Restream.io on 2024-09-19 at 11.01.38
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[00:00:00] Pip: Hello. Today we are talking about comparing the top course platforms and deciding which one is right for you. Because as marketers, we know how much experience do you have with different platforms, like besides websites. We both have had the opportunity to look into.
[00:00:22] Pip: course platform. So we wanted to talk about it with you today, see what you're picking and get into it. So I'm Pip Seymour, digital media, and this is
[00:00:30] Rina: Rina Little from Littleworks Indie Media
[00:00:32] Pip: And we are going to talk about what you should be thinking about when picking a course platform
[00:00:40] Pip: Marina and I talked about it in the car yesterday when we were together.
[00:00:45] Rina: We did. Yeah, so basically the title, we always create our titles quite early on in the process of what we're going to talk about and then sometimes through the tight through the working of the content, we realized that maybe the title wasn't quite accurate. So we're not going to look at the top four.
[00:01:02] Rina: We're going to actually talk about how to approach. How to approach it and what we found with the top ones that we've worked with. And they're, so the ones that we really looked at that we've all worked with, or that Pip and I have worked with is LearnDash, Kajabi, Thinkific, and then, Mighty, Kajabi.
[00:01:22] Rina: Communities and did you say that you worked with school?
[00:01:25] Pip: I've been on Rina it looks pretty interesting
[00:01:29] Rina: Yeah, I think that's the one that I know the least also, but it might be something that's up and coming I've seen it. A few times now, so it should be on the list also And first of all, there are two kinds of two kinds of platforms.
[00:01:44] Rina: There's the one that you self host with your website on your own server. And there's the one that you pay a monthly fee to that self hosted. So same with websites so you need a place to put all the files and to send people to. That's your first consideration. And it doesn't, we, what we found is that for the communities that are actually, and the the courses that are actually selling, it doesn't really make that much difference in the cost, once you get going, because even though it seems like paying a monthly fee is it's an obvious payment, but when you start to upload LearnDash, Pip, you were saying that it was all in the, Extra plugins that you need to run LearnDash.
[00:02:30] Rina: So LearnDash itself is fairly inexpensive. You do have to have some technical know how or some professional help to get that installed and organized on your site. Generally, that's what I found. Most of my clients haven't been able to install it and organize it. But, it's, not too terrible if you are tech savvy and, feel confident on most platforms, you might be able to do that yourself.
[00:02:54] Rina: It's also I've seen a variety of, ways that it it ends up looking so, and it really depends on what you're able to do and how you choose to do the setup. So some look really good. There, I didn't even know they were learned dash and then other ones I can spot right away. And I think to myself, Oh, this must be a learn dash course.
[00:03:16] Rina: And it's a little bit, ugly, quite frankly, and not very smooth. So that's one thing, but the ones that are done well are actually. Quite nice. They look,
[00:03:28] Pip: what makes some difference and how can you not tell it's LearnDash? That's very interesting.
[00:03:33] Rina: Yeah. So basically what I can do to tell okay, so what I do to tell, okay I actually read the code.
[00:03:43] Rina: So that's the easiest way you can go and view developer code. That's one way. But there's like. As an aesthetic to all of them, if you really start to look at them, you can start to tell which one's a Thinkific. It just comes with repetitive use, and definitely Mighty Communities has a very particular look that's unique to its own.
[00:04:02] Rina: Some of them look similar to each other. Mighty, Mighty Communities is Completely different because it focuses on community first. Whereas I think the other platforms focused more on the course and how to navigate through the course. And they also have things that are really fun or can be fun. Prevented from seeing future content before you've completed the course content that is next.
[00:04:27] Rina: So there's a sequential aspect to it and they can also offer a If you want to offer certification of any kind, then you can also have quizzes on there to, get people through the course. So they finish the quiz, then they get on to the next module. So that's LearnDash does that and Thinkific and and, Kajabi all do that.
[00:04:52] Rina: I don't think that Mighty Communities does that, but I'd have to check. So what we'd like to do is now go back and formulate a nice little checklist little table to add to the group in the cyberpunk marketing mixer cyberpunk geek marketing
[00:05:09] Pip: mixer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Funny name, but great people.
[00:05:13] Rina: Yeah we'll put that in there for everyone at a later date where we'll do a comparison chart on all of the platforms that we talked about today, but okay, so I think Yeah, let's continue to talk about how to approach and then we can go on and pip actually I'd love to know which is your favorite platform.
[00:05:35] Rina: I know that you've run courses on a Few of them. I've changed love and I'll, tell you what I love at the end and we can see what, anyone else out there, if they've used something, what they love and why they love it or why they don't love it or what aspect they would love, wish there was. Pip, you talked about, the things that we don't think about when we're organizing a course.
[00:05:59] Rina: So if you think about a course, usually you're thinking about what's the course content? How do I get it up there? What does it look like? And how's it organized? But, and that's the basics that's the basics of getting a course up there. But what you really need to think about is who have I got to take that course?
[00:06:15] Rina: Where are they coming from? Do I have a marketing plan already organized in advance? Because you want to actually know these things. Because I came across a problem with somebody who used a program that wasn't intended for live courses. What was that? It wasn't intended for live courses.
[00:06:35] Rina: Pardon me? What was that? What do you mean what? What was it? What was
[00:06:38] Pip: Platform?
[00:06:40] Rina: Oh, the platform ended up being a square, space. So there is, now I don't want to, I don't want to mislead anyone. There's a space for courses up on that, that platform. And, it's actually robust and there's a space for selling products and space for selling courses.
[00:07:02] Rina: So what happened in this particular case is that these people don't have an online course per se, so they just wanted to sell courses and then have people come and be in person or be on Zoom and organize it outside of the platform. They didn't have an online Course in that same way. And so they chose to sell them using products, which didn't really work very well, because what you want to do is you want to send reminder emails.
[00:07:28] Rina: Welcome emails and reminder emails are very good at getting people from purchasing your course to actually starting your course, get onto the second module and all of that. And the way that the marketing on that. Platform works is that you can only do automations from this, the purchase date, not before the start date.
[00:07:49] Rina: So that caused a bit of a hiccup when it came to implementing automations, because of course, Squarespace and all of these other, Self hosted spaces or hosted platforms. There's no ability to go in and tweak that and make it how you want. If you have learned dash, you can generally custom code things or get them to change and add, a product requests.
[00:08:15] Rina: You can actually do that. So it makes it a little bit harder. So you want to think about how am I, what kind of automations do I want? How am I going to market this course? And do I want to send the welcome email? Just the welcome email as the automation. And then I want to do, I want to do all the other automations from maybe MailChimp or some other auto email automation platform, which is also.
[00:08:41] Rina: Doable, but you have to like really think about that. So that's the one one hiccup that we had the other and then it goes into the same I don't want to just ramble on do you want to say something? It's
[00:08:55] Pip: good because I've struggled with this right now I have so many options to pick a course really and I just you know, I so my experience was that I Thought you know, I was on one platform.
[00:09:10] Pip: I Felt it was too expensive, so I moved to another platform that gave us the opportunity to cut up our videos and have somebody else figure it out but then I didn't think it looked as good. I didn't think it flowed and, the pricing was the same. Like we just got nickel
[00:09:28] Rina: and
[00:09:28] Pip: dimed. So
[00:09:30] Rina: just to clarify for those people out there, you went from a hosted solution to a self hosted solution, which is the LearnDash and there are more expensive self hosted solutions, but LearnDash is the one that most small business owners, people starting out usually check into because it's annual fee is actually quite good.
[00:09:48] Rina: It's a good. It's priced plugin, but you're right. You get nickel and dimed later on in the same way. And you have to have a lot of tech savvy. It's like
[00:09:57] Pip: The, comparison between like, when you're telling a client, okay, get, you would do well with the WordPress site or you would do well with the Squarespace site and why you would recommend them, right?
[00:10:08] Pip: If. If clients don't want to have all the control or they don't want to think about some things like image sizing can be heavier on Squarespace, right? But we've learned over the long run, actually it all matters.
[00:10:26] Rina: So the next thing, the next issue that I noticed so we think about price and we think about automations after someone's purchased, we've covered those.
[00:10:36] Rina: The next piece that we want to think about is community. A lot of spaces are starting to build out community areas. I believe Kajabi has a more robust community space now definitely Mighty Communities is focused on the community space, but. You can't you can't thread messages on mighty communities, which prevents me from participating in the conversation by
[00:11:03] Pip: messages.
[00:11:04] Rina: So usually if you look at Slack or Facebook, you, somebody makes an initial post and then all the responses to that post go into comments, replies, and it's easy to follow a whole conversation. On Mighty, Communities, you get it's just one straight up conversation. Like using Google Hangouts where everybody's chiming in on different topics at they're answering something else and they're they may, tag the original poster.
[00:11:34] Rina: They may not but, and it's just very, it's super hard to follow. So I actually dislike that piece completely, but. Yeah so you have that piece to the community and many people are still doing their communities on Facebook pages sorry, Facebook groups or they might choose a Slack platform or they might I love
[00:11:58] Pip: Slack for, and just, I, because I'm always in there, I find it a very fast, effective way to get responses, give responses.
[00:12:06] Rina: I I like it too. I do like it too. I prefer Facebook because you can have pictures and stuff and it's easier. I'm Used to it a little bit more because I'm so old. Old people are on Facebook. We got told at the, I'm on
[00:12:19] Pip: Facebook,
[00:12:20] Rina: we got told at the conference, only old people are on Facebook. I just I'm, on Facebook and I, my headphones just died.
[00:12:26] Rina: I know. Anyways, excuse me. Excuse me. Sorry. So basically what happens is you need to figure out where your community is going to live, and you need to think about your that long term because algorithms change as we know. We don't own any of those, community based platforms. You'd have to literally I don't know if LearnDash has something built in, or if we have to find a whole other plugin for the website in order to create that community thing.
[00:12:58] Rina: I did use it once for one client. I used, Google Groups, but I don't think that really exists in the same way anymore. That's interesting. I know that we had, we sunsetted that from one of our clients and I can't remember why, because I do know that I'm still on a listserv for Google. But, but we did use Google groups in a, behind a membership.
[00:13:23] Rina: Login. So that worked out okay, but you have to figure out where am I going to put this community piece? Because we all know we learn better what together and you want to engage people and, have that sense of community in order to upsell them or maybe Find out if any of those people are going to be good longterm, clients or, anything like that or even hiring people.
[00:13:49] Rina: I know that some of the groups that I'm part of, they do the training and then they're also always on the hunt for the next like rockstar in the, group to, to hire them as one of their coaches or
[00:14:01] Pip: interesting.
[00:14:03] Rina: So that's, so you want that community piece for sure. If you don't, then sometimes those the, course spaces end up quite dead, like people will buy them, they'll try them, they'll forget about them, they don't come back because there's no community piece that they're logged into regularly.
[00:14:21] Rina: And then you want to think about are you, is your class completely? Video delivered. Are there downloads? Do you want to have a weekly or monthly question and answer time? Do you want something like that? And then what platform are you going to use to deliver that piece too? Because you could do Zoom, you could do, I think, was, is it is it Kajabi that you use that has the, Zoom?
[00:14:48] Rina: Yeah, Kajabi
[00:14:48] Pip: has, yeah. It is funny though, because unless you have to, it takes some fandangling in that you can have a live class in there, but if you go back for the recording, it's like this big and then you click on it and it plays and you're like, it took me a while to figure out how to make it bigger.
[00:15:11] Pip: Like the user friendliness, like it, definitely, or maybe I'm just funny don't when you click something in it, it's closes it versus what it's supposed to do. Apple does that
[00:15:25] Rina: sometimes. Yeah. So, yes. So like the
[00:15:28] Pip: Norman door, do you know what a Norman door is? Have I ever told you?
[00:15:31] Pip: Love a Norman door is a door. That when you go to it, you naturally think that you should push, but you should pull. So it's like backwards.
[00:15:40] Rina: Okay. Yes. And this is the whole point of user experience. Like you're not just looking at user experience on your website. You're looking at user experience through your entire business systems.
[00:15:51] Rina: Like really it's not just, it's not just your branding. Your user experience affects your branding and it should be a part of your branding and your branding needs to flow through every aspect of your business, not just the things that people look at. So that's like super important. I need to write that down.
[00:16:10] Rina: That's a good quote. I have it.
[00:16:12] Pip: We have it.
[00:16:15] Rina: Basically so yeah, so you need to think about that piece too. So now we've got the software itself and, what your stuff looks like on it and what you can do on that. Then you've got the the automation piece the emails that you send after they've purchased.
[00:16:33] Rina: Then you, now we've got the community. Then you got to think about the marketing piece. To, so how do we market to get the people to buy the course? And that's can be a little, there's quite a bit more leeway with that, like you can, there's a lot, there are many more options because it's just basic marketing at that point.
[00:16:53] Rina: And
[00:16:53] Pip: yeah, you need to have your timelines set out. And whatever the platform is that can help you. Gabby actually has a podcast, which elements, which is quite good. And, people do use it as their whole website sometimes. And it, sounds like people, you can do all sorts of things.
[00:17:13] Pip: I had no idea somebody would have thought to use Squarespace for their course. It doesn't sound like it worked well, but
[00:17:20] Rina: It didn't work only because it was not an online course that they were selling. It was an in person course, right? So Squarespace does have an online course section. Absolutely.
[00:17:30] Rina: Yes.
[00:17:31] Pip: Yeah. It's so interesting. I had no idea actually.
[00:17:36] Rina: Then the next piece that you have to think about is like, how big is your audience right now? How much is your budget for marketing? And how are you, like, how much do you want to grow that like right away? Because if you're self hosting, like if you've got the learn dash or something like learn dash, they've got some.
[00:17:56] Rina: Really nice versions that are like LearnDash. If you're doing it all on your server, then you need to make sure you've got the bandwidth and the CPU to handle all that traffic, all the people up there at the same time. Many people I found, there was one client, there was one client in particular just recently, they have a huge, they used LearnDash it's huge.
[00:18:23] Rina: Huge on the inside. They have multiple courses in there. The courses are intense. There's a, absolutely a certification issue. They're managing their community in Slack and and and their resources are jammed up so much so that it's really hard to load their site. So, that's one of the issues.
[00:18:46] Rina: So there and then there are technical ways around that for sure. But if you're using a LearnDash. It's a giant plugin. It's a giant WordPress plugin. If you're using that, you want to make sure that your other plugins that you're using are not giant or non existent. Do you know what I mean?
[00:19:04] Rina: We have, they, the issue that they had is that somebody built their whole site using Elementor, which is the giant theme. Like it's a giant, So then they put word dash learn dash on it. And then they were using WooCommerce to sell their other things. And so it was just three giant pieces of software.
[00:19:24] Rina: Unlike the cheapest hosting you could get, really. It's not and
[00:19:27] Pip: with learn dash, you have to have a payment gateway, which can often be. WooCommerce.
[00:19:36] Rina: WooCommerce.
[00:19:36] Pip: Yeah, exactly. So you're going to need, then you want your self hosting to be fast. Really robust.
[00:19:44] Rina: Yeah, really robust because there's nothing more frustrating than taking a course and waiting for things to load constantly.
[00:19:50] Rina: That's not great. And to continue that sales funnel into the course, you don't want to be paying for ads. So having people get to the site, it doesn't load fast enough and then they bounce. So you've paid for that. Click. On the app, but you're not getting any conversions on the landing page because they're, leaving before before the page is loading.
[00:20:13] Rina: Yeah.
[00:20:14] Pip: Yeah. So there are some really big things to think about. LearnDash, you want to it's the technical side that I think, would start that's where you have to hire where like. Something like Kajabi. You can just drag your video up that you record in there, right? Yeah,
[00:20:31] Rina: that's true.
[00:20:32] Rina: Yeah. So the hosted versions are definitely much better user user friendly, if you're DIYing it yourself. The cost is ongoing and you pay with more members is how I understand it. The more members you have, the more you pay per month. The LearnDash, most of the cost is up, up front. Until you get to the point where you need better hosting.
[00:21:00] Pip: Ah,
[00:21:01] Rina: yeah.
[00:21:02] Pip: Interesting. And you
[00:21:03] Rina: also need someone on your team who can update the content, as Pip was saying, they need to be able to, if you're going to continually add content, which that's a great strategy for keeping your members active.
[00:21:17] Pip: It is. You want to, it's it's really interesting because, We can see what did they say?
[00:21:21] Pip: There's 47 million at least to be had in courses in the, in 2025.
[00:21:30] Rina: Oh, wow.
[00:21:31] Pip: That's a lot of money. And there's a lot of people doing courses and there's a lot of people selling courses or, and so you gotta, I don't know. You have to take your time to pick the platform you want to use because. Of flow, consistency, enrollment, email, right?
[00:21:48] Pip: The content element, like a lot of the courses I've seen, they actually use like Kajabi as their website, which I wouldn't recommend because it's very limited,
[00:22:00] Rina: right? And you want to think about your, when you, so the, benefit of Kajabi is that it out the cost is outlaid every month over time.
[00:22:11] Rina: So that's one thing, though, it seems like it's expensive upfront, but that's just because you're not factoring in all of the costs to do it yourself on learn dash, the second part is though, is that you don't own your files. It's like that. I forgot which website platform somebody got, their they were paying per, by traffic, and as soon as they got to a certain level their, site all of a sudden cost them like ten thousand dollars and they had two weeks to get off the platform.
[00:22:46] Rina: So you're beholden to That platform and if they sense if it gets bought out and then sunsetted because often smaller platforms will be bought out by bigger companies and then they just move you over to the other company and your pricing can change your situate your whole situation can change overnight.
[00:23:08] Rina: So do it's a great place to start for sure. I enjoy going on classes that are on Kajabi for sure. They're easy for a user perspective also, like I find. I love Kajabi. Yeah. It's it's
[00:23:23] Pip: just so user friendly.
[00:23:26] Rina: I don't love the Zoom aspect or the, video conferencing. piece of it. I think that, I remember thinking about that.
[00:23:36] Rina: When we were test testing those out, not that long ago, but I can't remember exactly why my dog is, this dog is eating this paper bag. I got to step in, get a toy,
[00:23:50] Pip: save the bag. It is, funny because I think if we did a poll of what, of course, cause I, I did Thinkific and it was Canadian and it was, we have a free version, so yeah, so I did like it, but Kajabi seems the most, so from what I've seen so far is the most user friendly.
[00:24:10] Pip: What's your experience so far? Yeah,
[00:24:12] Restream.io on 2024-09-19 at 11.01.38: I think that's exactly right. So I do I have a tendency to like Kajabi also. I've taken a, I haven't I had one, one client a while back who used Kajabi and so I got the the owner view of it, which was fine. I, as a user, I love it best. I think LearnDash is.
[00:24:36] Restream.io on 2024-09-19 at 11.01.38: It can be set up really nicely but it's not always set up nicely. It's, and it's. Really hard to figure out how to make it look good. And I think the reason why the one client that I worked with, who's learned dash wasn't very nice is because she really wanted that finish this do all the questions in this order.
[00:24:58] Restream.io on 2024-09-19 at 11.01.38: And in order to do that, we had to choose the questions had to be organized by radio dial. So it was just really not like you couldn't upload pictures or. Yeah, not some videos at some places, but, I, didn't like it. I just felt like it you may as well learn dash.
[00:25:20] Pip: Yeah. Learn dash it I really wanted it because of the price originally because it, and then when we actually put it all together, we were like, whoa, we're paying like the same.
[00:25:32] Pip: Cause, yeah, I don't know I think the hardest thing about every one of them. And it's a little bit different than your website back end. And it's, there's different bells and whistles for each one. And so what's going to work best for you about what do you want to accomplish? I think that's what you have to ask, right?
[00:25:52] Rina: Yeah. You have to really think about at least be able to answer all of the questions that we put forward, the aspects to the questions like, do, does it matter if I own my files at this point? Maybe not. If I'm going with it, if. If I'm going with Kajabi, probably not because it's actually grown as a company to a certain stage that it feels like it's fairly stable.
[00:26:15] Rina: Would I choose a startup like that? Maybe not. Probably not, am I going to, like, where am I going to put my, all of my eggs, so you got to figure it out.
[00:26:26] Pip: Copies. So maybe having something on your Google drive or in your dropbox as like a.
[00:26:32] Rina: Oh, for sure. Yeah, just,
[00:26:34] Pip: just who doesn't need a little bit of backup, right?
[00:26:39] Pip: But Kajabi's used by a lot of people, I think.
[00:26:43] Rina: Yeah, it feels like that's the most well known. And then there's the school one, which the BNI application is on.
[00:26:51] Pip: Yeah, it's funny. One of the things I really like about school is their Oh, yeah. Simple calendar that looks like a Google calendar, but you just see when all the lives are or whatever.
[00:27:04] Pip: And it's lovely. But yeah, the school's interesting. It is very,
[00:27:10] Rina: I think this is different. It's actually S C H O X. com. But we're talking about school with an L. S
[00:27:19] Pip: K O L and then there's what the Mighty Networks is interesting. We know a few people in marketing who actually build these out for people.
[00:27:30] Pip: Rena, I know you have I know there's a Brittany I know who does some course building. She, can make some wicked recommendations too. So that's lovely. We are Rena, we're out of time. Wow, that was fast. I'm curious to see what happens. But bam! We're going to leave it here. And if you have questions about courses or you want an opinion feel free to message either of us or just put something in the chat in the Facebook group.
[00:28:01] Pip: So we are live in Facebook and YouTube, but we do have our Facebook group where we do. Our community. And yeah. Rena, do you have any final thoughts before I tell everybody what we're doing next week? No, none. Okay. So next week is the fourth Thursday of the month. And what happened on the fourth Thursday?
[00:28:28] Rina: Oh, I know. I know. We talk about what's, happened. All the news that's happened in the last month in the marketing arena.
[00:28:37] Pip: Yeah. So search social websites so that and AI because that's, a big thing. So join us next Thursday 11 a. m. Pacific Cyberpunk Geeks Marketing Mixer. Yeah. And I think that's it, but have a wonderful day and we'll see you in the group.
[00:28:57] Pip: Bye.
