My New Course Platform
Choosing a course platform is no easy task.
Anyone who has courses can probably tell you that they’ve spent hours evaluating and trying different options.
Recently I decided to make a move.
Yes, it’s true.
I’ve stopped using Kajabi.
Some of you already know this, but for those of you who don’t, let me just say this wasn’t an easy decision to make.
I signed up with Kajabi at the end of 2015 as a ‘founding member’. I knew that I didn’t want to host my courses on my own site (too many moving parts to keep together… email, payment processors, cart, etc.).
I had been watching the New Kajabi (as it was called at the time) launch and was pretty much sold on jumping in. It was probably one of the longest launches I’ve subscribed to (a couple of months), but it seemed like a great solution.
And it was.
Until it wasn’t.
The founder’s account I had was only $997 for the year (or $97 a month). Which were 10 full Kajabi sites with unlimited everything (products, emails, etc.).
I kept hanging onto that account because of all the features, but the truth was, I was never going to use all of the features (I will always have my content on my own WordPress site and prefer a separate email service provider as well).
It’s kind of like buying something just because it’s on sale and convincing yourself that you’re saving money (instead of not spending the money and actually saving the sale amount of the purchase).
I finally made the decision to move when I was working on a course promotion and wanted to build the landing pages in Kajabi (so customers would check out in Kajabi).
The page builder was extremely frustrating.
All the WordPress page builders give you complete control and freedom over the page. Kajabi’s builder doesn’t.
That’s when I realized…
I’m simply not their customer.
I think they’re a great company and it’s a beautiful product, but it really didn’t fit what I was doing (or would be doing).
I was never going to move my entire business into Kajabi.
While they have SEO built into the platform, my heart will always belong to WordPress first when it comes to creating content and running my own sites (that would be a little sad considering I was The WPChick for 10 years, right?).
A friend of mine had mentioned a platform called Podia (were you thinking I was moving to Teachable or Thinkific?), but I hadn’t given it much thought.
Then I received an email outreach from someone at Podia letting me know that one of my posts had some shortcodes displaying on the page (i.e, the plugin wasn’t working). The post was about choosing the right product/course platform.
No pitch, no offer to look at their platform, just a simple email letting me know there was a shortcode displaying.
That email reminded me to take a look at Podia again.
Coincidence or divine timing? 😉 (of course, I’m choosing divine timing).
I hopped on a call with them, had a walkthrough, and within a week everything I had in Kajabi was migrated to Podia (we also have a separate account for the Content Creators Planner).
And I’m saving $30 a month.
It has everything I need (another drawback to Kajabi was that I could only send affiliates to a Kajabi landing page, not a page on my site in order for them to get credit and be tracked properly. Podia allows any page. Nuff said).
I’m hosting a live stream with Len Markidan of Podia on Thursday, at 10:00 am PDT on my Facebook Page.
I’ll send you the link for the live stream tomorrow but in the meantime…
