Hi Lovely Simplerista,
In this business, there are 3 broad ways you can go about building your knowledge and expertise into a profitable, thriving business.
- You can sell your content through one of the marketplaces out there, like Skillshare, Udemy, Lynda, etc.
- You can put something together using Wordpress and various plugins and third-party systems
- You can go with a "high-end" system that handles (almost) everything for you in one integrated package - that's where Simplero fits.
Let's look at each one in turn.
Marketplaces
The advantage of the first one is that you don't need to do anything yourself, really. You don't need to market your course, you don't need to have a website, you don't need an email list, you don't need anything.
The downside is that you don't have much control over your business. Without a list and multiple offerings at multiple price-points, you're not in control of our business.
Also, the cut the marketplace takes is outrageous. On all of Skillshare, which has more teachers than we have, the total amount paid out to teachers is $4.5 million, and teachers make $3500/year on average. By comparison, teachers on Simplero have made over $20 million, and that amount is shared between much fewer people.
If you want to make a living for yourself, forget about the marketplaces.
Wordpress + Plugins + Various Systems
The great thing about Wordpress is that it's so ubiquitous, plugins are plentiful, and most of them only require a fixed up-front investment, rather then recurring fees. It can feel like a safer bet if you're not sure how committed you are to this business model. In reality, though, if you have to spend $500 up-front, only to discover within a few months that this business is not for you, then you're still out more than you would've been if you'd spent four months on Simplero before realizing it.
But the primary downside is that you have to play the role of tech genius and systems administrator trying to integrate all of these different systems and make them play well together. When they don't, you have to find where the fault lies, whom to contact, who can do something about it, and hope that you won't be bounced back and forth between customer service for these different systems. The biggest problem is that these plugins and systems are constantly updated, and so the thing that used to work yesterday suddenly stopped working today, and at first you may not even notice, and when you do, you have to figure it out.
A lot of our customers are folks who started out this way, and quickly realized they were wasting way too much time and negative energy managing all of this. If your time is worth just $50/hour, and Simplero can save you for just 2 hours a month, then it's essentially free. And that's not even taking into account the other expenses that Simplero saves you.
High-End Integrated Systems
The high-end integrated systems are InfusionSoft, Ontraport/Office Auto-Pilot, and Simplero.
These are systems that handle everything you need from email marketing to billing to content delivery in one package. Some are more integrated than others. With InfusionSoft, the membership sites are an add-on that's not as cleanly integrated with the rest, because it was an external company they acquired. With Ontraport, you have to have your member sites on Wordpress, so you still end up having to maintain that.
Compared to the other two, Simplero is easier to use, it's better integrated across all the features that you need, and it starts at just $100/month versus at least $300/month for the others. That's an instant and significant savings in itself, but you also save a lot on training your assistants, because Simplero is much easier to use.
Our customers who have migrated from Infusion or Ontraport frequently report saving a few thousand dollars a month, because they no longer need an army of assistants and helpers to do simple things. They can just go do it, it's faster, easier, funner, and a lot cheaper.
I hope this was helpful in understanding how Simplero fits into the bigger picture.
Here are comparisons between Simplero and InfusionSoft and Ontraport.
New Features in Simplero
This week we launched the ability to use any available Google Font with Simplero.
We also added a box in your admin interface to help you remind you of your "Big Why", your purpose for doing all of this. I hope you find the reminder helpful. We all do what we do for a reason, and this is a way to help remind yourself of that why, so you can keep the focus and motivation going.
Random Links from around the Interwebs
Love this story of a book on Amazon priced at over $23 million.
The new iPhones look to be waterproof. Awesome!
News is different.
With love,
-Calvin