LMScast with Chris Badgett

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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 Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. 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. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Beyond Basic Forms – Advanced WS Form Techniques for Your LMS with Mark Westguard appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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 Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom [00:24:00] opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order [00:25:00] or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. 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. I.  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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Podcasting WordPress Branding and the Long Game with Matt Medeiros appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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. 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.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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Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Revolutionizing WordPress Theme Upgrading With Brad Williams From ThemeSwitcher Pro appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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. 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 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?  Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. 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This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Emily 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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 Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. 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. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post The New Way Of Building a World Class Money Making Online Education Business With Emily Middleton appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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 Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris 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. I. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Success vs Failure in Online Education Companies appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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 Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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.  Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. 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. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Selling 5000 Enrollments to Groups Using LifterLMS With Student Confidence Coach Anita Van Rooyen appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now James 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. 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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 Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Build Your Digital Business With WooCommerce Core Product Lead James Kemp appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In 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. 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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 Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. 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. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Creating Courses, Coaching and Community with Michael Wolf appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In 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. 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. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. 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 Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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.  Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. 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. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post The Science of Bravery With Jill Schulman appeared first on LMScast.