How to Choose the Right Platform Without Overwhelm

Jeff: gotta open up the can of worms and just talk about, platform overwhelm. I get all my leads from another person. And it's worked great. I need to go and have something that I can call my own as well. So just trying to figure out, how to start that, where to go. I've got a school group and I'm like, yeah, that didn't play out as good as I thought it would. And so looking at going to Mighty Networks and all of a sudden I have a thousand options to go sift through.
So, bought into some stuff, all that kind of. Jazz, just don't know where to start. Do I just need something to start sending people to? I like those, that link idea, but I don't have a list. I don't have a group. I've been coaching for years and I don't have any of my own marketing. How about that for a giant question?
Paul: that's like a landmine question. So, but 'cause every, everybody's gonna have their own preference and most likely their preference is whoever influencer they got exposed to when they came into this world, they bought the product to service that person was an affiliate for.
And then they, absolutely love or hate. What, what I would start with, just so we can open it up, is can you give us a wishlist. just a short list, but I would do non-negotiables and then like the haves, because depending on what your must haves are, like what you need this thing to do, that's gonna totally change.
what I. Product or per, like you just went through an experience with, school, it's a great platform. A lot of people are promoting it. Most of the people are promoting it, have an affiliate link for you. you know, so they can make money off of you making the decision. And it has a long roadmap ahead of it.
It doesn't do all the things. So when you get it, it does some things really well, but then you have to buy into like five other programs and connect them all to do the other functions. 'cause they, they're just, they're still newer and they need to develop more. so there's pros and cons. Not everything's perfect.
So do you have like a must have?
Jeff: so I do have a partnership with another guy. I don't want to take up too much of your time. he does circle, it had a huge community. It's got like 22,000 people involved in that. We took out the community aspect entirely just to go to e-course.
So you go there. There's no interaction. and so I do public speaking coaching, and thought, the way that I could jump into that would be have the community and do the coaching and all the courses that we do anyway, so like I have it all mapped out. I have, I. Been coaching for years, putting the program together as a piece of cake.
just want to have that community aspect. That's why I was, I was like, I'm just gonna do my own circle thing. And I'm like, I dunno. Then I ran into Mighty Networks and I'm like, oh, that sounds pretty cool. And I got, you know, shiny syndrome, whatever you want to call it, but I just need to get out there, get something going.
the goal is to have a hundred members of $49, a month for $5,000 a month. recurring income. That's, that would be the, the biggest victory, that we have. So I've got, you know, 40 odd members in my school. One, some are paid, some are not. It's just a kind of a mishmash, so I want to wipe it out, start from scratch, get to a hundred paid people.
Is there anything that you feel school is missing for you specifically right now that is causing you to want to look at, you know, what's the shiny object that's somewhere else that is lacking and also does version 1.0 of your membership need that feature?
Yeah, good question. I think the, the issue with me, not the platform, okay. I look at all my marketing efforts, you know, over the last six months and they're amount to zero. So I'm pretty aware of that. I'm not sure if a new platform's gonna be the same problem in a different location, I don't know.
Hard for me to pinpoint that. That's need to start.
Melissa: That's good.
Paul: So I'm not sure if anybody wants to give any, we gotta be careful 'cause We don't wanna turn into commercials for, you know, platforms per se. we helped a lot of, help a lot of people over the years with a lot of tech stack.
Mm-hmm. You know, scenarios. so maybe we're, I'm just gonna kind of jump in, right out the gate to, to kind of help guide this a little bit. before we open Pandora's Box what I recommend is that you make a list of all the features That you want and that you need. no restriction, just make a list, whether it's a spreadsheet or a piece of paper, just like what are all the functions that, that you want in a platform?
Because for some people, part of that is I need it to collect money, I wanted to send email. You know, others are like, oh, I can get that somewhere else. So like, what are all the things that you want this platform to do? And then in a separate column, I want you to write down like, is this.
The minimal viable product, like if this is the MVP, like version one, like the iPhone one, or is this a nice to have but it can wait until later. So guess some of these features might be on more expensive all in one solutions later on. And I'm just letting you know, all of us are most likely not gonna stay with the platform we start with.
So it's better to just like, pick a platform, go all in on it. It's not gonna be perfect. The thing that, and you already said it, and this is something we learned the hard way through the years. your customers just wanna know how to log in and get to the content you're promising easily.
That's all they want. They don't care about the shiny objects. They don't care. All the things that we all geek out about. We're all concerned about, like, oh, this looks flashier and this looks cooler and more modern. They don't care. Like, can they get to the resource? You said there's a valuable download there.
Can they get to the download easily or do they have to go through 25 steps to find it? I'm, I'm just letting you know, we all geek out and we all get in our head about it, but we have friends that are in all the platforms and they make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year.
And they just do it. Now, there's a certain point for all of us, you're gonna feel like you outgrown the platform. The platform you loved is like lost their way or they went down or something happened. And in that moment you're gonna look at it and go, well, dang, I'm making $5,000 a month. I can pay a VA $2,000 to move all of it for me over to the other platform I really love.
then you don't have to worry about it. So I'm just letting you know none of the decisions are perfect and none of them are permanent. We started it 10 years ago. Well, we didn't start there, but we, we were one of the early adopters of ClickFunnels, you know, before Russell even came out with the book and he had a hard time selling it.
'cause most people didn't understand what a funnel was at the time, 10 years ago. And you know, we were, we were part one of the first several thousand people that got into it and we went through the bruises and scrapes and bumps along the way. There's a certain point we're just like, on the membership and course deliverability end, it was too restrictive.
So we went to wishlist member and we also spent a little over $40,000 to customize a complete custom experience. And while we were at a mastermind teaching at a live in-person mastermind, one of our members came up to us, and said, Hey, Paul, Melissa, the membership site is currently pointing to an adult website.
Just went to let you know. We were like, what? So we abruptly stopped the mastermind. We got on a computer and I had to reroute the URL, but one out of the 30 plugins that we had on WordPress, one of them was outdated, and a hacker hacked into our database and took over the entire website, inserted malicious code into, to the database and the everything.
I tell this story every once in a while, but I just wanted to use it as a reinforcing and learning experience for everyone that you can skip what we've done. a week later. Just as like if we had to push everything back and it was like, okay, we need to give all of our members and all of our course owners, I.
Access to their content. So I think it was Thinkific at the time. It was like a $97 month solution. It was just like, we need to house all the videos so you know, very quickly content so we don't get all these support calls, you know, because our current platform was completely down. And so Melissa and team member, boom, boom, boom, boom.
They got everything up within a day or two, you know, like overnight, you know, working on it for hours. an interesting thing happened after that. We started getting messages in our Facebook groups for our course owners and also our members, as well as emails people thanking us for finally putting a platform together that is so easy and intuitive to be able to find all the content, you know?
And it was like, what? Like this is a $97 month solution. We, you know, we just. Came out of a $40,000 custom thing that we thought was like the, the, the ish. And it gave us perspective in that moment. It was like, Ooh, we're geeking out about all these features and people just wanna know how to get to the content.
They don't care about the flashiness, they don't care about what the new whizzbang they interface type thing. so I would just pick one and go all in on it. Because it's, it's creating a stumbling block, a brick wall for you that doesn't need to exist, and just commit to it. Because none of your members are going, man, I would've signed up for you, but you're on circle.
Or, you know, I'm, I'm against logging in the circle. don't know what circle is. They don't know what Mighty Networks is. They, they're just gonna log in and they'll accept however you're presenting the content, you know, so I would, I would just like, just pick one and, and go with it.
Hopefully that's helpful.
Melissa: Is there anyone else that wants to just contribute anything to when they were picking a platform? Oh, go ahead. Diane.
Diane: I just wanted, so Jeff, I wanted make sure I understood. You're saying, you're trying to decipher which, platform you wanna use now for your people? Was it, did I pick that up correctly from what we were talking about?
Jeff: Yeah, I have one.
and just getting started on my marketing, everything gets funneled to me. I have eye paying clients, but I got nothing like, it could be shut down, you know, in six hours and I go from, you know, a hundred to nothing. And so I need something that's my own that I own.
Diane: Okay. I was just thinking what popped into my head was maybe you could write down those questions Paul was talking about and maybe take it to chat GPT and just see if they can outline and
break it down for you and then you could like print it out or look at it and compare everything and see what marks the boxes that you're looking for.
And that might help you kind of narrow things down without feeling so overwhelmed
Paul: love that.
Robert: Robert, I was gonna jump in as well to piggyback off of what, Paul was saying about pick one and, and go with it.
One of the things to keep in mind as well is that these platforms aren't static. They're going to change, right? The features are gonna change. The functionality's gonna change in advance. So, where you are today and where the industry is today isn't where it's gonna be a year from now. in terms of what the platforms are able to do, and they're all jockeying for position.
if that's one of those things that, that helps you make a decision of like maybe just going forward with what you have or I to, you know, Paul's point which is sort of make that list of what are the must haves and see if you could find them. I just went through this, I was building.
My website out and I was adamant that I was going to have complete functionality for everything. You know, I'm a big, big believer in the don't build on rented land kind of thing. and even sometimes don't build on paid land because when that company goes out of business, you, you're host. But so I was like, I want to have everything inside WordPress, right?
And I want to have a complete solution built inside WordPress. And so I was in the process of Being able to host e-course and being able to host, a membership community and do, you know, and do all these things. And it was getting to be very complicated just to have that all in one place, and to do it well.
And so what I ended up saying was, okay. I have a website which needs to have certain things on it, right? my digital course solution on there works very well and I can host my blog easily. Super great. Awesome. That's a good thing to do. The membership community, I wanted to have the, the ability to do discussions, right?
That is not an easy thing to set up well. on WordPress and to Paul's point, he's absolutely right. We're more concerned about the way it looks and the bells and whistles than other people are. but I, you know, I could have created a forum or something like that, and there's a lot of like, discussion board plugins.
I didn't like them. I fell into that. I had that same trap. I said like, I don't like this, I don't want to do this. said, screw it. I'm gonna go with a paid solution. A third party, and I'm gonna purchase a membership hub. like that I found a membership solution.
Does it do everything I want? Almost. I did have to buy one additional thing, to be able to plug in a calendar. And show people a calendar of what our events are. But that was me. Right. I mean, and I think, you know, Paul kind of alluded to this, you could do so much if you, if you get out of the bell and you know, the shiny object syndrome, the bells and whistles.
I've seen complete systems set up where it was an email service provider and a Google workspace.
Paul: Mm-hmm.
Robert: And they're literally just sending links around to people. now maybe if you're coaching and wanna build a community and all that, that might not be. The so solution for you, but there's a lot of things that you can work around fairly easily and so I would say for your community and everything, absolutely.
You know, I kind of pick one that is working really well for you and know that you can change down the road. And I would even step back and say maybe if you've got your own website already, you might think about the website for certain pieces that are easy to manage there. And then another, your community, you know, solution.
To handle that piece. 'cause some community, so don't do sales pages, right? So you have, or you're gonna have a, a something to do a sales page. Other ones do it and they do it well. So you could go that route. But, I have felt, personally, I felt so much better when I finally said, screw it, this is what I'm doing.
I can change later. Let's just go, let's just get it going. that. Relieved a lot of pressure on me. Am I a hundred percent on everything that I've got? No. But it'll work and it'll get it done.
Paul: I love
Robert: that. Awesome. Awesome.
Melissa: Thank
Robert: you.
Paul: And it looks like Natalie has her hand up.
Natalie: Yes. Thank you.
I'm in a. Community right now where I'm, I'm the end user and not the, owner of it,
So she has a membership Well, she owns Kajabi already, so she decided to move her community there, and so I understand because for her it's all in one place. But as the end user, I just wanted to make a little comment that Zoom is very reliable and the video quality is really good.
And like right now I have a picture behind me 'cause my office is not really very pretty and I have a chair that's, you can't see it, but it's one like, Robert has where it's got a head thing. Mm-hmm. And so as soon as we got into the community that she moved us to just for our once or twice a month meetings.
It started doing all this weird haloing around my head and it kept moving and shimmering like, I mean, it was like driving me insane. And I said, you know, I don't like this as an end user. I cannot use this. I don't like it, and I don't wanna take my picture away. So she, and you can't, when you go into that community, we were taken 5, 10, 15 minutes just to find the right link.
To get into the live session. So before we had a link, we just go to it and boom, you're in. So I said, well, this is just, I hope, useful feedback that for people that use a picture, this is really distracting. And then finding the link and wasting time trying to get in is a problem. But for her it's easier because it's all in one place.
And for me as a user, it's not, it makes me almost not wanna do it. Mm-hmm. So that's another little bit of a factor is to think of the end user's experience.
Melissa: That's a really, really good point to, again, you might like all the, the things, but like how is it gonna be for the end user and how easy, easy it is for them to, to get, find things, get things.
Absolutely. That's great. Yep.
Paul: Yep. Piggybacking on that, we, we all should probably do surveys to our members every once in a while and create open dialogue for them not to feel penalized that they do give constructive feedback. it's amazing how often we make assumptions on like, oh, everybody knows how to get to that.
Everybody knows how to do that. and then we find out later on. yeah, that, it, it's just one of those things that, we need a feedback loop. All of us every time we assume that people know how to do something, we get. Surprise. Well, I, I don't think we get surprised anymore.
people don't read. People don't read these days, so, even for us, it's like if there's a calendar thing or anything, like, depending, doesn't matter the technology or anything, it's just we're, we're telling people in several different spaces. Even for this call today, it's like. We're telling in a Facebook group, we're telling, you know, putting the link there, we're putting the link in an email.
You know, we're, we're going multiple different places, with it at the same time. Yeah. so all of us definitely need to think of the user experience. that's why we started doing onboarding, that was really important to us in our coaching programs because we were having people that were just like, oh, I never got the login information from you.
Mm-hmm. And it's like, really? It was sitting in their spam and promotions folder. I was like, oh my goodness. Like they bought and then they were sitting here, they, and then they finally get on a call with us and we come to find out, like they don't even have, they thought the deliverable was the Facebook group, you know?
'cause they were able to click to join it, you know, from the thank you page. And, they didn't realize all these other things that were supposed to happen. So user experience. Thank you for sure. Natalie. That was great.
Melissa: That's good.