it. But a cross sell is essentially, offering them a product that’s similar already to what they’re checking out for. But when it comes to upsell plugin, we don’t really offer cross sells typically with that.

It’s more of, taking them through a strategic checkout path. A cross sell from my experience at least is more of, something that’s popping up during that process of the checkout and selling them on another product or service.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s look at some like Lifter LMS examples.

And by the way, we’re going to be doing, this is a podcast episode. So you’re watching us talk, or you’re most likely listening in your earbuds. But we are going to actually do a video demo that you’ll find on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. It’s going to be a separate video. So we’re going to be talking about ideas and concepts here. But if you’d like to see this in action Eric’s going to do a demo and that’ll be on our YouTube channel as a standalone video.

Look out for that, but just to go over some other ideas, just to get the gears turning on how you could use upsell plugin with Lifter LMS. One example is you may like it. Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s say the first upsell is a course. Maybe you have an ebook that you’re selling, but then you want to be like.

In the checkout, like upsell from that, getting the ebook to also get a course or, and just, I’m just going to keep going up the chain. If you’re selling a course maybe you have a membership that includes private coaching or group coaching. So great. You’ve got the a hundred dollar course. Do you want the coaching for a hundred dollars a month or whatever it is?

And then you can upsell that way. Downselling is also fun. Let’s say let’s say you have an expensive membership to your academy of courses that has, five, 10, 20, a hundred courses in it. And somebody. It’s too much, It’s not right. It’s overwhelming for them. They could downsell into just a single like introductory course.

That’s much cheaper. So just throwing out a couple of ways to think about this.

Eric Davis: Absolutely. And if I can add on to that a little bit, cause again, as you mentioned it’ll make more sense when they see it in action. But one of the reasons I developed the upsell plugin as well. I’m not trying to bash WooCommerce for example, or anything, WooCommerce is an amazing tool. I use it for some of my own personal projects, But when it comes to, let’s use Lifter LMS again, as an example, and it comes to selling courses and membership, I’m a big believer in helping your customer obtain whatever results they’re looking for.

So when it comes like WooCommerce, for example, and letting them pick and choose what courses they want to add to their cart, to me, you’re doing a disservice to your customer. Because by overwhelming them and bombarding them with so many courses, they’re probably going to get too sidetracked and too much, information coming in overload that they’re not going to be able to reach whatever they’re trying to achieve.

So that’s why with the upsell plugin, it’s not like a basket. It’s not, let me, here’s my cart. Let me choose these six.

It might sound great. It might sound like to you as the core seller, the lifted Lifter LMS website owner. Hey, I just sold six courses. It might sound great, but you’re probably going to lose in the long run because by having them add those six courses to your card and checking out, they’re probably never going to really reach what they’re trying to achieve.

So with the upsell plugin, you’re taking them through a strategic path. I want to, I want to learn how to fix an engine on a car. Okay. I’m going to add that course to my checkout. Okay. I just checked out. I now have the course and I’m ready to start learning how to fix engines.

What goes along with that? Not necessarily how to fat fix basketball hoops, but it would probably make more sense on. How to fix, how to change a tire on a car. Okay. That makes sense. Let me, I want to add that to my order. So ultimately you’re helping them probably figure out how to, become a better mechanic or something. Or how to fix cars or how to, more everything’s related to that car.

And then they’re going to become, once you help them achieve that result on becoming a better mechanic and learning how to fix cars. They’re probably going to now become a lifetime customer of yours. So instead of letting them choose how all these different courses on things to do, and maybe that was a poor example, but ultimately what I’m trying to say is if you can take them through a strategic sales funnel on the course that you know, make most sense for them to achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve.

You’re probably going to end up, having a customer for lifetime. And that lifetime value is going to be more than if they just came to your site one time, purchased six courses, added them all to your cart, the cart, and then they never really get any with those. Again, hopefully that made sense, but that’s the process of, the upselling and downselling, you can ultimately do whatever you want with the upsell plugin.

But what I strongly suggest is not just going to upsell them on something just to make more money. You’re going to upsell them and offer them a course that makes sense with what they just purchased from you to help them achieve the results they want to achieve. And now they’re going to be like, I’m, they’re going to love you for helping them achieve what they’re trying to accomplish.

And they’re going to be. A lifetime customer.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Just to expand on what you’re saying there. I think Russell Brunson over at ClickFunnels did a really good job with instilling this idea to the internet marketing world that you don’t need a website, you need a sales funnel.

So it’s. If you’re new to these concepts like what Eric is talking about, having a guided experience. Imagine if you could not put a menu on the top of your website or even footer links and the experience that you’re crafting is they go from one page to the next page and they have decisions they can make Oh, I don’t want this right now, then we’re in a downsell.

Oh, I do want this right now. We’re in an upsell. It’s an extreme example to not have a menu on your website. And literally. The entire thing is landing pages that kind of have a decision tree in them, but that’s the way to think about it and understand it. For example, if you do a ad, you want to send people to a landing page with a specific offer or call to action, not necessarily give people a, the menu and all these places they can go.

You’re trying to do a specific sales funnel that starts from an ad or another call to action from, let’s say a YouTube video or any, anything. Okay. So thinking about that flow and guiding the user through your offer and giving them decisions is a really smart way to think about that.

Let’s talk technically a little bit like, so in the example we’re talking about, typically upselling happens from like a landing page. First there’s an offer on a landing page. There’s typically a call to action button. It’s somewhat good practice to have one call to action so that users don’t get or visitors don’t get decision fatigue.

But where talk about the technicality of upsell plugin in terms of. Handling the checkout, landing pages, WordPress. What are the pieces that come together to make it possible? So

Eric Davis: the beauty in my mind, at least the beauty of upsell plugin is we didn’t want to take over any of the page builders or the websites or the course, lifter LMS.

Everybody has a specialty and they do an amazing job. I would be lying if I said, Hey, I’m going to create a page builder. That’s better than Elementor or better than Divi. I’d be lying about that. But So ultimately, the way that click with the way that upsell plugin works is we integrate directly with everything.

So it’s really just links and short codes. So you can just install upsell plug on your site and use everything you pretty much already have set up. All you have to do is take a short code for the checkout form, plug that into your checkout page that you’ve already designed. And now the checkout form would be populated.

And then when somebody purchases course a, let’s say we created a product inside of upsell plugin called course a, We say, where should they be redirected to? After they purchased this, we can redirect them to a sales page that we created. That is now doing the one click upsell functionality of subplugin with course B.

So when it comes to the integration process with WordPress and everything, Lifter LMS we’re not redesigning anything, essentially. We’re working with whatever you already have in place and allowing you to use, all the amazing tools and features that those other tools already have.

Chris Badgett: And we’ll go into this in in a video, but lift their LMS just technically, if you’re thinking about how do I connect all this together as an example, courses and memberships have an option to have a. A different sales page for your course than the default lifter page. So you have two options.

You could have a custom page or you can embed that checkout with shortcode right where Eric is talking about. And of course you could link, you could have a button somewhere on your site that, or a menu link that goes into the flow that you want people to go into for upselling.

Eric Davis: And then the way that the upsell plugin, and like you’re saying exactly correct, we can even take it one step further because the way that.

Our integration works and it’ll make more sense. Once we do the screen sharing, people see this, but you create a product inside the upsell plugin. That’s again, let’s just call it course a and inside of when you’re creating that plugin, when you’re creating that product, there’s an integration tabs with Lifter LMS that you just simply enable it.

And you say, when somebody purchases this and product enroll them into course a and Lifter LMS. So you can create a sales page however you want and then that checkout call to action Button when they click on it would take them to the checkout form And that checkout form when they go through that process will automatically add them Into a course a on lifter lms because you have the product attached to the course inside of lifter lms

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Let’s talk a little bit about integrations so You have a lot of integrations. Of course you integrate with Lifter LMS, but you also have, for example, MailChimp and active campaign. So how did the email marketing tools like that integrate with upsell plugin? Awesome.

Eric Davis: Yep. So again pretty basic, at least to me, maybe I look at it too much.

But you essentially, add the API keys from MailChimp or ActiveCampaign, for example. And then what we allow you to do is just like we, just like I explained with Lifter LMS, if they purchase a specific product, you can tag them and, or add them to a specific list inside of your email marketing service.

Awesome. So again, let’s work with course a, if a person, if a customer purchases, of course, a, you can add them to course a list inside of MailChimp and tag them course a as well. So now when they make that purchase, they automatically get added to MailChimp. And then again, that’s huge because if we go back, I’m talking about, this customer becoming a lifetime customer of yours, you now know inside of your email marketing system what they purchased.

So you can follow up with them appropriately if they were on your marketing campaign. And now they purchased for say, you can set up an automation now inside of active campaign, MailChimp, all the other ones, we want to remove them from our marketing campaign. We want to add them to our, automation sequence for when somebody purchases a course a, so we can follow up with them appropriately.

We allow you to add your customer to a specific list or tag. With, most of the main email marketing solutions. So you can follow up with them using their powerful automation tools. And we also have a Zapier app as well. So if the email service you’re not using, isn’t we don’t have a direct integration with, we have a Zapier app that will allow you to connect with, pretty much any of the main guys.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And this is a good point to clarify on as upsell plugin creates its own checkout and has its own integration with Stripe and PayPal,

Eric Davis: correct?

Chris Badgett: You’re going to do this. You need to connect to your Stripe and PayPal, even though Lifter has those things. If you’re going to go down this route, it’s totally fine to use the upsell plugins, PayPal and Stripe integration, which is essentially the same thing as the Lifter one, and I’m really glad you created this because Lifter LMS does not have.

These kind of sales funnel like tools. So I’m really happy that you’ve done this. I also noticed affiliate WP on your integrations. That’s popular with lifter LMS users. What tell us more about how that works?

Eric Davis: Yep. So just as most website owners know, having an affiliate program can be extremely powerful.

It just helps you have users drive essentially traffic and sales to your site. So we have an integration, we have a direct integration with two. Affiliate programs. One is or affiliate tools. I should say is affiliate WP, which is a wordpress plug in. And then another one called I dev affiliate.

I think I dev affiliate has a direct integration with lifter LMS as well. But I did affiliate is not a wordpress plug in. It’s standalone solution. But it’s really powerful. And I like it a lot. I personally use I personally use IDevAffiliate, but AffiliateWP is another really good one.

And it’s pretty basic how it works. Again, it’s, just if the customer, you create your affiliate program using AffiliateWP, your customers, clients, whoever you’re influencers, whoever you’re trying to attract becomes an affiliate of yours. They now have their referral links, the referral codes, when they send the traffic to the website, if that customer checks out and purchases a product via upsell plugin, that affiliate will generate the commission based on the commission settings that you have set up inside of affiliate WP.

So again, going back to the page builders and things like that on how we work, we’re not trying to, sometimes people are like, you don’t have an affiliate program. And I, my answer is we don’t have affiliate program because we’re focusing on creating a checkout solution that’s going to convert for you.

That’s going to optimize for you. We can spend our time and try to figure out how to convert an affiliate or create an affiliate program, but affiliate WP does an amazing job. That’s why we would rather integrate with tools like affiliate WP, Lifter, ML, LMS, that does an amazing job. Instead of saying, Hey, I want to create, I own LMS.

I don’t. I would rather say use lifter LMS and use upsell plugin. So it’s the same process with the affiliate program. You use affiliate WP use the idea of affiliate because their programs are amazing. And then use upsell plugin as the checkout process.

Chris Badgett: Nice. I also see you have WP fusion, which is very popular in the lifter community.

Could you step through how that works with upsell plugin?

Eric Davis: Absolutely. So they have an integration on their end and then we actually have a direct integration on ours as well, but it works pretty much the same way as like the email marketing where, you know, that’s, I know WP fusion can be used as a membership tool and things like that, but it all ties back to your email marketing service system.

So it’s essentially the process works the same way where. You can add when it’s all on a per product basis. So if you need to do something with, WP fusion where, when somebody purchases Corsair, you want to enroll them into, tag them on Corsair inside of your affiliate program, or I’m sorry, inside of your email marketing system through WP fusion, you can do so again, it’s, I keep using the word basic. Maybe it’s not basic. Cause I’m just looking at it all the time. But that’s essentially how it works. Everything is like on a per product basis. So you can be extreme, so you can be strategic about your followups and everything like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I just want to throw a pro tip out there. So if you’re thinking about using the upsell plugin, and let’s say you already have, you’re using Lifter LMS as e commerce or the Lifter LMS WooCommerce integration. And you’ve got like a catalog of courses, but you’re trying to get more sales.

You’re trying to experiment with, let’s say, paid ads like Facebook ads or Google ads. And for that, it’s particularly helpful to use more of a sales funnel flow. You’re getting the traffic, you’re paying for traffic. You want a specific landing page. You want to upsell down and downsell that traffic and give them that more sales funnel, like experience that you can control, but also add more clarity, value, and ease to the visitor.

That’s a great way to get started with the upsell plugin. So you don’t necessarily have to like re engineer if you’re already moving, you don’t have to re engineer how your site currently works, but you can actually just add more value by. Doing some ads and doing some upsells. And it doesn’t even have to be ads.

You could be experimenting with, let’s say a strategic partnership with some, somebody else’s podcast or YouTube channel. And you want a specific flow for people coming from the call to action from there, that’s a great way to get started with the upsell plugin. Tell us the story, Eric. How did this all start for you?

Why why create this? Or how did I know people get fastened? There’s a fascination here because like you said, you’re super focused on just the upsell. Optimized checkout flow. How did that start in your story?

Eric Davis: So my story is, as you already mentioned click funnels, for example. So I’ve been developing websites for the past, probably about 10 years now.

And. About five years ago or so when ClickFunnels was really, making their main push, maybe it’s been more than five years now, my clients would come to me and say, Hey, I want to build a sales funnel. I said, awesome. That sounds great. Let’s create a sales funnel. Just like you, Chris, I’m assuming, I love WordPress and I like to stay inside the WordPress ecosystem just cause it’s open source.

If you want to. Do something as long as you, or, you can have a team around you that knows how to accomplish it and create it. You can create it with inside of WordPress. So when my customer, when my clients would come to me and say, Hey, can you help me create a sales funnel at that time?

I would say we can, but we either have to sign up for click funnels or there’s the solutions, with WooCommerce and if you’re selling courses and membership, it’s just. In my opinion, too much. It’s just, we have to buy another six or seven extensions, subscription extensions, things like that. In the beginning, I was helping them with those different, channels, but then, being the WordPress level or lover, I was like, there, I feel like there’s just this missing piece in the WordPress ecosystem for creating and being able to easily, I should say, create a sales funnel.

So that’s why for the past five years, I’ve been spending, my time, my energy, my money on developing the upsell plugin, continuing to maintain it because everything essentially is built into the upsell plugin. So again, you don’t need WooCommerce. It integrates directly with Stripe or PayPal and everything, subscriptions, you don’t have to get another extension through us.

It’s, it’s all right there. It may, to be honest, maybe it’s a poor business decision, having, I should be upselling people and buying more and more modules and things like that. But currently the way that, and for the past five years, the way we’ve been selling the upsell plugin is, everything is built into it.

Yeah. Again, I just thought that there was, there needed, I just thought there was a missing piece inside of the WordPress ecosystem for somebody that wanted to quickly and easily create a sales funnel. So that’s why, ultimately I’ve been. Developing and maintaining the upsell plugin.

Chris Badgett: And I just want to mention too I just went over to the click funnels pricing page and you’re looking at spending about 3, 000 a year with click funnels and upsell plugin, just like in WordPress, like they’re way, way more economical solutions for literally more power and customization and stuff like that.

Just throwing that out there. This has been awesome, Eric. I appreciate our chat. We’re actually going to switch to go create a video together about how specifically with screen sharing to use the upsell plugin with Lifter LMS. So go look for that on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. Also be sure to check out the upsell plugin.

That’s upsellplugin. com. You can also find it on the Lifter LMS website. In our third party add ons where we recommend tools to help add even more value to your learning management system. But Eric, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, we’re here to help you make more money like upselling and downselling and all this is can be very powerful and better for your users to have a clear path and give them decisions and stuff like that.

So thank you for making upsell plugin and thanks for coming on the show. Awesome.

Eric Davis: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett welcomes Mark Szymanski, co-founder of MJSTV, to discuss various aspects of content creation, agency work, and the WordPress community.

Mark Szymanski is a co-founder of MJSTV and a dedicated WordPress Consultant and Digital Educator. With extensive experience in creating tutorial videos. He specializes in the WordPress environment, helping individuals and businesses effectively harness the platform’s potential.

Mark has a strong interest in exploring new markets and emphasizes the value of sharing personal stories through engaging content. Through his business, he aims to help people navigate the complexities of digital marketing and communicate successfully in the ever-evolving world of the internet.

Additionally, Mark discusses how page builders, such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, and others, have made it easier for non-developers to quickly create websites. However, he also highlights how these tools can become somewhat ‘tribal,’ with strong loyalties forming among users of different platforms.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Mark Szymanski. You can find him at MJSTV. com. Mark and I just met in person at WordCamp U. S. I came across Mark in many places just on social media and videos and through Matt Medeiros and stuff. We’re going to talk about content, we’re going to talk about agency, we’re going to talk about WordPress, we’re going to talk about page builders.

But first, welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark Szymanski: Chris, it is an absolute pleasure. It was a pleasure to meet you in person. Been following your stuff for a while too, man. Love what you’re doing. I cannot thank you enough for having me on the show here.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you bet. It’s fun to chat. It’s this, a thing happens here in in WordPress land and digital entrepreneurship land. Specifically around WordPress is you come across like other content creators and we’re a niche within content.

There’s a lot of channels and podcasts and things that get it. A lot more views that are more mainstream. But this kind of niche world we live in of building sites for clients. Building solutions, helping people build websites, particularly with WordPress. It’s a niche. So whenever I see another content creator come on the scene and you’ve been on the scene for a while, I’m like, I gotta get that guy on the podcast.

So I’m glad you’re here. Hell yeah. When did you fall in love with creating content?

Mark Szymanski: Oh, man. I would say I’ve been creating YouTube videos for a while. I’ve had a little bit of a, I would say like a past life. Like when we, just as an example, when we bought our house here, I was like renovating some of it and I was just like documenting it.

I think one of the biggest things was I found. Most people have heard like Gary Vaynerchuk when he was like really big. He’s still obviously a popular guy, but it was just about documenting, putting things on social media. Just building your personal brand. I can’t, I have all this written down somewhere. But I feel like it was probably in 2016 or so, or maybe while I was building the agency, like 2018. I was just like, I just want to document this even just for myself.

If nobody watches anything, I just want to document it. So I started doing some of that, and then I started getting involved in WordPress in 2018, building the agency. And very quickly I was like I’m learning things very rapidly, and I know there’s other people out there that could potentially benefit from that.

So I did a little bit of like tutorial content probably in 20 20, 2021, 22. But I was still like just working and trying to build websites for clients. And then just over a year ago, I would say is when I discovered the WordPress community, which is a whole thing in and of itself. Like you could use WordPress for your entire life and never really jump into that realm.

But I decided to, and I don’t regret it. And I was, that’s when I started specifically making content with guys like Matt. And like whether it was technical news oriented, business oriented. I’ve just continued to try to find my way there. And yeah, I guess it’s that’s the, been the trajectory to this point.

Chris Badgett: What kind of content do you like to consume? Great question.

Mark Szymanski: I feel, I don’t know if anybody else has gone through this, but I’ve gone, I’ve noticeable, if I look back at my, I have a big Excel spreadsheet of all, like the big events that have happened in my life that I can remember that I feel like were pivotal or just like in general, if I go back through there, there are actual periods of time.

Like I consume an unbelievable amount of content on a specific topic, right? And I think I’m not, I’m definitely not unique in this fact, but I don’t hear too many people talk about it that often. So I remember I can’t remember the order, but I remember I was in college and I was like, okay I really want to like, know more about like money.

Like maybe it was around the time I had my first job. So I wanted to, I went super deep into like finance content. Dave Ramsey, Graham Stephan, like all these big, YouTubers, right? And it’s funny, and you know this, Chris, because you know how these algorithms like suck you in as soon as you get into one thing.

It’s you’re going to see videos forever until you get into another, hobby or topic. So finance was a big one. That was probably a couple of your stint. I feel like you go from not knowing anything to knowing like 75, 85 percent of it in if you really go hard, you can go like pretty quickly, maybe six months to a year.

And then you know way more than the average person, but then you got to get burnt down. You’re like, I’m tired of listening to this. So it was finance was one of those. Business, general business stuff was one of those more recently it’s been golf it’s just crazy. And then as soon as, it’s like now I don’t see really much any finance stuff, but I get the golf stuff.

Obviously WordPress has been a huge part of that for the past year or two. But yeah, those are my big ones right now. I would say right now it’s, that last year it’s been heavy on WordPress and the golf thing. Yeah. Golf is a lifelong game, similar to WordPress, maybe.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. I can definitely relate to the binging on niche interest content for a period. Could be months, could be years. And a funny thing happens. Like I remember before I, stepped out of my shell when I was just building some websites for clients and trying to figure out how to build an online business, I would listen to Matt Medeiros podcast, The Matt Report.

And there was a handful of other WordPress podcasts, and I just binged all that stuff. And then ultimately I got into the whole world and stepped into the community and started creating content myself. So it’s fun to, uh, listen to somebody and then all of a sudden, now you’re talking to them.

Now you’re shaking their hand.

Mark Szymanski: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: It’s wild. It’s so surreal.

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, I was like, we were talking before we went on guys like WP crafter and like Paul Charlton, WP, like WP. That’s I was, I’m 28 now. It’s I think back, I was just looking at this seven years ago, I was like just 21, like still in college.

I’m like thinking about like websites and WordPress and stuff. And I’m watching their videos back then. Then I go to WordCamp and it’s cool. It’s so cool in this community where you can just go to an event like that and you just start meeting the people that you’ve been.

Watching and all that stuff for so long. And it’s, it is absolutely surreal.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s like finding your niche. If the niche is focused or small enough, even though WordPress is big in terms of usage, the people that are really, I think Matt Medeiros used to call it small C, big C community, like the ones that are really on the inside.

It’s small if you think about it so you can run into those people. What do you feel like your niche is in WordPress? If you had to pick one thing, what would it be? Or you’re more in exploration phase?

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, I think it’s so big that I feel like I’m still exploring and I actually had some good chats with people at WordCamp US and I think that, I feel like there’s a there’s two ways you can do it.

You can try to find your own niche, or you can just put stuff out there and see if people create one for you, so to speak. And, I feel with that, the latter option there, I feel like people have pretty much, almost, pretty much, pinned me as the guy that like is asking questions and is trying to explore.

Cause I’m like new here, but I also love making content. I’m like, just always like like curious and everything. And some people express that to me, Jamie Marsden being one of them, just saying Hey, just lean into the exploring thing. You know what I mean? Like just go in and just try to explore stuff and be curious.

And people love that because they’re You’re documenting your journey. They’re, they’re learning alongside you. And I just, I think that comes really naturally to me. So I would say that’s probably my main niche right now. The other, the only other things I would say are like, I really do love like process and operation stuff.

Because I think that there’s a lot of people out there that I feel like I’m a very organized individual for the most part. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’m entrepreneurial. So I think that there is definitely a place for that as well. Like I used Exactly. Yeah.

Systems like setting. I love the setup phase. I love the idea of setting up new businesses, business ideas for people or, like the technical pieces of getting everything all your ducks in a row from I’m not a lawyer, but the legal standpoint the financial standpoint, the marketing standpoint.

I’ve often thought about I could probably productize that somehow. But yeah, I would say that exploring and then like building those pieces are some of the things that I’ve thought of, over my time doing it.

Chris Badgett: A framework for that is you can be the role model or the guru, but you can also be the researcher and both of those stories are cool.

Like you might be the role model and okay, these are the systems for this type of business or whatever. And then the researcher just, It’s fun to, go explore with Indiana Jones as they search for whatever. I will say one of the interesting things I’ve seen on YouTube, particularly our views don’t, our videos don’t get a ton of views, but the videos that have been most successful are when we do like a use case video, which involves tools made by lots of different companies, usually.

As a product company, I’m often like really focused on Lifter LMS. But if I actually think about the person watching YouTube and somebody says, I want to build a website like you did me with WordPress. It’s not just a lift or pitch video. I’m bringing in these other like affiliate partner management things like Siren and, some web hosting considerations and email marketing CRM.

You build like an actual business like Udemy, which Udemy has 240 million in funding or something like that. And you could do it for a thousand bucks with WordPress. Like it’s, those videos get the most views. We had a similar thing with. That one got 5, 000 views. The how to build Netflix with WordPress got 9, 000 views.

So if you’re not married to one company or brand, I think that’s some of the most, at least in terms of reach you can get, but individual product tutorials are also cool too. You can go a million different directions.

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, there’s a lot of avenues. If you’re trying to make content, which is like where I’m at now played the agency game.

It’s good. I love the clients that I’ve had. But I think that I’m more suited for we’re talking about offline. That’s I think we’re really more where I’m going. And I think, yeah there’s a weird thing and I’ll be completely transparent, like I’ve always wanted to be like, okay, I have an agency and I have these tools set this is my stack.

I only want to talk about these tools and stuff like that. And while that does make sense. And I feel like it’s like admirable to do that. It’s not super scalable. It’s also like a little I feel like it’s definitely, it would be limiting myself because there are just because I don’t use a tool.

Or I didn’t use a tool. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth looking at. You know what I mean? Like it’s, what I’ve learned is it’s not really that binary. I tried to simplify because I was running something and I don’t want to have 16 different stacks that I have to manage. But at the same time, like if people are, if you have like agency owners or DIYers or whatever, like looking at your content, you should probably tell them there’s some options out there too.

That’s the beauty of WordPress. So I’m always mixed on that, and your point on the type of engaging content, that’s 100 percent true, like we’re like a big community, so to speak, like WordPress is big, but it’s, there’s like a phenomenon where the people that actually care about this stuff is like smaller, and the people that like are researching and know where to look and know who like the sources are and everything like that is like small.

Okay. So trying to reel them in as a content creator is, it can be difficult at times, but those types of things are great. Like I love the idea of rebuilding, like a Netflix or whatever, because it shows the power of what we can do in WordPress. Because sometimes I think people don’t get far enough into WordPress to understand how powerful it is.

So it’s a lot there.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk about page builders. So like I came in before page builders and I’m not a developer. I can’t write a single line of code. So that’s why I partner with developers and have team and stuff. But So for me, in the early days of WordPress, it was really hard to make a great looking site.

You couldn’t even do columns without writing code and stuff like that. And and then for me, I was at a time when I discovered Beaver Builder. And We started using beaver builder internally and making some tutorials with it and stuff like that, cause it made it possible for non developers to build great looking sites.

Elementor came on the scene and then, but I was already all in beaver builder and a lot of people use Elementor and lately we’ve gone to a more of the full site native editing approach that we still very much appreciate. Page builders and their different takes on how to do things. But I have noticed like page builders get tribal every, lots of companies and brands do, but, um, there’s a lot of friction in WordPress between page builders, classic editor, native, the new full site editing Gutenberg thing.

You’ve got newer builders on the scene bricks, oxygen, etches getting ready to come. Like, how do you, what’s your view on page builders and how do you think about it?

Mark Szymanski: Yeah. So I think there’s a couple of things like the first bit of it is I came in. As Elementor had already existed, but I want to say maybe it was like at a million or 2 million less than definitely less than 5 million like installs when I came in.

So I came in and paint the picture. I come into WordPress and I’m like, okay, how do I work this thing? And then I see themes and then I install one of the, one of the themes that were on. I can’t even remember what it was at this point, but it was just, I was looking at the pictures, cause, Oh, what do I want? I don’t mind. And I’m looking at the homepages and stuff and I install one, a free one from the repo and I’m like, okay, cool. And then I’m like, oh wait, I can, I can’t like move anything around. I can’t like, affect anything. I have to just like basically replace text, replace pictures.

What if I want like something? What if I’m looking at like a website that I like on the internet, like a Tesla website or something at the time, how can I build that in this theme? I’m not, I didn’t realize I had to become a developer. And then I found like an Elementor and I was like, Oh, wait a second.

This is way better of an experience. I wasn’t even a designer. Like I’m not a designer. I just want the freedom to do whatever. So I find Elementor, I realized what that is and how you can build in the templating system and all that sort of stuff. I’m like, okay, this is fantastic. So I use that from like 2018 to 20.

About a year ago, like 2023 or whatever. Great product and everything like that. But now that I’m looking back on it, as I like switched more to bricks, and I would say that’s my main page builder, I want to get closer to core and I’m on the advisory board for etch. So there’s like a lot, there’s still, there’s a lot happening.

We’re not nearly at the end of the cycle of all that, but it’s interesting to look back. It’s interesting to look back from a product perspective, because this isn’t, I don’t think this is unique to WordPress page builders, but it’s like the people that innovated the Elementors, the Beaver Builders, I wasn’t here for all of them, right?

Like WP bakeries, like they innovated. But now you have a Bricks, or an Oxygen, or a Breakdance, or whatever, that we’re able to just be like, Okay, we can learn, we can go so much further so much quicker because we learned from all like the, any mistakes that like an Elementor would have made or whatever.

And I just feel like that’s really interesting to see it all. Now it’s a little unfortunate that it gets a little tribal at times. I wish that in an ideal world, software wouldn’t divide us like that. But I also think it’s like human nature. Like people really enjoy the things that they use.

And that are honestly, and for a lot of these people, like a bricks, for instance, is literally driving their livelihood. Like it’s, so you can you gotta understand that okay there’s a reason that they’re so like passionate about it. But, it’s I don’t know.

I don’t know how we change that or anything, but I think that the page building space has been quite interesting for the last seven or so years. And I’m really interested to see how Core continues to evolve because I do think that if we can do things, I’ve always said if the core of WordPress could for some way, you wave a magic wand and it could do all those things.

I think a lot of people would go there because they’re not just using page builders for no reason. They’re using page builders because it’s easy to do the things they want to do. So I don’t know. I don’t have a crystal ball, but it’s always an, it’s always a fun topic. The whole idea of page builders and just WordPress in general regarding that.

Chris Badgett: You, you made a good point like Earlier you said like training around your agency stack So when you get comfortable with your tools or your form plugin or whatever Page builder you use it’s just you just get used to it But you’re you like to explore and stuff too, which is great I think having a percentage of your time where you’re just testing and trying things is a you got to stay sharp It’s really easy to get stuck in this world and Not evolve in the sense that you have to evolve, but there’s innovation happening everywhere yeah, Florida a little bit

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, it’s tough when you got to be careful how complacent you get I feel like in that and And one quick Like example of what you said there is I never, right away when I was in the agency, like maybe some of the listeners can empathize with it.

As soon as I got into the agency life, like really, and I was like actually trying to build websites for multiple clients, all that sort of stuff. Immediately, depending on who you’re talking to, you’re going to get requests to do like really intricate stuff. Like when I say intricate, I know people that don’t use like dynamic data and that’s fine.

They don’t have clients that don’t need to use that or what, like they don’t use custom post types. They don’t use any of that. But the first project that I had, I didn’t know how to do any of that, and it, and I look back on it now, I’m like, that would have been, that’s a perfect example some sort of website with articles, white papers announcements just a bunch of those things, right?

And I look back and I’m like, wow, I really enjoyed trying to figure that out, even though I had no idea what the hell I was doing at the time, and I was trying to just use taxonomies and all this crazy stuff. But I look and I’m like, that was the thing that I was naturally driven to do. I was naturally driven to see like where WordPress could go, like how much I could do with it, like with dynamic data and conditions and all the sort of like logic and everything.

And. There’s a model that a lot of agencies have where they just want to pump out like the same, like quick brochure websites for a few thousand bucks, 5, 000 bucks, whatever. And I am like, by all means they should do that if they want to do that. But I just never spoke to me. So I was always in this spot where like I wanted to do agency stuff, but I want to do really complex stuff.

And it’s very hard to do complex stuff by yourself at scale and for the amount of money that you need to do, you need to, Be paid in order to do those things. So I was finding myself just wanting to do complex things, but at the same time, like just, it just didn’t, the calculation and the way I had it set up just didn’t all work.

Like I didn’t think I could scale it super long term. So I’ve pivoted slightly because this is like a new. Place that I could be in where I could constantly explore, provide value and potentially do like website builds as well. But I really just like building my own stuff.

Really, and that’s an end educating people along the way.

Chris Badgett: So that’s fun that that kind of happened to me. I was just naturally decent at marketing and sales. I get a project and they’re like, can you do this? I’m like, I can figure that out. And then I’d go try to find a tool if I couldn’t.

Oh, I think I might need to hire a developer to help me with this. So I do that. Oh, this is beyond my. Capabilities. I need to get some real designers on board here. And next thing I have had a big agency, but it’s, it was fun the whole time. And when you look back on it, it seems wild. Wow, you said yes to a lot of stuff that you had no clear path on how to get there, but you got them there about being resourceful,

Mark Szymanski: 100%. Yep.

Chris Badgett: Definitely. Let’s talk a little bit more about how your like YouTube process, like how do you think about that? Cause I know a lot of people, some of this audience are like course creators and they’re like, I need a YouTube channel. And they need to build process around how to do that, how to commit to it, how to like source topics and things like that.

Tell us about your YouTuber evolution.

Mark Szymanski: Yeah. I was, like I said, I was making YouTube videos for a while. Like just like older stuff that just didn’t have anything to do with WordPress during the, I want to say the COVID lockdown times and all that. Like I was actually like just doing a daily live stream, just like at night, just like at my desk, just going over like my.

daily recap of what I was doing and thinking about some stuff. Nobody was watching at all, but I just really enjoyed that. What do you like about

Chris Badgett: going live?

Mark Szymanski: I have no idea. I think, I like going live. I think I like going live because I, the, there is zero editing. Like I just don’t like, like I hate video.

I don’t hate video editing, but I really dislike it. I’m not a video editor. So I don’t like the idea of taking the time to do it. And I never hired an editor. So I don’t take like the time, the idea of trying to do it. And then edit it. I feel like that’s just tough. The other thing is This is super counterintuitive.

Kind of, I feel so much less pressure when I’m live than when I’m trying to make a prerecorded video, because I’m trying to, I’m in this mindset when I make the prerecorded video, especially if it’s for another channel or for a brand or something like it has to be like good like when good, like almost perfect.

I’m not stuttering. And I just feel like I get in more of a flow, as you can tell here, because I love to talk. I just get in more of a flow when it’s live. And I just, I don’t know, I just have a it’s just, I don’t know, maybe it’s just a skill I have or something like that. But I just, that’s one of the things, is I’m just like, way less pressure.

When I’m just like, yeah, let’s just go live, let’s talk. It’s like you’re talking to somebody. That’s the thing I love about WordCamp US. It’s we watch everybody on YouTube on X or whatever. And then we get to talk to him in person and everybody’s, a lot of people are the exact same. It’s just, you’re just talking to him in real life.

It’s like you’re on a live stream with him. I don’t know. It’s cool. But I think that’s a big part of it. I think there’s some people doing it really well. Yourself included Kevin Geary. Obviously, like I was watching his live streams before I started doing mine. I think the live aspect.

Is really valuable because if you’re trying to build any semblance of an audience or community, they can engage with you one on one. And again, like in a digital age where we don’t get super opportunities to meet up, like altogether, like we did this past week, it’s very vital to build those connections.

And I think the live setting as well is a really good one. It’s a little different than the YouTube comments. You know what I mean? The live chat is a little more synchronous, so that’s a huge thing. As far as like the video content that’s not live, I would say that my, my strategy there is pivoting to a degree trying to go more like affiliate and sponsorship routes while also covering, any sort of like news stuff and things like that.

And educating just in general, but it’s just, if you’re going to play the content game, you have to, you literally have to be cognizant of making money. So without hopefully shilling stuff, there’s a fine line there. So yeah, I would, that’s where, I don’t have a hard and fast answer on the process for the video side necessarily, because I’m still feeling it out.

But yeah, that’s the overall process I would say at this point.

Chris Badgett: What gets you excited about Etch?

Mark Szymanski: So I think the thing that gets me excited about Etch is, one, I met some of the developers this weekend, Andrea and Mateo of Kevin’s team, and I love those guys. And I think the thing that I’m most excited about Etch is, one, I do believe in Kevin and his team.

They’ve done great stuff. They have a track record. And they actually care about moving things forward, regardless of whether you agree with Any of the approaches, I feel like they’re a team that like, they want to do, they want to do better. They want WordPress to continue to succeed. They’re bought in.

They’re not just here for whatever. The bigger thing though, I think about at just more little meta is that I’m actually really excited that it’s not like a page builder, like another page builder, so to speak. And that’s no disrespect to Elementor, Brix, Devi whoever.

That’s not disrespect there. It’s just my thing was when I moved to Brix, I was like, Okay, this is better, in my opinion, for what I was doing than Elementor was. But it’s not really there yet because it’s still like super it’s still like disconnected, proprietary the stuff is in the database rather than flat file, like whatever you want to say, like flat files, like whatever you want to say.

So I’m like, I want to use, like I want to use the core experience because I feel like most of the time the native way is the best way from a Like a cohesive experience, if you had an, if you have an iPhone and you use like a native Apple, like app versus a third party app, it’s probably gonna be better generally.

It just does like a silly, analogy there. So I wanted to use that, but at the same time, like it’s not there as far as everything you can do with the page motor. So what I think, and again, like we’re in the, we’re in the building stage of that right now, the team is building it.

I think. I know what the vision is and the vision is to build a UI and extend the block editor and extend the core piece of it that will, create a better working experience, a better unified development environment, everything like that, but also not lock things away.

The idea would be that you can build with etch and you can just take it away and you’re still good. There are probably some other products that are doing that to an extent. But, I don’t think we’re talking about like custom, we’re talking about custom blocks like core blocks, but they’re not like, we’re not dropping in blocks that you can’t utilize your, if you get rid of it, then those blocks are gone, stuff like that.

And I don’t know every single detail cause I’m not like a hundred percent like the limiting, I have a limiting, limited experience within direct core, which is one of my. My next endeavors here. We’re going to dive in there full throttle. But but yeah, that’s just, those are some of the big reasons I’m excited about it and we’ll just, we’ll see how it goes.

Chris Badgett: What are you excited about or how do you use AI with websites?

Mark Szymanski: So I’ve used chat GPT. I think I have a pretty sure I have a subscription to chat GPT and Claude currently. And I’ve used. The cool thing. Okay. So I made a couple of videos about Claude. So Claude, I love like their artifacts thing where you can type it in and then it’ll give you a big synopsis.

It’ll give you the code. You can see it right there. Sometimes if it’s like a website or whatever, like it’ll even run it. Like if it’s like some HTML or whatever, but what I really love about Claude is you can build like literally plugins with the thing. If you give it the right documentation, you could create like a custom plugin that adds like conditions to like bricks or something or whatever.

So again, a couple of videos were like. When I’m alive on YouTube, reach out to the YouTube API and, make a condition that like dynamically shows or hide hides this section on my website that says, Hey, I’m alive. So something like that, right now it’s tough not to go off on a tangent with the AI thing, but it’s tough because if you’re not like a developer, you have to really have a developer’s touch to make sure that it actually works and like debug and all that sort of stuff.

But it’s normally pretty good, especially if you feed it the right information. So I would say that’s a big thing that I’ve used. That I’ve experimented using AI with for websites, maybe some image generation to the tough part. I feel like we’re in right now and it might level out or might continue to just exponentially go crazy is everything’s moving so fast.

I’m wondering like, Hey, what’s the best, what’s the best model? Is it Claude? Is it GPT? And then they come out with new models and it’s where am I, where am I getting the best information and things like that from? Copywriting, image generation, code generation, there’s just a ton out there.

Then the one other thing, I feel like this is a little bit of a, Less talked about one is like something like 11 labs. Where you can clone your voice and you can clone different things about that. Now that’s, we start to get a little scary, as far as the AI thing goes. But I think that I would really love, cause if you had a community.

Those people like once your knowledge and they watch your YouTube videos and they see this stuff, their stuff, your time, eventually as your community scales, you have, and this, you have less time because you have more people seeking that time. There’d be a really cool thing. I know a couple of people that are already trying to create like AI’s of themselves, like AI knowledge bases.

And you could basically chat, like you could chat with Chris. You could chat with Mark and it’s you’re basically going to get similar answers.

Chris Badgett: All your content.

Mark Szymanski: I would love that. You know who had that first is not exactly this, but like you could search anything from all of Gary Vee’s content, like the Gary Vee search engine.

I don’t know this guy, he like announced it, but a long time ago, but I don’t know how much it ever went, but it’s probably crazier now. Cause it’s way easier. He had it before. Like anybody was talking about this. You could search any word, any phrase, like, where did I hear that? And it would search like all of his Tik TOK is.

Instagram, YouTube or whatever. And it was amazing. I was like, I need that when I have more content, because again, the, this, I know, this too, like we’re, we we run in the same circle of content here. There’s so much good content. That is deep, buried and it’s just how it is.

Like it’s buried in the channel. That’s really good. And people would care about it. How do we resurface that, how do we recycle that? How do we reuse that? And then that all of that coupled with this is I need to leverage this more. I, the problem with the live content is not everyone wants to sit through a two hour thing or they don’t know, right?

That’s an investment that they’re not willing to make. We need to, the clips are like of the utmost magnitude. And there are some really good AI tools that are doing that now. I’m just not leveraging them well enough. Opus clip, I think is one that I’ve tried. I don’t know.

That was a big rant there, but I would say that there’s a lot of these tools that are actually just taking what people were doing manually and just making it easier and the people that leverage them are going to, it’s going to get pretty far ahead because they’re going to have way, way more efficiency built in.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a reason to become a content creator.

Mark Szymanski: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I joke that I started this podcast around the same time as Tim Farris. So I did 10 years ago and I’ve interviewed a lot of people with a lot of great stuff. A lot of great conversations, but it’s like discovering the old stuff is really hard for the regular user.

And I don’t know, I think 2, 000 videos on our YouTube channel, if you count into lives, there’s a lot of content. A lot of good content

Mark Szymanski: in there. 100%.

Chris Badgett: And then if the AI could mix and match Oh when he was interviewing Mark, he said this about this topic and this other person and this other person and amalgamate that into it’s, yeah it’s going to get really interesting.

It already is, but it’s going to get really interesting, but that’s why it’s important to create original content.

Mark Szymanski: A hundred percent. Yep.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I wanted to ask you for the agencies out there from your agency experience. I know you’re doubling down on content, but what was working for you in terms of a niche, like what types of sites like e commerce, WooCommerce sites, main street businesses, membership sites, like what, what was, what were some of your favorite agency projects that paid well and the client was really happy with?

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, so I the one I would say I go a couple different ways here. I would say the one that I fell into was more of like complex sites, so to speak. The biggest like one of the biggest projects that I did was like, I did a website for a like a wealth advising firm, basically.

Kind of like a redesign, rebuild, and stuff like that. And then they were like, okay we want to take, All of our knowledge is a really meta thing that happened here that we want to take all of our knowledge that we have and we’ve built in our firm and we want to create a another website, another brand that teaches and educate other wealth advisors.

So I’m like, all right, that sounds pretty cool. So it was like a, it was like, and this was years ago, a few years ago at this time. And it was like, okay, we’re going to create a website. That’s going to be obviously members only marketing side on the front, but obviously like the actual website is members only.

It’s subscription based. Everything that you do on a day to day basis, Chris, I’m sure like a learning management platform. Like they actually initially pitched it as we were like looking and researching other things they were looking at some other ones and it was using like a, like almost like a buddy boss type platform where there’s a lot of like social pieces too.

Cause you know, this is again, a couple of years ago at this point, maybe you go with a circle or maybe you do like a lifter element. It was just, it was like, There’s so many, there’s so many options, right? So what do you do? What, what features do you want? Not one. Cause that’s huge, right?

If you don’t want the social stuff, then maybe you don’t put all that overhead in there, right? You already have to have subscriptions, memberships, the e commerce piece, the actual courses just custom posts and stuff like that. Cause there was a podcast involved and it’s just it’s a lot of stuff.

It’s like literally just take all the buzzwords and just throw it in. And I loved building that. Like I loved the challenge. But the problem is that I ran into maybe the agency owners won’t run into this. The problem is if you don’t, if you, it was one of those projects where I had not done stuff like that to the nth degree yet.

And when you’re in that spot, you don’t know how much to charge. And you don’t know how much of, you don’t know how much of a pain in the ass that’s going to be to figure all that out. That is a real hurdle. So always charge more, but it’s difficult. It’s a double, double edged sword. It’s hard to say more and then not get it because it did teach me a hell of a lot.

And I know all that now, but once you have one or two reps, then you start to feel it. So I don’t know if that was exactly an answer, but that would be the niche that I found myself in was those more complex ones. What I did also have though was more, and I would actually recommend people try to more go this way is.

more repeatable things that still potentially scratch that itch for you. And I found like the best, probably the best client project that I’ve had was one of my more recent ones where it was like a small to medium sized business in a, in a industry that, makes money. Yeah.

Meaning like a, like nothing like, Oh, your buddy has a an idea for a apparel store. Spin them up a terrible idea. Like just tell them to go to Shopify or something. That’s probably blasphemous, but just, yeah, be careful. Just tread lightly there. What I’m saying is like something in like a tried and true thing.

Like lawyers, obviously people have different ideas about whether you should build sites how that industry goes, but like lawyers or like maybe doctors or like oil and gas like engineering, like those types of things, those big ones like that, where that is a, is an industry where like it, in order to succeed there, you have to be making money.

Like if they’ve been in business for 50 years, 10, 15, 20, like this company I was dealing with, like 50 years, like they’re established. You know what I mean? And they’re probably technologically

Chris Badgett: behind, right?

Mark Szymanski: Exactly. Exactly. They’re established and they need you. And they have some money.

Now, I’m not saying I’m not saying charge them an arm and a leg, go create don’t like gouge them, but I’m saying like, if you want to sell like websites or more, I feel like if I was going to redo everything, I’d probably focus on those types of people and we could talk about how you get those types of people.

Cause there’s a million ways for that too. But I’m saying like, those are the ones I would really look out for because the startup game is tough. The the new age businesses are tough, even younger businesses, younger people are tough just because. Like they’re either starting out or they, the whole WordPress thing could be like confusing to be like, it’s just, those are the ones that I feel like are really good because they, it just, I just feel like they fit extremely well and they normally have the money to pay and they’re normally pretty, pretty chill people.

Depending that’s super generalization there, but if you manage that process well, I think that’s probably been some of my best experiences to be honest.

Chris Badgett: I’m smiling laughing a little bit because Matt Madaris just dropped a comment. I don’t know if you saw it.

I can tell you guys are friends This guy yeah, you’re breaking the flow Matt you’re breaking yeah, come on man

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Funk Roberts shares insights into his journey as a fitness influencer and entrepreneur. He also shares strategies for building strong online communities by focusing on results and tribe-building techniques.

Funk Roberts is the founder of the multi-million dollar Over 40 Alpha Brotherhood, co-creator of the Tribe Method, and co-author of the Tribe Secrets book. He’s a certified digital marketer and community expert with over 20 years of experience in building thriving online communities and membership sites. Funk has shared the stage with industry leaders and recently won an Expy Award from the National Association of Experts, Writers, and Speakers.

His mission is to help course creators and membership site owners grow their audience, improve retention, and create engaged, lifelong customers through proven psychological strategies. Funk’s unique Tribe Method focuses on retention and engagement by fostering deep emotional connections, shared identities, and transformational experiences within communities.

Frunk gathered almost 15,000 members to his society, of whom over 10,000 made monthly payments. He also highlights that he’s developing a certification program for people to train men over 40.

If today’s conversation on retention and engagement resonated with you, don’t miss out on grabbing a copy of Funk’s co-authored Tribe Secrets book, where The Twins and I dive deeper into the 27 proven psychological strategies to build thriving, engaged communities while turning your customers, clients and students into a Tribe of loyal customers that never leave you, then Head to www.tribemethod.com to get your copy and start transforming your course, brand or membership today!

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. We’re joined back again on the show with Funk Roberts. Funk is a fitness influencer. He’s an internet marketer. He’s an entrepreneur. And he’s one of the most charismatic people I know on YouTube. Welcome back on the show. Funk.

Funk Roberts: Thanks so much, man. Thank you, Chris, for having me.

Thank you for all those listening. I’m really excited today to yeah, just share some knowledge.

Chris Badgett: We’re going to talk about your online education fitness empire, but we’re going to zero in and focus on building community, building tribes, being a tribe leader, designing tribes. But first before we get into the tribe aspect, give it, if someone hasn’t met you before, what did you do on the internet?

Funk Roberts: Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah. So I so I was a professional athlete before then I got, became a, did the nine to five stuff, but I was always in fitness, loved fitness. And then when. Probably 2007 when the YouTube started to take off, I, started to dabble in, blogging and then putting videos up on YouTube.

And I went away to Thailand to train for Muay Thai and realize that a lot of fighters out there who were MMA fighters didn’t really know how to work out. So I created funk MMA. com cause I came back with a, with my mind’s okay. I’m going to create a website called funk MMA. com and this website is going to be where any fighter on the planet, no matter what.

They do can go there and get strength and conditioning came home, funk, MMA. com launched, and it was just posting workouts and videos and all kinds of things. And I had a little, I had a program and that went really well, that, that brand of funk MMA really grew. And. Throughout those years, I’m learning about, I’m launching other programs.

I’m also a metabolic trainer. I would do metabolic training workouts for men and women. So I just throwing out workouts here and there. And then somebody said to me, Hey, you need to do a membership. You need to have a membership site. Put everything in and that’s that monthly revenue.

So I created funk university, funk fitness university. And that went well at first, but I had to, it fell, it crumbled. We don’t have to go too deep in that, but it crumbled because I was using a, the wrong strategy. And then six, seven years ago, I created the over 40 alpha brotherhood. I moved from strength and conditioning for fighters to.

specifically men over 40, because I had a story that, that was similar to a lot of men who were struggling, right? So they were struggling with their weight, low testosterone, et cetera. But I looked on the website and the internet and there was nothing out there. So I created the Over 40 Alpha Brotherhood, but this time I focused on transformation.

I focused on helping them get results. So I built out a one year program, workouts, follow along workouts, nutrition, but really focusing on the brotherhood part of it. And all of a sudden people were getting there when I first launched it, it wasn’t really good. So I asked these guys to come and help implement some, tribe secrets, et cetera, that we’re going to go into a little bit later.

But then I, after 10 months of training, there was 700 people who were still in the membership going, Hey, what do we do next? So I had to create another 12 months and then another 12 months, three years. And the point I’m making is that memberships have been a big thing for me. Of course I’ve done certification courses.

So that’s why I use LMS life for LMS, which I love because I created a certification course for trainers on how to train men over 40 and I also created a certification for metabolic training. So using all of those tools online to. Stay in my niche, but fill it up as much as I can where the weather where there are holes, if that makes sense.

So I’ve been online since 2007. I’ve been In the, following the big, the greats throughout the years and in the fitness industry, I’ve been around forever. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell us just a little bit more about the results of over 40 alpha. For example, I think I saw you got a two comma club award from click funnels.

You have 740, 000 people on your YouTube channel. I think I got that right. Can you tell us more just about, cause I want people to know we’re going to talk about building community, the scale of the community that you’ve built.

Funk Roberts: Okay. Yeah. Okay. So the over 40 alpha brotherhood program has brought me three two comic club awards over, I think almost, we’re hitting almost getting to the eight, eight figure mark.

I have over 15, 000 members. So these are 15, 000 members and not all of them are paying members because some of them became lifetime members because I would run a lifetime. By the way, this is tip number never run a lifetime membership promotion. Because with a membership, do not do that. Do not do that.

Anyway. So I have 15, 000 active members, about 10, 000 of them or 11, 000 are paying every month between 29, 39 or 49 a month. So you can, it’s almost 300, 400, 000 a month that the membership’s bringing in. And it’s based on. This method, right? Because I, and also the key for them, the reason why I built this membership, the way I have and why it’s so successful is because I focus on the results that these guys are getting, not on the transactions on.

Bringing people in because that’s what I was doing before. Oh, let’s bring people in. Let’s bring people in. I’ve already built out the memberships. I don’t have to worry about those people. But they’re the ones that are going to, they’re going to cancel. So when I switched my focus on being inside my membership and implementing some of these things, that’s when everything changed.

And now, to this day. I created my own supplements. So now we’re talking about different streams of revenue because of the membership. I have my own supplement line that I only sell to my members. And that’s a seven figure business just because of the, because I have a lot of members and they trust me because I’ve got them results and they want supplements.

Also, I have my resistance bands and I have my weight vest because that makes sense for my members. Some people want to move from. Dumbbells to resistance bands easier on the joints because I’m working in the 70s. So you start to see oh, wait a minute. I have all of these I can add more streams of revenue when I have a Membership that’s retention based right?

That’s really truly. Getting results for people and helping transform and including something that, that creates more than themselves, right? Like they’re doing this for more than themselves and that’s what keeps them going. So that’s been great. I’m literally in the beginning of next year, we’re going to be creating a certification for.

For people to train men over 40, but more than just the regular shirt. It’s literally you’re going to be a coach. Because now I have guys in my membership who won’t become coaches. And I did not expect that either, when guys start to retire, they want these and they know so much and they’ve transformed and they’ve learned so much from hearing me every single week for six years.

It’s you know what? I think I can do what funk does. And I a hundred percent, they can, they just need a little bit more guidance. So I will be using life for LMS again to build that coaching certification.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Let’s talk about the audience or the tribe selection process.

You’ve, for example, like one question I have is how did you go from MMA to men over 40? You also mentioned, it was like you you’re over 40, your own. So you’re working with a market you understand cause you’re in that spot too. But tell us about what it means to pick the right audience and how do we do that?

Funk Roberts: Oh my God, this is the most important thing. This is where you have to check your ego at the door like 100 percent but you have to have faith to know that if you’re only targeting the exact people that need what you. Are going to provide to them, believe me, you’re going to not only get them results, but they’re going to stay.

So the reason why I moved from fighters to men over 40, it was because I did that when I was about 46, 47 years old. And I started to think, okay, fighters don’t have a lot of money. So I’m just going to be spinning my wheels here, trying to generate a ton of money on fighters. No disrespect to any fighters.

Cause I do work with the UFC as well, but So I thought, okay let’s go on. Let’s, men over 40 was still something that was in the back of my mind because a lot of my friends were, are now in their forties too. And people are now that are in their forties are asking me questions, but I wasn’t really digging too deep into that at that time.

But then I went online. So I went online to see what was out there for men over 40. And there was still nothing. There was only one other person doing anything for men over 40 at this time. And I went back to my own journey. Because here’s the other thing. When people see me, I’m 40, when I’m launching this, let’s go back to 47 when they see me, I’m lean, I’m ripped.

So guys in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, they’re not going to relate to me because they’re going to think, Oh, this guy’s the next professional athlete. Of course he’s ripped, but I can’t get, he’s not gonna, he’s not going to understand why, but I had a transformation journey. And this is important when it comes to building and attracting the right person, if you have a story of transformation.

So for me, I suffered from low testosterone. I was heavy, like a 39 years old and a big belly. It was 215 pounds. I’m usually 185. I got deep into a depression because the girl I was leaving. Living with, she left me, I started going, partying, doing drugs, and I got really very bad from it.

And it wasn’t until I went to the doctor that he told me, Oh, you have low testosterone. You have testosterone of a grandfather. And I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I didn’t know that testosterone had everything to do with my health, me losing weight, losing fat, muscle energy, feeling better, having that drug because I’d lost all of them.

So when he told me that, and obviously he wanted to provide me with drugs, but because I was a professional athlete, I know I knew all of the negative effects of using steroids. So that wasn’t an option for me. I started to talk about, I asked him, can I do this naturally? He’s a hundred percent.

You just do this, and this. And then I went deep down and I transformed my body at that time from what, 215 pounds to 185. I was in the best shape of my life, which is why I went and trained Muay Thai. I fought Muay Thai. So my forties were like. I was in the greatest shape, I got married in my forties.

I started this business in my forties, but again, I was still doing the MMA thing because, that’s where my heart was at the time. So I just went back to that and I realized that first called my program over 40 shred and it wasn’t. No one was joining and I couldn’t understand why.

And then I realized, Oh, wait a minute, men don’t want to be shredded at this point. They just don’t want to, they got to get rid of this belly fat. They got, they want more energy. They’re maybe if they’re in the gym, they’re having problems building muscle or they’re, they’re skinny fat, they’re very soft.

So I had to change like, what about being over shred? It’s about, being where they’re at, understanding, okay, wait a minute. But I also went through what these guys went through. I had a big belly, I had no low testosterone, I was getting injured. I was having a hard time building muscle.

And I had no energy and drive and I was suicidal and I had depression. So that’s where all these guys are at. And so I changed everything. I changed my message and I made sure that the people who I was targeting, the men over 40, were not the men over 40 that were in the gym because I also realized that those guys already have, Yeah, doing something.

So why would I waste my time trying to convince? I don’t want to convince anybody, right? My goal here is not convincing you to come join. My goal is I’m going to help you with the pain, with your struggles, with your thing, with, whatever challenges you have, but I’m going to create, I’m going to give you a program that you’ve never done before.

Cause that’s the other thing. So first and foremost, I’m really dialing in on who I’m targeting based on my. And my experience, if you have a transformation story, the reason why you’re creating courses or whatever, that’s what you need to lean on. And that’s what you need to target, right? Or if it could be a story that you helped someone very close to you, but you also have to dig into what struggles they were going through, right?

Because that has to connect with people. So when I’m talking about my struggle, so many guys, when they came into the program Oh my God, like I didn’t realize you had that you were, Literally again, speaking to me, I could totally relate to you when you said that you’ve masked your manhood.

Cause that’s one of the things I did. I masked my manhood by going out to strip joints and getting hookers and doing all that stuff because my girlfriend left me and I could, my libido was low. So what do I do? Let’s go to strip joints because that’s going to make me more of a man. Not right.

Obviously not, but that’s as men. Sometimes we do very irrational things. So I can relate to them and I’m very open with everything. So that I think is another thing. I’m just myself. I’m not trying to be a somebody I’m not. So that’s the second thing, just be yourself because you’re going to connect with the people who connect with you.

Not everyone connects with me when I’m, not everyone connects with me. And that’s amazing. There’s other over 40 programs out there where you can connect with other guys who are going to help you. I only want the people who are going to, who, are going to connect with me who connect with my story.

And Yeah that’s the first thing is really making sure that you dial in your target. And here’s another amazing tip is survey your list. It doesn’t matter if they’re your current customers, hopefully you’ve built a list. So survey that list and ask them questions about what their struggles are, what their, what their pain points are, what their goals are, and that will give you a very.

A clear picture of what the top things you should be starting to using in your ads and on your sales page, in your marketing, when you’re talking to people in podcasts, et cetera, that’s how you really dial in on targeting the right audience.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. We’re going to come back to it at the end, but I wanted to plant the seed for later.

Can you go ahead and give us a quick summary of your new venture tribe method. com. So you built a fitness empire and this transformation for men over 40. What’s tribe method.

Funk Roberts: Sure. We just, we have a book that we, myself and the twins, these two twins, Mike and Rick Tielmans, they’re the ones who really gave me more clarity when I launched my over 40.

When I first launched over 40 shred, they were the first to say, you can’t call it over 40 shred. You got to give it a name that will give an identity to somebody. Who are they going to become? So they have these 27 psychological strategies. And throughout the years we have, massaged it to create the 27 tribe secrets.

These are the things that if you implement these into your brand, into your membership, into your courses, you will be able to create lifelong customers, like a collective, a tribe of people who will never leave you. And so not only have we done it with my membership, but we’ve helped other people to do it just, on the side, giving them ideas.

And now when you go to tribe method. com, you can get this book. This is the foundation. It gives you the psychological, each secret, for instance, to give you an example, shared beliefs and values. That’s a secret. You should create shared beliefs and values based on what you have and the value, and they’re going to have those same shared beliefs and values because that’s who they are.

My over 40 alphas, we are different from other men over 40, because we, Treat women right. We look for solutions, not problems. We, there’s certain things that we do and that we believe in. We’re here to provide, protect, procreate. That makes us different. And we all share that same belief.

So we’re all on the same, all 15, 000 of us are on the same. We know what’s going on here inside the brotherhood. So they will, they talk about the psychological Reasons and why that works and how other companies use that same strategy And I in this book will literally show you this is exactly how I used it inside my brotherhood.

So this is a foundation book it’s a pdf and then then we move into helping People build their tribes build their tribes. Yeah, and i’m excited about that

Chris Badgett: Yeah, so go check out tribe method. com. We’ll talk about it more as we go through this, there’s a framework I use funk.

That’s about like what you need to be successful as an online education entrepreneur. And you check all these boxes. I call it the five hats problem. You basically have to wear five hats or build a team around these challenges. The first is being a subject matter expert. You’re obviously a fitness expert.

The second is being a teacher. You are already like a coach and like you had teaching skills and speaking skills and kind of curriculum or training program design skills. Then you have to be an entrepreneur. You got to build a business. And you got to market, you got to sell, you got to build systems. You got to go get all up in the weeds of technology whether that’s ads and websites and email marketing and all kinds of stuff.

But the fifth hat is the one that’s least understood and that we’re talking about today Which I call community building Which is the tribe thing and I look at it before and after the sale like the tribe might be Like part of the product but also you’re building all this community on the front end and goodwill like in all your free stuff and everything Tell us more about just, like the mistakes people make when they’re like, all right, particularly if it’s going to be part of their program okay I’m going to have training, but I’m also going to have a community and I’ll just create a Facebook group, but there’s so much more that goes into it.

Tell us about it.

Funk Roberts: Okay. So listen, when I’m talking right now, everybody listening, I’m not. I’m, it’s not your fault. And I’m not like, I’m not hammering you. Okay. I’m just, but I’m the type of person I’m going to tell you exactly what’s going on. So what are the mistakes? The first mistake is thinking that you just need to put the community up there and people are going to come.

That’s that will never happen. People may join. What are you, what do you expect them to do if you’re not telling them what to do? You’re just putting it up there. And this is probably one of the biggest the biggest challenge that most people have with community. This is probably one of the biggest I’m part of the membership Academy, which is a membership for membershippers.

And that is one of the biggest challenges. How do I get people to engage in my community? So number one, the biggest mistake is just putting out there, not. Doing anything. So what do you do instead? You have to, when you put that community up, whatever you use, I use Facebook, there’s a few things you got to think about in order to ensure that you get engagement.

Okay. So first you, again, we’re thinking, we’re talking about transformation, right? You have to have a transformation mindset when you’re building your courses. That means that you’re not. It’s not about transactions. It’s about what are we going to, what am I going to do to make sure these people get results and that community is going to be very important.

The first thing you want to do is you have to be inside the community. Which means you have to post and what you have to post. What you post is what you want everybody else to post. So if, for instance, we have rituals, okay. That’s another thing, create rituals. Okay. Because. Remember, I have a lot of people in my Facebook group the community portion of it.

So I don’t have to keep, I don’t ever post Hey guys today is I don’t know, workout Wednesday or, Hey, I got a question for you or, we never that never happens. In fact, we had 60, 000 posts likes comments last two months ago. All organic because we have rituals.

Rituals, what are they? So for instance, of course, accountability Sunday, right? So account, but the rituals have to make sense. They’re not just random rituals. The reason why we do accountability Sundays is because if they are accountable, that means they’re planning for the week. They pick their go to foods.

They know what days are the days are going to work out that week. And they know what challenges are. So the accountability is actually a template. What they do is they’ll take a picture of themselves. They’ll post the picture hashtag accountability Sunday, and they’ll go through, okay, this week I got I got a wedding to go to, so I got to watch out for this here are my carbs.

I’m going to buy this week, my protein. So that’s. And everybody does. Everyone does accountability Sunday because the people who do accountability is basically the people who get the results. So that’s one ritual that’s already on Sunday. We already have people posting. The second thing I have, we have is called sweaty selfies.

Okay. What’s a sweaty selfie? A sweaty selfie is after every time you work out, you’re going to just take a picture. With our sign, cause we have signs too and post it. And generally what happens is these guys post the picture. They just say, Oh, I did workout day 12 phase 22, blah, blah, blah, workout, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it’ll just be a picture. I’m so you, if you went to our Facebook review scroll and you’ll see a whole bunch of guys, like looking like they just got beat up, but they all are sweaty. That’s called a sweaty selfie. That’s a ritual. We also have alpha meals. Why do we do alpha? So why do we do sweaty selfies?

Because accountability, right? Like I got my workout done and it also keeps them accountable. Hey, I want to show everybody else. I got my workout done too, right? The meals, alpha meals. So people post their meals and they break down the carbs, the proteins, the vegetables. That’s called alpha meal post.

Why do we do that? Because I know people post their meals and what foods they’re eating. They’re going to be more successful with nutrition. And. If you go to our Facebook group, you’ll see all the meals there. So again, that’s another post. We have birthday burpees. When someone has a birthday, they put up their video camera and these are men, 40, 50, 60, 70.

These are young guys. They’ll put up their phones, right? Not most, not the most technically savvy crew, but they’re getting better. Because they do use their phones more and they’ll do their burpees. And and the only reason why they do that is because I do the same thing. I post my accountability every Sunday.

I post my sweaty selfies, I post my meals. And I do everything like I’m part of them. So funk is the leader, right? This program is not about funk, but funk’s our leader. So if funk’s doing it, we’re going to do it too. So that’s why That fosters the engagement already because everyone is posting, you have that many people, they’re going to be posting all the time, right?

They’re going to be posting their sweaty selfies, et cetera. And then the comments, oh my God, comments. So many people are commenting because remember we’re all on the same journey. So of course, Hey, great. Oh no, maybe someone had a challenge, right? And they had a challenge that, Oh man, today was a tough day.

I didn’t feel like working out, but I still got it done. It wasn’t the greatest. Okay. Awesome. Jim. Oh, that’s amazing. That’s awesome. That’s amazing. So that’s how you show up for your community. You have to be right. You have to mirror what you want your members to do. And then it’ll just start.

That will just start to happen, but you have to be in there for a while. Cause when I first did it, it was, okay, there’s hardly anybody here, but then you’ll get a couple that start to do it. And everybody has that FOMO, right? Everyone has that fear of missing out. They don’t want to be left out when they’re in a collective community of people who are getting results.

So that’s the first thing you want to try to create rituals. The second thing, and I advise every single course creator on the planet to do this is to. I would say weekly coaching calls or lives or whatever you want to call it inside your member Hub, which is for me facebook or bi weekly, but just get on there have a topic just a short topic Okay guys, so we have our brotherhood hangout hanging in the hood every friday 9 a.

m Every single Friday, 9 a. m. We’re in the hood. We’re hanging out. I come with some type of a topic and then I answer questions. So that’s another thing that invokes a lot of a lot of engagement, right? People show up. That’s a ritual. We’ll show up inside your program. Yes. They have a ton of workouts.

Yes. They have all that stuff. But what is your goal creator? You want them to go through the course you want them to finish the course you want them to transform. So showing up for them inside your community makes sense. I don’t spend a lot of time inside my. My, my membership was only 10 hours a week.

And, but the amount of stuff I do in there, we also have something called ask fun. So whenever someone has a question inside the Facebook group, they will put hashtag ask funk. And of course the guys in there will answer the question. We got guys that have been in the, we got alpha OGs. We’ve been in there for a year.

We got alpha savages. We’ve been there for two years. Dream Kings. We’ve been there for three years. We’re going to most likely answer the question, but what, this is a, another great thing for you as a course creator. I, every week I get the questions and then I shoot a video and I answer the questions like podcast style.

Okay, question number one Jim, great to see you, Jim. This is a great question. Jim asked blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then I answered the question. Okay, great. Next next. So this week, I think we have 11 questions I got to answer. Sometimes there were 30 questions I had to answer, but we, then we repost those.

That video and the questions inside the Facebook group and tag everybody. Oh my God, I can’t believe. Wow. So I answered my question. I imagine if you’re the creator, of course, or you are a creator or a brand, whatever, and the people who are taking your program, you are the one answering their questions that you wanna talk about co the connection that person has to your brand when you can take the time out and it doesn’t take long.

Plus you’re answering questions, right? Plus AI is. Is going through the roof right now. I’ve answered so many questions that when the next chat GBT comes out, I’m going to load all those questions up into the chat, GBT, and the answers and the videos, all the coaching calls and everything I’ve done, and now I’m going to have a AI, I don’t know, bot or something that will be able to help me.

Get, give people answers because they’ve also asked me for that. They’ve said, Hey, do you have some type of an FAQ quickly that people can use to get questions answered right away? Because we’ve done a lot of ask funks. Like they literally tell like me, I’m like, don’t worry. Chat GBD five. So let’s all.

Again, the engagement that you have and the value that you put inside of your community is what keeps your community strong. And then of course the connections, right? The other good thing is if you use zoom zoom, I do all zoom coaching calls as well with our group. And this is not extra, by the way.

None of this is, Oh, you’re going to be in this tier. Oh, you got to pay extra because right away, you’re putting a barrier in front of what you want people to get, which is a transformation, right? Remember transformation over transaction. Don’t always try to monetize every single thing that you have in your courses or in your program until you have a strong tribe, right?

monetize everything before they even have any connections like this guy wants me to pay even more to do this. And I got to pay this level. No, man, make sure that you get them the information. Believe me, they’re going to stay with you. I have, we are one of the guys in our 90 day tribe. This is my other thing that we’re doing to help people build tribes is Rob, big up to Rob.

Rob, my membership five years yesterday, Rob said, one of the things that I was, I started to realize with funks, Membership. Of course, I’ve used the workouts. I’ve transformed my body. I feel amazing. But I felt my, I found myself buying things all the time. Like I was always buying things from funk.

I didn’t know. And I didn’t even know why I was like, Oh, okay, I’ll buy it. Yeah. And then he realized, Oh, wait a minute. There’s more going on here. There’s more going on behind the scenes. And so he has his own business. He wanted to find out what that was. Yeah. Literally what happened, people will be like, okay, you got this new thing.

Sure. Sure. But what happened? That’s what happens when you have tribe, like I’m an Apple person, right? The new Apple phone, iPhone came out. Of course I’m going to buy it because I don’t care what it has. I don’t care if it’s, yeah, I don’t care if there was no update. I’m going to buy it. Or do we are Jeepers, right?

We own a Jeep. If you own a Jeep and you drive by someone with a Jeep and you do this, they always. This is a jeep wave. It’s called a jeep wave. And whenever somebody in the car, they don’t know what that is. They’re literally blown away. It’s every single person and we drive our jeep all over North America.

And it doesn’t matter where we are. As soon as we see someone that cheap and we do this, they do it back. And we also have a bag of ducks in the back of our car.

Chris Badgett: Cause this from another jeep owner.

Funk Roberts: Yeah. Duck, jeep, baby. So this happened about six months ago. This woman, right? She, her and her friend are in the back.

And they’re just talking. They’re just outside of their Jeep. And we pull up for coffee and my wife goes in to get coffee. And I see this Jeep. I’m going to give them, I’m going to give them a duck. So I got my duck out. Now these girls, these women, like totally the opposite. Like I’m this black guy, tank top.

You know coming up to them. They don’t know who I am And i’m like who owns this jeep and one girl’s a guy on the jeep and I just gave this to her She was like, oh my god I can’t believe this. Thank you so much. And then we had a connection and her friend It’s just like standing what the, why is he talking to this strange black guy like they know each other, right?

And that, the connection that we had based on just giving her the duck and then talking about our Jeeps and just we had, it was such a strong connection. I had a strong connection with that girl. I probably will have a connection with her forever based on the fact that she has or had a Jeep, right?

And that’s how tight, A tribe is a community is even if people don’t know who you are if you do something like we have this as our sign I know that the other day I was outside and a car flew by my house Right and put their finger up like this and said funk and I had no clue who it was And then it came to i’m like, oh my god that person must be in the brotherhood because Only people in the brotherhood would obviously they’re driving.

So they can’t do this, but would know to do this. And so the next week I’m on my coaching call and it was James Eberhardt who lives right over. I didn’t have a clue. He’s Hey, that was me, by the way. I’m like, I knew somebody. So that’s how powerful focusing on you being inside your community so that you can foster that connection inside the community and you should want to be there.

Like, why would you not want to be there?

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about being a tribe leader. You’ve already said a lot. One of them is you practice what you preach, you participate in the rituals, you like hold the space, like for the call or the community. What else is involved in really stepping into that tribal leader role, particularly because I know.

Many creators suffer from imposter syndrome or, fear of failure, fear of success, whatever. How do you, how does one really step into that role?

Funk Roberts: You have to create, you have to know what your values and beliefs are as a person. Because those values and beliefs are going to be this the things that you will show and let people know and share with your community, because if I value health and fitness, if I value integrity, if I value helping others, if I value.

Laughing at yourself, like not being so serious, but also, stepping outside your comfort zone. Those are the things that I value. Always challenging yourself to be 1 percent better. Always being able to, fall and fail, learn from those failures. Those are all things I value.

Be transparent let people know where you’re at. Those are just all my values. So those are the values that I instill inside. My membership, so the people who are coming in right off the bat, they read the manifesto, they read the virtues, so they already know what they’re getting into. Now I can just be my, myself, right?

And as a leader I’m not, it’s not about me. So again, my program is not the funk Roberts program. It’s the over 40 alpha program. It’s their program, but I need to lead by again, just be by living by my values. And my virtues is number one. Number two, transparent. If you don’t know something, Hey, you know what?

I don’t know that right now, but I’m going to, I’ll find out for you. Cause that’s what a leader does, right? You focus on what you’re doing. I’m going to go get that answer. Or if you’re wrong about something, there’s been times where I’ve been totally wrong. The very next coaching, I’m like, guys, I was totally wrong.

I’m super sorry. That’s a man. I messed up. I messed up and I’m sorry, but that’s what a leader does. They come to the table and say, listen, I messed up, man. I thought it was this, but it was actually this. I’m gonna make, I’m gonna, I’m gonna make the changes or whatever. Be yourself. That is because wearing a mask is so exhausting, right?

Because one day yourself is gonna come up behind that mask and you’re gonna say something that they’re not gonna expect. And that’s gonna be like, what? I didn’t know what the hell, I didn’t know that. I thought you were, but you’re. And then you’re going to lose people. If you’re just who you are, you’re only gonna, you’re going to attract those people.

And then you can be, you can focus on those people leading with your own integrity, leading, knowing that, Hey, if I make a mistake, guys, don’t worry. Listen, I’m going to probably make a mistake, but I will make sure to correct it. Or, so that’s number one. That’s another thing as a leader, having values, beliefs, and making sure that the people who come in have those same values and beliefs in regards to whatever program I’m not talking about because remember you don’t know this, but in my program, I have men from all over the world.

I have people who have different religions, different race, different sizes, different backgrounds, but we don’t talk politics. We don’t talk religion. And we don’t do pop culture. We don’t do any of that stuff. We just focus on. Getting each other in the best health and shape and mindset that we can be all of those things are removed.

And we only focus on the commonalities and not the differences that as a leader, I can really truly focus on building an environment and a program based on that. The other thing is, you have to listen. You have to listen. Not here, but listen to what your members or your students are saying. And if they, one or two or three or five students are saying the same thing, okay, we got to change something because everyone’s saying the same thing, or we got to add something, or we’ve got to, when you listen to your students and then implement what they’re asking for, it is, it’s unbelievable. They’re like, I can’t believe Funk heard me say that we need this.

And now. We have it. Oh my God. This guy’s really cares. Yes. And that’s what a leader does. A leader cares for their community, for their tribe. And so a lot of times, even if you think you’re an, here’s the thing about the imposter thing. If all you have to be is like two steps ahead of everybody in your, and I’m not even joking when I say that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Like I figured this thing out last week and they’re getting question and it’s I got it.

Funk Roberts: You don’t need to be the expert in the world. You just need to know. Enough about and continue to be open to learning more. So let’s say you’re just new to, and you only know a few, enough to build your course out, maybe have this one course.

And then all of a sudden six people who finished that course say, Hey, I’d like a course on this, and this. And you’re like, Oh, yeah. I don’t know too much about that, but what are you gonna do? You’re gonna go and learn about that, learn what you need, and then as the leader, you’re gonna create that mini course, and you’re gonna give them enough to get the results they want, right?

But the point I’m trying to make is don’t, that can never be a barrier, because you’re gonna know more than everybody joining you, and that’s all you need to do, but if there’s more for you to learn, continue to learn, and this is why. I don’t post on social media and I don’t do that because I don’t have time to, I don’t want to be, why would I, and again, no disrespect to anybody using social media content, no disrespect to content creators.

Okay. Cause I love you’re all amazing, but I’m going to tell you for me, I, I don’t. Understand why I would put and put so much effort into tick talk and Instagram and reels and shorts and all those things to people who I don’t even own, because remember, you don’t own the tick tock followers. You don’t own Facebook.

You don’t own YouTube followers, Instagram, you don’t own those people. The email that I gather, I own, and I can take those emails. And I and here’s one thing I say listen, if you to pay your mortgage today. You couldn’t go to the bank and show the bank teller, the grandfather, right?

Facebook, Oh, I’ve got a million Instagram followers. So you need to pay your mortgage, but you know what I can do? I can shoot an email out for a new program and I can get 10, 000. No problem. Shooting an email out for a program or just have a program that I have. Shoot an email out. Hey guys, the sale for this program and generate revenue.

Take that money and go to the bank. Because I’ve built an email list. And so the point I’m trying to make is when you don’t own those people, but you’re putting so much effort, you’re 80 percent of your time is content. I got to put out content. No. I got to put out content. I got to know wait, I got, listen, we just shot 13 videos.

We’re going to slice them up. We’re going to throw them out there. And meanwhile, you got all these people who are paying you. Waiting for you. Oh, why is he out there in Instagram with people who aren’t even paying him? Why is he out there on Tik TOK? People aren’t even paying him. Why he’s spending so much time over there and not time with the people who love and support and are giving him money.

That’s, that was my, when I built the over 40 alpha brotherhood, that’s a hundred percent what I said is I don’t want to be posting out there. So we only have one ad running. The ad runs to the page. And when people come in, I make sure we onboard them properly. ’cause I gotta make sure that they transform.

’cause I got a $1 trial for 30 days. I have a free one, but I also have a $1 trial. Those people who take that $1 trial, man, they, 60% of them will convert at the end of the month because usually it’s about 60% who start. Because people who start. They’re in. So our whole focus is the onboarding piece and making sure that those people, get results.

And then if I have to learn other things and figure things out, again, I’m here with the people who are paying me and not out there. So I don’t know where I was going with that, but the point I’m trying to make is really think about, I don’t know where I was going with that.

Chris Badgett: We were talking about leadership and stuff.

It’s a,

Funk Roberts: yeah. Spending time to improve yourself as a leader so that you can lead your group. You can only do that when you’re focused internally. Not saying not to do any of that stuff, but a lot of times people start to only focus on the things that aren’t really bringing them revenue because the stuff that brings you revenue is hard, right?

Sometimes it’s very difficult. It takes a long time to build things, but you want that dopamine, right? So let me. Post something because I know that I’m supposed to post content. I don’t know if I’m supposed to, but I post the content and then you’re looking at how many likes he got. Oh man. It’s so fresh.

You guys know what I’m, I know if you’re listening to, exactly what I’m talking about.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Likes aren’t dollars or enrollments or members. No,

Funk Roberts: do a podcast. That’s what I always say. That, if that is the best way to, to connect with potential people, to get out there, to practice, research,

Chris Badgett: like you said like maybe you’re gotta get better at something.

So you interview a guest about that topic and

Funk Roberts: yeah, totally.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Funk is one of the best community builders I know on the internet. So go check out tribe method. com and get the tribe secrets book.

Funk Roberts: It’s seven bucks guys. Like literally this, it’s not the physical book, but it’s seven bucks.

You get a lot of great bonuses, but more importantly, this is like the foundation. And I’m telling you right now, if you go through this book, you will find something there that you’d be like, Oh my God okay, that, that makes sense to me. And it’ll start to give you more clarity. on why certain things in your business may not be working and what you can do in order to implement some of those things.

If you need more help, obviously you can connect with us, but this is the foundation. I’m telling you it’s going to be the best 8 U. S. 7. 95 that you spent in your entire life. But specifically if you have a business or a course and don’t have to have a membership. Just as a course creator, it’ll give you so many ideas.

And it’s it’s amazing. Amazing.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Funk. Thank you for coming back on the show. Go to tribe method. com. Get the book. I’m going to get a copy and we’re going to have to do this again sometime. I love touching base with you as your business evolves and as you help all these people and all this it’s really awesome, but thank you, funk.

Funk Roberts: Thank you so much. And again, thank you for a Lifter LMS, man. Cause that’s been a game changer for me. So I really appreciate you with that as well.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen offers insightful advice on how to grow online education companies, especially when it comes to focusing on bigger, business-to-business (B2B) prospects rather than just individual customers.

Kurt also highlights the need to think wider and concentrate on scalability, using examples from relationship, health, and wealth courses to show how individualized training can be stretched into more extensive B2B services.

Additionally, he also talks about his own experience of increasing the cost of his training after realizing how crucial it is to match value and price to draw in more serious customers.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS casts. I’m joined by a repeat guest. It’s Kurt Von Annen from Manana No Mas. Kurt is a Lifter LMS expert. He helps us out some at Lifter LMS. And today we’re going to talk about thinking bigger about selling to businesses, thinking about your learning management systems projects, and even how you approach life as an entrepreneur more at scale.

We’re also going to talk about agency life, but first welcome back on the show, Kurt. Dude, thanks so much for having me back. It’s always a pleasure talking to you. When I first met you, you were coming to Lifter LMS office hours. You were working at a big company. You were like, you would drop into the call in a cubicle area.

I think it seemed like on the floor. And you’ve always been like, around business and your niche and your industry of power sports, but you’ve also had this Insane obsession with, WordPress and building websites. I think you got into WordPress before I did in 2008, I think you came in 2006 or something.

I can’t remember. 2004. Four. Okay. Yeah. So you’ve been around this show for a long time and you were not just because of WordPress or Lifter long before that you’ve been into leadership, education, training. Improving teams, management systems, and all that stuff. So let’s dive in there. As an education entrepreneur, whether you’re creating an LMS website for yourself around your own subject matter, expertise, or you’re advising a client who’s putting together a course, how do we think bigger?

How do we think about scale and, creating more leverage and impact when we’re creating online education and businesses around that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s a big question. This could be a big answer when you are thinking about being a course creator and creating your content. I know you’ve made tons of content on who is your avatar and who are you selling to and who is your target audience and who are you speaking to?

And that’s all a hundred percent, but there’s another side of it. And it goes and I learned this the hard way with the power sport Academy. It’s you might know who you’re going to be working with. You might know who you’re going to educate. But is that the customer? And I think that’s where I really started to embrace this idea of a B2B sales model, or I hate to call it like learning brokerage or something.

But that kind of feels like that. Whereas I had to work really hard to identify. Who’s the customer? Who’s going to pay me for this service? And then how do I offer this service or this product in the best way forward for the actual students that are going to take the, and that happened. I was doing, I used to be the corporate trainer for Ducati.

Then I was the corporate trainer for Suzuki. I’ve worked with BRP. I’ve done a little bit of work with Triumph and Polaris was one contract I had. And so I’ve worked a lot with these bigger companies that have dealerships. And then someone has to train the people that works at those dealerships.

So if I’m training technicians or if I’m training service managers, the normal course creator thinks that’s their customer. And that was the mistake I made. That wasn’t my customer. My customer was the dealer owner that hired the service managers and the technicians. And then at some stage I realized in some cases, it wasn’t even those dealers.

In some cases, it’s an organization that runs groups of dealers, or it’s an OEM that supplies product to hundreds of dealers. And then you have to start rethinking what that scale looks like because you mentioned scale in the question. So is my client one dealership? Is my client a group of dealers that work with a specific product?

Or is my client Actually, all of the dealerships that fall within a giant organization. And then you start to think in terms of what is that financially? And that’s where things can get, if you’re not careful, you can become overwhelmed because you start counting the money before you make it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Yeah. And just to put some concepts out there from Lifter LMS has something called groups. It’s an add on, you can get it by itself or it’s part of the infinity bundle. Where a group, you can offer training to groups that then invite their members in, and those, that group may be a business and they have employees who need to train the group admin can invite people in, manage those enrollments in their group and view their reporting and progress and things like that.

All without ever going into the backend of WordPress. I just want to know, as of this live recording, mid September, 2024, We’re just about to release the automated checkout and automated group setup aspect. Lots of people are already using groups, but this is going to make it even better. And just a quick example I like to give in a video I just made, I was showing how to sell a course for 500 or to sell that same course to a group that has 100 people that need to take it for 50, 000.

So in one sale, you can, that’s how you think at scale. Yeah,

Kurt Von Ahnen: it’s, I was an early adopter of groups and one of the things I like most about it, Chris, was this idea that I could sell at an enterprise level, 50 seats, 25 seats, 30 seats, whatever. But. Because I assigned the client as the group leader to the group.

So they can get front end reporting. I no longer have to play like LMS manager and pull weekly reports and make all these pretty documents that say, you’re 17 people didn’t show up for class this week now that they can manage it directly through the site. And the client treats it like, like it’s a privilege, like it’s a perk rather than an obligation.

So it’s actually like a feature not. Even though it’s taken work away from me, it’s still a feature for the client. So it’s a win.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s not like you couldn’t do this before, but gosh, has it gotten a lot easier with a lot more automation? Let’s play a fun game and help the course creators out there.

Start thinking at scale a little bit. I’d like to give the examples of health, wealth, and relationships. Let’s say you’re really into health. So you’d be thinking about wealth while I’m talking. But let’s say you help people with fitness, right? And that’s your thing. You were a personal trainer and you help people with a certain kind of fitness plan, whether it’s lose weight or whatever your niche focuses.

You can do that all day and you can sell a hundred dollar courses. But if you think bigger, if you start thinking at scale, how do I create, how can I take my same course content and actually sell to gyms that have, you Lots of people there going to get who would benefit from some online training as well.

So just think bigger. Some courses and memberships are really not meant for a la carte individual purchase and group, but I think you’d be surprised how many. Things that we teach could just be thought about a little differently and sell the exact same thing to a bigger organization. How about you give us a business or wealth example?

Kurt Von Ahnen: The business example selfishly is that power sport Academy deal. If. And you know what? Everyone plays with pricing a different way. So is it okay if I’m a little transparent with pricing? Yeah, let’s do it. All right. So when I first launched the power sport Academy, I was willing to train dealerships for 1, 500 for a year with live coaching and access to the course and all this stuff.

And I thought there was going to be like 200 dealers that would sign up and I’d have to beat them off with a stick. And that’s not what happened. As I, when I just said at the beginning of the show, I was approaching the wrong customer. So I didn’t have the right flow. I didn’t have nothing was right.

So I did a proof of concept, had some people in and the feedback was it’s way too cheap. My boss would never buy this because for 1500 bucks, they’re assuming there’s no value. It’s got to hurt. It’s got to be 10, 12, 13, 000. So we raised the price to 12, 000 and then we improved. We added a couple of courses.

We made it better and better. And over the course of five years. To train one dealership to train all the employees in one dealership with a year’s worth of live consulting, homework, and access to the six courses it’s 45, 000. And so some people might be listening to this or watching this episode and going, who is this guy that he thinks he can sell some web course for 45 grand?

But you have to understand what you’re selling. You’re not selling the course is the course, right? What I’m selling is most dealerships that take our course, see an increase in revenue of between six and 800, 000 in their service departments after taking this training. So if they’re going to see a 600, 000 increase in revenue, why wouldn’t they pay 45, 000 to train their staff?

Because the side effect is also, increased company culture, reduced employee turnover. higher margins, higher customer satisfaction scores. If you take a look at all of the side effects of the training, it ends up being a triple win all the way around. And so don’t ever be afraid of what the number is.

Remember what you’re selling. Remember the results that you’re selling and remember the audience that you’re selling to. So if we fast forward to how we were talking about business to business and groups and scaling, that’s a year’s worth of training, live consulting, homework to review. I don’t believe in passive income really, right?

I believe in putting skin in the game and anything that I’m selling for a retail price. So this business to business deal that we recently made is an organization that represents a group of dealers. They have about 60 dealers in their network. They needed training. And so what we negotiated was A sharply reduced admission for the courses.

We still do live training and homework and consulting, but instead of a year, we reduced it to six sessions over three months. So if you break that down by the hour, I’m only putting in nine hours of live work. Plus, I’m checking some homework and I’m sending a couple of emails here and there.

The system is set up through the CRM tool to do an email sequence for reminders, notifications, class times, and all that stuff. That’s all set up in advance. Nine hours of live coaching, over three months, and I don’t want to give away all the sauce, but if I do that every quarter, that’s almost six figures for a course that, I created five years ago.

Wow.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. We’re going to come back to talking a little more about partnerships, but just to finish the example let’s say in the relationships niche, imagine you help people find the love of their life. And by the way, we have a course inside Lifter LMS that you can just click a button, import it to your site called the soulmate attraction course, and you can, it’s white label.

You can do whatever you want with it. And you can sell it as is give it away for free to build your list. You can add your take and videos and modify the content. But just going back to that example. You could sell to individuals who are looking for help in their dating life. Or you know what, if you think a little bigger, think about the hundreds or thousands of dating coaches on the internet that have, two, 10, 20, 10, 000 of their own clients who could then you could make their lives easier by selling to those groups.

They didn’t dating coaches. It could then add value to their business by bat. They could buy back some of their time and enroll. People in your course. So just I just wanted to complete that thinking at scale example,

Kurt Von Ahnen: The way that you phrase that I think you miss a core element of how you describe that.

That is people often lose focus of what their skill set is or take it for granted. And so they assume everybody can do it. So you might, like in that example, how many authors have written a book on relationships, right? What helps sell books, sister courses that go along with those books, right?

So they have an audience, they have a website to sell their book, and now they could have a sister course alongside that book, but they probably don’t have it. The web building chops to make it, or the thought processes to break their content down into courses. Thinking like an instructional designer is a skillset.

And there’s so many things that we take for granted as course creators or web developers or WordPress people that we think, everybody’s, Oh, my nephew could do that for me. No, your nephew can’t do this for you. This stuff takes skill. It’s skin in the game. It’s decades of work. And so when you stop taking it for granted and you affix the value to it, that’s when I think more of the opportunities open up in front of you.

Chris Badgett: Another thing that makes opportunity open up in front of you is something that you’re good at, very good at Kurt, which is relationships. And I know with your, you had a recent partnership that helped bring those dealers in and share the workload of pulling off the big scaled power sports training situation.

Can you tell us how that partnership evolved and how that happened and, how people could think about, maybe I don’t have to do it all alone.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So I tell Chris all the time when we have our private talks, I think there’s a lot of value in understanding what your own limitations are. And even if it’s not your limitation, maybe you just don’t like doing it.

Like people assume because of all the lives that I do and the work with WP tonic and lifter and all this stuff that I’m just this gregarious guy that would be awesome at sales. I hate selling. I love conversation. And if conversation ends up in a product sale, that’s phenomenal. But I hate calling up a stranger and asking them for money.

I just, it’s not in me. A gentleman reached out to me not long ago, a couple of months ago. And he said, Hey, we had a phone call three years ago. I told you I was going to build this organization of dealers. It’s called a 20 club, which means we put dealers in groups of 20. He goes, Hey, it’s worked out pretty good.

We’ve got 63 dealers so far, but some of them want training. So here’s where I’m talking about skill sets. He obviously has the chops to sell and build relationships with dealers, right? Something that I wasn’t being very successful at, but I was really successful at putting a thousand hours of my life into building this really cool online curriculum.

So I have what he wants and he has what I want. Like I want access to his 63 dealers. So we had a conversation and I think I said, We first talked three years ago and then he just called me back and spurred this conversation on. So this is another lesson on seed and harvest and being patient with what you create.

And so we worked out a deal where I said, so you’re going to sell to your people. You’re going to enroll everybody. You’re going to take care of the transactions and the transaction fees and all of the headache that goes with selling stuff. And he said, yeah, I’m willing to do that. If you’re willing to help my people.

And I said, dude, I’m more than willing to help the people. In fact, let’s do this. Let’s just split the revenue. Let’s just take whatever I would charge and we’ll split it. And he goes that’s pretty generous. But here’s where I come back with people like some people would say a normal affiliate fees, 20 percent or a normal affiliate fees, 30 percent an affiliate makes a referral.

This gentleman’s not making a referral. He has access to his own group of clients, and he is very much influencing those clients use our product. And he is finalizing the sale. He’s doing the transaction. He’s doing all of the hard work, which I say is the hard work for me. For me, the easy work is hosting the classes, building relationships with his people and teaching his people how to make more money in business.

And so I focus on my strengths. I leverage someone else’s strengths and we do the revenue split and by giving him such a generous portion, he has completely sold out a hundred percent skin in the game to help me find success in training his entire network.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to put some math behind what we’re talking about here, there’s a company value that Lifter LMS has, which is learner results first, which just means that we always want to take care of the people that are actually taking the course, but I was just doing some quick math with chat, GBT and the average U.

S. dealership sells 500 to 800 new units per year, which if you’re in doing 60 dealers or whatever, that’s 30, 000 in people’s lives that are interacting with a dealership for sales or repair or whatever. And that’s how, that’s where the money comes from. This isn’t like magic. It’s, you’re just having a really big impact.

And this is the difference between Selling like one course to like B to C to just an individual consumer about how to take care of your car versus thinking at scale at this business enterprise level you’re a fit, you’re affecting just such a large number of people as you go through what the training does, the jobs that it creates, the raises that people get, cause they do better advancement in their career, safety on the road, whatever, it just goes on and on, which is

Kurt Von Ahnen: cool.

I should hire you to make me a commercial. The the thing that I come away with and part of the reason why I’m so vested in this particular project, and as I’m involved with the Marine Retailers Association and I got a background in automotive and things like that as well.

When whatever it is, if it’s a boat, a motorcycle, an ATV, a car, when you take that vehicle in for service and you have to talk to somebody and try and tell them what’s wrong with it or what you think is, or what problem you’re having with it. And then you give your car to these people and then you’re hoping they communicate to their technicians what you said, right?

Like what was the problem you were complaining about? You’re looking at the paperwork. The paperwork doesn’t make sense. The guy that was talking to you didn’t speak to you the way you wanted to be spoken to. The appointment process was probably a little painful. And then when they sold you the work, you weren’t even sure if the work they were selling you fixed your root cause problem or not.

You probably thought it was overpriced when you picked it up. When you picked it up, you probably weren’t real happy with the work that was done. I’ve been in the industry since I was a kid. So I published a book on the subject. I’ve, become the trainer at Ducati and Suzuki and all these places.

And my goal has always been, I want people to have a heightened experience. I want the customer to have a heightened experience when they go to a dealership that I trained. And I want the people that work at that dealership to have that heightened experience and that positive relationship with the consumer.

And that only happens because we train people to do that. When you think about a technician or a mechanic, if you think about it, when did that person ever have professional communications training? They never did. They could be the smartest person and know how everything on a car works, but if they can’t pick up the phone You know, and nicely say, thanks for calling ABC shop.

How can I help you? Or when would you like to bring your car in if they can’t execute, what we consider best practices in retail, then we assume that they’re subhuman, that they’re not capable of things, but they are, they’ve just never been trained in how to deal with the public. So that’s part of what our training brings to them.

Chris Badgett: Leadership has always been a topic that you’re really good at into written books on teach on a lot of this stuff you’re talking about is like being good manager and leader and employee and stuff. You said something I don’t know, about a year ago about how. In dealerships, sometimes the different departments are in war with each other, but you have a way to turn that around.

And there was just some really valuable leadership lessons in there that, that don’t, that can apply to anything where there’s a, where there’s kind of conflict within an organization. Could you share that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s a really big topic for me. And that’s another one that goes deep. In fact, I’m thinking I might even write a whole book just on that topic.

And it’s. It’s an epidemic. I saw it in the office at Ducati, I saw it in the office at Suzuki. I saw it at the dealerships I worked at. I’m not making this stuff up. And people in the industry would tell you it’s exactly true. You could have a service representative meeting with service reps from all over the country come into a main office to have some kind of, annual rah meeting and the company would bring them pizza.

With no plates. And you’d be like, do you guys have any paper plates? And they would look at you with a straight face and say it’s not customary for us to provide utensils with the food you should have brought your own plate. Like it’s like totally ludicrous stuff. And then when the sales team comes in at, at 1130.

They’re packing up and saying, Oh, we’re going to run over to Mendocino farms, or we’re going to go to some restaurant, for lunch, we’ll be back at one 30 and they all go in the company flips the time, right? Because there’s such a sales focused industry and services always in the background.

That becomes. Just the state of being all the time, right? Where one department thinks they’re higher up than the other. When in reality, it’s the department that’s lesser thought of that has more influence over the relationship with the customer and the overall revenue that comes into the store.

So it’s a really interesting kind of like dichotomy relationship. So when I spoke. I spoke at dealer week last year for the Marine Retailers Association. And one of my talks was interdepartmental harmony. And the whole talk was on how we can use leadership skills and run our departments in a way that communicates with the other departments that lends, not just credibility, but lends positive relationship to each of those things.

So I teach when I consult with dealers, I’m like, if you’re the service manager, you need to have a daily meeting. with the parts manager. You need to have a daily meeting with the general manager and you need to be proactive. You need to say, Hey, what units did you take in on trade last weekend? Which ones need to be reconditioned?

Which ones are going to go wholesale? Meaning are they going to go to auction and get liquidated? Hey, I gave you the estimates to recondition these three. When are you going to approve those? We can work them back through the shop. And. Yeah. If you’re from the service side, if you’re proactive with the sales department and with the parts department, they’ll hate you at first.

Cause they think you’re nagging them or pushing them, right? You’re getting pushy over a 30, 60, 90 day span. If you were to look at how it’s transforming, it becomes a very positive relationship where they recognize, Oh, cause here’s what happens in a dealership Friday afternoon, three o’clock sales, sell something.

And it’s an emergency. Everything in the service department has to stop and you got to stop what you’re doing and prep this unit so that sales can sell it and let it, get delivered the same day. And sales always has emergencies on Friday afternoon and Saturday. But if we think about it, it’s not really sales is fault that they always have sales emergencies on Fridays and Saturdays, because if you didn’t, if you work service and you ignored that department for four or five days prior in the week, that’s your own fault.

If you would have talked to them on Monday or Tuesday, you would have known that, Hey, we need a couple more units prepped for the sales floor. We need a couple more units ready to go. This is what our inventory looks like right now. And it’s that. It’s that communication that’s lacking. And when we fill in the gaps with better communication, we get better processes and better processes, equal margin and profit.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. There’s some valuable lessons in there and going back into leadership. The base layer of leadership, in my view, is how you lead yourself and personal development and, work on yourself, basically. You do a lot of different things. You have a lot of skills. And you have an agency, you’ve got some jobs, you’ve got your own information, online education, businesses and partnerships you’re working.

Tell us about how you lead yourself and manage all that, particularly having a product like an educational company and A agency.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I think the first thing to identify with listeners, especially that might not know me yet is I’m a really big proponent of using what I sell or represent. I’m really big on that.

So almost to a fault. Cause my own website, manana nomas has morphed five or six different iterations in the last decade. Most companies would be more stable with their website, but I look at it like I’m representing product or I’m building product for customers and I want to show that I use that product.

So right now my website’s based on bricks. I just did a bricks exercise to make sure that I could use bricks and that I understood it and that I could see the advantages of using bricks as a page builder before that it was a buddy boss website. And I didn’t have any real social stuff built into my website presence, but I thought, you know what, let’s do a buddy boss thing for a while and show people that we can build community, that we can build, learning products embedded with community and we can make it work.

And so we have these things. So I’m a firm believer in using what I represent. The other side of the coin is I found as I got older. A lot of people say the riches are in the niches and you should focus on one thing. And the more you focus on one thing, the more successful you’re going to be. I tried that.

It’s not in my makeup, Chris. That’s not the way I’m built. I’m more of an eclectic kind of person mentally, and I like to have things in different channels, I learned over time that if I focus on four or five different verticals, but I recognize them as very separate verticals and I kind of time block my week accordingly, I noticed that I can skip a lot of the seasonality or a lot of the ups and downs of being in a niche.

For instance, we mentioned the Powersport Academy ad nauseum in this interview today. A lot of dealerships almost closed down for the winter, right? So like October to March, there’s like nothing happening at a motorcycle dealership. But that’s a great time for me to train those people. So that’s my busy time of the year.

I’m not training any dealers in July and August. Nobody wants to come to class in July and August because they’re busy selling motorcycles. So what would I do at that time? Like just not make any money for two months. That’d be silly. So I focus on the agency work. I focus on the public speaking.

I focus on some of the other things that we do with course development and consulting work. And so by keeping those verticals alive, it creates a stability for me and my family. And gives me the mental variety. I need to stay engaged with stuff.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about burnout and how you avoid that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, I actually have a course on the money. I don’t know. Mosque benefits of saying no. I’m saying no is it’s not only healthy for you. It’s healthy for a prospective client. If you are having a conversation with a client and in your heart, this is not a good fit. Hopefully you have yourself in a good financial position where you can afford to say no because if you say no to the client and do the right thing, refer them to somebody else that you know, find a good fit for them, be nice about it.

Say it’s not really a great fit for us right now. I’ve got another guy that’s in my circles and he’s really good. Now I could refer you to him. Do you want his contact information? That’s how I do that. And I roll those over to other providers. Okay. There’s certain things you just, that it’s not going to be a good fit.

So in some cases over time, maybe you’ve learned, like in my particular case, I am really efficient with startups, like brand new startups. And I have packages for brand new startups with templated websites, and I can launch them for as low as like 79 a month. And they, it’d be like for them having a Kajabi site.

But Kajabi is a couple of hundred bucks a month. And so I can give them the hosting. I put the product in it’s templated. All they got to do is change the text and images, startup people like that’s, they’re just getting started. That’s a really good niche for us. And we have a little bit of growth in that area.

The other area is in SCORM and enterprise education sites where we’re going for much bigger projects. And so when we look at a project that quite honestly, three, four years ago, I would have killed for, a 15 or 16, 000, custom website, they want a lifter site, but they want this custom, that custom, the other custom and community tools realistically.

That might not be the best fit for our agency at this time. So that might be something I would refer on to another provider, but it’s knowing when to say no and what things to avoid. Cause you, you sense it, it, you just have to execute on it. You have to be brave enough to say no and not be afraid of missing out because there’s always something better around the corner.

You just have to be able to get. That space to get around the corner.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You have I was thinking in my mind about how you say you’re not good at sales and I understand why people are that you don’t like it or whatever it is. But I think I’m thinking back and I think what you possess, I’m just making a comment here, maybe you can react to it is.

Sales just happen naturally around you because you are an opportunity creator. So like when you, when I first met you, you came into the office hours and you were contributing and creating opportunity. And then when you were looking to get involved with Lifter, I’m like, I know this guy he’s already here.

He’s already doing stuff, he’s using the tools. He’s, taking Lifter into bigger brands and stuff like that. And I’ve seen you, be around with WP tonic and with our, with your clients. And it just, you just create opportunity wherever you go. So like sales is just a, instead of creating sales to create opportunity, you create opportunity and it’s the sales are just a side effect.

It happens. And I don’t know, like you said, your partnership with that person who first contacted you three years ago. It’s like you created the opportunity and then you helped put it, put the opportunity together and the magic happened.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Very much a seed and harvest mentality. I try to work with the other thing, during the pandemic, I went live almost every day for two and a half years.

And I just tried drilling into people that you need to find opportunities within obstacles. Like a lot of times we experience an obstacle as a person and we take it as a personal defeat or a personal assault when in reality it’s a training moment. It’s a chance to learn something. It’s a chance to find an opportunity and maybe some growth.

And so I think there’s just, when you say finding opportunities, it’s yeah, that could be a challenge. Let’s take a look at that. And then not for nothing, Chris, I don’t know if this is for you or not, but just for fun, why don’t you roll into the manana nomas. com website and see if one of our packages fits for you.

All right. All right,

Chris Badgett: um you also Moved like a year ago or not even and created more opportunity Better, economic conditions and stuff like that but I also see you in your new town Like networking with the chamber of commerce and getting out from behind your computer going to the local establishments and everything and this is where you’re planting seeds.

You’re just like plant, seed, plant, seed, plant, seed. And stuff comes from all that. Tell us about that. Actually, like in terms of moving, particularly for people that are creating courses on online or memberships or coaching programs or building sites for clients, they do have an opportunity to change their location.

So what are some of the things like going through a location change, moving your family? That you have that are things for people to think about to create more opportunity in your next geography

Kurt Von Ahnen: without getting overly political. We escaped California and got the Kansas a year ago. This month makes a year and think about the amount of changes I’ve been able to make in a year.

Like I’ve made a lot of live posts about it. I’m not very shy about it. We went from, being riddled with debt, trying to keep up with rent out there to being able to pay off all of our debt and buy a house in 11 months in Kansas. That’s really amazing. It’s a complete paradigm shift right now.

If what you said earlier, which is. Pretty flattering. Thank you. We moved here. I didn’t have any expectations of doing local business. I really didn’t because I, in my mind thought we’re moving to Kansas. Thank God. I know the people that lifter L. M. S. And W. P. Tonic and I have a couple bigger contracts because I didn’t think there’d be any business.

We got to Hutchinson, Kansas, which has 42, 000 people in it. And on one of my bike rides, when we first moved here cause I still bicycle I saw a sign called startup Hutch. I said, startup Hutch. I wonder what that is. So I went home, looked it up and sure enough, they had a Facebook page and they’re the organization in town sponsored by the community college to help startup businesses launch in the area.

And so I called him, I said, dude, I love it here. And we had gone out to different businesses and restaurants, and we’d had a great experience at all of them. Like the people here are awesome. The businesses are awesome. Some of the buildings are old, a little creepy, but the people and stuff is awesome. And so I explained that to Jackson square, the guy that runs startup hutch.

And he said, dude, it is so refreshing to hear somebody say such positive things about our town. Would you be willing to come and be on our podcast? So I said, sure, I’ll come and be on your podcast. So I did the podcast and as soon as I was done with the podcast, he said, that was awesome. Would you mind maybe doing a public speaking gig on websites at city hall next week?

I said, for who? He goes we have this group that we run through every year. We take 12 startup businesses and we run them through a 12 week program on how to grow their business and proper, like best practices of business ownership and all of that. And so I said sure. Yeah. I’d love to go and present.

When I went to present. There were two banks, two lawyers couple insurance companies, there was nobody there for digital marketing except for me. And so I got to present to 12 companies and then we all had one on one like speed dating meetings with each of those companies. And that resulted in a couple of people I’m still in contact with today for business to take that another step further.

They also have. second Tuesday of no third Tuesday of every month. They have a startup hutch entrepreneurs meeting at a local bar owned by Pippin Williamson. So we go there and we hang out. We meet all the new businesses in town and then they have minority business meetups, which in Kansas doesn’t mean you have to not be a white guy to go.

They invited me to go. So I went. And it was not a handout. It was a hand up to everybody. They introduced me to everybody. Everybody introduced to me that it was just a wonderful thing. I’ve been to three of those events. The chamber of commerce, like you mentioned, is really strong here. The community college actually tonight is hosting a pitch contest for new businesses to pitch their business.

And the winner gets something like 2, 000 of seed money to help launch their startup. So when I say that my target audience in my new small town is startups. It was a plug and play situation for me. I showed up and there was nobody here in town really pushing WordPress. And now I run the WordPress meetup the second Tuesday of every month.

And I get to network with everybody on that level too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That shows the power of getting out of the building, getting out on the bike, getting your health in, being open to opportunity. Hey, what’s this interesting sign. Let me follow that. Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: It, and at no point, and I want to be like super clear here at no point have I ever felt oh, I’m going to take a stack of business cards with me to this networking event and push myself on people. That’s not what I’ve done at all. I’ve just gone in and introduced myself at a brewery. I have myself a nice cold beer. I meet 10 or 15 business owners. Hey, what do you do? That’s interesting. How long have you been in business?

And I’ll ask them, of course I’ll ask them. Hey, what’s your website look like? Do you have an active website? Are you using a Facebook page? Do you have your own URL? What do you do? Have you ever thought that your business could use training for your customers to show how to use your product properly?

Just simple questions. And some people would say that’s selling. But it’s having a conversation and at the end of that conversation, I’m totally fine if they say, Hey, it was great to meet you. And they leave. That’s totally fine. Cause I know I’m probably going to see them three or four months from now at the next event.

That consistency is that seed I’m talking about. And I’ll wait until they’re ready to ask. And when they initiate the conversation then I can set the hook and give them a proposal.

Chris Badgett: You’re also big on LinkedIn. So that’s one, one of the ways I would ask you is if we start planting all these seeds, eventually you’re like, wait, who is that person?

Or how do I keep track of all this? Or at least catalog them in my social network so that I can find them again. But any tips on, managing all these opportunity seeds you’re planning out around your life?

Kurt Von Ahnen: You’re going to make me pitch again. I have a LinkedIn course on manana no mas, but I’ll tell you guys that the number one thing I’ve done in LinkedIn is I stopped pitching people and sending people two and three and four paragraphs in a direct message and all of that stuff that annoys us, why would we do that to somebody else?

So I started treating LifterLMS almost like text messaging. Like I’ll just say, Hey, it’s great to meet you. You want to grab a quick meeting as an icebreaker. Do you want to have a sales free call? Next Tuesday, like just short, very short messages, no paragraphs, no nothing. And I never send people a scheduling link or a calendar link or a meeting link unless they say, Yes.

I’d like to meet with you. Please send me a link.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Like I never send the link until it’s, I hate to say verbalized. But they type it out, but it’s like until they acknowledge, Oh yeah, we’re going to exchange links and set up a meeting time unless that happens. I’m not sending a link. And the moment that I made that my personal.

I’m going to say like part of my personal brand. The moment I adopted that as part of my personal brand, my LinkedIn grew from like 3000 connections to 10, 000 connections in just a couple of years.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s Kurt Von Annen from Manana Namas. What are the best ways for people to connect with you, Kurt?

We just talked about LinkedIn,

Kurt Von Ahnen: I know, but I out there I’m the only Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn, which makes it really easy to search me out on LinkedIn. So if you find me, you know you got the right guy. And then if it’s business related, manana nomas.com. I do a lot directly through the website and, we’ve got some training there and we’ve got some packages and you can always reach out and set up a 30 minute icebreaker call through that website, just by clicking on the button.

Chris Badgett: For you out there listening or watching, I want to encourage you to immediately after you stop listening to this or stop watching this to think at scale. So how could you be playing bigger? How could you get more leverage in what you do teaching online or with your agency work, because. There’s so many great ways to do that. Kurt’s story holds a lot of gems and how he’s done that. Kurt, thank you for coming back on the show.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Education Entrepreneur Bradley Morris shares his creative journey, beginning with a low time when he operated a t-shirt business and dropped out of college, which helped him learn the importance of thankfulness.

His artistic career started in 2007 with the release of his viral “Gratitude Dance” video. Bradley became interested in meditation throughout the years, leading seminars and retreats before turning to recording meditations for an audio library that brought in passive revenue.

Bradley Morris is an education entrepreneur and creative visionary known for his innovative approach to building meaningful projects. He is from Majik Media. Bradley discusses how he prefers to work in teams to complete projects rather than working alone.

He strongly emphasizes the value of collaboration and relationships, utilizing the abilities and skills of others to further his goals. These stories were the basis for a children’s book publishing business and an entertaining audio storytelling app that aims to foster creativity, instill morals, and ignite the imagination in young listeners.

If Bradley Morris’s journey inspired you, don’t miss out on his Signature Workshop training, where he dives deeper into building a fulfilling and creative life. Click here to learn more and sign up.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend. He’s back on the show. His name is Bradley Morris. You can find him at magic media dot com. That’s m a j I k media dot com. He’s a prolific creator, everything from dance videos to meditation training to all kinds of different things with kids, the magic kids.

We’re going to talk about that. But first Bradley, Take us on a tour of how this all started. I know it started with the gratitude dance video that went viral. Tell us how your creator journey sparked.

I would say my creator journey sparked with rock bottom. I dropped out of College after my second year to start my first business, which was a t shirt business.

and we sold really offensive t shirts on the internet, my buddy and I, and within a year, my life became what was written on my shirts. And, and that set me off on the path of trying Get my act together and make some positive changes and the process I discovered the power of gratitude and my buddy and I, two buddies and I won out and created a video called the gratitude dance.

This was back in 2007, right at the early days of YouTube. And so this was the first video. I ever posted on YouTube and it went viral. and my buddy and I went on a speaking tour around North America for the next couple of years, teaching workshops and speaking on stages. and in that time, I got really into meditation.

after my tour, I went back to Victoria, British Columbia, where I was living. And I started teaching meditation classes based on the request of a friend. And that led me to, teach 500 workshops over the next three years. It was crazy. I was teaching all the time. I started doing retreats in Peru and Mexico and Hawaii.

and by the end of those three years, I was tired of teaching meditation, to be honest. And that was when I wanted to go all in on, on creating on the internet. I wanted to basically clone myself so that the teachings I was sharing with people that had changed my life could reach people. Millions of people.

And that’s what I did. I produced a world class audio library of meditations. we started with 48 tracks, each with custom composed music, and I started licensed those to a whole bunch of different apps and I ended up going. Up through the ranks of Mindvalley’s Omvana app and I was number one on there for six years straight and through that a whole bunch of other apps started approaching me and as a result, over the next coming years and still now my work just keeps spreading, but I’ve reached millions of people.

It’s generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of purely passive income. I’ve never had to build a meditation audience. The apps do it for me. and then I could, I retired from teaching meditation. I went on to teaching creators how to bring their life’s work to the internet, how to create courses, memberships, and communities, how to do proper launches, how to use where, which is where you and I met, how to use entertainment as a vehicle to teach and transform and how to use gamification to get people to actually get the results that they’re trying to get in their programs.

So that has led me on this whole other journey for the last decade plus. And, Just three years ago, my son Soren’s eight, we’re unschooling him. So we’re supporting his educational path by following his interests and pulling in mentors around him and what he wants to do. And as a result, we launched a kids publishing and story company three years ago called Magic Kids.

Him and I have, co written 17 stories, a graphic novel. We’re working on our first audio movie together. he has been a part of our comedy writing team, our advertising and marketing team, and, we just launched our magic kids app in March. And we’re working on producing the best audio stories on the planet.

We have a team of producers that score all the music and sound effects. We’ve worked with over a hundred voice actors, most of which are from my Island on salt spring Island, where I live. we’ve licensed over 700 kids songs from musicians around the world. We have kids meditations and we create curriculum with every story so kids can have a whole bunch of fun integrating the lessons and themes from our stories.

And then, I just launched my, new enterprise with a buddy of mine, just This morning called play cheap all. com, which is a new sport. We’re bringing to the world. So I have been, as you said, I’m on the forever path. Some people play the long game. I’m playing the forever game like you. and so it’s part of my philosophy just always be creating.

and I’ve tried to build a career around following my passions and interests and to keep my artist self and my entrepreneur self happily married.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s amazing. You’ve done a lot of great work. And one of the things I hear in your journey is that you’re not doing it alone. And tell us a little bit how you think about that.

So for example, you are not trying to build, you didn’t try to build a meditation audience. people were like, wanted you to come lead workshops and stuff, but you went to the platforms that do guided meditation to distribute for you. You didn’t have to figure out that piece or spend a bunch of time focusing on that.

How do you think about team around projects and community and people?

Love that question. you hit the nail on my exact business philosophy. so I left social media 8 years ago. I have a master class called thriving in business without social media where I teach the 19 relationships based marketing strategies that I’ve figured out or an implement magic media, magic kids, and all the things that I do, but you hit the nail.

it’s relationships. our tagline at magic media is leverage your life’s work. And so many people struggle and suffer in their business because they’re trying to do it all themselves. They think they have to do everything that themselves, and they think they have to keep reinventing the wheel.

And so what I look for, what are the leverage points? How can we leverage what we’ve already created? And how can we leverage our skills? How can we leverage the relationships that we have surrounding us? And so I’ve built everything through partnerships. I’ve always had collaborators to support me because I’m not the best designer.

I’m not the best video editor, I’m definitely not an illustrator. I’m definitely not a web designer or a techie. But I have the clear vision of what I want to be doing. I have the enthusiasm to enroll talented people and that’s what I try and do. And then it’s to figure out the win when you and I met, we were launching the Grady course adventure, which was essentially like Indiana Jones meets Saturday night live and a business development course, which is still available in our magic mind community.

It’s still just as epic as when we made it. And back then when the idea struck, I didn’t have a couple hundred thousand dollars to invest in hiring my buddies who were very talented designers and producers. So I enrolled them in a business partnership. Same goes when I produced my, my, meditation library.

I didn’t have money to hire my buddy for a year to produce and compose all these beautiful tracks. So I made them a business partner on it and paid them a share of the revenue that we made. I’ve always been one who looks for the opportunities to collaborate with other people. And I feel like that’s where alchemy happens is like when you and somebody else combine your magic, that’s when like super magic happens.

That’s when, you share the responsibility, you share the workload, you share. The revenue that happens, you share the marketing like it, when we can share that weight, it’s no longer all just on us. And I do that really well with what we’re doing for magic kids. We have several hundred artists who are contributing to everything that we’re doing inside of the magic kids realm.

And it’s just trying to find. What are the fair ways that we can all be compensated for our talent and time?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s really cool One more thing

on that just so I feel like this is another important one. So five six years six years ago I think it was now. I got really burnt out from magic media doing these big client partnerships and so instead of taking clients money of 50, 000, 100, 000 to do a project with them.

We started doing partnerships where they would pay us a retainer for 12 months, and then we would get a revenue share for two to three years. We would do these like longer term projects with them that would have this bigger ramp up. And, it’s been amazing and life changing, it’s just been so much better and more fulfilling for me to go on these long arc projects with people.

My entrepreneurial spirit feels more satisfied than like typical client work where it’s we do the project we’re done. It’s okay, goodbye. We’re done with the thing we said we would do. and so that’s been another way that I shifted my business model to just. Lean into partnerships and relationships.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I love the incentive structure there and how that, how you’re just sharing responsibility and revenue. you also are clearly a visionary. this is a funny question, but what’s your process for vision or does it just strike you? Like where did magic kids come from?

It usually is just it strikes me.

it’s a conversation. it’s, something that repetitively shows up in my life. So with magic kids, for that 1, my son and I were always just making up stories and he’s been growing up with very limited screen time. He gets 1 show a week. He’s eight now. He just doesn’t complain about that. That’s just the reality he knows.

And he’s cool with it, but he gets audio stories. So he’s grown up with audio stories and I found a lot of the audio stories that we were finding were basically junk food entertainment. They were funny, but they weren’t like. helping him to learn values or life skills or lessons or think about the world differently.

The ones that were more holistic in nature were just boring and lame. And so I wanted to combine what we’ve learned at Magic Media about, like, how do you use entertainment as a vehicle to teach and transform? In my opinion, audio is one of the most transformational mediums we have because you can get inside of people’s minds and you can take them on a journey.

You can activate imaginations. And that’s what we’re trying to do at Magic Kids is like, you take kids from the screen time where they’re being fed Through this like strobe light effect, whatever it is that the screen wants to tell them or show them versus an audio story where it’s activating their imagination and they can feel and they can each kid is going to have their own experience of a story that we’re trying to share with them.

they’re going to imagine it in a different way. They’re going to see a character in their mind differently. If you get. 30 kids to all draw the main character of a story. They’re all going to draw it differently. And what was the question again? I was about where vision comes from. Oh yeah. so yeah, that with magic kids, it just, we were making up stories.

And then, so I’ve had this men’s group I started years ago called man ventures and every Tuesday we get together and whatever guys show up, choose what the adventure is the following week and we’ve done. Amazing things. You’re not allowed to do the same adventure two weeks in a row. So on one dark and stormy October night, we had 12 men in my office and we all wrote children’s stories.

Then we read our stories to each other. I wrote a story called the master’s Apprentice about a wizard who looks for his apprentice. And then the apprentice shows up and it’s all rhyming. And, really, I thought it was really cool story that kind of ingrained the, philosophy that to go from good to great practice every day and that when we’re starting out at something, it’s very frustrating.

But if we just keep practicing, we become a master. And that story the next day after I wrote that, I was like, I want to publish this. I don’t want to go the traditional route. I’ve gone traditional publishing routes before. It can take two to three years to get a book on a shelf. I’m going to get 6 percent of the revenue that’s made.

They’re going to pay me in advance, which is a debt to the company. I don’t want any of those things. So we’re going to start a publishing company and it’s going to be called magic kids. And it’s going to be a fair pay publishing company where we pay 50 percent of the revenue back to the artists because I’m an artist and I want to be paid well for my work.

And so that was the beginning. We did three or four months of research. I hired two different friends to who had publishing experience to just get me all the facts and all the information. Everybody told me not to do it. I raised a little bit of investment capital to get the first, 12 books paid for with the audio stories.

I thought the audio stories would be, or the books would be the thing that made money. And I was dead wrong. We lost a lot of money on books, but that led us to build the app. My son Soren actually had the idea to build the app. Vision struck him one day. We had a marketing meeting, six of us in my office, and he’s at his little desk whiteboard wall.

And we’re mapping out all the ways that we can get more books sold. And he walks over with his little whiteboard with

Chris Badgett: A rectangle and a circle in the middle of the rectangle. And he said, listen up everybody. This come from a six year old. What we need is a button and he holds up his little whiteboard over his head.

Button buddy. And he’s we need a button. Kids just push a button and a story pops up and starts playing. Oh, like an app. He’s yeah, we need an app. We’re all just like jaw dropped and it was one of those moments where the universe spoke to us and we’re like, okay. We erased everything on the whiteboard and we said, what’s the magic kids app?

And that was when we started working on it and that was two years ago. and then he walked back, Mike dropped moment. He didn’t say another word. He walked back to his desk and kept drawing and we’re just, what was that?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And that’s M a J I K kids, magic kids. That’s right. And for anybody out there listening, who’s a parent, or knows a kid that might enjoy this, like what’s the.

Target age for Magic Kids

4 to 10 is what we’re going for, but we have friends and customers that like the whole family gather around to listen to stories. We release new stories every Saturday morning to help replace cartoons. Our stories can be 15 minutes. They can be 25. We have 490 minute audio stories that we’re working on that are like audio movies.

yeah. We’ve got several that are around 45 minutes. So there’s like something for everyone. And the way that we’re trying to do the stories is kids are geniuses. So treat them like geniuses. So a four year old can fall in love with the story because the characters and the sounds and the humor that’s in there, the occasional fart joke, and then the parents and older kids fall in love with them because there’s these, Deep life lessons that are being taught through the character’s journeys in the stories.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I want to dig into something you mentioned about quitting social media eight years ago. I think it was, tell us more because I think that. That can almost sound impossible to an entrepreneur, particularly a digital entrepreneur. but you’ve pulled it off. just give us the story there.

Okay. It’s a good story. I wanted to leave three years before leaving, so I created a evacuate Facebook group. I could feel the toxicity back then of what it was becoming of just this, like there was these mixed signals that I was getting. In the space that just weren’t congruent. The idea of, instead of friends, we’re getting followers, the anxiety, people were feeling the loneliness, the screen addiction that was happening for me, my work days were on average 12 hours a day because I was spending three of those hours wasted on social media every day.

there was a lot of things, but I had one, one particular moment. We just had our kids soaring. So he was a baby. We were just launching the Grady course adventure. And I was up on a mountain watching the sunset by myself. It was a beautiful moment. Just reflecting on, I was feeling really lit up in my life at that time.

I was like, first part of my career where my artist and my entrepreneur self were perfectly married through the delivery of the Grady Course Adventure. I was stoked. And so as I’m watching the sun go down, I suddenly started to notice my mind pre writing what I was going to post on social media. In that moment, I realized my brain had been hacked.

My thoughts weren’t my thoughts. My experience was no longer my experience and Mark Zuckerberg essentially owns that experience now, and it felt so out of alignment with the life I want to create for myself and for my son and the freedom that I seek in all of my experiences. That I went home and I told my wife what happened and I said, I’m leaving.

I’m pulling the cord on social media. I’m deleting my account tomorrow. So I messaged all my friends that matter to me most and I deleted and what happened next was the reason why I think so many people don’t leave and I’m grateful for the experience, but it was hard as hell. It was crickets. It literally felt like I got erased.

I erased myself from the Matrix, I no longer existed. And I wasn’t having friends text me. I wasn’t having people call me. Nobody reached out and said, Hey, dude, what’s going on? Is everything okay? Why’d you leave? I saw your account’s gone. I saw your goodbye poster. Nothing. No party invites. No potluck invites.

Nothing. I just spent 10 years developing a following on the internet and it was all a lie. None of it mattered. So that was when I realized I needed to focus on real-world relationships. And so my whole philosophy on life and business changed as a result of being erased because everything that I thought was real, all these followers, it was all not real.

That was when I started my men’s group. My wife, I felt super lonely. So I started this adventure club. my wife started a group on our Island for a handful of moms who all had kids the same age that grew into a group. There’s over 1200 moms in it now from our Island. Our population is only 10, 000 people.

Like it’s the grandmothers of the Island, the mothers of the Island, and they, it’s become this incredible hub for collaborative support on our Island. and so that led me to 19 relationships based marketing strategies and how do we come back to the old fashioned way of valuing relationships and my philosophy when I left was like, I wanna have wealth in my life.

I want to do well. And I was convinced that in order for me to do really well with my work, I don’t need 10, 000 followers. I don’t need 10, 000 people on an email list. All I need is 10.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Shahjahan Jewel shares the story of how FluentCRM started as an internal tool for WP Manage Ninja before becoming a full-fledged product. He also shares insights about marketing automation

Shahjahan Jewel is the owner of WP Manage Ninja, a business recognized for developing well-liked WordPress products including FluentCRM, Fluent Forms, Fluent Bookings, and Fluent Support, was founded and is led by Shahjahan Jewel. Shahjahan highlights that FluentCRM offers powerful marketing automation and CRM functionality at a far cheaper cost than SaaS options like ActiveCampaign since it was developed with small businesses, creators, and WordPress users in mind.

Additionally, he emphasizes how crucial it is to integrate CRM features directly into WordPress so that users can handle all facets of their business including customer interactions and courses in one location and not depend on third-party systems. Shahjahan also covers the difficulties of using WordPress to manage a CRM, particularly for bigger email lists, and how Fluent CRM is designed to meet those needs.

Shahjahan also discusses FluentBookings, another WordPress Manage Ninja product that draws inspiration from Calendly and Cal.com.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend. His name is Shahajan Jewell. He’s the founder and CEO of WP Manage Ninja, which creates a lot of products. Fluent CRM, Fluent Forms, Fluent Bookings, Fluent Support, and much, much more. This is going to be a fun episode.

We’re going to talk about tech. And we’re going to talk about entrepreneurship. We’re going to talk about WordPress. The first welcome to the show.

Shahjahan Jewel: Hi, Chris. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m really excited to chat with you today. And I think it’s a long time. We chat last time. I maybe that was in Taiwan.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we had some good chats in Taiwan. And I remember, I think I first met you in Greece in person. Yeah. And I think sometimes when entrepreneurs get together, they have a lot to talk about. So it’s very easy to talk to you in this unique world that we find ourselves in. But first I wanted to get the story behind fluent CRM.

And the reason why this is really important to you out there watching or listening is. In the learning management system space, you can do a lot with an LMS and a CMS like WordPress, but you need a CRM too, to do more marketing automation, broadcast emails, do more advanced stuff with your contact records.

Can you tell us the story of how Fluent CRM came to be? Okay.

Shahjahan Jewel: So it’s a bit different. It was not intended to be a product actually. We started, selling press plugins back to the 18 and then when we released an update then we had to let our customers know.

That we have an update or, promotional email and those type of things. And first we tried, MailChimp MailChimp is really great, simple. The problem was actually like every time we have a sale, we have to, custom coding or, export the CSV and import those of the thing.

And we are not like marketer, but, we are all the developers. So we, we thought okay, How what can we do? Maybe we can just, have a very simple page where you can just type the subject and the body and hit send, and it will send those emails. So that was like the very fast version.

And, we are using it and, our developers and me too. Added use features like one of the, struggle we had like when someone actually send us an email or give us a support ticket, then actually we had to find, which products they bought or what attributes they have in the other system.

Then then we made a system like, okay, if I search by an email. Or, name, I will get all the details of that user. Then actually it became okay, it’s having shape and then actually work for a year on top of that. Then we see that, okay, this is something that we can actually release as, open source and people can use that.

That’s the behind the story. After, really the first version that was like, pretty fast version. When we released to the public we have a very minimal features and then people actually started using it. Give us, lots of requests. Like I need this integration.

And then actually okay, let’s org on it. We had a very, loans of Fluent CRM. And what we did actually, we reinvested all the money that we got from the loans campaign into it, and then we made it a really big so that’s the backstory of Fluent CRM.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I, one of the things that fascinates me about a WordPress based CRM and email marketing automation is how affordable it is.

As an example, I’ve been using active campaign for a long time. I have a somewhat large email list and the pricing got up to around a thousand dollars a month. And then I reduced the level of the plan I had cause I wasn’t using all the features. And then just this month they raised the price on my plan, another 100.

So it just keeps coming. And I’m like, it’s like you mentioned MailChimp. It’s great. We recommend it. It’s a, it’s got a free, easy way to get started, but once you scale it, it’s challenging. And I find it really impressive with Fluent CRM and a lot of your other tools to how Like fluent support is an example.

I pay help scout a lot of money every month. And I just want to get how you think about that. Cause you’re really disrupting the market in terms of providing in many ways, a more powerful solution at a much cheaper price. How do you think about that and design for that?

Shahjahan Jewel: So in a sense, like actually, we, I never reinvent any wheel or we never invented anything new.

The idea behind, all of our products actually, that is, we want to build products that will help the, small businesses like us or a, a shop owner, or, a creator who is, building a course or selling something like that, and, all those tools that exist.

Okay. So like you, you mentioned like active campaign is great. Like fluency RME is very inspired by ActiveCampaign. We actually used ActiveCampaign for months to understand ActiveCampaign, how the automation work. So we tried to mimic the ActiveCampaign automation into Fluent CRM.

And so our idea is actually, there has lots of tools in SaaS services. And many people actually like us want to use self posted services. They want to reduce the cost. They don’t want to give tax for success. Like when you have 2000 subscriber, MailChimp is free, but when you have 10, 000 subscriber, you are paying hundreds of dollars per month.

So that’s the idea, actually, like all the tools we want to. Build those tools. So it worked in self hosted it, use your server and it was great. It integrated with everything. So like fluency and our idea is actually like when you install that in your WordPress, I know you have say like a lift elements in store, so I will, so all the data of library limits into the same red database.

So I can actually easily, query those data. And when you see a customer, you can actually see who is courses this user enrolled, or I want to see who is my contacts are completed is a course or purchased a course. Those type of things like you are hosting your, e commerce, you are hosting your learning management system in WordPress, but you are, managing your contacts in a another server, another instance.

That’s not a, I think, ideal experience for a business owner, because you have to go back and forth to many places. So that’s our idea is actually like you are managing your, entire online business in WordPress. These tools should be in WordPress. So that’s by personal view about the self hosted open source and everything.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I think we, we think very similarly, like at the beginning of Lifter LMS in WordPress. So this is like in 2013 even the inside of WordPress, you had to get, All these different solutions to create a learning management system, like a separate membership plugin, separate e commerce, separate engagement, gamification stuff.

So we started with this philosophy of how can we just make it easier on the user and kind of consolidate? And I think that. With learning management system websites, almost all of them would benefit from a CRM. Why not have it in WordPress? And that just, it makes a lot of sense. I wanted to ask you a technical question about it.

I get asked this a lot and I’m hoping you can help me I can learn from you on how to answer it better. But when you do like you have a web hosting account, you put WordPress on it, you start adding other tools that send emails, a CRM and email marketing automation tool like FluencyRM, especially if you’re doing a broadcast email.

Can you explain the limitation of just WordPress by itself sending email and then maybe using Fluent CRM as an example, how do you give people the confidence that it’s going to handle the email?

Shahjahan Jewel: Yeah, so this is the, this is our Kind of challenge and not technical challenge, but it’s to educate our users.

It can handle your your server can handle , something like that. So IGA is actually for last couple of years, uh, the, we like many users actually, open support ticket okay, I want like friends CRM, but I’m really afraid that, something will break my email will something will be, will go wrong, something like that.

So only thing I actually like say to customers Look, you are selling your products from your WordPress. You are using WooCommerce. WooCommerce is really big and your server can handle that. You can actually host your email marketing tool this way. And the way we build Fluent CRM.

It very like we had to really do lots of overengineering to build FluentJRM. So something like that, say say you have, you are sending like, 50, 000 emails. And you are getting lots of traffic too. And if a friend said, I’m see that your, server memory is up to 70%, it will stop sending email.

We had to do, lots of background things. If we, if it would be a SAS solution, then we could actually easily, solve this technical challenges from our server because we don’t have any, control over the server. So that’s why we had to do this thing.

So influential and we like this, like we have a very powerful automation. We had to find out what’s the super optimal way we can do that. How we can manage something like we want to run only our code when these things happen. So yeah, definitely that’s like challenging.

Sometimes we find like someone actually sending say 50, 000 emails. And it’s say, they’re saying like, okay, how, why is. Taking one day or 12 hours or 15 hours. Then we had to, explain that when we asked them, we suffer you are using, so maybe they are using a like a shared server, like 5 per month server.

Then we had to explain that okay, you are, managing 50, 000 Contacts you are. sending these emails. So better, at least you are, buy a VPS like 20 per month and host that and you will get the full power and there will be no issue. This type of things like educating the users.

That’s currently challenging, two years ago, the things we, faced about this issue. Now it’s much less. I think more of most of the users are more educated now. There has, lots of good software management tools like they they let you connect your VPS.

So some, so there is lots of things, not like shared server, but there is lots of, new server management tools. They also help the overall ecosystem. I think after a few years, this will not be problem because, the servers are getting more powerful, less expensive.

Yeah, I think it’s a good thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I think the market is maturing too and realizing the difference between a five dollar a month shared hosting account for a brochure website or a Platform that needs more resources and there’s so many great hosts out there that are Doing better and offering, more resources.

If we look at what I call an education entrepreneur, somebody who’s selling courses and coaching, and if we look at coaching specifically the, there’s the booking element of Hey, I’m ready to book my coaching call with the coach. And I love this one because you’ve basically taken what tools like Calendly or acuity scheduling.

Do but you’ve brought it into WordPress. Tell us about that. Like how the About fluent booking.

Shahjahan Jewel: Yeah, so I am a big fan of Cal. com so we used both cal. com and calendly And then I saw there has no plug in wordpress Like this smooth Calendly or Cal. com, WordPress.

And also we are our marketing team actually planning to do sales call. So our idea was actually when someone actually purchased one of our license, select French CRM, then we will do a sales call. They can just, come to our site and then they will, fill up the form and schedule a call.

And then as I am very much, develop developer mindset and, it’s not actually, I would not say it’s a good thing, but, that’s what I am. So okay let’s, build that build a very minimal version just for our use and we can do that. Then, we the first version we started using it we, and then then we said okay, let’s build this as a project product.

And then we like work like seven, eight months. And, we try to. You can say we are really inspired by cal. com. I really love it I love the company how they operate and they are also like open source. They but they’re you know you need you know, lots of things to set up and everything and So that’s you know, like we built fluent booking And I think you know now, thousands of people are using it.

So it’s good

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome Another one, and I’m starting to detect a pattern here that, yeah, so you’re scratching your own business problem.

Shahjahan Jewel: actually, like all of our for most of our product, we are the biggest user. A few months ago we released F Boards.

I think we are the, second largest user of that product frameworks like. alternate of, Trello. And so our whole company runs on that in fluent boards as a project management tool. And so fluent support, that’s the same kind of same story. We want to host everything ourself. So when we do, we, we try to find a Open source or paid version of that.

And then we see that if that, what’s for us so the fluent support before print support, we are using, awesome support. It’s a WordPress plugin. We’re using the premium version. The problem is actually they stopped, developing that plugin. So it was like the world is style custom post type thing.

And, our, uh, we could not use those data effectively and as well as it, it just slow for our, support agents. Then we built the fluent support and we tried to optimize that every millisecond level. Like the idea was actually if I, save one second we get like 300, 400 tickets per day and then it will actually help us a lot save time.

So that’s the idea of our products philosophy is actually. We need that. Let’s build it and then make it, sophisticated and then release for the public. And get the feedback as much as possible from the users and all on that.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And just to go over that fluent boards is like Trello, which is project management, which most course creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs need.

And Fluent support is similar to help scout or free scout so that you can manage email with teams and stuff like that, which is super helpful. These are tools we as business owners use every day. What’s your recommendation? Let’s say there’s an, a small business entrepreneur out there. Do you recommend they put it all on one website or have subdomains or how do you?

Like what’s your advice there? We get this question a lot. We see people do both. They like have a site with everything or they move things out. If you could advise, how would you advise?

Shahjahan Jewel: It’s just contextual, right? Different people on to manage different type way, but I can share what I, we do, we host everything in our main domain.

The leisure is actually, like our shop is in our main domain our user account also there. And our support also there, our CRM is also there because if we, I would, host our CRM and subdomain, then it could again got the disconnect connection, right? We could not use all the data, all the events happening in my main store.

If you go to, our store, buy FluentCRM, I can easily actually, run an automation. I can send the welcome email series for you. I can check if you purchased, FluentForms or not. Then I can, send an email about the FluentForms. And, try to educate you about those type of things.

Now I can actually. Easily feature like who is who are our, main top paying customers, which products they’re using. So that’s for that. We use actually everything together in our main domain. So it’s less moving part. So that’s my, personal preference.

That’s how we actually, design these things.

Chris Badgett: I like that. I started with more separate stuff, but over time, they’ve all been coming back to just keep it simple and just get good hosting and you’re good to go.

Shahjahan Jewel: If we, if I need to upgrade my server, I can easily do that. Because even if I do that, all the things in different servers, I had to buy multiple servers, right?

So instead of buy the multiple servers, I can, buy the big server in it and use it. Let’s talk

Chris Badgett: about some of your entrepreneur journey stuff. Did you, a lot of people in our field start as an agency and building sites for clients. Did you do that or no?

Shahjahan Jewel: Okay. Yeah. So that’s the, my story is the same.

I started WordPress back in 2019. So I just started my university graduation engineering. And then, I I started building websites for myself like how to build the website. I had no idea. Okay. So I started with if you want yeah, so there was like blogger.

com was really like blogspot from Google. So that was like really popular. Then I can customize it. How I can, build something that I can customize. So that, I heard about WordPress. And then I, in 2011 I started my first like agency business. In that time mostly we would we are working with, few different, agencies in USA, basically, and USA, one was USA and another one is in health sector.

We were, building the tools for them. So mostly those project or with Laravel and Laravel just started like version three and people started using it we also, loved it the Laravel. And then I kept that business for, I think 17. And after that, then I see that okay. I built many things. I want to now build the product. It’s like the problem was agency business in that time for me you know, lots of projects coming. I am working on a project after three, four, five, six months. I have to move to another project. And then the same story goes every time and when I stop, working like, my revenue stream is not actually that that way it’s not, anywhere.

So that’s, then I realized that, okay let’s try to, build product for WordPress. Because I, in that time, I have a very great experience with WordPress. And that, that then I started, my first plugin was in 2018. And that, that was Ninja Table.

Chris Badgett: That was which one?

Ninja Table. What was Ninja Table?

Shahjahan Jewel: So you say it is a very, it was, so it was another story actually. So in my, agency, I so I was working on a with the bank. And that bank actually, they have to show some data in their office site at the front end was the banker bank’s front end website was and the idea was actually they have some data and they have to, manage that easily and show that in the front end and that need to be very searchable and also mobile friendly.

So then I could not find a, single plugin that can do it in WordPress in that time. So I think that is like 16 or 17, something like that. I built that plugin very simple like you can manage the data in the backend and it will show on the front end. Then actually I from that, I worked a couple of months and then, released us free.

Within just a few months, it got 5, 000 active installation. I was getting like lots of emails. Like I need this feature. I need this feature. And some people email me, okay, I am using this, plugin. I want to donate you. How can I donate you something like that? And then I thought okay, now.

Maybe this can be my first product

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You have over or somewhere around 110 team members How did you?Let’s look at today Like what percentage like where are the people in terms of like developers designers marketers?

Shahjahan Jewel: Wow. Yeah. So around 30 percent 35 percent are developer. And another 30 percent is marketer.

Then we have support. So we have lots of support people. I think around 20 to 25 percent support. So that’s the distribution. And, I think it got crazy big. I know even I I don’t know how it got crazy big. So I think most of those hires actually happened in the COVID.

So when COVID started, and. We are getting, getting crazy. Like we are having lots of, sales, support, everything. Then actually, so when COVID started, our team members were like 25, 20 or 25. When we reopen our office, then our team members are like 60. And wow, so then, we try to, so another thing is actually like why we are, we have, lots of people the thing is actually like is a product is actually like a startup.

Normally we don’t share resources. So like a developer, we’re working on friends here and he will never work on fluent homes. And so that’s why every product is like a startup and they have a team. So there, those are like cross functional team. So from developer, marketing, and also the support.

And from this three department, we call it a team. And they have a like team lead and he’s the, managing everything. He’s the general manager of that product and he managed all the things when we, release update from the marketing, how we will, market these things, something like that.

And I think that’s why. It got big. If we share the resources, then maybe we would not be that big because same person would handle multiple things. But the problem is actually like when a person actually handle multiple things. Then he get distracted. So sometimes a product, uh, is not getting enough attention.

So we want all the products to be succeed. And so that’s that’s where we are, so many people.

Chris Badgett: So at your current stage, how do you see your role in what you do day to day or monthly,

Shahjahan Jewel: Developer, I told you, like I am, I still try to, code as much as possible, but I don’t get much time to, code.

So that I said, so all the, People are managed by, his team. And in the last couple of years, I tried to build those team. I tried to build those leaders from his, team. And then I, we also have another level that is like department wise. So like from the developer, I have, I have the engineering manager.

From marketing, I have CMO and also for big product, I have like marketing lead of that specific product from support. I have several leads So in the last couple of years, I tried to build this thing. There’s a structure. So even when I normally every year, I, I love traveling. You already know that.

So when I, go to traveling sometimes I, I never, check my emails or I never check my discord channel what people are doing because they are like autonomous, they are, self sufficient. So that’s that was, I think in my entrepreneur yeah, that was the hardest part, to make those structure.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Very cool. In terms of marketing and growth, And maybe speak in generalities or specific stories, whether somebody is a course creator or any kind of small business owner or a WordPress professional, what have you found in your growth, like some marketing things that tend to work well for WP managing?

Shahjahan Jewel: for us the one thing really worked for us and that is word of mouth. Till last year we had zero marketing paid advertisement budget. We never run any ads this year. We are like testing some, ads social media ads, Google ads, those type of thing.

But auto mount, that really helped us a lot. So something like, so think about it. Some like that, week, one of our customer asked a feature for influence CRM and this week we we had a, a schedule, real estate, and then I asked the team, okay, let’s, try to, build that feature and ship it.

And we shipped it. I think several people asked for that feature, Facebook community. And after we release those user was really happy. And I think this type of experience when a customer get from a from a, plugin vendor on something like they never forget those things.

So when someone will ask for a recommendation or something, he will actually say that. Okay, use the friends here and we’re playing forms, something like that. So that helped us a lot. Another thing really helped. And that is from our support we try to, extra mile for a customer.

So sometimes our support engineers actually like to spend several hours to solve a problem. Even it’s not, our support scope and that is something really, helped us. And and when we, give better support and listen to our users communicate very clearly transparent way.

Then actually they purchase, all of our kind of follow up products. We have lots of customers who, purchase more than three products from us and our retention rate is really high.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love the saying that the best marketing is a good product and that creates, word of mouth.

And then we get that too at Lifter LMS, cause we try hard and support that like people talk about that. It’s a differentiator. Support is literally a feature of the product. So treat it like that. How do you think about growing so fast? And you also just have like, when you release something, I noticed there’s a lot of integrations.

You just seem to have a lot of speed. So tell us about

Shahjahan Jewel: speed. It’s also a, our own power really, poor thing. So all of our way from the very first in WordPress, lots of the, companies or things there has, they, there has a big, very established business model that make really, lots of money for the company and that is tire based pricing, like if you.

Purchase this then you will get certain add ons. If you purchase, higher, you will get all those features. And the starter is that it’s a pro, but it does not have many features. And that’s really helped for a company to make more money. The problem is actually it’s not the, I think it’s very, my personal thing.

Okay. That it’s not a best expense for you. So from the very first from all, for all of our plugins, what we did actually, we don’t lock any feature for different pairs. So like when you actually, like if you, our, flint share and pricing is, it starts with 129. If you purchase on 29, only restriction is actually like you are getting the license for single license.

Someone is purchasing like 499 is agency. You will get like 50 site license. So that’s the only different and we don’t have any add on. When you actually purchase, fluent ceramic install that if you have lifter if you have WooCommerce EDD or any plugin that we have integration that will be automatically activated.

And that’s the, experience I want to give, I want to give the, very frictionless experience for the user. And I think, that is that also help they get better experience. We get less support ticket and yeah, that is we really like core thing.

I know, if we had like tiredness, We could make more money. Maybe our revenue would grow like 30 percent or 40 percent but that’s the this is the path we choose awesome.

Chris Badgett: I heard you say in another interview that Money is not the most important thing to you. So what motivates you?

Shahjahan Jewel: Yes, that’s true so my theory is actually say I am making X amount of money now next year, if I make five X amount of money, my lifestyle will not change.

I like it will not, it’s not like I have to buy a jet or I have a Tesla or something. The lifestyle I am living that’s the, that’s like constant I will do that. So when I had I have not lots of money. Maybe I, I had a level of my lifestyle, but it’s now it’s the like max, I don’t have anything like, I don’t so it’s not something like I cannot do that for money.

So what really motivate actually, like when I get a review, when I get a good word from a customer, or when I go to an org camp, I meet people and. They are excited about my product. They know me, that’s kind of thing like that really, motivate me. So another story is actually, I think, two years ago I got a very good offer.

Someone wanted to, acquire the whole company. And they really offered an amount of money that, I could go to retirement. I don’t have to, work a single day. And then I realized. Say, I am, selling the company, I am going to determine what I will do, what will my deal look like?

And I see that will be really boring. And I can’t, live without the life I am having. I cannot live with the team member I am interacting with every day. So that’s really very important for me. Like I, I want to, do things that I really love every day that make me like alive, feel alive.

Chris Badgett: So yeah. Creators have to create. So be careful with your company. What in this line of thinking and particularly for you with a large organization, how do you think about company culture and staying positive? Cause it’s easy. There’s challenges when you work on the internet, for example you may have some angry, probably every day there’s an angry customer in support or there is.

A team member who’s maybe burning out or having challenges or you’re having challenges in your life or so. You strike me as a positive, optimistic person, but like, how do you shape a culture? That’s, and it’s okay to have bad days and challenges and everything, but how do you think about that?

Cause that really matters in a company.

Shahjahan Jewel: Yeah, definitely. So yeah, what culture or, environment is really, matter for a company. Or our company, we have very, some core values. So these are values we hold whatever happens, these are super, super important and all of them is actually, we must have to respect each other in our organization.

Orchestrate space. Okay, we have to make sure that it’s really work friendly for everyone. Okay. So that can be, sometimes we get really, very, angry customer from support. And in that case, sometimes I say that our support people, we say that okay, for those customers, assign me those tickets.

And sometimes I had to. Tell my customer like, okay, you are interacting with a human being, so please, if you want, I can, instantly refund you, but please, be social. We are here to help you. Okay. We are not, rob your money or anything. So that’s I try to help my members, I try to understand what my, what my team, what specific team member want what’s their goal, and then I try to help them with their, career wise.

Sometimes, we have, many developer many people in my developer team who started their career support and then they moved to, diff team, and that’s the culture. Anyone can access anyone. So anyone can, come to my, room anytime and ask me a question or anyone can say something.

It’s not like that I say something in my office and everyone must follow that. If someone thinks it’s not the right thing to do, they can definitely, argue that they can definitely tell me that, okay, maybe we can do. This way this is a better way. This is not the best way. So that’s the culture from every step in my office that I I built, and I think that’s very important.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You’re obviously a visionary and an innovator. Is there anything that you’re you’d like to share about the future or what you’re excited about now, or new products you’re working on or anything like that?

Shahjahan Jewel: Yeah, so yeah, definitely. So we really, invest Almost from the, when we started the company, we always all the money we make profit or revenue.

Most of them actually, goes to reinvestment and I did not, start another business or anything, but within this business. And from to R and D to, hiring more people working on new things, solving problems. We are working with some exciting things and I am really excited for this year.

Yeah, we will have. I think few new product this year. And those are something like really big, like we are working for the last two years for a product. And I am excited.

Chris Badgett: One last question here. How do you think about the small business customer that you’re building for? Who is that person?

And I know it’s you guys so it’s easy. You just scratch what you need, but any other ways you think about that when you’re. Innovating or designing product.

Shahjahan Jewel: When we like building a new product or anything our, ideal persona is actually a small business. So that is a creator.

or someone who has a online shop, who was like, say, you can say maybe the yearly revenue is, a few million dollars 10, 20 people in that team, they’re working something. And that’s when we design something we always think about them can they use them?

And so that’s the thinking we use to design like everything. That’s really help. Like when you have like specific category of the people, like I’m building only for them, then it’s easier to target easier to, create those type of experience.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s Shah Jahan Jewel.

And I want to encourage you to check out WP managed ninja. com that has all the products. But particularly check out Fluent CRM Fluent Booking, Fluent Support, and Fluent Forms for if you’re looking for a form plugin. And it’s a, it’s an honor to catch up with you. I always enjoy our chats and I’m really excited for what you guys are doing and the way you’re doing it in the world.

Keep up the amazing work. We’ll have to do this again down the road. Thanks so much.

Shahjahan Jewel: Thank you.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Brian Hogg shares about his career journey. His journey is a combination of technical expertise in teaching and community development for the software development area.

Brian Hogg is a developer at LifterLMS. He started his career at very young age and gained experience of 20 years in technical area by traditional education in computer science, self-learning and its practical application.

Hogg highlighted his passion for creating accessible and actionable online courses with LifterLMS, the leading learning management system for WordPress.

He developed and lead the project like the Event Calendar Newsletter plugin for simple need for his local community which indicates the importance of solving real-world problems and evaluating user feedback and experience.

Brian’s career story showcases us the value of networking, continuous learning and teaching with in-depth understanding and keen interest for growth in teaching industry.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show from seven years ago. His name is Brian Hogg. That’s hog with two G’s at the end. Brian’s a developer at LifterLMS. He’s been with us for how long has it been?

Brian Hogg: About six months. A little over six months, I believe.

Chris Badgett: Yep, six months. He’s an amazing developer. We’re lucky to have him on the team. He’s also the creator of event calendar newsletter. You can find that at event calendar newsletter. com. His personal site is at Brian hog. com. That’s hog with two G’s. Welcome back on the show, Brian.

Brian Hogg: Thank you very much. Yeah. I can’t believe seven years. I had a little more hair back then, but yeah, I’m not sure.

Chris Badgett: It wasn’t a pro tip for you introverted folks out there. I came out of my shell and started going to some WordPress conferences, I went to something Chris Lima put on called Cabo press. And I think I went six times. I think the first one I went to, or the second one I met Brian Hogg and that’s how we connected first met in person seven years ago.

And then I had a podcast. So I started interviewing some of the interesting people I was meeting at conferences. So pro tip for networking out there. And here we are seven years later working together.

Brian Hogg: Yeah. And I can’t believe we’re reconnected off. I think a tweet and I’m not even really on social media, but I just happened to see it there and I’m like what are the odds?

So yeah, no, it’s a small world.

Chris Badgett: It’s cool. Before we started recording, Brian and I were talking about omnipresence and being in a lot of places, which is really hard to do as a course creator or a WordPress professional or entrepreneur, you’re very busy, but sometime, the name of the game, especially in the AI world.

Relationships matter. People are mad matter. People are behind the internet. So connecting with people and getting out there is important. And it’s stress reducing too, which we can, we’ll talk about a little later. The first Brian is prolific. He’s done podcasts. He’s an entrepreneur. He has his plugin event calendar newsletter.

He creates courses, which is what made him a really perfect fit for LifterLMS, because he’s already in the space. He’s created courses and he does a lot. He’s an amazing engineer and does things like mob programming, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But first let’s start with the e learning thing.

What attracted you and made you fall in love with the idea of creating courses or teaching on the internet?

Brian Hogg: Yeah. So I for a couple terms, a couple of years taught at a physical college and so got the experience there actually working with students in person and so it was like design.

It was a last minute thing. It was like design with some development WordPress in there. A general course for a second year students at the college. But yeah, seeing the it was restricted, obviously, that people are only able to teach or take the class in person and see it there.

And just the idea that someone, you could put out content on the internet that people are able to access from wherever they are. Even if they have a slow connection, right? It’s if it’s not a live thing, they’re able to access the content, the videos like that. Download it might take a little longer.

But that anyone in the world, like just with nothing but a laptop and they don’t even need a laptop, they could go to a library and access it there is able to gain access to that content, learn from it at, in, in. The big difference between a physical college and online is, oh, a course might cost you X dollars compared to thousands and not just the cost of tuition, but also the cost of physically getting there and everything else.

That was a big draw is that just the reach that you have and that you can really get to the point like physical colleges tend to. a little more, it feels and so you’re really able to just hone in on, this is a actionable skill that you can apply in your daily lives, whatever that might be, quickly.

And just seeing the power of that was a huge job.

Chris Badgett: How did you learn engineering? What was your development as a computer scientist?

Brian Hogg: Woof. So I think I started coding when I was like 10 or 11 or something. Had a book it’s holding up the monitor right now. See, by example, it’s a little broken.

It’s been there a while. Learned that over a week, it was just had, had was fortunate enough to have access to, a laptop, decent internet at a younger age just people in my life. Used to play racquetball and. Friend’s father, was at the university of Rochester, one of their head tech people.

He had access to tools and software and knowledge that, that really just sparked a lot of it. And yeah, no, it’s been an interesting journey and it was 16 or so launched like an online bingo game that, which became very popular. And yeah, definitely more recently after meeting like Mike little when I lived in the UK and I was going to a PHP conference there.

Yeah, just getting more into the WordPress space and attending more camps. And and here we are.

Chris Badgett: So how did, I think it’s a challenge for some aspiring developers to learn WordPress and get going. It’s, there’s this whole ecosystem and like what advice do you have for a developer that wants to grow and how to think about it?

Cause You can’t really like all, almost every WordPress developer I meet, it’s like a windy road and they figure things out. Some are have like academic computer science training. Some are completely self taught or it’s a hybrid. Like how does one, if somebody wants to get involved in the WordPress development arena, What’s your high level advice?

Brian Hogg: Yeah, obviously you just need to go to plugins for beginners. com. Purchase my course. No, it’s it probably always will be a windy road. I don’t think there’s any straight line. But I think the biggest advice is just having a project of a tangible project in mind. It might not be for a client.

Ideally something that, that maybe you would use so that you, you’re more invested and interested in it, but just literally this is a thing I want to accomplish by the end of creating this plugin or the seam or whatever. So it just has more structure to it, obviously throughout the process.

That working on that project or or just in general, you might be just learning random things here and there, blog posts, whatever, but just having that tangible thing, which hopefully isn’t so huge, you’re not, I want to make YouTube for purpose. I don’t know. Yeah. Some things relatively small that you can just sink your teeth into it, it directs the learning a lot more.

As you’re figuring out how to do that thing you’re looking up some more specific things, not just like. How to make a plugin in WordPress. Cause that will tell you. Any number of results, which may or may not apply to what you ultimately want to do. Yeah, I think just having a project in mind I did do university a five year program, software engineering and management.

But to be honest with most of that content. Was, if you’re working on a nuclear power plant or an elevator or something, like there were some useful skills, but most of it, like you said is the, or we were talking about before is the personal relationships that were built there and.

The learning how to learn. And you can do that either at the university or online on your own. But yeah, being part of a local community is, it’s helpful as well. Cause then you can ask questions and things that AI and Google might not come back with someone with real experience who’s an actual human would able to answer for you a lot quicker and save you a lot of time in your So

Chris Badgett: what’s as you go through, I imagine.

Engineering is like a lot of things. It’s an infinite well and everything’s always changing, but what’s an example of the epochs for 20 plus years and engineering that. Something you learned recently that you weren’t ready for in the beginning, as an example.

Brian Hogg: Not sure.

Cause yeah, it’s funny how much things have changed, but yet a lot of things haven’t, if statements are still if statements while loops are still while it was like a lot of the fundamentals haven’t changed a lot. So now I’m struggling to think of like something, that I’ve learned more recently that maybe it wasn’t ready for.

And maybe it’s harder as you go down and that’s almost where teaching. Comes into play as well, right? There’s some expression, right? Where if you can teach someone something you’re, it, it shows you’re an expert in it, or it shows that, it’s really the true test of whether you understand and know something and just seeing what questions that students have really like prompts like, Oh shoot.

Yeah. I never thought of that. I assumed that I knew that. And obviously 23 years ago, I didn’t know that. But you forget. over time. Yeah, teaching and being involved in the community and hearing some of the questions that people are having keeps you more, grounded, or able to actually see what opportunities there might be to further everyone’s learning, including your own.

Chris Badgett: Yeah the learn do teach. It sounds like a simple framework, but it’s super powerful. And that’s, it’s you’re teaching in a lot of ways. You might be making a course, but you might also be writing a blog post or a piece of documentation or a social media post, and you’re like, Oh, wait a second. I’m not fully formed.

My idea isn’t fully formed here yet, or I don’t have all the details I need.

Brian Hogg: We’re just working with more junior developers. However you define that. Yeah, it’s super, super helpful to just see where they’re at in their journey and and also be able to to do one thing at a time, right?

That’s the biggest thing you can do probably with learning or or teaching is giving too much information at once. That’s the benefit of having more years of experience is that you can just, yeah, so you could explain in depth as to why, like you would do this versus this, but it’s just giving a solid piece of, and then if they ask questions or want a little more explanation, great.

But if you fire hose it, it can really. Detrimental to the learning process. I find

Chris Badgett: the other, we just recently on this podcast, one or two episodes ago, we were interviewing a teacher. And she was talking about the concept of scaffolding of not giving them too information. We need to build this foundation before we go on to this higher level thing.

And that scaffolding can be giant. It can take years or decades. So one step at a time. Tell us the story of events. Event calendar newsletter. That’s it. Event calendar, newsletter. com. How did that happen?

Brian Hogg: How did that happen? I was involved in the software and Hamilton community when we lived in Hamilton and the organizer of software Hamilton.

com had events as obviously as part of it. It was a demo camp and whatever other events. And I just would notice that the emails coming in sometimes would have, the link would be wrong to the event or the date would be wrong, right? Like you could tell that, Oh, he was probably copying and pasting it from a previous newsletter and forgot to update the date or time or venue or whatever.

So I just said, Hey, are you doing this manually? He’s yeah we’ve become really good friends since. And yeah, it was after one, I forget which event we, we just hit it, hit up a restaurant bar across the street. Like a few of us had my laptop and a couple hours created, the first version specifically for the calendar he was using doesn’t exist anymore, but yeah, that was the story of they’re here’s a physical need that I’ve noticed that That Kevin Brown had and was able to create a solution for it.

That great. Now you can copy and paste it. And then from there, just hearing suggestions and feedback from users and Hey, it’d be great if I could automate this. And you’re looking into it and you’re like, Oh, okay, shoot. You’re going to have to add an API to every single mail sender out there. It’s wait, if we do it with an RSS feed, that’s pretty universal and allows us to integrate with a lot of different services.

different email providers. And that was added and that created the first pro version and the way we went, but yeah, that was the origin story to that. And after creating the initial version for him, added support for a couple other popular calendar plugins, put it on WordPress to Oregon.

It grew over time. That spawned through that the events calendar short code plugin by taking some of the learnings from developing that and how to customize calendars and then be able to speak about it at work camps and that led to meeting someone who had that plugin, who wasn’t looking to maintain it anymore and then taking it over and then growing a pro version off the back of that.

One thing led to another from that.

Chris Badgett: Talk us through like the mechanics for somebody who is wanting to do events, like how this works, what are the pieces? So for example, I was in a software entrepreneur coaching program for a couple of years and there were courses. But there was virtual events every week on zoom.

There were three live events per year at different locations, different cities around the U S and Canada. And I could see and in the world today of like infinite content, community and events are important part of the learning stack. You don’t have to have them. But if somebody wants to add, I want to more easily organize my virtual and in person events.

What are the components that come together to make? Event calendar newsletter work.

Brian Hogg: Yeah, the core of it is really any number of WordPress calendar plugins. So basically they’re, that plugin is the way that you’re able to add the events, whether they’re in person or virtual. To your site.

So from you, by using that plugin, adding events, specifying the location, the time, the date what are some of those top plugins? Yeah. So the events calendar, I’d say far and away is like the most popular one in terms of like customizability and feature set and support and everything else. Yeah, so they’re one of the big ones.

There’s a simple calendar is one that is less supported. I knew the previous owner of that one and that one’s great. If you have a Google calendar and your events are within there it’ll import those but the events calendar also has an option to to import events from various sources.

Get them into WordPress. Then from there you can use event calendar, newsletter, any number of other add ons to, to promote and advertise the the events there. And there are a few other ones, but yeah, honestly, and more recently, we just had a support for event prime, which is a smaller plugin, a few hundred users or so, but really good support that we’ve seen so far.

But yeah that’s usually because the events counter has a free version, relatively feature rich doesn’t have recurring events and stuff unless you get the pro, but that’s probably the first place I would say to start and see how you like it.

Chris Badgett: And then how does the newsletter aspect work with the MailChimp or ActiveCampaign or AWeber and some of the other ones you support.

Brian Hogg: Yeah, so from there if you have event calendar newsletter, you can either use the free version and just have the events and then you’d be manually copying and pasting it into AWeber, MailChimp, whatever you use. But if, yeah, with the pro version, you’d be able to create what’s called, saved template.

You can specify what details do the events you wanna show venue time. Change the font size, all that stuff, how you want the events to appear, and then you save that template that generates, essentially a feed URL, which you can use as a, an RSS URL in MailChimp or active campaign or any other ones that support RSS to email, and then the content of that RSS feed is your list of events.

Yeah, you would just include that in your newsletter, either just Have that and nothing else, or if your email program supports it, or if you just want to manually type around the events content, you can then add, blog content or any other number of content or any other content that you want to add into each each newsletter or just automate it so every week it just automatically sends the list of.

However long upcoming events, two weeks, three weeks a month, you can specify and even specify by category, get really fine grained if you want to have, certain subscribers only get events from certain categories. More of a MailChimp thing to have those conditional interest based conditions, but it’s definitely possible to do something like that with my colors.

Chris Badgett: What one of the things I’ve noticed that’s important for events, like if you’re building community or you’re doing a lot of events is the key to show up. Is getting people to add it to their calendar that they’re using. And I think the airline industry figured this out. So like now when you buy an airline ticket.

It ends up on your calendar automatically, the time zones converted, even if you move around, whatever, like the calendar, heavy lifting just happens automagically. Do you have any tips around helping people understand how all that works and how to get events from the website to locked on their personal calendar, whether you’re using Google calendar or the Apple version or something else?

Thanks.

Brian Hogg: Yeah, most yeah, like iCal most calendars give you, like WordPress calendar plugins, give you the option to show or have a link, right? Add to calendar, right? And then you pick Google or iCal or whichever one that you use. And so that would be how you get it from the website equally because it’s like a list of events, right?

Like something sent by, say a newsletter wouldn’t, just add Oh, here are the next like 10 upcoming events. We’re just add them all to your calendar, right? It would just be a show having a link, a similar link in there to be like, Hey add this to your your calendar, or you’re just linking to your website and then from there they have a link, right?

To to add some, when you RSVP then would send you essentially a calendar invite and then that calendar invite would be like, an airline or a doctor’s appointment, like whatever appointment or calendar invite you would normally get. And most email providers like Google would parse that and then automatically add it to your calendar.

Either as an event that you like accept. To attend, but it still shows up there. You get reminders automatically and stuff. So yeah, having it within your calendar is pretty key. And especially if you have it, yeah, as an RSVP, I haven’t tried it. Cause I’ve run events in a while, but yeah, if you have it as an RSVP and then you update it, like that’s the magic of it too, right?

Is that it updates in their calendar automatically. Yeah, definitely. If you can set that up, that’s huge.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And for somebody who’s let’s imagine the most simple use case, let’s say they just have a blog post or a page on their website and they want to just have a link, like to add event to your calendar.

Is there actual, like just code you can write to the link to add all that? Or is it. Is that not even possible?

Brian Hogg: Oh, it is. Yeah. I’m trying to think if our default template has that and it may not, and it may add it after this. But yeah, like basically we’re using like say the events calendar shortcode or a show code that’s provided by whatever calendar you’re using.

A lot of ones come with one out of the box. Yeah, if you have a blog post and you want to promote like a specific event related to the blog posts or what have you, or say the next event that’s happening in a category related to the blog post then you would have the output of that event right there and ideally include a link within it to add to your calendar.

So no, it’s absolutely possible because yeah, the data is already there on the same site as the blog. And so you’re adding the the event information, right? Within your blog content, either at the bottom or in the middle, depending as a call to action to get people there, especially if you’re running, yeah, say a webinar or a virtual event that you’re trying to use as like a lead into your e learning.

Yeah, that’s definitely key and having it update automatically is key. So that you’re, you have this kind of evergreen content that’s in your blog posts, you have now you’re automatically updating as you’re adding webinars over time, or, maybe you’re running them every week or twice a month or monthly, it’ll just automatically update that content within the blog posts or at the bottom.

And then more people will get into your funnel that way. That’s

Chris Badgett: awesome. So what for event calendar newsletter? If somebody is like really interested in what we’re talking about here. What’s the. way for them to start and dive into these waters.

Brian Hogg: Yeah. I think it’s event calendar newsletter.

com. It’s got a demo video in there. There are a couple of courses on like I have a full course on the events calendar specifically and event espresso, I believe I’m on YouTube, so you can search for it on there and that’s end to end on like setting up the plugin and setting up, either shortcode to promote them within the site or event column or newsletter to promote it by email.

Set all that up and yeah, I can definitely reach out if there, are there any questions on that?

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Switching gears, talk, go into personal life stuff. Okay. What is. Let me back up and say, I see a lot of burnout in our industries, whether that’s entrepreneurship, web development, marketing how, for, when somebody has done what you’ve done for 20 plus years, and perhaps you’re like, I don’t know, I haven’t figured this out, but what What tips do you have for somebody who’s either struggling with burnout or kind of feeling a little worn down?

How do they keep going or fix the issue?

Brian Hogg: Sure. Yeah, it can be a lifetime thing and a thing to check up on all the time. No I’ve always been an active proponent and talk about this to anyone I can on the benefits of therapy or speaking with someone, I, obviously you can speak to family and friends, but having that therapist or someone you don’t need to invite to Thanksgiving to go through any struggles that you happen to be having in your life.

And it can take a few tries, to find one that’s a good fit, which can be tough. Especially if you’re not in the best spot, right? If you are experiencing burnout or fatigue or whatever, right? It can be hard to know is this, is it just, is it me? Or is it like, or is it just the relationship between the therapist?

That therapist is just not a good fit for me. Like it can be hard to know the difference. But luckily after I think four or five times, yeah, I found someone who I still check up on or with every month or two to just go through any challenges that, that I’m facing.

And But a huge component has been, exercise, which is obviously a common thing, but just last few years getting into running has been awesome. Not just from, the physical benefits of running, but also some of the social aspects of being part of a run crew or participating in races or what have you squash before that as well.

Kind of haven’t played it recently, but before COVID, so just having some or multiple ideally outlets to, step away from, the computer if the burnout is caused by work or what have you and just have that kind of your own space to rejuvenate, like clear your mind, what have you and work through things.

But yeah, it is something that You need to consciously keep up on, right? Cause it could be so easy to be like, Oh, I’m good now. I don’t need to do any of this. And then, a few months later, weeks later, even it can hit you and then it can be harder to recover from versus just keeping it as a maintenance thing that you integrate into your daily lives, ideally for the rest of your life.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And related to that, one of the things I enjoy working with you is Positive person. There’s a lot of like negativity and tech and social media or whatever. But you’re a positive person and you like, you communicate well, which I’m learning is coming from a lot of that’s coming from the teaching background.

Maybe.

Brian Hogg: Yeah. I would say it was a most social computer nerd you’d ever meet. Yeah. Even as a younger oddly. Yeah, It was it’s just always been the thing for,

Chris Badgett: there’s a tool I use a lot called assume positive intent, intent and you seem to embody that and like working through issues or brainstorming or whatever, but how, is that just your personality or have you worked on crafting that outlook?

I think that’s also just part of. Being online and there’s so much information and data and it’s all overwhelming that it is easy to get negative or burned out or overwhelmed. Or anxious how have you developed that or, yeah, what are your thoughts on positivity and communicating well virtually?

Brian Hogg: Yeah, being on, I’m not really, like I said, I’m not really involved in social media anymore and that’s probably a big reason for it. There’s just a lot of not solely negativity, but just a lot of stuff that can feel like it. It should, and I hate the word should, affect your life more when it really, if you want it to, you can choose it too.

But a lot of times it’s completely unrelated and not important and distraction or stressor or whatever. Yeah, I’m not sure. Like when I was younger, I had a huge anger and you’d never know it now. Like anger. Problem, right? Or, and maybe related to ADHD. Like I’ve seen kind of friends with kids and stuff that seem to have that.

And that seems to be a more prevalent thing. So yeah, through therapy and medication for ADHD that’s certainly helped. But even before that, just letting go of some of that anger, just consciously, and just not being so quick to, to anger, has created a huge And yeah, I think that’s right.

I didn’t coin a term over it, but yeah, definitely assuming the positive intent in people has been massive. Cause yeah, most people are just trying to, fix an issue or help someone else or whatever. Yeah, that and just being helpful as, and it, I think at one point I was too far on that spectrum, right?

Like obviously you do want to be helpful and help people wherever you can, but it is okay and good to be selfish as well sometimes. Cause if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re not going to be helpful to other people for very long. So that finding that balance has been a more recent thing the last few years, I would say.

Yeah of knowing when to say no, that it’s okay to just say no, not oh maybe I could do that one day for you if blah blah blah because that leaves the door open and then it’s still in your brain and everything else but yeah sometimes it’s no I can’t help you with that I’ll, but I can see if I can find someone who can or I know this person who can and setting them up that way.

Chris Badgett: It’s a strange like conundrum or whatever where In my experience, I’ve similarly, like as a guy who’s run an agency before some of the best agency people are super helpful and also tend to learn the lesson the hard way about being over helpful or always available. Sure. We can solve that problem too.

You thought about this, and this, and next thing you know, you’re like inventing the business model for this person. And you were just hired to build a website, but at the end of the day, that’s what makes you an awesome agency person, but it’s a lesson. A lot of agency freelancers, helpers just learn those boundaries and stuff.

One more on the personal side. Working online either as an entrepreneur or as a developer, designer, marketer, sometimes people get isolated and that causes some of the other mental issues. And I know you don’t live alone. I don’t live alone. I have a family and stuff, and that definitely helps. We talked earlier about meeting at an event.

Which was like away from the computer which that starting to do that really helped me Feel less isolated and quote find the others like other helpers helpful people and creative people and problem solving people and that was really great, but What’s been what’s your advice and story with isolate isolation working remotely, or how have you figured that can of worms out for sure?

Brian Hogg: Yeah. Mob programming, which we’ll talk about later was certainly helpful. Especially, moving here. Three acres near a small kinda city, , , and then covid, right? Like we moved 2020. That was a great way to avoid is a lot of the isolation because you’re on a Zoom call with people, three, four or five hours a day working through problems and chatting and whatnot.

I’ve just certainly, I have a handful of people I regularly schedule, virtual calls with if I can’t get together with them in person or go and visit. If I can and that’s just maintaining those relationships. Even if it’s via text message, sometimes just to avoid said isolation you’re sharing kind of moments in your life.

And I find, yeah, like either hopping on a call, visiting someone in person or a direct text message or a group message, whatever. A lot more effective than social media, right? Cause social media is you’re. beholden to the algorithms to know like whether someone’s going to see it even and obviously someone just might be tired or busy or scrolling when they’re about to go to sleep.

So then, you could start to think, Oh, this person saw, but they didn’t hit the heart icon or whatever. And so that can add to, I think the isolation factor. Though it has its benefits. I’ve had a lot of really cool people via social media in the past. So that can be really good, but yeah, it does need to be a conscious thing to go out and yeah, it takes effort, right?

And especially with the run crew, right? Like you jumping into the water as being like, how fast are they going to run? Is this going to, how’s this going to work out? But pretty much every time especially if you go in there, you’re not going in there to like, Sell a group of people on something, right?

You’re going there to learn, to be helpful, to meet new people and learn about them. Pretty much always it’s going to be a positive experience that is energizing. But yeah, I could see that being a struggle if you’re less extroverted than others. But yeah, it’s worthwhile. I think.

Chris Badgett: Picking up the thread on mob programming. One of the challenges with being a solopreneur, freelancer, working alone and stuff, but collaboration is really powerful for learning and problem solving. Tell us, I hadn’t heard of mob programming until I met you. So tell us about it. It’s really fascinating and interesting.

Brian Hogg: Yeah. It’s basically structured pair programming with more than two people, right? The typical way you would run it is you have what’s a navigator and a driver. The navigator’s job ideally is so before you start, you come up with some goals like this, at the end of this one hour or whatever session.

Ideally we would, a good day would be we’d have this done, a great day would be we’ve had this done, and if, holy crap, this is an amazing day, we would get this done. So you have, you spend a few minutes at the beginning getting that all in line, and then you can just randomize, who’s in what spot.

So then someone starts as a navigator, someone’s a driver, the rest of the people are just in the mob, and ideally they’re not. They’re not shouting. This isn’t like a lynch mob or anything where everyone’s trying to do everything at once that doesn’t work. And it’s all on one computer. So it’s not like everyone, obviously people can use their own if they’re in the mob and they’re looking stuff up, but all the work is done on one.

So ideally the navigator would just say, Hey, like my high level intention is to do X, Y, Z is to make it when you click that button. It’ll do this. It’ll save this form or it’ll whatever, and that’s it. And then they just say, stop talking give the driver a space. The person who’s on the keyboard space to figure that out.

And ideally the driver is speaking, and that’s a learned skill for sure. Cause most developers will just throw on headphones and type and not say anything. But ideally you want to be talking. While you’re trying to figure out the solution so that others know your thought pattern and whatnot.

And then obviously if you have questions, you can be like, Hey, I don’t know how to do this specific thing or whatever, but the navigator and the rest of them, I really needs to resist the temptation to just be like, Oh man, you Got to do this, type this, you silly, you dummy, right? Like ideally, like you don’t want to be doing that because that will very quickly reduce the confidence of the person at the keyboard and just everything in general, and it’s just chaotic and stressful and not fun.

Yeah, so that’s the thing. And it’s really powerful in that. Something that you might spend a day or more, multiple days on a stock or not realizing a certain path or taking a whole other path, like a misinterpretation of what the task is or whatever through that environment, you’re, nine times out of 10, someone in the mosque and be like, Oh, are we sure that’s what we want to be doing?

Not like when you’re planning, right? Oh, is that the and that saves a bunch of time or you’re trying to figure out some technical problem and someone in the mob or whatever. knows the solution, right? And on their term, because you’re only doing four or four or five minute turns.

You rotate that way. Someone’s gonna have the solution for that. Other people see that solution being implemented, learn from it. And over time, they just, you just see a dramatic improvement. And the knowledge sharing and technical ability and just team atmosphere through that. Yeah, it’s a really cool way to work.

But obviously there’s benefits as well to struggling on your own a bit sometimes so that you actually really understand hopefully by the end of it, what you’re doing and the issues that you had along the way.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. Last question for you. And let me try to frame this in.

When you joined Left 4 LMS, one of the things that I was really impressed about was your ability to gather context quickly. And it shows six or so months in with your ability to quickly Let help a support team member troubleshoot something or troubleshoot something on your own. You’re like, Oh, I didn’t even know we had this.

And now I’m in it. And you’re like, get to the answer. To me, it looks very fast and speedy. So one, I’m just admiring you for that. But to your troubleshooting ability, if somebody is watching or listening to this, and let’s say their website, isn’t doing what they want, or they have some kind of conflict, or maybe they’ve Just bloated it out with too much stuff, too many plugins, two plugins doing the same thing, all kinds of stuff.

Like I’m wondering if you can package your troubleshooting wisdom and into some rules of thumb that can help people, whether they’re building a site for themselves or for a client and they’re hitting issues. How can they slow down and troubleshoot a little better?

Brian Hogg: Yeah, I think big part of it is, yeah, I isolate one thing at a time, right?

Like whether it’s troubleshooting something on a website or programming or whatever, if you’re trying to figure out why these five things aren’t working together, it’s going to be really hard. So yeah, slowing down it’s a very common thing where, oh, you have a problem with this thing, deactivate all other plugins and install a default theme and activate that.

And now you’re in this environment where it’s this is the only thing, that’s affecting anything, unless you have some other really wonky issue or something, but So yeah, drilling down because, yeah, a lot of the times I found it’s this isn’t happening when I do this and, and and throwing out all this information that, it’s not directly related to the one problem that we originally started with.

And so just backing up and being like, okay, what are the steps to reproduce? What you think is like an issue, right? And just through the act of going through that and actually not just saying this doesn’t work or, I want to do this. It’s what are you, what are, what physical steps are you doing right down to might be right down to install and activate this plugin.

Go to the settings, right? But what are the, what are you clicking on? And that’s where video can be like super powerful ’cause or, ideally hopping on a call, but. If not a video of just seeing and especially them talking through the issues that they’re having, right? Like you can actually physically see what’s happening.

But again, that’s less helpful if they don’t have, or if they have everything activated and they’re trying to do everything at once, like you’re still not going to be able to tell is this causing the issue or is this causing the issue or what? Yeah, just having things as isolated as I think it’s the biggest thing and just, yeah, just asking questions like how do you reproduce that?

Like, how can I do that thing that you’re trying to do step by step? And a lot of times when they’re going through oh shoot. Yeah. I didn’t go through this step, when they’re trying to communicate that they’ll usually, it’s like what the rubber duck thing, right? Oh, what is she already having?

I’m having this thing. I was like, Oh, shoot. Yeah. I missed this. I missed step four in what I was trying to do. Yeah, a high level of whatever, but every challenge that comes in is is different and that’s the nice thing about it where, yeah, there’s so many out on so many different use cases that there’s never a dull moment.

And it’s great to just see that you solve, that either bug or, lack of documentation or what have you or pointing to the right documentation and then they’re able to. It just cascades, right? They’re able to finish the course and then people are able to take that course and then they’re able to learn.

And then ultimately maybe they’re teaching things one day, right? Like it’s a really cool cycle. It’s not just, Oh, this is a bug. And this is they’re the users trying to be difficult. It’s no, like at the end of it, there’s a goal in mind and they’re trying to be helpful. And by you solving that you you you enable that for them and it’s it’s really cool.

Chris Badgett: As a as you were talking, I was thinking of really learning the difference between correlation versus causation and so a classic like support thing for that or tech support thing is I I updated your plugin recently and now this thing doesn’t work well, that’s likely correlated, but not causation.

Brian Hogg: It could be necessarily, it could be, but it’s

Chris Badgett: I like to think of it clinically like a doctor almost like I’m trying to diagnose what’s going on here. And yes, you just turned 40 or you did this yesterday, but I’m not sure I need to go through and, measure and find all these things.

details to actually find the cause of what’s going on here. Exactly.

Brian Hogg: No, it’s can you reproduce it in a separate environment? And if not, then that’s probably something unique to that environment. And then you can go back and, Hey, do you have a backup? Restore a backup? Oh, does it work now?

Great. Okay. Let’s see the difference, like it was getting to a working state. Which is a huge thing with if you’re developing, hopefully you’re using some kind of version control, ideally get, and yeah, just using something like get a bisect. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s just so powerful because it’s just Oh, this version it worked, this one is broken and it’ll just, it literally bisects, it’s like, cool.

All right. Halfway through. Does it work here? Yes. Okay, great. So it’s probably, so it’s fine. So this is fine. Let’s go here. Okay. Does it work here? And I’m like, no. And then you can isolate the very, The exact spot where it broke. Or at least one of the spots it broke. You might have broke it, fixed it, and then broke it again.

But at least you can find one spot where it broke and then look at the difference between that and diagnose the cause and not the

Chris Badgett: The other cool thing there, like related to what we were talking about with learning and teaching and experience is the cool thing is if you’re patient over time, you start to have pattern recognition.

You’re like, Oh, I’ve been in this kind of thing before. So your instincts are better and your speeds faster. Or it’s I’ve seen exactly this pattern before. I don’t even, I know exactly what it is because I’ve seen it 10 times. Exactly. Though it can be

Brian Hogg: a detrimental sometimes where, yeah, I’ve caught myself a couple of times where like assuming too soon.

Exactly. Yeah. You assume too soon. Oh yeah, it says to see this. It’s so I really try to never just ask at least one or two questions to verify that the assumption is correct in some way. And then always it’s often, it’s if you do this, it will be fixed.

It’s I think, or I believe that if you do this, it’ll likely fix it and let me know, if it doesn’t, right. And then, yeah, that solves that avoids any any issues there. And obviously it just continues to show that you’re willing to help.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s Brian hog.

That’s G’s. You can find him at Lifter LMS. Go check out eventcalendarnewsletter. com if you’re thinking of adding events and community virtual in person events and make that whole show run better on your website. Go to eventcalendar. com. Brian’s personal site is brianhog. com. That’s hog with two g’s.

Brian, thanks for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. We’ll have to do it again. Not we won’t wait seven years, but we’ll have to do this again. Any final words for the people or anything else you want them to check out?

Brian Hogg: No, I think yeah. Fenn counter newsletter. com Brian hog. com. I’d like to say social, but yeah, like I said, I’m not really on there anymore.

Yeah, those are the best avenues for sure.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show.

Brian Hogg: Thank you for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Matt Medeiros from The WP Minute shares that formative events he experienced as a child inspired his passion in music and radio.

Matt became motivated to engage in these interests by his uncle’s passion for building his own radios. And his father’s profession as a radio presenter. His choice to start a podcast was influenced by his history, questions about possible income sources. And want to establish ties within the PHP community.

Matt knows artificial intelligence can evaluate and reproduce data; he is not confident about its present use for podcasting however. Having personally interacted with artificial intelligence systems, the author can confirm that these tools have a propensity to ignore the most important podcast episodes—a typical issue in the marketing field. Though he is enthusiastic about the future uses of artificial intelligence. He feels that the already used applications fall short of his expectations.

He claims that the popularity of the podcast “All In” has been continuously rising. That its hosts, wealthy and powerful businessmen in venture capital and information technology. He was trying to make the point that it is difficult to reproduce the popularity of a celebrity’s podcast. Particularly if it gets lots of money and attention. Still, he underlines that lonely podcasters may thrive by improving their technique. And finding a unique audience niche for themselves within the online community.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Matt Medeiros. Matt is one of my, a good friend and one of my favorite people in the WordPress community. Before I knew Matt personally, I listened to his podcast, The Matt Report. It’s how I kind of first discovered that there was this community behind WordPress and these entrepreneurs trying to figure things out.

And, it had a huge impact on me as in becoming a podcaster and becoming more involved in the WordPress community. Matt does a lot of things. You can find him over at gravity forms. He has a podcast called the WP minute, which is awesome. It’s one of the ways I keep up to date. On what’s going on with WordPress news and in the community.

And then he has podcast story, which is, or no, sorry, podcast setup, which is all about the gear. He’s a gear head. If you’re watching. If you’re listening to this, as you see him on YouTube, dude, always upstages me with his technical equipment, his lighting. He’s he’s a, he’s a podcaster I look up to, and he’s working on a new podcast called our.

Beloved medium, which is about how radio changed the world and some stories you haven’t heard from that. But first welcome back on the show, Matt.

Matt Medeiros: Thanks Chris. Thanks. Thanks for the depth of an intro. I really appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: You know, this episode is going to be about the power of podcasting. Matt and I have been podcasting for over 10 years. So you’re, you’re listening to 20 years of podcasting experience here.

But one of the reasons I know you so well is because I’ve probably spent 95%, maybe more. Probably like 99 percent of time, not getting to know you by listening to you and my earbuds. Listen to you, interview people, listen to you, tell your story and stuff like that. But if you could give us like an overview of like how you became a podcaster. I know a lot of people want to, and it’s funny to me right now.

So In the sense that it’s podcasting is really huge and it’s only getting bigger. But how’d you get into it like a decade ago?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. So, before I started the agency, the digital agency that I ran with my father. Which is why I had started a podcast. I, you know, having answered this question over time, it sort of dawned on me that even before the agency.

My, my family owned car dealerships, uh, down here on the South coast. And my dad would always be on the radio. So like when I was young, I remember going to radio stations and there’s. I was trying to wonder like, why, where was this affinity for audio, radio and presentation stuff like that come from.

And I think it, you know, it goes back to then when I was. You know, watching him go on the radio, talk shows, recording commercials and stuff like that. And. My uncle used to, his brother would always like build, into CB radios. But he would like build me a radio, uh, with like a toilet roll with copper wire.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, Chris, but it was like toilet roll, copper wire as the antenna. And then you could tune it with a. Lead from a pencil on a razor blade. It was amazing. You show me how to like build all this audio stuff. And then when we started the agency. My father and I was looking for a way to, you know, meet the community. And understand what opportunities were out there in WordPress.

Because I, I wasn’t a developer, right? I saw Jake Goldman and all these other people building their agencies super fast. How are they doing it? It was because they were connected to the community. Which was tiny back then, but still very important to have that connection. And then, that’s how I started podcasting at the time.

I was listening to Andrew Warner for Mixergy. I was like, maybe I’ll try to be like the mixer G of WordPress. Since he wasn’t covering like all these WordPress folks, that I was seeing. Uh, and that’s, that’s how it kicked off. It became a sales tool for, for the, for the agency. And then I just started doing it more and more for the love of it.

Even once I was out of the agency game, spent a couple of years in the audio industry at a podcast hosting company. Really started to see podcasting from, you know, the customer’s perspective. How do I start a podcast? Why do I start a podcast? the importance of open source. Podcasting, you know, so it doesn’t just, you know, get scooped up by Spotify’s. The apples of the world and why, podcasting district, open podcasting distribution is so important.

You know, to now continuing to do it for gravity forms with the breakdown podcast. With my stuff at the WP minute. And of course now this new project with our beloved medium, Yeah, I love, I love podcasting. There’s a tons of, importance and opportunity in it for business owners. And just for like open source NIS, like open publishing.

Do you love WordPress? You should probably also love, if you love the idea of open source WordPress. You should probably love the idea of open source podcasting as well. Because there are two open source channels that, help us humans get the word out about our stuff.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. We’re going to go all over the place with this conversation.

Cause we both are just complete geeks in this industry. I’ve been thinking a little bit about AI and large language models. So if we look at the, like why podcasting is important for business or building a personal brand. Or just getting your message out in the world. I’ve been thinking about, you know, on this podcast, LMS cast. We’re approaching 500 episodes and that’s like 500 hours of content where it’s mostly me interviewing smart people.

About what they’re up to as a course creator in the WordPress community. So there’s just so much raw material there to, and I learned from you. I saw you launch a custom GPT that was trained on a podcast. I’m like, how’d you do that? Then I figured it out and then I did it. And I was interviewing this AI about.

You know, gems from the LMS cast podcast, but what’s your take on AI, large language models and podcasting?

Matt Medeiros: Well, Chris, unfortunately I’m not as big of a fan of it as you. And, you know, no, look, I think there. I think there will be a layer of coolness, you know, this stuff. Like creating it for us to either do internal research on the past that we’ve produced.

You know, and I think about how, how crazy, like all of the recorded content that I’ve ever made. Just like yourself, 500 episodes, me, probably the same amount in audio plus video. And what does that mean in a world where, you know, you could feed all of this content about how. I communicate with other people, reactions, laughter, crying.

Cause I’ve cried on a podcast before, you know, all kinds of emotional stuff. And I think about that. I was like, I was actually thinking about this the other day and. This is a side note and it’s actually going to sound like I do love AI. But, I was thinking about like, wow, all of this content could be like, there could be an AI version of me.

Much more easily reproduced than a couple of my friends who’ve never recorded a podcast or shot a YouTube video before I have all of this content and. What it would it be like when. I’m not here anymore and maybe my kids can interact with me as if I were alive. Amazing, just crazy stuff can could happen with AI.

Because of all this content that you and I have both put out or another podcasters and content creators have. So yeah, there’s like this, Crazy futurist world where it might be pretty cool. But in the right now in the moment I don’t love it because it’s a lot of it is the, the, the marketing stuff.

The, let me clip my podcast quickly. Let me pull the excerpts from it. And it just never really hits for me. Like it’s not like a lot of these AI marketing platforms, even my favorite tool, Descript came out with a big update and like, Oh, you can clip your content. Now. And the clips are never the clips I want.

They’re never the clips I want. If you don’t, I guess if you don’t care about that stuff. If you’re looking for a quick, easy way for marketing, okay, it works. But if you’re really trying to punch in to like the great stuff. Or the great moments, in my opinion, anyway, AI. It still has a ways to go.

And everyone says it’s going to get there six months, a year or two years. I’m sure it’ll be better. But right now I. I’m not all in on it. Because it’s just not effective for me. Perfect example with Gemini. So I, I watch a lot of my city council meetings on YouTube, where I live. So the other day I was like, a two hour video came out from the meeting. I was super busy, had a bunch of stuff going on.

So I’m like, you know what, let me just ask Gemini, who’s YouTube’s AI or Google’s AI, which owns YouTube. I’m like, give me like the, the top 12, points from this, from this video. And I fed it the URL that came back with like three things and none of it was important. And I’m like, it’s just not ready yet.

Like you guys are throwing a trillion dollars at this thing and this is all it’s given me. You know, so I, I, I just don’t find it useful for me. Right now, but in the future, maybe it’ll come up with some, some good stuff. As I, that was a cheap way out of your question. But that’s how I feel about AI right now.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. No, good points. Do you happen to listen to the all in podcast?

Matt Medeiros: I do. I’ll, I’ll jump in and out of it, depending on the topics.

Chris Badgett: I think perhaps this, Friday when they record. I’m guessing, but I think they’re going to, interview Donald Trump on the. Or have him on the panel for the podcast. And I watched those guys start up and during the beginning of COVID. It was just a thing for them to get together.

And now they, within two years or three years, it’s like this super influential. Podcasts where they’re literally bringing on like world leaders and famous folks. I mean, they’re, they’re like predominantly venture capitalists and startup community stuff, but they’ve, it’s grown into something much bigger.

What, how do you think about that? Like in terms of why is the all in podcast? Why has it risen to what it is? Speak a little bit to the power of what can happen with podcasting and conversations and what makes the ones work that work.

Matt Medeiros: So this is, a deep topic for me because like. I, I see how like money moves in.

In the podcasting space, and I think first you have to look at it, from like that perspective. So for instance, when Joe Rogan went premium only through Spotify. Or it was, you could only get his access through Spotify. So he was open podcaster, open RSS feed. He was on YouTube as well, but he had an open RSSV that you could tune into his show.

Then Spotify bought the rights and you could only listen to him on Spotify until earlier this year. Where he went back to open RSS in YouTube. He is still a Spotify show. He’s now openly distributed everywhere. Through COVID, the audio space and the podcasting space saw a huge boon, like a lot of us did in tech, but it saw a huge boon because everyone was home.

Everyone wanted to start a podcast. And then you started to really see the money start to move. You start to see, you know, every celebrity get a podcast, start a podcast. Every comedian, start a podcast, money was flowing into it. And, you know, folks like the guys at smart list podcast was acquired by Amazon’s company.

I forget the name of their audio company and 80 million bucks after running for a year. Or something like that. Now they’re doing roadshows. It’s, it’s crazy. But the point is, you see a lot of money in the podcasting space going to that traditional, what I’ll call Hollywood celebrity, right?

Again, the smart list guys, Kevin Hart, tons of celebrities, tons of big comedians, and it’s all just doing it the same Hollywood way. I can guarantee you that their numbers, like their downloads are nowhere near what they’re getting, what they’re getting paid because it’s the traditional. Celebrity slash Hollywood business model.

So like there’s all this attention, all this stuff, cause they’re, they’re a celebrity. Oh, they’re getting paid millions. It costs millions to produce this thing. But then there’s folks like you and me that whatever, you can pick up a hundred dollar microphone and start the show. But nobody’s tuning into us because we’re not that celebrity status.

And we certainly don’t have a marketing machine behind it. And, and I think when you look at the industry as a whole, you’ll, you’ll see those spikes of interest. Uh, you know, this show is great. But it’s Conan O’Brien. He was on TV for two decades or three decades, whatever it was. You know, it’s really hard to find celebrity shows really winning.

And what I’m getting at is when you look at All In, it’s somewhere in the middle where they’re, they’re not like household names for sure. But, But they’re billionaires, right? So there’s already an, like, there’s your interest level already. Oh, there’s, there’s two, there’s two billionaires on this show, right?

I think Saxon and Chamath are probably the billionaires. And then you have Jason who, who has that, like, again, 20 years of podcast and media or 30 years podcast media expertise, and he has an audience. So it was like this perfect infusion of. Oh, these guys are like super interesting because I know a couple of them are a billion couple of billionaires and they have like these, these really extreme points of views that like mesh together.

You know, but I don’t want people to get distracted by that. A lot of people sort of look at it and go, Oh, I want to do an all in type podcast, or I want to do a Joe Rogan style podcast, super hard to replicate those personalities in that sort of, uh, energy in the, in the, uh, pop culture. guys can bring to the table.

But it is amazing how fast they grew. Uh, and now they’re turning it into the same thing, events, event, uh, once a year or twice a year in Miami that they’re doing it. I know they constantly say that they’re hiring a CEO. I don’t know if that’s just like, I don’t know if that was banter, if that was true.

And it can turn into a big business and it doesn’t always have to be about, you know, audio, you know, and I’m sure they, they, most of their views on, on YouTube. But, yeah, it’s amazing how fast they expanded it. And there’s tons of opportunity when you start a podcast to go in multiple directions, you know, as you’ve seen with, with them, you have to, if that’s just like, if that’s what you’re trying to monetize, you have to be able to split it up, but, Yeah, I don’t know if I answered your question there, but I just see it from like a, a broader perspective of like interest and, uh, you know, where the money’s going.

Chris Badgett: Well, in a more narrow perspective, like this audience is mostly education entrepreneurs, subject matter experts that want to build a brand and teach online and make money with information products. And then we also have. You know, the WordPress professionals, the agencies that build sites for clients, no matter what I do, focusing on one avatar or the other, they both show up.

But if I’m an aspiring course creator or a you know, I build websites for clients type person, how should I get motivated and think about podcasting and why I should do it?

Matt Medeiros: Oh yeah, that’s, that’s great. Because for me, when you, when you talk about AI and, I know this has been in the, in the Twitter ecosphere, a lot, a lot of people saying like, Oh, you know, AI is going to start taking our jobs.

And I’m sure you have a strong opinion on this too, Chris, but I just, Now’s the time to inject the humanity into your service. And to me, audio is, is the most affordable way to do that. The other tug of war that’s happening in the audio space. And I’ve written about this on the podcast setup is a lot of people are saying, YouTube’s the, Oh, YouTube’s the new home for, for podcasting now, because everybody wants video with their podcasts.

But to me, that’s okay. But you’re starting a YouTube channel. You’re not starting a podcast when you’re doing that. And I’m not one of those guys that say, Oh, you can’t. You can’t do both or you shouldn’t have both. I’m just saying, well, it’s two different paths, two different mediums, and then there’s two different approaches.

You could do a recorded show like we’re doing now, where it’s largely two talking heads being recorded and sent over to, to, to YouTube. Or you’re actually like doing a Mr. Beast type production, which is. It’s insane, right, to do that, but where do you want to live and where do you want to compete on, you know, on the YouTube world?

Uh, but creating the audio, it’s the most effective and affordable way to have that literal human voice, uh, for your customers and for your brand, right? When I do the breakdown podcast for Gravity Forms, it’s behind the scenes at Gravity Forms. It’s not another, it’s not competing against, you know, uh, your show, Chris, not competing against my show.

I’m not doing WordPress news, I’m not interviewing WordPress entrepreneurs. I’m taking you behind the scenes of gravity forms, interviewing something that’s happening with the team, something that’s happening with the product. And then I’ll bring in like our the people in our ecosystem, gravity, whiz, gravity kit, those guys bring a man, what are they doing with their products, et cetera, et cetera, quick bites, short form, uh, and put it all together.

It’s a variety show. So there’s plenty of different ways that you can make audio work for your brand. Uh, for your listeners. And then I think the next question that most people say is like, well, how many downloads should I, you know, how many downloads should I get? How quick should it grow? it’s not about that on the audio sites, especially not on the audio side.

You should look at your hundred downloads an episode show as a win.Especially in the audio space, as long as you’re slowly ticking up, which could literally be one more subscriber every month, you’re doing a good job and you’re, and as long as those people are still tuning in, your 100 downloads per episode show is doing a great job, uh, because those are 100 committed people who are connecting, you know, with you, you.

Every week or every two weeks or every month, whatever it is that you publish. Um, and those are, they’re going to be your best, those are going to be your best community members, your best customers, your best amplifiers. Um, you know, and I’m just a huge proponent on, you know, connecting at that level, uh, with your brand.

And then you do all the other stuff. If you want Instagram, Tik TOK, YouTube, blogging, email, all that other stuff. Um, but I love podcasting because it’s such a connected and committed audience.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I agree with you. It’s not about the size of the podcast, like This podcast is so niche around course creators and WordPress and technology and stuff like that, that even though we get relatively low downloads compared to the all in podcast or whatever, we’ve still built like a huge, you know, substantial business around that.

And I would say the same thing about our YouTube channel. I don’t care if my video about how to create a dynamic certificate with this certain type of merged data only has. A hundred views. Every one of the people that watch that are probably a customer. So it’s a hundred customers, a lot of customers.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And the audio in the podcasting space specifically, this is another tug of war that folks like you and me are, and thousands, tens of thousands of other podcasters are not represented in, um, when you look at monetizing, uh, a podcast, because when you go, if you were just like, how do I monetize a podcast?

You would come up with. The typical advertising rates dumped onto us by, you know, Nielsen, I heart radio, like all these like big corporate places that have TV shows, movies. So they just look at it from how can I get 1000 people listening or 10, 000 people or a hundred thousand people listening to this audio?

And what are we going to pay in advertising? And the, and the, I think the average CPM right now costs per thousand that advertisers will spend is 26. Right. That’s the average CPM. Now that’s a thousand downloads , right? You and I, I know you don’t do sponsors on your show. Uh, but I do. And uh, if I was only charging $26 that , the WB minute would not exist.

Right? So it’s way more than industry average because of the audience. And in your case, you’re funneling that. back into your business. It was just making X amount of thousands and thousands of dollars on the back end of people knowing who you are and buying your product. We’re just not represented in that, in that equation.

And that’s the biggest tug of war in the space is these big platforms come in and they say, Oh no, You need, you know, in order to make a couple hundred bucks with your show, you need to have a few thousand downloads. You’re like, how am I going to get to that few thousand downloads to only make a couple hundred dollars?

You know, that’s, that’s nothing. So you have to look at it as a business and you have to say, well, maybe I can bring them into a membership. Maybe I can bring them into merchandise. Maybe I can sell them a product. You know, so as a side tangent, but the industry at large is really, really tough on, um, making money with your podcasts.

If you’re not thinking creatively, or if you don’t have a business, like maybe like many of us listening to this too.

Chris Badgett: There’s probably something about your and my similar personality types where I hear these stats that like 90 percent of podcasts don’t make it past 20, 20 episodes or something. And I’m like, for me, it’s felt frictionless the whole time getting up to 500.

Like I was just a natural fit for the medium. But I, so I think a lot about podcast failure, cause if you are going to commit, you should really get married to the idea and be a pot, become a podcaster. Like your identity is changing. You have to make space in the calendar. Um, but I think one of the things that holds hangs people up is not really getting clarity on who the listener is, the avatar, like the reason you’re doing it and stuff like that.

How, like if someone’s like, let’s say a subject matter expert, In jujitsu or something like that. And they want to, they’ve been doing it for 20 years and they want to create courses and they want to create a podcast. How should they think about the avatar of the listener? Cause I feel like all, all I am as a representative for the people that I know are listening to the show.

And I’m, I’m asking questions, not just for me, but for them, you have a pretty good sense of who they are, but what’s your advice around that whole. Avatar listener clarity.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. The podcasting space, again, when you look at it from the business perspective, it’s one of those things that’s super hard to, to measure it’s it’s success.

Or I hate to use the worst thing you could say is like ROI of podcasting because it’s like immeasurable on how to get to that, but, um, it creates that surface luck area. People know you, they listen to you. Even if they don’t listen to every episode. Even if they don’t listen to any episode, but they just know that you continue to put out the podcast immediately in their mind, you’re the guy or the gal that does that thing.

And you’re already winning from like a brand perspective. I know they put in the sweat equity to continue to do this crazy podcast. Therefore I respect them at, you know, at some level I’ve given them a little bit more than the other, Competitor who might not do that or the other person who might not do that.

And you have to start like, so the technical advice I’ve always given somebody about podcasting is, yeah, start with the goal. What’s the goal? What do you, what do you really want to get? And then let’s walk that back because a lot of people are just maybe a little overambitious, um, or have the wrong setting at the wrong sites, but once you are set the goal, you start doing it for yourself first and that 20 Mark, 12 episodes, 20 episodes, that’s when you love it.

That’s when it’s great because you got 20 friends, you got 20 colleagues and it’s easy to get them on the show and interview them and do all that fun stuff. And then it’s after that, you realize, I’ve got no more friends and nobody else wants to do a podcast with me. That’s when the, when the real work starts and that’s when you maybe look back and even 20 episodes is still far too early to, to look back on your body of work and say, who’s, who are the people listening to this?

Um, but you do get a sense of it. You know, up until that point, even if you’re 20 episodes took you six months to get to or whatever the number is. You kind of know what’s happening in social. And you see the, the stuff that’s connecting with people. You see the retweets, the likes, the comments, you know, what type of content is starting to work.

And you can kind of start to form that opinion on, on who the person is who’s listening to your show. You’re getting the DMS, you’re getting the, Hey, great episode. Oh, I love this episode from Chris. Um, in fact, I interviewed, I listened to your episode with Alex Staniford who launched, uh, Siren, uh, affiliates.

Yeah. Um, I was actually listening to your episode and then the next day he emailed me to come on my podcast. Uh, but I was listening to your episode and I was like, wow, you know, this guy’s got a great product. Really, really liked it. You know, and you start to form those opinions on who your avatar is and then you need to move at some point.

And move into actually communicating and connecting with that audience as fast as possible. Here’s a survey, uh, you know, if you like this thing, join this newsletter, um, have a open office hours, air quotes, open office hours about your podcast. Hey, jump in. Uh, let’s just talk about the shows that you like.

Do a live stream. Live streaming is great for connecting and, and learning who the people are that are listening to you. Bye. It is important. But me, in my opinion, I’m like 50, 50, 50 percent of this is me wanting to do this. And 50 percent is. serving the, serving the audience, right? certainly if somebody is outreaching to you and they’re like, Hey, I want to be on your podcast.

That decision is like 90 percent the audience. Do I want you in front of my audience? So I protect my audience. But when I’m creating my content, I’m largely thinking, okay, 50 percent is serving the stuff and the ideals that I want to push forward on this. And then I start to think, okay, will the, will the audience actually want this kind of content?

Uh, but you got to connect with them as fast as possible. Surveying Social interactions, live streaming, and start getting the pulse of, of who’s listening.

Chris Badgett: Related to the audience, I think beginning podcasters have a decision to make, and I’ll frame it in, I think, the way Gary Vaynerchuk describes it. Uh, or it might have been Tim Conley or somebody else, I can’t remember, but there was this idea called the two audience approach.

If you start a podcast or YouTube channel or whatever, and one audience is like your customer, your prospects, your target audience for your business. But then there’s this other audience, which is other people in your industry. So. I’ve seen the emergence of a lot of the build in public ethos. Some people make podcasts about just how they’re doing in business and how they’re growing, or maybe a couple of founders get together and interview each other.

You know, Brian Castle does a lot of that. And I really like his content because it’s. I’m like an industry insider. So I learned from that. What’s tell us your thoughts around building public as a podcasting decision. So instead of like maybe targeting my ideal customer, I just want to share the journey.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the, that’s the surface luck area. Um, and that’s the stuff that’s really hard to measure. in podcasting, um, the stuff that doesn’t go into the formula of, you know, the value of an advertiser spot, 26 CPM, because you could get a part, you could land a partnership deal. You could get a customer, you could get a job.

Like when I left my job in the audio space, I was able to get a job because I hadn’t, I did not stop podcasting the whole 10, 11 years of my life. It is, it creates opportunity that it’s just not on that is not on paper all the time. Somebody refers you, somebody recommends you, somebody trusts you. They know that you’re available to hire and they reach out to you because of all this work that you’ve put in, you know, over, uh, the You know, over time and building in public is certainly another Avenue that allows that to happen.

That’s the way that I’ve always done it. Like I’m not a. Big SEO guy. I don’t do any, I do zero SEO, even my YouTube videos. I don’t, I S I don’t do it. Uh, it’s foolish. Like I get it. It’s foolish for me not to like pay attention to it, but I just want to put out the content. That I, that I like to create serving that avatar that I know is in my head.

And if you watch it, great. If you listen to it, great. If you don’t, I don’t stew on that. Um, sometimes I do where I’m like, I should have a bigger audience or I would love to monetize more, but largely like I’m doing this because I love it and I’m hoping that the other people on the other end, it was consuming this also loves it.

I know they do because they, I see the numbers, I see the downloads and I get the feedback loop. Um, but building in public is a, is a fantastic way, uh, to do that. It’s probably an easier way. It’s actually a more welcomed way than, than maybe interviews in the beginning, because interviews can come a challenge after those 20 episodes, right?

Now, what do I do? Who do I get? Then it’s the logistics, it’s scheduling. It’s making sure that that other person on the other side knows how to do a podcast, or if you’re just doing something where it’s just, you know, reporting on the work that you’ve been, that you’ve been up to great, fantastic. You know, and it’d be, it’d be great if more people in the WordPress space did, you know, did that as well.

For a podcast, uh, medium or, or a YouTube series or something like that. Yeah, so I’m, I’m all in, to steal that phrase. I’m all in on, on the build in public stuff. I think it’s, I think it’s great. It’s smart. It builds the brand. It builds that human brand. Again, that might get overtaken by AI because it’s your story.

It’s your lessons, It’s your successes. It’s your failures.

Chris Badgett: So I like it related to build in public. something all podcasters or content cradle creators struggle with, which is imposter syndrome. So the first fear I would have around building public public conversation is, Oh, what if I talk about a challenge in my business or a challenging customer or something like that?

And then that person hears it. And then I’m in, I’m in my head. So what, what’s your advice for, uh, Battling imposter syndrome, particularly to get through those 20 episodes and keep going. And I find like with you talking with you, it’s all very, it’s very easy and very natural. I don’t get nervous at all for, uh, podcasting.

Sometimes I do, if I I’m getting interviewed on a big show or something like that, but. So I’m, I’m human too, but, and I still struggle with imposter syndrome. But, uh, what’s your advice to get over that initial mountain of imposter syndrome?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Like a sort of like technical strategy is you’re just never getting ahead.

What’s the term? It never getting ahead of your skis, right? Like you’re never taking on something that, uh, if you’re actually like creating content. You’re, you know, uh, the whole fake it till you make it thing, yeah, kind of works. But if you’re recording a, a podcast, you know, weekend and week out, or you’re doing a, a word, a word, WordCamp presentation or any presentation, you know, you know, that feeling when you’re like, I don’t, I don’t want a hundred percent know this content.

That could be something like, don’t create content that you’re, I know this sounds like crazy, but Super like obvious, but I’ve been in the situation to like doing a presentation or, or recording an episode that I didn’t fully understand this topic. And I was, I was getting nervous. And then when I was getting nervous, the content coming out was not good.

Um, so understanding like where you’re, where your, uh, uh, zone is for content, a hundred percent is where you should start because that’s already going to give you the confidence to focus in on the stuff that you’re really good at. And one of the things that I always fall. Uh, uh, fall trap or fall into the trap of is doing too much, like presenting too much content, uh, for one topic.

And that is something that I, I always struggle with, especially like in creating YouTube videos. It’s like today, I’m going to show you how to set up a template inside of, uh, 2024 theme. But first let’s talk about the history of templates. And then it’s just like, yeah, but the way you should really be doing it is, and the way we did it in the past was functions, PHP.

And you find yourself just tumbling down this Hill of like all of this other content. So from a technical standpoint, Like, how do I get out of the zone of imposter syndrome? Making sure that I’m always dialed in to not going above my pay grade and staying as focused as possible. The flip side, like you, which happens to me, um, like Jason Calacanis, perfect example.

When he came out with his book, Angel, Angel, which was, I don’t know how many years ago. He put out a tweet and he said, Hey, I’m taking podcast interviews, tech shows, talking about my new book. So I DM’d him and he said, great, I’ll get you in contact with my producer. So I was like, oh shit, that was easy. Then, so then the producer reached out, she sent me an email, asked me a bunch of questions, podcast downloads, all this stuff.

And then she’s like, great, we’re going to book him for, I don’t know, a couple of weeks from now. I was like, wow, this is great. Then the day of. Uh, she’s like, I need your phone number because I’m going to text, I’m going to text you when he’s ready to go live or to record it wasn’t live. And I was like, wow, this is like, now I’m like, now I’m getting nervous.

So it’s like, she sends me a text. She’s like, all right, hey. Uh, he’s going to be in back into his hotel room in like 10 minutes. And now I’m like in my office and I’m like, Oh my God, like, what do I do? Like, this is so weird. And then, uh, she’s like, he’s going to, he’s going to, uh, text you from his number, from another number when he gets there and then just, you know, go to this link or something like that.

And then I remember getting on and just being super nervous. Um, but that’s, that’s the, um, That’s how you know you’re human, that’s when you’re really pushing the boundaries and imposter syndrome there is okay because you’re really pushing yourself to an extreme. You’re nervous because you want to do a good job.

You’re not nervous because you’re lying, right? Like, I’m, you know, I’m pulling the cover over, you know, some people, which, you know, happens in, in WordPress and in, in internet at large, right? Where it’s just like, here’s how you make 10, 000 in a weekend kind of person. Uh, but you’re, you’re nervous because you’re taking on a new challenge and you just want to do good.

Um, which is totally normal. Totally different. Those, I don’t really have a tactical advice other than breathe and just be confident in your past work to understand that, Hey, this is just a casual conversation. But you know, focusing in when you’re creating that content, definitely like don’t get ahead of yourself and don’t go ahead of your skis and really focus on what you’re doing.

You know, be as focused in as possible.

Chris Badgett: I think a fun way to do this last part of the show is I know that you are an avid podcast consumer as am I, and I almost don’t even read books anymore. I listened to audio books, but I would actually prefer a podcast interview with the author. So instead of a four hour book, I can get a one hour interview and get like the gist of it.

That’s kind of my filter for committing to a full book on audible. But what are some of your, let’s talk about us as power podcast consumers. I think I listened to eight podcasts this past weekend and a lot of them were long. And, uh, but what are some of your, let’s start with what are some of your favorite podcast shows?

Matt Medeiros: So I listen to every WordPress podcast, uh, because it’s, it’s, I have to write for, for the work that I do with the WP minute and certainly what I do with gravity forms like that. That’s, that’s how I stay in the know, um, of what’s happening, uh, with, with WordPress. Um, so I have to listen to every single one.

I might not listen to every single episode, but I’m subscribed to every single one. Depends on the topic.

Chris Badgett: About how many are there? Oh

Matt Medeiros: God, at least 20. Yeah. It’s at least 20, that, that cover WordPress and. You know, mixed in with like YouTube series and stuff like that. So I tune into all of that stuff.

And then I’m all on the flip side, on the podcasting side. I listen to at least half a dozen podcasts about podcasting. I don’t know how I have the time for it. But, I do, because I, and again, it’s not every episode and the power tip there is I’ll do the thing that a lot of people in the podcast industry hate, which is I’ll listen to it at, you know, one and a half times speed, right?

If it’s something like I need to get through. I’ll listen to it at one and a half times speed and podcasts and people hate that. It’s, you know, it’s their art and they want it to be consumed. At the right speed, which I totally agree. But sometimes I have to plow through them. Cause I need the news information.

Like I need to know what’s happening.

Chris Badgett: Somebody is listening to this right now.

Matt Medeiros: At 100%, you know, and there’s like, there’s apps, like, if you’re an overcast user. They have special, he has a special formula on how to speed up the show. So he cuts out the gaps and then there’s literally like the one and a half times button that you can click.

So that’s how I, I plow through it. And then the other podcast that I listened to is just for like entertainment wise. I listened to a couple of comedians and I listened to, um, I’m going to forget the name of the whole series now, of course, but, uh, Sounder sounder productions has like a ton of like history podcasts that I listened to.

So of course the typical like World War II stuff, and a lot of, real dictators is a fun one for those of you that want to know, uh, the history and the impact of, of dictators throughout, uh, human history. But those are fantastically produced. Podcasts, right? Sound design, uh, voice actors, script, those I listen to for more of like that entertainment side of things.

And I’ll also admit that I go to bed sometimes listening to those podcasts and fall asleep listening to those podcasts. So I try to, to get as much done. Professionally through the podcast, uh, the podcast about podcasting and the WordPress stuff every week. So it’s about like, at least a dozen episodes, a dozen individual podcasts every week that I’m churning through.

You know, I just try to do as fast as possible.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I mean, I’m also, you know, educate myself through podcasts. Like I didn’t go to business school or entrepreneurship school or whatever. Like I would say 90 percent of what I’ve done that’s been effective. I learned from a podcast interview.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: It’s such a helpful, helpful thing.

And like you as well, it helps me turn my brain off at night to listen to a podcast. Uh, you know, before bed or leading into bed, which is, uh, and I like to, in the, in that time period, I like to go, cause I spend so much time in business and entrepreneurship, I like to go outside of that. So maybe the recent Joe Rogan interview with Terrence Howard.

Is a perfect late evening podcast for me or, Alex Friedman interview with somebody about some big topic that’s, has the potential to change the world or already is, or how to make peace in the world or whatever it is. Those are some of my favorite. And I look at like the all in podcast is sort of like my news.

I don’t do a lot of news. And, um, but like, okay, like the, the things that are surfacing there in general are things that are good to talk about. And I think that’s one of the things they’ve done well is they’ve kind of divided it up to like politics, science stuff. Some big business news thing, investing advice, like a lot of cool.

How’s the economy doing?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: How’s what’s going on in society? What major events happened?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I think

Chris Badgett: that makes that podcast really special, which is why I’ve kind of been hooked on it all the way through.

Matt Medeiros: There’s a podcast. God, I’m going to forget it now too. But if you’re ever, if you ever can’t sleep, oh, here it is.

So it was called. Northwoods baseball sleep radio. This guy, my producer, the producer that I’m starting the other show with, he helped this guy produce some of the show or no, he interviewed him for a show that he used to do. And all it is is a mock baseball game from like the 1930s. This guy, this guy has built like a whole universe of baseball teams and he just played and it’s just, he plays out a whole baseball game.

Like you hear the, the crowd, the announcers. The, the organ playing like advertisements, running fake advertisements and eat the whole score. Like, all right, he throws the pitch, hits a single and he runs the first page and you listen to the whole thing. But if you’re trying to fall asleep, it’s the most like calming thing.

Cause it’s just like background white noise. And it’s an old, old school baseball game. It’s crazy. Uh, the power of audio and the mix of content that’s out there.

Chris Badgett: There’s another one similar. Well, in the sense that helps with sleep is, um, there’s this podcast, forget what it’s called about ancient civilizations and how they collapsed.

It’s really interesting, but it’s so soothing. And the storyteller is so good. It’s not a hardcore history, which is also good, but it’s something else. Uh, last question. One of my biggest frustrations as a podcast consumer. Is when I find a great podcast and it’s, um, and I’m like, how did I not know about this?

It’s been going for four years and this content’s awesome. I check another couple episodes. I’m like, great. Now I have a full other, like, or at least pay attention to going forward. I find that podcast discovery is hard, especially as there’s more and more. And, you know, I have a lot of different interests.

How do you surface good podcasts? Do you find it on Twitter? Do you just type in a search somewhere? How do you find good stuff?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I mean, the technical answer is maybe like where to find other podcasts. There’s a, um, if you’re just purely like, I need to find stuff, um, good pods. It is also a podcast app, but it’s also a app slash podcaster community.

So good pods, you can use that as a tool to search for stuff. And then they have like community aspects, features to the app. So you maybe see like the ones that have the most comments there’s, you can create groups there as well. If you’re the podcast creator, you can create a group there and people can jump into that group.

So that’s like one way to reverse engineer it. There’s a bunch of, like trailer. Podcasts that are out there, um, pod news, which is the, the five minute daily podcast that I listened to for all my podcast news, James Cridlin, he has a whole podcast trailer podcast. So you can just subscribe to that and hear new trailers that come out as long as they submit to submit to his trailer, uh, thing.

You know, you’ll hear new trailers there. So that’s another way to get discovery. And of course, like just combing things on social, you hear somebody talk about a show, you tune into it, you check it out. But podcast discovery is also one of those things that’s super like in the podcast space, that’s like one of the more challenging things.

That’s why everyone’s like, yeah, let’s just give all our content to YouTube because they’ve got a great search engine, you know, and we can discover more podcasts there. It was like, yeah, but you’re forgetting what you’re doing when you’re giving up the open RSS distribution. Um, when you go that route.

Uh, so it is one of the more challenging things in the podcasting space because there is no central network that ties RSS feeds together. There should, but there isn’t. You know, and, and, you know, things like good pods and there was another one pod chaser used to be a thing, but they got bought out by a bigger company.

Um, so you might be able to go to pod chaser. True fans, T R U E, truefans. fm is put on by my friend, Sam Sethi. He has a whole, like, network of, uh, podcasting 2. 0, uh, podcasts that are there. So that, that’s another great way. Podcastindex. org is, uh, The open source alternative to the Apple index. If you’re interested in exploring other podcasts there, yeah, it’s a, it’s a manual curation process, unfortunately.

As soon as you give it up to an algorithm, that’s when the commercialization comes in. Then we’re all back to promoted and sponsored podcasts.

Chris Badgett: Well, thanks for the those tips. It’s been a great conversation. We should have done a Joe Rogan style and gone for three hours. Because I know we could at some point I want to do that.

I was just like, I want to talk about something for three hours and not stop till it’s done. Might go to four, whatever. Can you, lay out where you out there watching or listening can, know what you’re up to and where to find Matt Medeiros.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I’ll, you can go to my, primary site craftedbymatt.

com. It has all my stuff there of everything that I do. If you want to see what I’m up to at Gravity Forms and tune into the Gravity Forms podcast. It’s gravityforms. com slash breakdown, uh, and then wordpressnews. com. TheWPMinute. com is where you’ll find me most. And if you’re interested in, uh, the impact of radio, uh, throughout human history, it’s OurBelovedMedium.

com, um, starting that. That will launch in 2025. Uh, I’ll have another interesting story to tell because I’m trying to raise a hundred, we’re trying to raise 100, 000 to get it produced to come out summer 2025, so about a year from now. Um, voice actors, sound design, original music, like we’re trying to. Scope all that stuff out.

And the a hundred thousand dollar mark is like super cheap compared to like, if you were to go to like a big network show, it’d be hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this stuff done. So it’s a shoe spring budget, even though it sounds like a lot to small podcasters, but that’ll come out 2025.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thanks Matt for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. And it’s always good to reconnect with you.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, man. Same here.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Dale Berkebile discuss about his goal to get people to own creativity and make the world a better place. He says that the main goal of his work is to help people become creative and forward-thinking leaders, because he believes that change can’t happen without leaders.

Dale Berkebile’s website is “Brandwise“. Dale was moved to write about his search for meaning in life after reading “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek. He worked on his vision for five years to make it better so that he could get the right people and turn away the wrong ones. His emotional and work lives are meant to be balanced, and he wants to make a difference in both.

He also talks about how he spent his time going to online classes and networking. Dale began making lessons in 2010 or 2011. He wanted to connect with people on a human level through his work, help his business grow, and give current and potential clients something of value. He looked at a lot of different LMS options and chose LifterLMS because he thought it gave him more power and fit with his goals. Making a change in the world, teaching, and talking to people are some of the things that drove him to work in online education

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest and a good friend. His name is Dale Berkebile. He is over at Brand Wise. The website is get brand wise.com. Welcome to the show, Dale.

Dale Berkebile: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I’m excited to jam out with you today, particularly around building LMS websites for clients and your journey, your story.

It’s going to be a fun episode. And by the way, we did an older episode with Dale where he did a guided meditation first time on the LMS cast podcast. We did that. It’s really cool. Go search the LMS cast website for the past episode we did with Dale. But I wanted to start us here, Dale. You’re one of the reasons I love hanging out with you is you’re very purpose driven.

You have a vision, the world you want to live in and the world you want to create for you out there listening, Dale, what’s your purpose?

Dale Berkebile: All right. Thanks for having me on again. And and give me a shout out to the previous episode. I appreciate that. So my purpose is to challenge people to become innovative leaders so that we can change the world together

Chris Badgett: And what’s on top of that? Let’s unpack that.

Dale Berkebile: Okay. So I think it’s leaders that change the world. And so part of what I do is help people. Become innovative leaders that, people that are maybe cutting edge or doing things a little bit different. And I think there’s a whole lot of leadership out there.

That is sketchy. Maybe they could use some leadership support or direction or purpose, potentially. And yeah and I was in business probably about 15 years or so, when I clearly defined that purpose and why I’m doing what I’m doing and what I want to be doing. And it was to beyond the marketing and all the stuff that I was doing, helping businesses grow, actually help businesses and make an impact out in the world as well. So that’s that’s where I get really excited. If you’re looking to make an impact and you want to do all this stuff that gets exciting. So

Chris Badgett: tell us more about how you found that clarity.

Dale Berkebile: Oh gosh, that was a journey. You hear about creating mission statements, vision statements, all that kind of stuff.

And creating your why it came from Simon Sinek inspired me a little bit with his start with why and just, it was something that I wanted to do for my business to gain more clarity, more focus maybe attract more of the right people. And also refine the marketing that I was doing and Whatnot so yeah, so the right people could maybe find me or Instantly scare away people that have no interest In doing what I want, you know what i’m doing.

So that’s a good thing too. We don’t want Prospects or clients that are not going to be a good fit. Think I, I was probably went on that journey trying to define that for probably, I don’t know, about five years, I put something out and I’m like, and then, worked it and.

Put something else out, worked it, work it, put something else out until I finally got to something that encompassed encompassed what works well for my business, my personal life and everything I do. So it’s the North star that I, set my compass for. And that’s where I’m going.

Chris Badgett: So Dale is a member of the LFTR LMS experts program. He’s built a lot of LFTR LMS sites. One of the things that I love about you is that you are also like a course creator, a coach, a community builder. How did you find your calling to use those tools, creating courses and creating communities and growing those things?

How did you get into this?

Dale Berkebile: I did a whole lot of marketing for my own business. I eat the dog food, so to speak. I’m telling clients all day long, you have to do this kind of marketing, that kind of marketing, you have to get these kinds of results, whatever. And I’m like I gotta be doing this stuff.

And I was looking for a way to offer a lot of value to my prospects. First off, to get to know me a little bit better to experience something. And then a lot of value to my customers even on a smaller scale that can, get into the game a little bit, get a feel for what I do.

And also offer some scalability for my own business. So that I didn’t have to be billing per hour. I was able to create something that was out there working by itself and making some money. So that was the initial reason that I got into the game and I worked with, different LMS is over the time, whereas I was trying to figure out my way or how to even build courses and all that stuff.

And gosh, I probably started. Trying to think when I started probably 2010 or 11 or something like that is when I first built my, built my 1st course. And I was creating ebooks and different things like that as a way to educate people. But I love the idea of creating a more.

User experience connecting with me, even if I’m not there, if they have a video of me, they can connect with who I am and either or dislike me again, making it easier to further the relationship or cut things short, quick which is a good thing. Yeah, and then I found lifter and.

This is the platform for me, and I do think again, it goes back to the why do I do online courses? Because I believe in it. I do it for brand wise and I do it for my other stuff because you can really make a difference. And there’s some of the impact I’m trying to make is. Online education.

Chris Badgett: Why’d you choose LifterLMS?

Dale Berkebile: Honestly, I think I saw you on some videos ages ago and it, you just seemed like a good guy and knowledgeable. And I think the previous, I tried a couple of different platforms and they had all of these great things. It sounded miraculous and whatever.

Then I was just in over my head and it was costing me a fortune and whatnot. And I’m trying to think Lifter, I think was, I started at the the original, I guess the smaller level. I don’t know if I did the free version first. I think I started at the the beginner.

Chris Badgett: You probably came in on the universe, bundle universe funnel.

Dale Berkebile: Yeah. I think, or maybe Actually, maybe I did come on the free version and I bought the Stripe, whatever, to just feel my way out and see if I could get it working. And once I started doing some stuff yeah, it just felt really good because it was on WordPress. It was I already knew WordPress and things like that.

So it was easy to do what I needed to do. And I think I knocked out a course pretty quickly. And so I was like, okay, yeah, let’s see what we can do.

Chris Badgett: Do you remember what year You first loaded up WordPress on a website.

Dale Berkebile: Oh, geez. I would say that was probably around 2009. I think I would guess if, I don’t know for sure, but I think that’s about right.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. You have deep history. And that’s about my story. Like 2008, I got into WordPress. What in your client work, what is your perfect fit client? What are they like?

Dale Berkebile: Oh really, so there’s a couple of different types of clients that I can work with, but my ideal customer would be someone that is, has either bought into Lifter LMS or trust me that, we’re going to use the best tools out there.

And they don’t question it. This is where we’re going. We’re going to do it. And then next one to either want to build something that they can, manage the backend stuff a little bit at a new course or edit courses or something like that, but not really Two, two into the back end and messing around too much.

But one ongoing support and including marketing to fill this, fill the classes because that’s one of the things that with any website, I think sometimes people think it’s a field of dreams. And just because in their mind, the idea is brilliant you build it and they will come is not really the case.

You got to do some work. To fill the class, you got to do some work to get found all that kind of stuff. But it’s amazing when you get there. And so someone that’s willing to commit that online courses is where they want to be and what they want to do. And they’re going to do ongoing courses and they’re going to do marketing to support it.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Cause a lot of this is one of the things that makes you really special in the space is some people who provide services or just like technical implementation or even customization, like adding functionality that doesn’t exist, but then there’s the whole thing of you need marketing too, and you can do both.

And that’s and you need both. And when the, when both hands are connected to the same body, It tends to go a little better.

I remember one of my first clients who became the first there’s, so the way Lifter was born is I was involved in the infusion soft community, which is a lot of marketing automation and stuff.

Dale Berkebile: Right.

Chris Badgett: And these people needed LMSs. So this is back in 2012 period. And, we were piecing all these different things together. WordPress didn’t have a great solution. So we built it and that’s where Lifter was born out of, but sometimes like in that kind of infusion soft error. The marketing automation space was being born.

They might’ve even coined that term possibly, but what ended up happening is a certain type of person. And I’m this type of person. And so are you could start visualizing all these like. Funnels and flows. And if they do this infusion soft had this thing called a decision diamond. And you could create all this like marketing automation, combination of emails, web pages, forms, all these different things.

But it takes a while to get like really good at that. And at the end of the day, you realize Oh maybe I should just keep it simple and still do all those stages of the customer journey, but not over complicated. And I think sometimes with clients, they get really focused on like this one piece or this one strategy they heard about, or this one tool.

But like part of it, and I’ve seen you do this well as advising people to be like, let’s focus. Do you have your first course ready, do you have your content ready? Do you have an interest list? And do you have, are you using community, which is like a thing that’s only becoming more and more important, especially in an AI automated world.

But tell us how you think about marketing and creating information products and take us through the whole customer journey that you’ve You advise your clients to do to have the highest odds of success and you can help them with that.

Dale Berkebile: Yeah. I guess it depends on how established people are where they’re at and that sort of thing.

But, ideally I’ve gone through the automation, world to probably right around the time when I started getting into WordPress 2009 is when I really started getting heavy into that and some of it is defining the the buyer persona, the avatar, the person, right?

Who are we going after? Do you know that? And it’s funny, and I’ve been Build guilty of this myself in different areas. How few businesses have a clear, focus on who they’re going to go after. So they just are going to go after everyone. And that, and I’ve been guilty of this myself.

But the issue with that is then. It’s very difficult to get what you need. And so clearly understanding who we’re going after fleshing out what their problems are and how you solve them or, how people talk about them and that sort of thing helps you, the 1st steps of marketing that you need to do, where are these people hanging out?

Are they online and communities, Facebook or LinkedIn or different places and how you get there and how do you entice them and track them and different things like that? I’ve come from the, I used to do a lot of direct mail back in the day and at that point we would create a list and we would know who we’re going after and what the problem is.

And then we would send out offers and different things like that. Over the years it just move to online. So it could be connecting with someone else’s audience. And that could be through different avenues or could be building your own audience. Do you have an email list?

Do you have a group that you manage or are a thought leader in that sort of thing? And so how can we reach them? Or do we just, blog like crazy, put some content out build an email list, do some email and different things like that. I think it depends on the client and their specific needs.

But overall, we needed to find who we’re going after, what the problem is, how you solve it and where do these people hang out and start being there and, building relationships and rapport building trust, right? Because no one does any anything unless they know and trust you. So we got to be there doing that, whatever that looks like.

So it could be email marketing. It could be direct mail back in the day, or just showing up and engaging in a community. If it’s, A Facebook group or something like that.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of community, I’ve seen you do a lot of great community work. I’ve seen you build your own communities. I’ve seen you get involved in other communities that you feel called to and also do partnerships and find clients in there.

I know you’re, you’ve done a lot like in the yoga and meditation space. What do you see is the right way I’ll put that in quotes, the right way to do community. These days, and ultimately if it’s for you or you’re helping a client do it, how does somebody build like a real sustainable community, both for lead generation, but also having a nice fulfill experience as possibly a community as part of the course or coaching program?

Dale Berkebile: Me personally, I’m passionate about the community piece of online learning. I think that I do a lot of online education myself. So I go through all kinds of courses in all kinds of areas that I’m interested in and things like that. And so I join communities and see all kinds of different communities that.

Are done well or done poorly. And I can tell you that the learning that I do when I go through a a course that has really good content is connecting with others that are going through similar experience, right? So we can share like what the heck is going on or, Hey, I’m having problems with the course can anyone tell me, how to find blah, blah, blah, whatever, and to me.

I would almost I would highly recommend that people find a way to add a community as part of their online education experience because, people are, I don’t know where we’re what’s the word I’m looking for? Just like people that connect, right? There’s something about humanity that wants to connect. And so creating a community that allows you to connect and share your experience and, you can be in there sharing, you can be the person offering the advice oh, here, go here and this, whatever, or try this and give some advice.

If you’re further along, or if you’re the newbie, you come in and if you ask questions and whatnot, you can get a whole lot out of it. It’s funny. I have I have some different programs that I’m going through now, where the community is like a huge piece of the gold as far as I’m concerned, because you connect with a lot of people people that are at your level and you can learn a lot.

Not just from the expert. That’s, teaching you, but from the users that are in the trenches going through this stuff. So I don’t know if that answered the question or whatnot. But I do think building, of course, is important. And there’s a whole lot of value that you can get from it from a user experience.

But then from a from a an educator, right from the person who’s doing the education, the teacher. For the instructor, the coach, whatever man, you can build some relationships. You just set yourself up for success and you get closer to the person. And then if it’s a solid program, I don’t know.

I feel like. I don’t know. It’s a really great way to build customer loyalty. And at the end of the day, we want people that are going to stick around. And you don’t get any better than, weekly showing up and doing something that offers value and then sharing some things throughout the week that shares value or having a team that’s there to support the people in need and ask questions and whatever.

I get super fired up when, as a user, if the coach or the trainer or whatever has great content, and then they have a course that’s amazing and they have a team that’s supporting and there’s one that I’m in now where the team is really amazing and they support, and.

It’s interesting seeing that it’s there’s groups that work and groups that don’t and the ones that don’t add a whole lot of value to the to the overall learning experience. But the ones that do, man, it’s just, know, hopefully that answered the question or help.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s very cool. Related to that, one of the things that makes you special as an online community builder and participant in communities is that you seem to have a good relationship with technology and balance and stuff. So for example, you were, you’re remain positive. There’s a lot of.

Buzz on the internet about people are saying like, Oh, I’m quitting Facebook. I’m quitting Instagram. You on the other hand, like sometimes when I post stuff and like our, one of our Facebook groups, I really appreciate it. When you take a second to hit the like button or drop a comment, you’re just like an engaged participant and you help people, if you have the answer to something you you chime in.

And in some of the communities that you’ve built, I’ve seen you’re very comfortable. You’re doing things like live streaming meditation together. And I think I even saw one where you were in the shower. Now you weren’t you were clothed and everything, but or yeah, it wasn’t like that, but you’re just very comfortable.

On social media and a lot of people are overwhelmed and you know have like either imposter syndrome or just fear a lot of fear or just a negative relationship with facebook as an example, how do you Cut and i’m sure you’re it’s not perfect like sometimes I spend too much time on social media and stuff like that.

But how do you, for such a long period of time, stay positive, create value, be yourself, remain engaged?

Dale Berkebile: So I, I love that question. Part of, you asked a, this is a multi tier question to some degree but let me just start with the people look at Facebook is, whatever.

I’m getting off Facebook and stuff like that. You have to do what you have to do. And I think work life balance is really important. And so if Facebook is dragging you down or whatever your platform is, I use Facebook quite a bit. So I say Facebook often if if it’s dragging you down, then yeah, we got to set boundaries and things like that so that we can have that work life balance or success in our life or not, go into anxiety mode or depression or all that kind of stuff.

And there’s all kinds of negativity and divisiveness out in the world and political stuff and all kinds of stuff, right? That can be very ugly. And so I understand when sometimes people want to we’ll say that Facebook or social media or whatever is a mess. And I’m like, in my life, I believe that you can either be part of the mess or you can work to fix it.

I am a believer that you be the change you want to see in the world. And so instead of showing up like, a jerk on Facebook or getting into Ugly banter back and forth show up in a positive way, just I don’t know. I probably about I don’t know, 11 years ago or something like that.

I struggled with depression and different things like that. And as I was creating my purpose. I wanted to change the world in some way. I’m like, I’m going to change the world. So I just showed up, started showing up and do post positive stuff and whatever. I’m like, I don’t know, someone might need to hear this and whatever everyone else, they will scroll over it.

And I

mean, any pretty cool person who is offering value, because again, I’m looking for, I’m looking to be the person I want. What am I looking for? When I get in there, when I join a group, I start, it’s funny. Facebook has these ratings now how top performers are top, whatever.

If I’m in a good group, I start plowing through the scoreboard of sorts because I get engaged and I start. Sharing and asking questions and doing whatever, because I want to be an active member. And that’s where the real value is. It’s, that’s where the value, it’s a lot of value for you as the student, but it’s a ton of value also for the the owner of the group, because you’re asking valuable questions and, or ideas that, I had a one of the groups that I’m in, I shared something and I’m like, this would be awesome.

And then two weeks later, the owner. Of the educator or whatever is like, Hey, we’re going to try, but I’m like, Oh, Hey, I knew where that idea came from. And think for me, it’s just showing up in a positive way. What do I want out of the community and be the person That I would want in my own communities, right?

And I have to be it before I can expect a bunch of people to come into my own community and be that person. Model the behavior, to some degree. So that’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: I know a part of you, in addition to being an excellent web designer and course creator coach yourself. You seem to find some balance from meditation, yoga, painting, art.

How did those things play into your life and work?

Dale Berkebile: Oh I think for meditation was one of the things that helped me get out of the depression that I was in. And once I went down that path and I said, holy crap, man, this is really Helpful to me. I wish I again, I wish I knew this before.

I feel a little bit obligated to help others with it. Yoga was something I added. Not too long ago. I started on yoga a little bit and it was partially to you. Add an exercise sort of program to my life because again, I was trying to like, balance out all these different areas to live.

The. Best life, the most healthy life, that sort of thing, the hell of good life. And Sunny, how that was something to get me active because, sit behind a computer all the time. You’re not always active depending on, what you do. And I wasn’t as active as I wanted to be.

So I added that as part of the mix. And then I really dove into that community. And art, I’ve always been creative and for about a year, I was like kicking around getting back into doing some painting. I hadn’t done painting for 30 years since I was in college and very little at that. And I was like, this might be something that’s fun.

So it was a curiosity thing but I was, hesitant. I kicked it around for a year and I’m like, Oh man, I gotta buy supplies. What if I suck? And all this kind of stuff, we get hung up on all this kind of head trash. And then I was just like, screw it, pulled the trigger and started painting.

I’ve been painting. Really consistently since October and knocked out, I don’t know how many paintings, quite a few of paintings. And and what I found was after a few months of doing that, I’m standing there and I’m looking at 1 of my paintings. I’m like, man, this brings a lot of joy.

This makes me really happy. And so I’m like. That is awesome, right? That’s what we need to find is things that just bring joy without any sort of I don’t know, goals or expectations or, whatever else when it comes to work life balance, we got to tap into some of those things that just fill the cup, so to speak.

And yeah, painting certainly done that for me, but I’ve always been creative and I see, creating courses and websites and all the marketing, all that stuff is creative as well. But this is a more pure creativity without any purpose necessarily. I’m not intentionally trying to sell or whatever.

I just started doing it for fun.

Chris Badgett: You’re also a husband and a father. And what are your, tips based on your lived experience with the craziness of entrepreneurship and being a creative person and including family and the work life balance, like I see you doing cool stuff with your family on social media and stuff like that, but what are some ideas or approaches you have to family?

Dale Berkebile: Yeah that can be challenging. I think I think, on some level, you just make time for it and you commit to just like you would commit to meeting, with a client or whatever you commit to time with family and stuff like that. And sometimes it’s easier said than done.

There are times where I’m working on the computer and sitting in the living room or whatever, and we’re together, but. Yeah. But I am certainly working, there are times when I’m on Facebook and I’m doing some different things. And, I’m there with family.

And so I’m not really there with family too. Ben, like yesterday, my my son’s birthday was on Wednesday. And yesterday we had a we went to, my wife. Set up a swim party or whatever. So he had a bunch of friends over and I just, took the day off and we went and did this big swim birthday party thing and stuff.

And that stuff is important. I think at the end of the day, connection with family and all that stuff is important. As important, maybe more important than all the business stuff. Making time for it and doing the best you can, I have two kids and I’ve been trying to make a group time and one on one time.

And, if you’re doing all that stuff, making time for the wife, making time for each one of the kids, making time for the whole family, that stuff can Add up quick too, and then it can go to overwhelm and burnout with work and art and like all that stuff. I think sometimes finding ways to incorporate different things together can help so for the art stuff, we did a little paint party together a couple 2 weeks ago, I think, and that was like great quality time.

Together and we were doing, something that I love and something that the family had a whole lot of fun with. Finding those overlaps where everyone is having fun or whatever my son. Here’s a funny 1 recently to my son wanted to have a game night, so I’m picking them up after school or whatever.

He’s can we have a game night? Whatever. And I’m like, yeah, we can. No, we had this, our coffee table was had all the stuff on it. And it was like the kid’s toys and all kinds of stuff. I’m like, we got to clean this stuff up. We can’t have a a game night or whatever, family night or whatever.

And he’s okay if I clean this stuff up, I’m like, okay, get at it. So sure enough, both of my boys went in and they started cleaning it up and stuff like that because they had a goal and they wanted to do stuff. So I think I don’t know that was really my just fell into my lap a little bit, but having them fired up so that we can do fun stuff as a family wanting to do fun stuff, maybe trying to set the tone for that.

I don’t know, I don’t know that. I have a great wisdom there, but try

Chris Badgett: awesome. Let’s talk a little bit more about your agency brand wise. What do you like? What kind of things do you do for clients? You mentioned marketing website, LMS building, but what are some of the details within all of that? What’s on offer at brand wise.

And that’s a, by the way, that’s a get brand wise. com.

Dale Berkebile: Yeah. I started out in the design space. Doing any kind of graphic design, whatever. But what I found was I wanted to evolve and get more into the branding side of things because I, what I found was to get results in the marketing, we had to do things.

We had to keep doing things. We had to stay out there in front of people and things like that. So the design is really the core and where I think A lot different than a whole lot of people. But but then over the years, so it’s been in April, it was 25 years. What I found was getting results is important.

So I’m looking for how I can help scale businesses, right? What I ran into in my own business was I wanted to scale it. I wanted to get to the point where I had employees. I wanted to do all these different things. Some of that took scalability and so building things that were getting results.

And that’s part of the reason I was doing direct mail. Then I moved to the marketing automation cause we could do that through SEO and different things like that. But it’s all about getting found and then making offers that get results. And beyond just the beauty of building the brand If we can build a system that goes from start to finish and gets people, gets the cash register ringing.

And also the customers happy and getting results because they need to get results too. Because if we’re not doing it for them to get results, then our results don’t really stick around that much. And that’s one of the things that I love about, online online learning is it’s a great way to connect with people.

It’s a great way to build that customer loyalty. It’s a great way to service people in an amazing way. And build a relationship over time instead of a lot of one off stuff. That was what I used to do in the past. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: One of the biggest challenges with working with LMS website clients can be, and it’s true for all web design.

And actually. Getting the content from the client is quite a challenge, even if it’s just text for the about page, or if somebody has a dream of making millions, teaching online through courses and coaching programs I’ve seen you. Have an extremely high output of videos, live videos, writ writing, social media posting.

So what are your tips for just being a prolific content creator? Cause sometimes getting, that first course or a lead magnet, whether it’s a PDF or a free mini course out, sometimes clients have trouble getting the gears turning and getting the content together. What would you advise?

Dale Berkebile: Yeah, I think that you have to see the value in it, right? If you’re not committed to it, that’s where I was saying earlier about commitment to things. If you’re not committed to blogging or, giving it a fair run blogging for a year, and usually I recommend twice a week and, whatever Two articles a week and then pushing it out on social and doing all these different things.

Like it’s some work. It’s a commitment. And if you’re not willing to do it, then maybe you find another Avenue. I don’t know what to tell you. But what I do know is if you want. A great community, then you have to be out there. If if you want to make some real money with the courses or whatever offerings that you do, you have to be out there.

So how do you get out there? And, it’s doing videos is good, doing live is good. Different things like that are a great way for people to see the, the real person, I guess behind the brand. In the old days we used to network at Chambers and different things like that to, to be out in the front of, connect with people.

But we hid behind the brand, right? Like we would put up a, whatever we did. And I did some work before, before the internet. We would, create logos and business cards and marketing materials and stuff like that. And the company, the real people would hide behind this brand that we make.

Now we’re able to connect. And so the videos, I think are an awesome way to do that. But At the end of the day, we still need to be out there. However, we’re doing it. And I think it’s just being committed to it. And at the end of the day, it’s committed to yourself, right? Your own company, because if you want success, you got to be out there doing it.

So that’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a commitment. I knew when I started a Facebook group, I was in there every day. And that’s been almost a decade now. And I knew what I was committing to.

Dale Berkebile: Yeah. And your Facebook group is awesome. It’s huge now. It’s been, it’s awesome. And seeing it grow.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think it’s around 9, 000 people and I’m the one that the biggest one. And I’m like, people ask me how’d you do that? I’m like, I showed up every day. And with a helping mindset.

Dale Berkebile: Yeah. Giving value.

Chris Badgett: That’s Dale from BrandWise. Go to GetBrandWise. com. In the spirit of community, how else can people connect with you, Dale?

Dale Berkebile: So you can find me on Facebook. That’s where I’m fairly active. You can I run hella good life is another company that I run. You can find me on Facebook for brand wise and for a hell of a good life on Twitter. But really Facebook is where I’m active. You can find me on LinkedIn searching for my name or brand wise, or I don’t know about how a good life maybe, but Yeah.

You want to interact and engage, you can find me on Facebook. That’s usually the best way to do a search for my name.

Chris Badgett: That’s Dale Burke, a bottle from get brand wise. com. And just as the final words of this episode, could you say your purpose statement again?

Dale Berkebile: Okay. So my purpose is to challenge people to become innovative leaders so that we can change the world together.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast Chris Lassiter shares his own experiences with BuddyBoss and LifterLMS tools on their customer visits.

Chris Lassiter is an experienced WordPress professional and AI enthusiast. He is the owner of Learn AI Now. Chris guides individuals on navigating and customizing BuddyBoss, ensuring they can confidently utilize the platform to its fullest potential. These days, applications on a mobile device allow BuddyBoss and LifterLMS to be accessed.

These days, applications on a mobile device allow BuddyBoss and LifterLMS to be accessed. He explains in this video how to make the app compatible with BuddyBoss’s services and import it into the Apple and Google app stores. During his conversation at Lassiter, he underlined the significance of making sure that all of the content on a website is available before the application’s release. He also offers guidance on how to abide by Apple’s in-app purchase policies, among other restrictions controlling the app store.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Chris Lasseter. You can find him at his agency FastWebCreations. That’s FastWebCreations. com. You can also see one of his personal LMS project sites called LearnAINow. That’s LearnAINow. ai.

Welcome back on the show, Chris. Thanks, Grace. Thanks for having me. It’s been fun getting to know you over the past year or so. You move really quickly. Like I’ve seen you launch your learn AI project. I’ve seen you create success for multiple of your clients who are using particularly lifter LMS and buddy boss.

And you push the limits to of okay yeah. We can customize this. We can extend and you have your, you just like customize and really solve unique challenges. It’s a lot of fun to watch. Appreciate having you in the community. I know from our conversations that people often get interested in building an online community and in addition, or in tandem with online education, and some of those folks get into buddy boss, but they get a little lost and that’s where you come in.

Could you tell us a little bit about what happens when somebody’s in that problem area around trying to figure out BuddyBoss and LMS. And then you come in and help sort through it and fix it or create the solution they want. What’s the challenge with getting started with BuddyBoss as an example?

Chris Lassiter: Chris, I think the biggest challenge with BuddyBoss is that, that they have so many features available that people just get locked down and they’re just afraid to. To go through and just start clicking and learning because in this, tech world, this industry that we’re in, the only way that you’re going to be able to learn is by just doing it.

And they come in, they hire me and what I do is I give them the confidence boost. To be able to work in buddy boss, to work in lifter and WordPress so that they can take on their project and be able to do it without me. I think that will, that’s what makes me a little bit different from a lot of developers is I don’t like to lock down my customers and make it so that they have to have me there.

They have to have me, Update a sentence or change a color, the whole point of what I do is teach them, make them so they’re not afraid to click on things and, let them know, hey, don’t click on that to break it. But hey, you can do this. I believe in you. You can do this here.

Here are the developer pages. Here are the social groups. Lifter LMS has a great community on Facebook and, so does BuddyBoss and, just be able to teach people on how to, help themselves is what I’ve been really striving for.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And I saw you shared a win in the Facebook group.

You had deployed three client sites that have the BuddyBoss app. And BuddyBoss and Lifter LMS, what have you learned in getting the apps, the BuddyBoss app, an app, in addition to having a WordPress site, tell us more about that. Because a lot of people reach out to us and they’re like, I want an app.

And we’re like WordPress and Lifter, it’s a web app. They’re like, no, I want a mobile app. So tell us more about what you’ve been able to figure out there.

Chris Lassiter: No, absolutely. So BuddyBoss. They don’t directly integrate with Lifter LMS, but what you can do is since BuddyBoss app is mainly ran off your WordPress and first off, you have to have a good server.

You can’t use a shared server. Or you’re not going to be able to run the app because it does use a lot of resources. But, once you have all the tools set up correctly being able to run a Lifter LMS is not a problem. Because you can go into the plugin on the website and you can change like your home screen to like the courses page and it will still load in the app.

And you still have the social aspect from the buddy boss group. Or even the social aspects from, Lifter LMS from their plugin add ons. Also. What’s really nice is it doesn’t take that long to actually launch the app once you’ve done it a couple of times because we always use Buddy Bosses services where they will help create the images to the way that you like for what you’re launching.

So basically let me. Let me set it up on how the process of contacting BuddyBoss to when the app releases. And I think that’ll really help out a lot of customers who are looking to use it. Once you go to BuddyBoss’s website and you purchase whatever plan you want I always recommend to have them, the, do the DFY project, have them help you out.

So the first thing that you’re going to do is I’m going to say, okay, here’s my website. I’ve got the server. Everything’s good to go. The most important thing is to make sure that you have all your content on your website because that’s the one thing that slows some customers that I have down is oh, I want an app.

I want an app. I want an app, but they don’t know why they want the app or they know why they want the app, but they don’t have the content because we’re going to get to a point in the app Before it gets released to the app store, you have to be able to give screenshots of what the app looks like when you’re beta testing it on your phone.

And if you don’t have the correct content on there, then you’re not gonna be ready. So let’s go back to the beginning again. So you get, you purchase the plan, they’re working with you. What they’re going to do is they’re going to create like your login screen. And then they’re going to download the plugin on your website.

They’re going to make sure that it all works. And then you’re going to be able to beta test it on your Apple devices, your Android devices. You can bring some friends in and they can help you beta test that make sure everything works. And then once that’s done, they’re going to ask for configuration access to the the Apple developer and the Google developer side.

And they’ll do all the connections for you. That’s really where I come in. Because even though they have YouTube videos on how to do the developer side to get them access so they can help you. Those pages are always changing for Google. They’re always changing for Apple. And that’s the reason why my clients come to me is to help them out, be able to bridge that disconnect, to be able to help get that app going and be able to be on the developer side.

And I’ve worked a lot with BuddyBoss and they really appreciate it because it speeds up. The access for them. Once they get that access the next step is going to take screenshots on your app once it’s ready to go. Then you’ll submit that to buddy boss. And then they’ll say, okay, all right.

Hey, we’re good. You’re good. All right. Hit that publish button inside the buddy boss plugin on your website. Once they do that, it will go out to Apple and it’ll go out to Google and you’ll sit there and wait for the feedback. And that’s where sometimes. We’ll get caught up at, because let’s talk about Apple real quick.

So for Apple, if you want to sell anything within your app, they’re automatically going to take 30 percent of whatever you sell. I always recommend to my clients, I was like, Hey, if you want to keep that 30%, then just make it a member only app. So you have to go to the website, buy the membership. And then they’ll have access to the app.

But when you do that, you have to make sure for Apple that there’s nothing on there that mentions memberships. Or you can click a button in the app to purchase a membership because then you would be breaking their guidelines. And the way we do that is, is we just add a little bit of CSS code that hides it Within the app on the phone.

So super simple. And that’s where a lot of people get hung up at because they don’t want Apple to take 30 percent of their other profits. And uh, that’s where I come in and, I give my recommendations, make those changes. So normally with Apple, it takes normally about one to three kickbacks from Apple.

With them saying, hey, you need to do this or hey, you’re, you’re not within policy for Google. I’ve done it in 1 try and I’ve done it in 2 tries. Google is pretty flexible. And so I’ve been really fortunate to not really stress out too much. Getting the app released with them.

So normally if we release apps at the same time, normally Google will come out of the play store, the Apple come on the play store about a day or two before Apple does as long as we have our, T’s cross and I dotted. That’s pretty much the process. I would say timeframe, let’s say you have a website and everything’s ready to go.

Registering, getting with BuddyBoss, getting everything in. I would say it’s probably a 60 day process.

Chris Badgett: Nice. So somebody has, let’s say they’ve purchased Lifter LMS, they’ve purchased BuddyBoss, they have their hosting, and they need some help setting up the website and Getting the app release.

It’s like a two month process. It’s like a realistic timeframe and it has some content ready to go. That’s assuming content’s ready to go.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. If content’s ready to go and they’re on the right servers they have enough resources, I would say two months. If it’s a customer who is like, Hey, I’ve got this idea.

And I want to do this and they have nothing, then you’re looking at, three to six month project to get it going. Mainly that’s just waiting on them to get everything together. And I help guide them and I say, Hey, this is what you need to do. You need to do this. And then once everything’s ready, then, we go in there and we reached out to buddy boss and say, Hey, we’re ready to do the app.

Chris Badgett: And once the app is live, I’m assuming it auto updates as you, let’s say add new courses or just more content to your site, the Apple automatically update, is that correct?

Chris Lassiter: That is a great question because a lot of people actually asked me about that. That is the one thing I love about BuddyBoss and Lyft LMS is since it’s connected through your WordPress website, it’s instant.

As soon as you update a course, as soon as you update a picture, whatever you update on your WordPress website, if it’s clickable within your app, it’s instantly going to update. When it comes to making app updates, like security or features or what have you, things that BuddyBot pushes out. What you do is you just update your WordPress website when it says it’s ready to update.

And then there’s going to be a button at the top of your website on the back end that says publish a new build. And you just click on it, you select what’s up to date. Operating system. So you’ll say Apple and Android get push build and hitting how big the update is. It takes anywhere between five to 15 minutes.

And it updates the app and that’s the nice thing. They never have to download a new app on their phone because it constantly updates on the back end. So it’s not like one of those apps, where you go to the app store and you’re like, oh, I need to update. Nope. Doesn’t do that. It automatically updates everything.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s awesome. So once it’s live, once the app is live, it’s pretty much set it and forget it. Just keep your website updated and you’re good to go.

Chris Lassiter: Exactly. Exactly. Once in a while like any technology, there might be like a bug here, a bug there. The biggest bug I ever had was like a notification issue.

Hey, someone sent me a notification. I see it. The notification icon doesn’t go away or Hey, I need to add someone and I click add them and, it didn’t work for a second. But what’s nice about buddy bosses, their customer service. I’ve reached out to them and then within anywhere between two to 24 hours, it is quick.

They will get back with you. They’ll go, Hey, This is the issue where we have released an update and it’s going to go out to everyone. And here you go. So it is really quick support.

Chris Badgett: So for your clients that are building these types of sites in their mind, are they creating a split experience where people are sometimes on the website, sometimes on the app, or are they trying to get people to mostly use the app or mostly use the website?

Or it’s just a blend.

Chris Lassiter: That’s a good question. The last three customers that I’ve had that have actually used the app they all use Lifter LMS. They all do completely different things with within that system. So, let’s talk about my first one. They mainly use the website, but they have the app.

So if people are on the go if they’re at conferences and they need to look up training, then they have access to it. So that works well for them for another company that I’ve done it for they mainly use it for the social media aspect like a Facebook, but it’s more of a private Facebook for them where it’s specifically just for that industry and they’ll be able to, just communicate and chat.

And then my most recent one is one of my biggest projects where I think we’re going to have. Tens of thousands of people on there within the next 12 months. And I’m really looking forward to working with them. But there, there’s actually, is actually a mix of both, they’re going to use the website to do the course training, but also at the same time, they’re going to have the mobile app to where they can do the social, the course training the private messaging, sharing of pictures.

Sharing photos for this third company I work with is a huge thing for them so they can share photos while they’re out and about. So yeah, it’s gonna, I would say it was a little bit of both.

Chris Badgett: And for you out there listening, if you’re not quite sure what we’re talking about, I always like to give this example that, when I do Gmail on my home computer or my laptop, I’m in the browser I’m on the web, you if I am.

on the go or traveling or something. I might, I’m just using the Gmail app on my phone, but they’re synced together. And that’s what we’re talking about here. And when you do that with your email. It’s a seamless experience. You’re just on one or the other and they talk to each other.

Chris Lassiter: Exactly. And whatever you do on the app it updates on the website.

So if you’re doing a course on the app, you can pick up where you left off and continue on the website. So if you want to, work on a course and then you’re at lunch and you’re eating French fries or what have you, you can open up your app and continue the course.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. What else is in your tech stack?

We talked about Lifter LMS and Buddy Boss and WordPress, but what other tools do you frequently use for these types of projects?

Chris Lassiter: Let’s see here. So for my tech stack, I would say one of the biggest things that I use, um, let’s use a learn AI now dot AI as an example. I use a plugin called better docs.

It’s basically like a knowledge based tool to where you can post knowledge based, frequently asked questions how to’s that’s a really good one. I also am using an AI chat box. Or within the courses that I’m starting to put out on learn AI now I’m actually using integrated chat GPT so people can ask questions within the course and get the answer and feedback.

So right now I’m using AI power for that one. Let’s see here for forms. I always recommend fluid forms. I love them. They’re easy to use. For Lifter LMS, they have a fantastic and simple gateway connection with PayPal to Stripe. So you really don’t need to have to use like WooCommerce or SureCard or what have you, if you don’t want.

But of course there’s, if you want those extra features I don’t, for WooCommerce, I don’t like the way that they’ve gone over the years where You have to pay an arm and a leg just to do anything with them. So I’ve actually migrated over to a SureCart and I’ve been using them on a lot of my websites, if I need more advanced features for for e commerce.

So I use that for my automations I use sure triggers. That’s a good one. They’re always constantly updating and always putting new hooks and stuff like that. So that’s pretty nice. Let’s see here. What else do I got? Four. Oh, this is a good one. So in order to control user roles I like to use like more advanced plugin for like memberships.

So for that specifically right now I’m using capabilities. Give me one second. I’m trying to pull up the the actual name of it. While I’m waiting for that to show up For my videos. I use your guys as advanced videos a lot. But sometimes I, I might have to for a client, they didn’t want to use YouTube.

And so I went with a Presto player. And what we do is we host those videos on bunny. net. As the CDN and they use that to host their videos. And then we use press the player to display that. So, let’s see here for the to control more user roles and capabilities. I would say that one is I use published press capabilities pro.

That’s a really good one. And then for all my SEO I’ve gone back and forth for, I’ve used Yost. I’ve used what’s the math one? Rank math. Yeah. I’ve used rank math. And now I use SEO press and I’ve really liked SEO press. I just feel like it’s less clunkier. So for right now, that’s what I use.

And for my SMTP, I just use the free WP mail SMTP and I connected to Google. Cause I use Google workspace and I just use that to send out all my emails and then for a lot of my custom codes that I use a WP code box to add all my functions in JavaScript. So I don’t have to keep on going back.

To the function dot PHP file, I just keep all my code there. And what’s really nice about WP code box is when you create those custom codes you can do CSS in there, JavaScript, PHP files you can add it to the cloud and it saves it under your key, your account name. So when you’re working on another user’s account, you can actually download that and bring that in.

Use that same code on another website. So if I have tons of new Lifter code, I can just put it in the cloud and I can just continue using that to, to make all those, the functional changes. So it’s really nice.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Fun side story. Lifter LMS is actually not our company name. It’s our product name.

Our company name is code box. We have no we’d have no affiliation with WP code box, but it’s fun to hear that name. Awesome. Can you recommend like a web hosting company? Like you said, if you’re going to do an app, you need to have sufficient server resources. Are there, is there one in particular or a handful that you’ve had great success with?

Chris Lassiter: Oh yeah, absolutely. Right now for all my clients we use web nestify. com that’s web N. E. S. T. I. F. Y. dot com. They host all their servers on the New York side. That company, it has been fantastic. The pricing has been amazing. And the owner, his name is Simon. He is very well known within the WordPress community.

And him and his team have just been fantastic. And I would say one of the main reasons why we go with them is not only is the customer service just fantastic. The pricing is great, but it’s the security. The security is just great and they customize all their servers, they’re all cloud based too.

So that way that makes it really great. So you don’t have to worry about physical dedicated servers. They work within the WordPress community. And all their servers are just configured, when you set up with them to be able to run smoothly. And I have had absolutely no issues with them.

I have companies who are multimillion dollar companies that use them and I have companies who, make a couple hundred dollars a month. I use that. What, whatever you need, they’ve been able to help me out. You can also run buddy boss and not have an app.

Don’t require, all those resources. And I would say if you use shared a SiteGround, I love SiteGround. I’m not an affiliate. But I’ve been in this business for 15 years and I’ve used so many different hosting. And honestly, I think SiteGround is one of the best. Shared hosting companies out there their customer support is 24 seven literally.

You just get on chat and they answer instantly and they will help you out. And yeah, so I’d say if shared hosting works for you LifterLMS has worked fantastic with them also.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And I’m on nestify. io and the pricing is from 20 a month to 80 a month for, Solid resources. So that’s that does, I see why you say the price is right.

In my view, just general back of the napkin for a website hosting, that’s got sufficient to carry e commerce and LMS and community and all this stuff. You’re looking, it’s usually like 30 to 40 is like for the solid, super solid plan is a good mark. But like you said, if you want to keep costs down and come in on a shared host, maybe you’re waiting to get your initial customers and just want to keep costs down, you can still pull it off if you’re not doing an app at the same time.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, absolutely. I would say once you get the app, that’s when you want to go and get a dedicated one. Bye. But yeah, if you’re just doing, a couple hundred members on your site and you’re using BuddyBoss and Lifter, shared hosting will work perfectly fine for you.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And I’m on your website, fast web creations. You have your phone number and big numbers in the top right corner, which I admire, make it easy for people to contact you. Tell us a little more about what you offer at fast web creations. What’s like a perfect client for

Chris Lassiter: you? A perfect client.

I would say a perfect client is somebody who knows what they want. They have the resources to do it, but they just need the guidance to get there. And that’s what fast work creations is there for. We’re there. To just quickly get you to what you want. That’s web creations. Exactly. We help out with WordPress.

We also can help out with a little bit of video photo editing. Also we have connections in AI when it comes to voices. So for example honoring voices. If you’ve ever heard of that one right there on yourvoices. com that website right there, we can take a loved one’s voices when you passed away or those who have lost a voice, do you have a recording of their voice?

Or if you have a military member who is on deployment and they can record their voice for us, we can use AI and recreate those voices. And, for example, have a military member read a book. To their child and, every week they can change the book and have the book reread if the service member is not available.

There’s a lot of things that we offer out there in the industry.

Chris Badgett: How did you get all these skills, Chris? You’ve got AI website building, coding, designing video work. How did all this assemble

Chris Lassiter: for you? I would say a patient wife and a loving family. Do have a full time job and everything that I’ve talked about, I do in the evenings.

And um, just being able to have the flexibility with your family to be able to dedicate certain time during the day to be able to do all this and, just years of experience, the biggest thing. Is being able to

take that mental block that someone has and go, I don’t want to do this. I’m afraid. Oh if I do this, I’ll break it. Just break it. So I got to do, I work for clients all the time to where I have staging websites which is basically a copy of the website on a sub domain. And I break their website sometimes on purpose, sometimes on accident.

And to just be able to figure out On how to make it better. The other day I was working on a client’s website on the staging side because we were trying to figure out some code and this is a funny story. I haven’t actually shared this story and I broke it so bad that when I went to go log back in, it changed my role from an admin to a student.

When I went to PHP, my admin it, it deleted. It just broke everything like, because I was playing with SQL commands and I was trying to learn how to do some things. And, even though I’ve done it so many times, You have to break it to fix it. So I had to re upload the website.

I had to make a fresh copy and then re upload it again, which was fine. It only took a couple of minutes, but sometimes you just got to break it to make it work. That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And that’s why staging sites are important. I re that’s one of the things I recommend every Lifter LMS user have to try new ideas or test updates or do some special project.

Chris Lassiter: Speaking of sorry to interrupt, but speaking of staging websites for lifter, learn AI now. ai, we have it set up right now to where users can go in there and register for free. And they can create courses for free just to test out left or LMS. I don’t have an affiliate with you guys, but there’s, I believe in your company so much in the software that I, and I love teaching people.

So I, I’ve opened it up for free. People can use it. I’ve created a custom code. So when you’re in there and you’re creating your courses, everyone who signs up. Is automatically signed up as an instructor and the code that I’ve created to make it just a unique experience is right now. The way lift our list is if you are an instructor, if you’re on the back end, you can see.

Other courses that have been created, but you can’t edit them because you didn’t make them. What I was able to do on learn AI is hide all that. So basically WordPress will say, Hey, if you’re not the author of this post, because everything’s a post then you can’t see it. When you’re back there and you’re creating courses on the custom dashboard that I made on the front end.

So you don’t have to go to the back end. You don’t see anyone else’s courses. So you have that private this right there. So you can create courses upload media. You only see your own media just to test it out. And, if that’s something that you’re interested in. And then you can reach out to us and then we’ll get you hooked up with Lifter, get you a plan and get you going.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us if somebody is like more earlier in the journey and they’re trying to decide between WordPress, BuddyBoss and Lifter LMS versus something like Facebook group for their project what got you so hooked on? WordPress is the way to go.

Chris Lassiter: I said, the reason why I like to go WordPress is because the community is so huge and the support you can go really anywhere on Facebook or on Google and ask the question.

And it’s basically already been asked and you can just get so much help and it’s customizable. That’s the one thing I love about WordPress is it’s all based off PHP and you can just. Customize it the way that you want. And that’s one thing, to even go back to Lyft or LMS it’s open source and so you guys give so much training material and documentation of, Everything.

And so it’s so easy to go onto your website or hit you guys on your support email and say, Hey, I can’t find this. Oh, Hey, Chris, did you search here? It’s right here. Shout out to, to, to Alex for that one. I love it when he goes, what did you Google it here? It shows up on the site. Oh darn it. I should have Googled it.

You’re right, Alex. Thanks. The support team is fantastic for you guys. That, that’s what I really love about it. It’s just, you get to connect with great people. Support’s amazing. Everything’s customizable. And then, I’m not an expert at everything. AI is fantastic. I would say over my 15 years of using WordPress and just doing web development I used to own my web hosting company many years ago that was pretty successful.

And, I wish I had AI back then because I could have just made it more successful. AI is just a powerful tool. It’s not going anywhere. So don’t be afraid to use it. Ask the questions. Is it right all the time? No. But once you’ve done this long enough and you know the people to ask or what to look for, it is a great tool to help you either get to a solution or ask the right question.

To the right people. So you can get the help you need.

Chris Badgett: And you built a custom GPT recently, right? Trained on the Lifter LMS developer docs or API. Can you explain what that is and what you’re the story behind that?

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So for. Lifter LMS API that basically allows you to connect like two systems, like one system to lift LMS.

So you can make a, so you can basically make a custom like dashboard and say, Hey, create a course. And while that’ll connect to Lifter LMS API, it’ll create the course, bring it back to the website and you can just, make a custom panel for somebody. So what I did was, is I took a chat GPT.

And I created a GPT bot, and I was able to go into your developer side and download your API knowledge base and basically upload that into the GPT, ask a few questions, make sure that it was spitting out the right answers and then saved it. And basically I’ve been able to use it and ask questions.

That I would normally, go to your guys’s ticket support systems to ask. But now the bot answers the questions for me. Does it make me an expert in API? Absolutely not. I’m a teacher. I’m a learner, but I’m not, I am not a coder and Chris, I’ve heard you say that so many times.

I put people who are smart around me that can do that for me. Just like you do, you have a great team who does that. And, but this tool. Basically just makes it so much quicker to be able to ask questions and be able to get where you need to go. So yeah, it’s been fantastic. That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: It’s been a great conversation, Chris. Again, I’m really impressed with what you’ve done in short time. How long, when did you first get to lifter? Was it less than a year ago?

Chris Lassiter: It was actually back in December of 22. Okay.

Chris Badgett: So you’ve been in it for a couple of years here and Yeah, I’m impressed with what you’ve done and the community LMS niche is a really good one.

There’s a lot of interest there and figuring out the bridge with the mobile app. That’s awesome. Chris’s phone number is on his website. So fast web creations. com. He’s in the Lifter LMS experts program, which we get asked constantly. Hey, do you know anybody that I could hire to help with my project?

So we created that list of vetted professionals. Chris is a popular person on that list. Go check him out at fast web creations. com and check out learn AI now dot AI. Is there anywhere else or people can connect with you or places you want them to check out, Chris?

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. I’ll go back to honoring voices.

com, so right there, we do amazing work there for, especially for military service members. I just had a person from Hawaii who, whose grandfather passed away and they wanted for their grandmother’s 85th birthday give her a love note from her husband who’s passed away recently.

So we were able to take a couple of YouTube videos of him on a podcast. And we’re able to recreate his voice and have him say things that he would normally say to her in private. She sent that to her and she just cried and thanked us so much. Honoring voices. com, it’s a great place to go to, to, preserve memories.

And yeah, check it out.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Chris, thanks for coming back on the show. Always a pleasure. We’ll have to do this again sometime.

Chris Lassiter: Absolutely. Thanks Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this episode LMScast, Erica Nash has taught the creation of courses, web design, and design in general for a long time.

Erica Nash, an web designer and course creator with a lot of experience. She is motivated by her passion of learning and her conviction in the potential of education to change people’s lives. whether she is teaching high school or operating her own company.

She shows you where to go and she shows where to go. Erica emphasizes the importance of creating actionable and engaging courses tailored to the learners’ needs, highlighting strategies like scaffolding to build confidence. Erica also discusses her brand-new Course Builder Live tool, which leverages AI to accelerate course production, making subject-matter experts more helpful and easily accessible. Her technique emphasizes on providing students with current, meaningful knowledge at the appropriate moment to help them learn and interact with one another.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Erica Nash. You can find her at Erica Nash. com. This is going to be a great conversation. Erica is a combination of a teacher, instructional designer, website building, professional designer, and she’s a course creator and coach, but first welcome to the show, Erica.

Erica Nash: Thank you for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I consider you really lucky in the sense that you possess, all what I call all the hats to, you know, be successful as what I call an education entrepreneur. Um, and you really have developed in all those areas. Can you tell us kind of your story of. You know, learning how to teach, learning how to build websites and do graphic design and then becoming a course creator and coach yourself.

I know that’s a big story, probably, but let’s, let’s get into it. How

Erica Nash: did we can dive in for sure? Um, I guess at the root of everything, like if I was going to sum it up in one sentence, it would just be that I love to learn and I believe that education is really, really powerful and it changes people’s lives, and we just live in a time where we have access to all of this information, and so I’m like, why would I not learn how to do this?

Like if I’m interested in this over here and that over there and that over there, why would I not learn how to do those things? And so that’s probably the, like, I don’t know, seed of the entire story. Um, but Yeah, my, my, um, my 1st career, I guess you could say was as a teacher. I taught high school. Well, I taught I’ve taught K through 12, except for 7th grade.

Uh, I taught for 10 years and it was a blast. I loved it so much. Um, the majority of my experience was with high school students. And so I got to see how they were. I taught culinary arts. And so my goal was always to teach them, uh, life skills. So it was like, when you leave this classroom, are you going to be able to cook for yourself?

Are you going to be able to start a business cooking for others? Are you going to be able to work in a restaurant? You know, your life requires that at any point. Um, and so it was really awesome being able to see how close they were to leaving home and using the skills that I was teaching them and truly putting them into practice, whether it was working at a restaurant as a high school student, or, um, you know, going on and, and using those skills after they left, whether it was for, you know, survival and that they were making themselves food or they were earning money doing that.

And so. That was kind of the beginning of, um, my desire to like, okay, how, how can education continue to affect people long after they leave the classroom and not just in a classroom setting? Like, you know, we can learn in any setting and it doesn’t have It doesn’t make it more, uh, powerful or better if it’s in a classroom, like we can learn from YouTube.

We can learn from TikTok. We can learn from anybody who creates a course or educational content and, and you put it, puts it out into the world. And, uh, and so that that was sort of that piece, and I have always been, uh, creative. I love, I’ve loved drawing since for as long as I can remember. And, uh, I started designing, um, When I was in high school, and so I have been designing for a really long time, and, uh, it wasn’t until I, I don’t know, probably my mid 20s that I was that I thought to myself, oh, this could really be something.

Like I could really use this to create income to help other people. Um, because before then I really didn’t see it as it was just a hobby. It was just something for me and it was fun. Um, there’s been a long journey of that. We, we don’t necessarily have to get into it, but like, that’s really kind of where, where that started.

And then I was creating businesses, um, like for myself. So I was creating my. Branding my website and stuff like that. And then people were seeing what I was doing and were like, Hey, like, you know, how did you do that? Or can you do that for me, Or can you help me with that? or like, you know, sort of those sorts of questions.

And, uh, there’s been a lot of ups and downs, you know, as a teacher, it can be kind of challenging to see life outside the classroom. And so it was, it, there were points in there where it was like. I don’t know if this is actually possible for me to create a life for myself outside of teaching and, and really fully living a creative life that creates a sustainable income.

That was really challenging. But fast forward to 2021 life sort of at its own plan and I had to leave the classroom, not really by choice. It was my 10th year was having some health issues. It’s the height of cobit. Right? Things were just wild. I was sort of forced to leave by my because of my health.

I was like, okay, like, we’re just going to go all in on, you know, this, this, um, graphic design, web design stuff. Found some amazing people, a community that, um, you know, really supported me along the way and my development and, uh, that transition was really difficult because sort of had a little bit of an identity crisis because I left the classroom.

And now it was like this creative business owner that I was never really sure I was going to get to be. I, in theory, it always sounded great, but now that it was reality, it was like, I have no idea what I’m doing. And, uh, so, so in the sort of process of figuring out, you know, now where I fit in the world now, what do I call myself?

Like those sorts of questions. I figured out that my teaching experience. Didn’t have to just sort of end and go by the wayside. And so I, um, continued to do the design and, and, you know, the graphic design, the web design and all of that stuff. But I also found a space where I was like, able to pull in my teaching experience and in creating my own courses and things like that.

And saw how valuable that was to, I mean, I had been purchasing, this was in 2021, I had been purchasing online courses to learn different things since like 2013. And so it was like a light bulb moment because I hadn’t really made that connection before. Like, of course I could help with that too. And so, uh, at the end of 2021, uh, that’s when I sort of made that like.

Sort of half pivot into into that area and, um, a coach that I had, uh, Shannon matter, and she became a client and we worked on her curriculum and then it turned into, um. A client success coach position and, uh, and now I also help coaches with client success in their programs as well. And so it has been quite a ride and it is, and you’re right.

It is a lot of hats, but it’s been so incredible to be able to enter business and engage in business as my whole self.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s awesome. What a cool story. And I know what that feels like. Uh, you know, it’s the imposter syndrome. I don’t know what I’m doing. You’re building the airplane on the way down.

And I think it’s really cool. You found community and reshaped your identity. These are all like really hard things.

Erica Nash: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Um, now I have a bunch of questions based on that story. Okay. So To help people who are, uh, you know, outlining a course and they have no teaching background, what are some fundamental concepts of instructional design?

If you, if you could just pass along, you know, some key things for Like, okay, I’m an expert in gardening or cooking, but I’m not a teacher. How do I create my course outline? I know on your website, I see the register for course builder live. So feel free to mention what that’s all about. But I see a lot of experts, subject matter experts challenged with actually.

Teaching and kind of getting through that roadblock. What are some tools and ideas to help with that?

Erica Nash: Oh, my gosh, this is such a good question. And I could talk about this forever. Um, the 1st thing I would say is that the major problem that I see when it comes to figuring out how to put a course, whether it’s a course outline or or, um.

Like, creating all of the content for the course is that there’s too much information and it typically happens for 1 of 2 reasons, either just out of, like, a sense of generosity. Like, they truly just want to, like, give their audience the best and the most information. Um, and then on the other side, where it’s just as an expert, sometimes we, we see all of the connections with all of the pieces.

We deem them important, but they might not be important to the audience and the specific goal that they’re coming to you for. So you have to figure out which pieces are not necessarily relevant immediately and and get rid of those. It can be so difficult. Like that. That is, I think, truly the most challenging part of putting a course together.

Is this idea of not being married to all of the ideas that you have about this specific thing and how it should be taught and really, and like, this would be another, like, sort of step 2 is really getting to know your ideal client and talking to them and asking them. All kinds of questions and really getting to the root of.

What it is they’re coming to you for and like, okay, how can we streamline this in the most efficient way possible? So that it is the least amount of information they need to achieve whatever it is that they are, you know, joining your course for and so really kind of looking at. their end goal and working backwards and only including, you know, what is necessary.

So those would be, those would be the top two things. Um, Course Builder Live is, this is, so this is, today is, what is today? June 11th. And so this is happening on June 13th, so Thursday. Um, and I, so I love, Being really efficient and, uh, minimizing the time it takes to do things. I am just very conscious of my own time and, you know, my clients, they’re, they’re busy, ambitious people.

And so it’s also important for them to be able to sort of collapse the time it takes for them to do things. So Course Builder Live is, uh, a live demonstration Of course, outlining process I built, uh, earlier in the winter, I built a, uh, custom that is a, it’s essentially my instructional design brain inside.

Um, the GPT and it, it, it, I have fed it with all kinds of research based educational practices, my specific course building process and the things that I ask and look for and, and the way that we put it together. And, uh, I have successfully tested it. It has been, I could get really nerdy about it, but it’s been really fun.

And it’s, it’s such a cool. It’s such a cool way to take the course planning process. I’ve taken what could take weeks, what has taken weeks in the past, this sort of back and forth with clients and figuring out this outline and, and sort of what’s best. And I’ve gotten it down to under an hour, a lot of times half an hour, but under an hour.

So it’s been really cool. So that’s what that is. That is a live demonstration of that. And, uh, and, you know, that that’s, and I’m going to preface this also by saying that chat GPT using chat GPT to outline a course is not always going to be super helpful because. A lot of times it’s going to be like that expert and give you like the super, super bloated, not really targeted outline of information.

Some of it may or may not be relevant. And so, so the difference between, you know, the 2 is that, like, this is specifically designed to, like, minimize. The information and get really targeted and ask really specific questions. Um, and so we can talk more about AI if, if you’re interested in, in kind of talking about that regarding course creation.

But, um, as far as tools, it can be a great tool. If you know what information to feed it and what questions to ask it.

Chris Badgett: Could you provide an example there? Like, let’s say I was an investor and I wanted to teach people how to invest for retirement. If I just go to chat GBT and I’m say, write me a course outline for a course about investing for retirement.

What’s an example of your custom GPT and how it would, you know, not just take out where you wouldn’t just go for that five second response and be like, cool. I got the outline.

Erica Nash: Yeah. So. You know, with the sort of five second response, it’s going to give you, it’s going to give you so much information and it’s going to be really general information.

So it is going to be for, um, it, it, it may be for high level investors that maybe have multimillion dollar, you know, like budgets, it might be for, you know, the, the newbie investor that is just learning what. You know, terms are and things like that. And so it’s going to give you like a huge span of, uh, of information and it’s going to be maybe not as, uh, as, um, I don’t know what other word to use in education, right?

We use the term scaffold it. And so. It might not be as scaffolded as it needs to be and like building on each other. Um, and so with mine, um, for example, the part of the key is the information that you feed it at the beginning. And so the input, um, it’s going to ask some questions about your audience.

It’s going to ask some questions about the goal of the course. We’re going to get, um, some ideas on like, okay, what lessons do you want to include in here? And so we’ll kind of sort of look at that. We’ll look at, um, you know, is there a specific structure that this course needs to take, um, and, and, you know, some other general information.

And so we’ll feed it that information up front and then instead of giving us sort of this, like, bloated, really, really broad information, it is going to, um, Keep it really succinct. So it’s going to give us information that’s specifically targeted to whatever audience we have put in. Oh, and it also, um, is going to ask questions about their, uh, like their level of learning.

So in this specific topic. Are they a beginner, Are they intermediate? Are they advanced? You know, where are they in this? And it’s going to take that into account. Um, and then it’s also going to kind of look at the lessons that we have included in. Okay. Like we, we definitely want to include this and this and this.

It’s going to fill in any gaps that there might be with those lessons. And then it is going to give us within each of those. It is going to make suggestions for, uh, things that might be necessary for students to have access to, uh, in order to implement whatever it is that, you know, they are, uh, trying to, trying to achieve.

Like, for instance, I believe that all educational content should be actionable rather than, like, theoretical. It is always going to, uh, Create lessons that are actionable lessons. So, like, what is the student going to do in this lesson? Like, what are they working towards? And it will help, you know, sort of set that up.

And then from that, what materials, tools, resources are they going to need in order to do that? So it’ll give you kind of a list. Of things to like, maybe create it is going to generate some ideas on. Okay. Here are some possible student obstacles that may come up when they’re trying to do this. And then here’s how you might be able to mitigate that.

So that if we know ahead of time that that’s coming up, we can maybe put in some things in place to avoid it completely. Or if not. We at least know like, okay, here’s like plan B if you know, that does come about. Um, and it’s really just going to look at the course as a whole and sort of place these things in a logical learning order and sort of where it’s scaffolded and they can, uh, they can build on each other.

Chris Badgett: I love that. It’s too bad. This isn’t the Joe Rogan podcast. Cause I feel like we could go for three hours. Um, one more question on the instructional design point. You mentioned scaffolding and structures. Can you give us some examples of like some different thematic structures that could be used? And I think those frameworks kind of help people who have the writer’s block going on how to think about structure.

Erica Nash: Yeah. So one example that I really love to use, um, is in terms of like fear. And so whenever you’re asking your students to do something, um, we kind of, you can kind of look at. Fear on, on a, uh, sort of a spectrum. And I guess it’s not necessarily just fear, but it’s like, what would be the best word? So let’s say that you were asking your students to, uh, let’s say the goal of your course is for students to grow a business.

Um, there are a lot of scary things involved in growing a business. You have to like really get outside of yourself. And so if one of the things that, uh, you know, you have your students do in order to like grow your business, their, their business is to do a live TV interview. You’re not going to ask them to do that the 1st module, because what’s going to happen is they are going to get so scared.

They’re just going to like, peace out. I’m done. Like, we’re not and they’re going to totally disengage because that’s too that’s too scary. That is not something that you can safely ask them to do at that stage of business, because they more than likely, and it obviously it depends on like who this audience is for, but if they’re like new business owners, they have not yet developed their capacity for risk for that yet.

So a way to scaffold that and, and to lead up to that, because you don’t want to necessarily, like, if that is part of the process and framework, you don’t want to. Just remove it completely. You want to build up to it and make it the logical next step. So what you would do first is you would do something like, okay, say in module one, uh, the goal is going to be to set up a, uh, one on one interview with a peer inside of the program.

And you just talk to each other. And then in module two, it’s going to be, um, you know, you are going to pitch yourself. Or a, uh, like a guest blog, uh, article or whatever that you, that you write. And so we’re, we’re increasing the capacity for risk just a little, they’re not showing up on camera, but they are having to talk to someone new and, and pitch their pitch, their whatever topic it is.

Uh, and then, like, let’s say in the next module, it is, uh, you know, they’re, they’re then pitching themselves for a podcast interview, but maybe it’s not 1 that’s on video. Maybe it’s just audio or maybe it’s not live, you know, that then that would be the next step. Sort of a live podcast interview, and then the next step would be very natural, right?

A logical next step could be a live TV interview. So that is a really, really basic sort of breakdown of scaffolding and what that looks like. And so really you just have to think about, you know, uh, engagement as this spectrum and sort of a healthy dose of not fear, but If they’re too afraid, they’re going to disengage.

And once students disengage, it’s so hard to bring them back. Um, but if they’re not motivated to do it, then obviously it’s not going to get done. So there has to be, it has to be a happy middle. Um, and part of the, the way that we reach that happy middle is that we ask them to do things that are outside of their comfort zone, but not so far that it pushes them all the way over into fear and paralysis.

Essentially,

Chris Badgett: I love that. So we’re not just delivering content. We’re delivering confidence and building on it. Exactly.

Erica Nash: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: One more structure question before we move on. And I know this is a, it depends answer question, but, um, you know, what part of the experts curse is like you said, building a giant library of Alexandria with everything, you know, in there, what’s like a good length for a course number of lessons or how do we, how do we know when we’re hitting the wall?

Like, another way to think about it is. Maybe I should create a membership with multiple courses versus this giant 100 lesson course or whatever. Like how do you think about length and depth of an effective course? Yeah.

Erica Nash: No, that is such a great question. And like you said, there is no one answer, maybe a, uh, um, not a better way to look at it, but another way to look at it.

It’s lesson link. So Sometimes I will get into, you know, be like auditing a course and I will be looking at the lessons and they might range anywhere from 20 minutes to 90 minutes. That can be really challenging for, uh, for people who have busy lives. We, we are all, you know, whether it’s. That we’re also, you know, running businesses or maybe multiple businesses or businesses and jobs or businesses and jobs and kids that are doing all of the things, you know, so, so keeping in mind that more than likely your audience is ambitious.

It has a lot of things going on. So keeping in mind that, you know, their time is limited. In general, the sort of best length, and this is research based, I don’t have the information with me, but, uh, the, the sort of average, like, top length of time you want your lessons to be is about nine minutes. Um, and that really just comes down to, you know, like, how long attention span and like, what are we asking students to do?

And, and are we able to, well, this, this goes back to this sort of library of Alexandria thing. Like, is the, if my, if my lesson is 90 minutes long, does it truly need to be 90 minutes long, is the first question. And then the second question is, In that 90 minutes does every single bit of that of relevancy towards whatever objective it is that we’re trying to achieve with a specific lesson.

If the answer is no, then some of that needs to be removed. More than likely, and this is, this is not necessarily true across the board. So, you know, obviously there are lots of factors here, but more than likely, if you’re looking at your video analytics for a 30, 60, 90 minute lesson, engagement is probably dropping off pretty quickly, you know, it probably is a pretty steep downward trend.

And so in terms of, you know, how do you know what your length is? It really comes down to knowing your audience and knowing what data you have available to you. And so kind of looking at, okay, let me go in, let me look at my video analytics. Let me see what the numbers are kind of doing a little bit of a deep dive.

Um, you know, auditing, auditing your own program, auditing your content, auditing your, uh, Uh, your videos, talking to, uh, talking to your members, um, and really kind of asking them the hard questions that might kind of hurt a little bit whenever you get the feedback and being okay with whatever it is that they tell you and being willing to take that information and, uh, and implement it in a way that is going to serve you, but also them, you know, and so.

I can’t say that there is a recommended sort of number of lessons or even length of time because it really does come down to the material itself and, uh, and your audience and what it is that they’re trying to learn if you have a really, really engaged audience and they are huge fans of, like, I want to sit down with this person.

For 90 minutes and I want to learn from them, then that is cool. And if that works like more power to you, it’s just important to know who your audience is and what works for them and what they want out of it. I will say that 1 trend that I am seeing, and I think is probably here to stay is many courses, like, really targeted pretty short.

Like, we’re doing 1 thing. You’re going to come in. You’re going to learn. And it’s probably going to be, you know. Under an hour, under two hours, like get this done really fast and you’ll be on your way, um, creating results. And so that is something that, like, I think is worthwhile to consider, like, you know, what pieces of this can I take and create.

That is not going to be a ton of work for me, but it’s also not going to be a ton of work for my students, but it’s still going to get them the results that they’re looking for.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I saw a great mini course like a year ago where somebody, the whole purpose of the course was to set up your home video, audio, like content studio thing.

And it was very, it was a very specific thing. And I saw how popular the course was. like, yeah, clear problem, clear solution quickly. Okay. Buy exactly these things, set them up in this way. And, and yeah, um, one, you mentioned goal orientation or, uh, get your students taking action, which I’m a big fan of, you know, there’s templates to fill out like spreadsheets and tools you can make.

There’s like assignments, like before the next lesson, go do X, Y, and Z. How do you get your, a course to be more action oriented and outcome driven?

Erica Nash: Oh, that’s a good question. So, um, you know, I think there’s a couple of different ways to go about this. So if I, if we’re like, setting up a brand new course, so, like, let’s kind of look at it on that side.

If we’re setting up a brand new course. We’re going to start with the end goal in mind. So, looking at do what

Chris Badgett: the learning objective? Yeah. Yeah. So, like, what

Erica Nash: is what is the big what is the big goal? Like, by the end of this course, they are going to be able to do. X, Y, Z. And then taking that and working backwards into like, okay, why can’t they do that right now and giving whatever answer that is and then doing that with that one.

Okay. Why can’t they do that right now? And then just working all the way backwards to where they are, and then that’s essentially the goal of each of each module of each lesson. So, you know, if they’re unable, like setting up their, their home video or whatever. Uh, set up, you know, why can’t they do that right now?

Well, they don’t have the equipment. They don’t know what equipment. Why don’t they have the equipment? They don’t know what equipment to buy. Why don’t they know what equipment to buy? Well, there are a ton of options. And so, you know, just like working backwards from there and like, getting really, really, like, each 1 just gets a little more targeted and a little more targeted.

And so then that’s how it starts to be scaffolded naturally. Because you’re building backwards. On the flip side, if it’s a, if it’s a, uh, course that is already like built and it’s already students are already taking it and all of that stuff, you know, kind of, you can, you can work backwards that way, but that’s going to be a lot more disruption and interruption to the current students.

And so, in that case, it would almost be kind of working, like, doing an audit looking backwards. Right? And like, you know, where, where are the. Where are the gaps? But then almost working forward, like, okay, in this first module, this first lesson, you know, what are we asking them to do? If the only thing we’re asking them to do is to listen, is there some, like, does that really need to be there?

And if the answer is yes, then how does it connect to, like, when is the next time we’re asking them to do something? How does that connect to that information? Like, can, can that be combined, you know, in some way? And so really orienting everything to the student task. What are they doing with this lesson?

Because whenever we are just asking them to listen and learn, it’s just not as easy. Um, and I think that’s the most engaging as when it’s like, okay, you’re going to, you’re going to listen and do something along, you know, with me or take notes so that once you finish this, you can go do this thing and doing this thing is going to be necessary to move on to You know, the next piece, um, and 1 of the reasons why that’s so important is because 1, it’s engaging, but 2, it just allows them to to win faster.

It allows them to reach their goals faster. And like, that’s the whole reason we’re making courses. That’s that’s what we want people to to. Get results. We want people to, you know, see their like dreams realized. And so by getting them to take action, that’s great for them. But it’s also great for us too, because that’s where our testimonials come from.

That’s where our results come from. And so we get to share, you know, those wins then and, uh, and create a bigger impact. By marketing, you know that like our course is actually working and here’s the proof

Chris Badgett: very cool Uh, let’s talk about coaching a little bit I call it Like in the instructional design aspect a support mechanism design so You know, you’ve got your content and you’ve got your action steps, but not everybody is one size fits all.

I’ve really come to realize that, you know, when it comes to something like pricing, masterclass, you can learn comedy from Steve Martin for 10 a month, but he’s not going to help you with your jokes or he’s not accessible. Yeah. And you can do like. Private coaching group, coaching calls, you can do email support, text messaging support.

You can create a community. There’s a lot of things you can do to create a support mechanism as part of your offer, but particularly with your background and teaching and helping people when they get stuck or designing your own support mechanisms. What do you find really works there? Cause I think it’s a under focused area when designing this project.

Well, what, what happens when people get stuck or have questions? Like, what do you do? Yeah.

Erica Nash: Yeah. And it’s such an important question to ask because well, and I think since 2020 people are really, have really been seeking support. Like, I don’t think. Not, and again, not to say, like, this is not like a blanket statement, but I think the majority of the time, uh, people don’t want just a court, like, a do it yourself, self paced, like, with no community, no support, no, nothing.

Um, and maybe sometimes feel cheated because they’re like, I can go find that on YouTube or, you know, whatever, like, even though that’s not necessarily. It’s not going to be the same way. Like, you know, there’s a lot of, of nuances there, but I think that’s the way that they feel a lot of times. And so I think it is so important to be asking the question about support and, and how to offer support.

I’m a huge fan of creating and offering whatever type of support though is appropriate for your current life situation. Uh, I don’t think anybody should feel pressured to. Um, you know, every day, all day long, I don’t think anybody should feel pressured to have, you know, any kind of like, you know, 1 on 1 calls if they don’t necessarily have the time or space for that.

I don’t, you know, there’s nothing that I, I feel like should be in a program other than there should be some avenues for support. But what that looks like gets to be up to the course creator. Um, again, I think it’s really, really important to talk to your people and ask them what it is that would be really helpful for them.

But only after you’ve asked yourself, what do I have these for? And what do I really want to do? Like, not everybody is interested. In, uh, having a Facebook group, and that’s fine. That doesn’t necessarily have to be there. You know, are there other other avenues? Is it, is it that it’s the group itself and Is it that it’s on Facebook?

Is it, you know, like, what are the pieces that you’re like? Oh, I don’t really want to do that. And if there are another avenue that maybe fits, whatever it is that you’re looking for. So, really kind of looking at, you know, what is sustainable for me? What am I interested in engaging on? What’s easy. I’m a huge fan of doing what’s easy and like not making it harder than it needs to be.

Um, kind of thinking through, obviously thinking through like budget. Are, is this a paid tool? And do you need this fancy paid tool? Or are you just doing it? Cause that’s the like trendy tool at the moment. Um, there are lots of great tools out there. Paid and unpaid and so, you know, you get to, you get to do whatever it is that fits your, uh, your budget.

Um, and I mean, as far as different types of support, like you said, you know, there are all kinds of different types. Um, I would recommend choosing a few from, um, not necessarily tiers, but like 1, that’s like, you know, how can the community engage with each other? How can the community engage with each other and you and then how can the community engage with you and that last 1?

I don’t believe it has to be like, well, they can schedule 1 on 1 calls with me X amount of time. It doesn’t have to look like that. Like, but if they’re stuck and they need, like. Some a private check in or whatever, you know, can they email you or like, what does that look like? And being very, very clear about the boundaries and, you know, the expectations for that, like, you can email me, but if you email me, here’s what it needs to look like.

Here’s what it needs to sound like. Here’s when you can expect my response and, you know, so on and so forth. And so, um, I hate to say that it also depends on that, but it does

Chris Badgett: a solid advice. Um, let’s talk about the avatar, the ideal customer profile, your people. How did you, I see some people like, well, I have a lot of interests and they can’t, they avatar.

And then they’d need to, like, choose a problem to focus on or a goal. And maybe you’re into multiple things. Um, or I would ask you too, in your transition from teaching, how, what have you learned in, like, getting to know your people, but even before that, like, Taking what to focus on because it starts with the who right?

Like, who am I helping here?

Erica Nash: I am going to be super transparent and saying that that has been a wild ride. It

Chris Badgett: has

Erica Nash: been a journey. It’s probably if I, if I’m being super honest, it is probably just this year that I have felt somewhat settled. Like in who I’m talking to. So I think in the beginning, I mean, even though I had. I already had experience working with people sort of as a designer, as an artist, uh, I was viewing, excuse me, I was viewing this very differently.

And so it was almost like starting over. And I think just like anyone in the beginning, it was like, I was talking to whoever would listen. I mean, it was just like, I, like, I don’t necessarily know exactly who I’m talking to. But if you’re listening, I’m talking to you. And over time, you know, as I honestly, as I just started talking to people. I was figuring out the ones who I just sort of had an easy conversation with.

I think that I think that was probably the, the thing that I was like, oh, okay. Like these, these are my people. And then as I continued to, um, and, and, you know, this is for me as a business person. And I think it’s, I think it’s a similar thing. Um, as a course creator, you know, it’s the, it’s the people who you have a lot in common with.

It’s the people, maybe the person who you used to be, you know. It’s the people that you are able to really help on a different level. Um, but I, I think the key is. Having a lot of conversations and talking about what it is that you’re doing and what you want to do. And I think being curious is a gift. It’s a really important piece of being able to figure out for yourself sort of where. And I say this in quotations, but like where you fit in.

In your own little business world with the knowledge that you can fit in anywhere you want. And you can, you can be anything you want, and you can help anyone you want. And me, what it comes down to is not necessarily. An industry, but a type of person and that’s really where I once I figured that out. I became really, really settled into who I was helping.

And so the things that are important to me are also important to them. You know, I education is important. Oftentimes they put out a lot of educational content, whether or not their coaches. You know, things that are important to me are like, just the fact that we’re able to make an impact by having an online presence and like, they, they want to do some good in the world.

So that’s, you know, that is really important to me. It’s really figuring out these people who are very ambitious. That’s, that’s my ideal client avatar. They are ambitious entrepreneurs who want to change the world. And, you know, whether they have a course right now or not, they probably will down the road.

And so, you know, just really kind of being open to, I don’t know, letting it flow a little bit. I think, I don’t think in the beginning I would have guessed that this is where I would be. but looking back I’m like, oh no, like that, that makes so much sense. Cause it’s who I am as well.

Chris Badgett: I love that your vibe attracts your tribe.

And, if you, you know what you love, lifelong learning, being ambitious. Making the world a better place, being entrepreneurial, like those are the people you want to hang out with.

Erica Nash: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: Sir. Cause you understand then, um, shifting gears to design. I heard this framework once and it just stuck in my brain and never left it.

And this is more for like a software company like we have at Lifter LMS, but, um, there’s the three halves of being the hipster, the hacker and the hustler. So the, the hipster designs, the hacker codes and the hustler markets and sells and that kind of thing. Um, but the hipster piece, the designer, let’s say somebody doesn’t come from a design background.

I see a lot of people get hung up here. Around either,just overdoing design, like on a website for courses and coaching and stuff. Or, you know, kind of hitting a plateau of like, man, they should really professionalize this design. A lot of us, we all think we’re designers because, you know. We, we like certain designs and stuff, but it’s really an art.

Even my, my design is not my strength either. So, like, when I go into Barnes and Noble, sometimes I’m like. I’m going to find that book about design that can just help me be think like a designer better. I just don’t find the section in the store. And, uh, it’s just 1 of those things, but everybody should level up and design.

So how did that happen? You said you’ve been doing it, I think, since you were 13, what are some core concepts in the digital world to create a tight design and, and just level up in that department?

Erica Nash: Oh man, that is such a good question. I think, I think probably above all, well, Above all is simplicity. I think just keeping it simple is going to do wonders or whatever sort of design ideas that anyone has.

You know, a lot of times in trying to stand out, things get really complex and it allows them to stand out. But not necessarily in the way that they had hoped. And and so I think simplicity above all is just. So important and I say that as somebody who loves to design, like, really fun and funky stuff that sometimes gets complex.

But it’s like, we have to look at it in a way of like, okay, I can create this really fun, funky, complex design, but at the base, how can I, how can I make it so simple that it can continue to work in black and white, that it can continue to work, you know, as the most simplified piece of it. And, uh, and so I think that is, is probably like, if I had any advice, it would be that like asking yourself, like, how can I make this more simple?

And then the other piece is watching other designers work. I have, there is so much to be learned. And like I said, like we can learn anything anywhere. Right. And so one of my favorite places is to talk, to watch other designers Like their process videos, they’re super fast. I’m not having to watch like an hour long YouTube, like walk through of their process or anything.

Um, it’s usually something really fast and they do something and I’m like, and like, I’ve been using illustrator for, I don’t know how many years. I’m like, oh, my gosh, I didn’t even know you could do that. You know, like, and so just learning how to. You know, either either tighten your process or, uh, learn how to do something a new way or, um, just visualize differently through the eyes of other people is such a fantastic tool and resource for, um, just for learning design for getting better at design.

Um, it just, you know, constantly improving, which we all, we all have room to constantly improve.

Chris Badgett: Awesome on that on the hacker front. The technologist had, um, you said you’d been building websites for a while. I think how did you, uh, How did you get into that? And what do you recommend for, you know, leveling up in that department?

Erica Nash: I, how did I get into that? I, so, um, so I, my daughter is about to turn 16 and whenever she was three, she was diagnosed with autism. We, so obviously that was a really long time ago, totally different world in terms of like the discussions about autism and, uh, there’s the acceptance, uh, about, you know, people on the spectrum and all of that stuff.

So totally, totally different world. We lived in a really, really small community and the prior. I use this with air quotes with the prior knowledge that this community had, um, about autism was very limited. And so my husband and I were like, okay, like, what can we do to. Help educate our community so that not only are they a little bit more compassionate towards everyone else that they might come in contact with on the spectrum, but that they’ll understand, you know, our daughter, our family, and sort of like, how we’re going to, um, you know, just engage with life from here on out.

And so we, uh, started, um, we, so we started this fundraising campaign. I would design a t shirt and it was like every year in April, which is autism awareness month, I would design a campaign or I would design a t shirt. We would run a campaign. We would raise money, sell the shirts, we’d raise money. And then we would give the money to like, uh, I lived in New Mexico, so it wasn’t necessarily look, we lived in a really, really rural area, but in a sort of local statewide, like, um, uh, foundation.

So we did that over the period of, um. Like, 5 years, and in the middle of that, I had a friend reach out to me and he was like, hey, like, you’re doing some great stuff here. I think you could do even more. Uh, I thought about, like, building a website and I, at that point, I was like, no, like, I’m not I don’t know how to.

I don’t know how to code, you know. And, um, he was like, well, I don’t think, I don’t think you necessarily need to code. I put this like site together for you. Uh, on this was like, after Wix had first come out, he’s like, I put this site together for you on Wix. Um, like, do you want it? And I was like, sure. Like, okay.

And so I took it and just started sort of playing around with it and clicking buttons and trying different things. And, uh, that was the 1st, that was the 1st 1. I sort of took what he started and, like, finished it out. And then from there, it was like, oh, the, the door has opened. The possibilities are endless and we can build any site, any site that we want.

So. I know that it has been frowned upon in the past that the majority of my experience building is on Wix and, uh, and it has served me pretty well. It’s, you know, it served our, our, our goals. Well, um, and so that is that is kind of how that started. But again, I think in terms of, like, you know, figuring out, like, sort of leveling up.

Honestly, I think the biggest piece in leveling up in your web design is finding a community of like minded people who you can learn from. And so, you know, finding a community of people who either are learning the same builder that you are. That you want to level up in or find a good community of people who are leveling up in business, who maybe know a variety of builders, and, you know, if you’re interested in learning, you know, A different builder or, you know, additional, additional skills from there.

So, I think community is probably the most important piece

Chris Badgett: and what just real quick. What is, what have you liked about working in Shannon matters community?

Erica Nash: Oh, my gosh, that that community is just incredible. It’s seriously 1 of the best places on the Internet. And, um, I mean, as far as, like, the best thing, I mean, it’s the people, it’s the people it’s getting to help.

It’s getting to, see real time, I’m overcoming really hard stuff and reaching their goals in spite of. Life throwing all of the things at them that might keep them down. Um, so it, it’s just been, incredible, you know, to like, to work with all of them, learn from all of them, work with and learn from Shannon and, and just continue to be part of a community that truly, really cares about people.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Erica Nash. Go to Erica Nash dot com register for course builder live and thank you for coming on the show. Erica. I really appreciate it. Is there any other ways for people to connect with?

Erica Nash: Yeah, oh, my gosh. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And, always enjoy talking about this kind of stuff.

So I appreciate the opportunity. Um, I, so I am on Instagram, but I’m getting ready to like, wind that down. Um, but right now I have started, you can get on my email list. I’m there a lot. Um, when you can just like sign up on my website, but I am also on. And, I’m starting to share some things there and you can just search my name and it will come up.

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

Erica Nash: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, Erica. And thanks for, you know, just being a great example of what I call an education entrepreneur, unicorn spinning all the hats and, helping other people on the journey.

Erica Nash: Thank you so much.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Derek Ashauer emphasizes the need of maximizing WordPress LMS websites and Tracking conversions.

Derek Ashauer is from Conversion Bridge, a platform that integrates with various analytics tools and WordPress plugins to streamline the process of tracking and improving conversions. From his vantage point, a sale is any activity a user plans to do such as clicking on an icon, email subscription, purchase of goods.

Starting the process, he advises using a privacy-oriented data tool like Plausible or Fathom or a Google data tool depending on this. By tying to many WordPress components, his response, Conversion Bridge, streamlines the procedure. Derek discusses conversion funnels websites’ tracking of user behavior and identification of spots where people often lose interest.

Privacy issues make it somewhat difficult to keep an eye on certain people throughout many sessions. However, looking at the bigger picture, group trends can be incredibly helpful. He suggests trying out multiple iterations of a page using FunnelKit and AB testing to boost response rates. For smaller websites, a method that is done by hand might also work well when changes are made and the results are tracked over time. Focusing on and improving key points in a user’s journey can help website managers get more users to stay on the site and make more money.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Derek Ashore. He’s from conversionbridgewp. com. We’re going to nerd out today on analytics, conversion tracking. What is a conversion? Why does that matter for online course, websites, coaching businesses, even LMS is doing internal training for a company.

We’re going to go deep today, head on over to conversionbridgewp. com so you can see what we’re talking about today. But first welcome to the show, Derek. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it, Chris. I’m excited to nerd out with you a little bit on conversion tracking. It’s a big topic and I think the base level is people want to know where what caused a sale, whether they’re selling courses or memberships or whatever, but just at a kind of fundamental level.

How do you define conversions to a beginner? So they really grasp the concept.

Derek Ashauer: So conversion is just when someone does, takes an action that you want to keep track of. It could literally be anything from clicking a button or even just visiting a page. As simple as you know that signing up for your email newsletter.

Making a purchase, there’s submitting a form. Those are all pretty common things that we want to track on a website.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And what do you think is like the first place, if somebody wants to get set up for conversion tracking, like what are the fundamental pieces that they need to put together to make it work?

Do that. What do they need with a WordPress website?

Derek Ashauer: The WordPress, the first thing is getting an analytics platform. So the most typical one that people have heard of for over a decade now is Google analytics. But these days there’s a lot of other options that are privacy focused ones because of all the EU privacy laws.

There’s some great ones that are out there. Plausible, Fathom, Persh, UserMaven ConversionBridge itself integrates with 13 at the moment, different analytics platforms beyond just Google analytics.

Chris Badgett: And what like for the WordPress people out there, what plugins can ConversionBridge support? Bridge track conversions four.

I know there’s a long list, but let’s expand the scope of what’s possible here.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah, so of course there’s lifter, LMS is one of ’em, but at the moment of right now recording this, there’s 51 different plugin integrations. So there’s all the form plugins that you can think of WS form, gravity forms WP Forms all those, all the ones that you would expect.

E-commerce platforms, WooCommerce, easy digital downloads. There’s what else? There’s a bunch of newsletter ones like groundhog or CRMs and newsletter ones, groundhog, for example. Those track when they people sign up for your email newsletter forms are on there. Yeah, there’s just, there’s a whole bunch of them.

I’m trying to, I’m trying to go there right now to even remind myself there’s so many let’s see. We got some page builders. The big page builders are on there as well. Beaver builder. Let’s see, beaver builder bricks. Elementor so that you can makes it really easy. Simple toggle to set up conversion tracking on a button on there, even for modules or widgets, whatever one they call it, call the actions and things like that.

So it integrates with. All those things. Yeah, there’s just so many of them. There’s even some pop up integrations pop up that show up so that when you show a pop up, do they subscribe or do they click on the button within that pop up that could be another great one that you’d want to keep track of there’s even file downloads.

So there’s a couple of plugins that are built specifically to help make to organize file downloads so you can track one of those. Maybe you offer a white paper and you want to track whenever one, whenever someone downloads one of your free white papers on your website as a lead magnet or something along those lines.

So those are all a bunch of different, different types of plugins and things that you may want to be tracking conversions for.

Chris Badgett: Love that. And let’s zoom out even more and let’s actually use that white paper ebook download example. I think it makes sense that you would want to track like, Oh how many opt in conversions, email addresses, or am I capturing that from people that want the ebook?

But what if they land on a page to download? And then they don’t actually download it. What if I knew that conversion point? So you start chaining these things together. What are some of the most popular, ways to think about conversions and like situations that people would want to do without I want to track everything.

You don’t necessarily want to track everything. What are the important things?

Derek Ashauer: So what you started describing is called a funnel. So you get them to visit your homepage, your website, you then get them to go to another page that maybe talks about their email newsletter, get them to subscribe.

Then that gets them to a page where they download. Those are funnels. And so that’s a common thing is to track where do people do, how many people complete an entire funnel? Where do they exit that funnel? And so you’ve got to track when they take each one of those steps. And then you set up your funnels.

Some of the analytic platforms are better than the others, but you’d want to set up your funnel homepage, visit newsletter, subscribe visit the download page and then actually download the document in the end. And you can track, of the 100 percent of the people that visit my homepage, 50 percent of them landed, hit this one page that I want them to visit of those 50% 30 percent of them subscribed of those X amount did this.

And if you notice, there’s a huge, massive drop off at one point in that funnel, you can say, Oh, there’s something wrong with this page. What am I doing wrong? What could I improve it? Maybe, you got a whole bunch of people to that download page and nobody downloads it. There’s a technical issue.

Or maybe you just forgot to the, download button link just doesn’t exist or it’s hidden or it’s hard to find, or there’s some wording that doesn’t make it clear what they should do on that page so you can really determine how to improve your conversion rate on that page.

Chris Badgett: Let’s educate you out there watching or listening on there’s the perfect funnel, like where somebody goes through that flow, you mentioned of homepage opt in download, and then maybe they purchase a product, but oftentimes that doesn’t happen on one website visit.

Or maybe they don’t go through the thing in a certain order. And so how do you help people understand conversion tracking? Is it staying with them? Even if that whole process takes 30 days and then they. Maybe they did some other stuff on the website and it just didn’t perfectly go through the funnel.

How does that work or how should people think about that?

Derek Ashauer: Yeah that’s, a challenge in modern websites with privacy stuff. It becomes harder to do that to track an exact user or across this how do you tell someone maybe they subscribed while they were on their computer?

And then the next day they get the email and they’re using it on their phone. And unfortunately there’s not the, a great way to connect that same person. Because they’re on different devices and now that counts as a whole separate person. So a lot of the conversion stuff, you’re never going to get 100 percent accuracy of this exact person who’s that Jane Doe who sat down on this one device and then maybe use another device or that kind of stuff.

It’s not going to be perfect. But you go with generalizations in some ways, like 30%, roughly 30%. We never go 32. 339 percent of people did this. It, there’s no way to be perfect with it. So that’s why when we’re looking at our analytics, we just tell how many people hit this page. X amount of people left or this amount of people converted.

Now when they downloaded, how many are they, once they opted in, how many ended up clicking on that link and going to the download page? And we mark that as a conversion and things like that. And we just do it on overall numbers, of traffic and conversion bridge itself does have a conversion journey tool to it.

So what that means is that if it is the same person using the same browser because that’s how it’s tracked, it’s uses the other browser and some other stuff. And anonymizes it so that we don’t have any personally identifiable information, but then keeps track of that person so we can see what exact pages they did view throughout the entire journey.

But like I said, if they jumped to a mobile device in the middle of that journey, that does count as a whole separate user and view and stuff like that. But yeah, I lost track of the original question.

Chris Badgett: No, you got it there. It’s there’s converged, there’s these conversion points.

And then conversion bridge has calls it a journey, which is like a funnel. So like the individual elements and then that path is the funnel or the journey. So you look at metrics over time, what happens, you mentioned if they’re in the same browser, but let’s say it’s. They did each stage of the funnel a day apart, meaning the computer closed and got turned off and opened again.

Does it still know anonymously that user is the same person?

Derek Ashauer: It depends on the analytics platform that you use. Google analytics will be better. There’s some plausible and some other ones. There’s a handful that take privacy very seriously. And to their credit, they’re very serious about that.

And that it it doesn’t track a user, and across multiple pages. What it basically does is just tracks how many people in general came to a page. It doesn’t know that they went from one page to the next. And and that’s what. Most analytics is. So that’s why we’re playing this game of how do we determine what steps does a one specific user take a lot of the more privacy focused analytics and even Google analytics is having challenges with this to also obey all the privacy laws is what step by step, what did that person do on your website?

Conversion bridge itself does, like I said, adds a little bit. That in between it does add that. So it does have the conversion journey. So when someone does do a conversion, make a purchase, sign up for something, you can then see what was the first page they hit. What was the second, third, fourth, fifth, and all the steps that they took in between, but when you’re looking at just your analytics platform, that data and that exact journey, you’re never going to get that.

You usually get maybe an entry point where they started. And then where, and then that they actually did a conversion, but that’s about the most. And that’s also another area where conversion bridge itself helps, give you some extra data to learn. Oh, I’m noticing people are going from here to here.

All of the people that convert and buy something on my website or signed up, I noticed that a lot of them are going to my about page and then my services page. And then they buy or whatever that flow may be. And you can start to learn a little bit about what is important to your users and what, and to keep improving that content or making that content easier to get to in some ways.

Cause you know that’s the content that really gets people down that path to ultimately converting.

Chris Badgett: Love that. Let’s talk a little bit more about conversion rate optimization. Cause it’s really easy to get really busy in marketing, doing a lot of different things. But if you have this journey, like homepage or visit the site, downloads the lead magnet the opt in newsletter, whatever, and then buys like a cheap product, maybe it’s a trial or a little mini course or something like that.

And then they buy the big, product or the membership or the signature course or whatever. That’s four steps. And if you. Like just build your marketing and allocated your time around optimizing those. It makes a lot of sense, but what kind of things can people change or work on to test a theory on, Oh, maybe if I do X, I can increase my conversion rate at all those stages.

I think the. There’s like a one in marketing circles that has been around forever, which like, Oh, maybe you should change the button color or something like that. But what else can people do?

Derek Ashauer: Yeah. Yeah, that was a big thing of what I think, like orange or something like that, it was the best buy now color or something like that.

And

Chris Badgett: everybody had orange buttons. I still have orange buttons on my website, but yeah.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah. There’s. Yeah, you could literally change every last little pixel on your page. It could be down to copy to placement of that button. What does that button text stay? Does it say buy now or purchase now try now?

There, you could literally put any word on there and see what. You know what that does to your conversion rate. It’s a challenge because if you have a small website, you have to let that run for a while. You need a lot of data. And so what we’re talking about right now is what some people might have heard.

It’s called like AB testing ABC testing. You can run unlimited different. Tests on a page. And usually you only want to make one, maybe two changes to a page. You don’t want to, you could have two wholly separate designs two versions of that page, but then you don’t know what about that is what actually caused.

An increase or decrease in your conversions. So making small changes at a time, and it depends on your traffic. If you’re only getting 20 people a day to your site, you might have to six months to a year. To get enough data to even see if that’s enough. But it’s worth playing with those things to try it, give it yourself a little bit of time.

I think some people get impatient and think that after a a week or two, they’ll have enough data, to make a decision, but, but yeah, you can play with everything the headline at the top is that getting, is that telling people what they really need to know about your product or service in order to convert?

Where’s that button on the page? Is it right underneath the headline? Do I need to list the price next to the button or do I make a little more vague and say, buy now, and there’s no price included, all those are different kinds of things you can try.

Chris Badgett: So there are tools for A B testing, split testing.

I’d be curious if you know any that you might recommend for WordPress websites, but I’d also like to say that. You can do it the more rough way and just okay, I’m going to change this for a month. I’m not going to change a million other things. Wait another month and then make sure the traffic was more or less equal and get a, you don’t have to get into these fancy tools of AB testing, but is there, how does one get into the AB testing where it literally splits the traffic 50 50 with different paths?

Derek Ashauer: Yeah, that used to be done. There used to be a Google optimize. But unfortunately they shut that down. So that’s not really available. Yeah, there’s, I think it’s funnel kit might have an AB one.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Derek Ashauer: AB tool to it. Yeah, there, there really isn’t one. And, Yeah, that is something that is in the back of my mind and is in regards to conversion bridge itself, honestly, you honestly wasn’t planning on talking about that, but it is, it’s on a.

It’s on a list for conversion bridge is having an A B tool. So yeah, because it, when Google optimize disappeared that, a lot, everything was, there was so many tools that were built around using Google optimize and Google analytics as a way to do A B testing. And now that’s gone. So there really isn’t too much.

It is significantly harder these days to do A B testing.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about analytics platforms. A lot of people get frustrated, myself included, with Google Analytics. It’s hard to figure out. The interface changes a lot and getting the right report I want to try to see is a little difficult.

But it’s not always the case that you should abandon ship and go somewhere else. But what’s your advice to somebody who’s I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with Google Analytics. What should they do to either know they should stay or check out these other tools?

Derek Ashauer: So one great thing about conversion bridge is that it integrates with 13 analytic platforms right now, and you can enable all 13 of them at the exact same time.

If you wanted to, I do it while I’m testing. Honestly, it’s not that big of a deal. The analytics platforms themselves are very lightweight JavaScript that gets added to the page. I’m sure your theme probably adds. 100 times more javascript than these analytic platforms do. So it’s great.

You could test multiple different analytics platforms at once and while maintaining your Google analytics, you’re not losing any of your Google analytics data, but you could try say, fathom plausible, perch user, maven any of these other great tools. They also have many of them have free trials or they’re free while you’re under a certain amount of page visits.

So you could run it for a few weeks. See you and then see and test and see what you like about these other analytic platforms. I agree with you. It’s one reason why I created ConversionBridge is because When GA4 came out, I was like, what do I do? I don’t understand where did all these simple reports go?

When I was doing sites for clients, I could often set up Google analytics and say, here you go log in. And they’d be, Oh, this is great. And they could figure it out pretty simple. I never had to walk through Google analytics itself to explain what it was and what the data meant. And now with GA4.

Even I, as someone who’s been making websites for 20 years, I’m like, I don’t, what that was my first, I I spent a while and I still struggle to figure it out. I I doing conversion bridges forced me to take the time to do that, but something that requires a week long course to use, I think is, Like Google analytics to just look at basic traffic data is over engineered.

If you go to any of these alternative analytic platforms, it’s a single page. It’s incredibly easy to digest and understand. You could send it to any client or anyone I think could figure out what the data is and what it means within a few minutes. Yeah, I would recommend trying some of them out.

Pretty much all of them have a free trial at this point.

Chris Badgett: I know conversion bridge is impartial to like, Which one you choose.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But sometimes it’s helpful for people to know if you’re frustrated with Google analytics, maybe try brand X next, like maybe it’s like pretty popular and a lot of people like it.

Is that like fathom or.

Derek Ashauer: Oh I think, each one has its pros and cons. If you have a blogging site, fathoms a great one. And you just have some information new, you have a newsletter sign up when you, some of the other ones, like maybe user Maven or perch are better. They have, they’re improving a lot faster and have a lot more robust reporting tools and funnels that you can set up and things like that.

And those are great if you’re doing more advanced things like an e commerce website where you want to send in more complicated data. Plausible is another one that can accept that. And what I mean by complicated data is for example, say you’re selling widgets you have a 5 widget and a 500 widget and and you go there and you say, okay, this ad that I ran on Google ads, it gave me 10 sales of my 5 widget.

Or this ad led to two sales of my 500 widget. You want to know which one’s getting you more money, maybe not necessarily more sales. So in some platforms, it’s very simple. It’s you just get the number of sales because I can’t as conversion bridge, I can’t send the data about how much the sale was worth, but in other platforms I can send that data in.

So that is that’s a good important metric that you would want to keep track of. And if you go to the conversion bridge website. On the bottom, there’s a link to a comparison of all the different analytics platforms. And one of those is the, does it have advanced e commerce, tracking and abilities.

And so that’s if your site is doing that, then that is important. If you’re only doing like a blogging site and maybe you’re doing a newsletter subscribe, you could probably work with any of the analytics platforms. Cause all you care about is did someone subscribe? Did someone read a page? Did someone do that?

So on and so forth. And so those lower level Or more simplistic analytics platforms would be perfectly fine.

Chris Badgett: Let’s speak to the non developers out there who are busy doing a lot of things and setting up an analytics platform, it often is okay, here’s this code, install it, or give it to your developer.

And that creates a lot of friction. So how does a conversion bridge like talk about the setup and how people get started with it?

Derek Ashauer: So if you install a plugin, like you would with any WordPress plugin. And then there’s first thing you do is you select your analytics platform. All you have to do is toggle a little on switch for which analytics platform you’re using.

Then each platform gives you a unique ID. Each one calls it something different, but there’s some kind of unique ID for it. And you just copy and paste that unique ID and you’re done. It’s added all the track, the core tracking code to the website. So there’s no where do I add the code? How do I add the code?

Code, there’s no get, those plugins that where you, do insert the header and footer and all that kind of stuff, you just have to cut and paste that random character string that identifies your site and you’re done. You now have your analytics tracking code on the website.

Next step, you go to the integrations tab. In conversion bridge and there you’ll see a list of all the plugins that you have installed that conversion bridge works with so very simple outlines. Here are the ones. Here’s the ones that I can add conversion tracking for. All you have to do is click a toggle and you are done for almost every single for Every integration.

Some integrations require a little bit extra one extra step, for example, like forms. Because conversion tracking can be enabled on each individual form. Maybe some forms are just internal thing or using it for something obscure. You don’t really need to get conversion tracking on it, but maybe there’s more public facing forms.

So that’s why conversion tracking allows you to enable tracking on a perform basis. But when you go to edit your form, it’s the same thing. It’s just toggle and that’s all you got to do

Chris Badgett: right on. Yeah. That’s a huge time saver. I think we lost your video, but yeah, it’s cool. We can keep going. I’ll switch to, Oh, there it goes.

What, I know there’s a lot of stuff in the news you mentioned earlier about. Privacy and if you’re selling to an international audience, or and I, know the other, there’s two parts to this question. Another part is I think Apple and certain browsers take like a different approach.

Just what should people know if they’re trying to sell to the whole world, they don’t necessarily care what browser they’re on, or if they’re on a iPhone or something else. Other device like do privacy focused analytics platforms track better or are mostly just like respect better or respect privacy more?

How does how? Let’s dig in a little bit on privacy.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah, so those alternative analytics platforms by their nature. Our privacy focus. That’s why they were all developed was to solve that problem that Google analytics was causing for a lot of people who lived in countries or got traffic from countries where they really needed to respect the privacy of the users.

So those are. Inherently private. It does come with the downsides that that level of detail that Google analytics used to be able to get because they could just violate that user’s privacy and just keep tracking them no matter what. It comes with some trade offs.

So that’s why earlier when we talked about the exact user and all this kind of stuff. So yeah, so that’s, what’s great about those is that you don’t need a cookie banner for any of those alternative platforms. That’s another reason why. Okay. I got into this realms cause I did not want to have cookie banners on my website.

And so I started investigating alternative platforms.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s super cool. So if you don’t track them with cookies, then you don’t need that opt in thing. This

Derek Ashauer: is cookie. This is my current understanding. Again, I am not a lawyer to preface, but this is my current understanding.

Just because you have cookies doesn’t mean you have to have a cookie notice. If you’re tracking personally identifiable information, then you need a cookie notice. Personally identifiable information is stuff like IP address, their browser, their city. It doesn’t have to be their name and email. It could be even something as vague as some of those other things.

So that’s what these alternative analytics platforms are doing, is that they are tracking in a way that doesn’t grab personally identifiable information. And thus, they Then you no longer need to have a cookie banner on your website. There may be something else on your website that is causing you to need to get a cookie banner.

And that’s something that you have to research on your own. But but using those you’ll see the plausible fathom, all those ones they’ll specifically say, you do not need a cookie banner by using our, because you use our product. Do you have,

Chris Badgett: you’re back, do you have a, Like a take on, when, I’m trying to remember my thought there was a, it’ll come back to me, but let me see if I can grab the thread of where I was thinking, oh, conversion value.

So like sometimes like in Google analytics, when you set up events and you’re like, Hey, what’s a, like at Lifter, for example, we have a free plugin, download, page, which has a form and an opt in and let’s say in our view, based on looking at the data, that’s, I’m just pulling a number out of the air.

That’s like worth 20 or an email subscriber is worth whatever 4 is that. Can you help unpack that the theory behind assigning values like monetary values beyond outside of e commerce, why some people do that?

Derek Ashauer: I think it’s, I struggle to find use cases for it, to be honest as well. Because you go, you can do the math yourself honestly, and a lot of that stuff you go, okay I got 57 email newsletter subscribers.

It’s which one has better value to You Do you sign that’s a value of one? I just know that newsletter subscribers are usually worth about 1 a piece. So conversion version makes it available. You can put in a value for every single conversion, a custom value, whether they submit a form, sign up for an email newsletter, all that kind of stuff.

If it’s a purchase, the value is the value of the purchase itself that numerical number. But, But yeah, I don’t actually have a great answer for you on that one.

Chris Badgett: I think it comes from when people get into paid advertising and they’re not going straight for the sale, they’re like, okay I want them to book an appointment and there’s like a six week sales cycle and my, I know my appointments convert at this rate.

To tell if I can get row as or return on ad spend, I need to, they put that value in there to make sure their ads are running profitably. I think that’s where that comes from.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah. I still feel like if I I ran this ad for we spent 5, 000 on this ad and we got 500 email newsletters, subscribers, you can just go, was that worthwhile?

Cause I know how much an average newsletter subscriber is to me. You know what that, what that monetary value is. Like I said, that one I don’t have a great answer for you, but conversion bridge makes it available if you want to, if you want to do that. Yep. You need to go that.

Chris Badgett: Is there any more you would like to say on ads?

Cause I feel like ads is where people really get focused on conversion. Cause especially if you’re going to start shelling out, 30 a day or 300 a day or 3, 000 a day. You don’t want to just have a blindfold on and then be like, I hope this is working. Tell us how to think about ads, analytics and conversions on our site and how they work together.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah. So in my latest release, 1. 3 it was a big update for to work better with Google ads. Especially for those who are not using Google Analytics. Everyone kind of makes the assumption, I’m doing Google Ads, I have to use Google Analytics. ConversionBridge makes it very easy in a no code way to track those conversions even if I was using an alternative analytic platform.

So ads it’s very similar to what we were talking about earlier with kind of A B testing. Your webpage is you on a bunch of ads and you want to see what actually gets people to take an action to convert, whether it’s newsletter signups or purchases, whatever that, or fill out, filling out a request for a quote form.

If you’re like an agency or something like that. Yeah it’s important to track all those you gotta do that. And what’s great is also by converting those ads, Google analytics say you write 10 ads, sorry, if you write 10 ads and Google ads, you can Set Google ads to automatically optimize those, which ads they show based on which ones are performing better.

You have to tell Google ads, which ones are performing better by telling it, which ones are converting. So that’s what conversion bridge does. It says, Hey, this person bought something. Tell Google ads, Hey, this we got a conversion, we got a conversion and Google ads. Okay. Okay. Who is this person?

They’ve been tracking it and then they say, all right, we know that, we can tie this back to this ad type thing.

Chris Badgett: So it’s not just like building a bridge that goes one way from your website to the analytics platform. It can, they’re they can communicate both ways.

Maybe that’s a bad metaphor, but I’m going with the bridge there because that’s cool. I didn’t even realize that I didn’t even really realize that part about doing Google ads and split testing over there and optimizing because it knows the conversion. You

Derek Ashauer: want to see which ads are performing better. So you can get a better idea of, Hey, I’ve ripped.

It’s always great to write a whole bunch of different variations of your ad and then run them and see which one gets better performance.

Chris Badgett: But you can do that with, even if you’re not using Google analytics for your conversion tracking.

Derek Ashauer: Correct. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s pretty cool.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Cause if you fall in love with a different platform.

But you still want to use Google ads. I didn’t even know that you’re, I thought you were just married. Okay. I’m in Google. So I Google ads, I need to use Google analytics. I didn’t really

Derek Ashauer: and Google purposely that. It’s not.

Chris Badgett: what what are some of the common, like of the people who were coming into conversion bridge?

What, are some of their most common, like first steps? When they get started, they’ve installed the plugin. They’ve been, they’ve chosen their analytics platform. It’s syncing correctly. What’s, what would be like step one, two, and three from there?

Derek Ashauer: From there is just checking it every once in a while to make sure that you’re, confirmed that when you get a purchase or whatever conversion that you go into your analytics platform and make sure that they’re there.

And then from there, it’s what we talked about as well. You just let it run for a while, get some good data, say you learned that for every 100 people who come to this page. 3 percent of them convert, and then you can go what can we do to try and improve that? What and I know a common question that people ask is what’s a good conversion rate depends on what you’re trying to measure.

Every single thing is different. Every single industry is different. It’s the goal is to just get better than what you had last month. So it’s, hard to say and there’s so many factors that can affect that. So then at that point, it’s, once you start having some data, it’s. Doing the conversion rate optimization.

It’s playing with your content, playing with your website design, playing with your pricing playing with your placement of things like that. And just trying different things and see if there’s stuff that you can do to increase that conversion rate over time.

Chris Badgett: I love that. So if you are flying blind without conversion or analytics for your website this is like marketing is, Artistic and creative, but it’s also very scientific.

We’re on the scientific side here and you can use art and science together to grow your traffic, increase your sales, improve user behavior on your website, whatever you want them to do. This has been a great chat, Derek. What’s the best way for people to get started with ConversionBridge?

Derek Ashauer: Visiting the website, there’s conversionbridgewp.

com you can go in there and learn about all the different integrations and analytics platforms, learn about like I said, there’s a comparison table with some, I’ve started to write some reviews about each of the platforms themselves, so you can take a look and give it a shot and, Give it a go.

Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I, in my opinion, everybody should set up their analytics integration with their WordPress website from the very beginning, it’s like part of the launch of the website. So if you haven’t done it yet, don’t feel bad. But let’s get it done.

Head on over to conversionbridgewp. com. Derek, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Sandy Ellingson talks about her path from early childhood development to becoming a significant person in the RV business in an interesting conversation with Chris Badgett.

Sandy Ellingson is a vibrant professional with a broad background in technology, finance, early childhood development, and the recreational vehicle sector. Sandy describes how she moved from technology and banking to facilitating better collaboration between RV manufacturers and parks, particularly during COVID-19.

She highlights the need of providing correct information and fostering a sense of community, mentioning how she uses LifterLMS to create online training courses that are both scalable and effective. Sandy demonstrates how LifterLMS’s group and permissive user privacy features foster innovation and teamwork within the sector.

She also commends the platform’s help staff and the insightful conversations she had with other users during live calls. Sandy’s narrative demonstrates how she strategically used community development and technology to address industry issues and promote the expansion of the RV business.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Sandy Ellingson. She’s from the outdoor hospitality hub. Dot com that’s outdoor hospitality hub. com. Also check out the hub for RVers. com with dashes between each word. Welcome to the show, Sandy.

Sandy Ellingson: Hey, thanks for having me, Chris.

I’m excited to be here.

Chris Badgett: I love meeting with people that are using LifterLMS, getting into technology, marketing, building community, and all these things. It’s always fun. And I enjoy these conversations and really those people that are making that impact and putting out a positive message and helping people in their careers and their industry, just being a force for good in the world it’s, a lot of fun and an honor to chat with you.

Let’s start a little bit with your story. How did you get from early childhood development into all this techie community building, RV industry, building online training and all this what was the story there?

Sandy Ellingson: I graduated high school at 16 and I graduated college at 18 and in Georgia, you couldn’t teach until you were 21.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Sandy Ellingson: I couldn’t be a teacher. So I went in, I was already working in banking, so I stayed there for 10 years. Then my kids started coming along and I decided I wanted to stay home. And it was an accident that my brother called me one day and wanted some help. And he was running about a 2 million business on paper.

I said, I think I can figure this out. So I taught myself networking. I built the computers. I taught myself accounting, I brought in the accounting software. And basically it was just, that was the start of my career in technology. And so from there I ended up going and working for an accounting firm as a consultant, then starting my own firm.

Then a few years ago I retired and we were going to hit the road as RVers and just enjoy life. And we, I started helping campgrounds along the way because I did love what I was doing. Before you knew it, I was helping a hundred campgrounds. My husband said, honey, turn around. You’re not retired.

I was doing what I love, but not making any money at it. It’s just been a series of being at the right place at the right time. And I was very blessed to end up connecting with a lot of people in the industry side. So up until a few years ago, you had the industry side, which is the manufacturers who make the rigs and all those suppliers.

Campgrounds and they never really connected because one was manufacturing and the other was hospitality and because of what I had done with technology and building communities. I saw that there was this gap and there needed to be a connection. And so I basically spent the last 4 years. learning about each of the communities and then in my head, figuring out how we proactively connected them so that they were working together.

And that’s what the result of the outdoor hospitality hub is. It’s really a way of connecting the industry with campgrounds so that they can proactively make better decisions.

Chris Badgett: That’s it. There’s a saying that one of the hardest things to make is like a two sided marketplace. What were some of the challenges with getting campgrounds and RV manufacturers to sync up and help each other?

Sandy Ellingson: That was the biggest problem was they didn’t see what they had in common. And so I would talk to a campground and they’d say, why do I need to have anything to do with a manufacturer? They’re manufacturing, we’re hospitality and vice versa. And then COVID hit and COVID showed us that we had to work together.

There was so much going on and there were things that were innovating because of COVID that, but nobody was talking to each other and it could have worked better if we’d worked together. Yeah. That’s when I started getting involved. And there were about five industry challenges that we identified that I felt every one of those could be solved in a campground.

So I started saying, look, we can work with campgrounds to do this and solve this problem. And we started doing that. They said how do we it’s okay to do this 1 to 1, but that takes forever. And that’s, I kept thinking, I know I can do this. There’s got to be technology out there that I can use to build this bridge so that it’s not a one to one connection.

A couple of those is we have only 1 technician for every 4000 rigs on the road. And there’s an amazing school called that’s trying to train technicians, but then getting them out into the campgrounds are getting them out and getting them experience once they graduate. Was a challenge.

Now we can place them in a campground and they do what we call tech camping, where they work in conjunction with the campground. The campground can market that they have a tech, the tech gets the experience and everybody wins. And so there’s several all, five of those issues are that way. It’s a partnership where we all win.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And as an RVer myself, I was always amazed at when I go look at a YouTube video, like how to winterize an RPOD 179 or whatever I had, there’d be this video with a hundred thousand views. Can you tell us a little bit about like the size and the scope of the RV industry?

Sandy Ellingson: It’s one company is over six billion dollars, and that’s just one of the major companies. It’s big and thousands and thousands of units sold every year. Actually, what we’ve done with the Outdoor Hospitality Hub is going to solve another one of those problems where we have on YouTube is like the wild West, right?

And we have a lot of new RV years that came into our ecosystem during covet. They don’t know a thing about camping. They’ve never been in a rig. And then they go to YouTube and they’re watching a video on how to do something that is somebody that has been camping for two weeks, but everybody wants to be a YouTuber, right?

So what we’ve tried to do is make sure that there’s, the social side of our site and then there’s the educational side and everybody that is providing any kind of education or acting as a subject matter expert has to be vetted. And we only have content inside of our system that we know is accurate.

There’s some actual dangerous stuff out there, especially when you start talking about propane and some of those things. If you don’t know what you’re doing and you think it’s you’re just doing this YouTube to try and get click clicks, or you do worse, do click bait. And, Mislead people that doesn’t help the industry overall. So we hope that by having this inside and that was 1 of the reasons we added on the RV portal is because we had such demand over the last 60 days with saying, we don’t know what to do. There’s videos out there, but how do we know if they’re accurate?

And so this will give them a place where they can go and know they’re getting accurate information.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I like to use the phrase trusted advisor. Like people are looking for a trusted advisor. There’s a lot of content on the internet, but they, what they really want is that kind of brand that they know they can trust what you’re building.

How, do you get RV manufacturers or campgrounds or. Our viewers themselves onto the site. Like, how do you get traffic? How do you think about just growing the platform?

Sandy Ellingson: So it’s actually just in a soft launch right now. We don’t do our full launch until June the 15th, but what’s been interesting is.

I have been encouraged and even pushed by those entities to do this. So it’s not like I’m having to go out and do a lot of marketing. One of the things I like to do on the campground side is work with the state associations. A lot of people don’t really understand the value of their state associations.

So the first course that I created was called understanding the benefits of a state association. It even blew my mind. When I started doing the math, and so it was a lot of fun. So if I get the campground associations involved. Then all of their parks come in. So I’m not just going after an individual park.

And it’s the same thing with the industry side of things. There’s a lot of Hot buttons that they have needs they have and all I have to do is give them That opportunity and they’re ready. They’re jumping in and I just left a big national rally Last week that was in indiana And there were about a thousand people there, and I was inundated with requests for, can I download the mobile app yet?

And of course, it’s not ready, so I had to throw up real quick a page that said, here, give me your name if you’re interested in being notified. And before we left the campground, I had over 500 names on the list. It’s that part of it has been really easy because the need is so great.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I like to say you really got product market fit when they’re like the, your audience is like pulling the product out of you.

You’re not pushing it. And then also that kind of one to many approach you’re doing. If you get an association, they’ve got all their people, one campground, and they bring all the others and all that, stuff. It’s very scaled out way of thinking and tapping a river of demand and meeting the needs that they’re desperately looking for a solution for.

That’s, awesome. How did you get into WordPress?

Sandy Ellingson: Years ago, I thought I could be a web developer. Actually it was funny. I started playing with websites in Drupal.

Chris Badgett: Me too.

Sandy Ellingson: That is I thought when you learn that way, you don’t realize how much more complex it is than WordPress.

And so then I would hear people talking about WordPress and I go that’s the kindergarten version, right? If you can do Drupal, you can do anything. But then of course as WordPress took off and was so great for smaller companies and people that wanted to learn it themselves working with nonprofits, which is what I did a lot.

It became a superior option for me. And so I wanted to learn enough about it that I could talk the talk, right? Don’t I’m a functional girl. I’m not a pretty girl. Okay. I can make things sing on the back end, but I do not make things pretty. And so I learned my where my weaknesses were, and then I went out to find how I could to, could fill those gaps.

So I got involved in a design conference called Creative South. Every year I was got to be with thousands of designers and make friends and mama them. So I pulled in and found people that could do what I couldn’t do. Started partnering with them. And so that’s when I started really, a lot of them were using WordPress, right?

And so that’s when I started really loving WordPress. So I’m, I am maybe a hacker, but I can hack enough to get it going.

Chris Badgett: You sound like a lot like me. A lot of people think I’m a web developer, but I can’t write a single line of code I’ve, but I learned how to work with people and get on the mission vision and do the parts that I do well.

And, build the team around you. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. It’s a lot to where as an education entrepreneur, to be a technologist, an entrepreneur, a community builder. An instructional designer or teacher and do all these things like in one person, some of the most successful projects tend to have multiple people involved.

Why did you choose LFTR LMS for the learning management system? How did that happen?

Sandy Ellingson: I had worked with mighty networks for a while and so I knew they were out there. They are perfect for some of my small churches and some of my nonprofits, they were very easy for them to adopt. And I knew a sort of about the LMS is, and then I had a client that used can jobby and she liked that.

And she kept saying, you should try this, but I didn’t really have a reason for it. But then when this came up, I knew that the demand was going to be much greater and even in, in talking to them, they were like, we don’t think we’re going to be able to handle it. I really believe that. 18 months from now, we’ll have 100, 000 users hitting the system at any one time.

And so they just did not feel like they could scale to that. So then so nothing against them. I think they’re great, but not for this situation. And I built my career on not standardizing with just one thing. I would never represent software for commission. I wanted to make sure I was representing them because I believed in them.

And then we actually found another software. And we thought we were going to go with it. It was very complex. And we liked it, but then they had a limitation. They could meet the demand, but they couldn’t meet some of the other things. And I’m still searching and found Lifter LMS in a Google search and started watching you guys videos and stuff.

And I was like. Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. And the more we got into it, we did the free trial. And the more we got into it, it was like. This is awesome. And so it was just basically through trial and error and Google searches and we didn’t know anybody else using it or anything, but I do have a gift because of the last 10 years of my career, I worked with venture capitalists to see what they should invest in and what they shouldn’t.

So I look at things with a very critical eye and I can almost look at the front end of something and tell you what the back end is, what language it’s written in, what database they’re using. You look at so many, you just get used to it. Yeah. And I kept trying to find a flaw and I’m like, little things that I might tweak or do differently or functions that I would add, but for the most part, I couldn’t find one.

And everybody on my team was raving. So we knew this. We found the right one when we found Lifter LMS.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. What, do you know what, like Lifter LMS add ons that were important to you? I’m just curious, some of the stuff we have e commerce related or. Integrating with the email marketing or like advanced videos or groups, social learning, things like that.

Like what are you using or excited about?

Sandy Ellingson: All of those things were important to me. We’re not going to have a store right now, but in the future I do see that. So all of that was important. I loved that the integration with buddy boss for the expanded social side. So we my elevator speech is we do, we connect.

We communicate, we collaborate, and then we innovate, and it happens in that order. And for me, when we’re using, we connect and communicate first, and then LFTR LMS handles the heavy lifting, which is the collaborating and the innovating, because we use the groups extensively. And we’ve even come up with a really creative idea of how to use groups.

So we are using groups as what we call opportunities. So let’s say somebody in the industry wants to connect with some parks, then they create a group that’s a category of opportunity. And so those show up on 1 page. And then we notify the campgrounds that are within the parameters And so we can restrict the group by saying we only want 50 people in this group, but they can say, look, we’re looking for 50 parts who are interested in storing the most common failure parts that we we need and we want to have a conversation about it.

They can then permissively join that group because it’s really important to me that everything is permissive inside the hub. And and their name might be Sandy Ellingson, but it also might be Sparkle right from inside the hub. So when they join that group, they’re still not giving away their identity.

And then beyond that once they start communicating, if they choose to identify who they are and go outside the ecosystem, that’s fine. But I love all of that. The ability to protect and be permissive. I look for that a lot as an inbound marketing certification person. I want to know that we’re being permissive and that people aren’t getting spammed.

And so all of that was really important to us.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What’s your experience with Lifter LMS? Support I’ve seen you on some live calls and stuff. What would you say?

Sandy Ellingson: Oh I, love the way you guys do things. I join, usually I try to join both the calls. There’s two every week.

But the Thursday call, I really enjoy. I have learned. You need to be prepared. Otherwise, we will have some fun conversations, but not necessarily learn as much as I want to learn. I’m the check every box kind of girl, right? And Curt and Will, they see me coming and they’re like, okay, Sandy’s already ready and posted all her questions, but I am also really impressed by the people that join the calls.

These people know their stuff. stuff. It’s amazing. And so I learned just from listening to the other people. And then anytime I’ve had to send in a support ticket somebody messages me back pretty much 24 seven. I’m hearing back within a reasonable amount of time. And it’s always, Hey very very polite.

When I’m asking a stupid question that I probably could have Googled and found the answer to. But I just didn’t see me. Here’s the reference. We’re so glad she contacted us. It makes me feel good about being a newbie in the system.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. Yeah. We’re, we know a thing or two about building community here as well.

And like you said, even just being in a community of other education, entrepreneurs, or service providers who are working in the industry, you just learn through osmosis, that’s one of the biggest benefits of community. What other technology is important to you? Like you mentioned a buddy boss. What do you use for web hosting or what do you see is like your super critical tools to pull off the outdoor hospitality hub?

Sandy Ellingson: I chose to work with 1 of the experts that you guys recommended for to find the right hosting. At some point, there is a data center when we get super large that I’ll probably move to that I’ve worked with in the past. And they’re, huge. They. And work with Homeland Security and all that.

So as we go international, I’ll probably move to that. But for right now, we’re really happy with the hosting company that he recommended and I do. I love the, expert that we’re working with. He’s really good about letting us do what we can do and then picking up the ball when we can’t. Can’t get beyond that, or we need it and just saying, I can do that quicker for you, or you can spend 4 hours pulling your hair out.

And I’m like, thank you very much. Take it right. But very respectful of our budget. So that’s important is to have those experts for when you need them, but somebody that will let you do as much as you can do. And not just run away with the budget. So we love that. And then I’m using several other CR in a plug ins here and there.

We’re just now getting ready to implement fluent CRM and so we haven’t gotten that yet. It’s not as important immediately. And I really want to implement an SMS system. So having something like that is going to be important because I still think email is Very difficult to get the responses you need.

And so for, especially in our industry, people really like the text messages. So we want to do that

Chris Badgett: on the text messaging front. Lifter LMS does have a Twilio integration, which does some cool SMS stuff. That’s awesome. And I go ahead of

Sandy Ellingson: the software companies that I work with that does prop property management.

He’s written this whole module for Twilio, which basically, It allows my parks to do marketing and use different telephone numbers so that they can even track the success of traditional marketing You know like a billboard or whatever because it has a unique number that they’re calling into And so i’m thinking there’s you know a future there with maybe looking at some of that as well

Chris Badgett: Tell us some more data points.

I’m just interested you mentioned you’re forecasting like a hundred thousand users in a future How many courses do you plan on? You’ve made some courses. Like how many we’ve talked a little bit about the scale of the RV industry and the campground industry and just RVers, what are some like what do you see in the data?

Like just around. The outdoor hospitality hub.

Sandy Ellingson: I think it’s going to be huge because we’re, we’ve already signed contracts with about 31 subject matter experts. These are the people that will be creating our, primarily our content. We haven’t started teaching them how to do it yet because I’m still playing around with it again.

I like to learn it myself first. And there’s some things that I want them to be able to do on their own, but a little bit easier. So we’re playing around. Like I messaged you guys about cloning and some things like that. How do I make it easier for them to create the different types of content? And because my background is teaching, I want to make sure that we’re using all the different kinds of learning.

And I really would like to have to create some templates, whether we do that with our The person that’s working with us, and we do it outside of what you guys have already done make it a little bit easier. But ultimately, I think that by the end of the year, we’ll have at least 1000 lessons.

I don’t know how many courses that will be. And then we’ve got some really great CEOs in the industry that they’re going to they’ve already given me 52. Lessons they’re gonna do once a month. Once a week, I’m gonna interview them like this. It’ll be an 8 minute in out kind of thing. And then the next 1 will drop the next week and then the next week.

But these are amazing. CEOs of big companies who having the ability to connect with somebody at that level for all of my parks and my other people is huge. And so we’re doing culture and leadership with one of them. We’re doing all these different types of things about financing and how to grow your park and, what, things should you be looking at for KPIs based on today, not Five years ago when the old content was written.

So that’s some of the things we’re like a thousand lessons is our goal. We hope to exceed it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to double click on the subject matter experts.

I’ve heard a lot of folks with goals to build the training platform that’s bigger than one individual. What are some tips you have and things you’ve learned on recruiting content creators to help make courses or other content on your site?

How do you make that happen?

Sandy Ellingson: I think that we’re a little bit different from a lot that I’ve seen in some of the case studies I’ve read in that. The hub is set up so that you cannot do commerce inside the hub. I don’t want it to be a place where people feel they’re inundated with sales pitches. But you can establish yourself as a subject matter expert and to teach others about doing that.

We, that’s why we have 50 that we’re bringing in as our initial subject matter experts and they are an extension of us and they sign an agreement that says we agree not to do certain things. What’s nice is that these 50 people are very passionate about what we’re passionate about. So they they’re doing this.

As themselves with no financial benefit to themselves. And so I’m very fortunate in that situation. Now, our 2nd tier, where we have other people that are suppliers and people that basically do sell to parks and things, they’re still coming in and they can establish themselves and get involved and have conversations and build relationships.

But if they want to start, if they. If somebody asks them, hey, can we buy your product? They have to give them a link inside. And then we give them a disclaimer that says you’re now leaving the hub to work with one of our premier providers, but we are capturing no data. And anything you decide to give to them is you’re, giving it to them because I think it’s really important for us to stay Switzerland and to not, I don’t want anybody thinking, oh, I’m getting a piece of the action.

I think in that situation we’re very different and it makes it easier to invite people and get them involved because everybody I am working with is about creating education and improving the ecosystem as a whole.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I’m a big fan and community building of giving before you get.

So if you have this real strong mission, like kind of value community, no pitch zone where it’s the focus is on the community, the sales will come later. And people get to know and trust you and that makes selling easy.

Sandy Ellingson: That’s why it’s taken me four years to get here because I had to earn, the trust of the people.

I really quick, funny story when I got introduced in the industry to all the big people, there was a gentleman that he’s known as the person that if in the industry, everybody listens to. So we’re at this nice dinner and he’s behind me with his back to me. And I hear him say, Oh, she’s just a flash in the pan.

She won’t last. And I turned around and said hello. How are you? And his face was blood red because he knew I had heard him and I did not bring it up. I just had the conversation with the people that he was there. And then as everybody started to walk off. I leaned close to him and I said no he, said I was the flavor of the month.

And I said, you know what? I might be the flavor of the month. But I’m chocolate or vanilla because they can stand the test of time. He started cracking up laughing. What was funny was he became my biggest advocate. So that’s what I feel like. If you treat others the way you want to be treated, I’ve developed this with my hands wide open.

Everybody that’s involved, and there’s a lot of big organizations. I have gone to them and said, is this going to be in conflict with you, right? If it is, I’ll give it to you, right? You can have access to it for free, or if you’re not doing it, do you want to work with me? And because of that, I think that people understand my real motivation, which is to improve our industry.

If we do that, then You know, there may be money that comes along. And you know what? Honestly, if we don’t, I don’t care because I’m not motivated by money. I’m motivated by making a change. So

Chris Badgett: I love that. I have a similar story. I won’t get into where someone said, Oh, you shouldn’t get into software.

That’s really hard. And it’s just funny how it works out. So we were talking a little bit about like data numbers and figures, but qualitatively, I’m also Not I guess the word would be scared of retirement. Like I like working. I like community. I like helping people I like being creative.

But what do you see as like the kind of qualitative benefits of this project?

Sandy Ellingson: So are you talking about the long term kps? Is that what you mean,

Chris Badgett: Not non Data, but like just like more like sense of fulfillment or creativity you know meeting amazing people like more What what lights you up and what are the benefits of this project for you that have nothing to do with money or the eyes or anything?

Yeah.

Sandy Ellingson: Yeah. That’s exactly what I was saying. I established my personal mission statement when I was 26 years old and it has not changed. And it is, I want to make a difference with people who make a difference doing things that make a difference. And as a consultant, every new client I got, I said, can I make a difference?

Are the people I’m working with, can they make a difference? And then the last one was where everything would either rise or fall, because are they willing to do the things that make a difference? Because a lot of people are afraid of change. And I know when I can make a difference. It’s a gut feeling and I’m committed. I’m I am going to stick it out.

It might take me 10 years, but I’m going to succeed. I will not give up. And but there’s times when I’ve had to give up on others because they were not willing. To do those things, and for me at the end of the day, if I’ve established relationships with people, and I’ve been able to help them grow, and I’ve been able to ultimately help the industry.

That’s gonna be the reward for me. But the other thing, too, is, of course as my heart being teaching love mentoring. I was I’ve always been a mentor in the technology industry. So we have what we call we have. It’s called the hub, but we have spokes on the hub and you have to fill out an application to be a spoke on the hub.

And you have to tell us either what industry problem are you solving? Or how are you innovating? And so I’ve got 17 applications right now of people wanting to come into the hub after we launch that these are their businesses and they are for profit businesses. These are things they’re going to do and they are going to be changing the industry.

And so I love that model to think that I helped to launch something else with some young person, right? That sets them up for their life, doing what they love. That’s what’s going to motivate me to keep going.

Chris Badgett: Can you share your mission statement again?

Sandy Ellingson: I want to make a difference with people who make a difference doing things that make a difference.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I have a similar thing with where I, my life mission and my company mission are the same. to lift up others through education. That’s what lights me up in my personal life, my business life. And it’s fulfilling to have that peace of mind and that compass and being like a hundred percent alignment with it.

So I’m really happy for you that you found out and you’ve been, just, it hasn’t changed and you just, you found your calling.

Sandy Ellingson: Yep, I do too. I think it makes it so easy. And I can’t imagine having gone through life without it. Because then how do you measure up and know there’s opportunities everywhere, right?

How do you know which ones to go after if you don’t have something to measure it by based on what you want to do?

Chris Badgett: Said what? Like when you sat up in the RV and you were like. I guess, I’m not retired.

Sandy Ellingson: No.

Chris Badgett: How long? I think I know the answer, but how long before that moment and then this project that you knew it was going to work.

And I think you would say I knew I already knew at the beginning, but like, when did you really get the signal? Like how much time passed where it was like, you know what? My vision is coming true. This is going to work.

Sandy Ellingson: Wow. Really, the year before COVID hit. I started making some headway, but it was slow progress. But then when COVID hit, that created all of these opportunities. I had to work with new people. Because initially campgrounds weren’t seen as essential businesses.

So they were closed. And we had to fight to get get our campgrounds open again. And that’s when the industry side started going, Oh, wow, it is important for us to to be working with campgrounds. Obviously, if the campgrounds are closed. Nobody’s buying an RV, right? And so suddenly it was like, glaringly obvious we needed to do this.

Since COVID has, we’ve come out of that. And then now we’re in this recovery process that the doors are much easier to open. literally it’s just been in the last probably six months where I’m like, not only is this going to succeed, it is going to succeed above my wildest dreams and expectations.

And it’s not me, right? I’m just that vehicle that sticks it out there. It’s like you said. It’s the industry that is clamoring for this and wants this right now. And so I’m just super excited, but it has been in the last six months where I’m going, wow, this is going to happen. Am I ready for it?

Chris Badgett: Amazing.

Anything else you’d like to share about the project? Or just where you’re at and what’s happening.

Sandy Ellingson: You guys just keep an eye on me and watch out on the 15th. There might be a lot of support tickets that come in.

Chris Badgett: We’re ready for it. We’re ready for it. Awesome. Sandy. I want to thank you for coming on the show.

This has been an awesome conversation and talking to education entrepreneurs like you, you’re just a shining example of what lights me up. And I’ll see you next time. Helping people make a difference and all that stuff, create value in the world. It’s, really inspiring. So thank you for sharing your story with us today.

What are the best places for people to go check out what you’re up to?

Sandy Ellingson: So outdoorhospitalityhub. com is the industry side. So if you’re a campground or someone working in the RV industry as a whole. Then the hub for RVers with the dashes in there is a place to go for campers if you’re interested in connecting.

And the most important thing to know about that is this is a unique space. It’s, we’re not trying to replace Facebook and we’re not trying to replace YouTube. We’re trying to meet a larger need for campers and give them the ability to connect. With the industry and permissive ways to get problems solved.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Sandy Thank you for coming on the show I can’t wait to do a follow up with you in a couple years and see where we’re at and Yeah, thanks for all the great work you do. I really appreciate it

Sandy Ellingson: Thank you so much, Chris. This was a lot of fun.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Jason Coleman discusses insights into entrepreneurship, starting a consulting business. Also shares about important ideas from his company’s journey route map. In 2006, he and his wife Kim started their own consulting business.

Jason Coleman, CTO of LifterLMS and co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro. At first, they focused on e-commerce solutions, but later they switched their focus to Linux. Because of this, they made Paid Memberships Pro, a membership tool that became open source in 2012. By 2016, they were handling a virtual team of 15 people thanks to the help of this plugin, which helped them become a plugin-centric organization.

Jason looks at the value of open source projects, their involvement in the PHP community, and the inspiration behind PHP e-commerce development. Apart from the difficulties working with a partner, he looks at the need of reaching harmony and using effective communication. Their commitment to innovative ideas and community involvement has been crucial even if keeping competitiveness in an industry that is always changing and controlling their development presents difficulties. Jason counsels budding business owners to start small, experience real-world challenges, maintain a tenacious and strong attitude while open to honest criticism.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a very special guest. He’s a friend. He is co owner of Lifter LMS with his wife, Kim. He’s the founder, co founder of Paid Memberships Pro. We’re going to have an awesome conversation today. I know Jason really well. I think the world of the guy and I’m excited for you to listen in to our conversation.

Welcome to the show, Jason.

Jason Coleman: Thank you, Chris. I I’m happy to be here. I don’t know why it’s taken so long to get on this podcast, but hopefully this breaks the seal and I can be like your most frequent guest.

Chris Badgett: That would be fun. Jason and I have played around about starting a separate podcast by the way.

And so we want to hear what you think about this episode. But getting into it for those that don’t know you, at the beginning of 2023 you and your wife, Kim Coleman joined LFTR LMS as owners. You’ve been helping in the business. If you out there listening or watching is a user of LFTR LMS, and you’ve seen a lot of the great innovation and stuff that’s been happening over the past couple of years, Jason and Kim have been a huge part of that.

But I know Jason from back in the day when I first started using WordPress and I needed a membership plugin and I installed paid memberships pro, which they created. So give us the high level story of paid memberships pro where that started and what year it was and how that began.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, totally. So you’ve mentioned Kim a couple of times and.

It’s really Kim and I are married, but also business partners and been in business together since 2006 or so we started out as consultants building anything, lots of prototypes in the web 2. 0 era. And then we solely focused on WordPress and then focused on e commerce and then focused on membership sites.

And we. Back in 2010 or 11, we had four customers that needed membership functionality, excuse me. And we, didn’t like the plugin options that were there. We also saw how, building open source tools and making your code available and inviting other people to contribute and share and hosting your plugin on the wordpress.

org repository, that was a way to you don’t get more exposure for the software and more people involved. So we build a membership plugin for our four customers and open sourced it around 2012. Sometime in 2016, we were able to switch from being like a consultant company with a plugin to like a plugin company that only sold support and updates and, stuff around the plugin.

So since 2016, so now we’ve been growing just slow and steady every year. And at this point we’re about 15 people on the paid memberships pro side. And we all work remote updating the plugin, maintaining it, taking care of our customers.

Chris Badgett: One of the things I love about Jason is he’s a very humble dude.

And so I always find out things like, Oh, wow, this guy’s really good at investing, which we’re going to talk about later. But back in the day, you had an investing blog and you had a wine blog Gary Vaynerchuk, tell us about that, like your blogging era there.

Jason Coleman: Yeah that, and it’s turning out that like that’s like a magic moment of the internet where, like when blogging was taking off, that people were interested in things could write about it.

And that, that was useful. It wasn’t like right nowadays, there’s so much Content is automatically generated and generated for business. And now AI is generating content and social media is so fast. We there’s some blogs around that still work, but we, really don’t have the attention for the, I don’t know the golden era of blogging.

So we had a investing blog with a three friends. I think I met Gary. I. We had a site wine log, which was like a kind of social network for wine drinkers to keep track of their notes and things. And Gary advertised on the site. And I remember giving him a hard time. Like he, I forget what it was. He was like going to pay me 600 bucks and I forced him to pay me like whatever the industry standard CPM was.

And he’s like, all right, man, you’re driving a hard bargain. He’s you might regret this. Cause it’s more important, the biz dev than the 600 bucks. But but. He pay for the ad. That’s funny. And so at different conferences, I used to run into him back in the day when he was doing the wine library TV thing.

Chris Badgett: And then the

Jason Coleman: investing blog, like what happened there? Yeah, that was interesting. Like I thought we did, a good job. So it was just me and two friends. Like we newly out of college, we had like 401ks, but we didn’t know what they were. So writing about something forces you to learn it. I was really interested in it.

And so it was as we invested and thought about investment, we just wrote about what we learned. And part of me regrets because we, it got pretty popular was like one of the top whatever, what was the site that used to like rank. Blogs, but we were always fighting for the top five investing blogs.

And I think the three of us had different separate ways. I tapped my table. Sorry about that. And and so we never really got to lean into it, but it’s always, so it’s been a hobby of mine, but that really is like the first time I used WordPress was for that investing blog. And it’s still around that one.

Investorgeeks. com has the old content and it’s like a lot of it holds up. As the economy goes through a cycle again, like the last time, like the yield curve inverted, I was like, Hey, what does this mean? What’s the yield curve? It’s Oh, this old Jason kind of is pretty smart. He did some research.

So it’s funny.

Chris Badgett: One of the other stories I love that I don’t think gets enough attention is you created possibly the first e commerce transaction on WordPress. What was that about?

Jason Coleman: Yeah. It’s like hard to claim that. When I’ve, I was talking with you about that. Made me think, is there a way I could validate this and I’m certain I wasn’t like the very 1st, but definitely 1 of the 1st.

Kim actually was still in college and she went to a business school and had to like, start a business in a quarter and they started a laundry service. And so it was a website. Built on WordPress do something maybe, or like 2000 four ish, and we embedded PayPal into it. And then after that we, got other customers and we embedded like OS commerce was a open source.

It’s still around, I think PHP based we embedded OS commerce into WordPress. And then sometime around 2006, we were like, we should build like the e commerce directly into WordPress instead of taking another tool and swapping it in. So we built like an early e commerce plugin, but we only managed it for like our four customers that were doing e commerce and they integrated with PayPal at the time was like the only gateway really in town.

And so we saw it was awesome. It had like integration with FedEx shipping. And I always thought the way that we did options was pretty clever. But it, yeah, it was, so that was back in like 2006, we were building e commerce in the WordPress. And we saw how the open source version of that WP e commerce was like the first big one.

There was one called shop with two P’s. And then later Jiggo shop. We’re like, it’s like, Oh, like you could build this in an open source way and share it with everyone. And other people would use your tools and that helps build a better tool. But also I, feel good that we can enable people to make money on the internet without having to be like they’re single developer on a single site.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, awesome. Piece of history there. And I’ve heard you interviewed before, so we don’t have to park on it for long, but people always ask you and Kim, what’s not, what’s it like to work so closely with your spouse, but you guys do a really good job and I’m sure you have family stuff and whatever, but if somebody is like thinking about working with their spouse or trying to make it better, what.

What’s the big lesson that you’ve learned there, one or two things that like make it,

Jason Coleman: man, I, don’t know if it’s something you can learn. So it’s you have to try it. I suspect definitely not every couple can do this, but if it does work, it’s awesome. Cause you get to spend Kim and I get to spend tons of quality time together.

And actually now that the business has grown, we have different. Areas that we have to manage. We don’t work together as much. And it’s man, can we just like work on a little project together? That’s really fun. First like just managing different teams and, bring in each other, like the headaches that come up in like normal course of business.

But I guess like some tips, we were both the type of people that work through problems and don’t take things personal. And so we’re able to get heated, about work things and then separate it as good as possible. It doesn’t always sometimes it bleeds over into the personal life.

But we’re good in general. Outside of business, when there’s conflict between Kim and I or things coming up We talk and communicate well and solve it. So that, like the, fact, if you can manage that part of your relationship well together, that’s like an indicator that you can manage those same kinds of issues in business.

And then like it is, it’s good to, set time for each other and the typical things of Hey, we’re not working now, but it’s harder, especially like you work from home in the home business. And you were so when we hang out, we go out to dinner, we’re talking about work.

It’s interesting. Yeah. And we, try to make time for other things, but we also don’t get too hard on ourselves. I think Alex or Mazzi had, or Layla they’re another like couple that work together and they, say we just we’d doing the work, like I don’t feel guilty about it.

So that’s good too. I don’t feel guilty. Like we got to dinner and we talk about work. It’s fun. Like we’re enjoying building stuff together. So we, don’t feel guilty about it, but we do try to make safe spaces where it’s like, Hey, we’re with the family, with the

Chris Badgett: kids, we’re doing all this stuff.

Speaking of building stuff together we’re part of the creator economy. We create software, we’ve done blogs, we make content. What’s your view on how the creator economy is, what it used to be and where it’s going, it seems like it’s having a moment right now where like creator, it’s like, there’s a lot of desire and drive.

For people to build creator businesses, but it’s always been around change. What’s your perspective there?

Jason Coleman: We are riding a wave of people selling themselves online in some way, creating courses, content. And so that’s been interesting aspect of the business. And it, feels like that kind of thing is.

Going to continue that, we’re building all these tools for people to start these online businesses. They’re going to use them. What, one of the most important things about this is just I even don’t really understand it as the scale of the internet. So there’s so many people out there. And, so when you sell a course or some content online or a membership site.

Your total addressable market is huge. Even it’s just it’s not just like the little town you’re in. It’s like all of America, but also all of the world. And I think so some stat is like for every 22, 000 people in the United States, there’s a McDonald’s. So if you like, that’s like a unit of a metric.

And so if there’s a McDonald’s, there’s probably like a law office, like a garage to fix your car like all these services that a dentist for every 22, 000 people. So if you imagine like the 22, 000 people around the McDonald’s is closest to you could you sell your course to 1 of them?

Okay, cool. Now, There’s not 22, 000 people in the world. There’s 3 billion people on the internet. I did the math earlier. It’s 150, 000 times more people on the internet than like around your local McDonald’s. And so it’s 150, 000 is like a huge number. So if you could sell one person at the McDonald’s, like over the course of a week, there’s 150, 000 people like that person in the rest of the world I don’t know if the math works out.

And it’s that’s just why, and that’s, I think that’s like the, one of the secret sauces of why. This career path is so successful is that if you really can build something that people need in one. There’s, you can find the audience online and that’s not easy. That’s work sometimes.

But if you do there’s tons of money to be made and also you’re making a bigger impact. If you are in the education space and you’re teaching people. Like it’s very admirable to be a teacher at a school and you get like a classroom every year, 30 or so kids per year.

But if you’re teaching online and you can hit 150, 000 people every year, it’s just like a bigger impact. So I think that’s why people are drawn to the space.

Chris Badgett: One of the core missions of paid memberships pro is helping people get paid. Where does that where did that mission come from? I can see it in the thread of your story, like, all right, I’m deleting commerce.

On WordPress and figuring that out and helping facilitate the money to go through you’re trying, you’re, you built your own creator career, but where does, what’s the genesis of helping people get paid?

Jason Coleman: I remember I was on a, like a radio show in the Philly area. And the interviewer kept pressing me like, what did your parents teach you about business?

And at first I was like, nothing, man. I’m my own, I’m self made. Like they had nothing to do with it. I did this all myself. And I I was like, I don’t remember that as childhood. Like I this is my adult life. Why are you keep pushing me back to my childhood? He’s there’s something in your childhood that did it.

So it forced me to reflect. And I was like, they’re absolutely right that when I was a child, like my family had money problems, I came from like a middle class maybe like lower middle class. And when my parents got slightly better jobs, moved up a little bit family and like money was tight.

I saw money problems. And my dad would talk to me very openly about it. And he was optimistic about he’s you don’t want to work in a factory like I do. You should be a doctor or a lawyer, or you could do more. Like he was, he opened my mind to like entrepreneurship, even though he didn’t do it himself, he knew it was an opportunity.

And so as a child, he’d have these conversations with me and he always encouraged it when we did it as kids, like we were selling newspapers on the side at school, we got in trouble. Cause it was like a underground newspaper verse, like the official school newspaper. And like selling candy to your friends and stuff.

Like I was always doing these entrepreneurial things and my dad He saw that like I was a path and so instilled in me that if you have money problems, you actually can address them. You can take control of them. And, I took that in my childhood and whenever it’s you got to get to college and you need, how do you get scholarships for this?

It’s figure it out. You want to get a car. So I, and, and so I saw the flip side of that, both like the people who don’t have money, and then people also who feel like. They don’t have the power to do anything about it. Like they feel victimized by it. So I was like, Oh, like it’s, it feels good to build these tools to help people get paid and then also teach them how to use them so that they can.

Take care of themselves and also like associations and charities that use our tools collectively use the money to like, to do good in the world that that they want to do

Chris Badgett: speaking of building tools, why open source, like, why is that important to you as a engineer and entrepreneur?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, so part of that was that story of when we had basically a closed source solution for our four customers, they were the only ones who could use it. So I see it as a way of putting making it public and available for others to use. And then I also feel like it makes the best software. The more people who use it, the more people who get involved, the more kind of incentive and motivation it is for a random consultant implementing it for one customer, finds the bug and helps you patch it.

So I was It seems like the way to make the best software. And then I think I there’s also like this kind of like business model, like the business model aspect of it, of giving it away for free and just charging for the services that for some reason that bothers me, like when a business model feels like a tall.

I think I, I developed this like watching the MP3s Napster music industry phenomenon. And there’s a version of that going on with AI content too, where like the technology Is moving in a direction and it’s get on board or there’s like a physics of it of information is free.

And like the cost to clone an MP3 and give it away is free. So it has to happen. Like people want it for free and they don’t want to pay for it. And you set up a toll. It just, it doesn’t feel right. So I kind of business models like that where like software is you like charge for it and you only give it to people if they charge.

Like it, it just feels. I’m fighting against the physics of the information of the internet. And so I was more inclined to like, hey, give it away for free and then find ways to build businesses on top of that get people using it. And then if I’m helping people make money and saving time and stuff I’ll find ways to make money business.

On top of that,

Chris Badgett: you’re probably one of the biggest champions of open source. I know. And in some ways you take it the challenge to be even more open source than WordPress itself. What does that look like to you? How do you think about that? Like, how can we be even more open source?

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Like one kind of specific way is that the code that we write all, we make all of it publicly available on GitHub.

There’s some internal tools that aren’t. And sometimes when we’re starting a new project, we keep it private for a little bit until it’s ready to go. But otherwise all there’s 198 repositories or so stranger studios, every line of code is on GitHub. So people can. Interact with it, but also use it like it’s easy to like, you download a zip file, you install it and run it like there’s no kind of complication.

There’s no service required to get it running. The same exact plug in that you would get off wordpress. org. Or if you come to our site and give us money or go to get hub, it’s like the same exact plug in. And as a developer myself, that just enables so many things like weekly, I’m working on something.

Just today it was or I was building something and I know that this other company has a similar thing. And I’m like, I wish I could just look at that code and see how they do it. And I know I can get it. I can go to find someone who has it or buy it from them or GPL vault.

It’s like weird that I have to go through these hoops to gain access to the code. Because what we’re going to end up doing is is building a better thing. So I don’t want. That friction on our, software. They’re still like putting the code away for free. And I feel like when automatic bought WooCommerce a few years ago, I know WooCommerce had closed repositories for their plugins and be at that time, most of the WordPress plugin type stuff automatic did was on.

org and open. And so I was like, what’s going to happen here? We’ll like the automatic influence over WooCommerce and their plugins will get open or will. The WooCommerce kind of business aspect, charging for software. Influence automatic. And I think the latter happened, like you still, the extensions.

And as I’m talking about this, I’m not judging. I’m just saying what I see out there. Cause there’s very valid reasons for doing things the way that they do they, and they have business relationships with all the developers who made those extensions and they feel that keeping the code hidden will drive more revenue.

What I’d like to do a naturally lifter could be an example of this. Also has Extensions that aren’t fully open on GitHub is we can test that because I saw it with our own plugins that it doesn’t seem to have an impact on revenue with some of the sand hill stuff that they did before the awesome mode of acquisition.

I think they’ve had repositories that went from private to public, I believe, or either the other direction. They didn’t see any change in sales. And so I think we can make money off, other things than just keeping people from using the tool. And I, also, it’s we’re motivated to get people to use the tool.

Like I, if someone uses our plugin and makes money off it and I’m not involved I’m like, that’s great. That’s actually the goal is Like I’m doing well, we’ll do well enough. We’ll make enough money to maintain the plugin. Like my real goal is to get as many people using the software as possible.

And that’s not the goal of every business out there. There is like a weight of a user who’s not paying you and you have to support them and stuff like that, and it’s fair that businesses make business decisions to not support people that aren’t giving them money. But it’s weird. I I was watching a Sam Altman interview.

It’s like weird to compare myself to him. He’s like the most popular person in the planet right now, but, but something that rung true with me that he was talking about how, when, they did some kind of reformation of open AI, he didn’t take any equity in the business. And people were like, why not?

He’s I’m already a billionaire. I don’t need any more money. And they’re like, so why are you doing this? He’s I want to build AGI and give it to humanity. And everyone’s yeah, but what do you really want to do? What’s your real goal? Like people don’t trust that’s his incentive. And everyone.

He said on an interview, something like, if I just took a bunch of money and said, I’m trying to make as much money as possible, they’d be like, oh, okay. And then he can make the money and give it away or something. It like society and the business partners and everyone would accept it. More readily than him saying I’m just trying to make cool software.

So I feel like I’m in the same boat. It’s a different kind of thing. Like we’re making a membership plugin and he’s making like AGI, but I’m like, I’m really just trying to like, that, that is the goal. And I struggle with it. Cause it feels like you’re fighting, like going uphill. It’s, like, it’s similar to that, like the physics of the information.

I’m trying to like, go with that wave, but there’s this like capitalism saying nah, man, like people understand when you’re asking for money. People understand when business relationships are incentivized by the money involved. It is like the common currency of like how deals get done. And I don’t I know it’s a strain that I got to work out in the business.

Chris Badgett: And that’s not a magic trick. There is value for paying for the software and accessing the support team and having automatic updates. Like it’s not like a win lose scenario. My big takeaway from listening to you is there’s the physics of innovation. And if you really care about that and care about an open source and decentralization and empowering people, that can work with greater velocity if you are truly open source and you can still build a business around at the same time, it’s not mutually exclusive.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. It’s you don’t want to fight those factors. I think maybe like a tip that helps like the course creators and content creators out there too, or if you believe in this thing I’m talking about, it’s similar to that MP3 analogy where Spotify is the way people get their music now or similar tools.

And it’s all about the easing the delivery like they they, I’m grasping at the words here, but it’s not the actual music that they deliver. It’s the, the ease of use, they make it easier. They package it better. They, bring it to all the devices where you want it, They make it as fast as possible, all that stuff.

And I think there’s a similar thing in the content space where I’ve often told people, and I’d like to like, hands on feel this experiment. Cause, To know that it really works, but a lot of people are scared to put their content out there, or they have free content and they want to make paid content.

And now they feel like their paid content has to be better. And it’s no you already have the awesome video that teaches someone how to stop, quit drinking or how to build something or how to connect this tool. You don’t have to make a better version of that. You just have to, ease the delivery package it up in the right way that the people want, find the customers where they are and put it in the format and everywhere they want it, like just value in that. So that’s very similar in terms of like music. It’s all about delivering it to them in the way that they want our plugins with delivering it to them in the way that they want.

We make it easier for them. They’re happy to give us some money to do it. So they don’t have to download it off, get hub and figure it out on their own. And the course content that we give them, they can find the same stuff in YouTube or ask chat GPT, but. If we deliver it exactly where they want it in the format that best works for them.

And, also maybe like we segue to the AI conversation, like with the human touch people, you can ask chat GPT about things and it’s getting more and more knowledgeable and smarter and able to browse the web and figure things out and reason, but people still like learning certain things in particular from human, other humans.

And they, like chatting, I think like communities becoming more popular. It’s that’s like a, that’s a thing that you. Putting these people of like interest in the same chat room to talk with each other and facilitating that is that’s something that, you that’s valuable that people are willing to pay for it.

And it can’t be automated yet. Maybe that’s an opportunity to automate it. But,

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you have a lot of experimentation with AI and have studied it and language models and all this. And you’re definitely on the front end of all that stuff. What, how can course creators, people building coaching programs, membership sites, just building websites in general, what are some of, what are some of your principles around AI and where it’s going for the creator?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, it, for myself, I’m, trying to have an AI first mentality when I’m solving problems or doing work where. I might like struggle through a first draft on my own and I’m like, man, the AI is really good at taking my notes and turn it into a first draft take my notes turn into a first draft.

And so that’s 1, 2 is if you really embrace the tools and use them, it can speed up a lot of things and it can get you over these like creative humps that you have. And it’s It’s very similar. It’s like writing in particular, but there’s analogies to video production and other things is it’s easier to make a bad first draft and then go into edit mode and edit it.

And so using the AI, it’s like good at both those things in different ways. It’s it can help you get that bad first draft more quickly and it can also help you with the editing. So, like embracing the tools is good. I do think like in terms of the type of content the creators are making, AI is going to have an influence.

So in the short term, there’s going to be this phase where humans plus AI will make better content than AI alone or humans alone, even, and that’s similar to what happens in chess and poker and other places where computers got really good at playing those games. If you think of course, creation as a game the computer is getting good at it.

I don’t know how long that phase is going to be, but say it’s 5 years, you got to so embrace the tools and try to use them. You’ll be able to make better stuff than without it. But again back on that, like the type of content, I think, there was a kind of content that was mostly informational, It was like how to pass a test and, the language models have a lot of this even built in, or they can figure it out, they find it.

And I think they’re only going to get better. Like the, it’s just like the MP3 world, like the data’s out there. Even if the LLM in some way is going to consume someone else’s old course, regurgitate it, you can’t stop that from happening. Like the information, so courses that were informational I would fade those.

They seem less useful because people are going to have these answers, like really good versions of the answers at their fingertips, but there’s other kinds of courses, like I said, like community type stuff, bringing humans together, stuff that’s like IRL in the real world, almost what are the best places to eat in Paris is like a better course maybe in the future than how to pass X, Y, Z test because people want a human to answer obviously the LLMs can’t eat yet.

But like people, they can aggregate reviews but like people, even if you could get like the aggregated reviews and you get like the human aspect, like people want that content from a human. So I think actually ask that question, what kinds of content, what kinds of interactions do people.

Yeah. Want to do with a human, I think like art is big. So even though the generative models are good at writing, they’re good at painting and making images and stuff. There’s something like human about art that like, it, like it devalues the art when you can just ask the computer to generate a painting and you’re like I’ve seen this in my, I felt it.

Other people probably interact with these tools. They’re like, yeah, so what big deal. And you’re like, so you’re not amazed by the awesome painting of a dragon in space and like neon colors, but like art, like the story of the art, the connection to humanity, the connection to your own story, like all that stuff is real and you can’t, you can’t make, it’s not artificial.

You can’t make it. So that kind of stuff will have value. So I think like communities, stuff that’s in real life, stuff related to art, people are going to value, like learning about that stuff from humans.

Chris Badgett: What’s your take as an engineer and a developer with AI? If you’re, let’s say customizing, you want to write a custom plugin for paid memberships pro or lift your LMS and you’re not a developer.

Can AI do that? Maybe not now, maybe in the future. Like how do you use AI as a developer and where do you see it going?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, it feels like the tools now. are really good for experts and also good for training, but like a little dangerous in the tools in the hands of a beginner. And I get in certain contexts that’s okay.

But if you’ve never programmed before you like 90 percent of the time, it’ll be like 95 percent of the time, maybe 99 percent of the time you get code that works. And that’s exactly what you want. But that 1 percent of the time, like if you don’t understand. And it’s more than 1 percent now, but this stuff will get better.

But it’s often making like little mistakes, adding S’s to the end of something that totally breaks. And so people using the tools, it’s good. I tell my teams, it’s you have to check every single line that of code that the AI writes. And you, have to understand every line of code. So it speeds up the process, especially for some like tedious things that when you’re programming, there’s like tedious things that you do.

And the AI is just here’s a pattern and then you, similar to like writing content, it helps you get over that hump it gives you bad code and then you fix it up. It’s really good at if you know how to, so if you know how to program one language, it’s really good to help you learn another language.

And so that’s good. Like when the world is changing and it’s like, Hey old, timer. Now learn, react it’s shoot. And it doesn’t feel like starting at square one. It feels like you get a couple of steps ahead. Cause the, the co pilots and things like that, help you pull it up.

But if you have enough programming knowledge to know, like when something is wrong, It helps a lot. It saves time. I it’s, almost, it’s almost, it’s like calculators in school. There’s a reason to learn it’s hard. I think education is tough with LMS. Like you, you have to not have that tool.

So you learn how to do it with your human brain and appreciate it. And then okay, here’s a tool. And you’re like, oh my God, now I can do so much more. But these language models and AI now, they’re also good tutors. Like they can watch you, what you’re doing and help you learn. So there’s such a temptation, like it can just do it for you, but there’s still value in learning how to program, I think.

And you want to try to use the tool to help you learn rather than just like leaning on it to just give you the answer. It’s tough. I don’t know.

Chris Badgett: Crossing back over to the human side, if or one of the things I love about working with you and Kim is. You’re positive people, right? And you treat people well and, but you navigate complex and situations, sometimes conflict.

What I’ve learned is I know you have as well when you’re reaching, this, those so many people, the one out of 22 at every McDonald’s around the world. You’re like interacting with humanity at scale through the internet. Sometimes you get treated, a little nasty, let’s say, like in a support ticket or, just some kind of communication or a review of your software.

Even just more broadly, like working remotely when you’re not like in an office together or whatever, like sometimes people behave differently than when they’re in person, pressing the flesh, how, and it can hurt people especially if you’re sensitive and empathetic. And somebody treats you nasty when you’re trying to provide this tool and you’re genuinely care about helping them.

And how do you, how have you, it’s not just like building thick skin or whatever, like how do you navigate negativity when you’re operating at scale on the internet?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, this is, important to me. Cause I like, two reasons. One is, like you said, it’s not just developing a thick skin and getting over it I don’t know, you can’t get your skin thick enough for those negative interactions to not ruin your day.

Like the first time I I yelled at my kid cause I was like, In a mood, because I was talking with a bad customer in the morning, it was like, wow, this is wrong. I have to get a handle on this so that the negative stress of work doesn’t bleed into my, the rest of my life. And then I also, I talked to other creators, people building products, you want to sell things and they’re like, oh I would, do that.

I’d rather sell to a small number of people. Cause I don’t want to deal with the backlash or I don’t want to go on Instagram. Like people are gonna make fun of me or talk this, or I don’t want to do this. Cause these people get upset. So people are making business decisions based on like their perceived inability to handle the negative feedback in certain cases.

So I, there’s a, I’ll talk about this. I have a blog post called dealing with haters on the paid memberships pro blogs. So if you search for that, you might find it. It lays out a lot of this stuff, but, there’s some things like you can do some things to prevent it. If you have a all money guarantee give them their money back and get them away from you as soon as possible that can diffuse it.

So you don’t even have to deal with it. You can, process your refunds quickly every time someone gets upset about something like we often end up adding a line to our terms of service or tweaking on this line here. Like famously someone said you said this would be easy.

And I was like, who said business would be easy. I was like, so I was like, told the team. Scrub the word easy from our website, which is it’s like inverse marketing. Like everyone’s like the easiest plugin. And I was like, this stuff ain’t easy. And I was like, we got to find like other messaging.

That’s not easy. Cause of course we’re trying to make the software as easy to use as possible, but dude you’re, building a business. Like it’s not, going to be easy. So yeah, like up to Managing expectations helps, but you can’t avoid it because as if you go from 30, we went from consulting the products.

So we had 30 customers a year, maybe. And you could deal with it. And then actually like the way to deal with it, it’s different. Like when, you’re in consulting, you go above and beyond and someone’s getting out of line. You would just find the time poured on them over deliver.

Clear your conscience and then stop working with them, but you really could pour on the love and give them some good stuff to smooth it over but you have 30, 000 users, like you just can’t do that. And there’s so many more people who are just having a bad day.

There are raids, they’re having to fall in through the cracks. They’re upset. And they lash out at you. So so it’s like finding, so some tips too, is look for that criticism. So like I said, update the terms of service and your expectations and your copy is there positive feedback in there?

Can you like pull your most, not get defensive and be like they have a point we messed up here so you got to look for those, you can like a trick I do is like you write a draft. So to get the energy out someone calls you an asshole, try delete the email address or whatever it is.

So you don’t actually accidentally send or maybe copy it into a notepad and then type up like what you really want to say to this guy. A couple of those leaked out and got out when I’ve done that in the past. Usually I get it out of my system and then you okay, I got it off my chest. And I can try to respond to them in a What’s best for the business and them and everyone else spectating sometimes in public forums on this stuff.

I also like, yeah, just always. Reply professionally you don’t want to get involved. You don’t want to lead them on. There’s the isolate. Isolation that’s important in a number of ways. 1 is, like I said, make sure that you’re not answering customer support from your phone at the dinner table, where your kids are around do it at a time when you have time before and after.

To transition, so try to like, if you’re doing that activity, don’t just do it whenever it comes up, schedule it so that you’re doing a certain time. Also we get the higher folks to handle the support and I always try to monitor this. I feel like I’m like, putting them on the front lines of a war to like, deal with this negative energy.

Some people are just better at doing it. So they’re okay. They’re also like, they don’t take it as personal. I assume they don’t take it as personal because they’re not invested in it. Like we are. Or sometimes you’re literally saying like Jason I’d want to punch Jason in the face. So if you’re not Jason and you read that it, it, hits different.

But so we gotta take care of those people cause they but you can hire people to insulate you from it. And then so you’ll get the stress from these things. I think also like, I think I’m gonna say is you I said, you can’t avoid it. It’s going to happen.

And there’s different people who said versions of this, but like anything that’s useful and beneficial to the world is going to have people who hate it and fight it. And you don’t want to like, you want to listen to it as much as possible, but you’re like, like you can’t avoid it.

So you have to deal with that stress. And I started meditating. As a practice really helped a lot to separate and slow things down. So I’m not as responsive. Another tip then in isolation, buddy system, having people help you. Another one is like engaging with happy customers.

So we’ve done this almost as a cleansing, you get a bunch of 1 star reviews and you can, if you have access to your community through a newsletter or slack space, You can just be like, Hey do you all mind writing a positive review over at this place and just send them the link and you’ll get a few, or ask for feedback from your happy customers that like you, and you’ll get some of that.

So that’ll help warm your heart and counterbalance the negativity bias that we have in dealing with these things,

Chris Badgett: so many good tips. If we shift back to helping people get paid or just thinking about money in general, one of the things just watching you operate over almost two decades, is that’s two decades.

You’re in the long game. There’s this thing with creator economy, get rich quick, or if you’re building software, build it up and scale it and sell it as fast as possible. But you tend to, you’ve shown like. Long game chops, like playing the long game. What are your thoughts? Or, and I’m not saying that get rich quick is even a bad thing or scaling and starting software, scaling it fast and selling it as a bad thing.

But what’s, your take on the long game versus the short game when it comes to making money on the internet?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, I think there’s many paths. And so there are those other paths, but. They’re very shiny. So people are aware of them. And maybe it’s not as shiny to just have a business that grows 2025 percent per year for 20 years.

But like compounding interest, you’re like, oh, that goes from making 150, 000 a year to making 2 million a year over a few years. And so My personality is like conservative with money in a sense. Like I didn’t like taking loans or pushing for like huge wins in a sense, I we, really just always, we have an old spreadsheet when we did consulting that was how many customers, what’s the average price how much money can we expect to make?

And then the fun thing is we’ll try to grow 25 percent per year and you drag the Excel sheet down. And then you’re like, I don’t know the money we make. But the hard part of that, so that’s easy. You’re like, cool, the number moves. And I like that target. The hard part then is it forces you to figure out okay, how do we actually do that?

How can we actually make 25 percent more money? We’re either raising our prices, getting more customers or selling more stuff to the same people. And, that’s how we operated. And I guess we started there at the business. We were just Let’s try to grow. How are we going to do it?

And at some point it made sense to flop from like consulting the products. And maybe at this point in our life, we’re we still set those growth targets, but we struggle with do we really need to grow? Cause we’re, but, yeah, so maybe it’s just my personality. I think, yeah, like it’s good to know it’s an option and there, there are returns in this.

I think I’m benefiting in ways and I’ll continue to benefit that. Becoming an expert in the same thing and kind of driving home the point and working on the same thing over so long. You become an asset to the world as long as that thing is useful still. And all the people who are in it for the get quick, rich kind of bounce in and out.

And I think probably our plugins are in a phase where. There’s a lot of consolidation in the WordPress space. And this happens like in other spaces too. But we, if we’re well run profitable businesses that don’t have these issues, cause we didn’t like swing for the fences and waste a bunch of money. And so we can just sit around and as the competitors fall, we can hopefully we can pick them up, but we compete with these giant public companies.

It’s easier for them to pick up the pieces. So that’s something I have to figure out, but yeah. Yeah. So it’s like sticking with it. It, yeah. Compounding. Like it makes sense in investing the compounding interest is hard. I used to, but it also happens in terms of like your skillset and your ability to influence the world that compounds to, if you stick with it.

When around investing, one of the things I did on the investor geek site was like a spreadsheet where it was like, if you you could buy a brand new car now, or buy like a used car. And I forget it was at the time, if you save like 10, 000, all right, now invest that 10, 000 in the average stock market returns.

And then in 25 years, you’ll have a hundred grand or something like that. But I remember like enough money to buy a sports car when you’re going through your midlife crisis. So it’s like you’re fresh out of school by the use car. Now put some money away in, in an account, let it grow. And when you have your midlife crisis, you can buy a Porsche.

And so like that, like spreadsheets can show that compound growth when we don’t really feel it. It’s hard to delay gratification that way. And I, for some reason, it’s easy for me with money and things like that. It’s harder with eating the best food in the restaurant. It’s hard for me to eat a little less to delay gratification into my old age.

Chris Badgett: But yeah. Speaking of compounding, I think it was Warren Buffett who said the eighth wonder of the world is compounding. It’s one of those things like. The scale of the internet is really hard to comprehend. The power of compounding is really hard to comprehend. One of the things I look up to you with is your experience and skills and advice and investing.

And we could do a whole episode about investing. So just to frame it in for the creators out there, or if you build websites for clients, or you’re getting you’re getting paid and you’re able to like you’ve got your cost of living down and you’re thinking about what should I do with this money?

How do you think people that are new to investing should think about getting in the game and you know You can invest in your business. You can invest in yourself and your own education There’s stocks, real estate, crypto collectibles. There’s like all this stuff. And like how would you advise like an, a newer person to investing to start making some smart moves?

Jason Coleman: And yeah, maybe so a fun, maybe a fun, humble brag story to set the tone. I guess people understand investing is important. But we’ve always, we’ve worked, Kim and I have kept our expenses lean. And, always have been like set targets to invest. So it was there was a time when it was like all the money went away, we run through that and then we were lucky enough to have this skillset that we could sell.

And we we became, Hey, we can live and eat and do things. But then we operated lean so we could always save money. And so we’ve always been saving like 10 or 20 percent of our income over time which is a lot. Not everyone can get there, but we, kept that as like a, as a goal and I made some good moves in Bitcoin and Netflix and Tesla and whatever.

But the power of that is that like recent, like a few years ago, there’s this consolidation and WordPress space and people are trying to buy the plugin. And I was like, we should talk to them like this March, let’s talk to everyone and hear their best offer. And they’re making offers and they’re like, dude, this could be life changing money for you.

This could be life changing money for you. And I remember talking to Kim, I was like, what’s your number, like what’s your number that like you would need to sell the business and get out. And she gave me a number and I was like, We already have that much money. Like we’ve invested well and sure.

It feels good to have a lot of money, but it was like, I have the freedom. I didn’t have to sell my business to someone to make that money. Cause I want to send my kids through college or cause I don’t want to work. I, have the free, like Kim and I have the freedom to choose to show up and do this instead of being forced to, and that’s partially due to saving.

Being disciplined about money, saving money and letting it compound over 15 years, but so that’s it. It’s you want to, save, you want to get to that spot. If you have to spend all your money cause you’re you’re. You’re only making enough to really sustain yourself where you’re living.

You have to get there first. And then it’s you want a skill that the world values, you can parlay that into making money. So you want to set aside a big chunk. It helps to like, do it first, have a separate savings account. Like when the money comes to your check ins account, always put some into the savings account, that’s that’s the money to save.

And there’s a number of ways to do it. Like you should invest in your 401k or IRA. Most people should just invest in like total market funds, like the VTI, the NASDAQ funds, like technology. That’s like maybe one tip if you want to be like a little risky is put half your money in the QQQ, the NASDAQ has most of the tech companies.

And if you’re optimistic about technology, like I am, like they should outperform, like they continue to outperform like they have in the past. But, If you start picking stocks and things, I do that because it’s fun. I realized, it’s in my wheelhouse and especially the technology stuff that I have an understanding of how it all interplays in the players and the companies and what they’re doing.

So when I hear Microsoft say, we’re going to make AI that will change the world. And Facebook says, we’re going to make AI that will change the world. I can judge who’s really going to benefit from that. In other areas where I don’t have domain expertise, like, the energy sector or in pharmaceuticals, I, they all say the same thing.

And I was like, I can’t pick which pharmaceutical company is going to outperform. But, you want to keep it simple. And there’s different ways, the, what’s that little book of invest in John. Bogle is like invest 60, 40 portfolio, something simple. There’s timeframe ETFs.

You can just you can buy like a I’m going to retire in 30 years and they just generally invest in the stock market. So specifically what to do, like you should do that. So it Hey, make enough money to get by as soon as you do set up an account. That’s separate from your main checking account.

So you can hide the money away and you don’t feel it. And whenever you get a raise or you make more money, set aside a certain percentage of that goes into the investment account and then regularly move that money into a very generalized, Investing scheme. And that’s probably like the number one thing you can do is then as your income grows, as you’re going, like you’re continually setting aside certain amount into investing.

Chris Badgett: How do you think about time horizon for a beginner? Yeah.

Jason Coleman: For, of investing time horizons.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I heard this advice once, think of it as being a collector, not an investor. Long time horizon. Yeah. You can day trade and have short term stuff that you do, but if you’re investing for your future, just start as young as possible and forget about it, put it,

Jason Coleman: but what would you say?

There was like Robert Kawasaki, rich dad, poor dad, that, that book is decent, especially if you. Come from a poor dad. That character Kawasaki is a problematic these days, but, but I remember he had a game that like you would play, it was like Monopoly, but it was a little more real world and it was all about building assets versus expenses.

So it’s like you go on vacation, all that money leaves. If buy a stock, you get a return every year on that. If you buy a treasury bond, you get a return, or if you buy a business, it probably has a return or, that’s like a way to I just like that book talks about that, like building assets.

There’s also a good one called like Phil town has one called rule number one and then one called payback. And that’s interesting. Cause rule number one is he’s introduced to day trading and swing trading. I think actually he’s swing trader, which so swing trading is like over. You hold a investment over the course of a week or a month instead of a day.

So he’s all in and he has really good advice on picking stocks and then learning technical analysis. And his second book, he’s I was all wrong. Like I was, Investing way too active. The people who are really, rich, they just own the stock and hold it forever. And so that’s like that idea of collecting these assets over time.

I definitely have that. I think most, like I said, most people should just buy the ETF and maybe you can try to get as many shares of the VTI. It’s hard to personify like an ETF, the same way you can like net, like if you’re investing like companies, you’re like, I’m on team Facebook, I’m on team Apple.

And you can, make room for making individual investments like that. I do, when you do that, . And I do recommend you want to think of it as like you’re owning a business. You can even just take apple and chop off whatever it is, like six zeros. It’s oh it’s a company that has about 300, 000 and makes about 500, 000 a year and has about. If you are trained it’s if you’re buying a laundry mat.

First buying Apple, you can make like an investment in the stock with that same mindset. And if you’re not thinking about price going up and down, you’re just it is a superpower. If you’re investing in individual stocks to have a five year timeframe. Cause no, no one does really like you, like managers have a yearly timeframe.

They have to deliver. The fund managers who buy most of the stocks they have to deliver every year. And so they’re making moves and you’re like, only Warren Buffett is the guy who’s buying and holding stocks forever. And so you have an advantage if you can sit out the swings, but it’s hard.

You have to be able to, met like when stock you buy goes down, see it as a positive, if you really feel invested in the company, like I know it’s temporary. It’s easy though. It’s easier to hold that stock and you want to buy you like it’s on sale by more. If you’re thinking 5 years out and you have some kind of model saying it’s going to be worth 2 times 5 years out, you don’t mind that it dips 10, 20, even 50 percent now.

I don’t know. So yeah, just rambling about the way that, yeah, having that five year timeframe on those kinds of investments, no one, because no one else is thinking on that timeframe, it’s a superpower. Like you’re, it gets a little technical, but there’s things like, I always lose like options trading, like when options expire, that’s like a gamble you can say I think they’re going to win.

They’re going to lose. There’s like literally super computers that are analyzing all the trades and then they just figure out how to suck up all the money. Like they’re just Oh, like they have enough money that they can like manipulate the market. It’s like tinfoil hat stuff, but it’s effectively happening.

They can manipulate the market to have a stock go down. Everyone, like the most amount of people lose money on their options, then the stock goes back up and they get in. And so it’s like, when you’re. It’s like playing online poker and you’re playing with bots that are superhuman. If you’re, but if you’re investing on a short timeframe you’re literally investing against computers that are superhuman on it, but the computers aren’t investing on the five year timeframe.

So it’s like a different game. You’re like, you get to go hang out with the old guys at the poker lodge and they’re playing Omaha and they never even read a book, so it’s I’d rather be in that poker game that then a poker game with a bunch of computers that are better than I am.

I’m

Chris Badgett: sure you’d agree with me that if you must be a gambler or a DGN do it with 5% or some smaller percent or after a certain threshold. Like you don’t Yeah. It’s not like you have to choose to you can split that focus and like still feed that need to pick stocks ’cause they’re fun or try something risky, but Yeah.

Yeah. Don’t bet the farm,

Jason Coleman: right? Yeah, I think so. That’s like common advice I don’t know where it’s 10% or 5% you want. It’s good. You, I always treat it like, like it’s educational. And even, like I said I, always lose that, that options trading thing. I still do it from time to time. Cause it forces me to interact in the market in a way I don’t usually.

And I learn a lot and I lose money, but it’s a relatively small amount. It’s less than 10 it’s like less than 1 percent of what I have invested. I’m making bets on stuff like that. So yeah, if you have that mindset of it’s a small amount of money, I can lose it, I’m going to do this investment.

I’m going to learn. In the process, like you can’t lose, even if you lose the money, you’re like, okay I’ve learned a new way to lose money and I’m glad it was only extra cent and not everything. And I think that’s good. Cause sometimes I think there are opportunities. If you really understand the business well.

And the stock is on sale, if you had bought individual stocks before, you’ll feel more confident to be able to do it now, so you won’t miss those opportunities if you, educate yourself on that. But I struggle with that because I’m like a nerd about this and I spend like hours every day interacting with it.

And I’m like, if I didn’t do that, I don’t know, like, how it. But if, yeah, if you are going to do it, it’s good to do it. Like with that mindset of I’m going to learn and it’s a small amount of money. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s Jason Coleman from paid memberships pro and partner at lifter LMS with his wife, Kim Coleman.

Thanks for coming on the show, Jason. I really appreciate it. I’d encourage you to go check out paid memberships pro as a paid memberships pro. com. They also have a feature for using LMS together called streamline. So you can actually use both tools side by side if you want, and it’s great to be on the journey with you, Jason.

Any final words for the people as we say goodbye or other ways that people can track you or connect with you on the Internet?

Jason Coleman: That’s good. I am on X Twitter, Jason underscore Coleman. That’s a decent way to follow. My occasional posting and get in touch with me by DM or something there.

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

Thanks so much for coming on the show and I look forward to doing it again with you sometime.

Jason Coleman: All right. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everyone.

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In this LMScast episode, Will Middleton talk about his path from high school dropout to successful solopreneur by the time he is 22.

Will Middleton is from WP Course Guide. Will talks about how he first felt unsatisfied with regular schooling and how he decided to become an entrepreneur because he was afraid of living an empty existence. His introduction into the WordPress community happened when the CEO of LifterLMS extended an opportunity to him to work as a freelance copywriter.

Will developed his own firm and produced instructional material throughout the years, going from a beginner to a WordPress guru. To foster development, he underlines the need of always learning, adjusting, and facing personal anxieties.

His capacity to relate to consumers by discovering their problems and offering customized solutions is essential to his success. would counsels business owners to meet customers where they are, provide relevant material, and interact with them in a way that would draw in new business. His experience emphasizes the need of tenacity, compassion, and interpersonal relationships in creating a profitable internet company.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s been a while since Will’s been on, but we’ve got Will Middleton. He’s from WP Course Guide. Will has a fascinating journey and story. We’re going to talk about how will by the age of 22 build a successful one person web development solopreneur business how that started how it’s going and the journey along the way I think you’re going to find this a lot of fun.

Welcome to the show will

Will Middleton: thank you. Yeah that journey that was That’s a really good journey to be talking to you about yeah dive in i’m happy to be here

Chris Badgett: Life is a journey that, it’s always a process of becoming and changing and all that stuff, but just to frame it in for you out there watching or listening what was your first step into the online business world?

Can you set the stage for us of where this journey started?

Will Middleton: Yeah. So being a kid in high school, like really discontent, not liking the system, not believing in a future where I had like college and a high school diploma. I don’t know, I was just lost. I didn’t really know what I was going to be doing.

And so I I was like, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m going to take the ACT SAT and I’m going to get into a college. I’m just going to go to college and be like not interested in high school anymore. Just go into college. But then I’m like if I can get into college without a high school degree, could I get into my career without a degree?

Could I, Maybe not go to college because what do I want to go to college for? When I sit down and ask that question, I really just don’t know the answer. And so I am in this position of being a 15 year old, having a midlife crisis as 15 year olds usually do. And then I’m like, okay, the solution to my life now is to be an entrepreneur.

I’m going to drop out of high school and then just start being an entrepreneur, whatever that means. And then The CEO of the company, my mom worked for at the time. Cause I was in Boy Scouts and stuff. So she’d talk about me, here and there. And so CEO knew I existed and was like, Hey. Does we’ll want to position writing for our podcast is regarding marketing entrepreneurship courses.

I sounds like that’s what we’ll try to get into. And yeah, so so I got hired into that. And that was at Lifter LMS. That was the LMS cast. That was you hiring me into being like a freelance copywriter. And this is before I had really opened WordPress. I probably opened WordPress before, but I like I’m like, I don’t know.

I added a page and I don’t know what to do. Like I’m just gonna do this in HTML. And then to eventually becoming like a WordPress expert, full time WordPress person, and now business owner.

Chris Badgett: And so that was seven years ago and tell us where you’re at today.

Will Middleton: Today is very far from the beginning.

It’s like today is. I’m like a developer running my own agency, creating my own knowledge based business content working with clients mostly with Lifter LMS, but just really anybody who uses WordPress, I’m just doing that thing. And so basically just the, I don’t know, work from home, be your own entrepreneur person, that’s what I’m doing.

And I’m. Just experimenting with creating different kinds of content. I’m experimenting with what it means to take content to a higher level. Some course creators might be in that position where they have a course and they’re like, I’m not really proud of this, but my customers tell me they like it and that’s the position I’m at where I’m like, I look at my content and I’m like, Whoa.

That wasn’t like wonderful quality. It’s like how I look at my videos from years ago and they’re like useful and stuff and they get a couple thousand views, but it’s like how to do this, how to do that in WordPress where I feel like I could create something more interesting or high quality.

So it’s I got some validation with my courses and stuff, and now I want to take it to the next level. In addition to running an agency, that’s where I’m at.

Chris Badgett: Nice. A lot happened in that time period. One of the things I’ve always admired about you is. You have an extreme growth mindset and an ability to learn on the fly, continuously improve, try on different things.

I’ve seen you be a writer, a designer, a website builder, a developer, a manager of people, and the list goes on and on, an entrepreneur in your own stuff, an affiliate, like you do, you like, Try the whole menu and then you keep evolving to the things you enjoy where you create the most value and all that.

But at the core of that, that enabled you to try on so many different hats and evolve as your own entrepreneur. What was the underlying motivation that, you wake up every day. And what motivated you and still does to this day. And maybe those motivations change as you go, but tell us about the motivation.

Will Middleton: I totally think they change. I think the motivation has changed a lot, for years I’d been chasing things that were like external of me of Oh, I want to be an entrepreneur. And I want to have a cool car because entrepreneurs have cool cars I want to have but I now have a Honda element.

And that’s like the coolest car I could imagine, but it’s not the Ferrari I was thinking of. So I did absolutely have external goals along the way the whole time. But I think the real motivation was like fear. If I’m being honest, like it’s the fear, like I was zooming back to being in high school and being like, I don’t want to do this.

Like my fear is like that I’m not going to live a fulfilling life if I don’t go for this. I’m not going to like. I don’t know what am I going to do with my life? I have no vision for my life, I have no goals. And I don’t see myself anywhere 10 years from now, I feel bad about that. I know that I don’t see my future and I feel bad about it.

And so I was very afraid. And so I left high school and I’m like, I’m going to pursue any other life. Then, so I’m like, the only way that I’m ever going to work this math out where I’m happy in life is if I take action today, I’m going where I want to go, where I say I want to go. And so fear asked me to leave high school.

And then I. Was super excited, super motivated. I remember when my, I first asked you in like an email of Hey Chris, do you think you could meet with me once a month for an hour while I figure out how to be an entrepreneur? Like just for six months, timeframe, six meetings. You’re like, yeah.

And I was like jumping around my room because I’m like, okay, I’m really afraid of high school and I’m really pulled towards this future. And so then, and then I go into it and I start doing lifter things. I start building sites for clients, start learning how to use LFTR. I built my own online course that completely flopped, but it was the experience of learning how to use the platform and learning what failure felt like for the fifth time of just trying to be an entrepreneur, trying to create new projects, trying to put myself out there.

And it was in the LFTR space where I found a lot of success with things where I was talking about Elementor I’d go into the Facebook group and I would, answer questions about like someone would ask a question, I would copy and paste it into the title of the video, make the video, post the video, reply in the comments of the video in like under an hour.

And I was like, so proud of myself. It was like a game. And then I was manning the Lifter LMS sales chat. You’re like, Hey, how about like a commission sales basis. And I’m like, sure. So I started selling Lifter products in the chat, answering questions, fuels that to fuel my experts program where I was doing like copy and paste content entry, site migrations, quality checking on websites was doing those things.

In addition to doing things in Lifter side by side. And so I was like afraid of okay, I’m doing content entry. I’m afraid if I don’t grow my career, like I could do copywriting, I can do. This and that, if I don’t grow though, in this world where growth is happening so fast, how am I going to get to the next level?

So I’m always focused on trying to learn something new and it’s like a problematic pattern, but it’s also like helpful, but it’s also problematic. It’s I don’t know. Yeah, so I’m always growing of I know, caught writing. Let’s learn how to build sites, let’s learn how to like just build sites from scratch.

Let’s learn it, learn how to do consulting, troubleshooting errors, developing code and the billion things that are in between. Just learning new things and trying new things all the time. It was all out of fear. And so then I’m like, how am I going to live a life that I’m not really afraid of? It’s I got to lean into my true, like passion and authenticity and whatever.

I don’t know what any of that means, but I’m trying to figure it out. And so figuring it out through creating things in the world. So that’s how I got from like where I’m at to where I’m at now, like out of fear.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. One of the things that really impresses me about you that I noticed very early in your career is your ability to work with human beings, because in the online business world, there’s all, there’s this myth of like money coming out of the laptop, you like set something up and money flows into your bank account or whatever.

There’s like hardware, software, and then what I call wetware, which is the human beings. There’s still human beings involved in this process. And there’s clients that want things done. There’s software users that have real feelings, emotions, wants, goals, needs, and so on. Like selling and is like a very human thing.

Like when you’re talking to people during a sales process, you naturally, Were a natural at talking to all different types of people from all kinds of different backgrounds with all kinds of different needs Where do you think that skill comes from and where do you? What are your thoughts around the human part of online business?

Will Middleton: Yeah, I always think about humans. I can’t stop thinking about humans like all the time. I like your term wet where but where’s the human part? That’s what I would say if I like peed my pants during a client meeting. But I think where I God so I was always trying to read people as a kid and figure out like, if I could, I was like always seeking validation because I’m like, Oh, the adult, I was like a only child.

And so I’m like, always looking for attention of adults. All the people I hung out with were adults, but I was a kid and I wasn’t an adult. So I was like, they were writing shopping lists and I would see they’re writing a list and I didn’t know how to write or what words were, but I was like, take a, took a pen and was like forming lists, just mimicking what other people were doing.

That’s always what I’ve been doing, where I’m like, I see something, I want someone I like, and I go try to figure out how they do what they do. And so in that process, when people ask questions, I have this idea of what’s going on in their brain. That’s like mostly wrong, but I’m like, what.

What would be the perspective of this person asking this question as the best response they could get? So maybe a video, like in the Facebook group, people go to the Facebook group because they don’t want to read the documentation. And we’re the code, right? They’re clearly in a place where their, whatever solution they were looking for didn’t answer their question even though it might have answered the question if they looked closer.

What I’ll then do is create a piece of content basically exactly answering their question exactly where they’re at. Instead of being like, oh, we’ll go cite this material elsewhere because you haven’t done enough work into this. But I’ll try to meet people where they’re at. And so with that idea of meeting people with her at mentally, that’s where I got into that idea of trying to connect with people and trying to really understand what people’s problems are in addition to also like secretly manipulating myself and other people in negative ways.

But that’s what I’m working on now. And like figuring out how I can like actually be authentic, actually have fun without trying to dress a certain way or act a certain way or speak a certain way to make somebody else think something specific of me, because it also develops that problem too. Like imposter syndrome with online course creation is do I really have the expertise to put this out there? Do I really? Because I go into that right to yes, last night where I’m like making this membership is this really high quality enough? Does this really feel good enough? But it really feels good to me. And so what I’m doing is basically making content to answer other people’s questions directly.

In addition to making content to answer my own questions regarding getting more social media engagement or whatever problem I’m working on. So that’s how I try to meet people where they’re at. And also use the telepathy to try to read the

Chris Badgett: universe. All right. I’ll ask you one of the most popular questions that people come to this podcast for whether they’re building websites for clients or they’re building courses, coaching programs, memberships.

A lot of people want to know how to get more clients. One of the things I’ve noticed with you, we have a thing called the lifter LMS experts program. Will’s on there with a bunch of other people as well. You can find them at WP course guide. com by the way, if you want to reach out to him, but. Some people in the experts program tend to generate a lot more client lead flow and whether it’s the experts program or anywhere on the internet, what have you learned in terms of how to get more.

Clients, how can people get more clients? What have you thought about what you do that actually generates a client, a lead, and then ultimately a sale? It’s two step process.

Will Middleton: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. It’s like the answer to the last question is the meeting people where they’re at is I think a lot of business owners don’t try to meet people where they’re at.

I think they try to make people come to them, especially when they’re starting out, that can be a huge, complicated thing because you don’t even have the identity or thesis for what your business is going to be in the longterm figured out, or maybe you already have. do have it figured out and it’s been working for you for years, but now it’s no longer working and it’s time to pivot the business model to start like producing milk chocolate because online courses are declining and milk chocolate is gaining.

It’s just cause you’re looking at like the online course industry inclining every year is like a good reason to get into it. There’s like a lot of other people who are doing that. A lot of other people at different experience levels who are doing that. And WordPress as a whole is interesting because it’s like.

software that anyone can use to make website. You don’t necessarily need to know how to code. So it’s just lowering the barrier to entry like Lifter LMS and all the plugins of the WordPress ecosystem that are free like Lifter LMS is you can just get those plugins, put them on your website and start to build something that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to build without like higher levels of experience.

And sure you could take a computer science course and learn to code. It’s ah, that’s going to take you like three years. It’s taken me about eight so far and it’s still like amateur, not done, but like However long it takes you to learn things, you’re gonna have to go through some kind of learning journey.

And the more you can compress that learning journey for people, even though there’s already content on the internet that’s out there that can answer their questions probably more concisely and better than you can, but that’s okay because you can also answer the content and put it out there. And whether you’re creating a course or whether you’re, like, being an expert trying to get more clients, It’s the same thing about meeting people where they’re at and trying to answer their, the questions they have.

If you’re a developer who likes to build your own plugins from scratch, but most of the demand for projects is like, Hey, I just need this small customization. I just need a little PHP snippet or something. I’m not looking for a whole custom job, I’m not looking to get into a three or 5, job. I’m just looking for like really relatively basic thing and a plugin that’s going to be easy to edit.

And WordPress is becoming more easy to edit. By more people. The more that happens and the more you can ride the wave of like really meeting people where they’re at instead of just trying to be where you’re at. Your solution.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that makes sense. Part of your journey that I’ve found fascinating is just your relationship with technology.

So what I mean is you mentioned earlier you were making content about Elementor and I’ve seen you, get into cadence. I’ve seen you get into full site editing. Lifter rolled out a new theme, full site editing theme called Skypilot. And you really mastered that. Development houses, all its tools and tooling.

And there’s some of, for some folks that can be overwhelming. Like it’s a moving target and tools are changing. What the market wants is changing. But you seem to just do dance with the tools and just go with the flow. What is your approach to. Technology tools in a way that doesn’t create overwhelm.

And I’m sure you do get overwhelmed sometimes about whatever, learning something, but you tend to evolve with the market and just keep upgrading yourself and trying different things and using what works best for you. How do you do that?

Will Middleton: Yeah. So I think Kurt, who’s not on this call, but is on a bunch of other calls will completely agree with this.

And I’m going to. I’m going to put words in his mouth in this situation because I’m confident this would also be his answer. And also your answer, right? Is you just, I go, maybe I go into things I’d like. It’s have you seen those game shows where there’s like pad, it’s like a Ninja warrior, American Ninja warrior, or, but like the ones where the props are moving and stuff, some people just completely eat it.

And some people like gracefully move through it, but nobody could gracefully move through it the first time. Like the first time to go through an American Ninja warrior course is to go like smash your face in. on the second jump into the little course is or to practice slowly over time.

I’m not really a fan of practicing slowly over time. I’d rather just get into the Ninja Warrior stuff and just work on each individual skill until I could get it. And so it’s like going into those obstacle game show courses where you get knocked down, you build a course site, nobody shows up, you, you like try to generate an interest list and nobody’s interested, but it’s it’s free.

I’m making a free program. All my content is free on the internet and nobody cares. That’s like getting hit. with a some moving piece of plastic and falling into a bucket of water it like feels terrible and you don’t want to get back up again you don’t want to try again because you just got humiliated and physically hurt at the same time but it’s like you can you can get up and do it again and Develop an interest in that and then it’s like you will just get to the point where you can do what other people perceive to be complicated in a graceful way.

A lot of people in the audience can already do that because if you’re like experienced with life, when he or beyond or whatever, you could your daughter made a course when she was like really small. It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you like have any life experience or have learned to do anything or learn to change in any way.

Or have changed in any way. There’s something there that you can do gracefully that other people admire. And that’s like what you would tap into for learning technology, learning marketing, learning photography, and teaching a course about it, learning how to even do instructional design and what to create a course, how to help people learn, like anything can be done gracefully if you just spend enough time with it, I think.

Chris Badgett: I’ve watched you go through three distinct kind of. Milestones when it comes to becoming a solopreneur developer. The first stage at the beginning is you learn how to talk about the product, like you were doing pre sales before you were listening to other people on the podcast, talk about what they’re doing and stuff,

Will Middleton: and then

Chris Badgett: you get into the build phase where you start building websites and this is what makes WordPress and tools like Lifter LMS and everything so awesome is that anybody can build with this, you don’t have to be a developer.

But then there’s this third phase where, Oh, I’m 95 percent happy with the website I’ve built, but I need a, I need some custom code, like something custom developed. And you’ve learned how to do that. How have you what were the key things that got you from one phase to the next?

Will Middleton: Like I talked about earlier in fear and it’s like going into your warrior course where you’re going to get knocked into the water.

But like the fear of not moving becomes so great at some points in time. I think if you’re listening to this podcast right now, you’re either an entrepreneur or you Are considering being an entrepreneur, right? Or you’re trying to maybe incorporate online courses into an existing business.

So you’re an intrapreneur at that point, right? You’re doing things that most people aren’t doing as if you’re listening to this. And so in that. There’s automatically this kind of person who likes to improve themselves or improve other things. They’re trying to take action that’s different from what the world is doing in some kind of way, whether it means starting your own business as an entrepreneur or working within someone else’s business in unique ways as an entrepreneur, whatever you are in the spectrum, being here means that you like to upgrade in some way.

And the fear of not changing as you’ve experienced in life becomes so great that you need to change. You need to Figure things out in a new way. Like life becomes so painful and the fear becomes so great that you need to change and move on to the next thing. You need to navigate to the next stage.

It’s like Angela Brown, someone who has a wonderful LMS cast. Podcast episode here. And she talks about that change of I’m in the middle of my life. I have this skill and I need to learn a bunch of digital skills to upgrade my business.

Chris Badgett: She became a builder. She learned how to put the site together by watching videos.

Will Middleton: Yeah. And it’s there’s that kind of personality that I think people watching this. People watching other episodes, reading case studies can tell that everyone in the community has this kind of idea that they’re trying to affect the world in some way. That requires just sometimes leveling up or changing what you do entirely.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, going on a quest. And sometimes you don’t have to become the developer too. You don’t have to learn how to write code you can hire somebody like will at wpcourseguide. com but at least getting Like at least learning some of the basics of hey, how do websites work and what? What is the plugin and what is the theme and all this stuff?

If knowledge is power, right? Yeah.

Will Middleton: Yeah. And so get this, I have all this expertise and I’m a genius, but if you know how to open the WordPress editor and go to the WP admin and log in, things that some WordPress users don’t know how to do seriously, I’ve been on a lot of calls lately where I’m like, how do you log into WordPress?

Is it a WordPress. com or WordPress? Free open source software on a hosting company. Some people don’t know the answer to that question. If you don’t know the answer, that’s okay. But they’re like, I don’t know. I log into my hosting or and I click log in, it just sends me and it’s we don’t know what the WP admin is like.

No. And maybe you’ve logged into WordPress just once and understand the WP admin because you’re interested in the open source software piece of it. But even now that’s open source hosting companies still just give you auto log in links. Even if you use those links, or have used the links, and you learn that there’s a WordPress admin, you can make a video and tell people, Hey, here’s how you log into WordPress.

It’s different than Squarespace. And guess what happens when you back, log into the back end of WordPress? There’s more customization. You can do all these plugins. Isn’t this crazy? There’s a lot of people here contributing to them. You know so much that you can communicate. gracefully then you need to make content about it.

That’s a much, as much knowledge as you need to make content about how to build things in WordPress. So I always had this perception that like I needed to be a developer or I needed to be a better salesperson or a better marketer or a better customer success for something. I just needed to upgrade my game in some way in order to be good enough.

But I think with what you do know now, you are definitely good enough, even though it doesn’t feel like it. And trust me, I’ve been not feeling good enough for eight years. from day one. I’m like, I don’t know enough. And now it’s day later. It’s sometime in the future. And I’m like, I still don’t know enough.

And I know that in the future, I’m going to feel the same way. So I’m like, just make the content with the knowledge you have today. And don’t be ashamed of clicking the publish button.

Chris Badgett: One of the things that. I’ve seen you do well. And this goes back to working with human beings. One of the challenges of let’s say a business owner and a consultant or developer website builder is getting on the same page with communication.

Sometimes the client doesn’t have a fully formed idea or maybe they’re. They got some quote, bad advice or like over focusing on this one piece when there’s like a lot more things we have to consider here. What advice do you have to create like a winning relationship between a web developer and a client?

But speaking to both sides of the table, what would you tell the aspiring solopreneur developer? And what would you tell? a client to put them at ease about your expertise and being like a trusted advisor in the consulting process. Talk to both those people.

Will Middleton: Yeah. I think there’s a level of like where a client comes to you and you clearly know how to do everything they’re asking you to do.

And so then you just yeah, of course we could do that. There’s no problem there. It’s only a matter of seconds. Don’t worry about it. And so it’s like way over, and so you’re going to undersell your jobs there though. You’re going to undersell the value. You’re going to undersell the fact that the person came to you with questions.

There’s an aspect there that I missed for years about the fact that you’re coming to me with questions, I want to thank you for, and I want to make you feel good about the fact that you came to me for questions. It’s not what are you, did you seriously. Book a 30 minute call with me to ask me about this thing that there’s documentation about or this thing I did a video about that’s don’t do that.

I was in that for years where it’s like, Oh, I want to give people the most useful solution possible. And I know what’s best useful for them, but that’s not really true. And so sometimes people will come to you and you will know everything about how to do the project up front, but really taking the time to be intentional with the process is going to unlock a lot of insights with those projects.

Maybe everyone in the audience already knows that, but it took me years to figure that out. That’s when customers come to you with jobs that you already know everything to do, I think a more complicated situation is when people come to you with jobs and you’re like I know how to do 30 percent of that.

And I speculate about the other 70 percent about that this might be able to be done. And the more tools you learn, the more you learn WordPress, the more you learn more plugins, the more you’ll have in your toolkit to do. to build with the 30 percent might become more like 70%. But in some projects you’ll still have an under unknown degree amount of stuff.

You want to figure out it’s complicated emotional experience, but I think presenting it to the client saying Hey, okay, this is what I’m confident on. And this is what I still need to figure out. Going and figuring it out or it, okay. So if going and figuring it out is something that’s going to take too much money, don’t be afraid of a discovery process.

I just started doing discovery processes for, With project work lately, not people are doing how they work, but like project work. And it’s cool. It’s cool as hell. I’m like, you know what? Give me one hour, give me two hours of time, give me 150, 300 bucks. We’re going to figure out the scope. These are, I’m going to use this time to figure out what we don’t know now.

Chris Badgett: And it’s not fully formed

Will Middleton: It’s not fully formed. And people lie about it being fully formed. They’re like, this is where projects get tangled up. They’re like, yes. I know how to use a REST API. I can do this. The REST API doesn’t have the right endpoints. What am I going to do? And so you need to make sure that you’re communicating 100 percent truth.

And you might know everything, but maybe then you want to communicate more of like, why did someone come to me with questions and how can I best help them? You might come to you with unknown information and sometimes they’ll come to you and 100 percent of the project, like I have no clue how to do that, but I’m excited to figure it out.

And then if you tell them that they might still hire you. But yeah, that’s my opinion on that.

Chris Badgett: It’s funny. I love that way you describe that because If you look at, agency websites or solopreneur websites on the internet, everybody knows how to do everything. But the reality is that, it’s usually like, all right, I think I have 60 percent I’m rock solid here.

Maybe there’s some unknowns, maybe there’s a new skill I have to learn. Maybe I have to like, Hire an outsourced person to help me fulfill this complete scope. Yeah. What do you think is a healthy what’s it, what would you say is an average healthy percentage that like you should feel super confident with as long as you have the ability to learn and, figure out the pieces.

Cause I think some people oversell and what’s more common is people undersell or don’t believe in themselves and their ability. And their resourcefulness. So what is it like, as long as you’ve got like a 50 percent lock on it, you’re probably good. Or is it more like 60 or 80 or, should you probably stay away from projects where you know how to do 10 percent of it?

I’m sure that’s an, it depends answer, but what would you say?

Will Middleton: Never. Always take every project.

I think if you’re looking for projects, if you’re looking for new projects, if you need new, if you don’t really know what your, it depends on where you’re at in your career, really, I don’t think it depends on whether you know a certain percentage of the project.

It’s like, where are you at in your career? And like, where are you looking to go next? If you don’t know these things, take everything that comes in the door and figure out how you feel about it. But if you’re like at the point where you’re like, oh, okay, I know what I want to do. I know what’s next for me to develop in my life.

And I want to align my money and my personal development with the same thing so that I can build the life I want to, you might be at either stage. You like, I think at different times we’re in either stage, maybe I get married and have a kid and I like now change the part of my life. I’m in dramatically into I’m back in scarcity.

Just trying to make money. Like it could be that But I think the percentage of confidence you need is 100 percent confidence that you’re telling the truth and that everybody knows the truth because if you’re a handyman and you’ve had no experience with sinks ever, you don’t, you’ve never opened the bottom of a sink, but you’ve replaced toilets, then it’s you could communicate that to the person be like, look, I have no clue how to operate on a sink.

I’ve never installed a garbage disposal, I’ve never cut pipes. I’ve done what’s what I think is easier things. Up to this point, but I’m totally willing to give it a try. This is what it’s going to look like for me to maybe I could figure out sync by watching a YouTube video. Sorry.

There’s a siren in the background. Can you hear that?

Chris Badgett: It’s not very loud. It’s very faint. I think it’s

Will Middleton: going to get louder. That’s okay. I think

Chris Badgett: the noise canceling is working. Okay.

Will Middleton: Noise canceling technology, the future. Yeah. So if If you’re up front about not knowing how to work on things, but you’re like saying, okay, give me an hour to figure it out.

They might go with that. Or you could say I don’t, I’m not going to be able to figure this out until I get into it. So then you’re like but guess what? I’m going to communicate with you. The whole time about where I’m at, what I’m thinking and where we’re out on price. And then if I can’t do it for you, I’m, I’ve got a recommendation of where you can go next.

Fiverr. com go back to the Lifter LMS experts page. Maybe you actually do know somebody who might be an upgraded service who could help them. But as long as you’re honest up front, I’ve had people willing to pay me what I thought was a lot of money, like sway way so much money at the time. I was like, it was like 50 bucks an hour.

Cause I was like, like a 17 year old kid. I’m like, Oh my gosh. And so then I’m like, 17 year olds are teenagers, not kids, specifically different category. But they, cause I hate it when people call me a kid and now I call everybody a kid. I call people like 70 years old. I’m like, Hey kid. But sorry that’s a rabbit hole.

But yeah, I think that people would pay me just to figure it out because they’re like, Oh, this is a bright kid. I want to invest in their future or whatever. And you could be a kid. Like I said, up until you’re about 70 years old. So it doesn’t matter. Yeah. What you know or don’t know as long as other people are honestly communicated about it and you’re like Willing to work together.

It’s just what do you feel good about really figuring that out?

Chris Badgett: What would you say about niching? I mean for you just based on your journey You ended up in this e learning niche and you were there for a very long time and you’re still there And some people who want to become web developers, they’re like, I don’t really have a niche.

I like to write code or I like to build websites how, and it’s not like you don’t have any interests outside of e learning and you’ve built stuff outside of e learning, but you’ve done a lot in the e learning industry. How much of that. Just niche focus, do you think contributes to your success as a builder?

Will Middleton: I don’t know. I don’t have any clue at all. Actually. The I was, I don’t, I really don’t know. It’s like I was answering the questions that were in front of me. The people who had their ears open, I talked to them. And so those people are in the flow of

Chris Badgett: demand.

Will Middleton: In the flow of demand, wherever you are in the flow of demand is where you start.

That’s what I think a lot of people don’t go with online courses, entrepreneurship. I didn’t years. It’s I’m always trying to resist it. Okay, how am I going to get to, how am I going to get to Vegas? And how am I going to make a billion dollars? And how am I going to be in cool hotels all the time?

It’s no, I’m not there. I’m in Minnesota. And I’m figuring out what I can do with the opportunities in front of me right now. And so that approach led me to a very niche community because we’re at a time in the economy where niche services are popular. It’s very popular with forum questions about very specific questions because AI and all this stuff is becoming better at like generating generic answers that like more specific answers are just becoming higher demand.

These terrible videos I made that are outdated from years ago are getting more views than ever because I’m like, I don’t know. It’s very specific and AI is getting so good at being generic with people and it’ll get good at being specific too. So then we’ll have to do something else like being beef farmers, but, like something else to stimulate the economy in a way that robots can’t.

But while you have an opportunity to answer questions in front of you in a way that could potentially lead to making money or having an offering, I think you’re good to go. Whether those questions are generic, whether it’s like your grandma asking you how to connect to the internet, and so then you make a YouTube video about how to set up that kind of router, Or like you’re trying to fix the box fan in your room because it has too much lint on the freaking blades.

And I don’t know how to take the box fan apart. I’ve looked it up on the internet. There’s no video. So then Will records a video about it, puts it on the internet. No matter where you’re at in your learning journey, fixing a fan, connecting to the internet, or learning very weird, complicated WordPress things, whatever questions people are asking you, answering those will be the path to unlocking your community.

Chris Badgett: One last question for the. Agency folks out there for your clients that you’ve worked with long term. What do you see as the keys to like long term client relationship?

Will Middleton: Okay. I like this. This is a wonderful question. I think having just an awesome time. That’s what I think it is like the experience matters.

Yeah. Experience does matter. But sometimes you don’t have experience. Sometimes you’re going into a space where you’re like, Oh because I think you need this is a fun framework. I like this framework. You need to be able to get jobs done fast. You need to be able to get jobs done cheap or you need to be able to get jobs done with high quality.

I think you’ll need two of these three things. I think two of the three things are very important, right? Get a high quality job with a lot of money, high quality job, very fast. Yeah. That’s going to cost a lot of money. But then you get the one that’s a cheap job and it is high quality, but then you sacrifice time.

It takes a long time to get that job done. It’s an Angela Brown story where you learn it over the course of eight years or like my story, it took a long time. Or you could get, what’s the third permutation? Time and quality is expensive quality and time is quality and cheap is longterm.

What is cheap and quality. Okay. No cheap in time. If you get it, if you get it fast and cheap, it’ll be low quality. Yeah, if I was drawing this on an iPad, this would be so much easier. But yeah yeah so we need some combination of those skills to be able to offer services, but you might not have.

Quality, you might have time because I show up to my calls on time. I’m available tomorrow. I’m available today, but very fast, very cheap, but I have no clue what I’m doing and you can still make it. I’ve had clients. I still have clients. I talked to today at 150 an hour rates that I was talking to at 30 an hour.

Like I, most of my money comes from clients on repeat. And that’s scary. But it’s good. And so it’s like the more you can optimize the honesty and what you can help people with, and you’re continuing growing, no matter where you’re at in your journey, building products, starting from nothing, you will make it to where you want to be by just focusing, or you won’t make it to where you want to be by not focusing on it.

Chris Badgett: I like that. And over time, you build trust because you’re honest. The experience of working with you is great. They know that when you’re like, I’m 80 percent on this one, but I got to figure this 20 percent out. They learn to trust that, that your ability to figure it out. And That’s awesome.

This has been a great chat, Will. I really appreciate it. You can reach out to Will at WPCourseGuide. com. Do you have any other final words for the people or other ways they can connect with you?

Will Middleton: I think the way you said to connect with me is the perfect way to connect with me. I think that if you’re listening to this podcast, then you know the moment to start is now.

Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming on the show. We’ll have to do another update in another eight years and see what you’re doing. Cause like I said, you just have a, you’ve demonstrated tremendous growth and just continuous improvement and just you’re basically like a learning machine and like a problem solving guy that does great work with people.

So it’s great to be with you on the journey. Thanks for coming on the show.

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In this LMScast episode, Christian Taylor from Craylor Academy discuss his path to YouTube, which began as a pastime when he was roughly ten years old. Christian describes his present arrangement as a primarily single creator who receives help from two independent contractors, a creative director and a video editor. He discuss about Monetizing YouTube channel with online courses.

Christian methods of monetizing YouTube are sponsorships, affiliate links, and ad money. In addition, he is investigating course development; he started a free course to establish his platform and is thinking about offering paid courses in the future. But because courses must be updated frequently, particularly with regard to technology-based material, he finds the process more difficult.

The discussion then turns to why Christian decided to build his course platform with WordPress and LifterLMS rather than hosted SaaS options like Teachable or Kajabi. Christian appreciates WordPress’s flexibility and control, particularly with relation to price, data ownership, and independence from a single provider. He likes that WordPress is open-source, so he can move his content around with ease if needed and stay independent of possible platform changes or shutdowns.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Christian Taylor. He’s a YouTuber. You can find him at Craylor made on YouTube. He’s also a course creator, which you can find his work over there at Craylor dot Academy. Welcome to the show, Christian.

Christian Taylor: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to talk to you because you make such good videos, your YouTube channel successful, I think with almost 50, 000 subscribers, something like that. Some of your I was looking at some of your most popular videos that have over 400, 000 views, and I love how engaging your content is. It was fun to run across you at a WordCamp for the first time, but I’m excited to get into it.

A lot of course creators either come out of YouTube. Or they want to get into YouTube because they know they want to do some content marketing that way, maybe generate other streams of income, but let’s just start at a high level. You’re a YouTuber first and foremost, I think you probably categorize yourself as a creator.

Tell us about that moment in time and life 10 years ago or whenever it was. Where you decided I want to be a YouTuber. I have kids like the most, the things people want to be when they grow up as a YouTuber, you’re doing it successfully. What was the genesis of that for you?

Christian Taylor: Yeah, that’s a great question.

So creating videos has always been a hobby for me, a passion from Pretty much about 10 years old, I think around then is when I started playing around with video and it was really about learning to edit. When I started, I was fascinated by the idea of using windows movie maker. My parents had this big, like chunky desktop super low power.

But it had windows movie maker on it. And I remember there was one day I went to the library, checked out a book, and I had this little Kodak point and shoot, and I took pictures of all the pages. And made a slideshow of the book in windows movie maker and looking back on it. It’s hilarious. It’s like the pages were reflecting the flash.

So you couldn’t even see what was on the page really. And like, why would you photograph a book like that and make a slideshow? But for me, it was just capturing content and having something to edit in windows movie maker and learning about that process. And then I was hooked. I remember one year for Christmas, I got an iPod Nano and it was one of the few that had a camera on it, terrible quality.

It must’ve been probably 480 P it could record about five minutes of video at once before you’d have to copy it, delete it, start over. I made it work. I’d record for five minutes, copy it. Record another five minutes. And I know at the time it was really about me learning editing. I started getting into a little bit of motion graphics, text just learning how the software’s all worked.

And then as I started watching other creators on YouTube really inspired me. Probably when I was like 12, 13 years old just being like, Hey, I want to do what they’re doing. So YouTube has been a hobby for me most of my life, but. I don’t know that I expected it to become a full time job. It was more just a passion, something I love doing.

And right about the time I graduated high school, that’s when it coincidentally became a full time job. So I was very fortunate with the timing. YouTube is all I know since I’ve been doing it for over half of my life. So for context, I’m 22 years old. If that gives you an idea of like timeframe and all that, but yeah, that’s that’s what got me started.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You sound like Mr. Beast a little bit, like it’s, you’ve been doing it so long. It’s half your life started young. That’s incredible. I’m like you in the sense that I was always into video cameras and stuff. I even used to carry my dad’s VHS, big shoe box, size camcorder around, and then the cameras got better and smaller.

And it’s amazing the tools that people have today, but sometimes video just calls people. And I don’t know why that is, but I had that same calling. At a really young age. We’ll get more into like how you evolved, but let’s just give people, you start a snapshot of where you are now. You started at 12, you’re 22.

Now it’s been 10 years. What does your like YouTube business look like? Are you like a solopreneur? Do you have people that help? How do you monetize and have this career? What’s the current state today?

Christian Taylor: Yeah. So I’m mostly a solopreneur. I do have two freelancers that helped me. I’ve got an editor and that’s been a more recent addition, but love not having to edit my content anymore, which is a little ironic because I know I just said I started with a passion for editing, but we can drill into that later if you want.

But freelance editor. I’ve also got a creative director that helps part-time with ideation, brainstorming, just working with the packaging of videos, the title, the thumbnail. He also makes the thumbnails as well. But I would still consider myself mostly a solo creator. And as far as monetization there’s, a couple of different ways I do that through YouTube.

Obviously I think most people know about the YouTube ads that play before you watch a video, the 15 second ads, or now Google is getting more and more annoying and they’ll play two ads back to back before content starts, but that’s one revenue stream. And YouTube pays creators a 55 percent cut of that ad revenue.

So that one’s nice. It’s not very reliable. It’s all over the place, but it’s nice in that you don’t really have to do anything but get views and YouTube just takes care of the rest. So that’s one revenue stream. Another one for me is affiliate links. So someone watches the video, they like what I talk about.

They buy the product. I get a commission. I, think most of your audience would know what affiliate links are, but I always explain it when people ask how I monetize, cause some people aren’t familiar with the term, but YouTube ads, affiliate links, the third would be sponsorships. So companies just.

Working with me directly saying, Hey, we want to promote our product. We have a message we want to get out and paying for either an ad slot in the middle of a video where I read the ad or collaborating on a full dedicated video. So that’s how I’ve monetized YouTube. I am in the middle of working on diversifying a bit.

So for me, I think that’s getting more into courses. I just launched a free course, but that’s a way to build my course website, start getting a bit more comfortable with it. And hopefully a year down the road, two years down the road, max, I start watching some paid courses and. Growing some revenue there as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. We interviewed on this podcast many years ago. It’s one of my favorite episodes with Sean Cannell. Is that how you say? Yeah.

Christian Taylor: Oh, wow. Yeah. You’ve interviewed Sean.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Oh, that’s

Christian Taylor: incredible.

Chris Badgett: He’s a great guy. And I think he does a good job of YouTube channel and I should say channels cause he has a couple and.

He had has a signature course. I think he calls it the creator Academy or something like that. And I can’t remember. But it’s often, I’ve wondered why. I know a lot of YouTubers do courses, but why do you think it’s like, how do you feel about course creation? Versus making a video for the channel.

Like, how does that sit with you? Does it feel a lot harder? Is it, Hey, this is old hat. I know how to make videos or what’s your experience there.

Christian Taylor: Yeah, for me, it feels a lot harder. I’ve had a love hate relationship with the idea of making courses. In fact, while back, I think it was 2021. I decided, okay, I’m going to launch a course because this is the next thing to do.

And I don’t think I really wanted to launch a course, but I just felt this pressure of like, all right I’m doing everything I can on YouTube. I need to diversify. If I want to scale my business further, I need to launch another product. So I reluctantly launched a course and to push myself or motivate myself, I made maybe a quarter of the content.

And published it and started selling the course and did that model of Hey, I expect it to be done in a month or two. You can buy it at a cheaper price right now, if you’re willing to wait, like you already unlock access to some of the content, all of it’s coming in two months. And then I just got super overwhelmed by having to deliver on that promise.

So in the end, I just refunded everyone and said, nevermind sorry, I ever brought it up. I’m not launching a course. And so I think for me, The idea of creating a course is a little bit scary because of the obligation to support it long term. So any course that I would make would likely be based on software like WordPress doing a tutorial.

And I think If I make a YouTube video, I put the video out and it’s done. And if someone watches a tutorial on WordPress four years later, they’re going to understand there might be things about this tutorial that are outdated. Some of the screens may not look the same. It may be completely irrelevant altogether.

If I make a course on WordPress, especially if I’m selling it, I then feel like I’m on the hook because courses have that lifetime access model, most of them, of Creating this monster that I have to keep updating every year I have to re record all the videos because the UI changes or something changes.

So I’m a little, I’m really interested in like the subscription model for software based courses, because I think that might be a little bit more fair on the compensation side, but yeah, long story short, I definitely find creating courses more difficult than a YouTube video.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. And because your YouTube videos are so polished and highly produced, I could feel the pressure that is for making like a 20 lesson course or whatever.

I love that you’ve launched a free course to get started using a free course to build an email list. I think particularly for a YouTuber to get the email address and really know who their people are. It’s been one of the largest drivers for us at Lifter LMS. We have a quick start course on the Lifter LMS Academy.

It’s free. I ran into the same problems that you did where the interface changes, WordPress changes. So I’ve reshotted about five times over the past 10 years. But I take the pressure off in the sense that I’m just showing you the 5 percent of the tool to get the most value and keep it really beginner focused.

And lately I actually, the last time we reshot it, I actually got some help from the team to record different lessons and stuff. So it wasn’t as much on me, but that is definitely a challenge with technology courses because things change and courses go out of the date. However, if you look on somewhere like Udemy, some of the top selling things over there about how to use technology.

So people people do figure it out, but it is a, you’re right. A big commitment. Tell me about the decision. YouTubers in general, aren’t necessarily like. WordPress people, even though it powers 42 percent of the internet or whatever, what draws you to WordPress and Lifter LMS to, publish your course, as opposed to something like Kajabi or Teachable.

I see a lot of YouTubers using things like Teachable. Particularly in the technology niche, if you’re good at technology WordPress gives you a lot more customizability and power and stuff. But like, why did you choose WordPress over a hosted SaaS solution for courses?

Christian Taylor: Yeah, there’s a couple of reasons for that.

One would be I make a lot of content on WordPress. So I, wanted to practice what I preach. I did think about using Kajabi or some of those other hosted tools, but I thought I, I just really want to practice what I preach here and show my audience that I’m using WordPress. And I guess if we step back and ask.

How did I even get into WordPress over other website builders? I think it’s, always been a cost thing since I started exploring technology when I was young, like 10, 11. I think I was like 11 when I got my first laptop and. Just started tinkering online with Wix and Squarespace and Weebly, just all these website builders.

Cause I, I always thought that was interesting. But the power that you can unlock with WordPress for a much lower cost than Other platforms. That was a big thing initially for me. So that sort of got me on the train of being used to using WordPress to build all my sites. And then when I was evaluating that decision for where to host my course of course Kajabi is expensive.

So that was definitely part of it. I look at the pricing table and cry every time, but I think it was more about In recent years, I’ve started to have some issues with Google, specifically the AdSense side of things on my channel. And just really get that sense of, I, I don’t want to be tied to a particular company more than I have to.

Like I, I hate being reliant on YouTube and Google for the core of my business. And I just don’t want some SAS company that could one go out of business abruptly say Hey we got acquired. We’re sun setting in three months. Your decision is either to be part of our new parent company. Like maybe there’s a pricing change there or something, or get out migrate everything, have fun.

See you later. So that, that’s a concern. The other concern, which to be honest, is not really a concern for me, but it’s still a core principle I’m passionate about is not having a company be able to say Hey, we don’t like you. We don’t like your content. We’re kicking you off of the platform.

So WordPress being open source really gave me that confidence that the worst thing that could happen with the second example is, One web host says, Hey, we don’t like you or Hey, we’re shutting down. And to me, it’s much easier to migrate a WordPress site to a different host than it is rebuild my course on some new platform.

So I think just having the technical flexibility, the lower cost and that full peace of mind that I have a lot more control over. My data, my site, my platform, those all kind of led me to using WordPress and LifterLMS.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s go back to earlier in your story as you’re turning 18 or graduating high school or whatever, that age.

There’s a lot of pressure on young folks to go to college and you went full time YouTuber and pulled it off. What was that time period? Like in terms of having the confidence to move forward and finances or at least having some signal that, Hey, this is working, I can afford to live and stuff like that.

Christian Taylor: Yeah. So you’re right. I definitely felt that pressure to go to college. I think most people do. And honestly, I think even the past two or three years, it’s becoming cool to some degree to not go to college. More people are starting to speak out about that idea. But even when I graduated high school, it was that assumption of.

Like you have to go to college if you’re going to be successful in life. And I always knew I didn’t want to go to college. I tinkered with the idea. I had this like plan B in my head. If I go to college, I’ll probably go for computer science. Cause I was also interested in becoming a developer at the time.

So I, just. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I didn’t want to go to college. So my parents were very generous. They let my brother live at home free when he was going to college for four years. And they told me, Hey, you can live at home for free for the same four years.

As long as you’re being productive, like you’ve got to be. Working, doing something, as long as we can see that you’re being productive and doing something to further your career, we’ll give you that same opportunity. So I looked at it as, this is great. I have four years that I can not feel the pressure of overhead.

I don’t have high school anymore, so there’s no homework. That’s not tying me down. I can really hit the gas and go full speed ahead on YouTube. I was pretty confident that within those four years, I could make it full time. Cause right when I graduated, it was making just enough to be a decent part time side hustle.

I guess if someone was working a fast food job at that time and life, like for me, it was exceeding that. So it was like, okay this is. Not enough to be like a full time serious career yet, but more than I’d make it a fast food job, so I can’t complain. And really, it was within that first year that things Skyrocketed significantly.

And actually I, was able to buy my house and the, room I’m in now is technically the master bedroom, but for me, it’s like my studio. I was able to do that two years into that four year period. So it was a pretty quick progression of. Seeing things take off with revenue, just being able to save a ton of money for a down payment, start investing as a result of not having that overhead.

And yeah I, guess I just had the no plan B, no turning back mentality over that period.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And that’s such a great gift your parents gave you. And it’s the same thing as if a parent is going to pay for college. Yeah. If they provide the space for you to develop as an entrepreneur, as a creator for literally less money it’s, cool, but it’s like a, it’s a mindset change on what careers are and how they work.

And obviously the. The world is changing and opportunities are different and stuff like that. What going from doing better than fast food income or around their side hustle style. Can you pinpoint like one video or one strategy, or I think they probably a lot of things started to snowball at once, but what really helped you go from side hustle to homeowner?

Christian Taylor: Yeah, there were a couple of things there. One was, if you look at my channel, you’ll see. In the very early days, I was making whatever I wanted. So it, at the time it was a lot of what I thought were comedy sketches. I go back now and I’m like what, is this? But at the time I was like, Oh, this is hilarious.

I’m a comedian. Then I started to solidify my interest in tech, but it was. Consumer tech hardware. So I wanted to be the next Marquez Brownlee. That was my dream as a teenager was doing the iPhone reviews, the accessories, getting all the tech before it comes out with the press embargoes and all that.

And I started to figure out somewhere along the line that software content is a lot more profitable. And I didn’t just pivot because it was profitable. It was also something I was interested in. But I, at one point, I wanna say 2017, I experimented and made a video on the ble, the best place to buy a domain name, and that became the video that really took off as far as views and revenue to get me to that sort of part-time better than fast food income.

So I started to clue in that. Okay. Software is that’s what’s profitable. I can get views that way. Why am I spending all this money buying technology to review it? And I’m not making any money doing that. It’s way more competitive. Let me go all in on the software. So that was 2019 when I made that pivot and all of 2019, I started making a bunch of comparison videos on domain registrars, web hosting.

WordPress themes, just all sorts of different things. And I remember, I think it was about October, 2019, maybe a little earlier, maybe September, 2019, I got an email from a subscriber and he said, Hey, love your content. Have you ever thought of making a VPN comparison video? And I replied to him, I was probably like way too open and honest at the time.

Cause I just told him everything I was thinking. I was like, Hey, thanks for reaching out. That’s a great idea. Actually. I have thought of that. I’m interested in VPNs, but it’s not really my niche. I don’t do cybersecurity content, so I’m not going to make the video.

Chris Badgett: And by the way, this is the top performing video on his channel.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So

Christian Taylor: don’t know that I would. Say it like that today, but I was just like super direct. So he replies and he goes, okay, yeah, like I completely understand where you’re coming from. My brother has a YouTube channel and his niche was skateboarding. And one time he made a video that was completely unrelated to skateboarding and it was the top performing video on his channel.

I don’t know. I just think you should reconsider. And I don’t know why I listened to this guy, but something in me was like, huh? Okay. Yeah. Maybe I should make a VPN comparison. And one of my struggles being an entrepreneur is I’m. I’m a visionary person to where I can sell myself on just about any idea.

And then I lose that pulse of, is this objectively a good idea or a bad idea? Like I can get excited about anything. So I convinced myself it was a good idea. Then it was like, yeah I’m, excited about this. I’m going to make the video. So I made it, I released it November, 2019. And it already started doing very well over the next three months.

So I already had considered it a success, but then when COVID happened, lockdowns hit March, 2020. The video absolutely blew up and I imagine it was just everyone starting to work from home. People thinking, Oh, I need a VPN and searching for it. I’m still to this day, scratching my head, trying to figure out like, why did it blow up then what happened?

Cause spoiler alert, the VPN comparison content is not really performing anymore. So I’m still like, You know what happened? Why did it do well in that period? I don’t really know. But that one video alone is, or was responsible for the majority of my financial success over that two year period of being able to invest save a down payment, just really get myself in that full-time income position.

Chris Badgett: A couple of quick questions on that. How long did it take you to go from idea to video published for the VPN video?

Christian Taylor: Probably about four weeks. Cause I, had decided I was going to make the video in September and I think I had a couple of videos I was already working on ahead of that. So I think I spent about a week reaching VPN companies, asking if they would provide test accounts allowed about a week for them all to get back to me.

And then probably two weeks of testing the VPNs, collecting data, speed tests, all that and then about a week for the actual video production and turn around.

Chris Badgett: Is that like an average for one of your videos, like about four weeks to go through that process or what’s it like now for. Idea to publish.

Christian Taylor: Now it’s much more organized.

So my, creative director and I will have monthly meetings where we plan out four videos and my content calendar is always two to three months ahead. So right after we have that meeting, it’ll be three months ahead. And then I make a month’s worth of content. It starts to get down to 2 months, and then we meet again at the top of the next month, and then it’s 3 months out.

As far as the actual ideation, knowing what content we’re making next, those are scheduled 3 months out. As far as Like actually starting on a video, sometimes I might start some of the research four to six weeks out if it’s some kind of comparison where I really need to give it time to evaluate a product, or if it’s a topic that I’m already very familiar with, it doesn’t really require testing or research ahead of time.

Sometimes I’m scripting the video 2 days before I shoot it. And we shoot videos two weeks before they come out. So I guess that would be anywhere from two weeks to six weeks, as far as pre production time.

Chris Badgett: Quick question there. Do you use a teleprompter or do you have like bullet points that you riff off of for the script or how do you do that part?

Christian Taylor: Very chaotic. I do not use a teleprompter, I used to, but I wanted to get away from that. Because I could always tell you can see yourself looking at the camera and your eyes are like bouncing around it. And I just was never fully happy with how that looked.

So I got away from that, but I’m a very long winded person. And when I script my content. No matter how much I try to just stick to basic bullet points, I write full sentences. So I end up writing a word for word script, and then I treat it like bullet points. I’ll just like glance down at my script, look at the next few sections.

You’re like, okay, that’s what I’m going to say. And then look at the camera and do that section. Most of the time I end up sticking to the script pretty closely, but I also try to remind myself, this is just a guide. I don’t have to follow this word for word because sometimes I’ll stress out about, did I say that right?

Did I get the right word? And unless I’m saying something that would make the technical terminology inaccurate, would like somehow make the statement untrue I, try to give myself that flexibility and say, I don’t have to stick to it. Word for word.

Chris Badgett: That’s a pro tip right there, where correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re like, you have your script outline, you do a sentence or a paragraph or a segment and then you look down.

And then you look back, re engage for the next section. And then you just edit that stuff out in the post production and it’s, it makes a great video and you maintain the eye contact or attention with all that editing, but you don’t have to like edit as you go.

Christian Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And one of the biggest tips that I can give that’s worked for me is I will always record something in sections until I’m happy with it, And I at least make sure that the first sentence I say is the same every time.

So I don’t edit my videos anymore, but when I did edit, it was really easy for me to quickly go through that footage and I would just go to the last time that I say something. So I would, I just keep re recording a section until I’m happy. The last one I know is the one that I’m happy with. Cause that’s the one where I just stopped and moved on to the next one.

So if I’m saying like next let’s talk about pricing. If that’s the top of a section and I record several paragraphs after that, I’ll just skip in my timeline when I’m editing till I stopped hearing next let’s, talk about pricing and then I know, okay, that’s the one delete everything before it then I’m not like watching six different takes going.

Okay. When do I need to make this cut? It’s just a lot more evident and speeds up the A roll edit quite a bit.

Chris Badgett: Just for inspiration and just reality check. How many videos did you make approximately before the VPN video until you struck pay dirt or really had a, takeoff success? Oh,

Christian Taylor: how many years?

How much? Yeah. So that was 2019. I started my channel in. I would say the first probably three years of my channel, it was a very loose hobby. Like I had no upload schedule. So I’m not sure if I’d really count that time. Cause I was still just figuring out if that’s something I wanted to do more.

So if you factor out those three years, that would be, what is that 2014 Yeah, so like 2014 to 2019, that five year period of just making consistent content for most of that five years, I was uploading once a week, definitely from 2019. And now I’ve been uploading just about weekly with a couple exceptions.

So it was probably four to five years and I would guess. At least 300 videos that I made before I really started to see that traction.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. Tell us about your audience or like your avatar, your ideal learner or subscriber. What are they like? Who are you making these videos for?

Christian Taylor: That’s been a, an ongoing debate for quite some time, but I believe from the polls I’ve run and the people in my audience I’ve talked to, I’ve It seems to be a mix of both small business owners and tech enthusiasts, which is a weird mix, but half of it is these small business owners, like freelancers, local think like bakeries, landscapers business owners that.

Maybe don’t have the resources to hire someone to build their website or they’re like, I need a custom email. I don’t really know what to do. They find my content and they learn about how to build their website, how to get a custom email. The tools that they should be using, and they may not necessarily be that passionate about tech or even really care about tech.

It’s almost a necessity to them of, I have to do this DIY because I can’t afford to hire someone right now. So that’s probably half of the audience. The other half would be tech enthusiasts that just like geeking out about comparing different tools. And it’s been interesting for me to capture both of those audiences where both the small business owner can walk away from a web hosting comparison and say, thank you so much.

Like you, you really helped break it down for me. I feel good about the web hosts that I chose because of your video and the tech enthusiasts can go I think they can see like the, internal geekery that I have. So they know that even if I maybe don’t go super in depth on a particular section of the video that like, maybe they would go a little deeper on.

They still respect my opinion. They think it’s interesting to know what I think about different products and services. I’d guess that’s the core of my audience and what my avatars look like, but I know it’s two very different crowds.

Chris Badgett: How do you make a good comparison video? I was impressed when you said earlier, like with the VPNs, you did a bunch of research and looked at things, but if you’re comparing like WordPress plugins or themes or hosting companies or domain name registrars, What’s the key to making good comparison content?

Cause a lot of people go to YouTube to be like, help me figure out which tool I’m, solution aware. And then there’s these products. How do I pick one? How do you make good content in a comparison?

Christian Taylor: My ideology has always been approach it with a consumer first mindset. There’s way too much comparison content that treats it like a spec sheet.

It’s just, Oh, we went, yeah, we went to the pricing table and this company gives you this much storage. And this company gives you this much and blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s like anyone can go to the landing page and make those comparisons. So I don’t find that very useful. My mindset has been really put myself in the shoes of the consumer.

And that often includes. The setup process of a tool. So what are they going to experience from day one? The actual usage of the tool customer service. That’s a big one that I’m passionate about as well is when I’m testing a web host, I’ll act dumb and reach out to their customer service and be like, how do I migrate my site?

Or like, how do I connect my domain? And then they’ll Oh, point it to our name servers. Oh, what is a name server? I don’t know these terms. So just really trying to imagine what would the average user be doing here and what experience would they have? And there could be a case where a host has really poor responses with customer support.

They’re just not helpful at all. And for me, that may not be an issue because I’m relatively tech savvy, so I could be like, Hey, I know what they mean. I know what they’re trying to say. Or I don’t even need their help to begin with because I’m pretty self sufficient with going in the panel, doing what I need to.

I can also be objective and see the average consumer would be really frustrated. They would be confused. They would be. At the point of wanting a refund, just being like, I I don’t understand, like they’re, not being any help. I’m so lost. So by really putting myself in the shoes of the consumer, that’s helpful.

The other thing I would say is I’ve tried to cut out. Any part of the comparison that is redundant as far as features. So if every web host has 99. 9 percent uptime, I’m not going to waste time being like all naming out five different web hosts, they all have 99. 9 percent uptime because I feel it becomes irrelevant if they all have it.

I’ve approached my research and scripting from the basis of point out the differences rather than the similarities. And people can figure out what the similarities are, or that kind of becomes obvious when you’re doing a little bit of research, looking at all the landing pages.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tangentially related to that, how did you overcome imposter syndrome, i. e. fear of being on camera is 1 aspect. When you’re doing comparison posts if it’s a giant company, like Chrome versus opera, another one of your top performing videos, it’s like a big faceless org, but comparison content, you maybe you’re talking about smaller companies and stuff like that, and maybe you’re like, oh, they might not like my video.

And, or I know some people that work there, whatever. How do you get through all that imposter syndrome and just confidence in having an opinion on something on the internet?

Christian Taylor: For the being on camera side, I think it’s just many years of doing it. I, don’t think there was ever a time in my life that I felt really nervous on camera, but.

Definitely when I started out, it was a little bit more awkward, a little bit uncomfortable, but I think just doing it for so long, I became more and more comfortable on camera. And that’s never really been a big issue for me to overcome, which I know that’s not the case for everyone, but I guess I was somewhat natural at it from day one.

Now, as far as Being worried about offending companies. I think I, I also started making comparisons before I was at the stage in life of understanding, like networking and humans behind stuff. Obviously like I didn’t think robots made stuff, but I, just didn’t quite get that yet. And I think that actually worked out to my advantage because that allowed me to just be brutally honest about what I thought with the product.

And then. Getting to that place later in life of being like, Oh, there’s real people behind these products and now I have these relationships, honestly, that didn’t happen for me until about three years ago, that’s when I first started going to events and meeting people. And sometimes meeting team members at directly competing products and being like, wow, they’re great people.

They’re nice, they’re great people and they’re nice. Now, this is weird because I feel like I’m, pitting the 2 companies against each other. I’ve learned that if a company is worth working with, having a relationship with, they’re going to be open to honest feedback and they’re, going to want that.

And if they get upset by something you say they, disown you. They’re like, ah we want nothing to do with you then. I probably don’t care to work with them anyway. So I’m fine burning that bridge. I, have tried to be a little bit more careful as the years have gone on to make sure that everything I say is true.

I don’t want to accuse a company of something that’s not true. Or pick on them just to pick on them. I’ve done that a little bit in the past. You can probably see in my top videos, there’s one particular company I’ve never been fond of. But yeah, I think just realizing, okay, if a company is worth working with, they’re going to be open to that feedback.

And I also tell companies, Hey. You can always sponsor content like, okay, qualifier here. Cause I don’t want anyone to think I’m like a sellout or something. I will only work with a company on a sponsored capacity. If their product is good enough that I can recommend it in some way, but for. No product is 100 percent perfect.

So for every product, I’ve got good things and bad things to say. So if a company has already been vetted as a product that I could recommend for certain people, and they’re like, Hey, how can we get content on your channel? That is Just presenting our product in a positive light. Then I tell them you can sponsor some content if you want, because that gives you the control to say, Hey, we’re paying you to share the message about our product, and then it’s going to be presented more from a brand awareness perspective of, Hey, I want to talk about the sponsor of today’s video.

Here’s all the positive things instead of. Hey, you’re in an organic comparison and you’re getting free press, but that’s going to include both the good and the bad.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. As a podcaster, I try not to ask two questions at once, but just to set it up, if somebody wants to make money online from YouTube on one side, let’s imagine, and I’m speaking to like the course creator audience here.

One person like wants to get into courses, but they actually want to start with a YouTube channel and figure out how to monetize it. Practice being on camera. Really monetize the YouTube channel. So that’s like question one advice to get started in terms of monetization and what to focus on first.

And on the other side, you have people that have already created a course. Or a coaching program or a membership site. And they’re like, I want to do marketing on YouTube. I still want to make money online, but I want to get people on YouTube over to my to my website for my courses and coaching and community and all that stuff.

So what would you advise those two different segments in terms of getting started with YouTube fastest path to revenue monetization traffic? It’s a big question. I know.

Christian Taylor: Yeah. For that first person, I would push back just a little bit. If whenever someone comes to me and says, Hey, I want to start a YouTube channel.

I want to do this for a living. What advice will you give me? I push back and say, that’s great. Like I’m all for it. I love what I do, I want other people to do the same thing and enjoy it. I would only get into this if you’re willing to commit to it for two to three years and not make a sense. If you can put up with that, great.

Then I’ll give you some advice. If not, if you’re looking for some way to fast track and Oh, there’s gotta be some magic formula where in six months I can be profitable on my channel. Don’t do it. You’re just going to waste three months of your life. You’re going to get frustrated and quit. And I’ve seen that cycle so many times with beginners where they get this kick of inspiration.

They make content for three months and they say, Oh, no one watched my stuff. I didn’t make any money. Yeah, you did it for three months. So Mr. Beast always says, make your first hundred videos before you ever judge analytics revenue. Anything like you don’t have a license to judge that or say, oh, it didn’t work until you’ve made a hundred videos.

So that’s the preface. Once you’re past that and you say, okay, I’m willing to make that commitment. I’m in it for the long run. It really is just about repetition and. Not being afraid to experiment heavily with both topics in formats. A lot of creators, new creators think they have to find a niche from day one.

And like they, they have to be tied down to this one specific strategy. And I think that can be. hurting them more than helping them because they’re not allowing the freedom to explore to find the thing that actually works. Like for me I, pivoted a lot over my YouTube journey and found something that really worked well.

But if I had been really stuck from day one, like imagine I started doing comedy content and that’s. All I ever did, because in my head, I was like, that’s my niche niche down, everyone tells you niche down. So I have to be fixated on that. And that’s going to be the secret to growing. My channel is sticking with that.

I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today. So yes, it is important to niche down at some point, once you start getting traction and say, okay, this is a path I’m comfortable committing to, but when you’re making those first hundred videos. Just explore, make videos on content that you’re passionate about.

Try different things. If you want to make something that’s completely different from anything you’ve ever made, as far as topic, do it, try it out. Maybe it does really well. And maybe you decide. Hey this is something that I want to stick to because once you find something that works, you start making views, you start getting some traction.

The revenue will come with it naturally through both AdSense. If you’re talking about products, affiliate links honestly, like the, only practical tip. I could give as far as making revenue would be put affiliate links in your content from day zero. I slept on that for way too long. And I wish I had started putting them in my content earlier.

Cause you never know when a video is going to take off. So don’t wait till you’re getting views to sign up for affiliate programs. They’re super easy to get into most of them, at least sign up from day one, put affiliate links in your content. As you grow, if you’re interested in getting into sponsorships, I would look into Justin Moore.

I love his content. He’s the sponsorship coach guru, has his own course as well. Of course who doesn’t? That’s a guru. But I’ve learned a lot from Justin as far as Negotiating with brands, landing bigger brand deals, stuff that’s a bit more sustainable rather than the one off content pieces that are like that’s what I’ve done for the past couple of years before finding Justin’s content is like one video here for a brand, one video there, just very all over the place.

So definitely recommend Justin Moore’s content and also not thinking you need a hundred thousand subscribers or a million subscribers to make money. That’s one encouragement that I would give a beginner is you can monetize earlier, depending on the niche that you’re in. Some are more profitable than others at the small channel level, but I really was able to start seriously monetizing around 10, 000 subscribers.

And I think that can be true for a lot of channels. The YouTube ad revenue can even start at a thousand subscribers. So stick with it for the long run. Explore your interests. Don’t be afraid to try a bunch of things till you find something that works. Then the monetization falls into place. Now, for that second person, the course creator that wants to use YouTube as a lead gen strategy, I would just shoot for search on YouTube.

If you already know SEO strategies, Choosing a focus keyword, optimizing your title and description for those keywords. If you’re comfortable optimizing a blog post for SEO, it’s a very similar strategy on YouTube. There’s a couple of tools out there like TubeBuddy and vidIQ that you can use to analyze your title and description and say you’re doing well, or you need more keywords, but.

I think when you aim for search, you’re going to capture that audience who’s ready to make a purchase decision. They’re ready to solve a problem. If they’re searching, how do I build a WordPress site? And your video comes up, they watch it. They go, this guy knows what he’s talking about. I want to enroll in his course.

That’s probably a more valuable lead gen strategy than trying to do the sensational Mr. Beast type content. I built a hundred WordPress sites in a hundred hours, shocked face in the thumbnail you can try to go the more entertaining route, but. I found that it just doesn’t convert as well with educational content.

Chris Badgett: Solid advice. Really appreciate that. Last question, Christian, what’s your vision for your academy at Craylor dot Academy? I’m asking like, it seems like there’s a fork in the road. Some YouTubers that monetize with courses create a signature course. It’s like their main thing. And it’s just and maybe they redo it every couple of years or whatever, or.

They do a lot of like mini courses or a membership with okay. This is a focus, like how to build a yoga website, yoga studio website with cadence course. And then there’s another course about how to build a restaurant site with online ordering. And it’s, they’re like these many courses. Are you more signature course guy, or do you envision like.

A lot of courses.

Christian Taylor: I see myself going the mini course route. And furthermore, I even see a world in which I treat my website almost like its own YouTube and maybe launch a membership because there’s oftentimes people in my audience will ask, Hey, can you make a tutorial about. Insert random niche item.

I don’t know, like how do I set up email hosting with this very specific email host? And I think to myself, okay I could sit down and start screen recording and make that video and probably 20 minutes. But if I upload that video to my channel, it’s going to bomb. It’s going to drag everything down.

It’s way too niche, It’s it’s not going to get enough views. And if I produce that video to the level that I do content on my channel. It’s not going to be a 20 minute process. It’s going to then blow up into a two to six week process. So I’ve, been on this thread of I want to help my audience.

When someone asks that I would like to sit in front of my computer and just record a quick 20 minute video and something that would be highly valuable to them. But I can’t upload it to my YouTube channel. So I just don’t make it, but in the future, I would love to have some kind of membership program where people can join and I can say Hey, you’re in the 10 a month membership program.

Cool. I’ll make a video. I’ll put it on my website. Hope it helps. And then there’s they’re getting value out of it. Maybe it helps solve a problem that they were feeling overwhelmed by. For me, it’s something that I can justify because I’ve got this base of members that are paying to be part of the site.

And I don’t have this pressure of the YouTube algorithm of if I make a video and it doesn’t perform, I’m damaging my channel in a sense. I don’t really have to care about that cause it’s my own website. So if the video gets 10 views and helps 10 people, then great.

Chris Badgett: Nice. I love that. That’s definitely a pro tip and I hear it throughout your story that, and this is the story of lifter LMS as well.

The audience literally pulls the product out of you. And that’s, a great way to think about a membership. Just take common questions and make many courses or tutorials for those people. You can’t not be successful that way when they’re literally asking for it, particularly when there’s several, you’ve heard the question so many times.

You’re like, I think I need to make that email hosting video. I love that. That’s Christian Taylor subscribe to his YouTube channel. That’s Craylor made. And also check out his Academy at Craylor dot Academy. And thanks for coming on the show, Christian. We really appreciate it. Keep up the great work and it’s great to be with you on the journey.

Is there anywhere else you want to send people or any final words that you’d like to say?

Christian Taylor: Just thanks for having me. And the craylor made. com is probably the best place to go to find links to my channel, the Academy, everything. And I’ll just spell it out. It is C R A Y L O R Craylor. I only spell it because people often ask me like what, are you saying?

Or how do I spell that? So for all the audio listeners out there, you go. But yeah, thanks for having me. I’ve. Really enjoyed our conversation.

Chris Badgett: Thanks Christian. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode.

And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Mihail Stoychev explains that NitroPack began in 2013 with a focus on optimizing websites for the OpenCart platform.

Mihail Stoychev is the co-founder of NitroPack, a company focused on website optimization. The spark was a request from a big e-commerce business that was losing customers owing to sluggish website performance. Recognizing the necessity, they created an early plugin for image optimization and simple caching, resulting in a considerable increase in site loading speed.

The term “NitroPack” was inspired by the notion of speed in the “Fast and Furious” films, in which hitting a button reveals hidden power. NitroPack expanded over time to include over 35 optimization algorithms in a single service. They switched to WordPress, the largest platform, with the goal of making website optimization easier and more accessible.

NitroPack is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that allows you to control optimizations with a single button push after installation. They stress simplicity and usability for non-technical people, with the goal of removing complexity from the optimization process.

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2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Michel from Nitro Pack. That’s it. Nitro Pack. I love McHale’s mission to make the internet faster. We’re going to get into what NitroPack is, how to speed up your website and a little bit of McHale’s story, which is awesome.

But first welcome to the show, Mihail.

Mihail Stoychev: Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I’m, excited to chat with you today. Everybody wants a fast website. Everybody there’s so many, there’s a lot of different web hosts in the WordPress community and also different setups and plugins and different types of websites.

But this episode is about for people building learning management system websites, they all want a fast website. Let’s start at just a super high level. How, Mikhail, do you make the internet faster?

Mihail Stoychev: Thanks. That’s a great question to start with, Chris. Actually if I have to think as to how did we start NitroPack?

So first of all, we started NitroPack back in 2013 for another great open source platform that was Going after e commerce merchants back in the days. It’s called open cart. I think they’re still running well, so we started nitro pack in 2013 that was two years after we created our first plug in for open cart and We had a pretty big merchant from the Middle East and they were absolutely horrified and terrified by how many customers are actually churning and dropping because their website was not performing well enough.

So they came to us and said, Hey guys we have this huge problem. Is there a solution that you can figure out for us? So back in the day, so we were junior entrepreneurs it was your number two of our journey. So we started digging around and of course we will answer. Yes, of course.

We’re experts into this. So we figured out a way that we can actually optimize images, which was one of the. challenges. And back in the days, we didn’t have the amazing formats that we have today, which compress a lot of data. And back in the days, the internet was nowhere as good as what we are seeing as the norm today.

So what we did is we created this initial version of our plugin. And since we really created a 50% improving their site loading speed it was back in the times where fast and furious were just going very hard and those super nice racy cars, they will have a special hidden power that exerts you press like a red button and then you go.

And that was called nitro. So they were using nitrogen. And since initially what we developed back then was a collection of different features. We decided to call it nitro as in fast and then pack. Okay. So we started with image optimization and some basic caching. And today we have over 35 three, five different techniques that we bundled together and that we serve as nitro pack and our Initial thoughts when we decided to go after WordPress and deliver this to WordPress was open car is not big enough to have a massive impact.

We were helping tens of thousands of merchants, but we were like, it will be logical to go after the biggest. So the biggest the biggest markets back in the days I think it’s still today is WordPress. So the market share is just over 40 percent of the internet, which is crazy. Shout out to Matt and everyone else who worked on this absolutely stunning project.

And we made nitro pack. In a completely different way. So we decided that NitroPack should be a software as a service and that all the optimizations should be controlled by a single button. Remember the reference I did with the speed up. So what we did is essentially you install the plugin, you enable it, you press a button, which is selecting your mode, like the shift of the car.

You go into drive and then you can choose port. Comfort or economy. So once you install nitro pack, you select your mode, then press a button and you’re off to a good start. So on the back, we will do all types of settings, which we believe are good enough and stable enough for your website.

And we, the reason why we took this approach is that we believe that most of the folks want the complexity out of their life. And while they’re very tech savvy guys who want to go and tinker with the settings, the majority of the people who want to. You know run their own blog or go into a different type of a Entrepreneurship journey won’t as little of technical challenges as possible So we got inspired by this You know as minimalistic as possible as easy to use as possible.

And I think this is something that we’re keeping Today, as our cradle on how we’re building things and how we want people to perceive our our solution.

Chris Badgett: That’s

Mihail Stoychev: awesome.

Chris Badgett: I just keep getting this image of nitro pack is like the Vin Diesel fast and furious. He just has to press one button and then it’s off to the races.

Yeah

Mihail Stoychev: Making it a little bit making it a little bit simpler than it is really. And the, tech team probe wouldn’t, like this as they put so much effort into developing it, but listen, the user has to be able to press buttons and see value. And this is what we’re up to.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. 2013. That’s actually when Lifter LMS started and here we are You know, many years later over a decade or whatever, and it’s amazing when you stay married to 1 problem, like speed up the website for us is teach online. And it’s amazing what you can accomplish over all those years and all those learnings.

And. So congratulations on that, and I know you and it’s cool to come from outside. So you mentioned coming from the open car community and then seeing the opportunity in WordPress. And I know you’ve done some stuff with Shopify as well, and you get to take all that learning and just.

Continuously improve the product and the user experience, making the complex simple, which is like a great path to be on.

Mihail Stoychev: Yes. First of all I, now it’s a pure coincidence, though. I’m so happy. We started our, businesses around the same time. And I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the beautiful things about being able to develop for different platforms.

Is that you’re able to see the good and shiny things about them and the not so good and shiny things about them. And then at the end of the day, share with the community. So whatever we learned in open card was very beneficial for us to start on Shopify and whatever mistakes and things we headed in open card, we found less and less on Shopify.

And now we’re in the opposite situation. So we’re seeing a lot of things which are way better in WordPress than in Shopify. And it’s so empowering to be able to share the good stuff that we took out of Shopify as a platform and see which ones are applicable for the WordPress community.

And I think just like when you go and visit different cities and different countries, you enrich your culture. In the same way we enrich our technical knowledge and our platform knowledge and we can get all the jewels put them into work and hopefully be able to create a good product that’s users will be able to enjoy and if they enjoy, they’ll go and they’ll recommend it to some of their friends.

And if they don’t enjoy it they can go to some of the other alternative solutions. Like I said before, our mission is to make the Internet faster. So the more people can plunge and see what the difference is from a performance website versus a non performance website, not only from user experience standpoint, But at the same time of churn rates, at the same time of SEO ranking, as long as they have are using something we’re happy.

Our mission is complete. Whether they go to us we would love for them to come to us, but it’s it’s a free it’s a free market. And there are other great solutions that I want to give a shout out and respect to. As long as you’re doing something performing a performance base for your website, as long as you’re looking into Core Web Vitals, as long as you score good on page speed for mobile, if the majority of your user base is coming on mobile, or, Vice versa.

If they come from desktop, then I think you’re off to a good start.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, awesome. One of the things about WordPress is the community aspect, like you mentioned. And I think we’re in agreement here that part of being a member of the WordPress community is about contribution. And you have a free NitroPack plan and a free NitroPack plugin.

Can you tell us, which I think is great, and I’m a big fan of the freemium model. How does how do people get into it and get started and just tell us more about what’s, available for free?

Mihail Stoychev: Sure. So you go to wordpress. org or directly to nitropac. io or nitropac. com. You go and you hit pricing, or if you go to the org, you just have to download the plugin.

You quickly create an account and you’re off to a flying start. We’ll ask you, which plan would you like to take? Of course, freeze the default one. Be our guest to try before you buy. And when I’m talking about the free plan, this doesn’t mean that it’s a free trial. It’s a forever. It’s a proper forever free plan.

So as long as you don’t reach the quota, which is number of page views or CDN. Then you’re off to a flying start. You can use it forever. We have customers using us for what is it? Four years now since we launched in 2019 for WordPress and we don’t want to bother them with upgrading if it’s Suiting the size of their business.

If they’re happy with the performance, then we don’t want to sell ice to the Eskimo. So we want to go after the customers that we believe we really can make a difference. And of course, with more page views with a different mission critical businesses that they might have, for instance, they can be a big publisher or they can be a big publisher.

software as a service company, or they can be like someone on the verticals a specific WordPress website, which is very, competitive in the industry that they’re running. Let’s say plumbing, for instance, I’m just, or someone going for puppy food. So if they really need this extra boost and extra difference, then we would always recommend them to go with one of the paid plans.

Yes. And all of those come with a 14 day free trial and a money back guarantee. During those 14 days, they can see the difference. We can promise them that there will be a difference. And to take a step back, what we actually offer is a base layer. So over those past couple of years, we were able to select I would say the most necessary features for you to be successful with the business.

And we’re giving those out for free. Again, part of our pricing strategy is being able to differentiate based on page views and based on CDN. So we’re starting with, I would say, a myriad of different features that you’ll be able to enjoy for free, like different caching mechanism, minifications. And I would say one of the main differences of NitroPack when it comes to all of our competitors around is that whatever version you choose, you always get a free CDN and you always get.

A free tool that optimizes your images. So there are plenty of ways that different companies market this. I would say that more often than not, those would be two services you have to buy on top. But with us, since it’s a pack and since it’s a nitro pack, you get everything in the in, in one single foot.

In one basket. So at the end of the day again, our mission is to be able to provide you with a good base layer and a good base there for us means a good grade of CDN and really powerful image and gift and video facades, optimization features. And we believe that this is going to be able to not only boost your score, but increase your chances of essentially passing Core Web Vitals and putting your business at a much higher SEO position that initially you came with.

I don’t know if this answers your question, but this is like my, answer to what it comes with as as default features.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Awesome. Those of you out there listening and watching, go try out nitro pack, try out the free plugin, sign up for a free plan. And that’s an incredible amount of value you’re providing for free.

I’m a big fan of supporting the startup when their business starts to get more page views or traffic and they’re ready to then it’s time to perhaps upgrade to a plan, but while you’re validating and you just want a fast website and you’re, just speeding things up and getting started.

It’s that’s a great contribution you’re making there. You mentioned earlier, like that speed helps reduce churn. But there’s a lot of, I think it’s important for people to know why does speed matter? Could you unpack that a little bit? What do you get when your website is much faster, particularly as a business owner or somebody teaching online?

Mihail Stoychev: Yeah, sure. Just going back to our initial story We, as everyone else in the industry, just decided that if you’re able to bring and show something fast, then the user will be more likely to make a decision of whether they like it or not. Whatever website you had, just being able to make it load as fast as possible and all of the content to be available would essentially be a deciding point of whether the user will stay and consume and the amount of pages that are they going to open subsequently or not.

Afterwards, Google were like, all right it’s great that your site loads fast. It’s great that you have a high score on this. synthetic lab test which is not how the real users are actually experiencing your website. So they came up with a concept called Core Web Vitals, which is once the website is loaded, how your users are interacting with the websites.

And then they will break it down into did the content load fast enough? Did any of the content move or flicker? Is everything on the page the way that it should be? And is there anything else that’s preventing the website from loading as good and as efficient as possible so the user can have as good and positive experience as possible?

So we would measure the amount of pages that they would see once they, Are on the website. And of course, the way that Google measures this is via their chrome browser. So all of the chromium browsers are essentially reporting data back to them as to how users are experiencing their website and Google have a strong conviction that if you pass Core Web Vitals, you’re more likely to retain this user and to take them through the funnel, whatever it can be.

Sign on flow or buying this purchase or reading this next article or calling via contact page, whatever. So the way that we can compare today how solution A is ranking against solution B is there is this thing called Google Data Studio where they take all of the folks That we have sufficient Core Web Vitals data for.

So if you’re a very small store, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to collect data because you don’t have any traffic. If you don’t have any traffic you might have a very fast website, but if no one has heard about you You’re are not the main pain on the map. So once you get sufficient amount of traffic on your website, what you actually do is little by little, Google starts collecting data as to how your real users are essentially experiencing your website.

And all of this data runs not only the platforms, WordPress, OpenCart, Magento, Drupal, yada yada, hosted as well. BigCommerce, Shopify, but they also rank different hosting providers. Again, we would start from hosting A to hosting Z, and then they would start and rank also speed optimization tools like ours.

The goal is to give a map, a 360 map I would say, is cool. is with Google on this mission to make the internet faster, who is performing the best. And at the end of the day, the big price you don’t get like golden you to play if you have optimized X amount of websites. But what you have done is essentially giving Google enough data.

And telling them, Hey, listen, we’re doing something right. Those folks, after they consume our solution, are experiencing the websites way faster. And as a result of this, we’re bringing ABNC to this brand. And we have a lot of data of some of our larger customers. Which shows exactly how a bit of a improvement in the load speed, a bit of a, so the LCP largest contentful paint.

So a little bit improvement onto this, a little bit improvement onto the IMP. And there are actually six metrics in the Core Web Vitals. There are three and then three more, sorry. So six in total. As long as we improve and bring improvement to those Core Web Vitals metrics and If you pass two of them, you fail, you have to pass three of them in order to fail, which means you have to perform 70 percent or better.

So we took, we take always the 75th percentile as a gauge. And luckily for us, and thanks to the hard work of the engineering team NitroPak today is at the top of this report for the good stuff and at the bottom of this report for the bad stuff. For instance, a good stuff is how many websites using NitroPack would essentially pass Core Web Vitals.

Versus competitors, how slow the page will load and how quickly the time to first bite will load essentially. So there are different types of metrics that pretty much measure this. And I can say that this is a good enough cue and Google have confirmed it that recently this became one of the good ranking factors when deciding which site will go.

Bob whenever someone is performing a search and getting the blue links out of a Google search.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, awesome. Congratulations on, that. Tell us a little bit about, let’s imagine we’re talking to somebody who’s Not super technical. They have a WordPress site and they want to get a baseline of how they’re performing now in terms of speed, what should they do?

Mihail Stoychev: So the easiest thing that they can do is go to Google page speeds and just entered their websites, get a view of how fast they’re performing, get a view of actually. Whether they pass core web vitals or not. So whenever you’re seeing a score there again, this is a lab test. Lab test means that a server somewhere is simulating a user going to your website.

It actually doesn’t mean a lot. So the real deal in our sector is how the real users, so your users are experiencing your website And not how a lab test performs So don’t fall into gauging and measuring number a versus number b because it doesn’t have Absolutely, or it has very little effect to your overall performance and there are plenty of ways that you can inflate or fake this score, so I would say Just see your Core Web Vitals metrics.

Make sure that those metrics are good. And then I would say install NitroPack, install another tool. If you want to compare us, see which one brings you a better bang for the buck and a better score. And at the end of the day, you can make your decision, which one to choose for your performance.

Optimization strategy. I just want to say that unlike other things, those are not great to mix and match. So don’t try to create a cocktail of, I’ll use a little bit of this plugin, a little bit of that plugin, There are plenty of good solutions around the market that go for very budget price.

And if you’re serious about your business, you can consider some of the paid plans. And I think that this is where you would see the most value. Especially if you’re a revenue generating business and even a 0. 1 second improvement of any of the factors can bring you way more than you imagine that you’re living on the table right now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s educate folks a little bit on speed and let me see how I’m going to frame this question, but. Who’s responsible for speed? Is it like plugins? Is it WordPress, Is it web hosts? And is it speed optimization tools? Like nitro pack? I think the answer is we all are, but help people understand help people understand what WordPress is doing for speed, what web hosts are doing for speed, what plugins do for speed and what NitroPack does for speed.

You mentioned the CDN, the image optimization, and there’s literally 35 different levers you’re, pulling to speed up the website. Give us a tour across those different categories and how they impact speed in terms of plugins, WordPress, hosting, NitroPack.

Mihail Stoychev: Sure. So I would say the biggest impact that you can have.

For WordPress, in my opinion, is WordPress itself. This is why they have a performance team. And this is why they’re working really, hard in order to make WordPress faster for everyone else. We see that this is a topic in the latest conferences as well. And we couldn’t be happier for it.

Because, again, this is part of our mission. It’s part of Google’s mission. And this is pretty awesome. From there on, we obviously have the hosting providers. I think most of them provide some level of optimizations. Usually what they will do is the so called backend or server side optimizations.

And this is great. Some, hosting providers even have even have solutions and they have servers, which are, for instance, Lightspeed is a good example that you get the Lightspeed servers. Then on top of that, you can have their. their solution as well, which works good. But where we excel is we don’t touch the back end.

We don’t touch the database. We don’t play with it at all. It’s very dangerous. We don’t want to be blamed for screwing up something like that. So we would only work on the front end. And we believe that this is where we can make the biggest difference for. We believe that already the majority of the hosting providers have some form of caching.

They have some layer of optimizations going on in the back, and they serve a good purpose. So they’re a good ground. WordPress, good going great. Hosting providers, good going great. Someone going great squared. And then I would say that optimization Performance plugins like ours. What we do is we come and we actually deploy the final and most important step.

The one that really, makes the difference from good to great as the book is. So what we Really in power on is those optimizations which are safe, which pretty much speed of the front end, which actually improve the experience because the user at the end of the day is interacting with your front end.

And yes, some queries might be slow. Yes, some buttons might be loading a little bit slower might, have huge requests that go back to the server. But I think in modern, Website building. We see this less and less often. So we believe the biggest impact can be done on the front end. This was part of our DNA from the get go whenever we started the company and Up until today and for the future, I would say that we wouldn’t be interested into tinkering whatsoever with database or doing any sort of server side optimizations.

Rather than that, we would like to focus and stay on the front end and we would like to continue being the best inbreed at that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s ask about hosting because I get this question all the time, and I’m sure you do too, but we’re not hosting companies, but people ask for a recommendation, particularly concerned about speed and performance.

And different website builders have different budgets and the website maybe isn’t making any money or what we’ll never make money. It’s more content, but then some people have a robust store or LMS or whatever, and I’m not asking for to name names or anything, but how do you think about.

advising somebody on a hosting solution from like the shared hosting, the most economical stuff the, kind of mid middle of the road manage WordPress hosting. And then there’s like really expensive high end plans. Where, should somebody start if they’re genuinely concerned about speed?

Mihail Stoychev: So you, pointed it into the right direction.

Obviously, if you’re A weekend warrior or someone that tries something as a side hustle. I would say try to be as budgeted as possible. So there are always great deals on the long tail side of the costing providers. Pretty much for a few bucks a month, you can get a decent posting and that would be fine.

If you’re still trying to figure things out, there is no need to go ballistic and spend your budget on a hosting provider. Maybe some people will hate me for saying this, but in my opinion, you can make a much larger impression by making a decent website. And also let’s not forget how much money you have to spend in order to drive.

Leads to the top of the funnel. In my opinion, I would run hostings as Very good. I would say that probably 80 percent of the business of every single hosting I talk to is running WordPress. So by the time I think that the competition there is pretty fierce for anyone to be left out in a mediocrity.

So I think whenever you have a strong and and very resilient competition, you have great companies being born. I would start with shared hosting or with something cheaper than I would graduate. So make sure the hosting that you choose can actually, you can grow with it. I’m pretty sure the majority of them, you can, and then if you’re it’s important where the servers are, I would say the majority of the hosting providers now, nowadays are using cloud for all this, so they’re distributed and accessible from anywhere.

But in the end of the day you have to also try to see what other folks are doing. You have to see what type of Solutions the hosting provides. So a lot of hostings are building equal systems around themselves. And within those equal systems, you have quick installs from anywhere in their panels.

For instance, we where we work with any hosting around. So we’re compatible with all the postings in the wordpress equal system. But we have direct integrations with a few ones. The main name drop I’m going to use this Dow EP engine. We work with them for the past four or five months, and we already are sharing a pretty good amount of customers that are enjoying a very fast page speed.

Ever since we created a solution for hosting providers, services which we call NitroPack OneClick. Essentially, we were able to onboard a few more hosting providers. It’s not like you cannot install us if you’re not part of this program, but if you are, then a user will be able to access NitroPack within a single click of a button.

Again, talking about ease of use, I just think it’s the right way to go. At the end of the day, we are slaves to our user base and to our customers. And we need to work our asses off to make their life as easy as possible. And so they trust us with their money. I would say posting go whenever your heart is.

And if you if you’re in doubt you can just test a few, just like with everything else.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. You’re obviously obsessed, Mikhail, with Speeding up websites and you’ve been doing it for a long time. And you, have this strong mission to make the internet faster.

Tell us what in your crystal ball for the future and how nitro packs going to continue to, innovate and WordPress. What do you see in your crystal ball for speeding up the internet?

Mihail Stoychev: That’s a great question. Essentially. What we’re doing today is again, focusing on front end optimizations.

So for us, we want to find more ways that the users can interact in a predictable and fast way with their websites. This is the number one priority. Another strong domain for us is essentially being able to gauge what is the real user value of browsing the website. Again, we were talking about lab tests, about synthetic tests, and then we’re talking about how the real users are essentially experiencing the website.

And what and how does this relate to exactly the service that we’re bringing to the table? So not like going. Yo, come to our website. Okay, you installed the plugin, now go and do a test, then come back, then see what’s wrong. But being able to provide a 360 picture of where your website is, where it used to be before, how good it is now, how many interactions did we help with, how many of those were prolific, let’s say, and reach the final goal.

By the way, what’s the goal? How is the user experience? How is the different use case going to differentiate from, let’s say a publisher to an e commerce website to let’s say a platform, which is on a mission to transform education and help users create educational content. So all of those are different use cases and what we’re trying to create is.

A very simple way for us to essentially show exactly where helping, who are we helping to and if there are problems, how those problems can be pinpointed and addressed with a single click of a button so that you excel and you’re successful Way ahead of your competition. So my dream would be for someone let’s, say, not just starting out because that will be unrealistic, but let’s say a small and medium enterprise.

To be able to do something better than this fortune 500 company, not having this big budget, just being able to use this as like a gorilla secret if type of a tool and being able to win. So being able to arm the, let’s say growing up guys into believing that they can compete with the big wells in the blue ocean.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I love that. Yeah. I feel the same way about helping the little person or the startup succeed. If somebody has questions, this has been a great conversation and they want to explore NitroPak or connect with you or your team. What’s the best way for people to connect with NitroPak?

Mihail Stoychev: So they can connect with NitroPak by going to our website.

Again I don’t know if I mentioned this, we do have 24 seven support. If they want to reach out to me, I’m always available on LinkedIn or they can email me. I’m at if you see my first name, it’s Michail. So I’m at michail. nitrofac. io. So if you have any particular questions, you can reach out there.

We have a Facebook page. We also are on Twitter. One of the few European companies trying to be on Twitter. So we, we, try to be as as, as open and available as possible. And either me or someone from the team would be able to to, get your questions answered.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you for coming on the show, Mihael.

I really appreciate it. I want to encourage you out there listening or watching to go install the free nitro pack plugin. And really don’t wait to speed up your website because only good, things come from doing that, but thank you Mihail for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Mihail Stoychev: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen delves into the intricate process of migrating from traditional SCORM-based learning systems to more agile platforms like WordPress integrated with LifterLMS.

Kurt is a LifterLMS user and LifterLMS expert. His expertise includes handling SCORM content and migration initiatives, in addition to dealing with platforms such as WordPress and Lifter LMS. He describes the difficulty of balancing large expenditures on historical SCORM material with the requirement for modernization, emphasizing the unwillingness to throw away priceless assets.

Kurt suggests doable migration tactics including separating out older information into legacy repositories and reusing content by exporting it in web-compatible forms. He emphasizes WordPress’s adaptability by explaining the several ways that SCORM material may be displayed inside the WordPress environment, such as embedding, lightboxes, and independent tabs.

Kurt’s observations essentially highlight the need of strategic preparation and utilizing WordPress’s features to enable a smooth transfer to contemporary learning management systems.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. It’s Kurt Von Ahnen. He’s back on the show and Kurt works with us here at LifterLMS. And he also has an agency specializing in learning site builds. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to upload and track SCORM content using WordPress with Lifter LMS.

This is going to be a discussion, particularly if you have a. Big catalog of SCORM learning material that you’ve been building at your company over the years and how to get onto a modern, more affordable, more powerful WordPress based learning management system with Lifter LMS. We’re going to dive into it today, but first welcome back on the show, Kurt.

Thanks, Chris. It’s good to be here, man. It’s always fun to work with you. I’m excited to dive into it with you. We’ve been getting more and more inquiries about SCORM content and working with it, with LifterLMS. And I wanted to make some content together to help people that are looking at a move to understand the key variables of what to consider when LMS, like LifterLMS, but let’s start with.

What’s the biggest challenge somebody has when they’re thinking about the move? Let’s say they’re an enterprise. They’ve got tons of money invested in the SCORM content library, and they’re trying to figure they want to modernize, maybe they’re having security issues on their old system. They want to get to something in the, that’s a lot easier to run and, scale and own the asset of the learning management system website itself.

What should they consider right off the bat?

Kurt Von Ahnen: I think one of the biggest things to consider as we have this discussion and we think about who the actual audience is, Chris, I think of these enterprise type businesses that are large in scale compared to what you and I usually think about with presidents and vice presidents and committees and all of these.

Departments and divisions. And when you look at the size of these organizations, typically the training departments been left behind. It’s an afterthought and it’s you say it out loud and people say, oh, that’s not true. But it is companies generally focus on sales. Marketing and they’ll say sales is what drives the business.

And the way that they scale their internal staff is based on the actual sales and revenue and all that stuff that comes in through the front end of the business. So in a lot of cases scorned 20 years old. And so they may have made that decision two decades ago and invested a ton of money and assets in that direction.

So I think one of the biggest obstacles. To your question is, Oh my goodness. Like, how are you the vice president or the president of this big corporation? And you’re about to say, Hey, go ahead and push the delete button on that 1. 6 million file over there. It’s just not, it’s not a reasonable ask and it’s, really hard to get them to, when I say get them talk to these types of enterprise clients into using a different learning process, a different educational builder.

So they, a lot of them will stick with the SCORM generating tools because they made that decision so long ago and they’ve invested greatly in it. And I think that’s the biggest obstacle because after that, they become convinced over time. That they need a special website that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain and host, and it just becomes this never ending black hole of spending that a lot of these companies get locked into.

And then when I started with Lifter LMS, we used to get 1 or 2. Queries a month about SCORM and now we’re getting these questions every week. So I think there’s like this giant awakening. I think the timing is really good to hit the subject matter. And LFTRLMS is definitely a great place to put your SCORM and keep your legacy content alive.

Chris Badgett: Why do you think people are with, whether they’re an enterprise and it’s a training thing for their, SCORM content, or maybe it’s a curriculum provider of some kind with a catalog that they license out? They’re clearly already looking at WordPress and tools like Lifter LMS to make the move. Why do you, so they’re already interested.

They’re, it’s not about convincing them to Hey, check us out this alternative option. They’re already looking. Why do you think that is?

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’m just going to be blunt cost my corporate training background, Chris when you and I first started working together, I was amazed at what I could build in WordPress as far as capability and scaling went.

And I think a lot of people at that time, because we’re going back more than half a decade. A lot of people didn’t think of WordPress in those terms. We thought of WordPress in terms of like brochure websites or the independent course creator or the new startup or the entrepreneur.

And. I think the more that we began to recognize that you can scale in WordPress and you, can bring that content over. I think the more we recognized it, the more other people started to wake up and recognize it too. So we’re starting to see people look for the option. I can’t tell you how, much money people spend corporately on this type of, endeavor.

It’s Always a six figure conversation. Every time you sit in the conference room and have a talk or a meeting about it. And when you get into WordPress, you’re having talks about tens of thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that changes the whole scope of the project.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I think that’s interesting. Sometimes it’s just the extreme affordability of WordPress and lifter LMS, and even professional agencies like yourself at Manana web dev studios, we’ve worked on with some SCORM. Projects in a way, sometimes in sales, it’s like this thing is so cheap. It can’t work.

Even if I bring in this agency and stuff, it’s still way under the old way of doing things. But I think you’re right. There is an awakening there. And I want to provide a little context in terms of what WordPress is and what. A learning management system on WordPress does. And I actually got this insight from a SCORM and XAPI expert who said, do you realize that you don’t just have an LMS with Lifter LMS, you have an LCMS.

And I was like what does that mean? WordPress is a content management system or CMS. Lifter is a learning management system. LMS. But what, when you put all this together, you have a learning content management system. It’s not just about putting e learning in an LMS. You can do that.

And that’s what we’re talking about today in terms of uploading and SCORM and tracking the your, users and getting all the reporting and everything, but WordPress itself, anything on the internet, you can create that type of content and WordPress natively. Or embed it from another service or tool or file library or whatever.

But I think that’s like a key thing you have to get is this is, you could use a WordPress LMS, like Lifter LMS without a separate e learning authoring tool, because you can create all the learning content, the videos, the quizzes, everything directly with Lifter LMS and WordPress. But we have an issue here, which is if we spent two decades investing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in this catalog of SCORM content, we’re like, I’ve heard this in talking to people transitioning SCORM to WordPress is they say that’s cool.

I want to do the new way of doing things going forward. But I’m not ready to just disregard all this other work and convert all these SCORM content into web content. So there’s that’s a challenge. So how do we deal with that? What do you recommend?

Kurt Von Ahnen: My strong suit when I talk to people, Chris is just problem solving.

Each whenever I consult with a company, each one has a unique use case, right? So what a lot of people don’t recognize is when they make SCORM content, if they use a course authoring tool like Rise or Articulate 360 or one of these, what they’re high dollar tools too, right? Articulate 360, last time I checked was like 3, 000 a year for individual license.

So if you’ve got a team of five people in your company using this thing, you’re already out 15, 000 for the year just for software to make the courses. So just you have to keep that economic scale in mind when you think about all this stuff. But a lot of people don’t recognize that when they export the scorn package, it’s exportable in multiple ways.

And this is where I think a lot of companies made a big mistake. They subcontracted. Some instructional developer to make their scorn package and they got a zip file that they could put into their custom LMS and it worked, but they never kept the original authoring files to alter or to re edit or republish or update content and that stuff.

Tends to get lost over the years. And so these different SCORM authoring tools have the ability to export the material to display on the web, like directly. So a lot of people with SCORM authoring tools, they’ll say, Oh this doesn’t work with SCORM. And it’s wait a minute. You can, if you still have it, you can export that package to be displayable on the web.

So you can say export that as an HTML file, export that used to be able to export them as flash back in the day, but export as an HTML file or export as a zip file or export as, so you have the options. So that’s one thing. If you have the original files, you can repurpose that content, republish it and use it on a standard website.

The other thing that you can do, and this is what I did at Suzuki. When I worked at Suzuki, Suzuki had this amazing catalog of SCORM content. And it went like way back, like just quite honestly, millions of dollars of content. But it was old. It was really old. And to try and get a new technician coming into the field, like to say in order to be certified, you have to know how to work on a 1978 GS 1000.

That’s not realistic anyway. So when I redesigned the learning platform for Suzuki and that interface for students, we took everything that was three years and newer. We put that on our new interface. Then everything that was four years and older, I put into a legacy kind of repository. I was like, we didn’t waste it.

We didn’t hit the lead. We didn’t, it didn’t to the vice presidents and presidents. It didn’t feel like we were throwing away their investment. But we took all of that content and we literally just dumped it into a repository that was accessible by a search link and people could always pull that, resource up, but we didn’t have it on our forward facing learning site, cluttering up the works for the new technicians.

And in a lot of cases. When I consult with a company, especially a large company with a large library of content, that discussion has to happen where you’re like, Hey, let’s just be real. Nobody needs to learn about Lotus 1, 2, 3 anymore. No one needs to learn about Netscape. So let’s take that old content out.

And if you want to save it somewhere, make it accessible somewhere, we can do that. But let’s focus on what the needs are today. And how we’re going to keep you modern and light moving forward.

Chris Badgett: Those are great points. Yeah. Migration of learning management system isn’t necessarily, it doesn’t have to be a switch you flip where you just turn it on.

There can be a period where you have your legacy platform, you’re building out the new platform. You’re moving users over new people are coming to the new platform only. You’ve still got the back catalog if you need it. Let’s talk about taking the SCORM content and putting it onto the WordPress website.

There’s tools like GrassBlade, LRS. There’s other ones out there as well. So this is not like a new problem. People have been working on this for a long time. Grass blade as an example, directly integrates with Lifter LMS. So when they complete the SCORM package, it completes the lesson, feeds into the reporting and so on.

So if your goal is just to take what you have and move it all over, you can. But tell us more your, what people should think about or understand around just putting the SCORM content on WordPress. And I know there’s you taught me some things about, Hey, we’ve got light boxes. We’ve got opening a link over here.

We’ve got. Embed in the page and there’s all these you have a lot of options and it can look really good.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, then that’s the other strange part. Just as I said, a lot of people in the corporate space aren’t aware of all the export options and their course authoring tools. A lot of them aren’t aware that SCORM can appear.

Almost any way that you choose for it too. I, say that in a way. I try I, wish I could say that better. We rewind, redo, . You have options when you put it into a WordPress website that you don’t natively think about if you normally work with scorm. So if you have one of those corporate websites where SCORM pops up and it’s like a popup on the page and it’s its own little box.

That’s called the light box option. So a lot of custom LMSs are just built with that light box option. So every time someone is managing the LMS for the company, they upload the zip file, and then they go to review those zip file or the page, and it just pops up like a light box. And so for the instructional designer, they come over time to just think that’s the way SCORM works.

You know what I mean? Like it just becomes that’s the method, but in reality, it’s content. And you mentioned it earlier it’s a content management system. So how do you want to display that content? Do you want to embed it in a page and have it work inside the page, like page content, but it stays interactive.

So if you have buttons to push or options or Moving images or quizzing as part of your SCORM package, it still operates, but all within that embedded part of the page, you can do that. You can do the standard light box option where you have that standard kind of launch button or some kind of trigger on the page that launches the light box.

But my favorite option, Chris and I think this was a surprise when you and I were doing a demo with web dev studios recently you can have it open in a separate tab and then that SCORM content. It becomes well, and this is just me. It’s my favorite way of doing it because it makes the SCORM content feel like it’s like living and breathing inside the site.

It fills the whole tab of the page, It seems more modern. It seems it’s more responsive because when it’s in there and you look at like on tablet or mobile, it seems to size better. I just, I really enjoy that option. And a lot of people don’t recognize that’s there. One of the ops obstacles, and you mentioned this is you mentioned grass blade or other tools.

And so people start thinking, Oh man, I got to add more tools. I got to that’s a subscription that’s 99 a year. That’s 150 a year. And, but in the grand scheme of things, we already talked about these projects costing over six figures every year to maintain and manage. And now we’re talking about an extra tool that costs 150 a year.

So I don’t even really give that credit. It’s yeah, you have WordPress, you get Lifter LMS, you put in grass blade and it just, And I’ve tried a handful of other different tools and you can get them to work, but I found the most consistent so far for me has been using grass blade in the grass blade.

LRS.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s great. And I like that. You mentioned the content just to put if you work at a company and you have a bunch of SCORM content, know that WordPress as a content management system has been around for 20 years. Lifter LMS has been around for 10 years. We’re really good at content. And for us, SCORM is just another type of content and it’s not a video.

It may have video elements and so on, but text images, interactive stuff videos, audios, PDFs, PowerPoints, all these things are just types of content that WordPress has been dealing with and Lifter LMS has been dealing with for decades. That should hopefully put people at ease. In terms of score, SCORM is just another kind of content that we play with in this ecosystem and make work for learning needs.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah

It’s,

unique, but just to jump in a bit, I remember when I got the job with Suzuki, right? This is like a story that’s. Not related, but I was a power sports person and the Marine people, cause it’s a there’s Marine automotive and motorcycle and the Marine people would always say, oh our outboards are so technical.

Our outboards are so technical. And then when I went to Japan for the training and they pulled the cover off of one of the. Outboard motors because I had to work on it. I was like, that’s it. It’s an engine on a stick. That’s not overly technical. If I can take apart a motorcycle, I can take apart that.

It looks like an engine out of your Volkswagen shoved on top of a stick. And I know that I have a tendency to oversimplify things. But what I just described with that Suzuki experience is what happens in our world with content management versus SCORM people in the SCORM world, because that course authoring software has lots of hoops and things to jump through to make the end product.

They come out of that experience and they go, Oh SCORM is just so technical. I don’t think it would work in a WordPress website. And it’s like. Why do you think WordPress is different from anything else that shows up on the internet? Other than the fact that you own it and it’s open source and all those things.

But to you and I, like you just said, it’s just content. Once it’s authored, it’s content. It’s like you can edit a video with your iPhone or you can edit your video with Adobe premiere plus. It’s exponentially more complicated, but when the video is done, you’re just embedding a video in your website.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, a hundred percent. And another thing that comes up is scale, like training organizations or big corporations that have training needs. They want to make sure it can scale. Just to give you an idea of some of the organizations that use WordPress, we have NASA, we have Taylor Swift. We have the United States government, and there’s many, more WordPress powers around 45 percent of the internet.

And a lot of sites are small business sites or whatever, but there’s a lot of enterprise WordPress, very high traffic, very big needs on the hosting or the server for resources or interactivity and concurrent logins. and things like that. So this is not a new issue, but I think WordPress has a like a perception problem.

Oh, that’s a blogging software. It’s it is, but that’s 5 percent of the features and it can scale to the largest newspapers in the world. If you’re just talking about blogging or articles but it can also scale as LMS, it can scale in e commerce. There’s very large. e commerce sites on the internet powered by WordPress that have a lot of needs.

So anything else you would add on to scale?

Kurt Von Ahnen: The, biggest, the absolute biggest component of e learning for a lot of these enterprise organizations is scaling. So you mentioned scaling, but you’re talking about scaling the amount of users or bandwidth or maybe security, or we’re thinking in those terms, but in the SCORM world, when you have a custom built learning management system, the providers that provide these custom websites at these huge dollar amounts, they have, costs that are based on active enrollment, right? And so if I’ve got up to 500 students, maybe it’s this much money. If I’ve got over a thousand students, if I have over 2000 students. And so once you start growing your enterprise to where you have 2, 500 active students, Chris you’re, spending as much on the per student licensing as you are for the original hosting and maintenance of the site.

It’s, just the way that they. License the product for you to use to teach your, circle, your community. That pricing model is really outdated. We’re going back 15, 20 years when they started putting these things together, but those pricing models in those custom LMS verticals of the internet, they haven’t changed and so when you transfer over to the WordPress model and you look at a tool like Lifter LMS.

A common question we get from people switching their SCORM into WordPress will say how many students can I enroll in my courses? And, we’re confused. We go, As many as you want, how many you got?

Chris Badgett: And how much more does it cost per student? Nothing. I think this is why people are coming over as they’re realizing that whether they’re using a hosted LMS Canva and talent LMS, and you, could probably rattle off some more names.

Oh,

Kurt Von Ahnen: SumTotal, Bridge, LearnUpon all of those that I still remember. I think they all still charge based on active user counts and licensing per user.

Chris Badgett: And, Lifter LMS has none of that. It’s there’s no limit on number of courses, number of instructors, number of students, number of admin users, or all these different user roles on your site.

If you’re selling access to your SCORM content there’s no, you’re not getting we’re not charging you more for that. So it’s, I think it’s that unlimited nature and people are getting used to that or they’re starting to discover like, Oh, I don’t need to pay 30, 40, a hundred thousand dollars a month for an LMS when I could buy LFTR LMS, everything I need.

For 1500 bucks, which also comes with unlimited sites, number of websites you can use it on. And you can even get a lifetime license and never have to pay LFTR again and fix your costs. So when we talk about scale, LFTR LMS and WordPress are infinitely scalable out of the box. Your web hosting is where there is some scaling costs, but even that is far more affordable than the traditional way of doing things.

And there’s great companies out there. Convessio is one that comes pops to the top of my head. We just did a blog post with them about scaling and there’s, a lot of great. Web hosts that people like NASA, the United States government and Taylor Swift use, and it’s fine. And it’s still like way, cheaper than the old way.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. And when you mentioned those famous people, it’s like when I was talking to Vic Dorfman about that project we’re working on, he was like, oh yeah, we have the website for the beast. And you think about the millions of users that follow that cat and you go, man, that’s there might be more people going to that website than the NASA site.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the scale concern it’s, basically handled, get the best software. If you’re all mess is the best in the WordPress learning management system ecosystem, there are several great there’s literally hundreds of web hosts out there, but if you’re a large organization, there’s a short list of probably about 10 of the top for that do the large sites and make sure it’s just a seamless, easy experience with a hundred percent uptime and all that kind of stuff.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And that’s, let’s just do the plug while we’re here. If you go to liftorlms. com right at the top menu is the recommended resources and you can go to recommended resources. And there’s a list of themes and hosts and tools and everything in there for people that are just checking it out.

Chris Badgett: Let’s, think about sometimes with WordPress and Lifter LMS as an example, when it comes to a big company adopting. It seems like there’s usually an evangelist within the company and innovator. Maybe it’s the, C the CEO or the owner is trying to cut costs. It’s a technical person who’s Hey, we really need to modernize our tech stack.

Maybe it’s an instructional designer. Who’s you know what these. I want to try to do something with native web content using WordPress. They do everything our e learning authoring tool does. Maybe we should look at this. How do you help somebody who is excited about this kind of sell it to their organization in terms of, could be a technical person, could be a person who’s keeping track of the money and expenses that could be an instructional designer, it could be.

A teacher, like how do we get everybody on board and excited about the opportunity here?

Kurt Von Ahnen: This takes me back. I think it was four or five years ago. You and I did a podcast and you were like, how did you get WordPress into Suzuki? And I was like, I didn’t ask for permission. I just did it.

Chris Badgett: They just wanted the outcome, right?

They just wanted a solution. You found the best. Most economical solution made it happen.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And then when you show it to them, like you put it up on the screen in the conference room you put it up on the big screen and they go, Oh, this is nice. When did you make this? I made it last weekend.

How much did it cost? Nothing so far. Oh, we like it. We like it. So the best advice for people in the learning space, honestly, Dude, sign up for the dollar demo, right? You get yourself a dollar demo. It’s good for 30 days. You go in, you put in the company logo, it, the rest of the sites populated with content and you get used to seeing where things are.

This is groups, this is forums. This is that. Cause the demo has all those. Premium tools on it. And then maybe you, look at maybe putting grass blade onto it, if you really have to show off the scorn, you put grass blade into that demo site that you’ve got for 30 days. Anyway, schedule a meeting with your VP or your director of it get them in a room, shut the door.

And go, Hey, I did some quick research and I see that we’re paying our, current provider 497, 000 this year for our e learning platform. I can build us a duplicate of that learning platform with extra features, right? For 58, 000 and, don’t worry about my salary. Cause I’m already on the clock.

And it’s really hard for somebody in corporate to go, wait, I can say 400, 000 this afternoon,

Chris Badgett: you

Kurt Von Ahnen: know, and say, no, they’ll at least let you explore.

Chris Badgett: And just to empower, if you’re watching this and you are in one of these organizations, you’re interested in SCORM as a training arm of your company, or as a curriculum provider, and you want to look at the WordPress and Lifter LMS.

We have a detailed blog post on our blog. Just Google Lifter LMS blog SCORM. You’ll find it. We have other videos on our YouTube channel about working with this content. We have the dollar demo, so you can start playing with it and see what it’s like to work with a learning management system and WordPress.

And you can build up a proof of concept, like you’re saying with GrassBlade and even just reach out to us. If, you’re looking for a demo, we host live calls typically on Thursdays where we can just open up and show you what you’re looking for with a screen share. There’s a ton of resources here that are visual that you can read about.

That you can view on a video, get a live demo, get a sandbox trial test site to test. You’ve just got options here. So this is a podcast. So we’re talking a lot, but I just want you to know there’s all these other resources to help you make this decision and move forward.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And at the risk of patting myself on the back.

A lot of enterprise clients aren’t looking to have a new project in house. They just aren’t so they’re thinking I can’t give up my provider. I can’t give up having a reliable, sustainable source outside of the office to do this. Lifter LMS has a whole list of vetted.

Experts I’m on the list web dev studios for enterprise work is fantastic. Codable is an option. There’s just a ton of experts available through the LFTR LMS ecosphere that can help you with these kinds of projects. And I know that Manjana Nomas is always open to this kind of stuff.

That’s right in our alley.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And it’s a skill set to really have that knowledge of SCORM, corporate, WordPress, Lifter LMS, hosting, when you host your own website, and yeah it’s, there are peop one of the great things about WordPress is the community of people. Agencies and people that can help support your project.

So if your concern is like in your mind, you’re thinking like, I don’t know if my it person can do this. I talked to them and they’ve never heard of WordPress or they haven’t used it. And in a couple of years you can hire, bring somebody outside to build it and you own the asset. It’s your website. You’re just bringing in somebody who’s an expert at all these layers.

Has the overlap with WordPress, SCORM and LFTR LMS and hosting and can really fulfill the project for you and potentially train your team so that they’re one of the cool things about WordPress is it’s empowering. Once people learn how to drive it and you learn how to create a course in LFTR LMS and put your SCORM content in there, go native and WordPress.

It empowers your instructional designers or your content people to, you’re not going to be caught infinitely outsourcing. Or hiring agencies, unless you want to, you can do that, but you can also upskill your team in house.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And most providers would offer some kind of tutorial or training service to show you how to use the platform once it’s built anyway, and that’s part of the deal.

When you, mentioned an interesting thing, and I want to make sure people don’t get confused or think it’s not possible. So you were saying you could upload SCORM or you could do work in the native course builder kind of environment, right? So the native course builder in Lyft or LMS allows you to put in text, video, pictures, any kind of file, PDF, PowerPoint.

You can just. Cram, anything that works on the web, like Chris said, can go in there, but don’t think that you’re limited. Don’t think you either have a SCORM LMS or a native LMS. That content can be completely hybrid. And what’s really cool is, let’s say you have multiple SCORM pieces and you’re used to your system only playing one SCORM package per page, With Lifter LMS, you can actually stack those SCORM packages in the same page.

Like someone could literally go chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, or however you label yours, modules or whatever. Sometimes our lingo is different, but the overall features and benefits. Are of the same theory, right? So we have a course hierarchy with lessons and courses and sections and memberships, which for you, you might think in terms of modules, pages, and chapters, but we’ll figure all that out.

We’ve got people at Lyft Rail MS that can help you line up your lingo and make sure that everything matches up for you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s a good point. I want to encourage you if you’re watching this and you have more questions. You can always email us at Lyft or LMS. You can find that wherever, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can drop a comment down below.

We have a community calendar on our website that you can find on the main menu that has our live events. If you want to come and ask personalized questions as you. Evaluate Lifter LMS and WordPress for your LMS. We’re here for you. And there’s a whole community, like we’ve mentioned of like agencies, Curt’s agency, which is separate from Lifter LMS, Mañana No Más.

If you’re looking for that person to come in and build it out help you develop a proof of concept, even to sell whoever needs to sell, like there’s talented people out there that knows the hybrid tech stack here. And I love what you said about. Clarifying that WordPress is a content management system.

Lift lifters, learning management system, that content can mix and match and be as variable as complex or as simple as you want. So there’s really no limit to the customizability there. And you get to own the asset that you create with your own learning platform, which is. Super valuable, especially in today’s world where you don’t want to get caught just renting access to everything.

And you don’t actually own the asset, particularly as a curriculum provider. You want to build your, asset and your content is just a part of the asset, but the platform. Is really valuable. One thing we’ve seen people doing with SCORM and WordPress and Lifter LMS is they’re like, I want to have multiple websites for different clients.

That’s all possible too. And again, this goes back to the unlimited thing with Lifter LMS, with our top license, it’s unlimited sites. So you’re not going to get charged anymore. You can just build one for this division or this state or this client. And you can work with your like core content.

There’s course importing and exporting and. There’s all kinds of stuff you can do to do a really large multi multiple website thing if you want to, or you can keep it all in one. It’s completely flexible.

Kurt Von Ahnen: One last thing, when we talk about enterprise projects and SCORM sites, and you touched on this, Chris, but I want to make sure we’re clear.

A lot of these companies have. A dedicated CRM tool, then they have their learning management tool, then they have a sales and marketing website, and then they have an inventory site. That’s on an S 400 server somewhere. They have all that stuff and. If they start with moving the training content over and they get that proof of concept working in that WordPress space, that WordPress site has the ability to adapt or adopt the other requirements.

So you can begin to say, Hey, what would it look like to migrate our CRM into that page? Into that page. Into that setting. So then you get rid of that tool that’s costing you thousands of dollars a month. And now you’re running something in your site. Hey, can I run inventory? There’s e commerce tools and all kinds of things that support inventory actions.

So you can go, okay now we can start supporting our inventory inside the site. Then you start looking at your other things. Before you know it, you’ve been able to streamline your whole tech stack. Now I T people are going, Hey, dude, I need my job. But realistically, you can consolidate these things in the one central kind of tool.

And some people might say, Hey, if it’s a real enterprise project, I still want to keep things separate on subdomains, or I want to there’s, different strategies for different companies and use cases are always different. But I find a lot of midsize companies do really good with just consolidating everything, simplifying everything.

And then giving all of their employees, all of their internal users, the ability to take their actions inside that site and use it as the communication portal for the whole company.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. And that’s just, that’s a great way to paint the picture of what an in state could be. You could end up there.

But all you have to do in the short term is take the first step, get a proof of concept focus on the LMS. You don’t have to kill your back catalog. Like we discussed and you can move forward. You don’t necessarily, you can start your new LMS and get going while maintaining the legacy one.

You have a lot of options. It’s all about just moving forward with the right people, the right tools. The right vision you have in your company and clearly communicating what you want. Cause this is an opportunity for innovation where workflows can be improved. Things can be automated. Tooling can be upgraded while also saving a ton of money.

So it’s a, it was a good conversation. Curt, I want to thank you for coming back on the show. Did you have a final thought there?

Kurt Von Ahnen: No, I was going to apologize for getting off track. Cause I get excited.

Chris Badgett: That’s not off track. I think that’s perfect. Cause that’s the ultimate vision of not only are you cutting your costs, consolidating tools, modernizing your tech stack Upscaling your organization and modernizing it, but that’s all like a a golden path that you can just start walking towards, but I think that’s the important part is begin with the end in mind and just start, walking.

Cause if you’re, and I think that’s what people are doing. That’s why they’re looking at these tools. Cause they’re like, I want to move in this direction. I’m not sure what the first step is. It’s seen, we have like decades of like legacy decisions and content here. So I get that it’s a little bit overwhelming, but all you have to do is start and if you’re investigating and you’re watching this video, you’re already on the path.

Just take the next step. Reach out to us at Lifter LMS with questions. Come to our live calls. You can ping Kurt over directly at his agency, Mañana No Más. And we’re excited. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We’re not going anywhere. WordPress isn’t going anywhere. Our mission is to lift up others through education.

So we’re just here. This is what we do education, whether that’s in a company or lots of different ways that education is done. And we’re democratizing that we’re making it more affordable. We’re making it easier and more to use more powerful, more customizable. We get to benefit from the WordPress ecosystem, which isn’t like one company.

It’s like literally because it powers 42 percent of the internet. There’s literally like hundreds of thousands of professionals who build tools and have services and agencies that can help you. So that’s what it’s all about. Thank you, Kurt, for coming back on the show. Really appreciate it. I know you get passionate about online education and solving business problems at scale.

So it’s, really fun to have this discussion today. Thank you so much for coming on.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Ah, thanks for having me, man. It was great.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Zack Katz shares a comprehensive overview of GravityView and its associated plugins developed by GravityKit. Also he shares how to create a app for your LifterLMS website with GravityView.

Zack Katz is the founder of GravityKit. He is a prominent figure in the WordPress community. In this episode, He highlights how Gravity Forms can be used for more than just standard contact forms; they can also be used as entry points for other kinds of apps on a website.

Zack also emphasizes the contribution GravityKit makes to the functionality of Gravity Forms by way of plugins such as GravityView, GravityCalendar, GravityCharts, GravityMath, and others. Gravity Forms data may be efficiently organized, migrated, edited, and visualized by users with the help of these plugins.

GravityView makes it easier for form submission data to be shown on the student dashboard or LMS website, allowing for functions like report viewing, submission grading, and score summaries. Zack also covers practical uses for Gravity Forms and related plugins, such creating expert or instructor directories, exhibiting user-generated content, organizing event calendars, and automating processes like vacation requests.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Zach Katz from Gravitykit. com. We’re going to be talking today about how to use GravityView, which is a product that GravityKit makes that deeply integrates with LifterLMS so that you can display submission form data in the student dashboard and in other parts of your LMS website.

We’ll get into all that. We’re also going to do a live demo of that, but first welcome back on the show. Zach.

Zack Katz: Thanks Chris. And thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s good to chat with you again. I’m a huge fan of Gravity Forms and GravityView. Let’s start with some basics for people, because I know in my journey, It took me a while to realize that the internet is mostly powered by forms and what that actually means.

And then that’s only half the story, collecting data through forms. Then you might want to use display that data somewhere. So take us down to the fundamentals and talk to us about Gravity Forms and then visualizing data,

Zack Katz: right? So Gravity Forms, best WordPress form out there. Sorry, everybody else, but you’re not as good as Gravity Forms.

I’m coming in hot Chris. Gravity Forms is the best way to create little miniature applications. So forms aren’t just. contact forms anymore. There are really entry points to applications and to jobs to be done for your business. So a form could be a checkout form. If you wanted to sell something, a form could be a student article submission for, their end of year project.

And all these different entry points currently sit in Gravity Forms, and you can connect it up to other places. If you have Gravity Forms add ons, you can get an email with attachments. You can submit it to Google Sheets and stuff like that. But what GravityKit does is we try to take all that Gravity Forms data on your website so that you can create applications for yourself to make your flow work the way you want it to.

Students submit reports, and the teachers log on to your own website. The teachers have can create, you can create views for the teachers to view reports of their own students, grade the submissions right there, view charts of submissions over time, summarize the scores, like all this types of stuff is possible inside your website using Gravity Forms and GravityKit.

And we try to take whatever you’re trying to do for your business. There’s so many different flows that are available to be converted from something where you need to go somewhere else. To, process a an assignment process a log. And instead we can take that internally and you can create powerful integrations with other tools like Lister LMS and create dashboards for your own data that facilitates people in the organization and outside.

You can have it be internal only private to you, or you can have it be public, have people be able to browse this data publicly as well.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And I’m a GravityKit and Gravity Forms user. I’ve been using Gravity Forms for over 10 years. And two of the ways we use it on the LifterLMS website is we have an experts program where people ask us all the time to refer them to freelancers and agency folks.

That have experience and skills with LifterLMS. So we created an experts program. If somebody wants to get that business and generate client leads from LifterLMS, they go through our little application form and a lot of the data that they’re submitting, like their profile picture, links to their website, their contact information and stuff like that.

GravityView, once we approve the submission, then turns it around and publishes all those experts in a directory. And we actually have it on randomized order so that the order of people that show up is always random. That way somebody who, joined a long time ago doesn’t just end up always at the bottom and alpha, alphabetizing isn’t always fair.

So we, we use the random feature. And we do something really similar with pictures that people submit and website links of websites, they’re proud that they’ve built with lifter LMS. We call that a showcase. It’s also randomized and it allows us to create user generated content by our users that we can then approve and display on our website.

And I just want to put another for the LMS user out there. We get a lot of people who want to build. a Udemy clone or a course marketplace or certify certain professionals. And these are places where a directory becomes comes in handy where if somebody wants to teach on your LMS platform, they can submit an application form.

And with all the details you need that later displays on a like an instructor’s page that has all the people or all the people that were certified to this program. Really, the options are completely limitless and what I’m most excited about is it takes away, you can build all that kind of content from scratch using WordPress or page builders.

But if users just have the stuff and you’ve got the layout set you’re, literally automating so much quote, busy work, building out like a nice looking page of teachers or certified professionals or businesses or so many different ways to use it.

Zack Katz: Yeah. And one of the things we offer is GravityCalendar, which is a way to display Gravity Form entries on a calendar.

And that creates a calendar feed that you can subscribe to on your apple calendar app, for example, or Google calendar. So for one way that you could use this is for teachers to submit events for a school and the school could have a form where you teach to submit events and all these teachers, once it gets approved.

Can submit their own events to the school, people can subscribe to the school calendar, and voila, it takes care of it all with, just with Gravity Forms and GravityCalendar, you can bypass so much complexity and have teacher, give teachers the power, and administrators have an easy time setting up the functionality.

And then you can embed a calendar on a page that shows upcoming events you can click into it and see You can embed GravityView views inside the calendar itself to show people who have signed up for different events. It, you can build out applications one step at a time, drag and drop, no code required.

It’s really powerful for educators. And we have a ton of people who are using GravityView and our other tools for educational purposes.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You just gave me another project by the way, cause we have a community calendar at LifterLMS. com and what you just described is way better than how ours works and in our case, like different team members need to add events to a calendar that the public needs to subscribe to and all that, and that is That’s really cool.

I’m going to have to dig in on that one.

Zack Katz: And I have a we have a team vacation calendar that we have internally that people submit vacation requests and I subscribe to that on my Apple calendar so I can see what team members are taking off on the weeks coming up. We, love that functionality as well.

Chris Badgett: Perfect. Perfect. Let’s double click and go a little deeper on what you were just talking about in terms of. view is one product within GravityKit. Can you just describe and explain the main products in the suite that makes up GravityKit? Sure.

Zack Katz: We have a bunch. Our goal is to allow the, allow you to view, export, edit organize, migrate all your Gravity Forms data.

We have different ways to view your data like GravityView and GravityCalendar and GravityCharts that we have an easy way to create charts from Gravity Forms data. So if you Will also I’ll show you that later in this broadcast But we have you can embed a chart inside lifter now with this new GravityView integration we also have GravityMath to do calculations like advanced summing, dividing, like all sorts of algebra with your Gravity Forms data and arbitrary numbers.

So if you ever need to do calculations with Gravity Forms, that’s the way to go. And we have easy ways to import and export using Gravity, import and Gravity, export and Gravity migrate to move. If you have multiple sites writing a whole bunch of Gravity form stuff, and it’s frustrating to have to recreate it on each site, we bundle it up into one thing and you can migrate it all at once.

That makes it really easy. Then bulk actions with Gravity actions. If you need a way to see all the changes that you’ve made over time, like track changes, but for Gravity Forms, we have Gravity revisions. And then if you need to make easy changes to your data, gravity edit. So Chris, we’ve got a lot of add ons, but they really come together.

We’ve created each one of these add ons because we’ve identified a need that our customers have for an additional. important part of their toolkit that they don’t have. So we built an out on and now they all work together really nicely. And we find that people can create incredible applications that power entire websites that some of these replaced their software that they said they were paying 120, 000 a year.

For this software, for this custom education software, they’ve built out some,GravityView that do this functionality instead. That type of power powered by your own website data you own and control. That’s what you get with Gravity Forms and GravityKit. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: And you, have some fans live with us here today.

James Tryon says, hi, Hashim says he loves that GravityView original theme song. Yeah, Zach and his team. There’s a lot of great creativity and the way they do their marketing and branding is awesome. So definitely go check out GravityKit. com and you’ll see what I’m talking about. One just kind of base level question.

If somebody is new to this and I realized this with lift your LMS as well. Is it takes a moment sometimes for somebody to understand the difference between a website and an application, like with Lifter LMS, you’re actually building a web application. Yes, it’s a website, but it’s an application that does all these things, but maybe you can help me describe, help somebody grasp that concept of what makes an application different from just a website.

Zack Katz: Let me come up with a metaphor on the spot. You can have a house is your website and then you can bring running motor into your house systems. Yeah. So like you, there are multiple systems inside your house your furnace and that could be an application in your house, which is your website and your house can contain multiple systems.

Maybe that’s a metaphor. I like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Cause it’s really going beyond just content management, which in itself is an application, but the It’s not a static website. You’re building like learning management systems, directories, some e commerce application using Gravity Forms and Stripe or whatever.

So it’s really amazing what you can build on a WordPress site.

Zack Katz: Yeah. And if you see people advertising a feature that can like an LMS, for example, that’s an application, like not that an LMS is a feature, it has many features, but Your, site can run multiple applications at the same time.

Chris Badgett: Kind of like your phone and all the apps. Chris, that’s a much better metaphor. Yeah. I didn’t even think of that example until we talked about it. That’s how we learn in community, as they say. So one of the cool things that you’ve done with your LifterLMS GravityView integration, Lifter LMS has a concept called a student dashboard.

Student dashboard. And in that dashboard, a user has their own unique view of the courses they’re enrolled in, their progress, their grades, their order history, if they’re making purchases. And there are certificates and all kinds of things. But now you’ve integrated GravityView into the student dashboard.

And before going into that you can display GravityView anywhere you want on your website. Can you talk like with shortcodes and stuff? Can you tell us how, just the basics of to get a view somewhere on your website.

Zack Katz: Sure. Yeah.

To create a view, you have a preexisting Gravity Forms form that collects the data, and then you create a view from that data where you drag and drop the fields that you want to display.

And say, if you have a contact form with name, email, phone address, but you only want to display somebody’s name. And if you want to, if you click the name, then it goes into a full profile. That is something that you set up with GravityView And so those, once you create a layout of fields that you want to display, you save it and you can embed it on a post or a page using a shortcode or a block, or you can also just link to it directly where it’s a custom post type of people know what that is.

It’s like a post or a page. but often people choose to embed it in existing content. So embedding it in existing pages and that you can do no problem. But what we were finding is that people wanted to have this data for the currently logged in user. They wanted to show only that logged in users data inside Lifter LMS.

So they could say I have this person who uses Lifter who submitted a bunch of school reports, for example. But. there isn’t a way to display GravityView inside Lifter without customizing it. And so what we did is we developed this integration where you can choose the display to display multiple views if you want inside a LifterLMS student dashboard.

where you can choose to display the current user, current logged in users entries. You can display the role of the current logged in user. So if somebody is a teacher or if somebody is a student, you can choose to display different data based on their role. You can customize it however you want now with GravityView having its own tab and you can rename the tab as however you like.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, jump into a demo. Cause I know we’re throwing around a lot of jargon and words and stuff here. What if if you’re watching, I just want to encourage you to, go over, or I’m sorry, if you’re listening in your earbuds and the podcast app for this segment of the episode, I encourage you to go to our YouTube channel and just look up GravityView Zach Katz.

Podcast. You’ll find it. And and you’ll be able to see what we’re talking about here. But if you want to guide us through a demos act, that’d be great. And and we’ll and do your best to, do it in a way that if somebody’s just listening, they’ll pick up what you’re laying down.

Zack Katz: Yeah. That sounds good.

All right. I am now selecting my screen to be shared.

All right, we good? Yeah, we’re good. All right. I am showing my website. Actually, we’re

Chris Badgett: We’re getting the stream yard from your share. I think you shared the wrong tab. Let me know. Okay. Stop screen.

Zack Katz: Sorry about that.

Chris Badgett: It’s all right. It’s live. This, we always have little hiccups with live technology.

Zack Katz: All right. I’m showing my entire screen this time. Can you see that?

Chris Badgett: Let me put it up on the screen and as we’re recording, I can hear my wife firing up the chainsaw outside. So that hopefully that’s not coming through. But if it gets really loud, let me know. But yeah, we’ve got we’ve got a chart GravityKit website and a chart up.

Is that the right screen? Yep,

Zack Katz: that’s

Chris Badgett: the right screen. Cool.

Zack Katz: So I have a Lifter LMS site. Lifter LMS is running. I have multiple courses that I’m displaying and one of the courses that I have subscribed to that I have enrolled in is a seven week fitness challenge. And in Lifter LMS you can embed a form inside each of the courses.

And we have done that so that you can In this one week, for example we have a form that says log your workouts for this week and the form has a date field, a day of the week, a length of the workout in minutes, workout type, strength training, cardio, yoga, Pilates, describe your workout, how did you feel?

So this is activity tracker. And As you can, as you continue throughout the course, you would submit your workouts for the lesson and you go to the next lesson. So each of these submissions then becomes a, an entry in Gravity Forms. And we want to display those entries for each student and embed those inside their LifterLMS student dashboard.

So I’ve created a view to show that data where I have embedded a chart and I’ll show you how to create that. I’ve embedded two different actual, two different types of charts. And I’ve want to show the day of the week, the length of the workout types. And these are all fields inside GravityView, configurator, where I can add different fields to show different content.

I saved that view, and then I chose to go to Lifter LMS settings, the integrations tab, and there’s a new option here that says GravityView. So this is the GravityView integration that appears when you have GravityView installed and activated. You’ll see it under Lifter LMS settings, integrations, and click GravityView, and you can see that you get to enable and disable the integration.

Choose the name of the menu in the Lifter LMS student dashboard. You can change the endpoint slug. So if you want the URL to be different, so you can say slash my hyphen workouts, which is a nice thing you can customize. And then you can also change you can choose which views to display inside your LifterLMS dashboard.

Right now I’ve chosen only to display the workout log. I’m clicking now to show the tab in LifterLMS, where you have a dashboard for the courses that you’re currently enrolled in. And there’s a new menu item in Lifter LMS, it’s called workout log. It shows a dashboard that you, that we just created in GravityView.

And this is all powered by the data for the current user in terms of their workouts that they’ve submitted inside Lifter LMS itself. So you can see a chart, a bar chart of workout minutes per day. You can see a pie chart showing different workout sessions workouts by types of like strength, training, yoga, Pilates, cardio.

And also there’s a table of workouts that have been logged showing organized by date and you can click into those and right inside left or LMS student dashboard. You can see each of the entries. that you’ve submitted and you can give your users the ability to edit their own entries.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Alex shares information on Siren Affiliates, a platform made to enable collaborations outside of conventional affiliate networks.

Alex Standiford is owner of Siren Affiliates. He highlights how adaptable Siren Affiliates is, able to work with a variety of collaboration models outside of affiliate marketing. It facilitates content programs, for example, in which partners produce material directly on the platform to impact visitor engagement and generate revenue depending on particular criteria, such as views or interactions.

Alex talks about the value of creating dashboards that are easy to understand, customized for each partner’s position, and tightly integrated with current systems like WooCommerce or LifterLMS. Through this connectivity, partners are guaranteed to have easy access to pertinent performance data without having to deal with intricate back-end processes.

Last but not least, he stresses the significance of beginning small when introducing a platform of this kind, first interacting with a chosen set of partners to obtain input and improve the offering.

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2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special repeat guest. His name is Alex Standiford. He’s from siren affiliates. You can find that at siren affiliates. com. This is a product that’s coming out or has just come out. For affiliates and all kinds of innovation around what partnerships are and how to leverage them on your WooCommerce and your learning site.

It’s, super exciting. Just all the innovation and Alex’s thoughts around creating effective incentivized partnerships, but first welcome back on the show, Alex.

Alex Standiford: Hey, Chris, I’m glad to be here. It’s been a minute. I’ve the weather is a little different than it was last time.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a little different.

What you’re building here with siren affiliates is really at the heart of online business. In the sense that we, as creators, we make things, we sell things, we create digital products or physical products, content, we’re creators. So anybody listening to this episode, if you’re watching us they have a desire to create, but then what happens with the artist, the creator, is they have to sell and then they do as best as they can, but then they want to look for partnerships and they want help with content and they want technology to be able to facilitate or help facilitate all those relationships and contributions.

So I’m super pumped about siren affiliates. At a high level or sorry. Yeah. Siren affiliates. com. I checked myself because you’ve often said in our conversations, it’s not just affiliate. There’s more going on here. So give us that broad, high level view of your vision for siren affiliates.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. Okay, great.

You’re right. It was with great difficulty. I had to go with siren affiliates because I just couldn’t think of a term that people would instantly latch onto, right? It’s the de facto online partnership that people think about in this context. So siren affiliates is an affiliate platform.

But unlike your typical 1, it doesn’t look at an affiliate program as the only program you can possibly create an affiliate program is 1 of many different types of programs that you can make as long as you can track. As long as you can measure a person’s performance, you can pay them based on that performance.

So I think of it as a pay for performance platform more than anything. I’ll give you, I’ll give you a more solid exam, a couple of solid examples here. An affiliate program is one, right? So you pay, you have a special affiliate link that an influencer or maybe some kind of content creator, whatever they are, they have a link that they give to their people.

You’ve heard these, right? Like use coupon code, blah, blah, blah at the checkout. They want that because they want to get credit for those sales. But what if I am a content? What if I want to have people write content on my own site instead of their site? So I could maybe create something like a content program where you publish content through my site instead of your own.

Maybe, you’re finding people who don’t have an audience or something like that, but they’re good writers and you just need content on your site. So you could create a writing program where anytime somebody visits that specific post, maybe that’s a trackable event, right? Somebody visited this specific post, so you can associate that person with that visit and then turn that into a sale or into a referral or something like that, just like you did with the influencer or the content creator that’s outside of your site.

So that would be a whole different program that could work in addition to an affiliate program. So you could potentially stack. Different programs together, or mix them together in different ways. Another possible option could be something like this is this is right up your alley. Of course, creation set up.

Maybe maybe you wanted to create a a learning site that is built by several course creators, and maybe you want to manage all these course creators. And help them provide them with a platform to publish their content. It would be Siren makes it, will make it possible to set it up so that those people can earn a percentage of your profits based on their courses performance.

Maybe it’s based on the number of people who complete the complete courses. It could be based on how many minutes people spend watching those videos. It could be. Based on anything. If it’s measurable within say lifter it would be integrated in a way that you can track that and reward those people directly.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. One of the most popular videos on our YouTube channel is how to build a Udemy clone, and you’re essentially saying if you want to do that this is siren affiliates. It’s the best I’ve ever seen and how you’re laying it out to manage all that. Cause it sounds easy. Oh, I want a website like you did me, but there’s a lot going on there and you take it, you always take it even further, like not just revenue share, but how do we get those creators on our platform, helping bring traffic, pay for performance on that.

Create content, pay for performance on that. And what is the conversion? It’s not just a sale. Like you said, it could be a view or a time on the side or whatever. There’s like lots of options there.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Badgett: Tell us, you’re also innovating around, we were talking about money, like affiliate commission or incentives.

But you’re also thinking about award awarding partners with things like credits or cash, tell us how you envision the reward program or the award program.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So any given affiliate or any given reward program pay for performance program at all, is. It really is broken down into a few things, right?

It’s broken down into what is the thing you’re tracking? How many, how much is that thing worth? So if you have a visit, that’s worth maybe let’s back to that blog example. Maybe a blogger writes a post. Maybe a visit is worth 1 point and maybe a comment is worth like 10, right? So you’re able to like, track multiple things and assign a value to those things.

And based on that value, you can then determine what the payout is. But the payout doesn’t have to be money. It could be store credit. It could be cash, right? It could be high fives whatever works for you. Maybe you have some kind of internal system where you are like a big company or something like that.

And you have a support setup like this. I see this a lot for like bigger corporate companies where They have an internal reward program, where if you have so many points, you can go and spend that on a 25 Starbucks card or something like that, right? This system could also work with those internal teams, like a support team.

You could set up a program where there’s a specific pool of points that your team can earn based on their respective performance. Whoever gets the most good high reviews or the best feedback or the satisfaction rates high, or maybe it’s based on the number of sales. They the people they convert or something like that in those sales.

There’s so many different ways that this can be approached. Not even just in terms of you do a thing, I give you a dollar. It can be. You do a thing and I give you store credit. I give you some other currency. It can be anything.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, super cool. Talk to us about the dashboard experience and, also you’re, launching this with a focus on WooCommerce.

So WooCommerce has a dashboard, but the, whole. Affiliate or partner program. It needs its own dashboard stuff. So what’s going to be possible there?

Alex Standiford: Yeah. That’s actually going to depend a lot on the integrations. My goal with this is to make it so that the collaborators, I call them collaborators, affiliates, or whatever you want to call them, right?

The, your partners. Is to provide them with an interface where they can have. Clarity and on the statistics that they need, but depending on what integration you’re using, that can vary. An affiliate doesn’t necessarily need to see their list of courses. But they, because they don’t have any, but they do need to know how many people have.

Visited the site as a result of their link, how many people have converted and all kinds of other statistics. And affiliates. Okay. Dashboard might look completely different than a course creators dashboard. And I am setting this up so that the dashboard will integrate deeply with those different things with the expectation that.

You won’t even have to those people don’t even necessarily have to see the WordPress dashboard at all. With lifter, for example, 1 of the, 1 of the simple the clear ones is for a course creator program. You can the, affiliate dashboard would include a list of their courses that they have and then they would have the opportunity to view that course or edit that course.

And once they click edit, that would take them into the the, LMS lifted LMS is course editor. For their content.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I know people get really focused around affiliate programs in terms of following the money. Can you give us a little more, like how it would work? Like, how would, what are some ways you could set up the money flow, particularly in the Udemy clone example, what are some options around how that works?

Alex Standiford: Okay. So One of the challenges, one of the, years that I’ve had whenever I’ve built programs like this, because like, all of this is coming from a decades worth of knowledge for me building these programs in my own agency. I didn’t have the software to do it. I was modifying existing affiliate solutions to make this work.

But one of my biggest fears was always. Now, I never wanted to decouple the money that’s coming in from the money that goes out, right? Because you don’t want to accidentally owe more money than you’re paying out. So there’s a little bit of a danger there, right? Because if you have an affiliate program and maybe you’re paying like 40 percent on that and a content program, and it’s maybe it’s paying 40%, these are really high percentages.

I’m just giving you an example. And then maybe you also have a sales program that’s like separate from your affiliate program. And it’s also 40%. If all three of those can stack, you’re paying 120%. You’re going to end up losing money on that. So you have to be thoughtful about the, out in the end.

And in order to solve that, I’ve created different ways to allow people to, make the payout methodologies work. So you can obviously do a percentage, right? You can also do a fixed amount, just like you can with any other affiliate program. But there’s two other ones that I’m really excited about. One of them is they’re both profit shares.

So one’s a weighted profit share and one’s a basic profit share. And this is literally what you’d companies like Udemy is doing. They, if you go and you look at their terms, they literally say, we take all of our profits and we take 25 percent of that. And we give it to all of course creators that money is the pool that is available among all course creators.

And the amount you get for that is based on how much your performance, right? How much traffic you’ve driven. So this is literally just doing that exact thing. So you can create a weighted profit share where you say. This month, my, my memberships earned me a thousand dollars or something like that.

I am paying out 25 percent of that amount to all of my course creators. So I would have a 250 pool available to all of them. And it’s just based on how much. How their performances, right? I was saying earlier, a comment or a visit was like, worth 1 point or 5 points. You could translate that into course content with every time a student completes 1 of their courses.

They get a few points or something like that, and maybe it’s every time a video is completely viewed or 80 percent viewed or something like that. Maybe it’s like a 10th of a point for every like minute watched or something like that. There’s, you can create this holistic way to measure the health and the effectiveness of a course creator around multiple different statistics, not just 1 and then use that in combination with the different payout methodologies.

That allows you to make sure that you are not only paying them based on their performance, but also making sure you’re not inadvertently paying out more than you’re bringing in.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Very cool. Yeah. It’s, like creating a course. Like you really have to do some. Design time and structure time and make sure you build, you think through all the cases, like what, if somebody is an affiliate, a creator and all these different things, what challenge I see in the space, or it’s more of an observation is that there are affiliates that are classic affiliates.

They may not even be a user of your product. They’re trying to make money online through affiliate marketing. And some like at Lifter LMS as an example, selling software we have some affiliates like I just described, but then there’s also some of our users become affiliates to develop another income stream.

And then there’s this. Other thing where somebody just, it would be called a referral program where maybe they get some points or credits based on their referrals, but they’re actually not that interested in affiliate marketing. They just want to refer it’s like the same folks who would leave you a five star review on a review site,

Alex Standiford: your biggest fans.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, but they’re just not really interested in becoming affiliate marketing or becoming affiliate marketers. As I think through having an option for everybody, maybe somebody just wants to write content for your blog and they have a different thing or motivation. And then maybe you have that power user that wants to do all of that.

A super fan. How do you think through, or what would your advice be in terms of as a platform creator educating people about all your different programs and Basically, it’s one thing to build the programs. It’s another, the pay for performance programs. It’s another to get people really using it. And yeah.

So what are your thoughts around that?

Alex Standiford: So I actually did an email series. I have an email series that’s related to this, but basically I, whenever I’m starting a program and I’m going to do exactly this with siren, I’m starting. Small and private, you have to treat this almost in the same way.

You treat a product launch, right? You’re in a lot of ways. This is a product launch. You’re launching an offering to the public. You have to treat it like that. Do you know what I mean? So you, start with your existing contact list, your existing contacts and you, start. Trying to find interest engage how much how many people would potentially sign up for something like that.

Obviously, you want to have something prepared ahead of time, but you wouldn’t just email your entire list with a program without you wouldn’t email your entire list. That you have a course that’s ready if you never looked at the course or made sure it worked. So why would you do that with a program like this?

So you would want to test it a little bit. Make sure it’s working. Make sure it’s effective. Make sure it’s. Helping, and in order to do that, you you want to do almost like a private. Smaller launch where you have. Maybe you’re testing it out with 10 or so people that you think are really going to be a great fit for this and you start there.

You work with them very closely. You have meetings. You get feedback. You talk to them and you work with them to succeed. And with all of that information, you now have, you’re now going to be properly equipped to actually be able to, others succeed at a bigger scale. So once you have that initial logic and then initial information, you can educate at scale.

Even if it’s a court, it could literally be a course, right? It could actually just be a course on how to sell your product. But it, the important part is you have to look at these people as partners. And like customers, and you were in a lot of ways, their coach, right there, you’re helping them succeed.

They’re not helping you succeed. And once you flip that mindset, and you think about it like that, it really changes things. There’s a lot of people out. There’s a lot of affiliate programs out there that. All they ever talk about is how do you get 100 affiliates? How do you get 1000 affiliates?

And almost every time I’ve ever spoken with somebody who has an affiliate program that’s actually bringing in a meaningful amount of money, they will always tell you. Oh, yeah, like 90 percent of it comes from a handful of my affiliates and the rest of them don’t really do much. So why are you worried about getting 100 affiliates when really all you need is 10 really good ones.

So start there, start finding the really good engaged ones, run with them, work with them, figure out what’s working for them and for you, and then try to scale that up to set up success for everybody else.

Chris Badgett: I think at Lifter LMS we have around 1500 affiliates and just to confirm what you were saying about 30 of them really move the needle.

Yeah. So why not just focus on the 30 not exclude people, but like when you think about it, think about quality over quantity.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. And even dig into meeting with them and talking with them and treating them. As like super affiliates partners. Exactly.

Chris Badgett: I also agree with what you said about the courses. Like we actually, I think we’re about 60 days into a new free course we made on our left rail mess Academy about how to become an affiliate, understand it. These are the players. This is how it works. This is how to join a program. This is how to promote and actually investing in training your people to be good partners is a really good idea.

One of the areas I got into trouble. Earlier on as a course creator, essentially building a Udemy clone, I had a organic gardening and permaculture site, and I would partner with these. This is before Lifter LMS. I would partner with these some really amazing experts. People would fly all over the world to see these people talk.

And. And I would show up with my video camera or hire a videographer, like basically record the content, do the add them to the website, do all the tech stuff, promote it. As a bootstrapped entrepreneur, one of the ways that I was able to do that with very little resources is I gave away, I just kept it simple and did like a 50, 50 partnership.

On the revenue through those programs, and there was an affiliate program on top of all that as well. But what I found over time is that the partnership ended up being skewed in the sense that, of course, they’re the experts content was really valuable and important and key. But I was doing all these, this work ongoing for marketing and growing and maintaining the platform and administration and all that stuff.

So you mentioned it before, but I just wanted to dig in a little bit. Do you, in your time in the industry, what do you see as like good partnership percentages? And I know that’s an, it depends answer, but I think the classic question is. If I do an affiliate program, what should my percentage to affiliates be?

Do you have any advice around that?

Alex Standiford: Do that for me, I based that entirely on my profit margin.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Alex Standiford: And how many different programs I want to have and the different roles that I want to create in my business. Because I really, that’s what I see this as I see these partnerships as. An encapsulation of a role in my business, right?

So the sales program is for myself, the sales people that I want to have in my business the, content writers has a program. I’m actually going to do a bug bounty program in siren. That’s for developers. Like my, a lot of my solution for hiring and outsourcing development. Is going to be through siren using a program.

It’s programs all the way down. But the for me the, rate to charge depends. Of course, it depends on what your competitors are charging and what they’re offering and all of that stuff. But it also depends on what your profit margin is, right? So if you’re. If your margin is 50% or something higher like that, then you can probably get away with doing as much as 30 percent of that going into your affiliate rate or something like that.

But if you’ve got like a 10 percent or lower rate, which I’m sure most of your customers don’t have because they probably don’t have a lot of overhead because it’s a digital product. Then you’ve got to look at lower, really low rates. And actually at that point, it might be hard to even compete and create a competitive affiliate program.

But that doesn’t mean that just means that an affiliate program may not be right for your specific business. That doesn’t mean that other programs aren’t right. It’s just, you have to like reframe what are your partnerships? What are the things that you need in your business? So if you looked at your Company structure, even if you are just a single solopreneur, or maybe it’s just you and a partner you look at what are all of the roles in the business and every 1 of those has an offer.

Probably has an opportunity. Not all of them, but most of them have an opportunity that they can be done either as an with an employee. With a freelancer or with a program that somehow incentivizes people to do it. The program may not 100 percent replace an employee or something like that. But for me as a solopreneur, if I can get two thirds or even a third of my content on my site written by somebody else who’s being paid based on their performance that’s, a big deal, right?

I’m, able to cut back on how much time I’m spending on this Without necessarily spending more money on it today.

Chris Badgett: I love that. That’s a really good reframe to think of it as a team member, independent contractor, and literally in the U S and this is not tax or legal advice. You, if an affiliate makes over 600 a year you’re, that’s an independent contractor, 10 99 form that has to be filed and stuff like that.

But yeah, thinking about it as a team makes a lot of sense. And pay for performance is a powerful way to create a great product or service. Because instead of the team member or partner having the mindset of I have a job, this is how much I make every two weeks or a year. It’s I get paid on results.

And that’s why like real estate agents as an example, have a commission that they make if they sell the house. And that’s, we see this a lot in sales, but it can go to other places as well, which is one of the amazing things that’s so innovative. With siren affiliates tell us more about pay for performance, like some other ideas for people.

Alex Standiford: Sure. And the

Chris Badgett: impact of it.

Alex Standiford: And also it doesn’t have to be 100 percent that, right? So you could, this could also be something that augments a an existing, like employee or something like that. So maybe you have a

Chris Badgett: Bonus Exactly.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, precisely. You can use it to incentivize People for those kinds of things.

And I don’t necessarily know if it would help you get a better rate or anything like that, but it certainly is. There to help incentivize people. If you’re trying to, if you’re at a point where you are trying to, if there’s like a specific number or some kind of specific statistic that you really need to work on, maybe your churn rate is really bad or, something like that, like in software, that’s what we deal with right now.

I guess you’re guys, your customers do as well, right? They have to deal with churn because they have memberships. So you can look at that and say, what do we need to do to fix that? To improve this, right? And one of the things you can do is build a program, around that for the people who can actually make change in that regard.

So you can, instead of spending money on more marketing and exclusively on more marketing and more things like that to improve that you can take that and then reinvest in your own people and not and it’s a win because not only are you giving them something to focus on and something to a motivation, but you’re also You’re instead of taking that money and then giving it to some other company or some other entity, you’re keeping it in house, right?

You’re not you personally aren’t getting that money, but I think it’s cool to be able to improve the welfare of the people who work with me by directly giving them. A reward for having an improved impact on the things I care about.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, dig in a little more on WooCommerce specifically.

WooCommerce is, there’s a lot of sites out there that use it. There’s a lot of them that want more sales and maybe you want help creating products and programs. What could a WooCommerce user do regardless of whether they’re using an LMS or not?

Alex Standiford: Woo. The there’s the affiliate program.

Of course, there’s also the sales program, which this is interesting because it is different than an affiliate program in my head. Whenever I say sales program, I’m thinking more of the traditional sales person, right? The person who actually reaches does like the outreach and things like that.

They’re usually the closers right there. They’re the ones that actually complete the conversion or something like that. Particularly if you’re selling like higher priced things. A salesperson can make a lot of sense, even if they’re working in conjunction with an influencer or a, content creator, I keep saying influencer cause it’s anyway.

So maybe the content creators are bringing the people to the site and then that is somehow setting up some kind of flow elite, it’s just coming in as a lead. And then the salesperson takes that lead and they’re able to you To convert that. And if that salesperson converts that sale, they get a cut.

And the person who actually made the original referral also gets their cut too. So what’s really interesting about that to me is, and that’s distinctly unique about Siren and the dynamic of creating multi platforms like this, is those two people now have a vested interest in working together. So instead of it being affiliate, an affiliate program, which is inherently competitive imagine a scenario where two affiliates.

Can actually work together that it doesn’t exist because of the very nature of the fact that there must always only be one winner In every affiliate program that is not true with siren You can have a salesperson who helps you close You can have an influencer who brings in the traffic and they both get their own credit and what’s really interesting is even with that from a woocommerce standpoint is You can actually set up an affiliate program so that multiple affiliates From the same program, get credit so you can set it up so that instead of only the last affiliate who for the traffic gets all the money you can set it up to where the last one gets half of it.

And then the person after that gets 25 percent and the person after that gets 12 and a half. And it goes down. You can divide it evenly among them. With that kind of stuff and with the ability to make it to where multiple people can actually earn commissions from this. You’re setting it up so that these people can actually collaborate and just imagine the possibilities of having two influencer type people who have big audiences that don’t necessarily overlap, or they collaborate together to create some kind of specific funnel that allows them both to be able to end up bringing in more than they would have otherwise been able to do on their own.

Chris Badgett: Man you’re the guy for this. Just, I love how clear your thinking is like nerding out on last touch attribution and an affiliate marketing. And the problems with that and making it more collaborative and share the wealth kind of multi partner approach is really cool. It’s really innovative and it’s really strong.

And I love seeing the innovation that you have here. So go to siren affiliates. com join the email list if it’s out go ahead and buy your copy today and start innovating and growing your revenue and your partner community. What other final words for the people do you have Alex and, how else can people connect and learn more about siren affiliates?

Alex Standiford: I can I’m, in the, Littler LMS communities too, so I’m, in your spaces. I’m around there. So if. I happen to see any questions related to this. I’ll probably just jump in and answer. But in addition to that, you can find me. At Alex Stanford dot com, and you can message me directly on there with any questions.

There’s also a chat bubble on siren affiliates. If you have any questions, you can post them on there. And please, by all means, I welcome and want questions. I want to hear. What people think of this, because there is some novelty in this, right? There’s a lot of things. There’s new concepts and new innovations.

And I, I really am interested to hear and what people are what’s exciting people about this kind of technology and what kind of things they would like to see more of. And I’m in a very, and especially if you sign up for that, the email list to get early access to this. You’re going to get early access to it, but you’re also going to be on the ground floor with me on this where we’re able to you’re going to be able to really directly influence some of my.

Decisions on how I proceed with this.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So talk to Alex and I just want to affirm what he’s saying there. Alex interviewed me and some of the team, I think three times, like really digging into the course creator, the membership, the course marketplace, challenges in the space. And as a guy who’s been around a lot of product founders and stuff, the best ones do that sort of thing.

Who’s ever, whoever’s closest to the customer wins, as they say. And you’ve definitely demonstrated that through the whole journey of siren affiliates. So go to siren affiliates. com. We’ll have Alex back on, we’ll do a live webinar when the Lifter integration rolls out. I know the WooCommerce integration is rolling out first, and there’s a lot of WooCommerce users out there watching and listening to this, so get ready.

It’s almost here. And it may already be out. Just go to siren affiliates. com. Thanks for coming on the show, Alex. Go check out our other episode with Alex. And head on over to siren affiliates. com. And I can’t wait to reconnect down the road and explore this further and be a user of siren affiliates, myself.

Alex Standiford: Look forward to it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Kay Peacey discusses her knowledge and perspectives on creating and managing the Active Campaign Academy, an online learning environment that teaches users how to make the most of the Active Campaign marketing automation platform. Also she shares about the Masterclass presentation.

Kay Peacey is an Entrepreneur and educator. She is from Active Campaign. Her experience in education led her to naturally gravitate into teaching, even though she began her career as an Active Campaign consultant.

About two and a half years ago, Kay made the decision to launch a membership-based Academy in place of regular classes. She can support small teams using Active Campaign globally thanks to this membership model.

She finds it fascinating that companies of all sizes, from one-person operations to multinational conglomerates, frequently confront comparable difficulties and need comparable training and direction. Kay stresses the value of having autonomous instructors and technological platform specialists.

Kay lists Lifter LMS, Divi for WordPress websites, WP Fusion for connectors, WooCommerce subscriptions for pricing. And Circle for community involvement as part of her tech stack. Kay concludes by outlining the elements of her educational program at the Active Campaign Academy, which consists of live calls (office hours), resources, courses, and a community platform.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. She’s back on the show. It’s KPC creator of active campaign Academy. We use active campaign at Lifter LMS, and I’ve learned countless things from Kay. She’s literally probably the most power user of active campaign in the world.

She’s an educator, she’s built an online education. Business around her active campaign knowledge and helping business owners and active campaign users get into the tool, grow, scale, automate. Welcome back to the show. Okay.

Kay Peacey: Oh, thank you for having me back again, Chris. It’s just such a pleasure sharing the journey with you.

It really is. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s so great to have you always love our conversations for those who don’t know what it is. Can you describe what? You’ve built with active campaign Academy, which you can go find over at Kay’s website, slick business. co.

Kay Peacey: Yeah. I started out some years ago doing consultancy in active campaign and found that most of the time I was actually teaching people because we all like to be in control.

We want to be in the driving seat of the powerful tech that we own. And. Because I have teaching skills. I started out as a math teacher for teenagers way back in the day. So I have the teaching skills and it seemed to me like a very natural fit to fill that gap when nobody was really leading the way on how do I use this incredible marketing tech email automation platform, active campaign.

And so I decided rather than going down the courses route, because I love courses, but tech like active campaign, that is a big landscape. There’s a lot in there. My feeling was very much that it needed to be a membership. And so I created the active campaign Academy around two and a half years ago, and we’ve been serving members ever since we serve small teams from all over the world.

And. One of the chief pleasures I have with it is that the literally the only thing they truly have in common is that they all use this one piece of tech, which is active campaign and the, what it’s fascinating to me, the commonalities that occur from a tiny one person business right up to a big global corporation actually need the answers to the same questions and the same teaching the same nurturing.

It’s just, it’s a great way to spend my time and it’s made me very happy. And I hope it’s made other people very happy as well.

Chris Badgett: I’m sure it has. I’ve been in your community and I’ve seen people getting their challenges solved and, growing their business. One of the things I’ve noticed after over a decade in the online education space is that with software particularly, it’s often not the software company itself that makes the best education.

There’s a very old episode of LMS cast where I interviewed a guy that I forget his name, but they, he teaches how to use a book writing and publishing tool called Scrivener. He doesn’t work at Scrivener and he, Has done a fantastic education business of his own, and he teaches Scribner better than you can learn on the Scribner website.

Kay Peacey: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And I’ve, so just for anybody out there who’s trying to figure out a course topic, if you’re a power user of a tool, do it. And even I, hope somebody out there, there are people that train people how to make use Lifter LMS. There’s people that have YouTube tutorials that are better than ours, and that’s just, yeah.

The power of community around a tool, but any other thoughts on that?

Kay Peacey: I’m so, with you on that. And I, actually, it’s one of my soap boxes because my feeling is over time. I see it again and again, where customers of a tech platform will go and ask tech support of that platform to help them with something that is actually strategic or that involves other tools in their ecosystem that are outside of that tech company’s responsibility.

See. And or beyond their remit to solve my feeling is that as customers, as consumers, we often ask too much of the companies who are providing the tech because their job is already huge. They have to dream it up, build it, maintain it, service it, make sure all the buttons are working and deliver it in real time to thousands of customers every day.

Their job is not to teach you how to take this Ferrari tech machine. and go pull a wheelie down the highway. That’s not what they’re for. They are there to build the machinery. To sell it in the market, to service their customers and make sure the billing works. They have so much else to do, right? They’re not there to tell you how to use it to grow your business.

That’s what I think. You can see I got a bit soapboxy there. So anyway, in a nutshell, the Ferrari showroom is not the place where you go to learn how to speed your Ferrari down the motorway. You have to have a driving instructor. And if you’re really smart, you get an advanced driving instructor who really knows what they’re doing and knows how to teach you to drive better.

And that’s where someone like me comes in.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Just to reiterate. Like business owners have used lots of different tools and you can’t expect like one of those tools to have the answers about how to integrate everything together. They, try, but the best expert, like you said, as a driving instructor who not only understands the car, they understand the road, they understand the rules of the road.

And whatever they understand how to get gas and all the other things you’re going to need to interact with to drive, right?

Kay Peacey: Yeah. And also I think who’s in a position where they’re independent enough to say, actually, this particular bit of tech isn’t the right tool to do this thing that you’re trying to do.

Yes, theoretically we could do it, but it’s a round peg in a square hole. So actually let’s join it up to this other thing. That’s going to do a great job of solving that problem in your business.

Chris Badgett: And

Kay Peacey: there’s this very human element that you need to have there of being able to understand the real question that someone’s asking you or the problem that they are looking to solve, which is often not the question they ask.

And I’d also argue that tech support teams do not have the time to, to spend with you on that. They don’t have time to get to know you over time to get to know the tech stack in your business and what skills you have in your team, what budget you have in your team. There is so much going on there, right?

To find how should I do this one thing? You need a human who knows you and understands you and has with whom you have a relationship and you can trust them. That’s big ask for a support desk. That’s not fair to put that on them.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s, a great point. And we’re going to get into the main segment of this show, which is how Kay grew her audience by 60 percent doing a masterclass.

But before we do that, I want to just get a little more context for people out there watching and listening. So with your online education platform, what are the main tools in your tech stack? Since we’re talking about using different tools to make it come together. So you teach online through a membership.

What are the key components of your tech stack?

Kay Peacey: I love this question so much. Lifter LMS obviously has been with me right from the start from when I made my very first free training, which is called accelerated active campaign. And that is still available for free. And it’s like core active campaign know how that you just got to have.

So lift has been with me right from the start. On top of that, I use a Divi to make my WordPress websites with WP Fusion, which is the secret source of everything. And that ties up WooCommerce subscriptions, which is how I’m running the billing and things. It, I have two domains that talk to each other through ActiveCampaign, and then we run our community on the Circle platform, which I’m extremely happy with.

I know there are lots of options for community. I have found that The Circle platform has really served our particular way of doing things, which is we deliver a lot of technical stuff in a short space of time and Circle has unleashed us to be really fluent and fast solving problems just day to day.

So I’ve really enjoyed bringing that into the tech stack. It’s, just, it’s a dream team. You put them together.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. And let’s talk about another stack, which is the offer stack. So when somebody joins active campaign Academy, like what is the package of the learning offer? What do they get?

Kay Peacey: Yeah, cool. Okay. So they get courses, resources, calls, and community. And so the courses of the standalone they, pull together as a coherent learning unit, and that’s what I’m doing in lifter every time. The resources is the stuff that tends to live in the circle community. And that’s more like short tutorials that answer a very specific question, or it’s a screen grab with annotation.

We run office hours, calls twice a week, every single week. And that’s the, ask me anything. And it really is. Those are amazing because you can ask me literally anything related, even tangentially to active campaign. And we can answer it right there. And then it’s super powerful. I love that bit. And then the community where we’re just hanging out together and it acts as a kind of a library as well as a place we can chat, share news, announce stuff, the whole package together is it pulls together very, nicely.

And we have two levels of membership as well. We have an essential level and an advanced level, and that comes back to the fact that active campaign has this big range within it, you can be on a plan, which is incredibly capable on a lower budget, right up to enterprise where they’ve got huge teams. So we actually put a split in the middle so that our more starter users are not going to get completely overwhelmed by hearing about webhooks and API calls and all that crazy stuff that they just do not need to know.

Chris Badgett: I love that. So like beginner and advanced levels, two, two plans to choose from. It’s not over complicated, quick side question you brought up and I’ve watched you execute well, which is I see a lot of education entrepreneurs have a desire or a dream to build community. You’ve built. Built community successfully.

People show up to your calls. You’re asking me any things I’ve interacted in your community with other users and stuff like that. What do you think makes your community work? Cause sometimes people build a community and it doesn’t work. It obviously takes like actual management plan, time investment and stuff, but why does your community work?

As part of your education offer.

Kay Peacey: That’s such a thought provoking question. I was heavily into community from the very beginning because the first place I started to connect well with other active campaign users was in their Facebook global group as a community. And so it became very visible in there and connected with people.

I then started my own Facebook group where I had ownership of it and I could lead on the tone. I’m a strong believer in we set the tone for the communities that are under our leadership, and it’s our responsibility to look after those people. And right from the beginning of that, that my open face group, so that’s not even my paid offer.

That’s an open group. We have led with value, integrity, and just being really human. We have never allowed the spam bots in there. Nobody disses anyone. You’re not even really allowed to dis active campaign. Like you can criticize it and say this bit is a bit sucky right now, but we’re not in there to be negative about the world.

So we set the tone. And that tone then for me carried into my private community. When we moved to the paid membership, that tone was already established because our founding members had all seen how, we are in the world. What are our values? How do we interact with humans that was already in place.

And so we had a really wonderful call from when we launched the academy. We had about 125 founder members. And so our membership community had that lovely tone right from the start and honestly, I cannot tell you how much I value

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s a little master class on building culture and community And I love how you got your first, users off of the facebook group that you own But you were helping in other groups as well demonstrating your expertise

Kay Peacey: and I still do that I’m a super user in that active campaign global community.

I probably answer four to five questions in there every single day You And honestly, I’m obsessed with active campaigns. So I’m doing this like I’m on the sofa having a cup of tea in the evening and watching TV with my kid. I might be answering your question at the same time because that’s where I live.

And as a subject matter expert, that’s I think that’s what we do as educators. We, That’s going to sound really cliched, but we do live to serve. That’s how we get our kicks. All right. So selfishly I’m doing it because I like the feeling of, ah, I just solved that person’s problem. Look at that.

That’s cool.

Chris Badgett: I love that. That is part of wearing the expert hat is you actually have to love and be passionate about. Your subject matter expertise, just because you spot an opportunity somewhere doesn’t mean you should build an education company around it. You really have to live and breathe it and enjoy it.

Kay Peacey: Yeah, I don’t think you could, I don’t think you could do it to this level of expertise and it’s like immersive. Immersive expertise and know how and, the, and it requires, and I’m going to use the word love. It does require love to lavish that level of attention and care on your learners. But for me, that’s what fuels me.

It fills me up every day.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And love requires commitment. And like you said, every day helping out and serving.

Kay Peacey: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Shifting gears, the number one or one of the top questions we get from people building membership sites, courses, coaching programs. So how do I get clients? How do I get customers?

You re recently did a masterclass that grew your community by 60%. Can you tell us first what the masterclass is?

Kay Peacey: The masterclass was called be your own, how to be your own active campaign superhero. So the kernel of the idea is something again, that I feel very passionate and very certain about, which is that any person can.

Be the master of their own tech and learn to drive the active campaign Ferrari. You do need some teaching. You need someone to point you in the right direction and tell you what’s possible. The biggest thing I always hear is you don’t even know what you don’t know about active campaign until someone unlocks it for you.

So I wanted to showcase in a very powerful way, but in a short space of time, and I wanted to establish Us as the, accepted leadership, the voice in active campaign education. So the masterclass came out of a desire to do that. And what we did was we cherry picked four things that could be done on any active campaign plan from light all the way up to enterprise that would make you more money in a very short space of time, because that’s what every single business needs, including mine.

We also need to make money. The passion is great, loving it. That’s great, but it also needs to make revenue. So we focused it in very tightly on make more money in less time. And we chose an item from each of the four stages of the customer journey from brand new customer to a hot lead. Now they’re a customer.

And then what happens at the end of the journey when they’re just moving on from your world as well. And pulled out four processes and what I did in the masterclass, we delivered it three times across different time zones. We called in all our partners to help us promote the masterclass. That was the first time we’d done that.

It was the first time we’d really had the confidence to say we’re doing this. It is going to be killer good. Get your people here. And here’s our affiliate link that you can share with them as well. So we really called in that support and community around us as a business and, me as a business person.

And the show up rate was incredible when we did the webinar, it was like a 55%. Show up right to the master classes. And I was just so happy with that. We got a huge reaction to it and people were very excited just to hear. There are these very simple ways that you can explain in 10 minutes that you can use active campaign to make more money in less time.

So that was the class. We showcased those four things.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And can you give us any like metrics or just quantitative data about like how the masterclass went? You said 60% like anything else you can, you’d feel like sharing?

Kay Peacey: Yeah we had, I think we had a target of registering 300 people for it.

So we looked at the statistics from when we launched. Originally with a much smaller audience overall, and extrapolated that into our audience as it is now and the reach that we have now through our partnership. So we were aiming for 300 people to register and we got, I think, almost 400 registered. So we were exceeding that target.

Our target overall, the big goal was to increase revenue into the membership. And we needed that so that we could focus on doing more growth activity and serve more people because we’re not reaching everyone out there who needs active campaigning help that would benefit from us So we need to be more visible to do that.

We need more revenue. So the target was to boost the revenue I think by 50 We then worked really hard on getting the people who registered to show up to the webinar And for that we leaned heavily on a very You Coherent combination of social channels, posting and emails that were going out with a countdown timer, really creating that you are going to show up to this and here is what you’re going to get from it.

I am going to be teaching these things live. We were sharing testimonials. We just threw everything at it, but in a really coherent way where we hit up all of the problem points that we know that people have in active campaign, our messaging, Was very clear. Everyone can learn to do these things in active campaign.

Come along to the masterclass. We’re going to show you how to do four of them to make more money in less time at the four stages of the customer journey. Come along and see what the conversion rate off of the back, off of the back of that was just ridiculous. 16%, 16 percent of people who attended that masterclass immediately bought.

Bought a membership and we typically keep them as members for around six months. Many of them stay for upwards of two years. We’ve still got some of our founder and beta members are still with us so that turns into quite a lot of revenue and more importantly than that, it turns into helping an awful lot of people.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s amazing. Tell us a little bit more about how you prepared for the masterclass and how long did that take and what did you put together and how’d you keep figuring out all your partners and all that stuff?

Kay Peacey: Okay, that’s a great question. I had a lot of help from Melissa Love, who I know you’re familiar with already.

Because she’s a close business friend of mine and she lives just down the hill. So we can literally go sit on the bench down by the Harbor and she can calm my fears. And actually Melissa was the one who made me set the date because left to my own devices, I would probably have been here thinking I really should do a masterclass and get some more members in because we’re really good at this, but I might not have done it.

I needed a push and Melissa gave me the push. So we set a deadline and then it was a countdown from there. I think I had a six week run in from deciding the date and we published the dates to figure it out. Sorry. Say that again.

Chris Badgett: Six weeks to figure it out and yeah. Yeah, that’s good. That’s not too long or too short.

That’s. It was

Kay Peacey: enough. And for me, it was based on knowing myself better than when we first launched. I know the amount of pressure that I can cope with, the amount of time and space I need in which to be able to do my best work. But also I know that I do need a time pressure. Because otherwise it won’t get done.

So as soon as we’d set the date, we put it out there. And once people have put their name down and said, I want to come to this, which they did very, quickly, we had a wait list or, a show a hand razor, list, and that just got piled on very, quickly. And I, need that in my world to fuel me up to be like, okay, I’ve said, I’m going to do this and all these people have said they would like that.

Okay, now we’re going to do it and we’re going to deliver. And once I’m on the path, I deliver. I, my execution’s really good. So we had an air table. I don’t know if you’re an air table user, Chris, I’m a huge fan of it. Yeah. So I use that to organize everything that’s in my head. So we planned out the stages from belief, believing that you can work active campaign evidence that we’ve already taught people how to use active campaign, helping people desire the things that we wanted to deliver in the masterclass.

Doing the countdown, showing the testimonials, lots of evidence and proof that we are the masters at this. And usually you don’t want to miss this masterclass. And then, yeah, I think prepping the, content of the masterclass itself, that was amazing. That was one of those opportunities as a teacher, as an educator that you just, you can dive into it like whole body.

I am all in on this one. It was a great piece of work, very carefully crafted to 10 minutes. And it was leaning into teaching the what, are we doing? Why are we doing it? But of course it was missing the element of exactly how would you do that? Like exactly. So we talked about active campaign features that were necessary to put together for it.

So we would say something like, Oh, and we would use a saved response. We would use a form and a pre fill throwing in all these words. That’s the driver then to get the conversion is, and we are going to teach this in the academy coming up in the next few weeks. And that was the real conversion moment, I think, was we showed that it is possible to use Active Campaign to make more money in less time, right across your customer journey in these four very specific ways.

We talked about the elements that you would need to put together to do that. And then we invited people to join the Active Campaign Academy to come and do that with us right away, immediately. And then in the Academy, the course is there. We have four courses teaching those four things and the results we get from those are extraordinary, really impressive.

Chris Badgett: So did you have those courses already ready before you did the training or they came after like you taught them

Kay Peacey: live? They came a little bit after. I I, it was a balance because I would have loved to get them taught. I would have loved to get them ready before the masterclass, but it just wasn’t possible in that timeframe.

And what I’ve learned as an educator is that. The teaching is better if I can talk about it first with people, see their response to it, listen to the questions that they ask, and then the job of the training, the specific course, needs to have all of those elements in it. So I often find that if I talk about something and have a bit of a delay while we chew it over and then make the training is better.

Yeah, that’s

Chris Badgett: awesome. So we did

Kay Peacey: some swift tutorials to get people who really wanted to just crack on and who already had the skills. We were like, okay, this is how you would put it together. Here’s the map. But then the courses with all the step by step detail took a little longer.

Chris Badgett: Can you share just high level, even if somebody’s not using active campaign, just the concept of one of the stages of the customer journey?

What’s an example, one of those?

Kay Peacey: Yeah, sure. One of the ones that landed really beautifully with so many people. And it’s based on a strategy that we developed for ourselves. I call it first look fandom because I like a bit of alliteration you’ve got to give it a good, give it a cool name.

So first look fandom is for the very first step of the customer journey. Someone has just found you and Oh my God, here’s Chris Badgett. He knows all about lifter. I love him. I’m going to fill out the opt in form. And get on the mailing list here for Lyft at LMS. And there’s always a burning reason.

Someone does that. They always have some question that’s in their mind, some problem that they want solving that they think you have the answer to. So here’s the sneaky move for first look fandom. And this, by the way, converts 10 percent of those brand new first look leads into buyers with one click. 10 percent of them convert to buyers with one email in the space of a week.

It’s, extraordinary. So here’s the trick. They’ve just filled out your opt in form for this person. They’ve just coming into your world on the thank you page where normally you might say, thank you for submitting the form, or maybe you’ve gone a little bit further and you’ve got some links and a picture of you great instead of that, or as well as that you put in an open question field.

They don’t have to fill in their email again. You just ask them a question, say, Oh, while you’re here, tell me what, is your most burning question about XYZ right now? And you don’t have to promise to answer it. Just ask the question. 80 percent of people who fill out the opt in form will likely fill out that burning question.

And hit submit. So immediately you have got gold on your hands because now what their burning question is for 80 percent of your people, the second they land into your world, every marketer’s dream, right? And then it gets better. What you do is you stash that stuff wherever you. Keep it, you can stash it somewhere, get it to pass in front of your eyeballs so that you notice what people are saying.

So you’re learning all the time. You have to learn from your, potential customers, and then you cherry pick the ones that you have the answer to in your existing services and you give them a personal reply very quickly. And there are tools in active campaign. There are features of active campaign that make this extremely fast and fluent to do.

That’s the bit I teach in the academy, right? I, we can talk about the strategy, the actual mechanics of putting that together so that it works really fluently and fast for you in active campaign. There’s some subtle stuff going on there, but once it’s built, you have a system where every single lead is invited to ask you their burning question, open text, and boy, oh boy, they tell you stuff in there.

It is enlightening. Then they, you have them pass in front of your eyeballs. You pick a few of them every week. It takes two minutes maximum to answer one of those burning questions. If you have your tech set up properly, you dispatch the answer and 10 percent of them will convert to a buy within a week.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And now that you’re saying that, I remember that from your presentation and that’s it’s pure gold. I remember. Your presentation, let’s talk about the actual masterclass. I’m remembering like a vertical slide thing that was scrolling or something. Can you tell us a little bit, and it was very well designed and your, presentation was just tight, but what, was that tool you were using and tell us about how you structured the actual

Kay Peacey: presentation.

I love that you asked that because that, so that tool, it’s a, it’s actually like a whiteboarding tool and it’s called miller note.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Kay Peacey: Millernote. And the original story of Millernote for me is I hate slides. Yeah. I loathe them. My design eye is just shockingly bad. It’s awful. And I’m, just chuckling at the fact that he just said it was really well presented because it’s incredibly difficult to put together visuals that don’t look like a 10 year old child.

On a bad day did them. So Miller notes is my solution to that. It has a nice soothing color background in our brand colors. And the actual items that I put on there, there’s very little formatting choice on there. So I can’t wreck it. I just need to make sure it all lines up vertically. And then while I’m on, while I’m doing my presentation, I use e cam, which is a wonderful bit of tech e cam films me and puts me in front of Half of the presentation.

So I’m right there on screen. It’s like putting yourself into your presentation, which I really love because I talk with my hands. You may have noticed that there’s a lot of hand waving and expression going on, and that’s really important. And with the, by having Milanote beside me and I’ve got my scroll wheel, so I can scroll through it exactly the pace I want to, I can literally point at the things that I’m talking about and it just works for me.

So I developed it purely because I am terrible at slides and I hate them. So it was an avoidance strategy that somehow turned into something that actually looks really nice and a lot of people ask about.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I remember too, from your masterclass, there was a lot of engagement in the chat. Like how, would you advise somebody who’s doing a masterclass to really make it interactive and immersive and get people, get the community talking?

Kay Peacey: Great question. First of all, I had a head start because we have a very engaged community already. And that comes back to our earlier, your earlier question around the Facebook groups. We have fostered that for years. We go out of our way to connect personally with people that first look fandom thing that involves me personally, emailing people who’ve just signed up to my email list.

So we have a very connected community already, and you can’t magic that up. Just for a one off masterclass. That’s not going to happen. What we did was we primed the pump by specifically asking our, existing academy members to come to the live webinar and to support us. And I was completely honest about it.

I was like, I’m going to be absolutely petrified. I would love to see some friendly faces in there to make me feel better. can you come and give me a wave in the chat? And that’s true. Seeing those familiar names in the chat was for my benefit, really. And we also had a couple of team members who were entirely dedicated to watching the chat, grabbing screenshots of great things that were people were saying that was a smart move, by the way, have someone in your team ready to grab.

Something brilliant that someone says about your presentation from the chat. We use that the next day on social posts, and that drove a whole ton more signups into the second and third runs of the same webinar. Very good strategy. So their job was to do engaging with people as well, because if you’re delivering the presentation, you can’t be talking in the chat.

You can’t even be looking at it.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s good stuff there. I know some people at the end of a master class or a webinar get a little bit of cold feet around transitioning to the pitch or making the sale. What did you do at the end to really position the offer? Maybe you did it not just at the end.

Like, how did you quote sell from the master class?

Kay Peacey: Good question. I’m trying to remember. We definitely had a spin to win.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Kay Peacey: So that was, so our spin to win, I think came after the pitch. So the spin to win is something I love to roll out just because it’s really good fun. We do a spin to win, put everyone’s names on the wheel and one.

Two or three winners, whatever we’re doing, we’ll get a one to one session with me, which you literally cannot buy. I do not do those. So that’s an, that actually, now I come to think of it, that’s our incentive for getting members to turn up live. Cause we were like you, can join this draw as well. If you win that’s yours.

One to one for an hour with me. You can’t get that anywhere else. And that happens

Chris Badgett: at the very end. Yeah, we do that

Kay Peacey: at the very, we do it before the Q and A. So the structure was intro, Presentation, then into a pitch section, then the spin to win, then Q& A. And our sticker, our rate of people sticking around was really good.

We’re very happy with that. I think the pitch, I don’t find the pitching to be a problem anymore, because I think I finally got comfortable with that notion that if I don’t tell people what we do and how we can help them. They’re not going to buy it and then they’re not going to get the help and they’re not going to get the good things for their business.

And I don’t feel, I don’t feel bad about saying that anymore. I feel like something shifted in me this year to be absolutely fine with saying we are the best in the world. I am the best person in the world to teach you active campaign. This is where you can buy my services. This is how much it’s going to cost.

You can buy monthly so you don’t have to be committed for a long period of time. It doesn’t have to cost you a scary amount of money like a consultant and we see a lot of people spending crazy sums on consultancy and then coming out of it worse than they were before. This is an alternative.

Here is how you can try us out. We do a refund guarantee, so there’s no pressure selling. Yeah, I just, I feel very strongly that what we offer is really, good. And I’m happy to talk about that now.

Chris Badgett: I love that. The first sale you make is to yourself. And if you really believe in your product and your mission, selling gets really easy because you’re just, you almost feel obligated because you want to serve and help all these people.

So yeah,

Kay Peacey: absolutely. And Melissa used to call me about it all the time. She would call me on it and be like, what? Nobody’s buying that thing you never told them about. Go figure. I should probably talk about this more. And I think another tipping for me was the valid tipping point for me was the validation that I got from around this time last year when ActiveCampaign created their first customer advisory board.

And I was their first call to be on that. I, have stature and status within the ActiveCampaign community. I have the respect and value from ActiveCampaign themselves. Invite me into their world to help them with how to serve their customers better, how to make the platform better, how to engage better with users, how to teach active campaign.

If they’re asking me, then I need to get over myself and stop being weird about saying, this is what we do. Here’s where you can buy it. It will cost you this much. And it’s really good.

Chris Badgett: I just want to highlight that strategy of a customer advisory board. This is commonly known in software businesses where you have some of your users and customers that you meet with on an ongoing basis or kind of group in a little community where you.

Open mindedly listen to their feedback, ask for help and stuff like that. I think more course creators, coaches, and education entrepreneurs could do that strategy because you don’t have to figure everything else out by yourself on how to make your offer better. Or the customer experience better. And when you find those customers and users or students or members that you love working with, and you’d like to get more of them by talking to them, you remove a lot of friction and get a lot of good ideas.

It doesn’t mean you can act on everything they want or recommend or agree with everything, but it’s such a valuable resource to listen and get feedback in that way.

Kay Peacey: So much. So much. And hearing you say that takes me back to when we were in when we were in our beta phase for the Active Campaign Academy, which was about two and a half years ago, and I invited 13 people to come in as beta members.

On their, contribution to the form that the academy takes is just enormous, absolutely enormous. It was the, structure that we have now of the calls, the community, whole courses, and specifically lots of little tutorials that are done in a fluent, fast fashion, that whole structure came from listening to what they needed and when they needed it and what, how they wanted to consume it.

It all came from them.

Chris Badgett: Pure gold right there.

Kay Peacey: Sorry, I’m just going to say one more thing, which is that you have to let go of your vanity as an educator. You have to let go of that feeling that you, know better than them about how to do this. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Great business isn’t built in a vacuum for sure.

Last question for you, Kay. So you ran your masterclass. What’s your plan for the future? And what would you advise people? Is this something that you do once a year, twice a year, four times a year? What do you think you’ll do going forward? And what would you recommend to people?

Kay Peacey: Okay. I think doing for me, it’s going to be annual at the moment.

I have some disability issues, I have family to raise, I have limited energy for me and I think once a year feels right. I’m certainly not going to leave it two years again. It’s going to be once a year because it rejuvenated the business and it establishes our place very publicly of we own this space.

You need to be here. I definitely want to be doing that once a year. I think probably we all should in terms of in between that, we are working towards sales cycles where we will have focus topics within the membership. We’re going to do that because it serves our existing members primarily.

But we’ll also act as a sales driver. So for example, right now we are having a very big member mission about deliverability, everybody’s favorite, sexy subject, email authentication, deliverability, engagement, and re engagement. And this is feeling really good for us because it drives things in three different places.

It drives our members to stay and to consume content because they can see exactly what they’re doing. And if everyone’s. Doing the same thing at the same time that builds your sense of community. That is a driver on sales because people who’ve been sitting on the fence or who left some time ago, this may now be the driver that gets them back in through the door because they can see us talking consistently about this thing, showing our expertise and giving them reasons to join the third one, which was my unexpected kicker was that it has made me.

Turn up and create the best courses I’ve created in a long time. Not that all my courses aren’t fabulous, but I just rocked one out on re engagement and it’s so good. I’m genuinely excited to get it out there. And if we hadn’t been doing this focus on deliverability and engagement, I don’t think I would have gotten around to doing it.

And I certainly don’t think it would have been as good as it is now. So it’s a push on all fronts, very healthy.

Chris Badgett: I think once a year makes sense, especially when you get partners involved, because the partner can only do so much and they have other things that have to do. But like once a year and you get a system and everybody’s happy, that’s becomes a, something you can just repeat in your business.

Kay Peacey: And we banked how we did it for that masterclass. We have stashed everything that we did. And I know that next time we’ve got the recipe there, we’re also going to turn that into a course. How do you automate a fantastic launch event or masterclass using ActiveCampaign? And then we’re going to evergreen a funnel that leads to that course.

Now, so there’s lots of repurposing you can do from that one event a year. I’m very confident that we will get a year’s worth of value from doing one big event. Cause it takes a lot out of me. I think I can only really do that full on once a year.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Kay, this has been a masterclass and in marketing and sales and just doing great work as an education entrepreneur.

Thank you for coming on the show. I want to encourage you out there listening to go to slickbusiness. co check out active campaign Academy. If you’re looking to increase your automation capabilities and, really leverage a powerful CRM, check that out. If you don’t have a CRM yet, the what’s the quickest, what’s the free course called accelerated?

Accelerated action campaign. See, you did the alliteration, which I like to do too, because it’s Lifter LMS. So it helps people remember the name of your products and business. Any other ways for the people to connect with you or last parting words here, Kay?

Kay Peacey: I’m always delighted to, connect with people on LinkedIn, particularly fellow, fellow educators, people who are passionate about that learning experience and how we do better.

On that all the time as the technology moves, as we mature, how are we doing that? Anyone can come and connect with me on LinkedIn. And there’s also my Facebook group, which is called automate your business with active campaign. And that’s open to anyone, probably better if you’re a bit obsessed with active campaign.

But if you’re into email marketing, we talk a lot of that in there as well.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s KPC slick business. co. Thanks so much for coming on back on the show. I can’t wait to do it again in another couple of years.

Kay Peacey: Thanks, Chris. Delighted to be here.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Calvin emphasizes the significance of overcoming emotions of inadequacy and having a significant influence while offering insights into the transforming path of business as a spiritual quest. He discuss about coaches and course creators in this episode.

Calvin Correli, co-founder of Simplero. He provides entrepreneurs with useful tools and community assistance via Simplero’s integrated platform. He emphasizes how courses, coaches, and communities may help entrepreneurs on their path to become their second hero by offering them both spiritual and practical assistance.

Calvin provides ways for combining pre-recorded information with live coaching sessions and organized courses to provide a full learning experience. Calvin advocates for simplicity in systems and spirituality.

In addition, he talks on the need of continuous involvement in a community that is encouraging and adopts an iterative approach to coaching and content development, constantly refining his views based on questions posed by participants.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Calvin Corelli. He’s from simplero. com, which is an online platform for delivering coaching, consulting courses and building communities with a super sweet angle of being an all in one approach.

So you don’t end up with this software Frankenstein of all these different tools. Welcome back on the show, Calvin.

Calvin Correli: Thank you, Chris. It’s great to be here. Yeah, I really appreciate you having me back. We had a conversation. What was it like three years ago or something? And I’m super excited that you’re having me back for another chat.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think this is going to be a good one. So Calvin and I have both been in this industry for about 10 years, basically helping people with something to share, to teach Calvin in our pre chat was describing it as like a second act. where somebody figures something out and they want to then take that knowledge and skills and experience and package it up and create a bigger impact and build a business around that with Simplero.

Let’s start there, Calvin. Tell us more about the this kind of perfect fit customer for Simplero and, really just this movement of people that. Maybe a little later in life, decide, you know what? I want to give back to those who are further back on the journey.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. So I’m inspired by Joseph Campbell’s story of the, hero’s journey, like the arc that, basically all myths from throughout history follow the same arc.

It was what inspired George Lucas to write star Wars based on the hero’s journey. And is this idea that You’re living your life. And then something happens that, that makes life as it used to be untenable. It doesn’t work anymore. Like you’re, like overweight. And I like your doctor says, you’re going to get a heart attack if you don’t do this, or you’re going to get diabetes or whatever it is, like something, something has to change, right?

Back against the wall. You need to figure out how to make some money. You may figure out how to make the money. And so we go on this journey. We, first refused to call everybody, refused to call though. Like I want to change, Oh God, then I don’t want it. And then we find a mentor and some helpers and there’s going to be some enemies and some fights, and then we go to the innermost cave of.

Battling our own demons and all that stuff. We come out, there’s more struggles and fights and more help. And then we return to where we came from. But now we have what he calls the elixir. We have the fountain of life. We have this like magic potion that we can use to help others because we figured out how to combat pre diabetes or.

Or being overweight or whatever it was, and we solved it for ourselves. And now we’re in a position where we can be the mentor to the next person. And I find, that most of the people that we work with are people of that sort. Now they have the elixir and they’re like, I got to share this thing.

Everybody in the world needs this. This is about most amazing thing ever. And then they’re like, why aren’t people just beating down my door to want this thing? And that’s when they realized. Oh crap, I need to go on another hero’s journey complete with another refusal of the call and another mentor and helpers and, enemies and opposers and going to the dark night of the soul and the innermost cave and all of that stuff to go to figure out how to actually get this to other people.

And that’s where we come in. We come in, we’re at that point where we help them on the second hero’s journey. They might already, have tried some things, right? They might have tried gluing together, like you said, nine different software platforms, email marketing and website and a shopping card and video hosting and membership site and community and affiliate tracking and surveys and, schedulers and funnel builders and like all of the things.

And they’re like, Oh

Chris Badgett: God.

Calvin Correli: complicated. So we help them on that journey on the technical side of things. And also on the, like the inner game thing, because it’s like 80, 90% it’s a, like the strategies and tactics and all that stuff is very important, but that’s. The least of it. It’s all about the mindset, the beliefs, the believing yourself, believing that you’re worthy of having a business of having a following, daring to be visible in the world, like all of those are all the things that people everybody, battles and myself included.

And so that’s why we do the software and we do the coaching for people.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell me more about the coaching side, as a software company with Simplero, how do you deliver the coaching? Is it part of the package? Is it like a value add, Is it an upsell? And then what does it actually look like?

Calvin Correli: It’s a separate program. And it’s not only for people who are using the software. It’s also for people who are not using the software though, like it’s. It’s most of the people are come from the software. Cause that’s the, majority of how we’ve marketed so far, but it’s really for people outside of some players as well.

And the, idea behind it is very simple. Being an entrepreneur is a spiritual journey. Every, every problem in business is a personal problem that happens to show up in business. And every personal problem is ultimately a spiritual problem. Like it’s, about who we are being in the world. Who what’s the truth about our nature?

And the reason I say spiritual problem is because What happens is that we all have this feeling deep inside in our personality that says I’m not enough. I’m not, I’m inadequate. Someone somehow, right? It’s whether it’s I’m not rich enough or successful enough or famous enough or skinny enough or fat enough or sexy enough or whatever it is, it’s I’m not enough.

And so we try to go into Personal development, teach me how to work out, teach me how to lose weight, teach me how to build a business, all those things, which is great. It’s very valuable, but we reach a point where we realize it’s never going to fill that void of feeling not enough because that lives at the personality level.

And that’s why when we go to the spiritual level, that’s where we can actually come to terms with the fact that we are already enough at a spiritual level and we’ll never feel enough at a personality level. And then we can operate from that energy. So, that’s the work. Like for me, it’s all about making it simple and it’s about bringing in this, like it’s the simple systems and then it’s the spirituality and it’s bringing the two together to actually get where we want to go.

And the coaching. So it’s, like I said, it’s an add on to, is an additional, like it’s a separate program, if you will. And and the format is. What I see as the most effective format in the market right now. And I am curious to hear what you see out there, but it is, we do a weekly group coaching call.

It’s 90 minutes where I present a framework upfront, 15, 20 minutes or something. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, but I present a framework and then the rest of the time is open Q and a either about that framework or really about anything that people have. And so that 90 minutes is where we meet every week.

Same time every week. That’s where I get to meet people. They get to meet me and they get to meet each other. So by showing up vulnerably with a question on that call, other people on the call, see them, everybody’s cameras on. And then the recording lives in the community site portal forever.

And so over time we build up this catalog of, knowledge, right? Both the models and all the Q and A’s. And then we have a discussion forum online and. Alongside those recordings. And because people meet each other on the calls, now the community works a lot better. So is that like content together, the group calls with the community and with some content, we have some, pieces that are pre recorded in addition to the coaching calls, put all that together, that format works really well because people can support each other.

In the community get a lot of value they can meet you they can get direct answers to those questions and It’s because they can see each other and they get all the models and frameworks And it’s very efficient for you as the coach because you show up for 90 minutes a week and then maybe a few hours Throughout the week, where you engage with the community and answer some questions, etc And I have a person On my team that manages the whole program.

So I just essentially just show up for 90 minutes a week.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. I would agree with you just in my experience and what I’m seeing with users that mix of content, whether that’s courses or live coaching and, community and actual like real conversational coaching is that’s where the magic happens.

Yeah. The question I have for you. I usually don’t ask two questions at once as a podcaster, but they’re related. So I’ll ask them together one. If you’ve been doing it for a while. Don’t you sometimes get to the point where your body of work has, is covered the hero’s journey or all the stages and problems.

So that’s one. And then the other one just inverse to that is I’m sure you’ve found a few areas or specific models or problem areas that are red, hot, and very popular. I’m curious what those are.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. So to answer the first I haven’t gotten there yet. And I’ve also gone back to certain topics to give a fresh take on it, a fresh perspective based on what I’ve learned in the meantime or just to sharpen it with people.

So I think that’s Fine too. The what’s great about it too, is that the questions that people ask, give me inspiration for what else to cover. And so I will, if there’s like, all right, here’s something that I see a lot of people struggling with. I actually don’t have the answer.

Let me go out and research the answer and find the answer from some of the smartest people in the world that I happen to know. And then I bring them. Or, just from books or whatever research I do. And then I bring it to them and I’ll be like, Hey, this is something that I haven’t yet implemented, or I’m in the process of implementing.

So I don’t know, I can’t tell you about, I am not talking about this from my personal experience of what I’ve done. I’m saying, this is what I’ve gathered. Here’s where I’ve gathered it. Here’s why I believe that’s one of the best answers out there right now. Because of these people or what I’ve seen or heard or, this place in that place.

So I love that because it like, I, if I try to sit down and create content and come up with stuff like in a vacuum by myself, it never, ever works. It never works. What works is always. Meet people, answer their questions, listen to their questions, see where they’re at, figure out what they need, and then deliver that either in the moment, or I’ll give the best answer I have in the moment.

Then I’ll make a note and go back and research and go deeper next time. And your second question was, what are the hot topics right now?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Favorite greatest hits.

Calvin Correli: So the. The model, this is something that, that I’m curious what you’re doing, but for, lead generation and conversion, right? Every business has three, three main parts.

You have the, you need to generate leads. People are interested, right? If you have a hot dog stand, it’s like the people who walk by or whatever, the potential prospect, right? Then you need to engage them in a conversation where you can have a chance of converting them. So sales So that’s when they’re step up and they’re interested.

I, you try to sell them a hot dog and maybe a soda as well. And should you want a pretzel with your hot dog or whatever upsells, whatever you have. And then delivery. So where you actually deliver the hot dog. Give them the hot dog. And then they hopefully eat and enjoy it. And it reminds me of it’s crazy.

I just, a book that I’ve read recently, which is on unreasonable hospitality. It’s freaking incredible. If you’ve ever read it we can double pick on that later. There’s a great hot dog story in there. Anyway, so. lead leads, conversions or sales and fulfillment leads tends to be the thing that everybody wants more of.

How do you get more leads or, and conversion to how do you convert those leads? But generally people want more leads, right? That’s the number one thing. And something that I’ve been struggling a lot with, like, how do you get good leads? You can do It’s basically like people talk about organic partner and paid.

Yeah. So organic is you put like SEO and SEO SEO is optimization, but SEO which I personally have always found excruciatingly boring, but. I know it works really well for some people, but then when you have chat dbt and Gemini and are we going to see a move away from search results and all that stuff.

So questions on that. And then there’s like posting organic content, which was great, like five, six years ago. And most of these platforms, mostly now it’s really hard. Yeah. Like real TikTok shorts are where you get the chances of distribution, but the games has gotten like a lot harder, So organic is difficult.

Partner can definitely work. Like that’s affiliate programs, referral programs of different kinds, partner programs. Ambassador programs. It’s definitely one of the things that have worked well for us, but we found it so far, it’s been tricky for us to really scale it. Like it does, it works well, but we don’t have a lot of levers to pull on it that we’ve been able to build, like acquiring new people or getting existing new partners or getting existing partners to promote more.

Hasn’t really done move the needle for us. Then there’s paid running ads. That is getting harder and harder as well. Like four years ago during, the pandemic. Everybody flocked to their computers and as we’re working on gangbusters, if it’s always been a game of that. You have to know what to do and how to do it.

You have to be a little bit smart, but like they generally worked really well. And then it’s just getting more and more expensive and more and more hard. Even back the whole reason that ClickFunnels exists is because of funnels, which is because like you couldn’t, you can no longer make the math work if you just ran ads to an offer.

And that was it. You need upsells in order to pay for the traffic in order to make the math work. And and, even with the most, the deepest, most advanced, most clever funnels, like it’s harder and harder. To make ads work. Russell did a podcast. Russell Bronson from ClickFunnels did a podcast end of December where he was like, I don’t know what to do.

I’m at Whitson. Like all our funnels are just not working as well anymore. And he was going to go hard on organic content as, the way to the, to To do it. Because if if you look at Alex, I’m always like what he’s done has been really, successful. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of effort.

You have to be really good at it, but it really works when you do it. So my conclusion is like a long answer to say my conclusion is that the best way to get attention these days. In general, and for me specifically is podcasts, which is why I’m here. So by going on podcasts, the right podcasts, of course but by going on podcasts, I get a chance to be in front of new people, new audience.

And those people that are attracted to like it, they end up spending like 45 minutes with me, which is fucking awesome versus an ad where they, or exactly where it’s five, 45 seconds or 60 seconds or whatever it is. Now they’re spending a lot of time with me. And then I’m going to invite people to then follow me on Instagram at Calvin Corelli on Instagram, go follow me there.

And then DM me if you DM me the words 10 K I’ll send you my super simple blueprint for how you can scale to 10 K a month as a coach, like the simplest possible. Path that I’ve come up with. So that’s my CTA. So now I’m getting people on Instagram, getting a DM and then on the DMS, I am going to spoiler alert.

I am going to chat with you and see if you’re fit to work with me either on some players as a client on some layer, or as a client on my co in my coaching programs and player Academy. And that’s. I found so far is the model that appeals the most to me. I’m not paying for ads. I’m actually getting to spend like 45 minutes an hour with someone that I like and that I care about.

And I talk about stuff that I care about for people who are interested enough to spend the time to, to listen to it. So that to me is the hot topic right now is like that combination of podcasts or like stages in general. So being can be in a physical stage, can be a summit, it can be whatever, but you’re on someone else’s stage talking now, and then you get people onto your social media.

I like Instagram a great chat DM platform. YouTube doesn’t have that. Facebook does. LinkedIn has a chat. So I like where we can actually. Converse with people. Cause that’s the, transaction happens in conversation, that conversion happens in conversation. Not it’s harder and harder to get like a landing page to work.

And so with this model, you don’t need funnels. You don’t need landing pages, you don’t need, any of that stuff. You can just over chat and roll people directly into your programs at 5k, 10 K, 20 K, 30 K. Like it’s there’s really no. Like you can enroll people into very high ticket programs over chat without a call without nothing else.

So that works really remarkably well. And so it’s that combination podcast to get new eyeballs, Instagram, or whatever your preferred social is to, nurture and convert those people. And that becomes a funnel, right? That becomes the funnel. That’s your podcast is your top of funnel. And then Instagram becomes your middle of funnel and your bottom of funnel.

So you don’t need. Yeah, no complicated software and tech and all that stuff.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And podcast too, gives you a lot of brand awareness. That’s not tracked. Like you don’t always know, but yeah, that’s still matters.

Calvin Correli: A hundred percent. It’s what’s in people’s heads. I remember a conversation I had with Gary Vaynerchuk years ago, where it was like, everybody else is like. So obsessed with the emails and the followers and they want to have all the, you’re like, I don’t care about that.

I just want to have that position in your mind, I want to have the, shelf space in your mind. So you’re going to look me up on Instagram whatever. Cause I like, I’m already in you and that’s that’s so powerful when you do that well.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you mentioned the podcast 45 minutes, I’ve heard it called portable content of it.

I’ve been podcasting for 10 years. I started my podcast at the same time as Tim Ferriss. I’m just a lot less known, but the whole thing with portable content is you’re only competing with three things. Audio books and music and podcasts. Other podcasts. And

Calvin Correli: you also portable as in people listen to it while they’re walking or driving or whatnot, doing the

Chris Badgett: dishes, whatever.

And, you have that long time, like po at least probably the small podcast is like 12 minutes. A long one’s three hours. Yeah. So you, have a lot of attention without as much distraction as like on a screen per se. Yeah. So that’s for course creators and coaches in particular. I think podcasting is absolutely great because not only can you sharpen your expertise.

By interacting with other leaders in your field and representing the best interests of your client.

Calvin Correli: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But you’re building that partnership relationship at the same time, where cross promotion, joint ventures or whatever can happen. Exactly. And that’s

Calvin Correli: a huge thing too. I’m glad you brought that up.

Cause yeah, like you and I being, on this chat together, like now we’re refreshing a relationship that has been dormant for a few years. And now Oh yeah. Chris is top of mind. Calvin’s top of mind. So. it’s really that opportunity for, relationship building is awesome.

And so my strategy is I have my own podcast as well. I don’t use that for new, for Legion, right? Because that’s not going to happen like that. If people are not going to I might, if I get really good at SEO, whatever, like people might search the park, Apple podcast directory and find my podcast, but probably not.

That’s more once they heard about me. On your show on LFTR LMS what, is the podcast called? I forgot

Chris Badgett: it’s LMS cast

Calvin Correli: on LMS cast. Once they found me, once they hear about me on LMS cast, they’re going to follow me on Instagram and then they might go try to look me up on YouTube or just podcast, and then they’re going to find my podcast and get spent, spend more time with me.

But my, that’s not even like the primary thing for my podcast is, number one, building relationships. So getting people on my podcast that I want to build a relationship with, that could be for potential referral partners, or it could be potential clients that I want to get in front of. And secondarily for content.

So we’ll take the content off of the. My podcast as well as this podcast, and then put that into what I call my content machine that then finds snackable bits that we can post as TikTok, YouTube shorts or reels, and also longer, like YouTube clips as well. And so those are the two purposes of my own podcast fulfills, but it’s not a lead gen tool.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. I, in my opinion, podcast is like the super, platform that can go a lot of places and do cross functional things. Totally. For the course creators and coaches out there, we’ll go ahead. You had another

Calvin Correli: thought. It’s just like when I started podcasting and I haven’t been super active, but I’m getting back into it now.

But when I started, I was really worried about but, I don’t have much traffic. It’s been, I think I’ve had one person ever that I asked to be on my podcast that were, was interested in that number. People don’t give a crap about how many downloads you have on your podcast. Generally, they’re just like, they want, they’re excited to chat with you and emailing people and saying, Hey, will you be on my podcast?

It’s such a better ask than, Hey, will you be a referral partner for me? Or do you want to like, can I sell you my software or my coaching program or my thing? My course, it’s a much better ask to say, Hey, do you want to be on a podcast? And then, Oh, by the way, now we can have a conversation.

Chris Badgett: I love that for, me.

Course creators and coaches who I know this is a hot button issue in our industry. So I wanted to ask your take on it, who have, who are wanting to do marketing. They’re getting that imposter syndrome of getting out on the stage, taking on the role of the mentor in, as in the hero’s journey framework for others.

And they’re like, who am I to be Gandalf or Obi Wan Kenobi or whatever that comes up. And then also just literally getting into creating information products and making video content videos and YouTube channels and take talks and all this, especially from your perspective as a spiritual teacher, how does one get moving and get past that imposter syndrome

Calvin Correli: by making it about them, not you.

When you’re like, Oh, I, who am I to, and I don’t have, and what it like, that’s you making it all about you. The more you can make it about serving other people that, that just totally goes away. Cause it’s not about you. It’s about them. So put your focus there. It’s actually my, my my first book is show up and serve for that reason, right?

Show up and serve, just show up and serve and not. Don’t be so focused on yourself. Focused on the difference that you can make for other people. It’s not even about so a hot topic along those lines are, you allowed to coach people on stuff that you haven’t yourself you haven’t.

Fully mastered yourself. And I think it’s fair. And I think like Gary Vaynerchuk likes to harp in on 22 year old life coaches. Dude, you haven’t fucking lived life. Get out of here. My take is that, that if you’re. If you’re on the path and you’re doing the work and you’re figuring stuff out, like you can even if you’re not, honestly, if you have the skills to actually help other people achieve their results, then go do it.

Just be honest about where you’re at. Forget the, like the fake like. all all those like fake private jet photos and, like fancy cars and all that bullshit. Forget all of that. It’s about you being just as, real with people as possible. One of my friends is Gay Hendricks is author of, the big leap and, many other books and been working on relationship, et cetera.

But he coached Michael Dell at Dell computers, for example, it’s not like he’s built a billion dollar. Tech company, right? It doesn’t have to, in order to successfully coach Michael Dell, because he knows how the mind works and knows to get Michael Dell to the, like, wherever Mike needs to go. I don’t know the details of their conversation.

I just know that they work together. So it’s not that you have to have the exact results. Is that you have what it takes to actually help people move forward in a genuine way. I think the trick is to, when we make it about ourselves Oh because I, like you’re, like, I need you to, for me to feel good, like about myself, like you become a proof that I’m like the bad ass, the bad guy the baller or something, right?

Like that whole like ego place, that’s where it gets a little bit tricky. You’re coming from a place of genuinely wanting to serve people, then go fricking serve those people. Like they, they need you. The other piece of that is like the further along you are, the harder it can sometimes be to remember what it felt like to be where you were like 10 years ago or something.

So when you’re closer to where your, clients are, you might actually be able to help them better.

Chris Badgett: I love that. You just gave me a new insight as a deep Joseph Campbell, study or myself, which is that the mentor like Gandalf, he didn’t get the ring. He helped Frodo get the ring. Morpheus didn’t stop the matrix.

He hadn’t done it, but he was a great mentor and guide for Neo to figure it out and find a way. The mentor is not necessarily a God. They’re just they just know how to bring the best out of people. That’s, a cool insight. Let’s talk about masterminds. I know that’s some of your users that’s in Plero or wanting to build masterminds as because they’d love community, but it can also be a powerful product that it can be life changing and really send a ripple of impact out into the world.

But how does one construct one of those?

Calvin Correli: Yeah, I mean masterminds is an interesting phenomenon, right? Cause it’s it feels so originally the idea came from Napoleon Hill. He writes about it in law of success. He writes about it in, in think and grow rich law of success. By the way, I only heard about fairly recently, like a couple of years ago and it’s Amazing.

You haven’t, if you read thing and grow rich, but you haven’t read law of success, I highly recommend getting into law of success is just incredible. Lays it out like very clearly. But so the idea of the mastermind is that you grab, gather a handful of people or a dozen people, whatever it is that have a shared outcome.

And we’re, working together towards that goal in our industry. Mastermind has been, morphed into this idea, Concept where it’s just like, we meet like three, four times a year maybe. And then there’s some coaching and then there’s some or not some coaching, really more, more content.

There’s some talks and then there’s some you can chat around the tables or in the breaks or whatnot. And then there’s an online component where you have the recordings from the live events, and then you’ve got a community where people can use each other. I have found that I think, honestly, that model maybe has peaked.

Because I think what people want and need are is like more, of the coaching, more of the relationship building. I’ve, what I’ve seen is that usually the online component isn’t working as well. For people in those programs, as in some other programs, I don’t know what you’ve seen. But I, really like that coaching format where someone is actually taking lead and saying, Hey, I’m on, I’m coaching and there’s a community where people can, use each other.

But I have a point of view. I have frameworks. I have a a direction here that I’m coaching people on because I think people come to you a lot because they want something that you have. They want to be like you in some way, and that’s what attracts people. And then you can help people with that.

But then. Really the bait and switches that you that a good coach will help people be themselves like they’re attracted to you because there’s some part of themselves that they have disowned that they’re seeing in you and they want some of that, which is awesome as you can help them reclaim that piece and then really.

Put the spotlight on them to be who they are, not be like you.

Chris Badgett: In my experience, I’ve I’m a huge fan of masterminding and I’m in some that have been going for four years meeting regularly and the best ones. They really, it’s not part of a product. It’s just people at a very similar spot with very similar goals, trying to do similar things, get together.

It’s outside of a product that doesn’t cost anything, It’s just a group of people. To me, that’s been.

Calvin Correli: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: The most sustainable and successful. I think when you try to productize that,

Calvin Correli: yeah,

Chris Badgett: I think you’re better off, like you’re saying, doing the courses and the coaching and then encouraging your members to form masterminds on their own, and that might, that can actually benefit your business by being a part of that connection and all that.

But it. It is tricky to turn it into a product that to have the long term benefits of a mastermind.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. The simple answer to your question is once you have five people, you have a group.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Calvin Correli: So, if you want to start a group, like a mastermind or group coaching program or whatever it is, once you have five people, you have something and then it’s just building from there and getting, success with those early people and making sure that they love it.

And then they refer their, friends to it because it’s so great. And then you build on that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk more broadly about the industry. What do you see in these past three years? Say if we go back to the early days of like online courses and internet marketing and like 2, 000 courses that were just videos with a bunch of bonuses.

Where are we at today? In terms of a better stack or this person called for the second act to do something, there’s all this overwhelm that comes with like tools and like what you’re actually offering. What would you advise that person to simplify and get focused and give them a frame to step into?

Calvin Correli: Yeah, I think that the whole. Like the concept of the value ladder, like you have something cheap and then something a little bit more expensive, a little more expensive, like that, that, like all those steps on that ladder is a little like outdated. We don’t need that the same way anymore. I think the people who come to you, like the leads are hottest when they come right in the door.

I think we’ve all been there where we, were searching something over the weekend and we looked at, and then we like reached out to someone on Instagram and got in the DMs or whatever the process was. And then. Like we didn’t hear back. And then by the time like Monday, Tuesday rolls around and we got a response, we couldn’t remember what was it?

Why was I like, really so keen on that? And then I forget so there’s like a halftime half life of, leads. And I think that the danger is like if you give people something like cheap and need to walk them up the value ladder, like the best clients are just going to go find someone else who will get them like what they really need at the point that they’re willing to pay, which is I hire probably and, give their money to that person.

So I think it’s more, what I’m seeing is like the, all the free social media content, marketing stuff, and the quality there keeps getting up, right? The bar keeps being raised for the quality of content that you need to put out there to be really heard and seen if you want to build a big brand and then So the free stuff and then a low ticket subscription, like for us, it’s the simpler or the software, but you’d also be like a low ticket 50, a hundred dollars, 150, maybe 200 a month community paid community.

And then a high ticket thing after that. So that could be more of like the eight, 10 K a year kind of thing. And then, or 15, 20 or something in that range, even 30, 60, and then you can go super high for Though one on one VIP experience, right? I’ve seen people charge two, 300, 000 for one on one coaching and a year kind of thing.

But so there’s still a value ladder of sorts, but it’s more like your cheap membership is really just a way to get to like your new lead nurture that you get paid for and what you want to do. And it’s helps you offset some of your. Advertising costs. There’s always going to be costs associated even with while you’re doing his podcast and still cost you money to do your time and all that stuff.

So it helps offset some of that. And then and, weed out the prospects that are not interested enough to pay you, like it could be as little as 10 bucks a month, right? Like it can be really low ticket, but it’s enough to get, have some skin in the game and say, Hey, these people are interested and now you can.

You can ascend people into your quote unquote real programs and then have that eight, 10, 15 K annual program as your main bread and butter business.

Chris Badgett: If you could wait, wave a magic wand, would you advise somebody to build, say, a lower cost recurring community first before building the high ticket program or opposite?

Opposite. Yeah.

Calvin Correli: Build the like eight, 10, 15 K a year program first, because that’s where you’re going to see. The most traction, the most value, you’re going to make the most money from doing that. And you’re going to prove that model works. And then you descend from that into, a cheaper membership later, but you, should be able to get just at least a handful of people in there.

without too much effort. And then, and you can lower the price on that and you can do it for free and say, Hey, I just need some case studies. The only, I’ll do it. It’s normally 10, 000 or 5, 000 or whatever it is, but I’ll do it for you for free. If you will promise that if you like it, offer me a testimonial and and, refer to her friends or something like that.

Because we want, we need to get started. We need some case studies. We need to show that we actually can deliver results for people. And so if you don’t have that, you can do that to get started.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I’m sure you see this too. So I want to get your take is education, entrepreneur person, but also a spiritual person.

Sometimes there’s really talented people out there that have a lot of interest. Maybe they got really paid really well at their job doing X, Y, Z, but they hate it, but they’re actually really into like yoga and alternative healing or, and like some kind of fitness program. And they’re just, they can’t pick a topic or an avatar.

And they’re just like, they’re really excited about entrepreneurship and marketing and they want to do this thing. But their, topic and avatar selection is just a mess. What do they do?

Calvin Correli: Pick one for sure. Pick one and pick one that you know, and right? Someone that you would enjoy working with, whatever that avatar is that you.

That you, have to really love the clients that you work with. You have to love working with them. So that’s a given. And then if that still leaves multiple options, then I would pick the ones that are, have the most money to pay you or for whom, like for whom, what you can offer for them is.

Is value valuable to the extent that they want to pay a good money for it, that they have the money to pay you for it, and that you can close, you can find them, you can target them and you can enroll them fairly easily. So those are the factors, right? You want to be like high average price point fast time to close when people to easily identify and target those people.

And then really enjoy working with them.

Chris Badgett: Solid advice. And just to jump on the other side of from leads over sales to fulfillment, what is unreasonable hospitality? You peaked my interest earlier, so I got to find out what this

Calvin Correli: is. So it’s a book about 11 Madison park, which is a restaurant like right up there on, on the upper East.

That was the number one restaurant in the world for many years. And the book describes what they did to just. Over deliver on people’s expectations as patrons of this restaurant. And what I love about it, like it’s something that we at Simplero, we over invest in customer success.

And if something, if you look at our reviews online, almost all of them mentioned our customer support, our customer service, just cause we, really care and that just comes from me. Cause I just love great customer service. I hate receiving terrible customer service experience. I hate being like talked down to, or not heard properly. And there’s so much garbage customer service out there. So something that we really invest in. And so when I read that book, I was like, it was one of those things where three people were recommending that book within two days. It was like, okay, she’d probably read it.

I read it. And then now I’m getting the whole team to read it. Cause we’re already good at this. And I want to like just double, triple down on that. And so one of the examples in there. Is that the they would be so attentive to their guests. One of the waiters was overhearing some two couples that were visiting the city and they’d eaten at all the top restaurants in the city and they just had a great time and this is not, they didn’t share this with the waiter.

They just, the waiter happened to hear this and they’re like, their only regret was that they didn’t actually. Get to visit a New York city hot dog stand, like the total opposite end of the spectrum from all these gourmet restaurants. But they were just like, they just wanted to have that experience. And so the waiter hears it.

Runs out the door to the hot dog cart on the corner buys a New York hot dog for them brings it to the kitchen and has the chef prepare it. So he chops this hot dog into four pieces, puts them on separate plates and then does some like chef magic, garnishing, whatever. And then they serve that as like an extra surprise dish to the group and they’re just ecstatic over the moon.

And that level of just attention to people, to care, to just like running with it and like the chef in the story was like, what the fuck are you talking about? He’s no, Trust me. Like we’re doing this. And then they went through with it. I just love that. It was like a couple of other examples.

There was a when, people come show up at the restaurant, they’re Ready for their, for to T they will have looked up everybody who reserved a table, they’ll have looked them up on Google. If you have the photo on the internet somewhere, they’re going to find that photo. So when you step in the door, they greet you by name, right?

Half an hour, 45 minutes before your reservation comes up, they review those photos. So they’re ready for you by the time you come in the door. And as you’re entering, someone is signaling to. The, host, whether your table is ready or not. And so they don’t need to look at the computer. They can just say, Hey, like here, they can just take you to the bar to wait or take you directly to the table.

They don’t need like these, be with you the whole time when you’re at the table and they’re asking you, do you want still sparkling or tap water. They’re going to, the waiter that asks you is going to signal some hand signs behind his back. And then someone else comes in instantly, like just gives you the right water.

So it’s it’s just thinking things through like little details like that. That’s just. For me, I just for me, I love that. I love that stuff.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s amazing. It’s, and I just want to confirm, it’s definitely part of your brand. Like that care and that empathy and that great support. I have a friend near me.

Who’s a cook and a chef. He’s actually. Use some Plero and I remember him talking about your just the, vibe and the support and the experience of the company. And I’ve just noted that’s just no implanted in my brain with the brand of some players, like these guys go above and beyond and support and actually really care about their customers.

And the fact that you have the the coaching as well, it’s just an indication. Like we’re just, we’re not just trying to sell you software. We want you to be successful and remove blockages and stuff like that.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. And doing the coaching for me has been just remarkable. Like I see coaching. As a force multiplier, I get to be with my audience every week, experience exactly what they’re struggling with so that I can take I just ingrains my people, my avatar into my brain every single week.

And it aligns me with the people that I’m serving in such a deep way. It’s been really helpful for me, like really profound to do that. And it’s crazy because I was like for many years, I was so busy doing the software and so busy feeling like I was not worthy and imposter and all of the stuff that we all struggle with that I didn’t do the coaching.

And it was actually one of my friends that, that. Whom sidebar I met at a food truck in Washington Square Park over there some years ago, right at the beginning of COVID. He was the one that, that got me to do a coaching program. I’m so grateful because it’s been, yeah, game changer for me and for the company and for our people.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And it ties back into your last point, which was that. If you’re having trouble selecting a topic or an avatar or a niche, who do you want to spend time with? Because if you’re going to be really good, you’re going to be spending a lot of time with these people and you got to like them and get them and want to keep understanding and going deeper.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. And an added bonus for, me too, has been with this coaching program, I’m doing exactly what my clients are doing. I’m doing the same thing using the same software. Guess where Simplero Academy runs? Of course it runs in Simplero. Everything runs in Simplero. And so that’s why too, I like doing it externally as well.

So we’re not just doing, working with Simplero client, Simplero members, but also with people who are not on Simplero yet is really helpful because that. Is me doing the things that I like that my clients would be doing.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Calvin, thanks for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it.

He’s a simplero. com. He also has a personal website at calvincarelli. com. Is there any other way you mentioned mentioned again, the The, Instagram DM thing.

Calvin Correli: So follow me, go follow me on Instagram at Calvin Corelli, C A L V I N C O R E L I two R’s one L very confusing. Calvin Corelli at Instagram and then DM me the there’s 10 K and say that you came from, LMS cast the podcast.

Then I’ll, know that this is where you heard. You discovered me and then I’ll send you over the link to the like the video where I break down how to get to 10, 000 a month as a coach. And and then, yeah, see how, if we can support you either on some Blair or in similar Academy or just some other way.

Chris Badgett: Awesome, Calvin. Thanks for coming back on the show. We’ll have to do this again sometime.

Calvin Correli: All right. Appreciate it, Chris. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Miriam Castilla shares insights about wealth, abundance, and the relationship with money in the conversation.

Miriam Castilla works as a coach, speaker, and businesswoman. Her engineering education gives her a distinct viewpoint in the areas of plenty, wealth thinking, and money management. She uses her personal experience of being able to travel for four months out of the year without worrying about money to illustrate her definition of wealth and abundance—having options beyond money. Where money doesn’t limit what one can or cannot do.

She introduces her “Magnetic Money” group coaching program, which is intended for those with variable incomes or those who want to improve their money management. It focuses on combining energy and mentality with realistic financial techniques.

Miriam draws comparisons between the relationship with money and that with a significant other, emphasizing symptoms of an unhealthy relationship as avoidance, bad emotions, and dread related to money management.

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest from the other side of the world down under in Australia. It’s Miriam Castilla. She’s from miriamcastilla. com, two L’s in Castilla. Welcome to the show, Miriam.

Miriam Castilla: Hello. Thank you very much for having me.

Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to get into it with you today.

We’re going to be talking about creating wealth mindset around money, abundance, entrepreneurship, your course creator journey. There’s a lot we’re going to get into. But let’s start with a question I’ve seen you ask in your videos, which is what does wealth and abundance mean to you?

Miriam Castilla: Oh, nice one. To me, it’s really all about choices and not having money be the thing that defines what I get to do.

So it’s actually about moving beyond money. And not even having to think about money. For example my husband and I now spend about four months of the year just traveling and not, thinking about money. So that’s what wealth and abundance means to me, having those kinds of choices.

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

Tell us a little bit about what magnetic money is.

Miriam Castilla: Okay. So magnetic money is a group coaching program Mainly for small business owners or really anyone with irregular income or who wants to try and figure out how to make their money work best for them. And the thing that we do there that’s really quite different to other money programs out there is we do what I call marrying the magical with the practical.

So we, we look at how do you organize and best manage your personal finances? Cause no one ever teaches us that stuff, especially when you have fluctuating income, what does that actually look like? What bank accounts do I need? What do I do with my money when it comes in? How do I decide?

What goes where? So we cover all of that and we cover the mindset side as well as the energetics the way you feel about your money.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think we’re going to unpack a few of those things. Let’s start with an unhealthy relationship to money. What are some patterns, mindsets, behaviors with an unhealthy relationship with money and wealth and abundance in life?

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, so the word relationship I think is really key to helping people figure that out. Because what’s a sign of an unhealthy relationship with your significant other? It’s when you start avoiding each other, talking badly about each other behind each other’s back start having less than pleasant feelings towards the other person and maybe not always expressing those.

So it’s It’s the same with money and I say to people sometimes if money were a person in your life and they knew how you really felt and thought about them would they want to hang around you? And it’s, having that, if you notice yourself having that love, hate relationship with money you want more, but you feel let down by it, or you’re uncertain or uncomfortable even dealing with it managing it.

Sometimes people avoid looking at their banking all together because they just fear the worst. And when we actually finally do, they go, Oh. It’s actually quite okay, isn’t it? So I think if you mirror it to human relationships that quickly lets you establish whether it’s a healthy one or an unhealthy one.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Let’s go a little deeper into the magical or the energetic aspect. What is, tell us more about that, like energy around money and we’ve got the law of attraction and all that stuff. Take us as a guide through this world of. Energetics and money.

Miriam Castilla: Yeah it’s, an interesting area. So my background originally is as an engineer.

So this whole law of attraction thing, it took me a long time to get to a point where I thought, Oh no, it’s a real thing. And you can use. It’s all different language to describe it, but we all know people where money just flows to them easily. Everything goes really well. One thing leads to another and it’s like they’re blessed or something.

And then we all know people, or sometimes we feel like we are the people where it just It doesn’t matter how hard you seem to try. It’s just not wanting to flow. And so that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the energetics, because ultimately you want to be in a state where you do just allow that money to flow.

You basically become magnetic to it, which is why I called my program magnetic money. And so it comes down to sometimes the harder you try, the worse it gets. That’s because we start focusing on the lack of it and the frustration around it. So that’s when all those feelings around, Oh money’s driving me crazy dah, And you just start worrying and fearing. You can look at it from all these different levels, like even your brain will shut down and you’ll stop thinking clearly and you’ll stop being Solution focused and open to ideas and creativity and ways to move forward and energetically, you literally shut down.

So your focus is then on there’s not enough and hey, presto, that’s what you tend to then attract more of not enough. It’s not working whatever you focus on expands basically.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about that. Like getting into the the attract attraction aspect of it. I remember I watched the movie, the secret when it first came out a long time ago and I was really into it and I’m, like it’s, it makes sense and I don’t know, I start seeing it everywhere, like your vibe attracts your tribe is a saying like what you put out there, usually more of that comes back to you, positive or negative.

What kind of behaviors and stuff can we do to really turn on that law of attraction or at least make it even more powerful than it is in our lives?

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, totally. So a little back story with the secret. When that came out, I was going through what I call my broke single mum phase, and I used to have it just playing all the time in my house.

My kids were going nuts. And one of the teachers I really loved on that was Mike Dooley. And I used, because he would just sum it all up by saying thoughts become things. Which is really the crux of the answer to your question. And I used to think, wow, that’s so simple. So cool. Imagine if one day I could teach something like this or work with someone like that.

And I actually do now. I’m part of Mike Dooley’s team and we actually deliver his infinite possibilities trainer program. Thoughts become things. And so what can we do? It’s, I think it’s if you want to sum it up, it’s about being clear on these desires without being so attached to them that we completely lock ourselves down and get in our own way.

And when it comes to money, it’s really about. Something as, it’s as simple as focus on the abundance that’s all around you and how much you enjoy it and how much more you want of it and all the cool things you can do with it. And it opens you up energetically to attracting more of it and to actually seeing and becoming aware of all the ways that can happen and what tends to happen for a lot of people.

And they don’t even realize it is because they want more money in their life. They are actually inadvertently focused on because it’s not enough. It comes down to what you focus on expands, but if you focus on the lack of money and that you want more because there’s not enough, that’s what you get more of.

And. You need to be able to turn that on its head and it does feel a little counterintuitive sometimes because by focusing on what you’ve already gotten, how much you love it and what it gives you, you actually then attract more of that energy. It’ll go more money to let you do more cool things. Does that make sense?

Chris Badgett: That does make sense. And I think just to maybe clarify it a little more, could you speak to how it works in personal relationships? So for example, if you want, if you’re looking for a life partner or you’re looking for more friends that lift you up instead of pull you down what would you need to do to attract those things?

Yeah.

Miriam Castilla: So you’ve got to be that thing first, right? If you want to attract really cool, fun people to hang around with, you’ve got to be one of them yourself. If you want to attract a really loving, caring partner, who’s got their act together and doesn’t come with a whole lot of baggage, let’s say, then you’ve got to figure out your own stuff and.

Be really grounded In yourself, if, and we all know this we tend to have like different places, different faces, same problem. And that’s because we’re bringing ourselves along and maybe we haven’t grown and evolved yet. So you’ve got to become the thing first to attract the thing. And it goes for relationships, friendships you can insert any topic, even down to health.

If you focus on your wellbeing and how much you appreciate it, Your body is going to start functioning better because number one, you’re not in a stress state and you start. Attracting more opportunities and good health into your life. So it works on every single level of life.

Chris Badgett: That’s, wonderful.

Zeroing in on that. If we look at a pattern that a lot of people end up in, especially when they’re first starting as an entrepreneur, particularly if they’re, let’s say in a more of a business niche Sometimes there’s a, there’s this advice of fake it till you make it kind of thing. But so how do we, with authenticity become what we want to be first, even if we’re not quite there yet with our business or our income or whatever it is, give us some nuanced advice there.

Miriam Castilla: So I think the fake it till you make it, it can be a little bit of a slippery slope because sometimes people feel like they need to pretend there’s something they’re not, and. It’s not really about that. It’s more about confidence that it’s all going to work out fine and really putting yourself in that space and into that energy.

And fake it till you make it is about being open to all the cool ways that can happen and actually training your nervous system and you’re literally laying down neural pathways that see that as your normal. I’m big on visualization because I’m also a hypnotherapist. And visualization is a wonderful way to condition your body to feeling success abundance, all those cool things.

You’re literally training your body chemistry and getting your body addicted to that state. And then you will naturally unconsciously keep seeking out more ways to make that happen. And also on the level of neural pathways, you’re laying that down and it becomes a routine track that you drank.

Brain travels down. So when you think about the future of your business and your goals, you see yourself accomplishing them, you see yourself achieving them. And it becomes an acceptable state. It becomes a first response. And then you naturally, unconsciously tend to act more and more in accordance with that.

So to me, that’s what Fake It Till You Make It is about. And it’s about really thinking about Believing in yourself, starting to see it starting to believe it and, elevating your self image. So I think a cool way to sum it up is I heard Bob Proctor long time ago say, you cannot outperform your own self image.

And that’s what it comes down to, right?

Chris Badgett: Wow. This is very good. I noticed on your website and for you out there, head on over to Miriam castilla. com money habit archetypes. What are those? And yeah, take us to school.

Miriam Castilla: Okay. So a lot of people will say, Oh, I seem to have all these money blocks or must have lots of limiting beliefs around money.

Now I’m fundamentally lazy and also I like to make things really simple. Rather than thinking about a million limiting beliefs that get in our way, if we actually go a level above that, it’s all just part of a greater story. So how do I know what this story is that I’ve programmed myself with?

Look at what you do with your money because that’s the ultimate expression and end result of whatever’s going on internally. So it’s, really simple at the end of the day, that the easiest starting point is to look at your general habit pattern around money and begin there and then work your way backwards.

So money habit archetypes are the way you, tend to naturally and unconsciously treat your money and I break it down to just 3 categories and then we go from there. And the 3 categories are overextender where there’s always more going out than coming in. Spender where it comes in and whoops, there she goes and accumulator, which is the person that no matter how much or how little comes in, they will manage to swirl some away.

And that’s their default programming. So that’s what the money habit, archetypes are all about.

Chris Badgett: Is the goal to like take the best parts of all three or just become an accumulator?

Miriam Castilla: No, look, the goal is not necessarily to become the goal is to become, to have a healthy money pattern. So my belief is I think the only one that’s really not going to serve anyone is the overextender because you’re going to keep going to more debt, but you can be a really healthy spender money habit archetype You know, you just living in the flow of abundance where money comes in and it goes out again, you spend it, you invest it, you give it away, whatever.

But it’s not coming from a place of because I don’t deserve to have my own. It’s coming from a place of there’s plenty for everyone. It might be a little bit of a utopian dream of mine that’s actually possible. I think for most people, it’s about becoming more of a healthy accumulator pattern and healing really the unhealthy belief systems that keep them stuck in an unhealthy pattern.

Because having said that most people think I need to be an accumulator. And the thing is that most of the people that are actually attracted to me and my work are accumulators. And what’s driving them is an unhealthy fear or belief that it’s still not enough and what I don’t want. To perpetuate is what I call broke millionaire syndrome, because there are plenty of people who’ve got loads of money and are really stressed about it.

So you don’t have to have loads of money to feel like a millionaire or even to live like a millionaire for that matter. So a healthy towards the accumulator kind of pattern, archetype and expression and relationship with money is the ultimate goal. Yes.

Chris Badgett: How did you in your life get this focus on money and abundance?

Like, where did the passion for this area of life develop for you and your story? For

Miriam Castilla: how long have we got Plenty of time.

So I think the lights went on for me around this. I went through a divorce, I mentioned my broke single mom, kind of period. And I went through a divorce and that was when I heavily got into the secret and really embraced that sort of spiritual side of life.

And I, dug really deep. But at the same time, I think being an engineer and Being half German and, all of that made me really take good care of my money as well. So I did it instinctively. Then the interesting thing is that what was born out of that period in my life was a business in finance.

And that meant that I got to see other people’s finances and where they were at. It was a really huge eye opener because the people who had large incomes were often the most stressed about money. Just because somebody had a great income didn’t mean that they were financially stable or were building their wealth.

Sometimes it was the people on quite modest incomes that actually had assets and that kind of financial stability. That was a huge eye opener where I thought, Oh, it’s not just me. And from there, I got really passionate about helping people understand that it’s what goes on in here as well as having the skills.

That you have to bring together at the end of the day, if you want to have a healthy relationship with money and actually not just have the money in the bank, but also feel great about it and feel like it’s enough and feel safe and secure. So that’s the short version of that story.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Tell us the part of the story of becoming a course creator.

For example, I see on Udemy, you have over 4, 000 students over there. How did the okay, I’m really passionate about this topic to, I want to teach and I want to figure out how to put that on the internet. Where did that, how did that happen for you?

Miriam Castilla: So I initially started coaching people one on one and quickly realized You know, can only help me reach so many people and there’s only one of me.

And also I find that unnaturally I love teaching. I really love, maybe it’s because I love talking. And I don’t know, but I love teaching and I like breaking things down into simple actionable steps. I think that’s the engineering background. And so it just lent itself naturally to building a course and being able to reach more people.

And I think the other. Cool part not only does the course help you leverage yourself, your time build this beautiful leveraged income and reach a whole lot of people. It also helps those people find a community. And I think that’s a really important thing too. It’s not just me telling them something.

It’s them being able to interface and connect with other people on the same journey who they can maybe relate to even better than myself. Because often what happens as, the teacher who’s lived it and been through it all, sometimes you seem a little removed to the student. And so having somebody nearby who’s maybe just one step ahead of them is a really great thing.

And it just happened naturally. I think it just seemed like a no brainer to be honest, to build a course and just reach more people.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. On the course topic specifically and as it relates to becoming your most authentic, positive, abundant self. I see a lot of people get hung up on figuring out what to focus on, like what niche or what should I make my course about?

What part of. Creating an abundant life. Can you offer some advice around selecting your focus and your like your topic for your course or your website or your coaching program so that it’s in alignment and has the highest odds of success for that individual.

Miriam Castilla: I like that. You said the word.

in alignment because I think that’s really critical. A lot of people will create a course because they think it’s going to sell or it’s, just a very economic decision. And for some people that may work out okay, but I find most people who want to create their own courses are actually driven by something a little bit deeper.

They want to make an impact. They want to. make a difference in the world. And so tapping into that and the way that truly lights you up, I think is, really important. So it has to feel in alignment. There’s an exercise I take some of my VIP clients through called your unconscious core values.

And we do it using hypnosis so that we actually get past the, this is what I think should be important to me to, Oh, this is what is actually important to me. If I’m completely honest with. And it’s those things that naturally drive us internally. If we can tap into those, the things that just light us up, that we’re really passionate about, what’s going to happen is that we get, we forget about ourselves and we move beyond ourselves in creating the course in the marketing of the course in the showing up, it lets you tap into an energy that feels a bit more limitless where.

You can get your rant on when you talk about your topic and get really passionate. And I think if you just selecting a topic, because you’ve done your market research and it says that learning how to knit scarves in three different colors is the course. And then you go research and create a course I’m not going to say it can’t work, but I think if you really want to love your business and love everything you need to do to make it a success Choose the niche that you feel really passionate about where you do know your stuff and you know it’s going to make a difference as well and you can really get behind that.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s, talk about getting results for clients and students. You’ve worked with a lot of clients and you’ve had students and readers and a bunch of people around your work there’s courses, there’s coaching, there’s community. What kind of pieces, if you could advise somebody who’s trying to help others with this in a specific area of life what, components make an effective program in your experience for the, in terms of learner results

Miriam Castilla: in terms of learner results, I think for me, it’s been a really interesting journey and I would actually say stay open and pay attention to what your people are saying, what the feedback is and what works for them, because I think every community Will be a little bit different, and it doesn’t mean that the large building blocks need to be different.

It’s more about how do I bring it all together? For example, in magnetic money, we’ve played with lots of different things, and I give myself permission to change it. So we will have practical workshops. I offer little 15 minute focus sessions. sessions with myself one on one, which not a lot of group course creators will do, but it works really well for my community because it’s not a full coaching session, but it’s just a quick check in.

Things like having accountability tends to work really well for my people. For others, it may not work well. So I think it’s really important to Be tuned in and not to lock yourself in too hard into those little ancillary pieces of the puzzle, but as far as the actual here’s the course log in, watch the modules.

The 1 thing that I think will work for everybody. Keep it simple, keep it short, break it down into little steps.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And I noticed you

Miriam Castilla: agreed with that.

Chris Badgett: Oh, I do. I love the first part you said actually about staying open. Cause these are human beings and yes, we’ve got technology between us, but ultimately it’s about a human connection and a transfer of knowledge and, then people are different.

And then you start seeing patterns of what works or where you can improve. And I love that you take the you offer some 15 minute one on ones and stuff like that, because I heard this saying once that. People like, how do you charge more or whatever? It’s really what people are paying for is access.

So there’s this website called masterclass where you can learn from all these famous people, but they’re not going to help you. They’re not around to help or anything. It’s just content. So that human connection is, super important also amongst the community of learners as well. So I, like your approach there.

Miriam Castilla: And I think as long as you stay in alignment and you stay in that positive energy that we’ve talked about, you, these ideas will come to you because I, don’t want to coach everybody one on one in my program. It would burn me out. Really fast, but this idea of, Oh, no, I can just offer 15 minutes slots and they’re limited.

And we, talk about that. Please don’t hog them we have an understanding that this is for the people who need a hand and. Let everybody have it go. It works really well and it. I even see people talk about, Oh I’ve, canceled my 15 minute spot with Miriam because I’ve worked it out myself.

If anybody wants it, there’s now one available again. It actually helps people look after each other. So there’s a million ways of doing things and we just need to give ourselves permission to be open to it.

Chris Badgett: I love that. What’s working for you from a marketing perspective or attracting clients or, getting clients?

Or, learners or customers, whatever you want to call them, how, what’s working for you as a coach and course creator these days.

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, that, that’s also an, ever changing thing because technology changes the market. Changes the algorithms change. What tends to work really well for me is things, I’m going to give you the energetic answer, is things that feel really easy for me and that I really enjoy doing.

With content, for example I do create content, but I’ve stopped sitting down once a month to create a block of content because I find that when it goes out there, I might be in a different space, so I’ve created something when I wasn’t in the right space. So I’ve given myself permission to do it in a way that feels more in flow for me, which means sometimes I’ll create it on the day and just put it out there, or I will create a whole batch.

I’ve allowed myself to be a little bit more fluid with that. Coming on as a guest on podcasts was like. Because I love talking. I love meeting people and it’s a wonderful way to tap into a broader audience. So I still don’t have my own podcast. So I think again, what works is yes, you’ve got to look at what makes sense strategically, but you also have to look at.

What’s going to work for you? What’s going to feel good? That’s sustainable for you. And having said that, I have started running ads again, because I finally figured out a system that is going to work okay for me. And now we’re up and running with ads again, but I hadn’t run any ads for about two years.

But I think ultimately what works for my audience is and what works for me to bring people into my world is for them to just like even today, we’re talking to have a little experience of what I’m all about. If I just put ads out there with stock images, it, I don’t think it would be the same because that’s not the kind of people that tend to come into my program.

The kind of people that come into my program are people who really want that connection and need that little bit of. I’m going to say mothering and support to go. It’s okay. You’re not the only one. You’re not broken. And we’ve got this because money is a very emotional topic for people, and it comes with a lot of stuff, right?

Yeah, again, it’s tuning into. Yeah. What, what’s going to work for me that’s sustainable, that feels in alignment and also what makes strategic sense and then finding those matches between the two.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think you would make a great podcast host, by the way.

Miriam Castilla: it’s on the list. It’s on the list, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I didn’t realize the wisdom of it for me at that time, but I’ve been podcasting for nine years and it’s, really easy for me and I enjoy it. I get a lot out of it, I learn. I meet amazing people, I help the community. It’s good marketing. It’s a really cool format. A money question for you.

And maybe you can give us both an energetic and an engineering answer. I see people get hung up a little bit on pricing of an online learning program. And particularly I noticed sometimes some of the best people that are really good are they have the most self doubt or imposter syndrome or whatever.

And their pricing, it’s just hold a finger up in the air and just guess or I don’t know, but since pricing is a money and a value issue, what would you advise people?

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, that’s huge. So I mentioned before that we run some workshops in my community. The most popular one has been the one on magnetic pricing because.

And so one of the big things, it is a huge mindset issue for starters, because what’s the right price for a course? There is no correct answer, right? It’s whatever the purchaser believes is equivalent of its value. And so if you’re the person selling the course, you’ve got to believe that yourself to begin with.

So I think a huge issue with pricing of courses is people come into it with this employee mentality still of thinking about charging by the hour. And then leveraged product where really You’re not working. You are working. You’re working your butt off to market the thing in the background, but you’re not mark.

You’re not working to deliver it., you’re not standing up in front of the class. And so they have this disconnect where they think I’m, not deserving it. I’m not Earning this money. And so the first thing is stop thinking about hourly rate, forget it. And look at the value you’re delivering and the difference that makes in people’s lives.

What’s that worth? If you help people save their marriage with your course. What’s that worth? Just even on a hard practical note, what’s the bloody cost of a divorce? Let alone the emotional aspect and being able to continue in a relationship that’s gotten through a rough patch.

That value is enormous. You can’t, and if you ask people who’ve been through that, and and have maybe come out the other side of it,

We’ve got a strange crackly thing. I don’t know if you can hear that. I can’t hear that. You can’t all

I’m just going to keep talking. I just didn’t want to be talking over the top of, oh, there you go. Sorry. So where was it? if you ask somebody who’d been through that other side and come out the other side of it and said what was that worth to you or somebody who’s going through it and wants to save their marriage they would tell you, I don’t care what it costs.

If you think about it from that point of view, it quickly shifts your perspective on what the value of your course is. And If you also think about if you can help people achieve an outcome in a shortened period of time, what’s the value of that? We’re all used to paying extra for express for an express delivery or yes, I want to get my whatever fixed, but can you please get it done in two days instead of two weeks?

We’re happy to pay extra for that. So sometimes when people Can create an outcome in a short period of time, or in just a few modules, say, they think, Oh, but there’s not a lot of stuff there, but really, that’s more valuable, right? Because you’ve created, say, six modules of learning and you deliver an outcome.

If you made people sit through 20 modules to get the same outcome, you would probably lose. Some of your audience along the way, and so it’s actually more valuable. So it’s about actually shifting your mindset from that employee kind of thinking. We’ve all been conditioned into growing up and really looking at what’s the value of the outcome I’m delivering?

How well and efficiently am I delivering it? And that’s valuable and. Just not making it about ourselves, I think is the bottom line not making it about our self worth and our sense of being deserving. It’s about disconnecting from that, shifting the mindset and going to do the work on why do I feel like I’m not deserving of having an awesome multiple six figure income from a course I created three years ago?

What’s that about? And when you work on that, a lot of the Kind of questioning of the value and the pricing of the course will just drop away and you’ll be able to look at it much more objectively. I’m not sure if I answered your question. Did I answer your question? You

Chris Badgett: did you a hundred percent.

Moving a little further into the journey, let’s say the, course is working, there’s some health and things. What I see happen to a lot of entrepreneurs is they end up on this infinite growth mode, sometimes sacrificing their health, their relationships. Even just the things they used to do for fun or friendships or whatever.

What advice do you have around that for if somebody is like accumulating, but they never, they’re like in this like battle fatigue where they just. Keep charging and they don’t stop and smell the roses or enjoy life a little what’s going on there. And how do we fix it?

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, I think you actually just said it because you said they’re in that accumulative space, right?

That so they’re being an accumulator in terms of it’s still not enough. I haven’t done enough. This can’t be All there is to it. So they keep going, they keep pushing. They keep driving from a mindset point of view and a sort of what’s the story you’re telling yourself point of view. It’s, that it’s not enough.

I’ve not done enough. It’s not good enough. So I have to keep pushing and driving. So it’s actually about feeling deserving of taking the time out. It’s also very much it becomes a. a habit and an addiction, like we talked about being addicted to having to sit at your desk, to having to check, your phone notifications or your emails as soon as you wake up in the morning.

Being able to break all of those patterns and working on actually feeling deserving is, really critical. So I that you can set up structures to help you with that. You can put apps on your phone that don’t let you open things up to begin with until maybe you’ve done your morning meditation or whatever that thing is.

So one of the things I teach people is, and this is. It’s really It’s related to what you’re asking about. But it actually is very helpful in what you’re asking about as well. I teach them a process or I guess an approach that you, I call start high, stay high. Now I’m not asking them to smoke a joint first thing in the morning.

I’m asking them to get on a high vibration first thing in the morning to get in the space of feeling good and just feeling good. Being grounded and centered, so you make that first part of the day about you getting into a good headspace and it means don’t look at your phone don’t Start with maybe a meditation or a walk or some stretching or some exercise, like something that gets you really connected to you and grounded.

And when you can get started like that and get some momentum going. It helps you carry that into your day. And then things like just working maybe to a Pomodoro timer and then forcing yourself to get up and have a break. What works for me because I do have my kind of. recovering perfectionist and inner workaholic that still like to mess with me, is I will just book things out of the office for half the day.

And then I know I’ve only got three hours in the office today. What’s actually important, what does need to get done. So then I focus in and I actually do the important work rather than just the busy work. So setting ourselves up. And self managing goes a really long way. And then at the same time, looking into those deeper belief systems and patterns around, why do I think that I have to work my ass off to deserve this?

Why do I feel like it’s never enough? What’s that all about? And if you need to work with a practitioner, work with a practitioner. But just starting to ask yourself those questions, maybe journaling around them, spending some time pondering them as you go for a walk will go a very long way towards unraveling that stuff.

Chris Badgett: All right. Two more questions for you. One of them is around relationships. What happens when somebody develops a more healthy Relationship with money, let’s say their partner is stuck in the old place where they were. Of course you want to help your partner experience the, things that you’ve figured out or the ways you’ve grown.

But maybe sometimes it’s, not, there’s just like a different money archetype there or whatever. And they’re, not interested. What Cause I know money is the root of issue in a lot of relationships. So talk, to us about relationships and money.

Miriam Castilla: Yeah this, is huge. And so what I found in the past, people would come into my program and two, three weeks into it, they’d say, this is awesome.

I’m really noticing the shifts. I’m feeling so much better already. Now what do I do about that? And I would be like, ignore them, please ignore them, keep doing the work for yourself. It, is a really challenging thing. it’s for that reason that we’ve actually now opened up the space and said. Bring your life partner for free if they’re ready and willing, because they have to be ready and willing.

And even if you don’t have that opportunity of bringing them into a space where they’re learning what you’re learning. It’s really important to stay in your own lane. As you especially do this work around money, feeling deserving, opening to receiving more. And just getting comfortable with the idea that, yeah, I’m.

earning great money, or I’m on my way to earning great money. And I don’t have to work my butt off to, to do it. And you’re getting comfortable in that space. You’re still a little bit fragile, right? You’ve still got these old patterns and these old belief systems that want to pull you back into the cave of safety.

Because we all have that reptilian lizard brain still that just wants to keep going. Keep us safe and keep us small. And so it’s really important to stay in your own lane. Do your own work, ignore them as best as you can. Because as you become stable and this becomes your new normal, and we talked about your own self image. As you solidify that and really get stable and unshakable in that, then you’ll become infectious to them.

But while you’re still wobbly. They will infect you and you’ll end up in. I don’t know, maybe a money argument or they’ll convince you that there is things to really be worried about and what’s going on with you. You’ve suddenly got rose colored glasses on and you’re not being realistic or whatever they may accuse you of, right?

So it’s no, just stick with it. Do your work. And it will automatically become infectious. It just happens. So it’s actually not your job to try and fix them if you do. You’re just opening yourself up to being toppled off the perch that you’ve just managed to put yourself on.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I saw it on your website too, the bring your spouse for free.

And I was like, Oh, that’s such a nice touch. It’s and that comes from a place of abundance. You’ve already paid. You’re not like 50 percent off your spouse. You’re literally like, here’s an olive branch to help if it’s helpful. I love that.

Miriam Castilla: Absolutely. And treating them as a fully fledged member of the community, I think is really important as well.

They’re, I think it really helps the relationship. As well, because now we’re not just asking our members to be the messenger. We’re saying no, bring them in if they’re ready and they want this we’re going to welcome them with open arms. And so it’s actually shifted. My community was women only in the past and now it’s not.

And I think that’s a beautiful evolution of my program as well to say, no, this work is bigger than gender and, any of those kinds of things. It’s, important for everybody.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more detail about Magnetic Money and who the ideal person is for the program.

Miriam Castilla: So the ideal person for Magnetic Money is somebody who’s a small business owner who maybe has been going for at least a year.

Usually they’re they’re usually still in the first five years of their business. Not always. And they find that money is an issue. They don’t really know how to manage their money and manage that irregular income. And it’s a bit of a red hot mess. And also they have these mindset issues around, how much do I charge?

Oh my God, I have to put up my prices. What if all my clients leave me or what if my program doesn’t sell? So it’s somebody who wants to get their money organized because it’s actually a very important part of their life. Resolving a lot of those mindset issues, it actually helps. So it’s definitely somebody who wants to get their money organized, wants to create financial stability and step into a space where they’re not thinking about the money or held back by the fear around money, where they can just move forward and serve their community and know that it’s creating abundance and financial stability for themselves.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check out Miriam Castilla. That’s C A S T I L A dot com. Thank you for coming on the show and thank you for doing this work. In some ways, money is a taboo subject. And like you said, it’s a very emotional hot button issue. So it’s great to dive right in and. And help people in that way.

But yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for coming on and I appreciate all the wisdom you’ve shared with us today.

Miriam Castilla: Thanks so much, Chris. I’ve really enjoyed our chat. It’s been awesome.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Brandon described how you can easily sell your online course and membership to people in China with China payment plugin. He shares the details about the China Payments plugin and its integration with LifterLMS.

Brandon Ernst is the founder of Gaucho Plugins. The China Payment Plugin is also developed by Gaucho. He clarifies that the China plugin makes it easier for non-Chinese companies or organizations that utilize Stripe outside of China to conduct online transactions while selling to Chinese consumers using WeChat Pay and Alipay.

Course developers may easily enter the Chinese market with the plugin, which takes use of Stripe’s connectivity with these widely used payment methods. Brandon also provides insight into Chinese consumer behavior by stressing the prevalence of WeChat Pay and Alipay in both online and offline transactions.

He highlights how Chinese customers are accustomed to and confident in these digital payment systems, which strengthens the credibility of companies that provide these payment choices.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Brandon Ernst. He’s from Gaucho plugins. Today, we’re going to be talking about chain China payments plugin. You can find it at China payments, plugin. com. Gotcha. Plugins also has some other plugins that we’re going to talk about, but first welcome to the show, Brandon.

Brandon Ernst: Thanks for having me, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be on the show with you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And thank you for integrating the China payments plugin with Lifter LMS checkout. We really appreciate it at a high level. Can you describe what the China payments plugin does and how it could fit into an education entrepreneur stack selling courses or memberships or coaching or whatever with Lifter LMS?

Brandon Ernst: Absolutely. If you’re selling online courses to China, the most commonly accepted payment methods or most widely used payment methods in China are WeChat Pay and Alipay. And so Stripe has created an integration with those payment methods that we’ve taken advantage of in the plugin that allows any non Chinese business or Stripe supported business outside of China to sell to Chinese customers via WeChat Pay and Alipay.

online. It’s a really useful mechanism. If you have any customers who are in China and want to make those payment methods available to them for your online courses.

Chris Badgett: If somebody help us understand kind of the boots on the ground in China as a consumer, if you’re in China and you’re looking to buy a course made by somebody in the United States or Canada or Europe or Africa or wherever, what like what’s their e commerce reality?

Cause my understanding is like they, approach e commerce differently. You have these super. Super apps like WeChat and Alipay. What’s, tell us a little more about that world of the Chinese consumer. Totally.

Brandon Ernst: It’s much more common in China to have a bank account at a traditional bank and a debit card.

And not necessarily having a credit card in addition to that. Whereas in the US or Europe it’s much more common to have a credit card Asia as well. But as a consumer in China outside of that WeChat Pay and Alipay have become the most dominant methods of transacting in China for brick and mortar stores as well as online.

You can’t really go anywhere in China without Meeting WeChat the app in some way. And then also the WeChat pay mechanism allows you to pay for pretty much anything, anywhere whether it’s a hotel, a flight service online or a meal at a restaurant. It’s not so common for a Chinese consumer to go online and punch in their credit card.

and purchase something. It is, it does happen. It’s not uncommon but it’s, definitely not the dominant method that people would use. And from a familiarity perspective, which I think is probably the most important aspect of this if you’re selling to a Chinese customer for them, WeChat pay and Alipay are completely familiar, so it’s going to offer your business a great deal of legitimacy that you’re offering these payment methods on your website.

It’s going to target to them directly, make them feel like they can trust your business because then they’re protected by WeChat and Alipay’s dispute mechanisms, all of that kind of stuff as well, which aren’t really used very widely either. But the point is that they’re familiar with that kind of tool and they’re more comfortable using that than giving their private credit card number to some service on the internet that they may not be completely familiar

How to Sell Your Online Courses and Memberships to People in China: with.

Chris Badgett: I’m just curious or like WeChat and Alipay, more of a mobile first experience or they, are they more likely to engage from a phone than a desktop or laptop computer? Or do you have any thoughts around that?

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s been one of the most interesting aspects of working on this plugin actually, is that WeChat Pay and Alipay are definitely mobile first experiences.

So on your website on the checkout flow for WeChat Pay, a QR code is actually generated. And the Chinese customer must physically scan the QR code with their phone. They can’t like even if they’re on their phone, for instance, trying to make the purchase, they can’t even extract the QR code or read it that way.

It’s actually required that they would have to physically scan the QR code with the WeChat pay app, and then they can complete payment that way on their mobile device. And then the website will update and display that they’ve completed payment. So there are a few limitations and tricks like that, that are important to understand about how these integrations work for the Chinese market.

And so that’s been an interesting journey getting to know the, user experience from our Plugin users, for instance who are selling to Chinese customers and integrating their Stripe accounts and all of that, all the way to the to the end user who’s in China who’s trying to figure out how to actually make the payment with this mechanism, which is becoming more and more widely used.

And so Alipay is also pretty similar. It’s, a little bit better of a flow. It will work on mobile as well where it just redirects to the Alipay website and then they can either scan a QR code if they’re on desktop using their mobile device again. So if they’re visiting the website on desktop, they’ll have to pull their phone out of their pocket and then scan the screen or they’ll get redirected to the Alipay app.

Which is a flow that we chat is having built out with Stripe and next it’s on their, roadmap from what I, understand. Yeah, they’re definitely mobile first experiences and it’ll either be scanning the QR code or redirecting to one of their apps in order to complete the payment.

Chris Badgett: I know you lived in China for a little bit. Is there like how else is it different from, let’s say the United States is it more of a paper cashless world or just when it comes to e commerce or exchange of money for goods or services. Like how is the culture and the way people do things different?

Brandon Ernst: It’s definitely become a mostly cashless society. Cash is used for some things. There’s still definitely many rural areas of China and many people who don’t necessarily have access to technology like we chat as often or frequently as most people in cities would.

So the vast majority though I’d, say would, be using WeChat, Alipay, these kinds of digital methods of transacting rather than physical currency of any kind. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, interesting. It’s a big world out there and there’s a lot of different ways to do e commerce and The world is a big place.

So when it comes to selling education thinking globally is a really good idea. I want to encourage you out there listening to go to China payments, plug in. com and check that out. We also have it listed on the Lyft or LMS website. You can find it there. Let’s talk a little bit more about Gaucho plugins.

Tell us what you guys have on offer over there in addition to the China payments plugin.

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. So we have a few kind of niche products that I’ve either been inspired to create with my team or adopt actually from the WordPress repository in the last few years. So one of the more popular plug ins is domain mapping system, which is a really interesting tool that allows you to map multiple domains to a single WordPress site.

And that might be a standard WordPress install or a multi site. So if you’re looking to create, for instance, a store under a different domain or brand and you have a different section of your site for that, you can just map a whole other domain to that without having to log in, log out of your site and kind of manage this new micro site within your existing WordPress site.

So it can save you a great deal of time for a wide variety of use cases. That’s been a really fun one to work on in the last few years. There’s also payment page, which is a payment form plugin that makes it extremely easy to start accepting subscriptions and donations through your site.

You can import a template connect Stripe or PayPal, and then start accepting payments. And the templates are the design of the payment form is totally customizable. That was actually my first foray into WordPress, you could say. I started WordPress in 2011 and building websites for clients as a consultant.

And the first thing you need to do is start accepting payment online in a reasonably fancy way without having to deal with invoicing or other, things that are just kind of barriers. Or at least automating those processes. So I struggled in finding a really nice looking payment form plugin out of the gate.

And yeah, that was a while ago, 2011. It was a different time in WordPress as well. But even today I scan the, repository, look at some competitor plugins there are great designs and you can definitely customize them, but I haven’t seen any that really offer like an import.

Tool for templates that just make it like zero to 100 really, quickly. So that’s that’s what is a little bit unique and fun about that one is the playful designs that you can create with the payment form. And I’ve seen all kinds of cool. Designs like retro gaming sites and stuff like that have taken advantage of it.

And it’s been really fun working on that one too. I think

Chris Badgett: just on that one, I think that it’s, that’s a great solution for if you’re just beginning your course journey and you just want to validate the idea or whatever somebody give me money for this training I’m planning on doing, or maybe I’m going to do some private coaching first with three trainings and it’s a hundred dollars a week or a month or whatever to try to flesh out your course curriculum or something like that.

You could literally have a WordPress site and payment set up really quickly. That’s, Yeah, that

Brandon Ernst: was what was if I were able to use this plugin starting out it would have been perfect to have that kind of thing. My main goal was just at the beginning to be able to start accepting one time either hourly or project payments or subscriptions out of the gate.

And so that, that really set the, my Web development business on fire to, to begin with and then moving into the plugin space later on.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about this split pay plugin. And again, these are on gaucho plugins. com G A U C H O plugins. com. What’s the split play or split pay plugin.

Brandon Ernst: I do that all the time too. It’s a bit of a, it’s

Chris Badgett: a tongue twister.

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. But the split pay plugin is very useful for Woo store owners who want to transfer a percentage of sales to any Stripe connected account, which would usually be a vendor for instance, or a partner of some kind to your business.

This, to make it relevant for courses, for instance, let’s say you have a bunch of teachers and you have an agreement with your teachers that you’re giving them a 75 percent cut of the course cost and you’re taking a 25%. What you would do is just install the split pay plugin, go to that product in WooCommerce and set up.

The exact percentage that you wanted to transfer for each sale of that product. And then you would designate a connected account to your Stripe platform, which is a really easy tool in Stripe to set up. You can create a Stripe platform with any Stripe account and then start onboarding accounts to your, it’s called a connect platform.

And so then you designate which account you’d like to transfer that percentage or fixed amount of each transaction to and then it automatically will work after that. So it’s a really useful tool in, those kinds of situations. It’s also great for vendors. For instance if you’re if you have vendors who are doing product fulfillment on your site and you want them to receive let’s say a percentage for the product itself.

And then also for maybe covering shipping fees, you can designate each of those independently as well through the plugin. So that’s, a really useful tool.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. About 30 percent of Lifter LMS users use our WooCommerce integration. So that’s literally something you could start doing today by going to Gaucho plugins and get the split pay plugin.

Brandon Ernst: We do have a, update coming up on that plugin in the next few weeks to ensure that it does work with all products in Woo, especially those generated by third party plugins that. Aren’t like the default WooCommerce product structure. That is, it is doable, but maybe not with the current release. So it will be in the next one to two weeks.

I’d say.

Chris Badgett: My guess is it probably works out of the box because Woo, Lifter Woo ties a course or membership enrollment to a WooCommerce product. We don’t modify the product or create it. It’s just perfect. Okay. So I think it would likely work out of the box. I could also see another solution where.

For example, in Lifter, sometimes courses have multiple instructors. So if there were two, you could then split it 50 50 or whatever.

Brandon Ernst: Yeah it’s, I love that, plugin. It’s actually one that we adopted. I’ve adopted domain mapping system and split pay plugin a few years ago and worked on them with a couple of different developers.

And it’s just been so fun because it’s not ideas that I came up with originally, but I’ve been able to add a bunch of my own ideas to this, kind of this niche and actually build out these niches in WordPress that didn’t really exist before. There are plugins that do domain mapping.

There are plugins that do marketplace functionality and everything like that, but not in such a simple and easy way. Intricate way that I’m trying to get these plugins to do. And so it’s been a pleasure to adopt them rather than invent or come up with my own idea or business that I would hope would just succeed.

So it’s, humbling in a way to come up with, take someone else’s idea and just build on it and make it Something that really contributes to the WordPress space. No, it’s

Chris Badgett: like a bottom up as opposed to top down Oh, I’m going to build a marketplace. It’s what’s the first part?

The the payments, like that’s the main goal.

Brandon Ernst: Huh. Huh. Yeah. And, for payment page that was more kind of my idea that came from my own struggle in WordPress. And so it’s it is more of a top down thing. What’s my idea and I’m hoping others will like it and use it.

And I have received good feedback on it, but of course that space is so competitive that it’s it’s, it just takes time to, to grow a plugin in that area and get people to, to know about it, to hear about it and because there’s a hundred other plugins that might be. Used as well.

But, that one’s also been fun and it’s come with its own challenges and everything like that too. And you just meet so many people in these different kind of niche spaces and find out different business models and you come up with different ideas. So it’s the plugins are a different variety, a different, you each have a different flavor, but that’s what makes them so great and fun to work on and also some of them do align together in a pretty interesting way.

Chris Badgett: I love the e commerce focus. That’s one thing I found accidentally, but. The closer you are to the money, it’s like they really want, the market really wants that solution if you’re helping them get paid, basically. And then there’s all those nuances around that. There’s a lot that happens when money changes hands through the internet.

Does the split pay plugin work with WooCommerce subscriptions?

Brandon Ernst: It does. Yeah. The way woos subscriptions works is basically it will just initiate the transaction over again your WordPress site. So it’s a bit of a different approach than creating a subscription in Stripe directly. Woos subscriptions will basically just replicate the Transaction details.

So if there was a transfer involved in that transaction, then it will happen again for each renewal.

Chris Badgett: That’s also good news for people using Lifter LMS with WooCommerce. Cause many do subscriptions. Yeah. And can you tell us about variations as well? You, does it work with variations?

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. So it’s been a complicated journey with this plugin because it was a very simple plugin.

Product to begin with the features we’re really limited. So with all the feedback we’ve received and ideas we’ve gotten from everyone who’s come across the product. And the plugin it’s been really fun to pick and choose what we should build out. So one of the things that we’re finalizing right now, also in this upcoming release is a fallback approach.

So where you have three layers of products in WooCommerce, you have this. Global layer that is unseen. You can set these kind of global transaction details, which is the first layer in our plugin. Then you have the product level where you can edit details on the product level and then the variable product level.

So if you wanted to split payments for five it doesn’t matter how many you can do multiple Stripe accounts. But let’s just say five Stripe accounts for one product for, and that might be because you have Five different teachers. Maybe a different teacher was selected to teach that, that course or something like that.

I’m there’s so many different ways to set it up, but the point is, if you want to split up a transaction between multiple connected accounts, it can be one product. It can be multiple products. You can go into the product level or the variable product level and set each connected account on that.

Specificity. So it’s actually really useful. On that, on those levels, I’m a micro level for managing even a small amount of a transaction let’s say, a few dollars to different vendor that you wanted to give a commission to, for instance or, a teacher that would get a larger percentage or fixed amount.

So the way it works if you have settings configured on a variable product level or global level, is that if there’s any settings configured on one of those lower levels, let’s say the variable or product level, they would override the global settings. So while you might have a 25 percent transfer amount for your store, for every transaction that goes on, you could also set these additional settings that would override that amount for specific courses or specific courses.

Products that you have in woo even at the variable product level. So it’s and that’s one of the, biggest areas of feedback we’ve received that people want to have that control at all of those different levels they want to have a fallback approach as well. So if shipping is needed to be transferred on one for one product, for instance. But not on others, that they can have these rules set up in place quote unquote rules, because they’re really just Values that you set at each level but the way they work sets up a rule based system for your entire store for how transfers work.

Chris Badgett: I love that. We’re really nerding out here on the details as e commerce guys. I think one of the ideas is swimming in my head. As you’re talking is Like in online education. Sometimes there’s like a variable product that has a course like DIY, do it yourself. And then of course, plus coaching, some people call it tutoring. Some people call it like they actually sell in the classrooms. And there’s a specific teacher that’s teaching that course on that variation or whatever.

And I can totally, how you’re just automating a lot of that manual accounting that people do on the back end. If you, that you could just set up with the split pay and very variable products and all that. That’s, really cool what you’re doing there.

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. It’s, definitely an interesting use case to, to come out to come on the podcast.

Now think about all that. I was going to say something about subscriptions because we, Started with China Payments plugin. That’s one of the limits as well with WeChat Pay and Alipay that should be mentioned is that unfortunately they’re not subscription based. They’re all one-time payment methods.

So it would require, if you’re selling a renewing course a subscription based course for each renewal the Chinese customer would have to manually make a payment again. But it’s most useful at this point for kind of lifetime or one time sales. If you’re going to renew I would suggest having a longer time period to make it less of a hassle for the Chinese customer to have to log in and keep access every 24 hours, for instance, or something like that but, yeah those things are.

Also being hopefully built out by Stripe and WeChat Alipay so that there’ll be an easier mechanism for Alipay subscriptions in the future. And then WeChat pay subscriptions mechanism as well. So

Chris Badgett: yeah, that makes sense. So if you’re thinking in subscriptions, most common being monthly subscription, it’s probably for trying to pay payments to think more like an, it’s an annual price and then they have to re up every year if they want to.

Yeah, and that’s another thing

Brandon Ernst: as well touching back on, on kind of China and how e commerce works there is that subscriptions are not really a common thing in China as well. There are, they exist, but it’s not as common here like. It would be in the US or in not any, country outside of China, really for services like Netflix or Spotify. Or other kind of online streaming services.

Platforms, they’re just not as the, I think the businesses don’t succeed as well in China because just subscriptions aren’t received as well by consumers.

Chris Badgett: So how does like a streaming video service as an example, like how do they approach that market? Is it more like a, it’s good for a year or it’s a lifetime access price or what?

Brandon Ernst: I think they’ll, offer a lifetime plan or a limited time offer. They will also offer subscriptions. Alipay itself does offer subscriptions but not through, not easily through the Stripe integration. But domestically they can do it. But for foreign businesses to accept subscriptions from a Chinese customer in particular would be really difficult to, find at this point.

It’s a bit of a barrier in that regard.

Chris Badgett: Tell us where the name Gaucho comes from.

Brandon Ernst: So my mom is from Argentina and the original team was pretty much all based in Argentina as well. And so I had the inspiration, I go, what should I name the plugin business? We’re all working together and I just love the theme and have some fun designing the website.

There’s some kind of cultural. Icons of Argentina on the website, like the, obviously the couch. All logo and icon, and then the horse at the bottom of the site. Then on the about us page, there’s a girl drinking or having having a picnic. And having some empanadas stuff like that. So it’s, been I’ve had some fun with WordPress over the last few years.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you mentioned something earlier I wanted to double click on, which is the idea of adopting a plugin. Can you tell us more what that means and how you went about that and how those situations emerged?

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. I, also heard about it. In the last few years, and that’s I heard about it and then jumped on a few that were available at the time on the WordPress repository.

There’s a tag that you can have tags on plugins. If you’re, if you have a plugin listed there, and as the, as a WordPress user, you can go and see the tags as well on the. I believe on the Listing the profile listing page for the plugin. One of the tags I believe is adopt Me or, Adopt Hyphen Me, something like that. So those plugin, you can search for that tag and you can find the plugins that are available for adoption on wordpress.org. And these are plugins that are just simply no longer maintained by their original developers or don’t have any updates happening to them. And the developers want to.

Pass them on to you hands that will maintain them or take care of them or add features. And so for many people that can be a business opportunity. I, I wouldn’t adopt a plugin and then take it off the repository. Which could be done I would look at it as an opportunity to adopt the plugin, build out more free features, make sure it’s working really well.

And then and then create a. A paid version of the product. If you wanted to invest in the product in that way, and you were receiving good feedback from the users. And so that’s how a plugin business can get started. If you don’t if you’re not a developer or if, you don’t want to necessarily hire If you don’t have development skills out of the gate and you see a good business idea already out there on WordPress and you want to get into it, you could adopt a plugin, hire a developer to help you maintain it, build it out, and then create a product from it.

And it’s, a totally doable and reasonable process. It’s not rocket science you get much more to the complicated aspects of it. When you’re talking about marketing the business. And growing and everything like that. Which is WordCamps are all about and all of this fun community based stuff that we were talking about before the, call here got started or the podcast got started.

By the way to everyone watching, there’s WordCamp Asia coming up in Taipei. Chris and I will both be there and it’s going to be really fun adventure. And I think this is a very timely update for the plugin for WeChat Pay and Alipay. Although they are targeted to the mainland domestic Chinese market and not necessarily to the.

Taiwan Taiwan consumers, but it’s, just timely for that region as well. So I’m looking forward to, to actually seeing you there face to face for the first time, Chris.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. And I love my team. I don’t know if we’ll find any maté in Taipei, but maybe we could have some maté. They

Brandon Ernst: might have an Argentinian steakhouse somewhere around.

Chris Badgett: That would be great. Awesome, Brandon. Thanks for coming on the show. You out there listening, go check out China payments, plug in. com. Think about selling your training into China. And also check out all the other cool things that Brandon has going on over at gauchoplugins. com. The particularly a payment page for validating your course idea and split pay for getting creative with partnerships. Or kind of teacher or coach vendor splits.

If you’re using Lifter LMS with WooCommerce. Thanks for coming on the show, Brandon. I really appreciate it. And I look forward to seeing you in Taipei.

Brandon Ernst: You too. Thanks for having me and look forward to hopefully connecting with some of the viewers here. Hope you guys enjoy the, new features that we got with China payments plugin. Thanks so much for taking a few moments to listen in.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Sally Crewe shares her journey and the evolution of NurtureDash, an all-in-one business solution based around a WordPress website. She also discussed about Health Practitioner Business.

Sally Crewe a background in graphic and online design and is an accomplished designer and entrepreneur. She is well knowledgeable about WordPress and its features. When Sally saw that practitioners, especially those in the field of nutrition therapy, needed more straightforward answers, she decided to venture into the internet business arena.

Sally set out to establish NurtureDash, an all-in-one business platform centered around a WordPress website, motivated by her love of technology and design. She wants to give practitioners a streamlined and integrated way to handle their online presence, courses, and client interactions using NurtureDash.

Sally takes a customer-centric approach to business, concentrating on comprehending and resolving the particular difficulties encountered by practitioners. In addition to being a computer specialist, she views herself as a helpful mentor who assists practitioners in navigating the intricacies of WordPress and online business tools.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m rejoined by a special guest. Her name is Sally crew. She’s from nurture dash. com. This is going to be a really exciting episode. We’re going to talk about basically taking all the power of WordPress and removing all the hassle and providing a solution for heart centered entrepreneurs and particularly practitioners.

Which is what Sally has been working on and working in that industry for a long time. But first welcome to the show, Sally.

Sally Crewe: Thank you. It’s great to be back. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s fun to have you back. And I love seeing like one of our company values is continuous improvement and you embodied that, like you’re just iterating and iterating.

For those of you. Unfamiliar with the term WAAS, that stands for website as a service. So that’s where you basically provide a full website solution. Sally’s even gone further than just the website with marketing and all kinds of stuff. So we’re going to dive into it today at a high level. Can you describe for us what nurtured dash is?

And. You out there listening, go check out nurturedash. com. But Sally, what’s NurtureDash?

Sally Crewe: So NurtureDash is an all in one business in a box with a, based around a WordPress website. So I’m a designer at heart. I started with graphic design that turned into web design that turned into how the heck do I get this thing online, which turned into learning about web hosting, which turned into running a hosting company.

We’re talking like back in the late nineties. So I’ve been at this a while that turned into a I was a, nutrition therapy practitioner for a while, and I saw that a lot of my colleagues We’re interested in doing, creating online courses for their clients. So I helped them. I taught them how to do that.

I had a training course that taught them how to do that. When we got to the module about setting up the tech and the website, which was actually the best part for me, that was the most exciting part for me. A lot of them just like froze. So it, it became apparent to me that was what they needed to help with.

So I, I developed that into a bonus for my course called the practitioner platform, which was an all in one website. And I basically cloned my course website, which was running lifter and gave that to my Colleagues, my students for them to fill in the blanks and put their own nutrition courses, et cetera, into it.

And fast forward to today, like that, that, that platform, which is what we talked about on the previous time I was on a few years ago. What happened there was I found that. Okay. Everybody loved what they had. They had a website, They had the ability to sell courses. They had the ability to book.

Calls. But because it was all built on WordPress and back then things weren’t quite as evolved and cohesive as they are now with the word WordPress ecosystem. I was finding I was potentially, I was basically spending a lot of time playing whack a mole with plugins. And as an earlier entrepreneur, I was still struck with the syndrome of, trying to please everybody.

And when you have WordPress as your main tool you can please everybody. Someone would come and say, Hey can you I have a podcast. Can we make this a podcast streaming site instead of course? And I’d be like, the true answer is yes, we can. We could, we always can if we’re using WordPress.

And I loved that part of it as a pseudo developer at heart. Yeah. So I, got a little bit off tangent with that and we ended up building a bit of a sort of a homer car. I don’t know if you remember that Simpsons episode, but it had a little bit of everybody’s input and, got further and further away from being a platform, which is supposed to be everybody has the same thing.

So we’ve briefly partnered up with go high level to provide so that we could stick with a true WordPress website and then just hook into go high level for the CRM and the email marketing and all the other tools that people were using. They were using different tools for those. So instead of me having to try and learn how to integrate ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, all these other things into WordPress.

I now just had one place to send them and integrated with that. It worked for a little while, but we ended up then with two platforms. We had what we were calling Nurture Dash, which was a white labeled high level. And then we had Nurture Sites, which was the WordPress hosting platform. So I gathered all the kittens together late last year and decided, Having taken another look in the WordPress ecosystem and seeing how far things had come.

I’ve always loved working on WordPress. I’ve never gone away from it myself. But for a while it didn’t seem like the best choice for running like. Email marketing, funnel building, CRM suite, or even booking. But that changed with a lot of the newer plugins. And I tested out a lot of the fluent suite plugins like fluency or influent booking.

And found out, yeah, not only were these. Good enough to where they were actually simpler and doing a better job at what my clients needed than the everything, all singing, all dancing, and often all breaking bigger platform that we were trying to plug into. So yeah, late last year, I rethought it, decided to put both of the parts of the nurture brand, the dash and the sites back together.

And it coincided with. Being reintroduced to the guys at wild cloud who I know you’ve had Roger on here, but they, do a fantastic multi tenancy WordPress platform. So now we are true. We are basically, we’ve basically finally created what I was trying to create seven years ago, which is you go to a website, you click a button, you give them the domain name that you want for your website.

Five minutes later in your email is a link to log straight into your website. And it’s all set up as a CRM, there’s a booking calendar, there’s a bunch of different templates to choose. It’s a really easy page builder. So that’s, yeah, that’s the little winding story of NurtureDash and how it came to be, how it is now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love how customer centric you are, cause you have this practitioner that is trying to basically build the online interface for their business and there’s all these different things they need and tell us a little more about what their current reality is like without nurture dash.

And let’s say they’re not working with you. What are they doing to run their business and trying to get clients and nurture clients? Their

Sally Crewe: current reality until they. Cross paths with me is a lot of moving parts. They probably have a WordPress website that is either half built or out of date or is precariously teetering with an unupdated plugins that they’re scared to push the update button on.

They probably don’t know where their domain. Where their website is hosted. They probably don’t know the difference between a domain and a website. And this is also with, a lot of love for these people. It’s just, that’s not there. That’s not their world. And they’ve come into this world as a necessity at various points in the business journey.

And so they’ve got. A domain name over here on this platform, they’ve got a membership site over here on this platform and they’ve tried to hook them up together. They’ve joined a training program by a marketer who’s recommended another platform. A lot of them are paying multiple subscriptions for multiple tools that overlap and do a lot of the same stuff, but are not talking to each other.

So they come to me and I, my, my joke is like, it, a lot of people. When they come to me and we I have what I call tech audits for my discovery calls. And I come in, I’m like, basically just open up your bag, put everything out on the table. Let’s see what we’ve got. And a lot of the time it, looks like a raccoon just got into your fridge.

Like it’s just like all kinds of dead ends and funnels that don’t work and affiliate links. And it’s just, and I totally, I, this is my world. I love this stuff, but it makes me overwhelmed. So I can totally understand how a lot of practitioners and coaches will say, I hate tech. I’m not good with tech.

So my job that I’ve given myself and I’ve, I have a website called the website Sherpa. com, which is where I do my blog and my free training. And that, name came about from somebody calling me that. It’s my, my, I feel like my job here is to guide them through this the, dusty trail of like tech, WordPress, where does WordPress end?

Where does your website end? Where do these other platforms begin? What are you actually paying these subscriptions for? There’s a lot of unraveling. To be done. And, to be fair, we’ve, a lot of us in this world have been have grown up with tech, so we’ve got older versions of, features that were locked into because we’ve got a lot of content on there and then we’ve got newer versions.

And if somebody is coming in today, straight out of the gate and starting an online business, they’re not going to probably have this problem because there’s so many all in one tools now that keep things More organized, but a lot of people have come at this over the years and have gathered a a bit of a mixed bag of tools with various incompatibilities.

So I’m basically in the service. So we, talked about last time we taught you, you’d mentioned the phrase friction removal business. Yeah. That’s still very much true. And I also, I think of myself as a tech therapist as well, because there’s a huge, Mindset component to this, especially with a lot of my clients and customers are, first of all they’re first and foremost, health coaches, practitioners.

They don’t even want to be in an online business, but it’s 2024. They have to be online. Second of all they, have a bit of like tech trauma and WordPress trauma. I’ll see them if I’m on calls with them and they’re sharing the screen and I’m telling them where to click, they will get what I call button blindness, I’d be like, click the button.

And there’ll be like,

Chris Badgett: yeah

Sally Crewe: or they won’t see there’s maybe there’s just one they won’t see. And it’s, that’s I’ve done a little bit of, trauma work and it’s it’s a fight or flight state that people get into an anxiety state and they can’t see, they can’t see where to click because they’re, Their bodies in a sort of panic.

And it it sounds a little funny, but it’s, I bet if you put probes on someone and measured their heart rate and stuff, while they were trying to look around the backend of the WordPress site that hadn’t been updated in two years. It would probably be not a healthy state for them to be in.

So I’ve like I’ve said I’ve, started saying it’s, like tech therapy. I’m trying to be like, first of all, let them know that I’m here to help them that they’re not stupid forgetting themselves in this situation. Much like an accountant for somebody who’s behind on their taxes or bookkeeping.

The first thing you need to do is to say, no shame. You’re here now. Let me help you. And so that’s where I come, at things. I, have a lot of calls with people who will get into that state where you can see their kind of clouding over with the tech talk. And they will say, I want to, I’ve not, I’ve no idea what, you do, but I want to work with you.

I basically, I feel. I feel like you’re going to be the person who’s going to save me from this big tech dragon.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

I love that. It’s, not just providing a solution. It’s being a guide and even a therapist, like you say on there. I love the Sherpa analogy as a guy myself, I’ve actually spent some time in Nepal and hung out with some Sherpas.

And part of that whole thing is a, Connection to the earth and navigating the landscape. And you have a kind of environmental component to your platform. Can you tell us about that?

Sally Crewe: Yeah I’m, from the UK. I’m from Sherwood forest. I do some volunteer work for the pagan Federation. So I identify as, a Druid.

I’m a lover of animals, I’m a lover of nature. I’m an animist, which means I feel like everything has energy. I’ve always felt that way since I was just a small child. That’s just how. Okay. I perceive the world as, someone who feels energy. So I had stuffed that side of me down.

Until I’m in my late forties now, and you start to find yourself again. And that kind of came back around and I realized how important it was to me and with the with the climate crisis and everything. So we partnered with One Tree Planted and there’s another similar.

Company that do this internationally. And basically we just for every, subscription payment that comes in a certain portion of that goes to towards planting trees. So when somebody signs up for if they sign up for a year for, with a platform, we will send them a certificate to say, Hey, congratulations.

You have planted 12 trees.

Chris Badgett: Nice.

Sally Crewe: And people love it. And it’s not I’m not literally out there with a shovel and a bag of acorns we’re just partnering with this company, this initiative that does it, but people really I’ve got a lot of feedback from people being like, Oh, that’s it makes me feel so good.

And it, and because we’re, all internet friends. We don’t often actually meet people in real life. So to know that this business decision that they made, The dollars that they could have spent on Kajabi or Teachable or Thinkific or just another, or just a WordPress site on their own, they choose to use it with us.

It doesn’t cost them any extra. They’re helping offset carbon emissions and everything.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. I love it when values are baked into a brand and backed up with action and that sort of thing.

Sally Crewe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it and, also through the, sort of the political climate that we’ve just.

Been through and are still in. It, personally to me felt like a, my way of saying, Hey, this is what I stand for. And for some people that they’re like, Oh, I’m you’re not the right platform for me. And that’s fine. But a lot of them have come over to me rather than give their money to like the big tech bros because they want to support a female independently owned business who supports the climate and who, donates to trees.

I think it’s more than ever people can vote with their wallets and with their business tool choices.

Chris Badgett: So a hundred percent and people are hungry to do business with people, like real people behind the screens and all that.

Sally Crewe: Yeah. We, have a blurb on our site. That’s about basically we support LGBTQ plus rights.

We support a woman’s right to choose. We support this, and this. And I know it’s a, it’s for some people, it’s be like, Nope, getting out of here. That’s fine. I wouldn’t want to work with that person anyway. So it’s it’s I’m a musician. So my, former life was, as a musician and I still do that for fun.

And it feels the most punk rock thing I’ve ever done. Put that on my webpage of here’s what we believe if you don’t. Okay, fine. But we’re not the choice for you.

Chris Badgett: That’s there’s that saying in marketing that great marketing should be polarizing and really attract the your, vibe attracts your tribe.

Yeah.

Sally Crewe: And I’m a I’m a peacekeeper. I’ve, always thought of a people pleaser and wanted everybody to get along, but this was something I felt strongly enough. It’s about to actually be like, yeah, this isn’t just a marketing shtick. This isn’t just to try and put my brand somewhere.

This is actually, you get to work with me as a person. Things are going to go a lot smoother if we are aligned on the sort of fundamentals of moral standings on things.

Chris Badgett: You’re, also a tech wizard. So I wanted to dig a little bit on the on the tech stack here. And you’ve mentioned a couple of things, so let me just cue it up.

Use wild cloud, which is like hosting multi tenancy. It handles the payment element of people signing up and getting started with the site WordPress site. It has a front end on it so that people aren’t just dropped into the WordPress admin with a million options. And you’re using certain tools to deliver solutions to different business challenges, like fluency RM for the, email marketing, the broadcast emails, the marketing automation.

You’ve got fluent bookings, which is very important for a service based business to have automated bookings. That’s a, I don’t know how many times I deal with a service industry and. I can’t, I have to end up in this email chain to get something on the calendar. I just want to link to book.

So that’s awesome. And then you’ve got Lifter LMS for if they want to do the education piece. Which I want to dig in on specifically in a little bit of how they use it, but could you tell us any more just nuance or detail of what’s in the tech stack that brings this website kind of online platform as a solution to that?

Sally Crewe: So the big difference with this I’m talking at first more to the other sort of WASP type of providers or other web developers, but we’re using wild cloud, as you said which is a multi tenancy deployment platform, which essentially allows you to have your own like Squarespace or Wix or something.

Chris Badgett: Which is a huge idea. That’s a huge idea right there. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s that’s just the hugest thing.

Sally Crewe: And that’s just like what The first part of the first ingredient in this recipe we’re using a UI press pro, which is an admin theme plugin. And I was lucky enough to have gotten on the lifetime deal for unlimited sites.

So that was, and I did that with a couple of the fluent plugins as well. So I’m cashing in on my. My earlier futurism we doing that. And, that’s really enabled me to, when you log into this. It looks like it doesn’t look like WordPress. We don’t even have a menu bar down the side.

I took the decision after a bunch of research of users that having a menu across the top your, computer’s this shape, I know you can use things on your phone, but for the most part, my practitioner clients are, you are on their laptop. It’s postcard shaped and I took the decision to rather than have a menu down to have it along the top.

So it’s always in view and you’ve got that much more real estate to play with. And one thing I’d noticed from my previous onboarding calls, when we did have the menu down the side, was that a lot of people didn’t understand how to scroll. So I I’m on a, I’m on a huge website person monitor, but if you’re on a smaller laptop and you’ve got 15 things down the side on the menu, and I’m saying, okay, go down to settings.

And they’re not actually understanding that this stuff that’s beyond the page. And this was it’s another thing that sounds a little silly, but for people who aren’t in WordPress or in tech or in websites all day long, like we are, it isn’t something that’s, that goes completely intuitive.

So I wanted to remove as many of those friction points that give every time there’s a bit of friction, it makes people. It makes people stressed, It makes people feel like an idiot. It just makes people like clench up and, not be as comfortable. And we talked last time about me trying to make my website templates, be a spa like experience that when you go to the website, even if you don’t understand the basics of design, you can.

On a subconscious level tell this is a nicer place to be than that place because it’s organized and there’s white space to breathe. I tried to take that to the back end of WordPress as well. So when they log in, it’s a nice place to be. It’s like going to a spa or back to your house when someone has been there and tidied it up and cleaned it all up and put new plants up.

And and there’s a little button there that you can take a break and it takes you to an embedded video of the ocean for five minutes. And just things I’ve learned from my own journey of, working too much. Being a workaholic, working too, late, not taking breaks because I was really enjoying what I was doing.

So I’ve tried to pull all of that experience, not only as a creator of a website or somebody who knows how to help people sell courses and book, discovery calls, but as somebody who’s an online business owner who’s who’s realized the perils of, looking at a screen all day long. And I I, I also build, I use it for my own business.

I think they call it is, I think it’s called dog food. I was like, did I make that up? Yeah, I do it because it’s got all the tools that I need and I don’t see a better way for me as the creator of this thing to be really on top of what’s needed and where the problems are. And, to know how to tell people how to do stuff than to actually be using it for my own business.

Yeah, I couldn’t

Chris Badgett: agree with you more. We’ve learned so much just having our literature on this academy and a quick start course. We use our own tool. No

Sally Crewe: I think really you’re doing a massive disservice to people if you’re not like it’s, and especially if it’s A curated collection of WordPress plugins.

Like I’ve said to my folks yeah, we, this is a curation of the best plugins for the job, as far as I’m aware. And I’ve been at this for 20 plus years. I’m a research hound. If something isn’t right, if something isn’t doing what we want it to do, or if something comes along that does that thing better or adds a new feature that we haven’t even conceived of yet, I will go and find us.

And you plug in a notion, notice the word as not you this is the platform. And so I’ve got this mama bear thing going on. I’m going to look after them. They’re sharing that we’re all using the same tools. I’m keeping ahead of the curve. That’s a whole other bunch of stuff that they don’t have to have in their brain.

What plugin should I use, what platform should I use? What this, do I need to be doing this on social media? Do I need to be doing that? I’m just basically saying,

How to Simplify Your Health Practitioner Business Technology Stack With the Website Sherpa: shush,

Sally Crewe: shush. Don’t worry about that. I will trust me to to be the guide for that part of the business. And, part of that is not just showing them the tools that they should be using.

It’s part, of it is saying, don’t need to worry about that. You don’t need, you don’t need to do that. You don’t need this particular bell or whistle that, some other guru was telling you that you need. And because it’s all on WordPress now they can really sense the the integrity behind that because I am choosing other, I’m sure I’m, piggybacking on your talents and your team’s talents by using Lifter.

And I’m telling them I’m not saying this is Nurture LMS, I’m saying this is Lifter. It’s what is the best, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve tried them all. This is the best one for you guys. And here’s how to use it. And I, will support my clients but they do know what these tools are. I’m not hiding that fact.

I’m not pretending that I developed everything myself. So I would warn anybody doing this, not to do that as well, because the ego gets in the way and the ego wants to take the credit, but the flip side of that is. If something breaks with that plugin, you’re the, you’re now the, yeah.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about how your users use Lifter LMS, like in their practitioner use case or in whatever they’re doing what, brings them to need an LMS, how do they use it?

Sally Crewe: There’s, that’s a good question. There’s a few different levels of it. So you would typically think of it just as for people who want to. Sell courses as a starting point on memberships. What I actually do is I have recommended to people the idea of, so everyone’s familiar with the idea of you, you have an, a landing page, you have an email, a magnet, a list, building magnet.

Nobody wants a to think that someone will sign up to the list, get sent a PDF and then that thing gets downloaded. Never to be seen again, never to even be looked at or printed or anything. And also trees, we shouldn’t be printing as much as we do. So what I’ve started telling people is a great idea is for everybody.

Even if you don’t have a membership or a course yet, have a members section. When somebody joins their list, your list, it will send you into the membership section and here will be your download. It will also be a very exclusive. Feeling you feel if you give them the keys to somewhere, you feel like you must have either been a really special client or that you’ve paid money for that experience.

And they haven’t, they’ve just joined your list, but it just really elevates and then people can come in and they can also see. Maybe they’ll see some other things that are, Oh, I might go buy that. I might go download this other freebie. Maybe you’ll have a community there. So I’m just trying to, everyone’s trying to get people off Facebook.

I think this is a really good way to do it. And also if you want to. Rather than just emailing your list, another link to another landing page, you can be like, Hey, I’ve just loaded this into your, into the membership portal and have tiered membership. So yeah, people are using it as basically a a content vault for free content.

For, subscribers to feel like they are kind of part of your world, and then they’re using it for traditional courses, memberships. And the other side of things, I’ve got practitioners who have courses and memberships where they’re at the level now that they have other people instructing using their material.

So another thing we’re working on this year is the ability for the, these people to have their own. Platforms. So they will have their they, will have a version of what Notre dash is on wild cloud. They will have a website with the ability for other practitioners, other coaches to say, Hey I want to, teach your material.

I want to, take people through your course. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, I don’t want to rip you off. And I don’t want to some people are really good at creating content and teaching. And they really don’t enjoy. Supporting individual clients through that process. And then you’ve got a bunch of people on the other side who really enjoy the coaching and the one on one handholding, but they’re not necessarily interested or very good at creating a course or.

Material for that. So I’m trying to put these two sides of people together. What they both lack usually is the desire or inclination to, to figure out all the tech. So I’m it’s not exactly a marketplace. It’s more of an individual. One practitioner has something, they have other practitioners who are interested in instructing.

In that particular modality and just putting those guys together with, this fantastic new tech that’s available and basically giving give your instructors a business in the box. Everyone wins. The instructor can hit the ground running with their own. Course platform CRM, everything already to go can be preloaded with email sequences that sell the product.

There’s any number of ways to spin it, but the ingredients are all the same. It’s the same plugins. It’s the same tech idea, It’s just moving it up.

Chris Badgett: It’s like a fractal. It just keeps going. And I totally get it because the there’s like an individual startup practitioner, but then they have team.

Sally Crewe: We’re calling it a digital franchise.

Chris Badgett: There you go.

Sally Crewe: Cause I do have clients that I’m. That I’ve built, or I’m in the process of building custom websites for custom membership sites. And they are at the stage where they’re like, okay, we’ve realized our demographic isn’t actually health conscious parents.

It’s actually other practitioners or other nutritionists. And they want to be able to guide their clients through my material. How do we do it? And here’s how, and we could also give them a CRM and a booking link and.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Yeah. Very cool. I also love that that idea for a lead magnet to just become a member and now you just have one login.

Yeah. And then if you want other, resources become available and it’s, more like building community. Exactly. Yeah. And you can bring a download.

Sally Crewe: You can build community without even actually having a traditional. Community chat area. You can have communities like here’s everyone gets the email.

They all get in there and see see the new material. And it just really when I’ve mentioned this to, to customers as a way of doing it, they, everyone’s, everyone likes up. Like they love the idea of, cause they can visualize that experience from their side. We’ve all got a hard drive full of things we’ve downloaded that we haven’t seen before.

Looked out, I can’t find. And this way you can keep the material updated. You can give, you can leave little cookies for them. You can be like, okay, rather than just bug somebody who’s on your list to go do something, you can say, Hey, I left you a, I left you a little treat or check out the members area

Chris Badgett: I love that.

And if you’re out there watching and you’re new to LFTR LMS, some people don’t realize it. So I’ll say it real quick here. LMSs are used for courses, but LFTR LMS is also has a membership component. So which can control access to other parts of the website or even pieces of pages and things like that.

So that’s such a cool innovation you’ve done there, Sally. I love that one. Can you tell us a little more about like for if someone’s feeling inspired and they’re watching this, and let’s say they’re in some niche and they’re, they want to really double down and build a platform for that niche.

And I really just let me side note and say, it takes entrepreneurs like you to do that because the software providers, as an example They’re really focused on like their slice of the tech pie. So we need these platform entrepreneurs to assemble the tools. Mama Barrett, as you say, to make sure it’s the right thing and adjust over time and protect your community and really provide the perfect solution for those people with that stack.

But once you, my question is, once you have. You’re kind of niche and the problem you want to solve for them with a platform or collection of problems. How do you get clients? Like, how do you get known in a niche? Like you’ve gotten known in the practitioner niche.

Sally Crewe: In my case, it’s been a very organic word of mouth thing.

I’ve, got like I’ve said I’ve got practitioners who now teach other practitioners. So that’s a ripple effect of other Potential clients. And I get really good recommendations from people because I’ve got the technology, but I’ve got the knowledge of their business model and they just know from their experience that the end of the day, yeah, not everything’s going to work perfectly all the time at the end of the day.

I’m here and I will do them right. So I think that’s it’s, weird at the one, side, my business is scaling and getting more automated, but that’s freeing up time for me to be more boots on the ground available for people. Versus in a few years ago it was less automated, but that meant I was having to do a lot of the manual setup and everything, and this sort of frees Much more available at a higher level for people.

So yeah, what the, but to answer your question as I started this with, education, so I’m bringing that back to the forefront and I have a, course that we call unblock your tech chakras that is and I did it, I did a little bit of as a free training last year as well as a list building exercise.

And we have a quiz and it’s it’s cute and fun, but it’s actually. Brings together. The the, line that I’ve been talking about is like the tech trauma and the mindset and seeing your, business holistically, especially as a solopreneur seeing that, yeah, there’s elements to do with the different energy levels of the body that relates your business and how you show up and what you’ll get out of that part of the business.

So I take them through Unblocking their tech chakras. And those, levels are tied to certain parts of the platform. So it’s a, it’s quite a high level overview of what the tool does. But there’s two ways you can get it. You can either sign up for the platform and you get access to the course, or you can purchase the course and you get access to the platform for a year.

So whichever, feels more value loaded for you. Cause it really depends. Some people. Our tool first and they, feel like spending money on a tool, but not on a course and other people are the other way around. So

Chris Badgett: that’s wonderful. Marketing like getting your target audience, like around the problem before they’re a perfect fit for your, solution or whatever, and educating.

And I love that. That’s cool.

Sally Crewe: And it helps just bring everybody to the same place and everybody realize get rid of that kind of icky. It’s only me like embarrassment, shame element and saying, look, this is difficult. I’ve been at it for 27 years. I still have things that don’t work, I still have things that go wrong.

I have, I still have things that I don’t do perfectly. We’re human. Here’s what we can learn from it. Here’s the best way to look at it. And it’s, yeah, it’s turned like into a much more of a sort of mentorship coaching mindset type thing than I would ever have realized or imagined would be the case.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Yeah, there’s tactics and strategies and tools, but there’s the human element has the, mind and the emotional component. One thing I want to highlight, you mentioned, which I think is really cool. I’ve heard of this idea of where you actually have two audiences. There’s, and you mentioned it with your practitioners.

There’s like the clients that come in for help, but then there’s the people who are in their industry. Mostly not as far along and like both groups are watching. So that’s really neat. How for you. You’re getting word of mouth growth through that kind of second, less obvious audience of other practitioners of the practitioner you’re helping.

That’s really, Yeah.

Sally Crewe: And I’ve, grown with them. Like I started, my default was to start with people who were. Didn’t they like the idea of an online course, but they didn’t know what to do next. And this was back in 2015 when online courses were a little bit less known.

And, but those, a lot of those guys have succeeded. Gone on to grow and gone on to become instructor platforms for others. So it, they they’re literally, I know it’s a cliche, but their success has been my success. Cause they’ve brought people back to Hey, this is, she helped me out.

Or they’ve moved off my original platform and gone to one of the big guys and then come back and being like why, did I think that this was like, I think they, because I helped them in the beginning, a lot of them thought that was like, I was the kindergarten teacher and they didn’t realize that I was also teaching college classes.

Excuse me. So they came back. A lot of them did that, came back around and I was like, yeah, I can help you with all that.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. I noticed on your pricing, there’s a couple months free, which there you go. Again, is removing some friction, help people like try it out what’s your advice there on creating something where.

People get, can get into it and develop the trust. And how’d you come up with that strategy? I’m not asking you a clear question, but just tell us. No, I get it. It, I

Sally Crewe: think it comes from, so my original businesses were hosting businesses, so it was very much paying by the month for me was something that was just always, there was never a switch to a subscription model for me.

That’s what it was always there. And it was often if it’s 50 bucks a month. Then 500 a year. It’s just the two months discount for the bulk purchase. And I just think it’s, a nice, easy calculation and it’s something people have come to expect. And I I can, I also now tying in the There’s various offers that run at the moment, it’s the, courses comes if you sign it for the year.

There’s other times when it’ll be we’ll do a one on one setup. We’ll do wire everything up for you versus you just following the instructions. So it depends. And I’ve, road tested a few different ways of doing it and they’re all they all work for different audiences. So I tend to rotate them.

So some people like love the idea of what we have, but they’re terrified of the setup as easy as we make it. There’s still like on the edge of the diving board like this. So once a year we’ll, often do a promotion where it’s okay, sign up for you, we’ll do the setup for you. And that’ll a certain sector of, the audience will, go crazy for that.

But for others, it’s more of waiting for we don’t, we’re not doing any kind of price reduction discounts anymore. It’s usually just value, added. Services or bundles of things. And like I said, it’s the automation side of things. It’s not giving me that much more room to spread my wings as an educator.

And I come back to, Realizing that I’m actually really good at that. And I do really like it.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And last question for you, you mentioned it in passing earlier. So I want to come back to it cause it’s it’s valuable for really any entrepreneur. You mentioned there’s a thing you do on your discovery call.

Some people call it a sales call strategy call. What’s the choreography of that? And what’s, I know you have a ton of wisdom here of like how to sell ethically and gracefully and make it a great experience. So take us to school, Sally.

Sally Crewe: Yeah, we call them tech audits. They, are it’s nothing like it sounds like an IRS thing.

It’s basically people like the person I’ve described that has a lot of, Bits and pieces of their business or various iterations of their business spread out over lots of platforms. And we just say, Hey, come in, no shame, dump it out on the table. And we go through and the, it tends to be a rhythmic cadence to the conversations and it ends up being like this, they say, I’m using this.

Can I cancel that? Yes. Can I, do I still need this? And we go through and it’s not designed as a money, a monetization type of exercise, but it always ends up coming back to, yeah. So all the benefits of working with somebody, you see the stress drain from them when they realize that somebody’s Oh, I’m going to take these.

Issues off their plate. And then they look around and they’ve Oh, and this is either going to cost me the same as I’m paying now, or it’s going to save me 30 bucks a month. And I get all this. So it really takes it into that sort of, it sells itself territory. And the exercise itself gives them a really good experience of what it is to work with, me, who’s someone who’s going to help them.

With the tech and make decisions for them. And I, can’t be anyone else other than I am. I’m just, I am who I am as Popeye said. People a lot of people, the right people do, gravitate towards that, they pick up on my energy and they, know that I love what I do and that I’m really interested in helping them fix these issues and streamlining, you It all for them.

And they usually can’t wait to pass that over to me. Like I said, a lot of them will just write after the call and be like, Oh, you’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting to find you. Cause they’re just, they didn’t realize how stressed. All of this stuff was making them.

Chris Badgett: I love that.

And that’s really the ultimate goal of sales is collect connecting a problem with a solution and making, and like, why not make that fun and like trauma relieving experience? Oh yeah. It’s like a little

Sally Crewe: bit of a game. And I I love, I’m like a problem solver. So I, But actually genuinely okay, what else do you have?

Any of this? And I do I have had more money to save. Yeah. And the end of the day it’s, guaranteed. It’s either the same or it’s less because they’ve often got multiple tools doing different things or they’re not using with, I’ve got, what is this? What’s this? I don’t like they’ve signed up for something.

They don’t even know they’re not using it. Do I still need this? So it’s great. I can be like whack a mole and just get their bills down by, but also relieve stress and and get them on the platform, which at the end of the day, I’m running a business. So

Chris Badgett: that’s awesome, Sally. Thanks for coming back on the show, go check out nurture dash.

com and see what Sally’s done there and how she’s solving platform level challenges, which is no small feat. Thank you for being a shining example of an education entrepreneur and somebody who continuously improves and iterates and cares about your customer, cares about learning and technology and innovation and the planet at the same time.

Sally Crewe: Takes one to know one. Just like

Chris Badgett: we’ll keep up the great work and thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m really excited to do another one in four years and see where we’re at.

Sally Crewe: Hopefully, Yeah. Hopefully we’ll both still be around and we won’t have been replaced by robots.

Chris Badgett: A hundred percent.

All right. Thank you, Sally.

Sally Crewe: Bye, Chris. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Barbara Thomason shares insights about social-emotional learning (SEL) within the niche of preteen education and development.

Barbara Thomason is a social-emotional learning (SEL) specialist and the creator of Joy Circles, an initiative that helps preteens build confidence and vital life skills. Barbara also talks on the unique difficulties preteens have in today’s world, emphasizing how incidents like the COVID-19 epidemic affect their mental and social health.

She highlights the need of specific programs and qualified facilitators in this specialty to help preteens navigate these difficulties and acquire critical SEL skills. In talking about the Joy Circles facilitator certification program, Barbara lists the perfect candidates in the niche, which includes school social workers, guidance counselors, and anyone with the empathy and communication skills needed to help preteens in their SEL journey.

In response to the niche’s need for current and easily accessible information, Barbara decided to make the facilitator training program available online. She makes sure that her curriculum reaches a large audience of educators and facilitators committed to promoting the social and emotional development of preteens by utilizing online platforms such as Lifter LMS.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Barbara Thomason. She’s from joy circles. com and she helps facilitators and the people that are helping help preteens with self confidence. Reading all kinds of skills, but first welcome to the show, Barbara.

Barbara Thomason: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for the invitation to come share.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m so excited to chat with you today. It’s cool to build an online business, but it’s also, in my opinion, even better to create a positive impact in the world. Tell us, let’s get to the root of it. What is social emotional learning, which is part of the joy circles program?

Barbara Thomason: Sure. Social emotional learning has an acronym like a lot of things do. So I may refer to it as S E L and social emotional learning has been around actually since the sixties, but has had a recent rebirth out of need. Mostly. Some people think of it in terms of character development but I prefer the SEL moniker because it’s more descriptive of what happens.

It is a child learning to understand better their own emotions, understanding themselves and how they interact with others. It helps them as they move into those very special developmental stages and how they interact with the wider world. So it essentially better prepares them for the world of, work.

world of relationships. So it’s very important and important that educators learn to recognize its importance.

Chris Badgett: So what happens? I like to keep it positive. But what happens when there’s stunted development and social emotional learning? Like how? How does it play out or and create challenges in a child’s life?

Barbara Thomason: I think it’s been obvious in recent years because what we’ve noticed has been the result of, COVID isolation when when young ones have not had the social interaction. They struggle a little bit with coming back in to society in learning situations and in working with the team and collaborating.

They tend to become very techno dependent. And I think that it takes time to begin to assimilate back into their, age group. Social and emotional skills are critical for academic learning. A young one who isn’t really comfortable with themselves and each other must be comfortable.

They have to be comfortable with themselves in order to be able to be comfortable with learning. And research bears this out that young ones who score high, I guess you could say on SEL make greater gains in the academic areas, such as math and reading and sciences. So it’s, just very important for all over development.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned like a scoring system or what, types of, what are examples that would cause a higher score in SEL?

Barbara Thomason: I’ll speak to a specific series of studies. There is a, Dr. Gerlach and some of his research has been most cited. And what he found is of course there were certain gains after social emotional learning.

I think he looked at several hundred. SEL programs of different types. And of course, the children that were exposed to SEL learning, as opposed to control groups, certainly saw gains in social emotional learning parameters, but What they didn’t expect, but they did see, was an 11 percent increase in academic gains.

That was rather amazing, and a wonderful finding, because what that communicates to educators is that it is worthwhile to spend instructional time on social emotional learning, because it’s a, Wonderful expenditure of time with a payout at the end for academia.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I love the name joy circles. Tell us about the name and the circles.

Barbara Thomason: That was both inspiration and I guess you could say a little bit of science too. There are a couple of researchers and of course their names have escaped me, but I have their book on the shelf that produced programming called the circle way.

And they have programs around the world that are a lot of them for adults and they have. Shown how important the circle is, that is putting people in circles. And of course they go back to almost prehistoric times to demonstrate how circles are used in adult gatherings and how, when you put people in a circle, everyone is on equal footing.

Everyone has a say, everyone is heard. And so this concept. It was extremely important to me in that when you enter into the whole process of social emotional learning, it’s important that you establish a circle in order for children to build trust with whoever is working with them and in facilitation you might notice that.

Whether it’s therapists or school counselors, when they’re dealing with a child who may be unregulated or in trauma, they tend to get down on the level of the child. They may kneel down or even sit down eye to eye with the child. It’s the same concept with Circles, everyone is seated on the floor or if, excuse me, if everyone is in a chair, so is the facilitator.

So everyone is equal. Everyone is heard. There are activities within the program that enable the circle to really be born out. There’s movement to music. So we’re doing that in a circle. There are times based on Cliff Derby’s program called Heart Talk, where you have a heart and you pass it around the circle and whoever is holding the heart has the privilege to speak at that moment about their deepest feelings.

So that is a use of the circle as well as there are other things, of course, that we do within the circle, but the use of the word circle is, very critical. Joy, of course, I think is inherent in, the name of the program because that is intended ultimate outcome. It was a perfect marriage of, two concepts really to create this program.

And I have to say it was somewhat divinely inspired.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. I love that. Love the name and the backstory there. You mentioned therapists and perhaps guidance counselors and educators before who is the best fit for the joy circles facilitator certification program. Cause you’re, going to the educator, not directly to the student.

Who are, who is, who’s the best fit?

Barbara Thomason: That is, that’s a great question because I think there are personal and skill characteristics that make the best facilitator, not necessarily a job title. So there may be someone without all of those credentials that could be a gifted facilitator. Like a camp

Chris Badgett: counselor, perhaps.

Barbara Thomason: Yes it could be someone without an advanced degree. It could be someone with an associate’s degree. It could be someone with no degree. Although that’s, I think, a little tougher to establish, but if I were to go into, a school district, I would most likely start with guidance counselors simply because they are most likely to get it most easily get the concept.

The school social worker is most likely to understand this. For the most part, they’ve had probably. 25 to 35 to 50 percent of the learning that I am offering in the facilitation program. For them, a lot of it is repeat or review for them. So they are wonderful candidates for this program. Teachers, only if maybe they they’re in a special situation where they have instructional time to do it and they have the skill sets and understanding.

But for the most part, they are very focused on the instruction, the area of instruction that they are required to deliver. And they’re usually under a lot of stress to deliver it. And that’s not a good place to be in order to deliver joy circles and social emotional learning.

Chris Badgett: All right. Tell us about the desire to and the story of putting this online and how you made it to the point where you wanted to have a website for this and, create the online certification program for the facilitators.

Barbara Thomason: The, Joy Circles program itself, the, what is delivered to the children, of course, is not online, that is a live program, but it was important to me that the facilitator training be available really around the world certainly across the nation, so that the program could be delivered Widely as quickly as possible.

So that was the way to do it was to, place it online and make it easy, easily accessed and make the interaction between those of us that deliver the program as impactful as possible and make it. Self paced for the learner as well as we could punctuate this, class with periods where we could have live sessions.

So built into it, or a couple of times when we would have what you might call check in sessions and coaching sessions with those that are going through the program. And at the very end, there’s a capstone session where they would do a practice facilitation with a live group but it was important to be able to, deliver this in a widespread way.

It’s also wonderful to be able to edit the program as we go. I attended a all day conference yesterday delivered by the Texas Teacher Counseling Association and went to a number of wonderful workshops and got some great content and thought as I came back yesterday, I need to put that in my, facilitation program so I can go in and edit.

Happily change the program and it’s, done I don’t have to go back to a printer and have a lot of expense, have any expense at all to make those edits.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the instructional design aspect of it. Like how did you figure out how to structure? The course and the content, and you said that it’s awesome that you can make it better as you go.

But how did you 1st encapsulate the program?

Barbara Thomason: Well, a little spoiler alert. I, have a master’s degree in human resource development. I know a little bit about instructional design and training and development. But I had never created a course and put it online. You guys make it easy.

This drag and drop simplicity the training courses that you all provide it’s hand holding all the way. And I it just made it, it just made it painless. I did it over the Christmas holidays, essentially, and and knew, of course, that as I went along, I could just slide another lesson in or slide another unit in as I went along.

It was. It was so much easier than I thought it would be. So thank you.

Chris Badgett: You’re welcome. I’m, glad that makes me happy. What was your experience with WordPress or getting into the tech of it all? Cause it, it’s not always easy. WordPress is infinitely customizable, but what’s your WordPress journey?

Barbara Thomason: I have a webmaster. And they’re the WordPress experts. In fact, they’re the ones that they gave me a list of 3 LMS companies and you all were 1 of them. And so I reviewed the 3. I ended up with you all. I’m glad I did. I always knew that I had. A fallback. I could go to my web master people and they could save me if I screwed up.

But it was, you just appeared on WordPress it was like, I didn’t know it was going to happen. And there you were. That’s how dumb I was about WordPress. I just found you there and just started clicking around. I could find what I needed just by clicking on courses. And it was easy to find.

And I, found that I didn’t mess up my website or anything. Yeah it was great.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do you remember, you said you were looking at three different LMSs. What, ultimately led to choosing LifterLMS?

Barbara Thomason: I can’t remember all that went into the decision. I will tell you that I think it was the support that you provide.

Certainly the, instructional support, the fact that we can call on you any, time I think that you were, you had a special going on and it was around Thanksgiving. That certainly helps. Everybody likes a, deal. I think you enabled me to try it, I don’t think I did.

I think I just signed up all the way at the beginning. There were probably other things. I think I liked the look the look and feel of LifterLMS sites. Certainly there were good testimonials there, there really wasn’t any reason not to sign up with you all. And some of the other sites gave me pause.

Chris Badgett: Okay. Here’s a question for you that we get asked a lot for it. It’s one of the reasons we have this podcast. It’s outside the scope of the software, but. How do you get clients or how do you, get facilitators interested in the program and get the message out there?

Barbara Thomason: That’s been tough. This is, I’m a new launch, so my best way is for example, going to a conference, a professional conference yesterday. I reach out to school districts one by one and attempt to make appointments either with. An instructional leader whoever’s heading up the counselors and just have that conversation, see where they are in their SEL programming.

We talk about who would be ideal facilitators just that sort of thing. It’s just the outreach. I also have an e newsletter. And so I have a pretty robust list of schools across the state of Texas right now. So reaching out to them through my e newsletter, which is quarterly. I had an info webinar in January and invited quite a few people to that.

So it’s just a lot of those, ways that, you outreach to your publics.

Chris Badgett: Thank you. I call that the ground game. You have to get out there and yeah. One conversation at a time. You mentioned checking in with districts on where their cell programming is. Is it already kind of part of the flow where, it’s educational institutions have some kind of social, emotional learning mandate or process and flow, or is it sometimes a new thing for a school?

Barbara Thomason: This is tough for me to answer because I don’t want to be negative.

Chris Badgett: a circle on the online right.

Barbara Thomason: Now, having said that I met a wonderful ones.

Program creator, former professor yesterday who has a high school program, which is partially online. And I think that’s perfectly wonderful. As long as they do have the live component, but, I would say that there are many other states that are head and shoulders above my state, the state of Texas, and I’m afraid that we fall far behind.

Many of the administrators, superintendents still view social emotional learning as something that steals away from academic instructional time. They’re not familiar with DURLAC study and, others, and don’t realize the importance, especially in this post COVID time. And I do my best to educate it. I’m just one just one person, but.

I’m hoping that over time they will see the benefit of it. Some of the programs that I saw yesterday especially those that are online just don’t seem to me to be impactful and they’ll, say that they’re evidence based, which is the key word in, social emotional learning, but they can throw that word around without.

Necessarily having to prove it. I think that it just depends on, what school district and what state that you’re walking into as to how far they have come with social emotional learning.

Chris Badgett: For the other folks trying to impact within the educational system, who is, who’s like the decision maker on the program that you mentioned districts, but then there’s individual guidance counselors.

Is it more likely the kind of district lead gets buy in and then encourages their staff to join? Or is it more likely a. Specific guidance counselor, as an example that gets really into it. And I call that land and expand and then others start getting interested, which is a top down or bottom up.

Barbara Thomason: That’s the question. That’s what, how is going to respond? It depends on if it’s top down or bottom up. Sometimes a new superintendent comes into his position and wants to make his mark. And if his mark is one that is pure academics, then social, emotional learning may go by the wayside.

And, that’s what I have seen in the very district I’m sitting in. While another may be one that is very open to listening to his professional staff and we’ll take their recommendations and if they believe strongly in a, sound social emotional learning program, then he or she will say let’s, invest in it.

So it just depends on what kind of leadership is there and how willing they are to listen and take a try on a program.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. You mentioned creating impactful training. What are some examples of how to make the facilitator training more impactful than let’s say other things that are out there and with your background as a facilitator and instructional designer, how does one do that?

Barbara Thomason: I think that in addition to having good content and one of the things that, that I try and do, it’s not always the fun part is, having sound. Resources and insight the sources, but to also have use your tool for what do you call them? It’s like homework and use the tool for creating quizzes.

And so, you’re getting feedback for each unit or lesson if you choose to do it that way so that they’re really assimilating that information and trying themselves out on it. I think too, the more that you can have. more interaction during the learning, the better it can be.

So, an example might be a lesson assignment where they join together with one or two other learners to work on a project, a group project, or they have to go out and do some research on their own and report back on that. Something that’s a little more interactive than just reading and spewing back information I think is, going to be more impactful.

Knowing too that the learning is something that is going to make a difference in how they perform. On the job. And I think just pointing that out throughout the lesson, for example, giving them tools on how to work with the child who may lose control. During a session and why they are that way and tools that they can use to, bring that child back into into self control, those kinds of things.

Chris Badgett: What’s an example of a tool like that? Where the child loses control and how can you

Barbara Thomason: help? There’s a model and I’m not going to go into the model, Chris, because it’s, not an attractive model, but it’s called the polyvagal theory. And it basically shows where we move neurologically in our brain.

where we start out maybe feeling pretty good and we’re in a certain part of our brain and then we go into the flight or fight, fight or flight mode or freeze mode and call that our reptilian brain. And that’s where a child goes if they may be a child who has been subjected to abuse or neglect or any other form of trauma, they go there more readily, and through acts of, ensuring trust and so forth, you can move them from that part of their brain into a more calming place.

There was a strategy I learned yesterday, and just I’m going to build this into my program. A lot of parents learn how to conduct time out, right? A child who has been neglected. or abused, time out would be very problematic for them because what they, don’t need to be felt like they’re, rejected.

They need to be brought in and, feel closer and connected to. A trusting human being so this particular theorist called it time in and I just thought it was a beautiful thing. And she demonstrates how she brings the child who has acted out in to a chair fairly close to her.

She continues to do her thing whether it’s grading papers or, cleaning up at a sink or whatever, and allows the child to maybe do some art or something, but be thinking about how he or she might have performed that behavior differently, not decide what you did wrong, but how might you have done that differently if you had a do over and, then when you have decided that when you figured that out, just say, I’m ready.

And then when the child says, I’m ready, then get down on their level, I level and hear what they have to say. And it’s just great. Let’s try it that way. And I just thought that was a beautiful strategy to bring maybe a child that is high emotionality down to a calm level where they can move from that.

Panic area of their brain to calm thinking logical area of their brain and have learning take place So I just thought that was a beautiful strategy. I’d never heard before yesterday time in I love that.

Chris Badgett:Where does your passion and motivation come for this subject matter and impact you want to make in the world?

Barbara Thomason: It’s funny when this lightning bolt inspiration came to me, I did not want to do this. I’ve had businesses before. I didn’t want to do another one. It was like. No, thank you, God, I don’t want to do this, but it just wouldn’t leave me alone. The day that my daughter was born, and this was pretty long time ago, it was a little over 40 years ago, when I brought my daughter home from the hospital, there was a front page article about a little boy named Tommy Lott, and Tommy Lott had been, had a long, he was probably only 5, 4, 5 years old, but in his short life, he had been really tortured and abused.

And the front page article was that Tommy Lott had been killed by his parents, essentially, by being scalded in hot water. And this horrifying story, the day I brought my sweet baby home from the hospital, Sat in my gut and influenced a lot of what I did. I volunteered for a child child abuse prevention agency for years.

I worked directly with child abuse At risk families I almost became a social worker at one point and decided I didn’t want to have my career fall into that area. It’s too depressing, but anyway, Tommy Lott has been in the back of my mind off and on throughout my career and I.

I have gone on to do other things community development work, economic development work. It’s all been very gratifying, but but, kids are where it’s at and I’ve never wanted to be a teacher. I’ve never wanted to work in a daycare. I’ve never wanted necessarily to have that direct contact.

It was enough to be a mom, but but I have this creative motivation to create and this is the facilitator program guide that they work from create the program and maybe have a little wider impact than I would have just working for the classroom or was always something appealing to me.

And I felt would have would make a difference. It would make a difference in the world. So that’s my motivation. Tommy lot.

Chris Badgett: That’s fantastic. Barbara. For those of you listening, Barbara just held up a workbook. Is that it’s like a binder. Does that come up, does that come with the program, the online program?

Barbara Thomason: Yeah, this would be something I would ship to the facilitator. And as they go through the online program, this is like lesson plans. And maybe someday these would go online as well, but right now because this is something they might take with them into a classroom, I just wanted it to be a little bit more portable and mobile now, we didn’t want them to have to depend on a laptop or a tablet to carry that around.

Yeah, that’s the program facilitator guide.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I actually really like that idea. I call it clicks and bricks. You have some digital stuff and some stuff in the real world and it all just works together For the program. Yeah. What’s your vision for the future with joy circles?

Like where, do you want to go with it?

Barbara Thomason: I want to go across the country. No, I want to continue to offer the, creative leadership of the program. I want to build a program. One thing that I haven’t emphasized really today is the fact that it It, combines reading reading skills development with social emotional learning.

The young ones in the group will read contemporary novels that are age appropriate. For example, one of the novels deals with some kids that are dealing with bullying. And so we read the book together. As we read in the group, the kids build their reading skill, because they’re reading out loud.

But we also stop and we have a series of discussion questions. Have any of you been bullied? What does it feel like to be bullied? What constitutes bullying? Or what is teasing? What’s the difference? So it’s sometimes easier to talk about Somebody else’s bullying experience before you talk about yours.

And because of that. Joy circles has an infinite number of possibilities in that there are an infinite number of contemporary novels for various age groups. So right now we focus on fourth through sixth grade. I’m going to go down to third grade eventually at the recommendation of some school principals, and I may go up a grade or so the other direction as well.

And then, of course, create depth in terms of more and more novels that we might introduce into the program. So, I could stay very busy and just working with developing the program with the addition of literature, KIDLIT as it relates to the different topics of KIDLIT. of bullying and race and socioeconomic differences and developing friendships and dealing with parents and all of those issues that children in this age group are just exploring and dealing with.

So on a micro level, that’s where I want to go with it. On the macro level, I do hope to bring Other professionals in to help me expand this business and to help it grow. I’d like to see it in schools across the country and that’s my vision to make a difference across, across the country.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing switching back to the instructional design hat. If somebody is. Working on something similar or tangentially related. I’m, just curious, did you create the physical binder of lesson plans first or the online course, and then there’s also this reading list which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

What would you advise somebody?

Barbara Thomason: I, created the program, the lesson plans first, but I. I had in the back of my mind, this outline for the facilitator program. The lesson plans are one thing, but the, facilitator training is why do we use circles? Why do we use models?

That’s another thing that makes us unique in that we, use graphical and word models. No other program does this, that Helps bring concepts to the young ones that will remain in their mind There’s one model for example called Sarge, and it’s this ugly kind of sergeant graphic and it is about the type of communication style that you might hear from a sergeant or another kind of authority and but it’s necessary in an emergency or a certain situation.

So sometimes children have a hard time distinguishing between what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate communication. So this is a kind of communication model that we teach them. And then we talk about other kinds of communication like eye messages and, how to structure an appropriate.

I statement I feel concerned when you talk to me in that tone of voice. All of this is, and there are more models that are in my head that need to be developed as we move into sixth and seventh grade levels. So program first, then the facilitator training will evolve as well.

Chris Badgett: I wanted to try to extract a, some wisdom from Your experience around a lesson plan for a T for somebody who’s not trained as a teacher, like what is the lesson plan?

Barbara Thomason: It’s a flexible script. And it’d be hard for you to see for me to show you, but it. It provides a theme for this particular day or period of time together.

It provides going, as an example? Like communication or leadership or self management or visioning. And it provides maybe a list of materials and equipment. That you may need to gather together to have for that session so that it helps them get organized and then it has the list of activities you start with movement to music and joy circles has its own.

Recordings of music we’ve, secured the services of a local musician who has provided a soundtrack for us. So it’s very upbeat, positive music that, that he’s created for us. So we have movement to music and of course we’ve taught them in the facilitator training how to do this in a way that’s open and fun.

And then we move right into what we call Soda straw breathing. Where they transition from that movement to music that helps them focus down to a calming state where they they might even have a soda straw and we teach them how to breathe in through their nose and out as if they’re breathing through a soda straw.

And we do that several times, so it’s self calming. And then we go right into reading, where we are in the novels. They take turns. If a child doesn’t want to read, maybe they’re not comfortable with their reading, they can pass or we might say why don’t you read the title of this chapter so that they’re comfortable with just a few words and we reinforce that great.

That was helpful. Thanks, Steven. And then. After we read whatever the chapter is that we’ve decided to do that day, we have our discussions. Why do you think why do you think she ran out of the classroom in that chapter? Have you ever felt like doing that and why? So we take whatever the action was and bring it down to their personal level.

And then we might introduce our models for the day. And a lot of times they’ll track with the action of the book and then we’ll have some kind of a closing circle as well. So it depends on the amount of time that the hosting organization has allowed. If it’s 30 minutes or 60 minutes or 20 minutes how much we can accomplish, but.

That’s, what a lesson looks like and this scripts it for you, but we allow lots of flexibility for a facilitator once they’ve been trained to make adjustments. There may be an activity like creating emoji sticks so that they have a collection of emoji sticks that shows different kinds of emotions that we would use throughout our semester together.

So all kinds of things that, that the lesson plans can provide them with ideas. And then we welcome them to submit their own ideas so that they can be shared among our facilitator community.

Chris Badgett: Wow. I love that. I think the, what I’m hearing, the really big thing there when creating a learning experience is multiple, These in the body, breathing music through the ears, reading arts and crafts.

It’s not like you said earlier, it’s not just receiving content and spitting it back on the test. That’s what makes engaging learning experience. So I say like one of the frameworks or models that I have for for people who create these kinds of online learning platforms. Oh, it can be challenging or difficult is because you got to be five people in once.

You have to be a subject matter expert, you have to be a teacher slash instructional designer. You have to be a community builder, both to get clients. And then also inside your program, you have to be an entrepreneur. You have to start a business and accept money through the internet and marketing, and you have to be a technologist who can work with hardware and software and websites and everything you’ve, put all those pieces together, both yourself.

And you mentioned earlier, you had a webmaster that helps on the tech side. What advice do you have for somebody that’s struggling with having to wear those five hats? That’s what I call my model is the five hats. Cause you were able to get it and get it launched. Like what, advice do you have for wearing all the hats?

Barbara Thomason: I would say get the help you need retain those things that you know, and love. And try as much as your budget allows to delegate the rest. If you don’t like doing your bookkeeping try and find somebody else to do it. If, you don’t like building a website, it’s easy to find people to do that.

I have the most wonderful web people, and they were not terribly expensive, and I have just, I have them on a retainer now to, So rescue me when I need them to do things on a monthly basis.

Chris Badgett: So how do you find that person? I’m just curious because people ask.

Barbara Thomason: What’s that online shopping place? Upwork or freelancer?

It’s Upwork. Yeah. I found them on Upwork. Great, place to go. Yeah, that’s where I found them. And it wasn’t necessarily that they were the the lowest price or anything, it was a gut feeling of a good match and I was right. I would just say, that keep the things that you’re good at and that you love to do and try and, Carve out the other things and see if you can find others to do. I, there are things that I really am ready to delegate but I’m not ready budget wise. I’m, I’ve created a job description and I’m, poised and ready to bring somebody else on as quickly as I can when the time is right.

But, but the time isn’t quite right. I’m just ready.

Chris Badgett: It sounds like also the having your strong vision, mission and purpose helps carry you through all those challenges. And what I’m hearing too, is the team aspect of it. You even mentioned like in your vision to bring in other Subject matter experts to add even more value to the platform, which is awesome.

Barbara Thomason: Yeah, I look forward to that time. It’ll it’s also a challenge too. It gets messier when you bring other people in Yeah.

Chris Badgett: This has been a great conversation Barbara She’s at joy circles. com. What are, what’s the best way for people to connect with you? And particularly if somebody is working in education and social work or guidance, what should they do to connect

Barbara Thomason: with you more?

They can find me through the website. I have an email, Barbara Thomason at joy circles. com. I’m on social media Facebook, LinkedIn, and just reach out.

Chris Badgett: Barbara, thank you for being a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur, creating a positive impact in the world and, using LifterLMS as part of your tech stack I really appreciate it.

And I wish you all the best on your learning platform journey. And thanks for coming on the show.

Barbara Thomason: Thanks for having me, Chris. Take care. Keep up the good work.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Madame Alexa describes how she went from working as a teacher in a program that immerses students in French to launching her own online language learning website. She decided to make her own interactive games and activities to fill the resource vacuum for younger learners in French immersion programs, with the goal of helping them acquire the language more successfully.

Alexa is owner of Madame A’s. She talks about how she creates classes using a combination of interactive features, video tutorials, and other activities to keep kids interested and learning at their own speed. Madame Alexa also discusses the technologies she uses, such as Elementor for WordPress website design, Genially for interactive activities, and recording tools for providing voice instructions.

Madame Alexa also reveals that her husband suggested WordPress to her as a versatile platform that would enable her to personalize her website and incorporate necessary capabilities like translation using the Polylang plugin.

She created a full platform with an LMS for children’s language learning, even though she was new to WordPress. According to Madame Alexa, she did a lot of research before finding LifterLMS, and she thought it was one of the few platforms that let her tailor her services for both individual parents and classroom environments.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Madame Aize. She’s from madameaize. com. She does language learning teaching over the internet. It’s French immersion from home. Welcome to the show, Madame A. Thank

Madame Alexa: you so much. You can just call me Alexa for this interview.

That’s totally fine. The kids called me Madame Alexa. I have a lot of different names.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I’ll do it. I’ll do Alexa because my French is not that good. No problem. I did spend a, I was in France this past year. I spent some time in the Chamonix Valley area and had a ball there, but I also spent a lot of time in Canada.

Quebec’s an awesome place as well.

Madame Alexa: Perfect. It is lovely. I do really enjoy living here.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us the origin story of how you started teaching French in online or in person. Like where, did the website Madame A’s come to be?

Madame Alexa: Absolutely. I was a teacher for seven years in the French immersion program in Quebec.

So for anybody who’s not really familiar with that, it’s basically a school program in French, where most of the students that will register either don’t speak French at home at all, so they’re from an English household or their parents might speak French at home, but they absolutely want their child to be bilingual.

A little bit of a background on the education system here in Quebec specifically, you when you are in the francophone system, you have about one hour of English a week. You can imagine that a lot of people are not becoming bilingual with that program. And in the English program as well, they have about one hour of French a week.

So again not, great if you want your child to be bilingual. So the immersion program is really everything is completely in French for the most part. And you have one hour of English a day. And when the kids get a little bit older, like in grades five and six, they actually have six hours a week.

So you, you get that additional hour as well in there. I taught on the French side of a French immersion program for seven years. And I got to live the pandemic teaching online with a grade one class, which is very interesting. So most of my colleagues were ripping their hair out trying to figure something out online and I’ve always really enjoyed.

technology and educational technology, and I really saw this as an opportunity to teach differently. I was going online, I was creating these self paced plans for my students, which is not something that’s doable in a classroom, but I’m like, hey, we’re online, we could do this, let’s do it.

And I was finding that there were very few resources made, especially for younger learners. And even more so when we fell into French immersion. So what usually happens with French immersion is that they’re not second language learners, so it’s not as basic, but they’re not necessarily at the level of a mother tongue French speaker either.

So we have this very large middle area. That’s rarely covered. And not a lot of material has been created for that level, so I decided well, this isn’t out there and I need it, so let me create it myself. I think I’ve got the skills to do this. I started creating these little interactive games for my students and they responded extremely well to it.

So well that during my last year of teaching I replaced all of my homework with these interactive games. That was their, lessons, their review. They would be doing it through these activities. So they would learn with me during the week and then they would go home and practice through these games.

And the parents really appreciated it because they used to tell me I always have to fight with my kid to do their homework, to practice this language, but. Every time it’s your games, it’s never an issue. So I saw that there was something to do with this. So I decided to leave teaching entirely at the end of the last school year.

And I’ve been doing this full time since July. So all of the activities are now online and here we are.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That is really cool. Tell us more about the games, like from an instructional design standpoint, like what are

Madame Alexa: they? Yeah. I try to do a mix of a lot of different things. It’s important for me to lay the foundations first.

Usually what I’ll do is I will have an interactive kind of image that the child can click around and can listen to my voice. So they’re like discovering through doing and then once, So instead of having a teacher just talk them through what they need to learn, they get to explore it themselves.

In other instances, I’ll also have video lessons if it’s really a concept that’s important that, that is explained to them. I’ll have it in a video and I, find it nice. especially for the younger ones who don’t necessarily have that attention span to be able to come back to it, hear it as many times as they need to, take a break in between the lesson if they need to.

And then what I do is I’ll have a couple of different activities that can be scrambled letters, it can be a word search, it can be a quiz I really try to vary it so that they never know what to expect and it keeps them on their toes. And then I take what’s been taught and I have them apply it to a bunch of different concepts.

So very pedagogical. Wow. And they really get to use their knowledge in a bunch of different contexts.

Chris Badgett: So cool. I wish I had you as a French teacher when I was younger.

Madame Alexa: Thanks. I would have loved that. It’s never too late to learn. Don’t worry.

Chris Badgett: That’s true. That’s true. Tell us about your technology stack.

What tools do you use to deliver all this?

Madame Alexa: Yeah this is a little bit complicated because I do not have a background in programming or anything like that. And what I was finding with most of these LMS tools is that they were designed for adult learners, right? We know that online teaching is extremely popular for adults in higher education, but it hasn’t been exploited as much, I think, as it could have for children.

So that was something that a big problem that I was running into was that these, LMSs are very busy. They’re very they have a lot of things that children don’t know how to handle or it’s not valuable to their learning. So I needed something that I would be able to really edit a lot.

But at the same time, I it’s got to be if, we’re talking about coding, I’m, it’s very limited what I can do. So I use a bunch of different programs depending on what I’m doing. If I am doing a an activity, then I’ll often go with Genially, which is an amazing tool. So that really lets me add a bunch of interactive elements.

And, put in the designs that I want, which is really nice. And then I will use a bunch of recording tools as well, so that I can add my voice to all of those interactive elements. Because a lot of these students don’t necessarily know how to read, so they need to be able to hear the instructions versus doing them.

And for the design of the website, then that was Elementor that I was using. Which was extremely helpful for somebody like me who has never done a website in her life. So really appreciated that Lifter and Elementric could work together.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. It may surprise you, but I’m not a coder as well.

I I, work with WordPress and tools that you move around. And yes, luckily for me, I have engineering talent on the team and partnership, so I’m able to make it happen. But I’m really impressed with what you’ve been able to do, both from a design standpoint and just making learning fun, I think that’s really the most important thing.

Madame Alexa: Thanks. That’s really the, ultimate goal, right? Is to make sure these kids can have fun and learn at their own pace. I’m so reassured that you say that because I’m like, look at Chris accomplishing everything and he doesn’t have a background in programming either. So it’s all good to go.

Chris Badgett: I don’t need it.

WordPress is for everybody really. It’s, the main goal was to democratize publishing and we just build on top of that with democratizing education is, there can you tell us a little bit about your WordPress journey?

Madame Alexa: Yes, I’m sorry. I seem to be having a bit of a problem with my camera.

Just give me one second. I’m gonna try to fix that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, no problem. Your audio is still coming through just fine.

Madame Alexa: Okay, that’s good at least. Let me keep talking while I try to fix that. Sorry, what was your question?

Chris Badgett: What was your, like, how long have you been involved with WordPress as a technology?

Madame Alexa: So I, this was my first stint with WordPress actually. So yeah, it’s completely, new here. Oh, there we are. Yeah. What I had done originally with the website is that I had taken a a platform that had the LMS and the website together. But it didn’t work out for me because I needed, like I explained, I needed to modify so many different things and it just was not letting me do that.

And my husband works in, tech, and he’s the one who originally suggested WordPress because he’s you need to be able to adapt a bunch of different things and still have a skeleton. So this seems like the ideal situation, right? This is, the ultimate tool to be able to do that.

That’s how we got involved with WordPress to begin with. The original issue I was coming across was that I couldn’t translate my website with the other platform I was using, which is a huge problem in Quebec. Everybody expects things to be available in French and in English, even if it’s a French learning program.

For kids clearly designed to English marketed towards English speaking parents. You will absolutely get judged if your stuff isn’t also available in French. So that was something that was extremely important that I needed to do quickly. That’s what pushed me towards WordPress.

And then when I saw how much I could adapt to what I wanted to do and find the tools to really fulfill my vision, I was like, all right this is it. This is where we need to go.

Chris Badgett: Do you know offhand, like how that French English button on your menu works?

Madame Alexa: Do I know how it works?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, like what tools you’re using to make that happen or anything?

Madame Alexa: Yes, I do. It’s called, it’s a plugin called Polylang. Okay. Yeah, so it’s, not magical. But it does let me have basically every time that I create a page I can, Tell WordPress like this is the page in English and then duplicate it and explain this is the page in French and then translate the entire thing.

So I still have to do the translations myself but it lets WordPress know okay, when the person clicks this button, we’re going to this, the version of this page that’s in French, basically.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. Very well done. Thanks. I’m impressed this is your first WordPress site. It’s pretty awesome.

Really? Oh,

Madame Alexa: thank you. It’s so nice to hear because I’m always worried that it’s not it’s not as good as it could be. So it’s, always nice hearing

Chris Badgett: that. It’s it’s, not just like a static website for a business. It’s like the whole thing. And you’re using advanced tools like translation and LMS.

And yeah, it’s there’s a lot going on. So it’s impressive.

Madame Alexa: Yes. In the beginning, it was a little bit overwhelming. I think now finally I’ve got it somewhere that I, like it. So I’ve been able to spend a bit less time on the website and a bit more time on my actual content which has been really nice.

It is definitely a big a big challenge in the beginning because you’re, learning a bunch of different. new tools at once. But yeah, I finally got it to I think where I want it to be. And I think it’s really nice to have all of these. It feels like limitless, right? All of the options that you can have with the plugins.

So I know that when I’m ready to crank it up a notch or add something else there’s, a ton of different tools out there that I could potentially add.

Chris Badgett: Do you remember how you found LFTR LMS or how you got, into that whole world? Research

Madame Alexa: Research Yeah I, at first I was like, there’s gotta be a business up there doing LMSs for children.

And there are. But it’s almost as if, as soon as you’re talking about doing something for kids, they want to really restrain what you’re able to do with it. And none of them I feel like the, concept of my business, obviously it’s not revolutionary. There are online games and online platforms for, children learning languages.

But none of them do exactly what I do, which is really a mix of a bunch of different types of activities. It was really important for me that everything was in one place so that if the child wanted to do it independently, they could. And I think that’s something that really hasn’t been exploited much.

So every single thing. tool LMS that I was finding was too restrictive one way or another. So that’s how I ended up doing a bunch of research for different different LMSs that would really let me customize. And that’s how I came upon LFTR and saw, okay, there’s a bunch of different things that I can do here.

And my service can be bought directly by parents. Who just want their child to have an additional tool at home, but they can also be bought by schools. So classroom access where you’ve got a teacher with a group of 30 students who are all advancing at different paces. And it was difficult to find a tool that would let me have.

Those two worlds working parallel with each other. And LFTR was one of the only ones who were letting me do that the way that I wanted to. That’s awesome. Yeah, but it was months of research comparing and trying things out.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s a little overwhelming with how many, there’s 500 LMS is out

Madame Alexa: there.

There’s a lot. Yeah, there’s a lot. There’s a lot. Yeah. But I think that my vision was so clear and detailed and I knew exactly what I needed. So it was fairly easy for me to go through them and be like, okay, no, this one’s not going to work. It doesn’t have this. This is a non negotiable for me. So I had a couple of points like that, that I knew.

If this is not available, there’s no way I can do this. There’s no way I can put my eggs in this basket and I knew that it was going to be a huge commitment because I’m, trusting this platform to, hold all of my content, to hold my business in their hands and, not let me down.

Let me do what I want to do, because this, is literally my entire product. So yeah you, guys, this is Came in and got me there. I was like, oh, yeah, I feel like I can trust these guys and Will is amazing Every time I was stuck I could go look at a video that he’d done and I was like, alright I feel like somebody’s holding my hand here at all times every time I need him So it’s like a running joke between me and my husband When I don’t know how to do something, he’s have you checked a will?

I’m sure. And then when I get really stuck, if he hasn’t, then he’s joined the lives a couple of times, cause he’s I’m so interested in, the way that they do things you’ve inspired. He’s a I’m going to try to get his title, right? He’s a product manager in a tech company. And he’s enjoyed the way that you’ve done certain things so much that it’s inspired.

His job. And he’s gotten things implemented in his business that because he thought you guys were doing it so well. So like the lives, for example, he’s we should do something like that. This is amazing. So thank you. You’ve helped two different businesses with lifter.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing.

Thanks a lot for saying that. And I’ll definitely pass that on to will as, well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. One of our philosophies is. We don’t hide behind the website which, you don’t as a language learner or teacher, you can’t, but like some tech companies, it’s just like this faceless org and we’ve, intentionally went a different path.

So I appreciate you saying that.

Madame Alexa: Yes. And it’s, I think ultimately that’s what convinced me. To go with lifter versus all of the other LMS is, that I, saw that through you. I saw that I can be the teacher that I want to be online and they’re going to let me do that.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Is there anything else on the lifter side that you like about the tool or the features or anything?

Madame Alexa: So many things. The number one thing is really how customizable it is. The, only thing I would say is that I wish I could customize even more. But yeah, to be able to in, the courses page, when you’ve got a student going through the activities it was really important for me that.

It’d be very uncluttered because the more buttons there are for a child, the more chances the kid has of getting lost. I had to remove a bunch of buttons like the mark is complete. I had to figure out a way for the system to recognize that. Yes. Okay. This activity was done. And we can move on to the next one without counting on the child to be like, yeah, okay, I’m done cause that’s, they’re not all able to do that, unfortunately. So I, really love that, that I could take out what I didn’t need. I could embed what I did need. That was really amazing. And it worked seamlessly with the different tools that I was using.

Chris Badgett: We, we get a lot of questions about making interactive content.

So I think you mentioned was it called Gina Lee or something?

Madame Alexa: Genially? Yeah. Yeah. It’s an amazing tool. Explain how you

Chris Badgett: did that inside of a lesson and Lifter LMS.

Madame Alexa: Yeah. Yeah. What I do is through my genially account that’s really where I’m creating the activity. I, have one part that’s the design.

So I do the design of the activity the way that I’ve imagined it in my head. I upload that into Genially, and then from Genially, I can make those different elements interactive. And so I can add a recording to it. I can make it so that when this is clicked, this happens and all of that stuff. Then once my activity is complete, then I generate like a a code to, So that people can, actually use it.

That’s a bit like a private code. Then I go into Lifter and under my lesson what I’ll do is I have to actually go through WordPress to do this. So I’ll go to WordPress. I will add an embed block and within that embed block, that’s where I put my link to the activity and there we go.

Nice. Nice. And then I make sure that it’s only accessible to the ones who are enrolled in the course.

Chris Badgett: Perfect. Yeah. Tell us more about the school or the classroom versus individual learner. How do you do that?

Madame Alexa: Yeah. I use your groups Add on, I guess we can call it that. Yeah. So I had to define the teacher role a little bit because my teachers are a little bit different than most teacher roles within higher education organized.

Because most of those organizations want their teachers to upload content and manage certain things, which is not the case for me. The content is entirely made by me. I don’t want the teachers to be playing around with that or adding their own content. That’s not really the goal, right?

I want to be an additional Like fully formed tool. I don’t want to add any additional work to them. So I really wanted it to be there and they, just have to add their students and then their students can do everything. On their own. So I have this teacher role who’s able to add her students, who’s able to see the progress of her students into the different activities.

And then each student just has their own login and is able to just go in and do the activities either in class or at home. So if the teacher wants to use one of my lessons to present it to the whole group and then have them do the follow up activity on the classroom iPads, then they can just log in and do that there.

Or she runs out of time. She wants them to do it at home. During the week when they have time, they’re able to do that.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s super cool. Super impressive. Inspiring too, to think of lifters up inside of a classrooms and

Madame Alexa: delivering all this on the smart boards directly. Wow.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Tell us, there’s a common question we try to help people with on this podcast, which is how do you get students or clients or classrooms in your case?

Like, how did you get your learning platform to get traction in the

Madame Alexa: market? It’s very difficult. When I originally started, I was marketing it to schools so I was exclusively doing classroom access and the education system in Quebec is extremely complicated. I think in the United States as well, this is something that you’re grappling with.

But especially when you come in as a private institution, as a private business into a public institution, you’re seen with a wary eye, unfortunately. I think because they’re thinking, Oh, this person is trying to just make money and exploit my students for their business when it’s really not the case.

My ultimate goal is to just teach these children and make, French fun. And obviously we all need to make money to make our, businesses. Keep, surviving but I’m never going to be putting a student’s success at risk just so I can make a few more bucks.

That’s, not the point, right? So that was very difficult because I had to cold call the schools, very difficult to get in contact. With administration

in a school and then you have to prove yourself. So bring that message and make them believe in something that’s very new. So yeah, that, that was particularly difficult and considering I’m on my own, that was very rough. Because I, do think sales is a full time job and when you are a business owner, you already wear so many hats, you don’t necessarily have the time to be doing sales full time, especially when, like me, it is not your forte yeah, I found that particularly difficult, so I ended up pivoting a little bit more and gearing the service more towards So lately lots of online marketing campaigns to go and reach those parents and to see what we’re offering and, to see that this is an available option for them.

Because I think on top of getting parents to, to trust this whole the, education of their child to something, an online service. Beyond that, we’re presenting something that hasn’t really been done often. There’s a whole element of trust that I need to to get past as well before these parents.

So that has been particularly difficult. I do find that presenting that, that face and that personal element really helps. So yes videos are, great and informative and educational, but the fact that you’re a real person and they realize that has been extremely helpful. I’m really starting to, I’ve never been good with social media.

I, I, it doesn’t come naturally to me to share my life. I just never thought that I was interesting enough for that, that nobody would care. But it turns out people do care. I’ve been trying really hard to share tidbits of, my life, of learning French, of tricks that parents can use at home, even if they don’t speak French, to support their child.

So that’s been extremely helpful. I think we’re bringing a, personal element, and they see that this isn’t just a face behind a screen. This is a real person with with real things to offer. It’s not just a, voice on the other end.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Is it is it like Instagram and Facebook and Twitter?

Yeah,

Madame Alexa: exactly. Facebook and Instagram, especially. I haven’t tackled Twitter yet. I am tackling Tik

Chris Badgett: TOK. Oh, good for you. For what it’s worth, we have a a Spanish teacher who does really well on Tik

Madame Alexa: TOK, so yeah it’s, Impressive that when you don’t have a very short time limit like people are interested in learning and I feel like this is just a, bite size way to learn now.

And it’s so accessible that I think there’s something to do with that. Yeah, for sure. And the algorithm is. It’s crazy scary good. If, it recognizes, Hey, you’ve got an interest in learning languages here’s a content creator who’s going to help you do that. And then we end up on their for you page and that’s really great.

It’s very impressive.

Chris Badgett: That is good. I agree with you that that whole micro learning thing is. It’s really a trend for one, but number two, tick tock is really good at that.

Madame Alexa: Yes. And, I feel like it’s a whole new era. This isn’t something that we would have been able to do some 25 years ago, right?

When, everything wasn’t so accessible with, the internet and with every, everything out there. So I feel like. It’s okay to adapt to new realities and, to change learning in a way that just suits people better in the lives that they’re living today, right? Of how busy they are.

You have

Chris Badgett: a like a free trial program course on your site? Yes,

Madame Alexa: I do. Yeah. Tell us about the strategy

Chris Badgett: of that and how it works and what it does.

Madame Alexa: Yeah. Originally it came from when I was still approaching schools. I think that Teachers are very concerned that if they jump into a new tool, it’ll be more work for them because they’re going to have to learn how to use it, how to apply it, where can they fit it in their planning.

And I think there was a big block there. They needed to see that what I created was good pedagogically, right? That it was good content, but also that it was easy to use. And I wanted them to see. I think a lot of them couldn’t fathom the types of activities that I was able to create with these programs.

So it was really important for me to showcase just a couple of activities just so they see the potential and that they see oh, wow, this is really easy to use. And my students are really going to enjoy doing this. So that’s where the free trial initially came from. It was just I think five or six different activities just to give the flavor and to show them how easy it was to use, but to also see we’re not just we’re not just teaching vocabulary.

We’re looking at reading, we’re looking at writing, we’re looking at speaking. Like we’re really exploring the language through all of this. It’s facets. So I, wanted them to be able to play around with that and put up an activity on the board and just have their students explore it. So that’s where I came from originally.

And then when I started pivoting towards parents, I figured, Oh, it it might be good for them as well to show this to their child and be like, Hey, is this something that interests you? Is this something that my child would do? And when they see the interest to be like, Oh yeah, this is worth me spending the 29 a month for my kid to have access to a bunch of different activities like this.

So that’s where it came from.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think that’s the best marketing you can do is a free course or free product. That’s, great. You mentioned a term and just for the non teachers out there, what is pedagogy or pedag? Pedagogical mean?

Madame Alexa: Pedagogical. So it means that there’s, a whole science to learning, right?

This is what we learn for four years in university, right? It’s how the brain works. How, is a completely new concept introduced to a young brain? And then gradually that learning solidifies in their brain to become something that’s fully acquired. So any, you can throw any fun, colorful activity at a child and they might do it and they might understand.

But how does that play into the building blocks of their knowledge and how do you use those blocks to gradually grow towards language learning and becoming fully bilingual. So that’s all of the thought that’s behind every activity. It’s not just fun. There’s, a, yeah, there’s, yeah, it’s not just we’re throwing in this number of activities just, just.

for giggles there, there is a, goal to each and every one of those and they all create building blocks so that the child can take what they learn, reuse it later, use that knowledge to push their learning further and, then build on that. So that’s what it is. It’s, not just willy nilly exercises.

It’s really there is the method to the madness.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And if I’m understanding it does it come with a weekly video

Madame Alexa: call? Yes, it does. Yeah. Part of the package. Yeah. When the when the parent purchases a monthly access, they have access to the activities drip fed weekly because it was very important for me that we don’t overwhelm the child either.

Sometimes there’s just too much going on and that’s a great motivation killer. So I wanted them to. Take it slowly. And every week when they’re on their home screen, they have a big button that says register for this week’s call. And obviously I have limited spots available because it would get very chaotic with 50 kids in there at once.

So if the parent wants too. They just have to press that button and it registers them for the weekly call. And then they get a a Google meet link that they can then join. So at the time of the lesson every week, and then we get to go over what they’ve practiced during the week. So the different types of activities that they’ve done, what they’ve learned, I get to practice it with them, but in an authentic.

context, right? Like, how do you respond with that knowledge when a French speaker is asking you a question, right? And you got to think on your feet. So we keep those very short. They’re only 30 minutes. They’re very young learners, so their attention span is quite short. And again, we’re going with the idea of we want to keep learning.

So we don’t want it to drag on, we don’t want them to get bored with it. So this way we get to do a fun little activity, I can read them books sometimes we can have like fun little discussions and every month I also do a live book reading that’s free that any, parent can join. They don’t have to be registered.

So if they just want their child to be listening to a French story. read by a native French speaker. That’s free. They just have to join the Facebook page and, we do that every third Sunday of the month. So yeah, just a bunch of different fun ways to, make French learning authentic for them.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s awesome. And the you mentioned, I think current pricing was 29 a month. We get asked a lot about how to figure out what to charge or pricing. Any, advice there in, this education market or how you came up with that?

Madame Alexa: I found that extremely difficult as well. Obviously my pricing for is different from my pricing for parents because we’re talking about an access for 30 children for the entire school year versus a monthly access for one child.

So that was a big moment for me, even for my school pricing was very difficult. I ended up having to drop the price to something. Almost ridiculous and even then it was very difficult to sell to schools because it’s so hard to pass all of those barriers. So I knew that I needed to go with something that was easy to digest.

I think a lot of people when they talk about a monthly membership, they’re very quick to compare it to other monthly subscriptions like Netflix. They come to expect that. As a a monthly subscription price. Obviously we’re talking about education and not just entertainment. So I think that really was an added value to what I was offering.

But you want something that They that’s a no brainer right for them that it’s like this is a very small price to pay for your child to have quality education that’s added to what they learned at school every day. And when I, spoke to many different parents to see the different tools that they had used, what did they, that made sense for them? And that price range came back a lot. The 25 to 35 a month was something that was often mentioned. And I, wasn’t even talking about monthly prices. I was just like what would you be willing to pay? And they’re the ones who kept coming back with the monthly pricing.

And that’s when I started doing the monthly pricing. Cause I was like, okay, this makes sense to people. So let me do that. And and I figured why not just start right in between these two numbers and, go from there. So it is an introductory price right now. I don’t know how long that’s going to last.

I’m thinking that the more, because I’m constantly adding content to these this platform as well. So obviously, eventually, I’m thinking the price will increase. But right now, since it’s all very new I figured this was the ideal place to start. I hope that answers your question. It

Chris Badgett: does.

That was really good. I have found by the way that dollar a day, basically price point is a good price point for certain things. So I’m glad you found that spot. What about expansion or growth plans for the future? I guess you could do more grades or ages and then different countries or like, how do you think about the future?

Where do you want to go? Oh,

Madame Alexa: so many plans. Originally the idea was to create content from kindergarten to grade six. At the moment we only have early learning. So it’s grades one and two. So definitely going to be expanding from. K to at least four and maybe to six. If I see that the interest is there.

It is extremely time consuming to create the activities and to make them as good as I want them to be. So yeah, I have to put a lot of thought into that. It’s a lot of planning. It’s a lot of creation. That’s a lot of testing before it’s put out there. Yeah. So for sure, I want To grow that I’d also like to keep adding on to the current activities that I have so that there’s more I’m going to be visiting Western Canada very shortly so that I can compare the immersion programs over there to the ones.

over here and see what the differences are so that I can better adapt to their needs. So that’s a growth that’s going to be happening very shortly on the school side. Eventually I would like to start marketing this to the US as well, because I think that if this is good enough for English speaking Canadian parents who want their child to speak French, then why wouldn’t it be for, you guys, right?

I think that language learning is so beneficial everywhere, especially today. And especially considering French is such a popular language. I can definitely see some parents wanting to give additional opportunities to their child and, seeing how easy it can be, right? And that they don’t need to.

the language to be able to give their child that opportunity. So that’s something I definitely want to go towards. And you’re the first to hear this. We’re currently developing a, an AI tool, a conversational AI tool specifically for children. So that outside of those. Live 30 minute calls if the child wants to practice their language learning, they’re going to be able to do that with a cartoon version of me, who’s going to ask them questions and respond to what they say.

So we’re working on that right now.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Do you know what that AI tech is called? Oh

Madame Alexa: boy, I do not. Clearly not my area of expertise. That is my husband’s. It’s definitely his passion project right now. So I’m, working on all of the educational side of it and the I guess the knowledge that goes into that.

That data but yeah, I couldn’t even give you a specific name. I have no idea.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. No worries. It’s interesting time for AI and it’s amazing how fast changing and what happens even over a year.

Madame Alexa: Yeah. And the possibilities are just endless. I’m constantly amazed with what he’s showing me that it can accomplish.

I I threw that idea one day because. What I do, right? Every morning I wake up with a new idea and I’m like, we should do this and expected that to be like a unicorn project in 20 years and then he goes no, you don’t understand. This is moving fast. This is possible.

And I was like, really? I feel like it’s way more complicated than you think it is. And he’s no, And within I want to say a week he had the very basic prototype done and the, voice side of it is a little bit complicated given. But it’s, working now. But when he made me try it after a week it was still written.

Which is great for older kids, but younger kids it’s is more complicated. And he had me write to it and talk to it as if I was a kid and it was responding and it was responding well. So I was very impressed with everything that we can accomplish with this. Now it’s, unharnessed, but So many possibilities, especially in learning we, could really take language education to a whole new level before, if you wanted to become a fluent speaker, you needed to put yourself in an environment where people around you spoke that language.

And now potentially we’re talking about. That might not be necessary anymore. Obviously it’s preferred if you’re stuck alone in the middle of a country where French speakers are, scarce that’s not going to stop you anymore, which I think is absolutely amazing.

Chris Badgett: That is really cool.

Yeah. AI as a tutor, particularly trained on your material and style content. There’s just so much there.

Madame Alexa: Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to be able to also analyze the speaker’s level and where they’re at and then recommend specific activities to work on. Their challenges based on that. So that’s the the end goal as well.

Chris Badgett: Adaptive learning. Very cool.

Madame Alexa: Exactly. Good job.

Chris Badgett: A couple more questions before we land the plane here, Alexa. Do you remember the time that went by from, okay, I think I want to try to build this site that does this thing to getting your first paying student or classroom on board?

Madame Alexa: You mean like from, the conception of the idea to actually getting it done?

Chris Badgett: getting it done and having your first customer.

Madame Alexa: So I started getting the idea in 2020 when we were teaching online. I started creating the material I want to say in 2021 or 2022. And I got my first paying customer. I think six months within building like the, bones of the platform. So it was very fast at first and then it came almost to a complete stop.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs definitely live that. Yeah. And, that’s exactly what happened to me. So it was working extremely well. And then It just froze because then it wasn’t just like my, immediate contacts, I had to push this further. And like I said, sales and marketing, I knew absolutely nothing about.

So I think there was a big adaptation period there where I had to be like, okay I’m going to have to put in some real effort for this. So yeah, but yes, initially it happened fairly quickly. I was making more than my costs. So I, was profitable within six months of, creating it. Which I’m, told is something to be proud of.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the, only reason that I was able to do that was because I have an online service, right? So I, it’s not like I have to pay an office or all of these material production costs to be able to do it. So yeah, it’s it’s a whole new era of business now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What advice do you have for somebody else who’s a language learning instructor who has a deep passion like you do and they’re inspired by something like this? What advice would you have for them?

Madame Alexa: I would tell them to have a clear plan in mind and to not expect things to be easy.

I think that teachers already make they, daily they’re doing a job that is extremely demanding. So I know that they’re not afraid of hard work, but this is a different kind of hard work. So I think. Yeah to, be aware that you’re going to need to wear a lot of different hats. And if you’ve got a passion for learning, it’s great because you will be learning a lot.

So for sure to carefully research what you’re going to be, the tools that you’re going to be using. Because they are going to really make a difference in Your, product or your service being successful. But also you want to be able to do your thing. So you need to be using tools that you can trust and so that you’re not constantly handling technical issues versus doing what you’re actually wanting to do.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for that, Alexa. And that’s at madamaise. com. Any other for the people to connect with you on the internet?

Madame Alexa: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So the Facebook page for Madame A’s and the Instagram is at madame. As. ca. And always free for a call if you want more information. So you can just write to me directly.

That’s alexa, a l e x a, at madameas. com. So that’s my personal email. So if anybody wants to know a little bit more, to ask me questions, I am always

Chris Badgett: available. Alexa, thanks for coming on the show and thank you for being an inspiring example of a language learning entrepreneur. I’m really impressed.

I can’t wait to see, we’ll have to do this again a couple of years down the

Madame Alexa: road. Yes, I would love that.

Chris Badgett: Thanks so much for coming. We really appreciate it. Thank

Madame Alexa: you so much for having us. It really makes a difference for small businesses to to be able to be put front and center like that. So I really appreciate it.

Thank you for all the work you do. You bet. Have a great.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Judy Butler discusses about legacy estate planning and the need of having a thorough plan in place to protect families from hardship when inevitable death occurs.

Judy Butler is an expert in legacy estate planning and is associated with The Guardians Gift. Her area of expertise focuses in offering educational programs and training procedures that enable people and families to proficiently manage estate planning. She highlights the importance of having an honest, humorous conversation while debunking some popular beliefs and superstitions around the subject.

Judy draws attention to the negative effects of not having a plan, including pressure on finances, strife within the family, and rash decisions. When inquired about the more straightforward approach to estate preparation, Judy clarifies that it involves more than just creating a will.

She highlights the intricacy of the procedure by drawing on her own experience, which encompasses legal facets outside of the will, such as healthcare directives and powers of attorney. She explains the comprehensive strategy of the Guardians Gift program, which starts from birth and takes into account finances, healthcare, and ancestry.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Dr. Judy Butler. She’s from the guardiansgift. org. She has a whole learning opportunity and training process around Legacy estate planning, how that works, how that, how to do it well to benefit the family.

We’re going to talk about the subject matter. We’re going to jump in to how she’s leveraging the online world to help with their mission. But first welcome to the show, Judy. Thank you.

Dr Judy Butler: Thank you, Chris, for having me. And I’m excited to be here today.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. It’s great to have you. This is a bit, this is a big topic.

It’s a heavy topic for people. So can you explain at a high level how families and children get into crisis? around inevitable death and, estate planning and the legacy they leave behind. How does that play out when there’s no real planning or it just pops up and there wasn’t really, things are in place.

What kind of crisis happens in the lives of people, when that happens?

Dr Judy Butler: People seem to think they know what’s going to happen, and we do at one level, we’re all going to die, and you’re right, it can be very difficult conversation, it can also be very depressing for some people and people are very superstitious, they think, oh, if I talk about it I’m, going to make it happen, and I’m sorry, but it’s going to happen anyway.

So let’s talk about it. And so I try to make it more light hearted and enjoyable to actually discuss and even funny sometimes what’s going to happen because when we don’t plan and I’ll. 67 percent of Americans do not have a plan. But when we don’t plan, we put our family members into crisis. We actually cause them to have to come up with financial resources physical resources.

We actually have to make decisions that we are not equipped to make because we don’t have the information that we need when a planning. a simple plan can alleviate the heartache, the headache, the family dysfunction, the dynamics. I’ve seen so many families that get into turmoil and they fight over things.

Mom told me this, or dad told me that no, they told me something different. And then it just, it’s a, he said, she said kind of thing. And I just think that there’s a simpler, easier way.

Chris Badgett: So what is that simpler, easier way? And can you talk a little bit about, are we talking about like a will or a lot more than that?

And what,

Dr Judy Butler: is it? It’s a lot more than that. This actually comes out of my own personal experience and life story. And that’s for a different time, but it’s more than just a will. People, a lot of people have a will, a power of attorney, healthcare, power of attorney, and a living, will, and.

Like a lot of adult children, my parents had those things as well, but, and I thought I knew, I thought oh, they got a will, that’s all I need. But when it comes down to what happens from the time a person starts their decline towards death, and this could go for years. And then the actual death, that is a place where caregivers actually spend a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of money, trying to figure things out.

And I was like a lot of adults, I thought I already know what mom, dad want, I just handle it. There’s so many legal parts to it that are not anything to do with the will. And so it’s about knowing how to navigate, how to actually ask the right questions, what resources to look for, and the Guardian’s Gift actually starts people out at birth.

There’s a component of genealogy. There’s a component of health care. There is a financial piece to it where we actually look at what does it cost from the time someone begins the decline to the actual death. Now, death and dying in and of itself is expensive, but it’s really expensive to think about.

In home care, nursing homes, assisted living, and what those things are, how they function, what does that mean, and people really get lost in the weeds when they start navigating that.

Chris Badgett: Couple of clarifying questions. Could you explain the difference between a will, a living will, and a power of attorney?

Dr Judy Butler: Absolutely. A will is a legal document that Talks about your assets and what will happen to your assets. A health care power of attorney is a simple legal document and it actually gives someone else the ability to make health life care decisions for you. If you’re not able to make them. An example would be if you went into surgery and while you’re under anesthesia, the doctor comes out and says, Oh we need to give them some blood.

If that hasn’t been decided beforehand, your healthcare power of attorney could make that decision. And of course it’s bigger and deeper than that. People associate it with pulling the plug, so to speak. If somebody’s on life saving measures. Now, a living will is a legal document that actually says what it is you want to happen or not happen about your life and if you were to need life saving measures.

And it’s different than a do not resuscitate, which is something, another legal document that people have towards their end of life. So a power of attorney is different than a healthcare power of attorney because a power of attorney is a legal document that has to do with your finances and handling of your financial arrangement.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. Thanks for clarifying that. And you said, you mentioned the word we earlier, so I was wondering is, it the parent or the child that leads this process or both? Is it, or is it really, are you really focusing on the person, the parent planning for the future?

Dr Judy Butler: Actually Because I’m also a therapist and I’m very, it’s very important to me that we secure the family dynamics as much as possible.

I really enjoy when we can have the adult children as part of the process. Of planning but sometimes senior adults and not always just seniors, but people in general are very private And they are very hesitant to talk about these things with their family members So sometimes an individual or a couple will come and they’ll want to put their legacy estate plan in place And they don’t want to discuss it with their children and i’m I have that conversation with them that at some point, these people, your adult children, are the people who will have to actually follow through with your legacy estate.

So I think it’s important to have the conversation, at least, at some point during the process. Now, some people don’t have they don’t have family members that way. Sometimes I have adult children that come and say, I want my mom or dad to actually talk to me about this, and I’d like to help them, and I’d like for them to get something in place so I don’t end up having to make these decisions later.

So it can be driven by either of the parties that you’re asking about.

Chris Badgett: Can you speak to the the, memory issues that are common Alzheimer’s or dementia and how that factors in and how that affects this, situation when the parent is starting to deal with that and it’s progressing.

Dr Judy Butler: So in the early stages, and of course, my father had dementia and that’s part of my story is. It’s important early on as possible to be able to get these documents and things in place because particularly with a health care power of attorney when. You take like I had to take my dad to the doctor on occasions and I’d have to go with him Because once he was given medication or some instructions for his health care And of course this goes to financial and all other kinds of areas, too I would have to remember those things for him and help him execute those things And if we had it all written down if We had the guardian’s gift.

Then I would have had all those legal documents in place so that when I went to the doctor’s office, I could say, here’s his healthcare power of attorney. And of course they ask for those things these days more than they did when my dad first was diagnosed. But we I would have those documents and the doctors and offices and all the healthcare providers, it makes it a lot simpler for everybody as well as It would have made it easier on my dad because he didn’t have to worry about it.

He would say talk to my daughter. She’s got it. She handles all that. And a lot of adult children already handle it. They go with their families. But having the legal documents in place is just an added extra protection for everybody. That’s

Chris Badgett: great. Thanks for that. And we’re going to get into the guardian’s gift.

In the time capsule in a second and for you out there listening, that’s at the guardiansgift. org. But a couple more questions before we go there. Tell us a little more, Dr. Judy, about your story and, why you were motivated to pursue this what, happened in your situation?

Dr Judy Butler: As I said, Dan had dementia.

And my parents, I grew up blue collar. My parents were relatively poor. Of course, we didn’t know we were poor. Everybody was poor. And so we I grew up that way. And as the, sometimes caregiving falls a lot to the girls, the family, the females, and I was the oldest and I thought, oh this is my job.

I’m grew up knowing that was my job to look after my mom and dad. But it got to a point where. My mother could not physically care for my father. He had begun to fall and he was having some difficulty getting around, and I was afraid, and my mother has a bad back, and I was afraid she was going to try to pick him up, and they were both going to be injured, and I was going to lose both of them.

So it was decided that dad needed the kind of care that we could not give him at home, and that is a really tough decision to make. And so we sought out a facility where they could look after him, but my parents being poor, they had a will and but they had a home and they had cars and they had furniture and their personal belongings.

They didn’t have stocks or bonds or major assets other than their home. But to go into a nursing home, a skilled nursing facility they could not afford that because it’s so expensive. People don’t realize you can’t just go to a nursing home. Somebody has to pay for it, whether it’s Medicaid Medicare, doesn’t pay for it.

They’ll pay for a few days if you’re sick and you need that kind of care, like for the first hundred days, but for extended care, they won’t pay. So you have to be Medicaid, which is you don’t have any money. And a lot of people don’t realize that, or you have to hire people. My parents couldn’t afford it.

So the only thing that was an option for them was for them to sign their house over. Department of Social Services said you have to sign your house over. So at some point, when he passes and you both pass, they would take the house and sell it to pay off the debt. Somebody has to pay. And my mother was like, no, I’m not selling my house.

I’ve worked my whole life and I’m not going to sell my house. So we had to wait a little bit and get the house put into a trust. And I learned all about trust and how those work but to protect the house so my mother would be okay and then to be able to have social services pay for dad to be in a nursing facility, so it was not the actual death and dying piece.

It was the getting to that part. That was the problem. So I learned all about the legal aspects. I went, I learned all about nursing homes and Medicare and Medicaid and how that works, what they pay for what they don’t and then when dad died. I was exhausted and I was physically worn out from running around, taking care of them.

Mentally, I just didn’t have anything left to try to make those decisions. I was like, we got to plan a funeral. I don’t know. And I’m a pastor. I’m an ordained pastor. So I preached lots of funerals, but this was my dad. And so it was different. And when it’s your own, it’s very, hard to make those decisions when you have no energy left.

So the day that my dad, at his funeral, I stood there. And I thought there has to be a better way to do this. Why doesn’t anybody have all of this stuff together? So I set out, it became my mission, which and I made it my life’s work, my passion, that I would help people. And the way that I figured this out, as a pastor for Senior adults don’t like to talk about death and dying, but they do like to tell their story.

And that’s why we start at the beginning. Where were you born? Where did you go to school? Who was your best friend? Did you have any pets? And I ask all those questions in a very simple format, and we’re going into a different space here but it became my mission to make it simple for people to tell their story, list their genealogy, put all their financial information And their legal information and their health information into a format that somebody like their adult daughter like me or their son has access to be able to make the decisions and help their family.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. Let’s dive into the guardiansgift. org. What was your journey into doing this mission? You have a website now and a process and the time capsule. Yes. Did it start with taking one-off clients and just helping them in consulting or, and how did it evolve into a website?

Dr Judy Butler: yes, it did start off exactly as a one off with a legal pad and a few questions. And and people were like why do you need to know that? But I just sat down with people and consulted with them and helped walk them through it and. Then COVID hit because my father died in 2018 right before the pandemic.

So I was doing it from the time he passed until COVID again with a legal pad and a few questions and then COVID and I was like okay, now what? So I had to transition and put it online so that I could not only make it simpler for people, But I could offer more value to people with more questions, more form uploads and all of that.

I looked at learning systems, which is what lifter is and the 1st system that I used was very basic. And but I learned from that. I learned to put the questions online. I learned to put videos online and to make things explainable and easily accessible to folks so that during COVID, they could just sit at their computer and they could actually create their will.

Get their will, their legal documents, tell their story and create their legacy estate. But I knew as we have progressed and grown, there needed to be a better system, a faster system, more elegance, if you will, for people to be able to do it. And I needed it to be simple and fast and straightforward.

And LFTR.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us more about are you doing the website and everything yourself? Or did you hire somebody to do it? How did you put it all together?

Dr Judy Butler: Yes, to all of it. So again, I started out and I had somebody help me with it. A lot of it I’ve done on my own. And I have again, every time I need some help, I’ll find somebody that can help or I’ll hire somebody.

There’s different agencies that offer. people that you can hire on contract. But when I transitioned and the end of 2023 last year to WordPress, I actually went to WordPress and I thought I need something that I can at least access myself. But it’s time for me now to let it go to somebody who is more proficient and more technical than I am.

So that’s why I went with WordPress, because WordPress is I guess the Rolls Royce, if you will, of hosting and such. But as part of that, I was looking for a learning management system, and there are several on WordPress. But I was impressed with Lifter, because it incorporated It incorporates the commercial piece that I needed to be able to present.

This as a format for purchase that people can buy it, but I also needed the quality That they that you guys offer of how to put the system together How could I put the guardians gift together in such a way? That it flows from one lesson to the next lesson to the next module and that everything is there and simple

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

Tell us more about the student or client experience. Are they working through videos? Are they filling out forms? What’s, in the lesson content?

Dr Judy Butler: So it’s, a mixed bag. When they sign into the guardian’s gift, there is a welcome video. So there’s a little video there. There’s also an instructional video that actually walks them through What they’re going to see, what’s coming up, what they need to do and how it functions.

And then they actually get into what are the forms. They are forms. And I chose formidable forms because Lifter actually said, we work well with these guys. And we looked at some other forms, but they didn’t do again, what I needed them to do as part of this process. They actually, it comes up, a question comes up and they just type in the answer.

Where were you born? And then it also has calendars that you can click on the calendar. This is the date. It has drop downs. It has all sorts of different parts of forms that people don’t normally associate with forms. But they’re very simple to set up and LFTR and Formidable work well together. And so that’s why I chose that.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Can you tell us more about what the Time Capsule is?

Dr Judy Butler: The Time Capsule is a series of questions or question prompts. There’s also a space to answer or tell your stories talk about your first pet. So the Guardian’s Gift, the Time Capsule piece is that we take all of your history That you do want to pass down your legacy.

You want to pass to your family your life stories and we’ve combined it with getting your will and your legal documents and we help you do that. We provide that as part of the process and then also the planning piece towards the end. Where you actually plan your end of life service. We help you write your obituary.

We, set all of these things up. They’re different modules. So there’s a birth through kindergarten module. There’s an elementary school module, there’s a high school, middle and high school. There’s college and career, and then there’s transitions and there’s adulting. We call it adulting because it’s where you would get your first, you get married, or your first love, or your first car, or your first house, all of those firsts.

And you talk about those things, and then we take you from the beginning all the way to the end, And there’s also an executor’s checklist that helps your family members after you’re gone, put everything in order. They’ve got it. They know what to do. Oh, yes. I need to remember to turn off the electricity.

For this outside light that’s running, or I need to remember to stop the newspaper. So those kinds of things, there’s a checklist for that as well.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. So in the end, like for the student, I would say, do they end up with do they print something out? And have a, it’s basically becomes the plan,

Dr Judy Butler: right?

So what we suggest, of course you’re doing this online and when you complete one of the modules, we suggest that you save it to a flash drive, which we give you this handy dandy little neat flash drive. We’ll send it to you. And we want you to save it to the flash drive, but we also want you to print it and put it into a binder because it’s, I hate to kill trees, but at the same time, it needs to be all in one place.

There’s also where you can upload pictures and the documents. So I asked people to get a copy, make a copy of their will, their legal documents, copy of the pictures, a copy of diplomas and certificates. And all of that goes in the binder. So you end up with an autobiography. But we don’t call it that. We call it a time capsule because a time capsule is something that someone else will open at some point in the future, and they will actually see things that you thought were important enough to go in this container, if you will.

But we also suggest. If you have someone that you can email it to, that you can email it, and you can send it, so you have it on a flash drive, you have it printed out in a binder, and you email it to your executor or an adult child or somebody, and they have it as well. So it’s in several different places.

Chris Badgett: Wow. I love this, I call this an instructional design. I call it clicks and bricks. You’re doing like this digital stuff, but then you have these physical things like the binder and the printouts and the thumb drive. That’s really cool. And it’s so focused on this specific moment in time and challenge of life.

I really admire what you’ve built here. Let’s look a little more where we started this interview around. What, happens if this doesn’t exist and someone were to pass away and there’s no will or living will or power of attorney or anything. And yeah, what happens when this, doesn’t exist?

Dr Judy Butler: The first thing that happens is if you don’t have legal documents they, the estate, and some people don’t think they have an estate, but they do it may be small but, we still have assets. It will go to probate when these things go into probate, it can take 18 months to years for this to be settled, depending on what a dispute is, if there is a dispute, but even if there’s not a dispute, the state, whatever state that you’re living in decides who gets to handle the estate.

The state of North Carolina, which is where I am, will select someone and most often they’ll select, if it’s a husband or a wife, they will select that other one. But say one of the parents has passed and now this is the other parent that’s has just passed. It could be some person that you don’t know comes in and says, Oh, there’s a nice estate.

Let me petition the courts. to be the person in charge and they have to provide some, information. It’s called a letter of testamentary and they go before the court to petition to become the person who handles the estate. It can take again a long time. Families get into quarrels about things.

Who’s going to get the clock? Who gets it? Surprisingly, you don’t think people are going to fight about those things, but they do. And if it’s stated in the guardian’s gift, then there’s a picture of it. And you say, this is who I want to get it. But if it’s not there, their family fights, people get into arguments that last for generations.

And sometimes they don’t even remember what the argument was about. 10 years later it becomes very expensive. It becomes you have to hire an attorney necessarily. If there is a dispute some of the major celebrities surprisingly have not had wheels. Let’s see the guy that was, The black panther.

Chris Badgett: I know you’re talking about I don’t know his name.

Dr Judy Butler: Okay, he did not have a will but he had He has a spouse a significant partner and there’s been a lot of legal stuff And so the again that it’s you’re already upset You’re having to deal with these emotions about losing this person that you love dearly and now all of a sudden you have to go into court and Fight about stuff because there’s no will there’ve been a lot of major celebrities that didn’t have wills that they would have their estates would have benefited from had they had those things in place.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned earlier that you came from a blue collar background. And you told your story. How is the experience different on either end of the spectrum? Let’s say somebody dies with very little assets and somebody moves on with leaving behind significant assets. How, do we think about that wherever we are in the spectrum?

Dr Judy Butler: People think they tell me a lot. I don’t have anything to leave anybody, but you do you have your stories You have your life stories if you don’t have any physical assets But even for people who are blue collar like my family as I grew up We had a house even you know, you had a car. There are some things that need to be taken care of a friend of mine few months ago and she did not own a house and she was never married and she had no children.

But what happened was she didn’t have a will. And so her friends were, calling and they said we know that you talked to her about this and you, she expressed some of her wishes. So all of her friends were trying to pull together to Create a ceremony, an end of life ceremony. What’s going to happen to her body, and her ashes, and what and so you have to piece it together at that point.

But there are things, even if you feel like you don’t have anything, you do. What’s going to happen to you, your body, when you die? What’s going to, who’s going to pay for the funeral? How is that going to happen? They can’t just stand you in the corner that the state of the United States doesn’t allow that.

And what’s going to happen, just simple things like that, what’s going to happen to your, clothes? You have things. I don’t care how poor you think you are. Even someone who’s on the street, they have sometimes a grocery cart with stuff in it. And I’m not saying that they necessarily need the guardian’s gift, but they have stuff.

Chris Badgett: Can you speak a little bit to the other end of the spectrum? If there’s a lot of assets stocks, bonds, real estate, People

Dr Judy Butler: who have money and who have a lot of assets tend to think that all they need is a will or they have beneficiaries. Now the thing about insurance, it’s important for people to know, is if you have a beneficiary, that is the person who will get whatever they’re a beneficiary of.

If it’s insurance or whatever. And that’s different than leaving things in a will in your estate. So that’s a different legal fault. But people who have lots of stocks and bonds and things like that, they can actually, a lot of that can be consumed in probate. And a lot of fees and things like that will be charged.

You have to hire somebody. And again, it gets into that. battle in the family. It creates dissension where family members fight over certain things. And so what you intend to leave to someone if you have a lot is sometimes consumed just by the process, which is really pretty awful. Where if you could actually have everything set up ahead of time and how it’s going to be handled.

Or even if you don’t want a family member to handle it, you can hire a bank, can take care of your assets for you and your your will and be the executive of your estate, or you could hire an attorney. So there are different ways to handle it. It just depends on what you have, how it’s tied up. Even a business Chris, like you, a business owner who What happens to your part of the business when you pass and have you made arrangements for that?

So if you own a business what’s going to happen with your business? So there’s a lot more to consider But it’s still the same process on the top end of the economic spectrum as it is on the bottom end.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for that can you speak to the the legal aspect where let’s say somebody creates their time capsule and or I guess one question there is like a will you can just write on a piece of paper, I believe, and it’s still like a will.

It’s their signature. But at what point is where does the legal aspect come in terms of. Having an official will and living will is that something to be done with a lawyer and that kind

Dr Judy Butler: of thing? As part of the guardian’s gift we offer it and when you buy into the guardian’s gift you get a what you get those four legal documents You get a will you get a health care power of attorney a power of attorney and a living will so that’s part of the process You’re right And in saying you’re correct that you can just write out on a piece of paper and sign it.

However, if anybody at all comes along and says. I’ve got a piece of paper, too, and I’ve got it, and then another person comes, so it’s very easily to dispute that’s a legal will. The thing about a will that’s important is not only Filling it out and signing it, but having it notarized that is your signature.

So there is a notary on there and also having it recorded in the local county or state wherever that you live so that it’s recognized. That’s really important. So that if it’s on a piece of paper, yeah, And sometimes that, that works okay, but that’s really sketchy, and I could fill out one and say Chris Badgett left me all of his money and his cars and vehicles and everything.

Yeah, that could be disputed very easily.

Chris Badgett: What’s the the time difference in general? You said something where there’s no No, plan is, goes into probate and that can take up to 18 months or longer. What’s, if you have your time capsule and all your ducks in a row and your plan, how long after the end of life does it take for all that stuff to settle out compared to probate?

Dr Judy Butler: Oh, compared to probate, you can settle that out in just a few months. It depends on the family and it depends on the assets and what has to some things are timed if there’s stocks and bonds and those kinds of things. But let me stop right here for just a second and, just say, let me make a disclaimer.

I am not an attorney. Okay, I have the things that I’ve learned and that I’m passing on today Are things that I’ve learned and I’ve learned from attorneys, but I am not an attorney. So I do want to make that clear however as part of the guardian’s gift We also partner with trust and wills and so we have that is set up where you get a legal bonafide, if you will document and those are actually notarized and they are recorded.

So, yes I did need to make that clear.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Thanks for putting that, the legal disclaimer in there. Side question for those who are inspired by your journey as a subject matter expert who was passionate about a topic. You have a great TED talk on YouTube. I saw it. It’s on your website too at the guardiansgift.

org How does one get a TED talk?

Dr Judy Butler: Oh, a lot of work. It’s just you have to you have to make an application to the TED area that you want to, go to. The best way to do it is you just you make application to a lot of different ones. Because they’re in rotations and you have to.

I had to go through, it took me about a year to get my talk together to figure out how to do the application and to go through the process. And I had a coach that actually coached me through that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And that, video is on the homepage of the guardians gift. org. I recommend you check that out.

Dr Judy Butler: Yeah, I did that at Purdue University. Let me give a shout out to Purdue.

Chris Badgett: All right. Awesome. What how would you describe the impact you’ve been able to make on the, in the world with your work here?

Dr Judy Butler: First of all, for me it, it, actually sits in my heart that. This really matters and people tell me all the time when they understand what the guardian’s gift is because I had somebody tell me recently I didn’t, I thought it was about being the guardian of a person and it is that way.

You are the guardian of your legacy for your family. You’re not a legal quote unquote guardian. But it, makes me so satisfied to know when somebody comes to me after there’s been a death in the family and they say to me I did not know this about my dad and he never talked about these things.

And here are all his stories. Or when somebody comes to me and they say, I wish I knew more about X, Y, Z for my mom or my dad. It’s just gratifying when somebody opens up the guardian’s gift and the pictures are there, the stories are there. They don’t have to find the legal documents. They don’t have to look all over and make decisions about what kind of song or scripture or story is to be told or read at the funeral.

It just people, it allows people to grieve in a healthy way and people come back to me later and they’re just so grateful and it just, it makes me happy. This is a passion for me. It just makes me happy.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What what’s the best way for somebody to get started with the guardian’s gift?

Dr Judy Butler: The very best way is to actually send me a message. Either I or one of my team members will give you a call to talk about what it is you want to accomplish. Because we’re not here just to sell something. We’re not here just to do that. The whole point is to make sure that nobody else goes through what I went through with my family.

So it’s about that. So we want to map out the strategy. We want to hear your what is it you’re concerned about? Are you concerned about what happens to your body? Are you concerned about the clock? Who’s going to get it? Are you concerned about stocks or bonds or what is your concern?

What is your fear? And let us help you figure out what the best way to go about this is.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Definitely go to the guardiansgift. org. And I wanted to ask you one more tactical question as we land the plane here from your story earlier. You mentioned coming from a blue collar background with your, parents house.

If they move into the state funded Retirement, they, the state would take the house and the cars to pay the bill. But you mentioned a trust as a, as something that could happen with planning. Can you just explain for those unfamiliar with trust how, somebody in that situation could, work?

Dr Judy Butler: You have to decide how you want to handle the trust. The trust is just a container. If you think about it as, a bucket, It’s just a bucket, so to speak, that you put things in. There are limited number or not of people who actually can put their hand in the bucket to take something out.

So you get to decide what the bucket looks like and what goes in the bucket. That’s the trust. So there’s all different kinds of trust. You hear about people very wealthy people who have Trust funds. And one of the best things that I know about trust is that for somebody who has a disabled child. Let’s say, and they are at the point where they’re in their last years of life. They set up a trust fund to take care of this disabled person.

So the monies are there. The money is just in this bucket, if you will, and they have somebody who is the trustee. Designated that’s the person who can reach in the bucket and take out and they can take out. To make sure that the disabled person is taken care of. You know pay their medical bills make sure they have a place to live food clothes all the day daily living necessities. But a trust is just a container and you can put Most anything in a trust. But there’s a lot of legal pieces that go with that.

And again, I’m not an attorney, but you can set up a trust to put the house in. You can put stocks and bonds and things in a trust and you can put jewelry and furniture. You can put all sorts of things in a trust and you can designate then who gets to be the trustee.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for Claire.

Thanks for clarifying that. And there’s so many nuances to this whole thing. I’m so glad that you’ve built the project at the Guardian’s gift. And I love how it’s not just about assets. It’s about stories and, experiences that are part of this whole process and planning ahead for all that. And it’s a big topic in some ways.

It’s a taboo topic that people don’t want to talk about or feel uncomfortable talking about. So I love what you’ve assembled here. Go check out the guardians gift. org. Any other ways to connect with you or any other resources you want to point people towards?

Dr Judy Butler: They can, of course, send me an email.

They can, and the contact is on the guardians gift. org, but it’s Judy. At the guardians gift dot org. Just send me an email. And there’s a ton of resources. The problem is for people when they go as a caregiver, you go on the internet. You Google something or look up something on the internet, it becomes very overwhelming.

So be sure that the first place that you look, is in your local community. People don’t realize what resources are available locally. A local church or synagogue or mosque they typically will have things that are very helpful. There are hospice homes typically have resources available. Look for a therapist in your area that specializes in grief, counseling, or family dynamics.

Those are some areas look locally 1st and and then look in your state and then expand out as you go. Don’t just go on the Internet and look at something that. Could be a scam or not that’s that’s just out there. Caregiving. com is a good one. AARP also has a lot of resources available and points you in the right direction if you’re going to look for those.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s groups. Are very good. Also,

Chris Badgett: Dr. Judy, thanks for coming on the show and thank you for being a shining example of creating a positive impact in the world with your work and leveraging technology and tools like WordPress and lift your LMS to help on your mission. Really appreciate all you’ve shared today and I wish you all the best in the work that you do.

Dr Judy Butler: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast, Tiago Faria, a coach and course developer, emphasizes the value of a client-centered strategy in getting outcomes.

Tiago Faria starts out by emphasizing how crucial it is to define the target niche and pinpoint pressing issues that need to be resolved. Tiago encourages the use of customer interviews to get insight into clients’ goals and difficulties, which enables the creation of offers that truly resonate.

Tiago advises include short victories to keep participants motivated as well as offering continuous assistance and accountability measures all through the program. His strategy revolves upon crafting precise, targeted offerings that cater to consumers’ urgent need.

According to Tiago, the online education sector offers a means of making a significant contribution to society. In the end, Tiago and host Chris emphasize how crucial it is to put outcomes first since they both feel that real customer success spurs organic business development.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Tago or excuse me, Tiago Faria. And we’re going to be talking about the course creation industry membership, sites, coaching, and most importantly, how to get your students and your clients to get results.

Cause if we don’t get them results. They’re not going to be successful with the program. They’re not going to refer you more business, but let’s just dive right in there, Tiago. How do we get our clients results and not just sell them products?

Tiago Faria: Amazing question, Chris. Thank you so much for having me.

First of all, it’s a true honor to be here. And yeah, in terms of generating results, I think it’s not, but it starts before the course even is created. I believe in my own in my own experience doing this for like already five, six years is we have to start first of all, defining exactly who we’re trying to help.

What kind of person, what context does she have? What kind of problem do we want to solve with this specific problem? Not just any kind of thing has to be something that they actually want to solve right now. So that we, they don’t fall into the trap of maybe someday I’ll do that or, and I don’t buy it.

Or if they buy it by pressure, then they don’t implement it because it’s not something that is urgent for them to solve. So it starts with that, the definition of, the niche. And then we have to what I love to do in my anti marketing approach is to just talk to people. I love to tell my, clients to, okay, you already have clients you’ve worked with before or leads you’ve worked in the past.

Let’s just interview five to 10 people. that you know you could help and ask them questions like what are the main frustrations, what are you dealing with daily, how do you, how does it make you feel, what are your objectives, because then you can collect all those emotional words that are super useful not only for you to craft an offer position your offer in a way that is super attractive to whoever is listening to and so that we are super clear also on what’s the outcome what, are we gonna what results can people expect from it.

So that’s the key thing. So talk to people, be very clear who you’re helping out and what is the outcome. And then also when you’re, in terms of definition of people, you will accept your courses. You also, you should also be very selective on where you’re most valued. Who will be more likely to succeed with you.

And You should be more selective and only accept those that you know. Okay. She’s the right, this person has the right mindset, has the right resources, has the right ability to implement, this is super crucial. Because imagine if you’re trying to help C level single moms to improve their relationship with their.

Child or something like that. If you have a course of 80 hours, it’s quite unlikely that person will implement or even finish the course or even get results. So we have to be extremely clear on exactly if the person has the ability to, implement, not only to buy, of course, if he has the resources, etc.

But the ability to implement and that, those are two important things for us to make sure that people actually that come in have the ability to implement and succeed. And then of course, in order to make them feel like they’re progressive progressing during the course. I love to not only wait not, only make the person wait until the end of the course so that you can have the outcome, but also think of some strategic quick wins that we could add to the beginning, like the first week you, if you do this, you’ll immediately have this cool momentum going on and the person will be motivated okay, this is working.

I can see this, happening. So those, things I think are, yeah. Super, important. And then of course the accountability part, which is something that all my courses, I had this problem that people implement or they got blocked somewhere, or if there has to be some sort of access to, you, the course creator I know most people say, ah, I want a completely passive just create something and sell it to people.

But there has to be some sort of Access to you, it can be live, like Q and a sessions or creating community where you manage that part. They can also be like offline support where the persons can submit the question, something that’s blocking them and you can answer on a loom video something offline.

And there’s, in my opinion, there has to be some sort of access to you. I think I rambled a bit about, I don’t know if it answered your question.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I love that. Tell us more about if we give them access, whether that’s like. An email form, a contact form, or a forum, or group coaching calls, or one on one coaching calls.

How can we best support them when we have that, when we’re holding that space for them and in communication with us?

Tiago Faria: How can we best support you if we have, if they have access to us? Yeah. I think one of the things is to have goals for the people to implement during the week or something something to keep them accountable.

Like in this week you achieve this specific goal or you have this thing in mind that you should be implementing. I think it’s a matter of having something for people to implement. And then simple asking, did you do this, but that you promised you had before. And then I’m trying to unblock, try to find out where people are actually being blocked on.

There’s something that they’re not, it’s not allowing for them to continue. And we should be there in those moments, either in real time and Q and a sessions. And, also I. I I learned that even in group programs where there’s like group Q and A’s and, et cetera, I think it’s, for me, it’s super important to still have one on one access to you.

Either it’s like by chat only or by some, platform or email support. Because I think in my opinion, that’s the way for you to guarantee that people actually reach like as close to possible to a hundred percent implementation and success in your courses. Yeah, I think that’s those are key.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned earlier before getting to results, the offer needs to be clear and the niche needs to be defined. Can you give us an example of what a strong offer in the health industry or the expert industry looks like?

Tiago Faria: Yeah. So imagine, you’re like a relationship coach. And you say something generic like I help you improve your relationship with your partner or something like that in that sense, since there are already so many offers in that area, that message dissipates it is not a strong reason for me to buy now because, okay, it doesn’t resonate with me.

It’s not, I feel it’s something very distant. It’s it’s, not something I’m feeling right now as a problem. So instead of that, of being too generic a good offer is, something that actually solves a now problem, something that is specific and urgent for the person that is on the other side.

So for example in a relationship niche, you could do something like focus on, on, on specific person and a specific context. I help like men that are on the verge of divorce to go back to, to, to normal relationship and, save your, marriage. So it tackles a problem that the person is feeling exactly right now.

It’s urgent for them to, solve. And that, that, that has by itself a very strong urgency attached to it, right? The people, the person wants to back now and it’s more likely that she will buy it from you and really want to pay a premium to, to have you solve that problem for them right now.

So I think that’s probably the, strongest component. Then of course you also have to have the, outcome has to be super clear on what the person is actually going to achieve. How is her life going to be like once it goes through you with, through the work with you? And the way we get there is what, I said at the beginning is by interviewing people actually talking to people and recording those conversations, instead of you interpret, interpreting their words, you actually just record it and transcribe it and okay, these are the emotional words people are using.

And if you use that in your own communication it will resonate. It’s, inevitable that people think, Oh my God, this is my, me right now. This person understands me deeply. So if she understands me deeply, it means she can actually help me. So I’m going to work with Chris or I, yes, those are two, two strong, components that if you’re, if you nail this down, it’s already halfway there halfway there to, have an offer that sells by itself.

Chris Badgett: What got you passionate about the help industry? The whole online course, coaching, information, product online education industry.

Tiago Faria: What got me, it’s it’s, just that I love helping people. I always loved helping people. And once I work at Google for eight years. And I was feeling very limited there in the corporate world.

So when I decided to come back to Portugal to start my own business, I was helping people. I was helping local businesses, helping small, companies. And I feel, I think I started feeling like the person that can help the best is, me. I’m, someone that is providing a service or a consultancy for others and trying to help others generate results.

And, I felt that, okay, I understand myself the best. I’m, my ideal client. And and I think it’s the most abundant business area because you really are helping. People make a difference in the world, you’re you’re helping the community around you, you help, you make others help others, and which is like a compound effect.

And that’s what, yeah, that’s what fascinates me in this industry. But of course, there’s a lot of a lot of, people in this industry that are not focused on generic results, which upsets me. But, we are here to make a difference, right? You and me, Chris, we’re focused on this is the results business.

So we should be focusing on that. And every, if you focus on that, like generate results to people the rest will, come eventually. Because you’ll get some testimonials, you’ll get case studies. People will be very happy to, work with you. They will tell others and it’s inevitable that you have success.

Chris Badgett: I think you mentioned it was about six years post Google that you’ve, come into this industry. Tell us about your experience as a helper, as a course creator, and how you figured out how to package your knowledge, experience and expertise.

Tiago Faria: Yeah, sure. So the first course I created was I made all the mistakes possible.

I made it like an encyclopedia course with everything I knew and, something else, of course. And which is, it was crazy because People to go through a huge program, they become overwhelmed and they will never implement it and they get lost. So this was the first mistake. And then the second mistake was not having a clear, like I said, a clear niche, a clear person that I was helping a clear outcome.

And also I created everything before I, sold anything, I spent like weeks or months creating that encyclopedia to then understand when I sold it Oh, okay. Just one or two, three people bought it. And it really didn’t, it didn’t work out as I wanted. So yeah, it was was many, years of experimenting and mistake, having huge mistakes all the time.

Until I, of course, working with other coaches, mentors that helped me out. Okay. Let’s clarify your message. Let’s make sure you simplify your processes to something that is easy to implement and generate results. It took me, a while, it took me a while to get there. At first I was focused on providing services.

I was a service provider for small businesses and then I transitioned to help industry. And for three years I did all those mistakes and I was falling into complicating my life and my clients lives. With overly complex strategies like funnels and ads and SEOs and crazy stuff like that. And it was only when I started simplifying everything, reached this anti marketing approach to, generate quick results to people and focus on a specific outcome.

That’s when things start to start, started working out, but it was a long, painful process.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the anti marketing angle.

Tiago Faria: Yes, it’s not exactly that I’m anti marketing. I love marketing, of course. But it’s, I’m more anti shiny objects for you to get distracted with funnels and ads and those, the same traps that I was involved in the first few years.

And I truly believe that you already have everything you need. Around you in your own world to start and grow a very cool sustainable business and if you focus on your established relationships you have everyone all of us have a contact list we all have a with friends, family, colleagues, LinkedIn connections, we have an audience that’s some of some sort and we have also a customer list, our previous clients we work with.

So tapping into those established relationships to help you craft an offer that reflects what they actually want to buy your ideal clients. That’s why I say you should interview 5 to 10 people in your network because if you do that you create something that people actually, want to buy and implement and then you can go back to those people to interview and say, Hey, I created this offer.

That answers this problem you said you have. What do you think? Do you know someone that would be interested in that? Only with that small interviewing process, you can start already selling your course or coaching program, et cetera. And then I love to do tapping into your own audience using social media as a, an excuse for you to generate conversations, to talk to people using those kinds of hand raising posts where you say, when you create a video that solves a problem that shows how people can solve a problem in a specific way that’s interesting for them.

And then I’m posting on, social media, something like I created a video that helps you do this. If you want to watch it comment below or send me a message and I’ll send it over to you just as an excuse for you to start generating conversations with your current audience. You can find those people that are ready to buy.

Now, if you do those kinds of posts and you interact with them and use DM Messenger, whatever. So those, for the people who actually want to buy your offer and for those people that are around you, that don’t need your offer right now that you can still make them help you because everybody needs money.

So you can, why not creating a cool referral partner, a referral program around your course. That incentivizes people to send you over potential clients and you can then pay them a commission. But as you see, you only use your tapping into your network. You can immediately get clients and you can immediately have access to big networks because people know people that know people and you can start having people helping you out motivated to help you.

And yeah that’s, the basis of, the on time marketing approach.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I know you created or completed in 2021 a YouTube 120 day YouTube challenge. I’m a big fan of YouTube. As a place to practice making videos and also reach your people and create valuable content. Can you tell us about the challenge you did?

Tiago Faria: Yeah, sure. It was inspired by Mr. Miles Beckler. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. Yeah. He’s one of the good guys of internet marketing. Yeah. So I, was incentivized because I was very introvert person. I even hated public presentations. And I knew that video was a super important skill to, to have.

So I just told myself, okay, I’m just going to destroy this silly belief I have that I am not a creator. And I’m just going to commit to 90 days of 90 consecutive videos on YouTube. And yeah, it’s it’s amazing because you, actually start breaking the silly beliefs that you have by brute force.

You’ll hate the first video, hate the second video. But you just keep going and forgetting what you just published. And at some point you find your voice you, get much more comfortable with the camera. And also you start positioning yourself as a cool partner of of YouTube, for example. It starts seeing you, okay, this guy is answering all the questions people have in his niche.

I’m going to put more eyes on him. And of course I was using. Some kind of SEO little skills for, to make sure that my videos are searchable on YouTube to leverage the search engine of YouTube, because at the beginning, you’re not going to have a lot of suggested videos going on to your site.

So I made a combination of those things, brute force, creating content, answering questions that people have in my niche. And yeah, and then start having comments, a topic of one video gives me an idea for the next video. The, ideas will never exhaust and at some point you became a creator, you suddenly.

Start your life kind of changes because you’re just a consumer before and suddenly after three months you’re a creator now and it’s a skill for life for to create courses, to create content, to sell your programs, et cetera. And yeah, and I, extended for 120 days just, because. Just because I wanted to extend it and overachieve at some somehow.

And it’s amazing. It’s the 90 day challenge is really life transforming. If you want to acquire a new skill of some sort that you’re not comfortable, but you feel it’s important, it’s for me, it’s the best way I did. Afterwards, I did email 90 day challenge. I did also I started with the blog 90 day challenge.

And yeah, it’s super recommended.

Chris Badgett: I’m looking at your YouTube channel. I see you’ve got some great interviews on there. What’s your advice to people to not just make all the content yourselves, but bring in experts and do shows. Like how did you develop the interview skill?

Tiago Faria: Actually, I started interviewing on my YouTube before the 90 day challenge.

I started that podcast because it was my first attempt to start becoming more comfortable in camera because you’re interviewing, you’re passing the ball to the other side, the attention is on the guest. And it was also a cool way for me to. Create a network of very influential people in this sphere.

Cause I was new to the business in Portugal in 2019. So it was, I was surprised at how easily people say, yes, people love to talk about themselves. And even if it’s someone you think it’s unachievable. You’ll be surprised by how people say yes, those the right people, the people that have the right mindset that know that it’s a matter of doing a lot of these things constantly.

And yeah, it was amazing to create that network to have access to other people’s audiences, right? Because those people bring their own audience. So people find me that way. And my podcast actually is still something that brings me people till nowadays. It’s a super abundant strategy. And then if you combine this, of having your podcast with also.

Being a guest on other people’s podcasts, it’s an amazing way to reach to new audiences that you would never reach in, another way, unless you play for ads or you play that game. But yeah, it’s super recommended.

Chris Badgett: Before we hit record, you were talking about expansion outside of Portugal.

And I’m curious one, if you could tell us about your ideas around thinking bigger and two, how you think about. Multiple languages like you have Portuguese content and you have some English content. So how do you, and there’s so many different languages in the world and we really think big.

That’s a, it’s a big challenge and not everybody speaks one language or whatever. So yeah, tell us about thinking big.

Tiago Faria: Yeah, I was not actually thinking big until last year I was focused on Portugal. We were talking offline because I thought it’s easier here. No smaller market less competition.

I know the language. But yeah then my, coach at some point told me, Tiago, you’re. Portugal is 10 million people and there’s 1. 8 billion English speakers that it’s there’s space for everyone. Yes, there’s more competition, but also there’s nobody like you you’re unique, you have your own unique perspectives and and it’s completely true.

It’s, a massive market that is out there that I was ignoring for too long. Yeah, I’m expanding my reach now. And of course having Portuguese and English, I think it’s opens up even more opportunities because there are Portuguese people that don’t actually speak English why not also help those out.

And I think you, if you speak second, third language. I think it’s a great idea to just not limit yourself to one. And if you work online, of course if you’re in this industry, that you can actually help people online, there’s the world is a limit I don’t believe that you should be limiting yourself.

But I was not always like that, right? So here we go. Now I’m the world is the limit. That’s

Chris Badgett: awesome. Tell us more about. Just your your journey into being a coaching client yourself. Sometimes I think it’s helpful to invert, like you help people, but you’re also asking for help from coaches and stuff.

What have you learned from your own. Experience as a client under a coach.

Tiago Faria: Absolutely. For too long, I was trying to do everything alone. I think it’s a natural tendency that we have sometimes at the beginning, you’re talking to everything my own. I’ll just use YouTube buy some courses here and there and just assemble it all.

And it’s possible. But that’s the hardest way. And actually understood it after interviewing all those experts on my podcast, that was a pattern that they all. Early on in their career, they reached out to someone that is already at a higher stage to, to ask for help ask for a mentor for a coach.

And that’s just the short, shortcut for, you to succeed and go faster to where you want to go. It’s But I think it’s crucial and I think it’s the earlier we do it, the better it avoids so many headaches, so many like frustrations. And why, wait? If, you can have a shortcut, someone that already went through your same path and that you avoid many mistakes.

Of course you still make mistakes, but at least you have a clearer path. Someone that already organized the information into Kind of a a guided way for you to, implement and it keeps you accountable. And when I, so after three years, 2021, I finally decided to work with a mentor. His name was Terry Dean.

And he, yeah, he helped me out let’s make a vision. Okay. To be clear where you want to go to keep you like avoid distractions and keep you focused, make a plan, yearly plan, weekly plan. And actually be concrete about who I’m helping. Simplifying my processes. So if I didn’t reach out to him, I would probably still be firing everywhere and trying, falling into all the traps, all the shiny objects.

While I could already be right now, I’m helping the people that actually need me. I will be postponing this, situation, right? And it’s the smartest thing to do, I believe. How do

Chris Badgett: you define your nature, your avatar, the people that you help?

Tiago Faria: How do I define, so I define it as I’m working the people that work in the health industry, which are coaches, consultants, service providers people that actually help others achieve some sort of results.

And my people are trying to get results consistently, but They cringing to think that they’ll have to post reels on Instagram every day, or they’re tired of wasting money on, ads that are just eating their budget. And they think that’s the only way to do it. So then that’s the kind of people that I would really love to help that it’s me in the past basically.

And I love to help them with the anti marketing approach. Okay. Let’s simplify everything. Let’s use the anti marketing method to craft something that your people really want to buy, that you are happy with, that excites you and them, and then tap into your network and then tap into other people’s audiences through podcast guests, guesting or podcasts creation.

So yeah, that’s my main focus.

Chris Badgett: What do you think the biggest challenges or problems that people in the help industry or have, what are the main buckets? It’s like One to five challenges that they have. And I, one of them you mentioned already, which was the, they’re trying to do it all alone and figuring out everything from scratch, like that’s a problem.

What and shiny object syndrome, but what else are they struggling with?

Tiago Faria: And I think the main tendency is also to try to help everyone like anyone that gives me money is a potential client and that’s a bit complicates your life too much because your, messaging is too bland dissipates in the ether and you don’t attract anyone specifically.

Yeah, drilling down the niches, I believe is crucial finding that person that you can actually help the best, the easiest, the fastest. That actually can buy your courses and they can actually implement your courses. It’s super, super important. So being super clear about that and solving the, problem that we talked about the, now the urgent problem.

So super, super clear. It makes everything so much easier. Your communication. Selling, you know exactly what are the object objections and you know exactly what the person wants and also the delivery of your course, right? If you’re super clear on that, you know that you don’t need to put everything inside the course, everything that you know, in the course, there’s only just a couple of things that are crucial for that person to achieve that specific result.

And you just put that and magic can start happening, right? So the niche and the clarification being too generalist is one of the biggest mistakes. And then maybe also the mistake I was making the creating everything before you even sell it, right? I’m a big fan of, selling it first and then going through the program with the first clients to, to make sure it reflects what the market actually needs and wants that answers all the main obstacles.

And I love that a lot of this approach of selling first. And then going through the problem with your first beta users, basically. Because we’re always in our own mind, right? As creators we, think we just create something in our own minds and then I hope that people will buy it. Why not just invert the process and have fun creating it together with, people, and and then it will be something that.

People really want to buy and achieve. So those are the, I think the main things that I find when people I talk to.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us more about your vision, the world you want to create. Or the the, vision of you’re, committed as a creator, like what, is your vision?

Tiago Faria: Yes. So I had the vision of I was limited to Portugal. I wanted to help 3. 14 percent of the population here to start finding their own purpose helping others and get, rewarded by helping others achieve results. And but probably not just by, by my own, of course I will by, my own content, by everything I create until then, by maybe my team in the future that will start spreading the message.

But yeah I, really believe that this is a super abundant area and industry that helps each other out and creates a community of, people willing to help each other. That’s, just something that fascinates me and it’s, super abundant. Yeah, my vision is to keep keep growing, keep keep helping people because the more people I, help the more they will help others and it just multiplies the effect and that’s, fascinating to me.

Chris Badgett: I love that we have a similar vision. I call it accelerate the accelerators

Tiago Faria: and, ah, accelerate accelerators. That’s cool.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Tiago is at Tiago Faria pt. How else can people connect with you and, work with you and, what can they do to go deeper with you? Yeah,

Tiago Faria: I think the, easiest way is to shoot me an email, with any questions you have about what we talk here today or anything you want to know about what I’ve been doing in the past. So it’s tiago at tiagofaria. pt. Or you can, if you want, you can go to my website to book a call at tiagofaria. pt forward slash call. We can have a chat. I just love to meet new people in this industry, brainstorm some simple strategies that people can implement today.

And that’s, those are two ways that I would love to connect with people.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Tiago. Thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it and I wish you all the best on the journey. And it’s fun to be with you on the journey cause we do very, similar things and yeah I’m, excited for you and I’m really glad that.

There’s people like you out there in the world that are trying to help the helpers because when somebody is called to help people, particularly the helpers, it can have a massive impact on the world. So keep up the amazing work. Thank you so much,

Tiago Faria: Chris. Chris was a true honor and I hope people take something out of this conversation today.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Harry Spaight shares insights into selling courses. He stresses the importance of adopting a sales strategy grounded in honesty and customer service.

Harry Spaight, a speaker and author of the book “Selling with Dignity,” advocates for a servant-based approach, particularly in an era where many people harbor disdain for salespeople. He advises overcoming mental health challenges like impostor syndrome by steering clear of a salesy image and focusing on comprehending buyers’ needs.

The significance of employing charm during prospecting, making a memorable impact at networking events, and streamlining the sales process is emphasized by Spaight. Addressing the common challenge of selling something one doesn’t enjoy, he underscores the importance of projecting an image of service rather than self-promotion.

Spaight encourages vendors to participate in networking, attend local gatherings, and prioritize brightening someone else’s day. He underscores the value of establishing genuine connections, acting with decency and empathy, and recognizing that understanding and resolving potential customers’ issues are often critical to closing deals.